141 Vol. 15, No. 2 (2014)
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Lori Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces. From the Digital to the
Bookbound
abstract
Review of Lori Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces. From the Digital to the Bookbound. résumé
Compte rendu de Lori Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces. From the Digital to the Bookbound.
Jan Baetens
Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press (Electronic Mediations Series), 2014, 226 p. ISBN: 978-0-8166-9126-5 (paper)
Reading Writing Interfaces is an important contribution to a great number of key issues in digital
humanities, media studies, literary theory as well as media archeology, by the founder and director of the MAL (Media Archeology Lab) at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A truly interdisciplinary work, this book takes as its starting point the notion of interface, which it examines from a cultural rather than from a technological point of view. In this regard, it continues the challenging analysis of the screen as interface as introduced by Lev Manovich in his study The Language of New Media, yet giving it an even larger definition than in Manovich’s study or in more specific research on interfaces such as the one by Florian Cramer.
Emerson settles “on an even more expansive definition so that interface is a technology ‒whether it is a fascicle, a typewriter, a command line, or a HUI‒ that mediates between reader and the surface-level, human-authored writing, as well as, in the case of digital devices, the machine-based writing taking place below the gloss of the surface.” (p. x). The interface, in other words, is both device and user, and it is the interaction between both that interests Emerson in the very first place, not only in digital environments but in all contexts that involve the use of writing devices (digital, print, typescript, or handwritten).
As the subtitle of the book, “From the Digital to the Bookbound”, immediately suggests, Lori Emerson does not develop a linear, teleological presentation of the interface (as was still the case in Manovich study of the screen). Although deeply rooted in history and context-sensitivity, focuses on a small number of case studies. First, the current trend to make the work of our digital devices as invisible as possible: the iPad as a modern form of magic. Second, the shift from the philosophy of the Open to the Ideology of the user-friendly, which actually goes into the same direction: the computer ceases to be a DIY device that the user can tinker with and rebuild for her own use to a sophisticated tool that addresses the user as consumer. Third: the corpus of “dirty” concrete poetry, i.e. of that kind of concrete poetry
142 Vol. 15, No. 2 (2014)
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that, contrary to the slick and streamlined design of concrete poetry of the 1950s, foregrounds issues of (un-readability and avant-garde abstract writing, which Emerson frames in the broader discussion of media activism. Fourth: the poetic production of Emily Dickinson, and the impact of pen and paper on her work as an example of the mutual shaping of form and content in predigital times. It would be a mistake however to conclude from this organization that this historically backward presentation makes that Emerson is looking for traces of the present in the past, which is then seen as a mere announcement or prefiguring of future times. Emerson historical thinking is strongly marked by Foucault’s archeology, which emphasizes ruptures and gaps between historical periods and contexts, and Zielinksi’s “deep time” media archeology, whose basic axiom is totally different from any form of teleological thinking: “Do not seek the old in the new, but find something new in the old.” (Deep Time of the Media, MIT, 2006, p. 3). Corollarily, Emerson is of course also very sympathetic to Zielinski’s “variantology”, the disclosing of and openness to individual variations in the use or (apparent) abuse of the media.
Emerson’s book is not only fascinating because of the richness of its close-readings or the thought-provoking frictions that it creates between historically, technologically, culturally, ideologically very diverse authors and practices. Its most appealing aspect is the political stance it takes towards its material. At first sight, the book can be read as a critique of those companies (Apple and Google, not to name them) that work against variants and openness. Yet Emerson’s project goes beyond this critical account, largely shared by the increased streamlining and control of these companies on the way information is produced, circulated and financially managed. Reading Writing Interface has also a utopian dimension. It displays a renewed DIY philosophy which is not a renewed Luddism (throughout the whole book Emerson stresses how much she likes to work with Apple technology, for instance) but an invitation to develop a counter-power that reopens the black box of modern technology, not in order to destroy it but in order to help us make a better, more inventive and liberating use of it.
