Gloss on Critical Code Studies Conference – Week One Discussion

The claim seems to be that the worm reproduces the heteronormativity of tennis marketing, no matter the gender, orientation, or motive of the coder or clicker (a qualification that is teased out later in the discussion). The critical point seems to be that the code is an INSTANCE of and/or (not sure which) a FIGURE for heteronormativity. But don’t both ways to read this critical point make the actual code irrelevant? If this is heteronormative interpellation at work, why do you need to understand code to understand that?

The claim seems to be that the worm reproduces the heteronormativity of tennis marketing, no matter the gender, orientation, or motive of the coder or clicker (a qualification that is teased out later in the discussion). The critical point seems to be that the code is an INSTANCE of and/or (not sure which) a FIGURE for heteronormativity. But don’t both ways to read this critical point make the actual code irrelevant? If this is heteronormative interpellation at work, why do you need to understand code to understand that? (The coder and clicker were both interpellated in advance – why do you need code to get that?) If the point is that the structure of the code somehow RESEMBLES interpellation, then couldn’t any kind of “wormy moment,” with any kind of ideological content, stand in? Later in the discussion, Marino answers the second critique by basically making the first point (code as symptomatic of its social context), but in that case, the first critique still applies.