Code, Software and Serious Games

I really enjoyed, if am confused by, Galloway’s discussion of fetishism. He writes on page 319 that he is posing software as “an example of technical transcoding without figuration that nevertheless coexists with an exceedingly high level of ideological fetishism and misrecognition.” Drawing from Chun, he writes that “Software is based on fetishistic logic” and then poses the idea that perhaps it is an allegory for fetishistic logic instead. From Marx, he writes that fetishism is perceiving value in something that has none. Then he goes on to write that fetishism is derived from an empirical (he reads this to mean “technical”) set of relations and thus, he concludes, a dialectic of technical transcoding and fetishistic abstraction has existed since the start (319). He then poses one of the central ideas of his paper, that the relationship between software and ideology is best understood as an allegorical one in which “ideological contradictions of technical transcoding and fetishistic abstraction” are resolved within the software itself (319). His justification for this comes much later when he argues that software-as-allegory can only be understood in the “larger social context” as software’s dialectical movement between “fluidity and fixity” is the same as the “political problem” posed by ideology (327). Its forced divorcement between the poetic and the functional are, he writes, a “projection” of the “agonizing scars of fragmentation” of social life (327). I am having trouble placing fetishism in terms of allegory — in what way exactly are technical transcoding and fetishistic abstraction (of ideology) resolved within software? How are the dialectics of poetic/functional, private/public, fulitidy/fixity related to the “original” dialectic of transcoding/fetishistic abstraction? How exactly is Galloway using and defning the central term “ideological fetishism”? Do we agree with his definition of fetish as contrary to technological transcoding?