Code, Software and Serious Games

One thing I found a bit disappointing about Hayles' essay was her strict adherence to theories of speech and writing put forward by Saussure and Derrida, when a lot of what she writes seems to hold particular relevance to Barthes' Mythologies (itself largely influenced by Saussure's theories). What struck me specifically was that her discussion of the structure of signifiers and signified in code closely resembles the structure of myth that Barthes proposed. For Hayles, "voltages at the machine level function as signifiers for a higher level that interprets them, and these interpretations in turn become signifiers for a still higher level interfacing with them. Hence the different levels of code consist of interlocking chains of signifiers and signifieds, with signifieds on one level becoming signifiers on another" (45). This process by which signifiers become signifieds is reminiscent of the way in which signs (consisting of signifier and signified) become new signifiers in the "second order semiological system" of myth. Hayles' also discusses the ways in which the layering of code helps to naturalize its own processes, similar to the way in which myth masks over its own history and presents itself as nature and common sense; "the more the worldview of code is accepted," she argues, "the more 'natural' the layered dynamics of revealing and concealing code seem. Since these dynamics do not exist in anything like the same way with speech and writing, the overall effect... is to validate code as the lingua franca of nature" (55).


The way Hayles' structures the functions of signifiers and signifieds in code holds some key differences with the ways in which they function in myth for Barthes. For example, while Barthes' theory accounts for mainly two layers of the signifier-signified process - meaning and myth - Hayles proposes that this process occurs throughout many more layers within the computer and in two directions (low level to high level to low level, and so on). Nevertheless, the similarities still exist. So this begs the question, ARE these dynamics as unique to code as Hayles' claims? What are the significances of these similarities? I would argue that the layering of code and the dual directionality of the signified-signifier relationship could be applied more broadly and metaphorically - that, in some ways, computers as we experience them today are something like myth-machines, constantly constructing and deconstructing ideologies and offering them up as common sense. At this point that may seem an obvious statement, and I suppose it could be applied to just about every medium and every technology. But the argument that this layered process of signified turning into signifier is fairly literally acted out within the hardware of the computer itself, in the form of voltages, binary, commands, etc., is something I'd never considered before.

Note: I haven't read Barthes in a while, so I apologize if I've horribly oversimplified his arguments...