Galloway 2012

Galloway, Alexander R. The Interface Effect. Malden, MA: Polity, 2012.

"Inter- faces are not simply objects or boundary points. They are autonomous zones of activity. Interfaces are not things, but rather processes that effect a result of whatever kind. For this reason I will be speaking not so much about particular inter- face objects (screens, keyboards), but interface effects. And in speaking about them I will not be satisfied just to say an inter- face is defined in such and such a way, but to show how it exists that way for specific social and historical reasons." (vii)

following Jameson, "culture is history in representational form" -- like a map, this representation is a reduction "or indexical and symbolic topology" (vii)

Introduction: The Computer as a Mode of Mediation

acknowledging Manovich, The Language of New Media, and its influence/impact; written in wake of 90s cyberlibertarianism

for Manovich, "new media are essentially software applications" (3)

book is held back by being 1) too beholden to cinema as first media (critiqued by Hansen in New Philosophy for New Media) and 2) blindness to history

"Would it be entirely correct to say that this book has no interest in the social, that it has no interest in the political, that it is blinded (by poetics and formal struc- ture) from seeing history itself? " (5)

"In the end The Language of New Media seems to be doing two things at once. On the one hand it tries to outline the specificity of new media, the particular qualities of the medium that should be understood as absolutely new. But on the other hand Manovich insists that new media are essentially cine- matic, suggesting that we must look not to the new, but back- ward to the various media that have come before." (8)

"Today all media are a question of synecdoche (scaling a part for the whole), not indexicality (pointing from here to there)." (8-9)

"The dual move in Manovich – both to the past and to the present – is in fact a single gesture, for the grand argument given in his work is really one about media in general, that to mediate is really to interface, that mediation in general is just repetition in particular, and thus that the “new” media are really all the artifacts and traces of the past coming to appear in an ever expanding present." (10)

"Objects are never humans to a computer, nor are they faces or bodies. In this sense the computer breaks with those arts (painting, photography, cinema) that fixate upon the embod- ied human form – the face, but not always, the hand, but not always – and its proximal relation to a world, if not as their immediate subject matter then at least as the absolute horizon of their various aesthetic investments. The computer has not this same obsession. It aims not for man as an object. The reason is simple: because the computer is this object in and of itself." (12)

ring of Gyges, wearer is invisible (Plato); "the computer is an anti-Ring of Gyges" (12) -- "The world no longer indicates to us what it is. We indicate ourselves to it, and in doing so the world materializes in our image." (13)

"he promise is not one of revealing something as it is, but in simulating a thing so effectively that “what it is” becomes less and less necessary to speak about, not because it is gone for good, but because we have perfected a language for it." (13)

conservatism of Kittler -- for him techne is "substrate and only substrate"; for him and McLuhan, "media mean hypomnesis" (16) -- but there is an alternate tradition "through the contrast between media (as objects or substrates) and practices of mediation (as middles or interfaces)" (16)

Kittler thinks of media primarily "in terms of artifacts, artifacts for storage, transmission, or processing. But what if we were to take the ultimate step and pose the question of media in reverse? What if we refuse to embark from the premise of “technical media” and instead begin from the perspective of their supposed predicates: storing, transmit- ting, and processing? With the verbal nouns at the helm, a new set of possibilities appears. These are modes of media- tion, not media per se. The shift is slight but crucial. The mode of storage appears instantly within its own illumination; the mode of transmitting returns from a far-off place; the mode of processing wells up like a flood of pure energy." (18)

failure of formalism -- trying to define medium with reference to a specific 'language' or set of essential formal qualities, which then, following the metaphysical logic, manifest in the world a number of instances or effects" (19) -- object-thinking begets the problems of formalism

"the computer is dramati- cally unlike other media. Instead of facilitating the metaphysical arrangement, the computer does something quite different: it simulates the metaphysical arrangement. In short, the com- puter does not remediate other physical media, it remediates metaphysics itself (and hence should be more correctly labeled a metaphysical medium). I shall refrain from saying it remedi- ates mediation itself, but the temptation exists. The metaphysi- cal “medium” of essences and instances is fundamentally dead today. And because it is dead, the medium of essences and instances reemerges in a new mediatic form, the computer. Informatic machines do not participate in the worldly logic of essences and instances, they simulate it." (20)

failure of the remediation argument --

"Recorded sound may remediate performed music, but what is being remedi- ated when a musician plays magnetic tape backward and hears for the first time a true sonic reversal (not simply the reversal of phonemes)? Or consider the computer. A computer might remediate text and image. But what about a computer crash? What is being remediated at that moment? It can’t be text or image anymore, for they are not subject to crashes of this variety. So is a computer crash an example of non-media? In short, the remediation hypothesis leads very quickly to a feed- back loop in which much of what we consider to be media are in fact reclassified as non-media, thereby putting into question the suitability of the original hypothesis." (21)