Galloway and Ideology

I’m reading Chun and Galloway here not as saying Kittler was wrong in positing that everything is hardware, but that such a conception might be prone to overlooking the power of software as a thing or analog for ideology. To paraphrase The Dude, Kittler’s not wrong, but he just might be an asshole. The work here in Chun and Galloway seems quite layered and dense, so I’ll do my best in discussion and investigation of it.

I’m drawn primarily to Galloway in this response, partly because he folds so much of his work alongside Chun’s observation that “software is a functional analog to ideology” (315 as cited in Galloway). I’m drawn in particular to Galloway’s discussion of software as modular in nature, with modularity a mode of information hiding. Galloway quotes Scott extensively on 324 to introduce this discussion, and I’m drawn, in part, to this moment as resonate with Stiegler’s concept of the opacity of technology. While software is reflective as well, argues Galloway, software is inherently paradoxical: “This is the fundamental contradiction of software: what you see is not what you get. Code is the medium that is not a medium. It is never viewed as it is, but instead is compiled, interpreted, parsed, and otherwise driven into hiding by still larger globs of code. Hence the principle of obfuscation” (325).

I realize Galloway’s discussion of ideology here is quite nuanced, but I want to take a moment to dwell with the observation here that as software obfuscates, so too does ideology. I don’t think Galloway and Chun are making as simple a claim as that, and I think it’s worth discussion in seminar how, exactly, Galloway is unraveling and/or interweaving the connections between software and ideology. But there’s some low level aha-ness to the observation that code, in its modularity that seeks to manage, divide, make invisible, and efficiently produce (though not maintain) functions in analogous ways to ideology which may seek to operate tacitly, unseen, and for purposes of production and control. I think Hassan is getting at some of this near the end of his post this week as he discusses subjectivity. Kelly, as well, is interested in discussing the confluence of software and ideology. Again, I think I’m reading Galloway’s treatment of ideology a little shallowly here, especially as I reread his final passages, but hey, that’s where I am at this point. Looking forward to seminar.