Galloway's Weird Notion of Ideology

As opposed to Hodge/Kittler’s perfect storm of difficulty in the last few weeks’ classes (Manovich is ok by me), I found Chun and Galloway to be astoundingly clearer writers (no judgement intended), with Galloway’s essay being of particular interest to me as an integration of Chun’s ideas into something greater. But what especially interests me in Galloway is his strange notion of ideology, both as a concept in itself and as used by others, specifically in reference to code. I believe (as does Joe, apparently - I’ve tried not to restate stuff here, but I didn’t read yours until I was almost done with this, I confess) that these ideas deserve a bunch of discussion in tomorrow’s seminar, as the possibility of a snow day seems like less and less of a thing the longer I sit here writing this.

To begin, though, there is this passage, which ended up being kind of a touchstone for me through the piece as I sought to make clearer what Galloway was claiming about ideology as it relates to software: >”…it would be shortsighted to write off the concept as some sort of cognitive delusion, a fog of false consciousness afflicting the minds of those it touches. Ideology is not something that can be solved like a puzzle, or cured like a disease. Instead, ideology is better understood as a problematic, that is to say a site in which theoretical problems arise and are generated and sustained precisely as problems in themselves “ (316).

I feel like this passage should be singled out for some discussion in class, considering that it effectively sums up Galloway’s notions of the wrongness of other conceptions of ideology as well as Galloway’s conception of ideology, and in doing so, gets to the heart of his belief in the relationship between code and ideology. Specifically, I believe that Galloway conceptualizes code as ideology because of their similar self-propagation, self-creation, and subcutaneous natures. Ideology and software are simultaneous generators of existing things from steam, while existing themselves behind shadows as to not be caught a glimpse of.

My question is then: why make the comparison in the first place?