Adrian Mackenzie (2005) 'The Performativity of Code: Software and Cultures of Circulation', http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/mackenza/papers.php; also in _Theory, Culture & Society_, vol. 22, no. 1, London: Sage, pp. 71-92.
Adrian Mackenzie (2006) _Cutting Code: Software and Sociality_, New York: Peter Lang.


Any sense of agency assigned to code relies on the relation of 'code's existence as both expression and process' (Mackenzie 2006: 141). Arguably, live-coding goes further as the act of coding becomes a prototype for its further action; what Adrian Mackenzie calls 'an entity that the code-index is held to represent' for software in general (his example is extreme programming). In this way, coding work - writing, compiling, and running code - comes to represent software as a whole. Code becomes privileged in a way that is simultaneously a simplification of the process and at the same time a challenge to the normative relations of software production and its further usage. Mackenzie clarifies the point:
'Making code and coding into a prototype for software production seems very recursive, but in terms of the contestations of agency associated with software, the primacy of coding can be seen as asserting the identity of programmers as the originators of software.' (2006: 141) 

Software remains unfinished in socio-technical terms. To Mackenzie, the 'performativity of code' (2005) challenges the commercial imperative of software development and also the social relations associated with this. Like the work it does, the coding performance disrupts the false distinction between 'coding as form and code as force' (2006: 178).

The performativity of the code object is characterised in this way by Mackenzie, with reference to the Linux operating system. The Linux kernal has a particularly unstable relation to commodified software and hardware as the most pervasive example of free/open source software development (taking the file and process of the Unix-like operating system), and through the enforcement of its GNU General Public License (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel). Mackenzie states that: 
'The way in which the Linux kernal is produced and continually changed cannot be separated from its structure as a coding project. The performance of Linux as a contemporary operating system cannot be detached from the circulation of Linux kernal code through code repositories and software distributions.' (2006: 178)

Free and open source software development is enacted through an ongoing collective and collaborative labouring process. As a socio-technical description of performance, Mackenzie describes Linux as a performative 'speech act' that produces an uncertain relation between the code object (the Linux kernal) and the code subject (the programmers), and thus challenges its property relations and corporate relations of production (2005: 13). 

To Mackenzie, Radioqualia's _Free Radio Linux_ (2001) is a performance in this sense. The source code of the Linux kernal (the core component of the GNU/Linux operating system) was webcast over the Internet, using a speech synthesizer to convert the 4,141,432 lines of code into talk radio. It was broadcast like other speech materials and presented as displaying aesthetic value.

Thus Linux somewhat demonstrates collective social action, or a positive implementation of general intellect in Virno's terms. It disrupts the false distinction between means and ends.