John Roberts (1994) 'Introduction', to _Art Has No History! The Making and Unmaking of Modern Art_, London: Verso, pp. 1-36. 

Software Art Has No History:
The title is ironic: borrowing from John RobertsÕs ÔArt has no HistoryÕ, in turn based on AlthusserÕs ÔIdeology has no HistoryÕ, that itself is a reference to Marx and EngelsÕs _The German Ideology_ in which he proposes that ideology is an illusion produced by those in power, but also its sense of history is a mere reflection of 'real history' - it has no history of its own.

The deliberately mischievous title belies the obvious fact that art has a lot of history. When Althusser claimed ideology had no history, he was expressing what he perceived to be its unchanging basic structures. The use of the phrase in John Roberts's 'Art Has No History' attempts to playfully reveal some of the paradoxes of art history: 'that there is no such thing as _art_ history, _Art History_ and art _history_' (1994: 1). The first issue derives from a sociology of art, the second with what at the time was referred to as 'new art history' (leftist in character) to critique the assumptions of art history as a unitary field of inquiry, and the third with a more fluid understanding of historical processes. That debate might be developed across the three aspects reveals the usefulness of historical materialism to critique the assumptions of traditional art history for the study of visual culture, and the dynamic and uncertain interplay between theory and practice. Much the same applies to the field of software art and culture, where practices resist easy categorisation and historicisation - and the figures of artist, programmer, critic and historian have become rather more fluid. In such a scenario, the artist-programmer is not simply doing work that becomes the object of history but intervening in the very processes of history - as Raymond Williams puts it (in his essay 'The Uses of Cultural Theory'), reflecting 'the socially and historically specifiable agency of [(software) art's] making' (in Roberts 1994: 36). 

This line of thinking evokes the older reference too. In _The German Ideology_(1845-46), Marx and Engels clarify their 'materialist conception of history' based on the premise that humans 'must be in a position to live in order to be able to "make history"'. In other words, the first historical act is the production of the means to satisfy essential needs to live: 'the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history...' (1972: 155-156, in Robert C. Tucker, ed., 1972, _The Marx-Engels Reader_, New York: Norton, pp. 146-200). 
From this derives the the dialectics of labour relations, the central paradigm in which history is perceived to be a process between humankind and nature, mind and reality, present and past.