There are three things I want to discuss in regards to what I’ve read in Wendy Chung so far:

1) Software and writing 2) Software and metaphor 3) Software and neoliberalism

1) This is a continuation of my question from last week on Hodge: if media has “noise,” doesn’t writing also have “noise”? By noise, I mean what Shannon thinks of as the “incapacity to transmit.” I know Scott encouraged us to think of “finitude” instead of “noise.” But my main concern is that writing is, after all, material. It can be messy, it can make mistakes, it can miscommunicate. Chung seems to agree that software can do this too. In the introduction, she states, “although information is often considered to be immaterial, the forces behind copyrighting (and taxing) software stress the fact that, regardless of information’s ephemerality, information is always embodied; it always . . . leaves a trace” (5). Chung goes on to dispute Galloway’s contention that code always does what it says it does. She claims this idea “both separates instruction source code and execution, between instruction and result” (22). In other words, as we all very well know, just because “know” code does not mean we will be able to properly “execute” it. The way we “interpret” the code, or put it together, always leaves a fundamentally human trace.

2) Chung states that code “does not pronounce knowledge or demonstrate it – it transparently pronounces itself” (22). This links directly to her discussion in the “Computers That Roar” section, where Chung claims that computers are a metaphor for metaphor itself. I’ve done a little bit of work on metaphor; particularly in looking at the way Aristotle thinks of it. Chung’s sort of going with Aristotle’s idea of metaphor as substitution here; for Aristotle, we “transfer” words from another category in order to make language vivid, or more compelling. In his example from Rhetoric, Achilles is described as a “lion,” a term which has been momentarily borrowed in order to refer to Achilles. However, no new reality has been created. The actual meaning of Achilles has not been inherently altered in any way. Chung goes on to posit that computers do create a new dynamic reality” (57). New meaning is created through substitution, for instance, when we think of software and power and power as software.

3) This is where I’ll get into some of the neoliberalism stuff that Aden also discusses in his blog post. After also having read Wendy Brown for another class, I think of neoliberalism as the economization of everyday life, the desire to get a “return,” financial or otherwise, from every action (wanting a “like” – or in more recent terms, a “wow” face - on Facebook is perhaps the quintessential example). I’m wondering how coding fits into this idea of neoliberalism. Chung claims that coding plays in to our desire to “produce results immediately” (48); it makes us feel powerful, or in her words, “sovereign.” But she then goes on to discuss coding as play, and hacking as “a game without a goal” (49). Can I really get pleasure from something that has no obvious return value (a question I’ll try to address in my coding blog post)? And does coding align with or frustrate ideas of neoliberalism?