Interface poetics A review of Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound
by Lori Emerson.
Review of Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound
University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota
ISBN: 9780816691265
232 pages, 41 b&w photos
2014
In his review of the iPhone 6 for The Guardian, the writer, broadcaster, comedian and
“Twitter personality” Stephen Fry expressed all kinds of awe and wonderment at the
advancements Apple had made. The iPhone 6s are, for Fry, not only ‘utterly gorgeous objects
[…] of absolutely exquisite dimensions, heft and feel’, but their high end audio, display and
camera specs are by turns ‘ravishing’ and ‘devastating’. Fry winds up the piece with a
reference to the iPhone’s new WiFi capabilities:
There’s barely space for me to talk about the extraordinary new Wi-Fi calling
option, which allows you to hold a conversation using wireless at home or the office
and continue seamlessly as you move out of WiFi range—allowing the LTE (4G)
mobile network (EE in the UK’s case) to take over without a blip with Voiceover
LTE. (italics added)
Writing before the iPhone 6 launch Lori Emerson dryly notes, ‘[i]deally, the seamlessness of
ubiquitous computing devices will make even choice itself recede into the background. In the
imagined near future, things will simply happen and we will simply do’ (3). Although
Reading Writing Interfaces, Emerson’s first monograph, is primarily a media archaeological
dig amongst the ruins of media poetics—Dom Sylvester Houéard’s “typestracts”, Young Hae
Chang Heavy Industries’ web poetics, Emily Dickinson’s fascicle volumes [1]—it is also a
consistently careful, timely, and emphatic rebuke of the writing of the tech industry itself, and
the incantatory logic of seamlessness and ubiquity as progress.
Lori Emerson is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University
of Colorado at Boulder and Director of the Media Archaeology Lab. The MAL is ‘a place for
cross-disciplinary experimental research and teaching using obsolete tools, hardware,
software and platforms, from the past’ [2]. In some respects Emerson’s book reflects the
ethos of her lab; it is a collection of textual artefacts, obsolete and forgotten. Emerson’s work
in her book and the MAL is to attend to such texts and position them as a set of live and
ongoing concerns. In Reading Writing Interfaces it is the “interface” that leads Emerson’s
analysis. The interfaces of Emerson’s title are the specific texts she critiques, but also at stake
in this book is the status of the “interface” as a site of media enquiry. In the introduction to
Reading Writing Interfaces Emerson draws on Alexander Galloway’s work in The Interface
Effect to figure the interface as ‘a kind of magician’s cape, continually revealing (mediatic
layers, bits of information, etc.) through concealing and concealing as it reveals’ (x).
The book is framed by the pull to think of personal digital devices and actions as
interface-free: it begins with a critique of Apple’s black boxed iPad, and ubiquitous
computing, and ends with a postscript on the “googlization of literature,” which is to say the
googlization of the Internet. In between these analyses of a public, general, technological
discourse, Emerson makes ‘archaeological cuts’ into a range of media poetic practices. The
second chapter surveys the period from the 1960s to 1980s when personal computing moves
from being ideologically and technically open, to ‘the ideology of the user friendly’. In the
second chapter Emerson combines close reading of computer industry marketing rhetoric—
from magazines such as Byte, and Macworld—with readings of digital literature from the
period by bpNichol, Geof Huth, and Paul Zelevansky. Working back and getting stuck in
history, the third chapter looks at the 1960s and 70s and the influence of Marshall McLuhan
on the typewriter poetics of Steve McCaffrey and Dom Sylvester Houédard. Emerson
demonstrates how ‘these poems express and enact a poetics of the remarkably varied material
specificities of the typewriter as particular kind of mechanical writing interface that
necessarily inflects both how and what one writes’ (88). The fourth chapter is a mediation on
the fascicles of Emily Dickinson. This chapter is the deepest cut Emerson makes and offers
the most in the way of a new movement between the digital and other, obsolete media
devices, interfaces. Key to the connections made in this chapter is the way discussion of the
material text is placed alongside a mediation on the work of composition. This chapter recalls
some of the methods of N. Katherine Hayles in Writing Machines (2002), but the connections
Emerson draws between Dickinson’s fascicles and the DIY tinkery and thinkery of late
twentieth century typewriting and personal computing are fresh, and inspired by Emerson’s
commitment to considering moments of ‘readingwriting’ as distinct interpellations of the
user (163). [3]
Emerson’s methodology combines the call to media archaeological practice of Jussi
Parikka, Wolfgang Ernst, Siegfried Zielinski, with the media critique of Marshall McLuhan.
It enables a generative mode of literary critique and media specific analysis: ‘[…] my hope is
that a media archaeological-inflected reading […] can refamiliarize the reading/writing
interfaces we use every day so we can look, once again, at our interfaces rather than through
them’ (130). In Emerson’s work, reading Emily Dickinson after Marshall McLuhan, or the
code poetics of John Caley alongside the net art practices of Constance Dullart and
UBERMORGEN, is not a practice of indexing formal remediation, or repetition, rather it is a
bringing together of distinct textual interventions that might express a similar poetics, a
similar politics. The term ‘refamiliarization’ is perhaps misleading in this regard: it implies a
reader/writer who has already been knowledgeable of media interfaces as interfaces—which
necessarily means a knowledge of what the interface conceals as well as reveals. Although as
users of media objects we all encounter the interface until we learn to forget it, to see past it,
we don’t all necessarily know how the interface functions. This is where Emerson’s book
began: with the user as passive audience for the new-tech-magic-show.
Throughout the book Emerson demonstrates precisely the ways the texts she looks at
serve a kind of pedagogical function, writing the reader into a position of knowledge by
praxis, perhaps for the first time. Writing about Steve McCaffrey’s Carnival, Emerson reads
against McCaffrey’s own assertions of this typewriterly text as pure “physical” language, and
instead suggests the manic marks are indexing the writerly labour, the writer’s process:
It is partly the evidence of the sheer volume of labor executed over a period of years,
all of which took place within the stringent confines of a typewriter carriage, that
makes the work less about what is written and more about how it provides a record
of the labor of writing that doubles as a kind of how-to guide to writing (123).
Here the attention to the media device as writing, and writing as always media poetics, goes
some way to pushing back on the tendency to bracket digital literature, and digital poetic
literacy, as “Electronic Literature” (and the canon that the category denotes) [4]. Brewing in
Emerson’s work is a way of reading/writing ‘expertise’ as an interface. The pedagogical
aspect of this work intimates a desire to witness the way technological expertise might itself
be an obfuscating interface, getting in the way of the coming into being of a more
knowledgeable user [5].
Reading Writing Interfaces tasks itself with making visible the interface as
metaphor—a paradoxical metaphor determined by the effacing mechanics of computation—
and the interface as a material articulation of reading/writing practices. Like the conceal-andreveal mode of the interface, Emerson explicitly registers a desire for a discourse that can
include not only multiple media—digital and analogue, new and old, print and pixel—but
also those experiences where mediation goes unnoticed. Although Emerson locates her work
in media archaeology, this book gestures at a less proscribed critical terrain. In Galloway’s
The Interface Effect, Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinksa’s Life After New Media, recent art
writing on post-net aesthetics [6] and, to an extent, in the burgeoning practice of media
archaeology itself, we can locate an attentiveness to the everyday embeddedness of digital
media that is also an academic separation of the computational from an everyday life; a move
made so as to see more clearly the ways the computational works on and in everyday life.
Emerson’s work is an important contribution to the study of media poetics, and to the
academic reception of the particular writers and readers given attention in the book. A
connected but distinct legacy of Reading Writing Interfaces may be its registering of and
participation in an emerging critical discourse, one concerned with the ways we “see” and
“read” and live the increasingly invisible interfaces of everyday digital media.
Notes
[1] Fascicles are bundles, or loosely bound volumes. After Dickinson’s death a large number
of unpublished poetry was discovered in the form of fascicles.
[2] From the “About” section of the MAL website <http://mediaarchaeologylab.com/about/>
[3] Throughout the book Emerson moves between reading/writing and readingwriting as well
as reading writing. This move is not formally framed here, but is reminiscent of WJT
Mitchell’s image/text, imagetext, image-text. See Mitchell Picture Theory (1994).
[4] For a critique of the canon-forming tendency of much work on digital poetics see
Caroline Bassett, “Canonicalism and the Computation Turn” (2012).
[5] Emerson discusses the function of expertise at length in forthcoming book project Other
Networks.
[6] See the collection You Are Here: Art After the Internet, edited by Omar Kholeif (2014)
and Gene McHugh’s Post Internet (2011).
Bibliography
Bassett, Caroline. “Canonicalism and the Computational Turn.” Understanding Digital
Humanities. Ed. David M Berry. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2012. 105-126.
Fry, Stephen. “Stephen Fry's iPhone 6 verdict: the most exquisite mobile ever made”. The
Guardian. 17 September 2014.
Galloway, Alexander, R. The Interface Effect. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.
Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2002.
Kember, Sarah and Joanna Zylinska. Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process.
Camb., Mass.: MIT P, 2012.
Kholeif, Omar, ed. You Are Here: Art After the Internet. Manchester: Cornerhouse
Publications, 2014.
McHugh, Gene. Post Internet: Notes on the Internet and Art 12.29.09 > 09.05.10. Brescia:
Link Editions, 2011.
Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994.