Course Code: CU71009A DissertationStudent Number: 33135507
“There is no wetware”Or we don’t even know what a body of code can do: An analysis ofaffect & bodies of code
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page Number
Introduction
2
SECTION 1: Literature Review 1.1 Structuralist Stance’s on Software
3
1.2 Existing Readings of Code and Affect
5
1.3 Being in a Body: Embodiment Refigured
7
SECTION 2: Case Studies 2.1 Interfacing with Affect
9
2.2 Acting and the Kernel: Sei Personaggi part 2
11
2.3 Islands of Code: ap0201
13
2.4 Calm Technology and the Ethics of Affect
16
SECTION 3: The Stakes of Affect Between Bodies of Code 3.1 On the level with code part 1: Interrupting Affect
17
3.2 On the level with code part 2: Situating Affect
21
Conclusion
22
Bibliography
24
1
Course Code: CU71009A DissertationStudent Number: 33135507
INTRODUCTIONThe affective turn currently enjoying favour in the humanities has seen anincrease in accounts which analyse our relations to technology and digital mediavia an affective register. This essay focuses instead upon the bodies of codewhich constitute the software underpinning said technology and digital media.This essay will explore recent attempts to negotiate the issue of our “embodied” relations with software by positing bodies of code as equal bodies meritingattention. In doing so it seeks to incorporate the critical spotlight shone uponcode by efforts such as ‘Software Studies’
and the proposed field of critical codestudies(CCS)
, with the aforementioned affective turn. This may be a forced oruneasy alliance due to the general lack of affect as considered between bodies of code in both fields and given that threads within the former movement gravitatetowards a more structuralist sympathetic analysis which the affective turn kicksagainst.Scholars particularly engaged with affect often pose the question ‘what a bodycan do’
as a means of returning an agency to the human which was perceived tobe eroded and denied within the structuralist and post structuralist tendencies of recent theoretical analysis
. This attention on ‘the body’ carries an attendant riskfor affective analysis to concern itself with only one body – the human body(arguably an over compensatory gesture which matches the essentialisingapproaches such analyses rail against) to the detriment of the affective capacitiesof other bodies. The original question has its origins in Spinoza
, and DeleuzeanSpinozism expands its scope to all bodies
, so we are justified in extending it toinclude bodies of code.While this essay takes seriously the constructivist analyses which have occurredin software studies, and acknowledges those who criticise too much of a focus
1
Matthew Fuller,
Software Studies : a lexicon
(Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2008).
2
Mark Marino, “Critical Code Studies,”
Electronic Book Review
(April 2006),http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/codology.
3
Lisa Blackman and Couze Venn, “Affect,”
Body & Society
16, no. 1 (3, 2010): 7 - 28.
4
Clare Hemmings, “Invoking Affect - Cultural theory and the ontological turn,”
Cultural Studies
, no. 5(2005): 548 - 567. Hemmings details that both Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick and Brian Massumi positionthemselves in this regard
5
Benedictus Spinoza,
A Spinoza Reader : the Ethics and Other Works
(Princeton N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1994). Ethics III, 2 scholium [FIND PLACE WHERE IT SAYS HE SAYS THISlook in earlier drafts]
6
Gilles Deleuze,
Spinoza, Practical Philosophy
(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988). “A bodycan be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea” p127
2
Course Code: CU71009A DissertationStudent Number: 33135507
upon affect
, it nevertheless aims to locate productive sites for considering affectbetween bodies of code. Therefore an overview of the lack of affect within mostaccounts of code will precede an outline of affectively driven analyses’ of ourbodies’ relation to and with code; analyses’ which proceed with a similar focus onthe human body above all others. I will provide case studies that point to the limitof this approach and then outline the significance of affect between bodies of code before pointing to the stakes of ignoring this and preceding with ourimpoverished understanding of affect and bodies.
A note on terminology:
Code shall be understood here as bodies of code, such as algorithms, or assoftware (a composite body of code) but not as coded information or informationmore generally. This distinction is not as concrete in some of the literaturesources; thus mentions of information should be taken as implying a body code.1:1 STRUCTURALIST STANCES ON SOFTWARE Software studies concerns itself with computation (and its possibilities of virtuality, simulation, abstraction, feedback and autonomous processes)
, theneglected aspect of our digital condition. It is one facet of an increasing focusupon code. This emerging tradition is important to note in terms of what affectiveinsight it might obfuscate.Florian Cramer displays the strengths of structuralist analysis of code, such ashow “any computer language is a cultural compromise between the constraints of machine design … and the equally subjective user preferences (i.e. usageefficiency)
”. Such compromises illustrate the inevitable codetermination betweencode and human sociality. Cramer’s consideration of software as a culturalpractice preceding the age of computation
at once accomplishes an extension of
7
Hemmings, “Invoking Affect - Cultural theory and the ontological turn.”Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard, “Biology's Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect,”
BodySociety
16, no. 1 (March 1, 2010): pp29 – 56: Papoulias & Callard attack what they considerindiscrimate theory plundering of scientific concepts by the humanities, and the consequences of uncritically importing those concepts: Mark Hansen is a target of their critique
8
Matthew Fuller, “Introduction, the Stuff of Software,” in
Software Studies : a lexicon
, ed. MatthewFuller (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2008). p4 It should be stressed that the definition of softwareStudies followed by this volume expands beyond the manner in which Lev Manovich originally coinedthe term, an expansion which scholars like Adrian Mac Kenzie also advocate.
9
Florian Cramer, “Language,” in
Software Studies : a lexicon
, ed. Matthew Fuller (Cambridge Mass.:MIT Press, 2008).p171
10
Establishing an intellectual history of software and a cultural history of computation p124Florian Cramer,
Words Made Flesh: Code Culture Imagination
(Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, 2005).
3
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There is No Wetware an Analysis of Affect and Bodies of Code
The essay component of my MAIM dissertation (which was 50% theory, 50% practice - the practice can be found here http://www.thereisnowetware.com/contemplative-computing/)
It is a little reference heavy and there are some pieces I'd revise in retrospect but here it is in its original form
It is a little reference heavy and there are some pieces I'd revise in retrospect but here it is in its original form
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