If it ain't Brecht, don't fix it

In Ramsay and Rockwell's essay, they bring up an interesting and as yet undiscussed point for us to turn our finely-tuned powers of analysis towards: the issue of the Brechtian in code, or, what reminds us in code that we are in a representation of reality, and not in reality itself. Is this everpresent in code? Is it not code's very own specific telos?

Yeah, probably, I'd say to both these questions. Ramsay's quotation of Abelson is here particularly telling: "'programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.'" This points us to an awareness of code as representation for reality, for the realness of the machine for which we write, as well as an implicit understanding that code is necessarily a representation, a mediation or even a translation. It is a representation of this 'reality' which we desire to change. I want that bit to turn on. I want my screen to show iTunes. I want my browser to 'scroll.'

We mediate these, our desires, through an interpretive language written for an audience that is never only one, but always many. We cannot write or talk just for the machine, as to do so in it's most pure fashion is impossible, unless you're that kid from Heroes. We've got to write for other people to understand so that someone somewhere can go in and say "OK, this is what this is doing in my representational view of reality. I have no comprehension aside from a theoretical one of the exact nature of the electrical currents running through this circuitry. Good thing this code is a way for me to figure it out!" Code, in this way, is always a Rosetta Stone to a language more than dead to us and always completely inaccessibly 'in-the-real-world.' To the good Brechtian's horror, though, it seems as though this foregrounding of representation has become so given, so taken for granted, so unequivocally natural in every area from computer science to the layman's ability to understand how computers work, that the very act of foregrounding representation has itself faded into the background oblivion of 'the obvious,' thus closing itself off to any further debate.

I know I'm reading code, Brecht. I am never just 'reading' when I read code the way I just 'watch' a movie like Transformers. Duh. The foreground of representation is explicit, not hidden, and therefore ever unable to be analyzed for there is nothing to 'draw out' or 'unpack.' Representation is the purpose of code whereas communication is the purpose of language. Though, we need communication to actually make the representation work. We do not talk to the machine, we shape reality through it. The only curious part here is that the representation is itself explicitly the telos of code (and we all know it), but the act of representing is the implicit underlying mental process occurring in our minds lying uninterrogated.

So I guess in a way, I disagree with the authors that code is writing and can be separated from the end-computer executable function. Code is writing AND translation, and never just one or the other. We cannot merely analyze it as if it were a kind of writing. When we code, we want an understandable (to other people) symbolic system AND we want the computer to just follow our script.

Which brings me to the most interesting part of the essay:

ramsay: It says here I'm supposed to smile. I don't want to smile.
rockwell: Very clever. Come on, follow the script.