Code, Software and Serious Games

I apologize for posting so late!

Wendy Chun’s article “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge” interested me on various levels.

The first section I would like to comment/concentration/question: “Programming’s clerical and arguably feminine underpinnings- both in terms of personnel and command structure- was buried as programming sought to become an engineering and academic field in its own right. Such erasure is key to the professionalization of programming- a compensatory mastery built on hiding the machine.” What Chun seems to insinuate here is that hardware’s role of hiding software and code is directly linked or influenced by a chauvinistic revision of history in erasing the role of women in programming and computer science. While I agree that such revision has taken place, I wonder if it is a strictly “chauvinistic” influence to blame. While I don’t want to go to into feminine theory, especially in the context of cyborgs and computers, Chun herself writes that there are “historical and theoretical ties between programming and what Freud called the quintessentially feminine invention of weaving, between female sexual as mimicry and the mimicry grounding Turing’s vision of computer as universal machines. (In addition, both software and feminine sexuality reveal the power that something which cannot be seen can have).” As a result, I begin to wonder that if we are to give an argument relating software and programming with female sexuality, if perhaps the very essence of female sexuality, the hidden, the unseen, the ultimate lack, contributed to the hidden role of women in computer science and consequently, the hidden role of programming in computers.

The other section I wanted to comment about was Chun’s comparing of software to ideology. While I agree that software and OS produces “users” as ideology similarly produces “subjects”, I thought an even more interesting argument could have been produced by a seemingly offhand comment Chun made in this section “Software is based on a fetishistic logic.” Rather than viewing the abstraction produced by OS and software as a form of ideology (which is somewhat problematic in Althusser terms as his ideology was constructed by his notion of interpellation- something which I don’t believe exists in the software-user relationship as there is no “pre-ideological user”), I think it may make more sense, and more useful, to see it in terms of fetishization. After all, my insistence on calling a computer folder a folder is not because software is trying to construct me, the user, in its own image, but rather my desire to attribute qualities to an inanimate object: fetish.