What We're Really Talking About When We Talk About "The Computer"

The more I think about it the more I think terms like “the computer” or “electronic textuality” are meaningless, or if not meaningless then meaningful only as shorthand for what we the computer really is: a dense, dense site of interacting inscriptive and representational technologies, from paper to the cathode ray tube to magnetic media to the mechanical typewriter (and of course others too). What are we really talking about when we talk about electronic textuality? The characters on the screen? If so, then in fact what we’re talking about is the cathode ray tube, a technology that has its own distinct material history quite apart from that of digital computing. If we mean stored “bits” then we’re talking about magnetic disk or some other storage media. And if we mean something like computations or machine logic then what we’re talking about are voltage increments and decrements that are notionally inaccessible to the human sensorium and accessible only as second order models or abstractions—that is, as representations, which are immediately implicated in other material technologies, a phenomenon Bruno Latour has described as the cascade. Thus Donald Knuth, author of the most important books we have on the nature of algorithms, took a ten-year detour to develop the typesetting language TEX in order to print his equations to his satisfaction.

In other words, “the computer” should not be understood as an entity that is materially stable, but as a linguistic convenience always on the verge of imploding from the centripetal energy of the numerous and varied technologies it serves to host. That some of those technologies (like the microprocessor or the mouse) have no practical use outside of the discursive constellation of “the computer” while others (like the keyboard or the printer) have more or less obvious correlatives in other media ecologies is beside the point: what I’m trying to get at here is the way that terms like the computer function linguistically to occlude the identity of the media that are the machine’s material make-up. Of course one could argue that this is a logic of infinite regression cloaked in the language of essentialism: what, after all, is the cathode ray tube but its own artificial horizon of constituent media and mechanisms? Well, precisely. Technologies have an almost fractal dimension, with planes of functional identity appearing and disappearing at the points where particular social, economic, and cultural pressures have combined to create necessary fictions like “the computer.”