Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound

4. The Fascicle as Process and Product

129  The Fascicle as Process and Product Windows, doors, airport gates, and other thresholds are those transparent devices that achieve more the less they do: for every moment of virtuosic immersion and connectivity, for every moment of volumetric delivery, of inopacity, the threshold becomes one notch more invisible, one notch more inoperable. As technology, the more a dioptric device erases the traces of its own functioning (in actually delivering the thing represented beyond), the more it succeeds in its functional mandate; yet this very achievement undercuts the ultimate goal: the more intuitive a device becomes, the more it risks falling out of media altogether, becoming as naturalized as air or as common as dirt. —Alexander Galloway, “The Unworkable Interface” Against a Receding Present ThroughoutthisbookItrytoproduceafrictionfromreadingnew media interfaces with, into, and against old media interfaces—a friction that not only troubles the distinction between new and old but also follows in the steps of instances of (activist) media poetics throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that similarly work against the grain of writing interfaces. This chapter positions Emily Dickinson not only as a poet working equally with and against the limits and the possibilities of pen/ pencil/paper as interface but also as one through which we can productively read twenty-first-century digital literary texts. My argument is that Emily Dickinson’s nineteenth-century fascicles—as much as mid-twentieth-century typewriters and late twentieth- and twenty-first-century digital computers— are now slowly but surely revealing themselves not just as media 130 The Fascicle as Process and Product but as media whose functioning depends on an interface that defines the nature of reading as much as writing.¹ This chapter continues my attempt to read older and newer media against each other not to produce yet another neat, linear history of technological change but to instead disrupt, by swinging back and forth between analog and digital writing interfaces, contemporary computing’s rapid acceleration of reducing creators as well as readers and writers into users and consumers whose access to the machine is limited to the surface gloss of a nearly invisible, supposedly intuitive interface. This back-and-forth bears the potential for disruption as it positions itself against the teleological narrative of technological improvement that is driving the disappearance of the digital computer interface under the guise of the user-friendly. As I explain in this section and touch on in chapter 1, the triumphant declaration that “the interface just disappears” is the logical end point of any version of the history of technology that charts its path into the future by tracking the movement from one invention to another while filled with nostalgia and marvel at the clunky, obvious materiality of, for example, pen and paper or the typewriter. Arguably, to invoke once more the ghost of Marshall McLuhan, these older analog media appear charming and clunky to us now because we are so enmeshed in our own media—media that work to veil their own workings. By revisiting older media, we can make our current media visible once again. Put slightly differently, my hope is that a media archaeological–inflected reading of the fascicle alongside and against the digital—one that firmly pushes against any inclination to say the fascicle is, for example, an early form of analog hypertext that anticipates digital hypertext—can refamiliarize the reading/writing interfaces we use every day so that we can look, once again, at our interfaces rather than through them. Without reading the digital alongside and against the analog , the present slips from view, for the contemporary computing industry, which is accelerating its drive to achieve perfect invisibility, desires nothing more than to efface the interface The Fascicle as Process and Product 131 altogether and so also efface our ability to read let alone write it. As Alex Galloway puts it in the chapter epigraph, the more user-friendly an interface is touted to be, the more invisible it is as it attempts to erase every trace of its own functioning.² An example of such an effacement occurred during one of the most well-known unveilings of a multitouch interface, at which creator Jeff Han proudly declared, “There’s no instruction manual, the interface just sort of disappears.”³ Another example comes from the Natural User Interface Group, who define NUI as “an emerging concept in Human/Computer Interaction that refers to a interface that is effectively invisible, or becomes...