On Sourcery, or Code as Fetish

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."Debates over new media often resonate with the story of the six blind men and the elephant. Each man seizes a portion of the animal and offers a different analogy: the elephant is like a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a palm, a rope. Refusing to back down from their positions-based as they are on personal experiences-the wise men then engage in an unending dispute with each "in his own opinion / Exceeding stiff and strong / Though each was partly in the right, / And all were in the wrong!" The moral, according to John Godfrey Saxe's version of this tale, is: "So oft in theologic wars, / The disputants, I ween, / Rail on in utter ignorance / Of what each other mean, / And prate about an Elephant / Not one of them has seen!" 1 It is perhaps

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