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effects and can either succeed or fail, depending on whether certain extra-linguistic conventions are fulfilled. 'Perlocutionary acts', on the other hand, are utterances that trigger a chain of effects. The speech itself and the consequences of that speech do not occur at the same time. As Judith Butler notes, the "consequences are not the same as the speech act, but rather the result or the 'aftermath' of the utterance." [41] Butler summarises the difference in a succinct formula: «While illocutionary acts take place with the help of linguistic conventions, perlocutionary acts are performed with the help of consequences. This distinction thus implies that illocutionary speech acts produce effects without delay, so that 'saying' becomes the same as 'doing' and that both take place simultaneously.rlaquo; [42] Insofar as 'saying' and 'doing' coincide, program codes can be called illocutionary speech acts. According to Austin, speech acts can also be acts, without necessarily having to be effective (that is, without having to be 'successful'). If these acts are unsuccessful, they represent failed performative utterances. Thus, speech acts are not always effective acts. "A successful performative utterance [however] is

 

defined in that the act is not only committed," writes Butler, "but rather that it also triggers a certain chain of effects." [43] program codes, viewed very pragmatically, are only useful as successful performative utterances; if they do not cause any effect (regardless of whether the effect is desired or not), or they are not executable, they are plain and simply redundant. In the context of functional pragmatic software, only executable code makes sense. [44]

Code as a mobilisation and/or immobilisation system

Code, however, does not only have an effect on phenotexts, the graphical user interfaces. 'Coded performativity' [45] also has direct, political consequences on the virtual spaces (the Internet, for example) which we are increasingly occupying: program code, according to the U.S. law professor Lawrence Lessig, "increasingly tends to become law." [46] Today, control functions are built directly into the network architecture, that is, into its code, according to the theory that Lessig outlines in Code and other Laws of Cyberspace (1999). Using the Internet provider

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