On "Sourcery," or Code as Fetish
Publikation: Beiträge in Zeitschriften › Zeitschriftenaufsätze › Forschung › begutachtet
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On "Sourcery," or Code as Fetish. / Chun, Wendy.
in: Configurations: a Journal of Literature, Science, and technology, Jahrgang 16, Nr. 3, 2008, S. 299-324.Publikation: Beiträge in Zeitschriften › Zeitschriftenaufsätze › Forschung › begutachtet
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TY - JOUR
T1 - On "Sourcery," or Code as Fetish
AU - Chun, Wendy
PY - 2008
Y1 - 2008
N2 - 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."
AB - 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."
KW - Digital media
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=77949276813&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1353/con.0.0064
DO - 10.1353/con.0.0064
M3 - Journal articles
VL - 16
SP - 299
EP - 324
JO - Configurations: a Journal of Literature, Science, and technology
JF - Configurations: a Journal of Literature, Science, and technology
SN - 1063-1801
IS - 3
ER -