Part 3 of 3 <a href="/object.rhiz?1861">Previous</a>

There is an argument that as texts in word processing are divisible and
combinable their 'contents' are eroded. "Texts are provided with a
pointed structure. The argument is structured in advance and divided
into separate subjects, items and paragraphs. Items can be added or
deleted later on which may result in some loss of the course of the
argument"21 Contents in this sense means their relationship to truth,
how closely their moral infrastructure is matched by the formal hygiene
of their construction. This is an argument more around
'brainstorming'22 or idea-processing softwares such as Inspiration,
where a missing or out of sequence cell in a flow chart can have
'significant' effects, rather than word processing as exemplified in
Word but essentially this argument is one with planned structure in
writing (something contradicted by the monotonous ticking off of 'issues
in cyberculture' by the book which makes it - itself a waste product of
a modularised education system). Where this effect is produced is at
the level of screen size actually precluding an overview of the document.

At a 'lower' level than that of content, documents are also marked.
It has become a commonplace that all speech acts are as much verifiable
by their circumstances as by what they actually 'say'. At the level of
import filters there is a politics of control over standards that
determines whether speech can even be enacted. Open a PC Word file in a
Mac and find where it sits on the hard disk of the author. At other
times, texts produced in competing word processors or versions of Word
that have 'surpassed' the one you are stuck with are rendered completely
unreadable. How Word interacts with and sometimes countermands the
local Operating System can also produce a kind of moire pattern of
competing systems of control: use Word on a Mac and find that if you
save to the desktop the program will pedantically rearrange your files
in the order of last use, no matter if you are attempting to spatially
order them by a different means. The way, like all programs produced by
Microsoft, Word is, to put it politely, optimised to work in
amalgamation with their other products.

In terms of how language is inflected, Word still has some way to go
before it fully automates flow or even composition. Whilst newer
versions of the program are capable of assessing whether a word needs a
space inserting before or after it when it is being pasted into another
sequence of characters it still does not recognise modes within language
on the basis of semantics. For instance, although in AutoCorrect the
first letter of a new line can be automatically capitalized, when it is
cut and pasted into another section of text the capitalization of the
letter is not reversed. All that is seen is the occurrence of an event,
a carriage return, the change in semantic mode is not recognized. This
is of course what allows for the relative flexibility of use of the
software and why it makes a strict division between itself and the
document. Where it most visibly does not however is where that
perfectly isomorphic machine Microsoft English is liberated from the
clutches of its miserable captors, the users.

stunt-double for spelling

The dictionary is always a revival of language. The Oxford English
Dictionary's attempt to surpass this condition by establishing itself
online, by having weather maps of linguistic norms and clusters updated
second by second as they breed, die and spill across the globe. (The OED
will soon no doubt begin to become available as an online facility built
into word processors as all text gradually becomes melded into one
document. Not only would they be able to provide exactly up to date
corrections of meaning and spelling by this means, but also be able to
scan every document submitted for any savoury traces of neologism, or
unlogged usage). Even in its networked state, the dictionary can only
break from its passive position of recording and instantly updating
nostalgia to impose a future on language by throwing etymology into
reverse, tearing the roots of words up from the mud of the past and into
the speech of the present.

Fearing such a hermeneutic catastrophe, the dictionary must always
remain the patient recorder of language. When it puffs its little
bookshelf chest up to establish a normative function is when it looses
and imposes, not its past upon the present, but its intended, already
lost to language, future of residues. In Microsoft Word this looser is
always grappling for some purchase on any piece of text that passes it
by before it is eventually swamped and drowned. This is not of course
to say that as a knowing, personalized zombie it cannot have its uses
for minor services of correction.

You have to go through several layers of interface to switch off
'Grammar' and 'Spelling'. Where things get odder and more interesting
though are in the user dictionary and in the setting for the
personalized 'AutoCorrect'. User dictionaries are not repressed by the
language of the dictionary in the same way that if you wear a stereo you
can spend enough time in a crowded train, headbanging, farting and
beating your fingers on things or in the street yapping and
gesticulating into your hands-free mobile without the constraint of the
audial conditioning of your physical location. This is of course the
same domain that an enlightened Kant allows for reason within discourses
circumscribed by the securing rule of the prince rather than that of the
headset. Room to manoeuvre. Sort of.

In order to escape this position, users incorporate the dictionary and
the thesaurus into every grain of their text, running verbs,
prepositions, nouns, the lot, through the mill of red and green
lines. Every possible utterance becomes a combination on look-up
table results. Global English, fuelled by digitization and a ready
supply of standard components simply becomes a permutation of all
potential combinations.

User dictionaries are full of skirmishes action against 'imperialist'
English, but with only this 'standard' to refer to they cut loose from
conforming to a more 'localized' set of rules (say, English English
English) unless they have already been learned, or unless another device
such as a dictionary becomes a part of the writing sequence. In this
way, given no direct resource to the production of a local field of
variation, they cut loose even from dialect. The divergence from the
normalized language of the world is potentially immensified as these
pockets of mistake, homonymy, dyslexia, takes their time to inbreed and
thicken their juices before lurching out into the supposedly clean white
substance of language under telecommutation. One spells with
correctness, a variant of it (derived from some minoritarian, dialectal
or other process of variation) or neglects to spell at all.

At the same time another private mutation is being hatched.
Microsoft's recent alliance with Real Names23 is an attempt at a
rigidification of language to the point at which it becomes solely data.
What is hoped by this scheme, (wherein words that are also brand names
typed into the search portal of Microsoft Network or the location window
of Internet Explorer lead directly to the correctly denoted site) is of
course that there is no longer any ground, but only a continuous and
spreading act of freezing. When the meaning of a string of characters
can be bought and locked into place this is the thermodynamics of
language reduced to a single cryogenic chamber in which the corpses of
Ford and Disney are in omnipotent storage. For linguists, a dream, a
few years on there will be nothing left to study, nothing except to go
round with clipboards ticking off the packets of data as they pass the
test

Other aspects of the impact of the net on Microsoft applications are
readily visible within Word. The provision for HTML code generation is
clear, but there are also quite substantial beginnings of a change in
use and in the construction of the user. From the beginning, Word came
with a single license for a single machine. This has not changed.
What has is the implication of a single author for each document.
Whilst it was assumed from the beginning that several users would be
authoring their own documents using the same copy of the software one
after another, the massive involvement of the nets in the production of
texts now produces side-effects in the construction of Word.

The economic foundation for this is the hope that by making a networked
work group accept Word as a tool, the people who they in turn have to
work with will also find it necessary in order to access the document
formats or features that have become incorporated into their procedures
- for instance the layers of stages in which versions of a document can
be 'signed off' by managers. A slightly more straightforward way of
enforcing this 'usefulness' is by configuring the import filters and the
formats in which files can be saved or 'Sent to' in order that Word
effectively works to disable its competition. Reinforcement of use is
thus provided positively by features such as the ability to Track
Changes and negatively by its selective ability to deal with non-native
file formats.

Word demonstrably succeeds though in those places when it makes
available the qualities of perception of data specific, at least at
speed, only to computers. Where the production of a text is spread over
various authors, locations or times the ability to deal with various
versions, to Track Changes for instance, allows the computer to begin to
take a part in the processing of text in a manner which maximizes its
own propensities without beginning to format the user in a
non-interrogable manner. The multiple and shared versioning of
documents is one level at which the nets impact on Word. The multiple
versioning of language is another, exemplified by the incorporation of
Unicode into Office 2000 allowing the program to begin to be used more
fully across a massively expanded, though not comprehensively resolved
range of character systems. The historical genesis of computing in the
West still leaves this material-semiotic lockdown - the way in which
text is still ordered from right to left for instance - remains for
instance as one of the most substantial legacy problems to be dealt with.

Another, perhaps more promising, way in which Word is opened up to the
net is again at a level producible only in the conjunction of computers
with networks. Macro viruses such as Melissa and the Love Bug exploit
the monocultural strategy of Microsoft, in its Operating System, in its
applications as a vector for its own multiplication. Absolute
standardization, whilst infinitely smooth in its topological isomorphism
has the quality of breeding its own infinitely fast massively predatory
nomads. Equally, if the strategy towards the language of the nets is
really as crude as that being put into place with Real Names its clean
world of unambiguous meaning is inevitably going to collapsed into the
subterranean plague pits of language, of allegory, of puns, of a
thousand mirrored misuses.

Typing with a raised fist

Office's capabilities remain very much the types of application that
defined and set the pace for the first era of personal computing. They
have largely stayed in the same state but metastasized functions. They
have been impacted, but not fundamentally changed by the nets and by the
multiple production of documents, rather than retaining a singular mode
of authorship. And they have produced a sensorium that whilst it is a
near-disaster in terms of design and overloaded with the
material-semiotic infrastructure of business is still of course
incapable of determining the uses to which it is put. That at least is
probably some sort of usefulness.

What remains here is to ask what can be learnt from Word in terms of the
production of software which moves beyond the limits of the increasingly
closed models produced by an increasingly small number of corporations
for a vastly increasing number of users.

Is there the possibility of producing a software which aids and
encourages 'autonomous work' in the terms that Gorz suggests? That is,
which reiterates the process of becoming autonomous at a more profound
level of producing the amalgamation which the work progresses through,
or whether it is possible to develop software in mutuality with specific
or numerous drives and tendencies that somehow maximize escape from, not
always simply repurpose, the codifications of programs such as Word? At
the same time, whilst autonomy is nice as a policy document, as a flag
of convenience, it exists a little too much on one plane, that of work,
to fully accommodate the sheer bandwidth of behaviour of life, of
language. What at the very least is also needed to be those moments
when what we know to be true, what our certainties are about software,
are lost. Is it possible to produce a software that joins with language
in throwing up both moments of realization and for the user, devices by
which it can become strange from itself?

The argument against this possibility is that software is somehow
neutral. There is no need for a drive towards a reinvention of software
or what is sometimes awkwardly called a 'radical' software because at
bottom, all software is simply just algorithms24. This is both
compellingly optimistic, in that it refuses to get locked into
determinism, but also a little more innocent than strictly necessary.
Mathematics is always situated, always developed in some sort of tune
with its moment in time. Ancient Greek mathematics clearly developed in
relation to geometry, measurement and building. Why is there so much
attention put into producing algorithms today? In order to run vast
amounts of changing data through sequences of uniform and repeatable
processes.

This is not to say of course that uses of certain forms of numerical
technology are determined by inherent relations of power. It is again
what they are amalgamated with that is of substantial importance. Not
everything produced in Word is a CV. However, acknowledging this should
not become a way of blocking processes of reinvention - particularly not
as a way of slipping a more thoroughgoing conformism through as a way of
seeming to, at least partially, confront the problematics of software
production.

As we have seen, software is reduced too often into being simply a tool
for the achievement of pre-existing neutrally-formulated tasks.
Culture becomes an engineering problem.

Where this is perhaps most telling is not in the area of proprietary
software, but in those areas of software production that have made an
important break with it. Free, or Open Source software, particularly
that available under the GNU Public License, works because it operates
via of one of the most useful socio-technical inventions of recent
times25. Those active in free software are increasingly aware that it
needs to develop beyond its core constituency of software written by
engineers to be used by engineers.26 This model has of course given us
some phenomenal successes but this process of openness needs itself to
be opened up. Just as Microsoft trapped Apple into its financial domain
by refusing to produce Office for their OS unless Explorer was bundled
as standard, proprietary software traps supposedly 'free' programmers
into their imaginal space by convincing them that they will have no
users unless they conform to what is already known, what is already done.

The surplus rationalism that has given us tools for tasks may be free in
some senses but its springs a trap upon itself every time it stays too
happy to accept access to code without access to its conceptual
infrastructure. Just as you can only fully reveal a phenomena if it is
already disappearing, Free Software is too content with simply
reverse-engineering or mimicking the cramped sensoriums of proprietary
software. Copying Microsoft Word feature by feature and opening up the
source code is not freedom. Mimesis is misery.

Whilst there is at least the beginnings of a move to collaborate with
designers and other users to produce replica DTP packages and artists to
clone Photoshop - and thus pull the practice of engineers into relation
with currents it has been excluded from - there is a need to go further.
Where it seems open or free approaches are most fruitful at present is
in small software, making specific interventions to precise technical,
economic and social problematics. Particular bottlenecks to the
distributed circulation of information are broken through, often of
course using simple surplus rationalism as their crowbar. Despite the
legal problems it encountered, the recent open DVD player, DeCSS, is a
strong example. This strategy of focussing on precise technical
conflicts needs now to be intensified by drawing in antagonisms from
supposedly separate fields. Geek drives to innovation must, as
awkwardly and confusingly as it will happen, be coupled with the drive
to make language, to cut the word up, open, and into process.

Matthew Fuller is a member of the speculative software group I/O/D
(http://bak.spc.org/iod/) and a regular collaborator with Mongrel
(http://www.mongrelx.org.uk/). Shake Editions
(http://www.shake-editions.com) have recently published his novel 'ATM'.
This text accompanies 'A Song for Occupations' a large wall-mounted map
of the interaction sequences of microsoft word

1 The HTML generated automatically by Word is of such low quality, full
of extraneous code, that Dreamweaver 3 for instance makes a feature of
being able to automatically reformat it into useable HTML.

2 Gilles Deleuze and F=E9lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian
Massumi, Athlone, London 1988, p.90

3 For a good account of this earlier stage see: EDP Analyzer, The
Experience of Word Processing, in Tom Forester ed. Blackwell, Oxford
1980 p.232-244

4 James Gleick, Chasing Bugs in the Electronic Village,
http://www.around.com

5 John Hewitt, Good Design in the Market Place: The Rise of Habitat Man,
The Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 10 no2, Oxford 1987, p.28-42

6 Andre Gorz, Paths to Paradise - on the Liberation from Work, trans.
Malcolm Imrie, Pluto Press, London 1985, p.64 (He continues… …By
its very nature autonomous behaviour cannot be explained sociologically,
of course it always occurs within a socially determined field, with
socially pre-given instruments. But both are reshaped in unforeseen ways
to fit the requirements of a personal venture)

7 Michel Foucault cited in Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character,
W.W. Norton, New York 1998 p.13

8 Heim, p.10 This is a preamble to Heim's attack on McLuhan for getting
wasted in the volcano of the random fragmenting world. See Also, Gary
Genosko, McLuhan and Baudrillard: masters of implosion, Routledge,
London 1999

9 cited in Wendy Goldman Ruhm, The Microsoft Files: the secret case
against Bill Gates, Times Business, New York, 1998, p.256

10 Heidegger, cited in Heim, p. 195

11 Edwards, The Closed World: computers and the politics of discourse in
cold war america, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1996, p.147

12 Heim, p.92

13 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology

14 Alan Coooper, The Inmates are Running the Asylum: why high-tech
products drive us crazy and how to restore the sanity, Sams Publishing,
Indianapolis, 1999, p.106-107

15 Tufte, Envisioning Information, Graphics Press, Cheshire,
Connecticut, 1990, p.89

16 Edward Tufte, p.53

17 Malcolm McCullough, Abstracting Craft: the practiced digital hand,
MIT Press, Cambridge, 1998, p.80

18 Reflection Eternal, feat. Bahamdia, Chaos , SoundBombing volume two,
Rawkus Records, New York, 1999

19 Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris
Cullens, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990

20 Lecercle, The Violence of Language, Routledge

21 Jan van Dijk, The Network Society, trans. Leontine Spoorenberg, Sage,
London, 1999, p175

22 Heim specifies a number of early word-processing tools (ie
framemaker) in which this capacity was still present.

23
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2000/03-14realnames.asp

24 For a version of this argument in Linguistic terms see, J.Stalin,
Marxism and Problems of Linguistics at http://www.marxists.com

25 see the Free Software Foundation Website: http://www.fsf.org

26 Matthew Mastracci, Linux Office Showdown (Oart 1: Applixware 5.0 M1
vs KOffice pre-beta) at
http://slashdot.org/features/00/02/22/0850251.shtml

with an excellent following thread on free word processors and office
suites including various short suggestions for a conceptual as well as
technical opening up of this area

End part 3 of 3