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On “Sourcery,” or Code as Fetish

Resource type
Date created
2008
Authors/Contributors
Abstract
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.”
Document
Identifier
DOI: 10.1353/con.0.0064
Published as
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. On “Sourcery,” or Code as Fetish. Configurations, Volume 16, Number 3, Fall 2008, pp. 299-324. DOI: 10.1353/con.0.0064
Publication title
Configurations
Document title
On “Sourcery,” or Code as Fetish
Date
2008
Volume
16
Issue
3
First page
299
Last page
324
Publisher DOI
10.1353/con.0.0064
Copyright statement
Copyright is held by the author(s).
Scholarly level
Peer reviewed?
Yes
Language
English
Member of collection
Download file Size
16-3-chun-2008.pdf 159.97 KB

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