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From A to Screen 4 71 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 Johanna Drucker how do letters appear on our screens, these exquisite expressions of design, our Baskerville so clearly differentiated from the Caslon and Comic Sans that we recognize instantly what font families we are inviting into view? Do they come, like pasta letters in a can of alphabet soup, intact and already formed, down the pipeline of network connections, so many obedient foot soldiers in the ranks of our textual forces? Are they conjured to their tasks through the sorcery of application apprentices calling the infinite stream of glyphic figures into service for maneuvers as written rows and ranks? Arguably among the most nuanced and thus demanding figures in our graphical universe, letters and fonts rely on an infrastructure that largely disappears in its daily operation, even as their existence guarantees the performance of the alphanumeric codes that underpin our encoded communications. We take the virtual letters as things, mistaking their appearance for substance, and we also overlook the agency of alphanumeric code, taking it for granted. In each case, and across an array of other activities sustained by writing in our analogue and digital worlds, letters function as much on account of how we conceive of them as on the basis of any autonomous existence based in what they are. Indeed, our concepts of what the letters are, as well as their literal forms, have migrated from scratched stone and inked surface to screen, and in their current iteration, they reveal much about assumptions on which other functional illusions are based. For a profound paradox governs the conception of alphabetic letters and their functional identity in the digital environment: they are at once understood as atomistic elements, discretely defined and operationally distinct, and they are also understood as expressions of complex, distributed contingencies whose identities are 72 JOHANNA DRUCKER produced across an array of ephemerally connected conditions. Code, that is, functional discrete-ness, should not be confused with appearance, the graphical particulars of individual forms.They are different orders of things in different conceptual systems.After all, the signs in alphanumeric code could be replaced. Another set of symbols, equally arbitrary and distinguishable one from another, could be substituted. The circumstances that have led us to use these familiar entities from historical reasons, our a’s, b’s, and 0’s to 9’s, are now less important than the dependence built into and around their use in many multiple trillions of lines of code. Few elements of our digitally literate lives are more integral to its operations. Alphanumeric notation underpins the processing of code, it is code, as well as the stuff of higher-order expressions in languages of all kinds. But the code–contingency paradox has implications for the ways we use letters, taking them for granted as a stable system in the first instance and recognizing their complex contingency in networks linking design, storage, delivery, display, and output in the second. The roots of the distinction are deep, linked to philosophical debates about stability and change that apply to particles and waves at a higher level of physics and to discussions of autonomy and codependence in systems theories and ecologies. The way we“think”the letters—how we conceive of them—shapes their design and our understanding as much as the technologies through which we make them. Conceptions of letters function as expressions of beliefs about form and identity, providing the basis on which functional activity of alphabetic code operates. If I could activate the a on my keyboard only through a process of distinguishing it from every other letter in the system of all letters in all fonts and styles, my typing speed would slow to geologic (or philosophical) time rates. But the fact that I can single out a letter of the alphabet is built on an assumption that it...

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