On "Sourcery," or Code as Fetish | Zendy

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun | Zendy

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On "Sourcery," or Code as Fetish

Author(s) -

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Publication year - 2008

Publication title -

configurations

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Journals

SCImago Journal Rank - 0.112

H-Index - 22

eISSN - 1080-6520

pISSN - 1063-1801

DOI - 10.1353/con.0.0064

Subject(s) - source code , nothing , computer science , code (set theory) , performative utterance , utterance , action (physics) , interrogation , programming language , code review , software , epistemology , static program analysis , artificial intelligence , software development , philosophy , history , physics , set (abstract data type) , archaeology , quantum mechanics

This essay offers a sympathetic interrogation of the move within new media studies toward "software studies." Arguing against theoretical conceptions of programming languages as the ultimate performative utterance, it contends that source code is never simply the source of any action; rather, source code is only source code after the fact: its effectiveness depends on a whole imagined network of machines and humans. This does not mean that source code does nothing, but rather that it serves as a kind of fetish, and that the notion of the user as super agent, buttressed by real-time computation, is the obverse, not the opposite of this "sourcery."

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