In the article “Language Wants to Be Overlooked: On Software and Ideology,” Alexander Galloway gets to the assertion in his title about a third of the way in. By this point, he has set up the article as a response to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s claim that “software is a functional analog to ideology” (Galloway 315). So Galloway has software, ideology, and language in mind when he lays out the “paradox” that “any mediating technology is obliged to erase itself to the highest degree possible in the name of unfettered communication, but in so doing it proves its own virtuosic presence as technology, thereby undoing the original erasure” (320). Because ideology enables “the representation of one’s lived social relation” through a “high level of constraint it puts on discourse,” which is what Galloway identifies as the source of ideology’s power, language plays a key role in teasing out the relationship between ideology and software (316). Language is the medium through which we creative our ideological narratives. I’m not sure that I have completely, accurately understood the portion of Galloway’s article that I’ve attempted to summarize in the previous two sentences and would find helpful a brief discussion in seminar of language’s link to software and ideology in the article. I’d also like to hereby second Hassan’s concluding question about resolution.

At this point, we get to Galloway’s titular claim: “language wants to be overlooked. But it wants to be overlooked precisely so that it can more effectively ‘over look,’” (320). Galloway references poetics at the end of his section on “analog” (325), but I began to think in literary terms when he made his claim about language. A line of poetry that especially speaks to me is “it is impossible to say just what I mean!” from T.S. Eliot’s well-known poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It’s ironic, because with this line, Eliot does say exactly what he means—it just happens to concern the feeling that he can’t put an idea into words. In certain styles of poetry and literature—realist fiction is another example—the goal is almost to get the reader to forget he is reading. The form represents the content in such a way that it draws the most minimal amount of attention possible. To Galloway’s point, if the author of such a work is successful, the reader might remark, upon completion of the book, “Wow! The writing was so superb that I forgot it wasn’t actually happening, I didn’t look up for hours, etc.” The writing, or language, of the work is brought back into focus precisely because it was experienced as invisible (or wasn’t perceived to have been experienced at all). While I see the similarity in code, which is oftentimes judged on how little the user perceives the language/work that went into it, I’m left wondering about the where the “conversion” that happens in software fits into the comparison (the example of Galloway’s that is clearest to this novice is that of HTML, which “is never shown in the browser window” but “is always parsed and converted from ASCII text into a graphical layout”) (323).