On "sourcery," or code as fetish

Configurations

Volumn 16, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 299-324

  Hui, Wendy ^a   Chun, Kyong ^a  

^a BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77949276813     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.0.0064     Document Type: Article

References (69)

1. John Godfrey Saxe, "The Blind Men and the Elephant." http://www.wordinfo.info/words/index/info/view-unit/1/?letter=B&spage=3.
2. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 48, emphasis in original.
3. Vapor theory is a term coined by Peter Lunenfeld and used by Geert Lovink to designate theory so removed from actual engagement with digital media that it treats fiction as fact. This term, however, can take on a more positive resonance, if on takes the non-materiality of software seriously. (Geert Lovink, "Enemy of Nostalgia, Victim of the Present, Critic of the Future Interview with Peter Lunenfeld," 31 Jul 2000 〈http://www.nettime.org/Lists- Archives/nettime-l-0008/msg00008.html〉 accessed 2/1/2007).
4. Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Power Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 164.
5. McKenzie Wark, "A Hacker Manifesto." version 4.0 (n.d.). http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol-2/contributors0/warktext.html.
6. See Richard Stallman, "The Free Software Movement and the Future of Freedom; March 9th 2006.". http://fsfeurope.org/documents/rms-fs-2006-03- 09.en.html.
7. Immanuel Kant famously described enlightenment as "mankind's exit from its selfincurred immaturity" ("An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment," What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, Ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: California UP, 1996), 58).
8. For more on enlightenment as a stance of how not to be governed like that, see Michel Foucault, "What Is Critique?" in What Is Enlightenment?, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 382-398.
9. As Niva Elkin-Koren notes in "Creative Commons: A Skeptical View of a Worthy Project," the Creative Commons strategy "does not aim at creating a public domain, at least not in the strict legal sense of a regime that is free of any exclusive proprietary rights. The strategy is entirely dependent upon a proprietary regime and drives its legal force from its existence. The normative framework assumes that it is possible to replace existing practices of producing and distributing informational works by relying on the existing proprietary regime. The underlying assumption is that if intellectual-property rights remain the same, but rights are exercised differently by their owners, free culture would emerge" http://www.hewlett.org/NR/rdonlyres/6D4BFD1E-09BB-4F89-9208-7C1E4B141F2A/0/ Creative-Commons-Amsterdam-final2006.pdf). Although Elkin-Koren is writing about Creative Commons in this passage, she makes it clear that this strategy of extending and revising intellectual-property rights is drawn from the Free Software Movement's GPL.
10. For more on this, see Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
11. See Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, "On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge," grey room 18 (winter 2005): 27-52.
12. Edsger Dijkstra, "Go to Statement Considered Harmful," in Software Pioneers: Contributions to Software Engineering, ed. Manfred Broy and Ernst Denert (Berlin: Springer, 2002), p. 342.
13. Structured programming was introduced as a way to make programs, rather than "programmer priest," the source, although the term programmer priest complicates the notion of source: Is the source the programmer, or is it some mythic power she mediates?
14. See Chun, "On Software" (above, n. 11).
15. For more on software art as conceptual art, see Florian Cramer, "Concepts, Notations, Software, Art." 2002. http://userpage.fu-berlin. de/~cantsin/homepage/writings/software-art/concept-notations/ concepts-notations-software-art.html.
16. Galloway, Protocol (above, n. 5), p. 165, emphasis in original.
17. N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 50. Hayles's argument immediately poses the question: What counts as internal versus external to the machine, especially given that, in John von Neumann's foundational description of stored program computing, the input and output (the outside world to the machine) was a form of memory?
18. Alexander R. Galloway, "Language Wants to Be Overlooked: Software and Ideology," Journal of Visual Culture 5:3 (2006): 315-331.
19. Alexander R. Galloway, "Language Wants to Be Overlooked: Software and Ideology," Journal of Visual Culture 5:3 (2006): Ibid., 321.
20. Galloway, Protocol (above, n. 5), p. 167, emphasis in original.
21. Galloway, "Language Wants to Be Overlooked" (above, n. 18), p. 321, emphasis in original.
22. This example draws from the PowerPC Assembly Language Beginners Guide. http://www.lightsoft.co.uk/Fantasm/Beginners/Chapt1.html.
23. Philip E. Agre, Computation and Human Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 92.
24. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," in Embodiments of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), p. 21.
25. Norman McRae, John von Neumann (New York: Pantheon, 1992), p. 378.
26. According to Friedrich Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals, "there is no 'being' behind the doing, effecting, becoming: 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed-the deed is everything"
27. see Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy & Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 178-179.
28. Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
29. Oxford English Dictionary Online. http://www.oed.com.
30. See Friedrich Kittler, "There Is No Software," Ctheory. 1995. http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=74.
31. Namely, twentieth-century genetics.
32. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, "Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium." 1995. http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze7.htm.
33. Oxford English Dictionary Online (above, n. 28).
34. William Pietz, "Fetishism and Materialism," in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 138, 139.
35. William Pietz, "Fetishism and Materialism," in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (1993), Ibid., p. 137.
36. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol.1, trans. Ben Foskes (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 165.
37. Marx, as quoted by Pietz, "Fetishism and Materialism" (above, n. 33), p. 149.
38. John Backus, "Programming in America in the 1950s-Some Personal Impressions," in A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, ed. N. Metropolis et al. (New York: Academic Press, 1980), p. 126.
39. John Backus, "Programming in America in the 1950s-Some Personal Impressions," in A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century (1980), Ibid., p. 127.
40. John Backus, "Programming in America in the 1950s-Some Personal Impressions," in A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century (1980), Ibid.
41. Richard Stallman, "Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks." 2001. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-and- globalization.html.
42. Ellen Ullman, interviewed by Scott Rosenberg, "21st: Elegance and Entropy." 1997. http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/1997/10/09/ interview/print.html.
43. See mez's site at http://www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker/.
44. See http://www.scotoma.org/notes/index.cgi?LondonPL.
45. Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 205.
46. Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (1963), Ibid., p. 206.
47. Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (1963), Ibid
48. William Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish," pt. 1. Res 9 (spring 1985): 12.
49. Freud, "Fetishism" (above, n. 44), p. 208.
50. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), p. 31, emphasis in original.
51. Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind 59. 1950. http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html.
52. N. Katherine Hayles develops this theme of revealing codes in My Mother Was aComputer (above, n. 17), pp. 54-61. Importantly, some software art projects also complicate and frustrate code as X-ray vision and connection as meaning, such as Golan Levin's Axis Aplet.
53. See Thomas Levin, "Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of 'Real Time,'" CTRL Space: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Thomas Levin et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 578-593.
54. Tara McPherson, "Reload: Liveness, Mobility and the Web," in The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 462, emphasis in original.
55. Coming from film rather than television studies and focusing more on applications than phenomenology, Galloway in Protocol (above, n. 5) similarly argues that continuity makes websurfing "a compelling, intuitive experience for the user": "On the Web, the browser's movement is experienced as the user's movement. The mouse movement is substituted for the user's movement. The user looks through the screen into an imaginary world, and it makes sense. The act of "surfing the web," which, phenomenologically, should be an unnerving experience of radical dislocation-passing from a server in one city to a server in another city-could not be more pleasurable for the user. Legions of computer users live and play online with no sense of radical dislocation" (p. 64).
56. For more, see chapter 5 of Chun's Control and Freedom (above, n. 10).
57. The following PERL program, for instance, says hello every five minutes (from http://www.webreference.com/perl/tutorial/9/3.html)
58. "The Origin of the word Daemon." http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/ Daemon.html.
59. This is why Neal Stephenson, in Snow Crash (New York: Bantam, 1992), describes robots or servants in the Metaverse as daemons.
60. See Wendy Chun, "The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory," Critical Inquiry 35:1 (2008): 148-171.
61. See Thomas Keenan, "The Point Is the (Ex)Change It: Reading Capital, Rhetorically," in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 152-185.
62. Matthew Fuller, Behind the Blip (New York: Autonomedia, 2003), p. 107.
63. See Matthew Fuller, "It looks as though you're writing a letter," Telepolis. 2001. http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/7/7073/1.html.
64. See Chun, "Enduring Ephemeral" (above, n. 58).
65. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge,1997), p. 51, emphasis in original.
66. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), Ibid., p. 52.
67. Richard Stallman, "Why 'Free Software' is better than 'Open Source.'" http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html.
68. The question that remains, which is the subject of another paper, is: What does this meaning of open close down?
69. Philip E. Agre, "Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy," Information Society 10:2 (1994): 101-127.