Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (review)

My 12-in Macintosh, circa 2003, returned home today unable to be upgraded to the newest operating software. Running simply on a PowerPC G4 processor instead the newer Intel Core 2 Duo processor, it had reached its limit with the move to Leopard last year. I also found out I could not revive the dead battery that had gotten jammed into the computer. To install a new battery, I had to sacrifice the old—that, or be prepared to spend $500 to remove the casing of my computer to get to the old battery without destroying it.

I tell this story because it fits well with what Terry Harpold talks about in Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path, for the focus of his book is a reexamination of seminal ideas that helped to shape our thinking about digital media in respect to "media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading."

Generally speaking, we think of exfoliation as throwing off or removing something from a surface, as in eliminating a layer of skin, but the Latin version offers a more specific meaning: to strip off leaves. Playing on this etymology Terry Harpold uses the word as "a loosely grouped set of procedures for provisionally separating the layers of the text's surfaces without resolving them into distinct hierarchies, with the aim of understanding their expressive concurrencies." Such an approach, he tells us, is "opportunistic," since "it accepts a disjunction between the signifiers it isolates … and the signifieds it derives from … in response to those signifiers" (p. 137). Just as Harpold suggests, I will eventually have to quit using my laptop, essentially throw it off, because it will one day be unable to access more robust documents that will, without a doubt, emerge. Like the old Classic, the blue gumdrop iMac and the white mushroom iMac sitting on a desk in my office, it will be relegated to accessing outdated media.

Harpold's ironic humor is at work with the book's format, for it reflects an upgrade of sorts of print technology—call it "Book 2.0"—in that the text is divided into chunks and numbered based on its location in the book. The first paragraph of Ex-foliations, for example, is listed as 1.01. Inside each discrete textual grouping (I am avoiding using the term lexia since Harpold takes Landow to task for his departure from Barthes' definition of it), we may find a link to another section of the book, a note at the end of the book or a figure within the chapter. That Harpold devotes close to a third of the book to Notes, Works Cited and Index should clue the reader in to the book's scholarly contribution to the field.

Those of us weaned on hypertext theory of the early 1990s will definitely find much to enjoy in Chapters One and Two, "A Future Device for Individual Use" and "Historiations: Xanadu and Other Recollection Machines," respectively. Here Harpold revises and/or clarifies old views of hypertext, challenging Jakob Nielson's assumption of reading practice, distinguishing between Ted Nelson's and Vannevar Bush's "textual systems" (p. 20), and rethinking Nelson's Xanadu project, to name a few points. We who spent hours creating links and nodes in Storyspace documents will gain much in Chapter Three, "Revenge of the Word," where Harpold revisits hypertext fiction and theories by Michael Joyce and Stuart Moulthrop, particularly as their work functions within the affordances of the user interface. It is in Chapter Four, in the 51st paragraph, that Harpold finally gets to detailing his ideas on "ex-foliations," defined above. We learn that ex-foliations

are well suited to the interpretation of the multiple and irregularly layered surfaces of objects in the digital field, especially those in which idioms of the GUI...