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MEDIUMS AND IMBRICATION: TOWARD A MIDDLE-ORIENTED HISTORIOGRAPHY OF TECHNOLOGIES
A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts in Communication, Culture, and Technology
By
Matthew Lindia, B.A.
Washington, DC April 22, 2020
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Copyright 2020 by Matthew Lindia All Rights Reserved
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MEDIUMS AND IMBRICATION: TOWARD A MIDDLE-ORIENTED HISTORIOGRAPHY OF TECHNOLOGIES
Matthew Lindia, B.A.
Thesis Advisor: J.R. Osborn, Ph.D.
ABSTRACT
This thesis works to develop a heuristic technique – the Imbrication Model – for
understanding technologies relations to other objects. These relations include objects which
contribute to the actualization of a technology and objects which are influenced by the
technology. The model draws upon four fields of existing scholarship: Graham Harman’s object-
oriented ontology (OOO); Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT), social construction of
technology (SCOT), and media ecology. The Imbrication Model is developed by proposing a
novel re-reading of the implications of SCOT and media ecology through the philosophies of
objects and non-human actors in OOO and ANT. Particularly, this occurs by stating that
technologies relate to objects in one of four ways: if an object relates to a technology, it must be
either a performative motive, an ostensive motive, a performative consequence, or an ostensive
consequence. These four concepts make up the four quadrants of the Imbrication Model.
The model is demonstrated by applying it to the object of the QWERTY keyboard.
Finally, the temporal implications of motive and consequence are considered in relation to
technological changes over time. This principle is explored via the Imbrication Model through
tessellations, where the four quadrants of one technology are diagrammatically compared to the
four quadrants of another technology.
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Ultimately, the unique emphasis of objects as the centerpiece of this thesis enables it to
provoke non-obvious questions and facilitate thought along lines which are helpful in
emphasizing the importance of indirect relations in media studies.
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To my parents, who pray without ceasing
To Read Mercer Schuchardt, who put me on to something
And to my wife, my ultimate best friend
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Acknowledgements
I cannot think of an individual who has been more helpful, inspirational, and supportive through this process than my thesis advisor, Dr. J.R. Osborn. I will be eternally grateful for your willingness to meet with and listen to me, from the time I was an over-eager first semester student at CCT, wanting to discuss my thesis, to reading 100 pages of rambling thoughts about this project before it officially began, to constantly taking my ideas seriously by encouraging me to develop the questions I want to ask and avoiding closed-off answers. I will carry the lessons I have learned from you for the rest of my academic career. Thank you to my other CCT professors, who have directly or indirectly contributed to my intellectual growth and the substance of this projects. Dr. Meg Leta Jones, your expertise in history and archives constantly reminds me to ground my theory in reality. Furthermore, it was through your classes that I came to realize my primary research interest is input techniques. For that realization, I am tremendously grateful. Dr. Matthew Tinkcom, I am deeply indebted to you for introducing me to psychoanalysis, critical theory, and the philosophy of technology. While many of the ideas we have discussed are absent from the text of the final version of this thesis, they are, in some ways, the scaffolding which holds it up. Notably, I also owe a debt of gratitude to you for introducing me to the term, imbrication, and its etymology, from which this thesis gets its name. Dr. Martin Irvine, thank you for introducing me to Bruno Latour, C.S. Peirce, and others. I have been deeply impacted by their writings. Thank you to my professors at Wheaton College, who set me on a path of academic pursuits, namely Dr. Theon Hill and Dr. Read Mercer Schuchardt. To Dr. Hill, I owe a very specific debt of gratitude in that your courses first inspired me to consider the complexity of the relation of the cotton gin to the Civil War – an idea which reemerges in the case study of this thesis. To Dr. Schuchardt, I owe my interest in media and technology in its entirety. Thank you for introducing me to media ecology, for encouraging me along the way, and for your sustained friendship since my graduation from Wheaton. Thank you to my family, for your undying support, prayers, and encouragement. Philip, thank you for reading a draft of this thesis and providing feedback. I value your insights more than you know. Peter, Michael, and Dad, thank you for reading and discussing the version of this thesis I presented at the MEA 2019 conference. I will never forget discussing it with you in Mom and Dad’s kitchen in Durham. Mimi, thank you for your encouragement and confidence in my abilities. Mom, thank you for your constant prayers and support. Most of what I know about writing and nearly all of my drive for excellence comes from you. Finally, thank you Brie, my lovely wife, for listening as I worked out ideas, waiting for me to get to stopping points, and for your patience and kindness. Thank you for your encouragement, your confidence in the quality of my work, and for challenging me to refine my ideas enough to be able to explain them to someone unfamiliar with my sources. You will always inspire me.
~ M.S.L.
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We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts. This is one of the useful arts
~James Joyce
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness
~Marshall McLuhan
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................... 1
1. A Model Proposed ..................................................................................................................... 16
1.1. Middle- and Object-Oriented Dualisms: On Harman’s First Question ...................... 18
1.1.1 Ostensive and Performative Objects ............................................................ 19
1.1.2 Motive and Consequence ............................................................................. 23
1.2. Interrelation: On Harman’s Second Question ............................................................ 30
1.2.1 Performative Motives of the QWERTY Keyboard ...................................... 33
1.2.2 Ostensive Motives of the QWERTY Keyboard ........................................... 41
1.2.3 Ostensive Consequences of the QWERTY Keyboard ................................. 46
1.2.4 Performative Consequences of the QWERTY Keyboard ............................ 52
1.2.5 The Imbricated QWERTY Keyboard ........................................................... 59
2. Tessellations .............................................................................................................................. 65
2.1. Trajectory: On Harman’s Third Question .................................................................. 66
2.1.1 The Spiral Structure of Technology ............................................................. 68
2.1.2 The Imbrication Model as a Model for Technological Evolution ................ 71
2.2. Single Tessellations .................................................................................................... 73
2.2.1 Wire-Toothed Cotton Gin + QWERTY Keyboard ...................................... 74
2.2.2 Alphabetic Moveable Type + QWERTY Keyboard .................................... 78
2.2.3 QWERTY Keyboard + Emoji Keyboard ..................................................... 80
2.2.4 QWERTY Keyboard + Modern Efficiency Desk ........................................ 82
2.3. Complex Tessellations ................................................................................................ 84
2.3.1 String Tessellations ...................................................................................... 85
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2.3.2 Cluster Tessellations ..................................................................................... 90
3. CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................... 93
3.1. On Harman’s Fourth Question ................................................................................... 94
3.2. In Media Res ............................................................................................................... 96
GLOSSARY .................................................................................................................................. 98
WORKS CITED .......................................................................................................................... 100
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Imbrication Model and Influential Theories ................................................................. 10
Figure 2: Tegulae and Imbrices ..................................................................................................... 13
Figure 3: Imbrication Model (Fourfold Structure) ........................................................................ 14
Figure 4: Imbrication Model with Definitions ............................................................................. 31
Figure 5: Performative Motives of QWERTY .............................................................................. 33
Figure 6: Sholes Typewriter without Letters on Keys ................................................................... 39
Figure 7: Sholes “QWERTY” Layout ........................................................................................... 40
Figure 8: Ostensive Motives of QWERTY ................................................................................... 41
Figure 9: Charles Thurber’s Printing Machine .............................................................................. 43
Figure 10: William Burt’s Typographer ........................................................................................ 43
Figure 11: Ostensive Consequences of QWERTY ....................................................................... 46
Figure 12: Performative Consequences of QWERTY .................................................................. 52
Figure 13: The Imbrication Model of QWERTY .......................................................................... 59
Figure 14: Levinson’s Tetrad Spirals ............................................................................................ 70
Figure 15: Tessellation Possibilities .............................................................................................. 72
Figure 16: Wire-Toothed Cotton Gin + QWERTY Imbrication Model ........................................ 74
Figure 17: Alphabetic Moveable Type + QWERTY Imbrication Model ..................................... 78
Figure 18: QWERTY + Emoji Keyboard Imbrication Model ....................................................... 80
Figure 19: QWERTY + Modern Efficiency Desk Imbrication Model .......................................... 82
Figure 20: Object-Specific String Tessellation ............................................................................. 86
Figure 21: Object-Indiscriminate String Tessellation ................................................................... 88
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Figure 22: Cluster Tessellation ...................................................................................................... 91
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INTRODUCTION
This thesis develops a heuristic technique – the Imbrication Model – for generating non-
obvious questions about technologies to objects and to other technologies. The model
emphasizes the role of objects in the histories of technologies in the spirit of Graham Harman’s
object-oriented ontology (OOO) and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT). Building upon
these theories, the imbrication model places non-human objects – defined as anything which
cannot be reduced either to its function or to its components – into two categories: performative
objects or ostensive objects. Ostensive objects are objects which can be physically perceived.
Performative objects, in contrast, lack perceptible qualities; they are learned or enacted. These
insights are then used to re-interpret two other sets of their theories: social construction of
technology and media ecology. The social construction of technology sets a precedent for
considering objects as motives, meaning that objects contribute to the emergence of a technology
along with other objects. Media ecology, by comparison, sets a precedent for considering objects
as consequences, as this tradition deals with considering the total scope of technological effects.
The Imbrication Model is developed by placing the insights from these existing theories
into conversation with one another. By spatially organizing concepts into a matrix, the
Imbrication Model works as a heuristic which classifies objects according to their relations to
other objects, including objects which contribute to the actualization of a technology and objects
which are influenced by the technology. Particularly, this occurs by stating that technologies
relate to objects in one of four ways: if an object relates to a technology, it must be either a
performative motive, an ostensive motive, a performative consequence, or an ostensive
consequence. These four concepts make up the four quadrants of the Imbrication Model. These
quadrants, in turn, arise from two dualisms. The first dualism deals with historical phenomena
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which precede a studied technology (motives) and historical phenomena which proceed from a
studied technology (consequences). The second dualism deals with subclassifications of human
inventions and artifacts: objects with perceptible qualities (ostensive objects) and objects with
imperceptible qualities (performative objects).
Both sets of dualisms, and the subsequent quadrants which they produce, however, are
not novel concepts introduced by this model, but are instead drawn from insights of pre-existing
historiographies of technology and theories of human artifacts. As a study concerned with the
insights of multiple theories, the ideas which define each quadrant are not necessarily the same
as any of the other quadrants. Instead individual quadrants each draw several different theories,
first placing those theories into new relation to one another, and second, placing them in relation
to the principles defining the other three quadrants.
Four primary traditions operate as important intellectual starting points for the construction
of this model: object-oriented ontology (OOO), actor-network theory (ANT), media ecology, and
the social construction of technology (SCOT). In their own ways, each of these four theories deal
with human artifacts in some capacity – by which I mean they deal with entities created by
humans, either physical or otherwise. By drawing together these schools of thought and
developing a model and research agenda according to their insights, I build upon the oeuvre of
Graham Harman (the leading figure in OOO), who, in addition to developing OOO out of the
Heideggerian tradition, has at different points in his career written on Bruno Latour’s ANT and
media ecology, particularly on the work of Marshall McLuhan.1 ANT, for Harman, informs
1 Harman, Graham. “McLuhan as Philosopher.” In Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism, 180–97. Alresford: Zero Books, 2013.; Harman, Graham. “The McLuhans and Metaphysics.” In New Waves in Philosophy of Technology, edited by Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen, Evan Selinger, and Søren Riis, 100–122. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009; Harman, Graham. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press, 2009; Harman, Graham. “The Tetrad and Phenomenology.” Explorations in Media Ecology 6, no. 3 (2007): 189–96; Harman, Graham. “The Coldness of Forgetting: OOO in Philosophy, Archaeology, and History.” Open Philosophy 2, no. 1
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OOO by its “ability to account for human and non-human entities in almost exactly the same
terms.”2 Comparatively, Harman’s work on media ecology relates to his project in OOO
tangentially, but does not, in many cases, move the OOO agenda forward. This thesis takes
seriously Harman’s affinity for media ecology by incorporating Harmanian/Latourian concepts
of objects into media ecology’s project of identifying technological effects. If Harman’s work
serves as a precedent for this thesis to consider media ecology, ANT, and OOO in relation to one
another, a detour through Bruno Latour’s work allows for the inclusion of SCOT in the set of
relevant theories for this project. Latour’s early work deals with the social construction of
scientific knowledge, which, at its most fundamental level, asserts that scientific knowledge and
nature do not share a direct relationship, where the former simply uncovers the truth of the latter.
Instead, scientific knowledge involves layers of values, institutions, interests, tools, and more
which work together to “construct” a fact about the natural world. If scientific facts are, indeed,
constructed on these layers, at least two possibilities have emerged for approaching the
understanding of the social construction of scientific knowledge: a negative interpretive
approach and a positive one. The negative interpretive approach, most commonly called the
strong program, asserts that the ideas which explain natural phenomena are socially constructed
and argues for the possibility of alternative scientific paradigms, which would either explain the
same phenomena by different means or proceed along different trajectories of inquiry and find an
explanation of a given phenomenon unnecessary for scientific advance. A positive interpretive
approach is less concerned with alternative epistemologies, and instead describes the process by
which a fact is socially constructed by making notes of values, institutions, interests, tools, and
so on – this is the Latourian approach. Latour’s approach leads him in the opposite direction of
(September 13, 2019): 270–279. 2 Harman, “The Coldness of Forgetting,” 274
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his colleagues who favor the negative interpretive approach, particularly when those colleagues
used that approach to understand the social construction of technology, and not just the social
construction of scientific fact. For these colleagues, the social construction of technology
analyzes the “social” (i.e. the institutions, values, relationships, etc.) in order to argue that
technologies are not arrived at by a process of linear or determinate evolution, but through the
active choices of relevant social groups. Latour’s work, however, brings him to redefine social so
as to include the material objects that SCOT claims the social world constructs.
By bringing SCOT into conversation with the Latour-Harman-McLuhan network found in
Harman’s work, two productive opportunities emerge which add nuance to the cocktail of
theories found in Harman’s work. First, combining Latour’s detour with SCOT allows for
exploration of technology as singular actualizations within a number of unactualized alternatives
which emerge in response to needs and wants of social actors, but through the lens of Latour’s
expanded and original understanding of social which includes non-human actors. It provides the
opportunity to consider, in other words, what social construction means if the social includes
both human and non-human actors. Second, SCOT provides elegant historical symmetry to the
claims of media ecology within the literature with which Harman deals. Whereas media ecology
deals with technologies as objects which facilitate effects within a society, SCOT deals with
technologies as the result of a number of different societal causes. Throughout this thesis, the
difference of these approaches will be referred to as end-oriented and beginning-oriented. An
end-oriented approach, such as SCOT, sees technologies as the end result of social negotiations.
A beginning-oriented approach, such as media ecology, sees technologies as the beginning of
social effects. By placing these approaches in relation to one another, the heuristic developed in
accordance to them becomes middle-oriented, which is to say, it encourages an understanding to
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technology which accounts for both a technology’s actualization as well as the effects which it
contributes to a society.
Ultimately, the Imbrication Model develops from a synthesis of ANT, SCOT and media
ecology through OOO. In other words, instead of dealing with Harman’s reading of McLuhan or
Harman’s reading of Latour, this thesis attempts to take seriously Harman’s interest in these two
thinkers (and SCOT) by imagining re-formulations of the questions that SCOT and media
ecology raise from an object-oriented perspective. In this way, by applying the ontological
insights of OOO and ANT about objects and their agency to media ecology and SCOT, the
Imbrication Model, uses orientation around objects as a common denominator for developing a
new model which takes into consideration these traditions’ very different agendas. Further, I
argue that the centrality of objects in re-interpreting SCOT and media ecology contributes to the
heuristic value of this model by facilitating the accessibility and legibility of the model. By this I
mean that the Imbrication Model and its object-oriented/actor-networked reinterpretation of
SCOT and media ecology do not propose replacements or reductions of traditional articulations
of these theories, but instead it facilitates their accessibility in model form.
The Imbrication Model is ultimately arrived at through consideration of these theories in
conversation with one another. Particularly, it develops a heuristic that takes the insights of these
four theoretical positions so as to facilitate questions and discovery about the histories of
technologies insofar as they exhibit both end-oriented and beginning-oriented relations (SCOT
and media ecology) of technologies to the original understandings of the social and of objects as
theorized by ANT and OOO. The discussion of chapter 1.1 will ultimately lead to an
understanding of the four quadrants as follows:
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Performative motive draws on object-oriented ontology and the social construction of
technology, the former primarily relating to the performative aspects and the latter relating to
motives. OOO lays a foundation for understanding performative motives by defining objects as
anything which cannot be reduced to its components or its function. Effectively, this sidesteps
tendencies to consider objects either as the opposite of subjects or as perceptible manifestations
of some entity in the physical world. By defining objects in this way, OOO identifies a slew of
additional entities as meaningfully existing under the umbrella title of object, including non-
perceptible artifacts such as corporations, rules, laws, games, values, traditions, and so on. Such
“objects” exist through the shared performances of those who use and interact with them; they
are not perceivable material objects or artifacts. These additional, non-perceptible entities are the
ones considered in this quadrant.
If the concept of performative motive derives from OOO, the concept of motive itself largely
derives from SCOT. As a research agenda, SCOT is concerned with understanding the
development of technologies as deeply involved with the choices of involved groups and
individuals. Particularly relevant for the Imbrication Model, SCOT understands technologies to
emerge as the result of multiple, compounding factors, and not due to any singular cause. In a
related sense, SCOT views technologies as responding to certain conditions in a given cultural
moment but not as the only possible response to these conditions nor as responding to the totality
of relevant conditions. This means that a technology’s viability for cultural acceptance is neither
innate nor ensured for the cultural moment in which the technology became actualized. Another
technology might have adequately responded to the same conditions instead of the one through
the course of history which actually did. Insofar as the Imbrication Model is concerned, these
principles guide its inquiry into motives by facilitating research into multiple causalities and by
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calling attention to the conditions to which a technology adequately (or inadequately responds).
Performative motives then, are the class of imperceptible objects which contribute to the
actualization of a technology. They are, in other words, the performative conditions – which is to
say conditions which cannot be seen, heard, tasted, touched, or smelled – to which a technology
responds, or which are important for its emergence.
Ostensive motive, like performative motive, derives a principle of motive from SCOT.
However, the idea of ostensive objects is drawn from the literature of Actor-Network Theory.
ANT is concerned with the relationships between actors, claiming that those relationships define
the social world. One of ANT’s most important contributions, however, has to do with the fact
that within this school of thought, networks are not only determined by the actions of human
subjects, but by the action and agency of non-human actors as well. ANT here provides
justification of considering the non-human actors role in maintaining performative objects in the
actualization of a technology. ANT includes material and physical objects and technologies as
actors within its networks which exert important influences on the objects to which it relates.
From ANT, the Imbrication Model derives the principle that these material, physical, and
ostensive objects must be accounted for in a historiography of technology. So, by postulating a
quadrant of ostensive motive, the Imbrication Model requires a researcher to consider the role of
ostensive, non-human actors in the course of a studied technology’s actualization. As is the case
with performative motives, ostensive motives are expected to be plural and involving conditions
which might solicit a number of adequate responses. Identifying an ostensive motive, then, is not
to claim determinatively this will lead to that, but to work descriptively, saying, this contributes
to that object’s emergence.
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Ostensive consequence deals with ostensive objects as necessary social actors as outlined in
ANT, just as ostensive motive does. Noticeably, however, this quadrant deals with ostensive
objects as consequences of the technology under examination, rather than motives for that
technology. Ostensive consequences draw theoretical insights from media ecology, which seeks
to understand media and technology by taking “an inventory of effects”.3 In other words, a media
ecological approach suggests that a technology is best understood by understanding the change it
introduces to the world. To identify a technology as contributing to a particular effect, however,
is not to identify it as the only cause of a given effect. In other words, while media ecology
highlights the role of a technology in realizing certain changes, it should not be misunderstood as
technologically deterministic. Instead, media ecology argues for an understanding of technology
which emphasizes technologies as necessary, but not sufficient causes which enact change.
Building on ANT’s claim that objects, artifacts, and actors exist in networks, the Imbrication
Model delineates media ecology’s inventory of effects into categories of ostensive and
performative objects. In the case of ostensive consequences, the Imbrication Model catalogues
objects which relate to a studied technology by having their physical and perceptible qualities
altered by or designed according to the affordances and constraints of the studied technology.
Ostensive consequences are physical, material, or perceptible “effects” of a given technology.
Finally, a performative consequence builds on concepts from OOO and media ecology, by
referring to the relations a technology creates or alters to objects of an imperceptible nature.
Performative consequences are the social, or performative, objects which arise in response to the
technology in question. As is the case with ostensive consequences, performative consequences
are not necessarily the result of a studied technology singularly producing change in or the
3 McLuhan, Marshall, and Quintin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Penguin Books.
9
emergence of a performative object. Instead, the technology relates to other objects through
performative consequence as a single actor within a much larger network of actors.
The purpose behind dividing the insights of SCOT, ANT, OOO, and media ecology into
these four quadrants is to demonstrate how putting these theories in conversation with one
another results in an understanding of an object-oriented history of technology which accounts
for multiple causalities and multiple effects. This is accomplished by asking how a studied
technology relates to different types of objects, both ostensive and performative. In the context of
this model, each of the four quadrants fundamentally draw from two of these four theories, as
related to their contributions either to historiographical approaches (SCOT and media ecology)
or the classification of human artifacts (OOO and ANT). The end-oriented quadrants deal with
SCOT, while the beginning-oriented ones deal with media ecology. Comparatively, quadrants
which deal with ostensive objects are primarily influenced by ANT and ones which deal with
performative ones are primarily influenced by OOO. Ultimately, the categories are not so rigid
that any given theory must be contained in its defined quadrants, but they might be generally
understood to be classified as follows:
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Figure 1: The Imbrication Model and Influential Theories
In sum, by proposing a middle-oriented historiography of technologies, the Imbrication Model
seeks to develop a method of inquiry which takes into account technological histories with wide
breadths of data. The model is useful, not as a technique which definitively explains
technological change, technological emergence, or technological effects, but as a model which
provokes previously unasked questions and inspires further research.
The subtitle of this project – Toward a Middle-Oriented Historiography of Technologies –
nicely summarizes the goal of building a heuristic from these theories as described in the four
quadrants explained above. The first description of this project maintains that this thesis is
middle-oriented. Indeed, as a project concerned with both SCOT and media ecology, this thesis
attempts to take seriously both the processes by which technologies become viable in a given
context as well as subsequent changes related to the introduction of said technology. I contend
that, in addition to being an object-oriented model, a major contribution of this thesis is that it
Performative MotiveOOOSCOT
Ostensive MotiveANT
SCOT
Ostensive ConsequenceANT
Media Ecology
Performative ConsequenceOOO
Media Ecology
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develops an model for studying technology which is middle-oriented: taking into account the
insights from end-oriented and beginning-oriented approaches to studying technology. These
approaches can be more accurately referred to by my second description: historiography.
Historiography, simply defined, is writing about history, but it generally refers to the nature of a
narrative — its assumptions and goals — in relation to the actual events which it retells.
Referring to this thesis as a middle-oriented historiography, describes its approach to
understanding historical events, which prioritizes describing both pre-conditions and post-
conditions in relation to a specific object. However, it might be more accurately described as a
middle-oriented experimental historiography, because the goal of this approach is not to develop
an approach for creating exhaustive histories where every single pre-condition and post-
condition are noted in a study. Instead, the historiography is designed so as to facilitate the
researcher in making choices concerning which conditions to include and which to omit and to
draw conclusions or trace new threads from included objects in order to raise non-obvious
questions. In other words, the model is designed as a heuristic device for the discovery of
indirect historical relations of a technology to Harmanian/Latourian objects which both
contribute to its actualization and are influenced by its presence in the world. These non-obvious
questions are raised in regard to the object of this middle-oriented (experimental) historiography:
technologies. In this case, the plural is intentional and crucial, as this project does not develop a
research agenda for studying this history of one technology alone, but the history of one
technology in relation to the history of at least one other technology. In other words, a
historiography of technologies is a historiography of technological relations. By describing this
project as one which focuses on technological relations, and not technologies, the Imbrication
Model shifts the intellectual locus from a single center to one with multiple centers in a
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constantly growing network of relations. In other words, the goal of this historiography is not to
trace the history of a single invention or technology, but to explore the ways in which multiple
technologies relate to one another and contribute to the emergence of subsequent technologies,
either directly or indirectly.
Similar to the subtitle, I feel that the particular phrasing of the title also ought to be
explained. Those more grammatically inclined – or those familiar with Latin plurals – have
undoubtedly already circled with their red pens the first word of the title, mediums, because, after
all, the plural of medium is media except for in cases of more than one person communicating
with the dead. Yet, I willingly and willfully describe more than one medium as mediums because
of increasing connotations of a singular, monolithic force in society — the media — which
encompasses print, television, social media, and more, in order to distinguish this particular
study from studies concerned with a monolith of that sort. While this thesis owes a great deal to
media studies and studies of the media, it differs in that the concern of communication media
find their place within the rubric here proposed not due to their mediation between a sender and
receiver, but due to their mediation from one historical object to another (I will discuss this
further several paragraphs down). In this way, by referring to media in the plural as mediums, I
distance this project from being limited to those technologies dedicated to mediating symbolic
communication between individuals.
The second term of significance in this title, imbrication, requires some explanation as well.
Etymologically, the word imbrication comes to the English language by way of a Greco-Roman
tiling technique. This technique involved designing roof tiles (called tegulae, or a tegula, in the
singular) to overlap. The gaps between individual tegula were covered by arched imbrices
(imbrex in the singular). In the figure below, (a) points to a tegula and (b) points to an imbrex.
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Figure 2: Tegulae and Imbrices4
Ultimately, I borrow the term imbrication because the proposed model visually recalls this
tiling technique by organizing historical phenomena in independent but overlapping “tiles.” This
model initially manifests as a fourfold comprised of the two dualisms: motive and consequence,
and ostensive object and performative object. These dualisms are arranged graphically in a
fourfold which puts the dualisms in conversation with one another, as displayed in Figure 3:
4 “Imbrex and Tegula.” In Wikipedia, February 17, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Imbrex_and_tegula&oldid=941216044.
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Figure 3: Imbrication Model (Fourfold Structure)
The model, in its extended form, serves the purpose of comparing the relations of one
technology to another because the consequence of one technology is the motive of another. This
principle is argued at length in chapter 2. When the model tessellates in this way, the tiling of the
quadrants visually harkens back to the imbrex and tegula technique.
In some ways, the division between title and subtitle are indicative of a dualism found
throughout this project. Through its reference to imbrication, the title primarily alludes to the
visual, graphic display argued for as useful in illustrating this sort of historiography throughout
this thesis. The subtitle, on the other hand, deals with the historiography and the theoretical
underpinnings of the model. Both offer intellectual contributions, and their projects run parallel,
although they are not identical. Fundamentally, the historiographical and theoretical work must
precede the model itself so as to justify its design. The model, however, suggests theoretical and
heuristic insights in two primary ways. First, it provides a researcher with an opportunity to
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spatially organize large amounts of historical data and place them in relation to one another in a
way which makes their relations more immediately accessible than tends to be the case in prose.
In the process of actual research projects, this visual/spatial organization can be helpful in at least
two instances: either at the beginning of a research project where a researcher arranges
preliminary data according to the model and builds hypotheses and arguments accordingly, or at
the end of a project, when, in retrospect, a researcher recollects the insights of a project, and
arranges them according to the model so as to be easily understood, remembered, and referenced
by a reader. Second, by visually organizing the dualisms of motive/consequence and ostensive
object/performative object, the model demonstrates the potential for the endless expansion of
technological relations, as well as the expansion of technological relations of multiple sorts in
multiple directions.
16
1. A MODEL PROPOSED
The historiography of media and technology faces a number of challenges which require any
researcher to make choices concerning the nature of questions they will ask about their subject,
and subsequently influence the nature of answers that they will find. The historian of media and
technology must ask whether they consider their chosen technology as a historical end or
beginning. The goal of the Imbrication Model is to synthesize the insights of the social
construction of technology and media ecology through the philosophies of actor-network theory
and object-oriented ontology into one coherent heuristic. More specifically, it seeks to unify the
end-oriented approach of SCOT with the beginning-oriented approach of media ecology into an
object-oriented approach by reading them through OOO and ANT. This synthesis demonstrates
the full historical positioning of any given technology by considering it in relation to the
conditions out of which it emerges and the conditions which it helps create. Ultimately, the
model develops into a tool for comparing the process of technological change which
diagrammatically compares the historical situation of one technology to another technology
which share a historical relation to at least one object.
Insofar as they relate to one another, the four theories which serve as the backbone of this
thesis can be distilled down into two fundamental dualisms: the motive/consequence dualism of
SCOT and media ecology, respectively, which coordinates end-oriented and beginning-oriented
questions in relation to one another and the ostensive/performative object dualism of OOO and
ANT, which deal with the agency of imperceptible and perceptible human artifacts. When placed
into conversation with one another, these dualities create a fourfold, from which the Imbrication
Model derives its foundational building blocks: ostensive motive, performative motive, ostensive
consequence, and performative consequence, defined again below:
17
1. Performative motive: A non-physical object contributing to the actualization of a
technology
2. Ostensive motive: A physical object contributing to the actualization of a technology
3. Ostensive consequence: The influence of a technology on the physical qualities of
another object
4. Performative consequence: The influences of a technology on the non-physical qualities
of another object
Fourfold structures have a long history in human thought, including Aristotle’s four causes,
Augustine’s four expositional modes, or Bacon’s four idols, as well as more recent intellectual
inquiries like McLuhan’s tetrad.5 Graham Harman has expressed interest in this pattern of human
intellectual history and through his inquiry of McLuhan’s tetrad foregrounded in historical
patterns of four, he derives four fundamental questions to ask of fourfolds.6 As I introduce the
foundations of the Imbrication Model and its methodology, I will use Harman’s questions as a
guide. The inquiries are as follows:
1. “What are the two dualisms that generate it?
2. Do its four poles interrelate, and transform or are they static? If the former, then how
does this happen?
3. Do the four poles exist simultaneously, or do one or more push us towards some past or
future moment?
4. Do the four poles apply to every corner of reality, or only a limited class of entities? If a
limited class, then we are not dealing with a philosophy strictly speaking, but a more
5 Harman, “The McLuhans and Metaphysics,” 101 6 Ibid., 103
18
specialized type of knowledge.”7
By answering these questions, I hope to demonstrate a variety angles from which this
middle-oriented historiography can be understood, as well as to illustrate its inherent ability do
address and categorize complex and nuanced subjects. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate that the
Imbrication Model is useful as a pedagogical tool, which, from a theoretical perspective, allows
for insights from SCOT, ANT, OOO, and media ecology to co-exist, and from a heuristic and
diagrammatic perspective, organizes the subject matter from complex research questions into
visualized fields which highlight certain relations which might be lost in the traditional prosaic
format.
1.1. MIDDLE- AND OBJECT-ORIENTED DUALISMS: ON HARMAN’S FIRST QUESTION
As the theories which inform the project of this thesis, the insights of SCOT, media ecology,
ANT and OOO provide the answer to answer Harman’s first question – “What are the dualisms
that generate [the fourfold]?8 The first dualism addresses the divide between material objects and
abstract objects, and the second addresses the problem of end-oriented and beginning-oriented
histories of technology. As alluded to by presenting the four quadrants of the Imbrication Model
in the previous section (which simply relate the principles of the two dualisms to one another),
part of the method for developing a middle-oriented historiography of technology involves
developing a vocabulary for quickly and easily describing both the nature of an object as well as
its relation to the technology at hand (i.e. the technology central to the history being written). By
and large, a major goal of this project and the Imbrication Model is to synthesize harmonious or
complementary ideas in social construction of technology, media ecology, actor-network theory,
7 Ibid. 8 Ibid.
19
and object-oriented ontology underneath the auspices of one cohesive mode of analysis. I hope to
achieve such synthesis by identifying unique principles foundational to each of these schools of
thought and putting them in conversation each other. I hope to make distinctions which are both
broad enough to apply in the case of every human artifact and specific enough to yield new,
compelling, and thoughtful research. In the context of a theoretical/pedagogical endeavor such as
the Imbrication Model helpful dualisms can be arrived at by beginning with the particular
assumptions and values of each of the four theories from which the dualisms derive, and
following them to their general principles, in order to account for their most unique and
important sets of intellectual contributions which shape the hypotheses of this model. Ultimately,
the dualism of performative and ostensive objects, derived from OOO and ANT, will allow for a
re-interpretation of the motive/consequence dualism by hypothesizing that technologies relate to
ostensive and performative objects as both motives and consequences.
1.1.1 Ostensive and Performative Objects
In the context of the Imbrication Model, the essentialist philosophy of object-oriented
ontology, particularly by the means of its “flat ontology” (which is pre-figured in Latour’s Actor-
Network Theory, as Graham Harman excellently demonstrates in his book, Prince of Networks:
Bruno Latour and Metaphysics), provides helpful insight into what it means to study media as
human artifacts, and more specifically, as human artifacts in relation to one another. The
perspectives of OOO and ANT, as complements to one another, provide the tools necessary to
construct a definition of the human artifact on which the insights of end-oriented and beginning-
oriented approaches might balance, and from which a middle-oriented historiography might
develop. Indeed, these insights lead to a dualism which, when paired with the
motive/consequence dualism, produces a useful heuristic.
20
Both ANT and OOO take an epistemological position which Harman refers to as a flat
ontology, meaning that neither privilege the relations of humans to humans and/or humans to
objects (non-humans) over objects to objects or objects to humans.9 In other words, both these
schools of thought on some level reject a philosophical dichotomy of a world split into
components of the human subject and the non-human object that favors the human subject. This
is not to say that they deny the existence of this dichotomy, only that a flat ontology does not
privilege the human subject as the definitive seat or starting point of phenomenology. More
importantly, in a flat ontology, the agency of human actors is not considered as more important
or legitimate than the agency or action of non-human actors. The Imbrication Model, then, takes
this insight of Latour and Harman as the basis for developing a heuristic which explores the
relations of technologies primarily to objects, and not primarily to subjects. Framing the goal of
this thesis in this manner implies in itself two questions: (1) Are all objects human artifacts and,
conversely, are all human artifacts objects? (2) If human artifacts are objects and there are
different sorts of objects, what sorts of human artifacts are objects? In other words, might human
artifacts be categorized, or understood in some typological way? However, it cannot be
overlooked that these questions presume some sort of coherent and compelling definition of an
object, for which we will turn to Graham Harman and OOO.
According to Harman’s own account, “objects come in just two kinds: real objects exist
whether or not they currently affect anything else, while sensual objects exist only in relation to
some real object.”10 The qualities of objects, Harman further states, share the same dualism —
they might be either real or sensual, respectively existing independent of affect (real qualities) or
9 Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology. London: Penguin UK, 2018, 57-58 10 Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology, 18 (original emphases)
21
in relation to a real object (sensual qualities). Perhaps more helpful for understanding Harman’s
position on objects, however, are his assessments of three common fallacies in philosophy,
particularly the philosophy of technology, which he refers to as overmining, undermining, and
duomining. For Harman, overmining occurs when the analysis of an object limits the object, as
understood, to its function; overmining posits that an object is only what it can do.11 Conversely,
undermining limits the understanding of an object to its components; it posits that an object is
only that which constructs it. Duomining combines the two, understanding an object to be
defined by both its function and its components. For OOO, overmining, undermining, and
duomining all fail because they fundamentally misconstrue the intellectual project of
understanding objects.12 As Levi R. Bryant puts it, “the question of the object is not an
epistemological question, not a question of how we know the object, but a question of what
objects are.”13 The ontology of objects, then, continues to be worked out in OOO literature, but
we must depart from it here. For the purposes of the Imbrication Model, OOO has done a great
service by deconstructing the concept of the object as not merely the opposite of a subject, and
not a physically isolated or materialist reification in an environment, but as a thing which is
“irreducible either downward to its components or upward to its effects.”14 Defining an object in
this way, Harman greatly expands the sorts of phenomena which can be categorized as objects,
including, in his own work, the American Civil War and the Dutch East India Company.15
Latour, unlike Harman, is not exactly concerned with the ontology of objects. Instead,
11 Ultimately, overmining is the shortcoming that Harman finds in ANT, which, in his reading, reduces actors (both human and non-human) to their action on other objects. 12 Ibid., 41-52, Harman discusses overmining, undermining, and duomining at length here 13 Bryant, Levi R. R. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2011, 18 14 Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology, 114 15 Ibid., p. 105-146; Harman, Graham. Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory. Theory Redux. Cambridge: Polity, 2016., 35-95
22
Latour deals with the structure of the “social” as networks of human and non-human actors. In
other words, Latour is more interested in understanding the structure of the network and the
action between actors than the essence of the actors making up the network themselves. This
being said, Latour must devote some attention to the actors lest he develop a network without
nodes. Famously, he argues that humans delegate their labor to non-human actors, an important
sub-set of which is his delineation between what he broadly refers to as “groups” or “social
aggregates” and other objects. Latour claims, “One way to mark this difference is to say that
social aggregates are not the object of an ostensive definition—like mugs and cats and chairs that
can be pointed at by the index finger—but only of a performative definition. They are made by
the various ways and manners in which they are said to exist.”16 The point of Latour’s
delineation is not to describe social aggregates in terms of a sort of ethereal or innate social
quality. In fact, he makes a point of stating this performative quality does not imply that groups
are only constructed as a consequence of speech-acts, convention, or fiat. The delineation, then,
is one of contrast, that some social actors manifest in an ostensive object, which is physically
manifested, and that some manifest in a non-ostensive one, which he labels performative.
Ultimately, Latour’s formulation of social aggregates which distinguishes some objects
as ostensive and others as performative gives a typology of objects for human artifacts because
his reasoning does for the “performative” social what Harman’s does for the “ostensive” object.
In addition to complementing Harman’s widening, Latour’s delineation here implies an
important nuance to which he himself does not give full attention: by understanding both
ostensive and performative objects as human artifacts, Latour implies that both perform
functions within an actor-network as non-human actors. So even though, for example, the
16 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 34 (original emphases)
23
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University, as a performative object,
requires upkeep and maintenance by human actors, its semiotic and performative structure can
relate to human artifacts and even human actors in a manner different from the agency of the
human actors which maintain its status as a performative object. Performative objects, however,
are not limited to the institutions and organizations which humans create, such as universities,
nations, families, and corporations, but they also include phenomena such as rules and systems,
law, sport, and others. In other words, if Harman establishes an understanding of objects which
includes the material and the immaterial – the performative and the ostensive – Latour
establishes that both of these classes of objects have agency as non-human actors.
Returning then to the opening question of this section — what are the fundamental
insights which ANT and OOO contribute to a study of human artifacts? — two fundamental
insights might be derived. First, that all human artifacts fall into Harman’s category of objects,
which is to say that they cannot be reduced either to their components or to their function.
Second, that the artifacts which humans produce (and which are produced by delegated action to
human produced non-human actors) take either an ostensive form, that is, they possess qualities
which can be physically perceived, or they take a performative form, which is to say they are
imperceptible and enacted as real. These principles work together to establish the first dualism of
this heuristic: that of performative and ostensive objects.
1.1.2 Motive and Consequence
An end-oriented research agenda seeks to uncover the societal and technological factors
which contribute to the invention and adoption of a given technology in a given context. In their
seminal work, which proposes the research agenda for the social construction of technology,
Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker outline several existing research programs with which their
24
theory contrasts.17 Perhaps most immediately, Pinch and Bijker contrast their approach with
histories of technology, which, by their account, often neglect the histories of failed technologies
and thereby fail to explain why successful technologies are adopted for use as opposed to similar
technologies or technologies designed for similar purposes which never see widespread use.18 In
this way, SCOT seeks to not only describe the process of development and invention in a
technology, but its relation among an ecology of technological innovations, each with their own
processes of development and invention and embedded in social fabrics. They also reject the
fundamental claims of technological determinism — although scholars in SCOT will take it up in
later decades, in order to account for Pinch and Bijker’s emphasis on how a technology becomes
socially viable, but not the effects of that technology once social viability is achieved (read: they
attempt to correct Pinch and Bijker’s overcommitment to end-oriented-ism).19 For Pinch and
Bijker, SCOT’s rejection of technological determinism is validated in their claim that
technologies, in any stage of development, represent a process of negotiation by relevant social
groups where some values, groups, and users are served adequately by a technology and others
are not. By seeing the development of technologies as indeterminate and realized through the
choices of an array of manufacturers, users, values, and problems, Pinch and Bijker attempt to
push back against technological determinism which sees the effects of technology as inevitable
and uniform. However, I contend that in their focus on the construction of technology as
opposed to its effects, SCOT’s rebuttal against technological determinism presents an alternative
to technological determinism as an end-oriented approach to understanding technology, as
17 Bijker and Pinch. “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts,” 404-408. 18 Ibid. 19 MacKenzie, Donald, and Judy Wajcman. “Introductory Essay: The Social Shaping of Technology.” In The Social Shaping of Technology, 1–47. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999, 5-7
25
opposed to a beginning-oriented one. This is not to say that SCOT’s emphasis on a multiplicity
of factors cannot be imported to end-oriented projects or used to correct technological
determinism, only that SCOT does not exactly offer a rebuttal to technological determinism
because it is an end-oriented approach concerned with multiple and varied factors, whereas
technological determinism’s opposite would be a beginning-oriented approach concerned with
multiple and varied factors.
For the purposes useful to developing a model which takes into account the unique, end-
oriented, SCOT is not relied upon because of its self-conscious rejection of technological
determinism, but because of its implicit emphasis on end-oriented histories. In other words,
SCOT is concerned with explaining the process by which a medium develops and becomes
socially viable. From these particular claims — namely, that technology emerges out of a social
process wherein innovations and shared (or dominant) values contribute to a matrix which
influences which technological projects are undertaken, accepted, and, in the end, are successes
or failures — the general principle can be derived that a technological pedagogy which accounts
end-oriented approaches must include a robust theory of what I will call motive and what SCOT
would understand to be the role of actors in shaping a technology.
In the spirit of developing a heuristic which contributes to asking useful questions, I
propose making three of the central tenets of SCOT literature the centerpieces of inquiries on
motive in the Imbrication Model. First and foremost, all motives — that is, all factors which
contribute to the development or the adoption of a technology or medium — exist within an
ecosystem of competing motives. In other words, no single factor or cause can be attributed as
solely important in the emergence of a new technology or medium. Second and inversely, a
medium, or a technology, arises as one actualized response among a number of actualized or
26
potential responses which also respond to overlapping motives. Meaning that no one technology
or medium is a panacea or singular solution to any problem or set of problems. Finally, motives
involve a complex matrix of human and non-human actors who each contribute to shaping
technology in a number of ways. In the theories discussed in this thesis, this insight emerges
primarily from Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory.20 Latour contributes the principle that
human actors frequently delegate tasks to non-humans, giving them some sense of sociological
agency. To be fair, incorporating Latour into a principle of motive shifts the balance of the scales
so that SCOT is not the only defining theory of this principle. By incorporating Latour’s work
into a principle of motive, I am not suggesting that Latour is a social constructivist, but I am
instead re-interpreting social construction along the lines of Latour’s definition of the social.
This definition will become crucial to understanding the performative/ostensive object dualism,
but for a principle of motive, it suffices to know that Latour argues that social actors include
humans and non-humans, perceptible objects, and imperceptible objects.
In contrast to the end-oriented principles of SCOT, the beginning-oriented principles of
media ecology provide the basis for the Imbrication Model’s principle of consequence. Unlike
end-oriented theories, beginning-oriented ones take a medium, not as an historical end point for
its intellectual project, but as a starting point. In other words, a beginning-oriented approach
takes for granted the reasons which contribute to the emergence, development, or adoption of a
technology, and instead asks about the changes instilled in a sociotechnical system as a result of
the technology’s introduction. In the words of Neil Postman, “a medium is a technology within
which a culture grows.”21 It is, phrased differently, a seed, which given the opportunity to
20 Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. This is Latour’s fullest attempt at expressing Actor-Network Theory 21 Postman, Neil. “The Humanism of Media Ecology: Keynote Address.” presented at the Inaugural Media Ecology Association Convention, Fordham University, 2000, 10
27
germinate, will not only grow into a full tree, but also change the very ecosystem out of which it
emerges.
From the insights of media ecology, the Imbrication builds a principle of consequence,
which most fundamentally grows out of the insight that technologies effect some sort of change.
However, the specific research programs of media ecologists imply some fundamental tenets for
understanding consequence, just as in the case with SCOT and motive. The first tenet qualifies
the claims which media ecology might make by establishing that consequence explores the role
of a technology or medium as a necessary cause, but not a sufficient one. In other words, the
beginning-oriented study of technological consequence sees a technology or medium as
necessary for the specific emergence of a given reality, although not necessarily the sole actor in
producing that reality. In one common formulation, then, the printing press is understood as a
necessary cause of the Protestant Reformation but neither is the press understood as the
Reformation’s only cause, nor is the Reformation understood as the press’ only effect.22 In other
words, consequence is not a thesis concerning pre-destination and inevitable Whig histories, but
one concerning the role of a technology in the actualization of another object or phenomenon.
Here, the term “consequence” works strongly in the favor of a beginning-oriented historiography
because of its strong directional connotations. The second principle of consequence relates to the
first one: that the existing environment can, and often does, effect how consequences play out
upon the introduction of a new medium or technology. This principle can be traced even among
so-called strong determinists, such as Marshall McLuhan, who says of his tetrad analysis, “The
22 Eisenstein. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change; McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962; Pettegree, Andrew. Brand Luther. Reprint edition. New York: Penguin Books, 2016; Schuchardt, Read Mercer. “The Reformation as Media Event.” In The People’s Book: The Reformation and the Bible, edited by Jennifer Powell McNutt and David Lauber. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2017.
28
tetrad not only reveals the configurational character of time, but also that the artifact (or founding
idea) is always the product of the users’ mentality… For example, an analysis of the effects of
the printed word on another environment usually engenders quite different results. The tetrads
for print in the United States, China, or Africa would have three different grounds.”23 In other
words, the consequences of a human artifact cannot always be expected to be reproduced in
similar or identical fashion. Finally, a consequence can achieve certain effects either through
semiotic communication or procedural imposition. Bruno Latour discusses this principle at some
length in what he regards as the delegation of human action to non-human actors.24 For Latour,
human actors can be compelled to change behavior via two major processes: the moral/semiotic
process or the procedural/technical one. Latour imagines this dichotomy as typified through the
contrast of a speed limit sign on a school campus and a speed bump.25 While both achieve the
effect of slowing down, the speed limit sign appeals to the driver’s sense of social order,
authority, and “morality” through a communication act, whereas the speed bump appears to the
procedural/technical reality that if the driver does not slow down, there will be serious
consequences for the suspension of his or her car. Lev Vygotsky proposes nearly the same
concept in dividing mediating activity into the categories of the tool and the sign.26 For
Vygotsky, the tool is oriented toward external change — that is, change in objects — whereas
the sign is oriented toward change in a person, or internal change. In Latour’s example then, the
speed bump (as a tool) is designed according to the object of the car, in order to achieve change
23 McLuhan, Marshall, and Bruce R. Powers. The Global Village: Transformations in the World Life and Media in the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, 10-11 24 Latour, Bruno. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, 176-178 25 Ibid., 185-190 26 Vygotsky, L.S. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Edited by Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, and Ellen Souberman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978, 52-57
29
according to that physical system. The speed limit sign, however, is to achieve an effect through
the symbolic capacity of the human actor who interprets it privately and acts, or fails to act,
accordingly. By comparing Vygotsky and Latour, I do not mean to equate one to the other or to
disregard the nuances between them, but to establish that the relation of tool and sign as
instruments for change has been considered in a number of ways by a number of thinkers, and is
not an eccentricity invented for this project. These insights establish a level playing field for the
consequences of a medium, whether procedural or semiotic, neither neglecting or privileging
either as more or less important for understanding the nature of delegation and the total scope of
technical relations.
In review, the principles of motive and consequence derive largely from the literatures of
SCOT and media ecology respectively, although Bruno Latour’s work on non-human actors
contributes to both dualisms to some extent. Both motive and consequence can be defined by
three major tenets and insights from these disciplines. In the case of motive, SCOT contributes
that (1) motives exist in an ecosystem of competing motives, varying in degrees of difference to
one another. (2) A medium emerges and is adopted as the actualization of a single possible
solution to a motive, or a number of motives, leaving any number of potentialities (which were
possibly equally viable) unrealized. Finally, (3) motives themselves emerge as the result of a
network of human and non-human actors. Media ecology, on the other hand, establishes that a
consequence (1) the changes which occur in the world which can be traced to being causally
related to a medium are very likely necessary causes and not sufficient or singular ones, which is
to say that a number of factors unrelated to a medium may work in unison with it to achieve a
certain consequence. (2) An existing environment contributes to determining how a medium is
used and therefore what consequences arise as a result of it. In other words, actualized
30
consequences of a medium in one context, even when accompanied by compelling evidence for
causal relation, cannot always be assumed to be replicable given a different set of circumstances.
Finally, (3) consequences of an object are neither restricted to semiotic/communicative processes
or procedural/technical processes but encompasses both in the hopes to cast the widest net which
includes all manners of relations to other human and non-human objects.
1.2. INTERRELATION: ON HARMAN’S SECOND QUESTION
If the dualisms do not merely exist in isolation to one another but relate to a principle from
the opposite dualism, the fourfold of interrelated quadrants is established:
1. Performative motive: A non-physical object contributing to the actualization of a
technology
2. Ostensive motive: An physical object contributing to the actualization of a technology
3. Ostensive consequence: The influence of a technology on the physical qualities of
another object
4. Performative consequence: The influences of a technology on the non-physical qualities
of another object
These four modes of relation directly answer Harman’s second question: “Do its four poles
interrelate, and transform or are they static? If the former, then how does this happen?”27 For the
sake of establishing a diagrammatic model for this type of analysis, the four poles — as well as
the research questions which they engender — might be illustrated as such:
27 Harman, “The McLuhans and Metaphysics,” 103
31
Figure 4: Imbrication Model with Definitions
For the model just introduced, Harman’s definition of objects which includes both ostensive
and performative objects, implies two things: (1) that the medium, or the subject of inquiry, can
be either an ostensive or performative object and (2) that the medium, as the object of temporal,
historical middle between end-oriented and beginning-oriented principles (as opposed to
communicative middle between sender and receiver), relates to both performative and ostensive
objects via the processes of motive and consequence. Furthermore, the distinctions between
performative and ostensive motives as opposed to performative and ostensive consequence
provide specific categories out of which a middle-oriented historiography can be developed. In
other words, performative motive constructs an end-oriented history of a technology in relation
to non-physical objects. Ostensive motive accomplishes the same for this history of a technology
in relation to physical objects. Comparatively, performative and ostensive consequence
respectively establish beginning-oriented histories for a technology in relation to non-physical
and physical objects, respectively. By constructing a research agenda which considers a
32
technology’s relation to performative and ostensive objects along the terms of both motive and
consequence, we construct a middle-oriented historiography.
The task of this section is to outline a mode for inquiring about the four poles in a way which
contributes useful and constructive insight. Put another way, inquiries of this sort can quickly
balloon in size to the point where their insights are no longer meaningful or falsifiable. In the
following expositions of each of the four poles, then, I attempt to draw out, through the existing
methods and traditions from which each pole derives, to invoke questions which identify objects
which relate to the medium meaningfully according to each of the four poles. Ultimately, the
fourfold which emerges from the two dualisms serves as a mode of organizing research and a
method for making non-obvious connections. In other words, after establishing and sorting
research to understand the relation of an object to its motives and consequences, new
connections and insights between motives and consequences can themselves come to light. If
thought of in the terms of a traditional research question, by interrelating the dualisms, this
section seeks to establish whether the model can be used as a generative rubric for inspiring
thought about a technology’s historical relation to performative and ostensive objects.
To this end, defense of each of the four poles benefits from specific applications in addition
to the abstracted theory which established the two dualisms from which they derive, in order to
demonstrate the breadth of analysis and opportunity for new connections. In other words, the
contribution of organizing an intellectual project along this fourfold cannot be fully demonstrated
in an abstract discussion of its poles, and instead must be applied to explore its merit. The current
chapter of this thesis, then, will raise its sails in faith that the wind from the case study of the
QWERTY keyboard will provide the momentum required for its intellectual journey. The
QWERTY keyboard exhibits several traits which make it a top candidate for consideration as an
33
introductory case study. First of all, the QWERTY keyboard, being invented by Christopher
Latham Sholes in 1868, has a long enough history to assess its performative and objective
consequences with some accuracy. Second, the QWERTY keyboard has been the subject of
scholarship from a number of historians, economists, and media theorists. This provides a unique
opportunity to compare the insights produced and organized using the Imbrication Model against
those produced by other scholarship. In other words, existing research makes the claim that the
Imbrication Model facilitates new insights and connections falsifiable and holds it accountable.
Ultimately, the goal of this section is to address some of the specific workings of the fourfold
introduced via the dualism extracted from the traditions of SCOT, media ecology, OOO, and
ANT by applying the theoretical principles discussed above to a case study.
1.2.1 Performative Motives of the QWERTY Keyboard
Figure 5: Performative Motives of QWERTY
34
To claim literacy as a performative motive for the QWERTY keyboard is to identify the
black-boxed object of literacy as one of QWERTY’s necessary causes. In the case of a project
such as the current one, a goal of the model is to first identify black boxes and second to make
them comprehensible. As a necessary cause and not a sufficient cause, literacy can be de-black-
boxed in relation to the QWERTY keyboard by asking a number of questions. The purpose of
these questions is not to connect the massive, historically expansive practice called literacy to the
QWERTY keyboard, but to work backwards from the QWERTY keyboard to the specific literate
practices which directly relate to its emergence. Along this theme, to de-black-box the
connection of literacy to QWERTY, I first ask about the literacy of what language using what
writing system. Is the ability to read and write alone directly related to the emergence of the
QWERTY keyboard, or must this ability relate to certain languages? Second, the literacy of what
groups in what geographical regions? Histories of literacy are by no means uniform or
monolithic. So, if literacy was a necessary cause for the QWERTY keyboard, whose literacy was
it? And by what means did this literacy come to be?
The first question is relatively easy to answer. The QWERTY keyboard, fundamentally, is a
keyboard designed for the letters of the Latin alphabet, meaning that in order to conceive of a
QWERTY keyboard, literacy must be achieved in at least one of the languages which makes use
of this writing system; in this case, the Romance and Germanic languages. This is not to say that
a different keyboard could not or would not be designed for languages using different scripts,
only that in the case of the QWERTY keyboard, the literate populations of groups speaking and
writing in these languages and the skills of literacy they developed were necessary for the
development of QWERTY. Of the speakers and writers of these languages, many inventors
designed typing machines with keyboards, but the actual layout of the QWERTY keyboard
35
emerged from the minds of English-speaking Americans. This answers both the first and second
question. (1) The QWERTY keyboard emerged out of the literate practices of the English
language using the Latin alphabet. And (2) these literate practices were those of educated white
American men and women in the late 19th century. The history of literacy to which the QWERTY
keyboard immediately relates, then, is the American history of English literacy, which is unique,
because the nation was founded, in part, on the principle of literacy as propelled by two factors:
the Protestant value of salvation and sanctification through reading the written word of Scripture,
and the political inclination to circulate ideas through pamphlets and newspapers.28
In tracing the spread of literacy from the first American colonists to its near ubiquity at the
end of the 18th century in his 1974 history, Kenneth A. Lockridge importantly, emphasizes that
literacy spread at different rates among different people groups (and was commonly withheld
intentionally from black slaves in the American south).29 By 1850, literacy rates among white
men and women were markedly similar with only around 3% of white men and women entirely
lacking the ability to read and write.30 Even though this extremely high literacy rate was not
mirrored in black communities or white immigrants (as well as other minority communities), it
does establish that even before the Civil War, a critical mass of literate people emerged who
would subsequently become candidates as users of the commercial typewriter.
In some senses, noting literacy as an important performative motive for typewriters and the
QWERTY keyboard may seem banal, unimaginative, or obvious. To the contrary, the assumption
28 Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness. New York: Penguin Books, 1985, 32 & 37-38 29 Lockridge, Kenneth A. Literacy in Colonial New England. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1974, 4 30 Vinovskis, Maris A., and Richard M. Bernard. “Beyond Catharine Beecher: Female Education in the Antebellum Period.” Signs 3, no. 4 (1978), 863
36
that the user of a writing machine would know how to read and/or write and would use the
machine to produce their own material marked a significant shift in the history of writing
technologies. Before the design of the keyboard, in other words, writing technologies were
designed without the assumption of a literate user. In other words, a printer could set the type on
a printing press simply by matching the symbols on each moveable type with those on the
manuscript which they copied without ever knowing what the symbols meant. In this way, the
technology of printing assumed the literacy of some eventual reader but did not require it of the
printer. The technique of typing, comparatively, required literacy both of the typist as well as the
recipient of the written material. So, whereas the printing press could emerge under conditions of
limited literacy, the typewriter could only emerge under conditions of mass literacy.
Of course, literacy itself could not predetermine or pre-destine the development of a
typewriting machine, let alone a QWERTY keyboard. Instead, literacy as an abstract skill was
not a performative motive of QWERTY insomuch as American literacy of the English language
written in Latin script was its performative motive. Even with this de-black-boxing, however, it
remains evident that this specific type of literacy created possible conditions for the emergence
of QWERTY, but did not create conditions in which this innovation in this form was required to
emerge. In fact, very few innovations respond directly to performative objects as the immediate
result, where the previous object is a necessary and sufficient cause.
In the case of the QWERTY keyboard, the American Civil War also led to circumstances
which moved the development and adoption of the keyboard forward in important ways.
Friedrich Kittler and Bruce Bliven both make note that upon the end of the American Civil War
in 1865, business for firearms manufacturers, such as E. Remington & Sons settled at a
37
comparative lull, contrasted by the wartime demand for weaponry.31 This decline in business —
as well as the corporation’s demonstrated willingness to branch out into other product lines, such
as sewing machines — contributed to Remington’s involvement in disseminating and
popularizing Sholes’ QWERTY design. In other words, Remington’s willingness to purchase
Sholes’ typewriter patent ensured continued development of its design which eventually led to its
market dominance. To be fair, historians and scholars concerned with the development and
adaptation of the QWERTY keyboard debate the degree to which Remington’s decision to
purchase of Sholes’ patents would have immediately influenced the market share of typewriters
and keyboard design.32 In other words, at the time of Remington’s purchase of Sholes’ keyboard
layout, Remington’s influence and consumer base was not large enough to ensure its future
ubiquity. And while this argument raises a good point — that Remington’s use of Sholes’ layout
did not ensure QWERTY’s eventual dominance — it overlooks the fact that without Remington’s
use of the layout, Sholes’ design may have receded into the shadows of history without a second
thought. In other words, Sholes was an inventor and a newspaper man, not a typewriter
manufacturer. He neither had the means nor resources to produce machines with his keyboard on
a mass scale, and certainly lacked the network of users and market force to make such a product
viable in the long term. So, while Remington’s intervention may not have been a sufficient cause
in the prevalence of QWERTY, it certainly moved the process along.
These two instances of performative motives — literacy and Remington’s economic state
upon the end of the American Civil War — typify two types of performative motives common to
31 Bliven, Jr Bruce. The Wonderful Writing Machine. 1st edition. Random House, 1954, p. 56; Kittler, Friedrich. Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986, 190-191 32 Gardey, Delphine. “The Standardization of a Technical Practice: Typing (1883-1930).” History and Technology 15 (1999), 315
38
human innovation: knowledge and institutions. In the context of the QWERTY keyboard,
however, neither address the material design of the technology, instead, they each elucidate the
historical process from which this specific keyboard emerged. In other words, given the
proverbial ingredients of mass literacy and Remington at the end of the Civil War, one can
conceive of alternate histories wherein a typing machine took any number of different forms
which resulted in a different dominant keyboard design. The question remains, then, did any
performative objects act, in the history of the QWERTY keyboard, as motives to its specific
design, and not simply to typing machines in general
A final significant performative object which contributed to the actualization of the
QWERTY keyboard, as widely disseminated in the 20th and 21st centuries has largely been
overlooked: patent law. For all the fuss about Sholes’ innovation in the QWERTY keyboard,
discussion of the keyboard generally takes the back seat in his patents for typing machines.
When keyboards are mentioned in his patents, he refrains from noting the layout of the letters
over the keys, even to the point that in the vast majority of the sketches included in his patents
depicted blank keys without letters represented at all (see figure below).
39
Figure 6: Sholes Typewriter without Letters on Keys33
When Sholes finally did denote the layout of the alphabet on the keyboard, it contained
several slight differences from the keyboard layout which has come to be known as QWERTY.
Although in a strict sense, Sholes’ keyboard could be called a QWERTY keyboard because these
six letters occupied the first six keys on the top row, the bottom two rows have subsequently
been slightly altered from Sholes’ design. In Sholes’ keyboard, as can be seen below, the “M”
key sits at the end of the second row, instead of the third, and the “X” and “C” keys are
positioned in the opposite order as has become common. The positions of punctuation marks also
differ from modern standard layouts.
33 Sholes, C.L., and M. Schwalbach. Improvement in type-writing machines. United States US182511A, filed March 30, 1872, and issued September 19, 1876.
40
Figure 7: Sholes’ “QWERTY” Layout34
The alteration of the keyboard, as illustrated in Sholes’ patent, occurred for no other reason
than to avoid a patent dispute.35 In 1882, E. Remington & Sons formed a new partnership with
the newly formed “Wyckoff, Seaman’s, & Benedict,” (WS&B) exclusively selling their
typewriting machines. In order, however, to not be accused of infringing on Sholes’ patent,
WS&B rearranged the X, the C, and the M to their newly permanent places on the keyboard. The
selection of rearranging these letters in particular seems unclear, however, it turns out that the
final alteration of the QWERTY keyboard before its standardization was nothing more than a
legal maneuver.
34 Sholes, C. Latham. Improvement in type-writing machines. United States US207559A, filed March 8, 1875, and issued August 27, 1878. 35 Yasuoka and Yasuoka, “On the Prehistory of QWERTY,” 168
41
1.2.2 Ostensive Motives of the QWERTY Keyboard
Figure 8: Ostensive Motives of QWERTY
By and large, discussions of ostensive motives tend to deal with physical objects — or the
physical manifestations of objects — which a technology is either constructed of or which
impose physical affordances or constraints. From the perspective of the 21st century, the object of
the typewriter conjures up very specific images with very specific designs, most of which
include the QWERTY keyboard or some similar variant, such as Dvorak or AZERTY keyboards.
However, before the standardization of the QWERTY keyboard under the influence of the
performative objects discussed in the previous section, no such standard image of the typewriter,
or writing machines writ large ruled supreme in any comparable way. This particular study, being
primarily concerned with the development and widespread adoption of the QWERTY keyboard,
largely evades the problem of most histories of typewriters, which struggle to locate the “first”
typewriter because of the many false-starts, wherein inventors designed machines which did,
OM:- Typewriter- Moveable type- Individual keys- Piano Hammer- Latin Alphabet
OC PC
PM
42
indeed, write with type, albeit, in many cases, with a different input system than QWERTY
keyboards (or keyboards at all, for that matter). This is to say that in many ways, the class of
objects which involved using individual type and keys to inscribe a message on a single piece of
paper letter by letter served as an ostensive motive for the QWERTY keyboard. For simplicity’s
sake, we will refer to this class of objects as typewriters, recognizing that a typewriter is a
machine that meets these criteria, not necessarily just the sort of machine embossed into the
popular imagination. These earlier attempts include William Burt’s Typographer, Charles
Thurber’s Printing Machine, Samuel Francis’ Literary Piano, and many more machines. Any
number of histories of the typewriter include chapters on these early attempts at creating typing
machines.36 These machines commonly shared individual keys which corresponded to individual
letters for input; a design only made possible via the use of moveable or individual types.
Many early typewriters, like Charles Thurber’s Printing Machine or William Burt’s
typographer (pictured in Figures 9 and 10 respectively), made evident a need for an efficient
key-by-key or letter-by-letter input technique.
36 Adler, Michael H. The Writing Machine. London: Allen & Unwin, 1973, p. 47-90; Beeching, Wilfred A. Century of the Typewriter. Hampshire: BAS Printers Ltd, 1974, 4-23; Blivens, The Wonderful Writing Machine, p. 24-41; Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim, 33-61
43
Figure 9: Charles Thurber’s Printing Machine37 Figure 10: William Burt’s Typographer38
The early solution for this problem drew from another technology which afforded one-key-at-a-
time input: the piano. The piano keyboard not only revolutionized input, by setting the standard
for key techniques, but it also revolutionized input through the retrieval of the piano’s hammer
mechanism, which, instead of striking the piano string to create noise, would strike paper to
imprint a letter. Eventually, the QWERTY keyboard and other similar designs would render the
piano keyboard obsolete on typewriters. The hammer mechanism, however, remained. In this
way, the lasting effect of the piano as an ostensive motive of the typewriter was not the seen
mechanism of input, but the unseen one of output.
At any rate, these early typewriters — along with the type, individual keys, and hammers
which constructed them — served as ostensive motives for the QWERTY keyboard because
these are the machines for which the keyboard was designed. In this way, they were ostensive
motives in a general sense; because the keyboard was designed in order to enhance this
technology, not because they technology determined or demanded the keyboard to be designed in
37 Thurber, Charles. Machine for Printing. United States US3228A, issued August 26, 1843. 38 Burt, William A. Typographer. 5581X, issued July 23, 1829.
44
the format which has become standard. In particular, the combination of piano hammers,
moveable type, and individual keys contributed to the innovation of a keyboarded writing
machine, which is to say, a writing machine which imprinted letter by letter. In other words, the
combinations of these technologies allowed for printing to transition to a more compositional
stage by creating a technology of writing which prints letters individually rather than along with
an entire page. So, while the moveable type was a technology of the printing press, the hammer
and individual key emerged from the technology of the piano, which requires input key by key
(or series of keys in the case of chords) in succession of one another. While not technically an
ostensive motive, it is interesting to note that by devising a keyboard, the typewriter effectively
reversed one of the major technological effects of printing: the mass production of texts. The
letter by letter input of a keyboard, unlike the printing press, generally limited documents to be
produced one at a time, unlike printing presses, which centered around exact (or near exact)
duplicates and commercial production of texts.
In a slightly more abstract sense, albeit still an ostensive one, the Latin alphabet was also a
significant factor in the development of the QWERTY keyboard. In other words, the small
character set and non-cursive characters of the Latin alphabet made this writing system a
particularly viable candidate for a writing machine designed to input characters individually. This
is a subtly different claim than the one made in identifying literacy in the English language as a
performative motive of QWERTY. As a performative motive, the Latin alphabet/English
language combination contributed to the emergence of the QWERTY keyboard because it
typified a practice of writing commonly used by a large group of people. Comparatively, as an
ostensive motive, the Latin alphabet contributed to the emergence of the QWERTY keyboard
because the character set is made up of a small number of characters, making the size of a
45
keyboard manageable, and because the letters are not necessarily cursive, lending them more
easily to individual type. Recent international histories of typing machines and writing/printing
machines, such as J.R. Osborn’s Letters of Light, which details the history of adapting Arabic
script to available writing, typing, and printing technologies, as well as Thomas Mullaney’s The
Chinese Typewriter, describe the difficulties of creating keyboard input techniques for writing
systems with large character sets and cursive scripts.39 Compared to these writing systems and
others, ostensive qualities of the Latin alphabet made the key-for-every character design possible
in a way that was precluded by many writing systems. The adaptation of the typewriter for the
Ethiopian Amharic script by Ayana Birrou, for example, involved dividing characters into partial
characters which the user of a typewriter could use to create artificial ligatures by adjusting the
position of the carriage.40 The difficulties of designing typing machines for writing systems like
Amharic, Arabic, and Chinese, then, demonstrate how typing, as a technique of creating text,
originally emerged in relation to ostensive qualities which are typically characteristic of
alphabets.
39 Mullaney, Thomas. The Chinese Typewriter: A History. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017; Osborn, J.R. Letters of Light: Arabic Script in Calligraphy, Print, and Digital Design. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. 40 Birrou, Ayana. Typewriter adapted for use in ethiopian languages by the use of special signs. GB378402 (A). London, issued August 9, 1932.
46
1.2.3 Ostensive Consequences of the QWERTY Keyboard
Figure 11: Ostensive Consequences of QWERTY
The QWERTY keyboard, unlike many of the innovations crucial to the development of the
typewriter, has continued to play a central role in writing, input, and computing technologies.
The type bar, platen, and carriage are all obsolete, but the QWERTY keyboard remains. This
being said, the ostensive consequences of the QWERTY keyboard can generally be divided into
two classes of technologies: those technologies which were designed out of necessity (or
perceived necessity) in response to the ostensive qualities and designs of the QWERTY
keyboard, and comparatively, those technologies which use the QWERTY keyboard as a
combinatorial part of their design. In the list from the diagram above, filing cabinets typify the
most obvious instance of the first class of ostensive consequences, although there are certainly
others. Once the QWERTY keyboard became the preferred input method commercially produced
47
typewriters in 1876, offices saw dramatic increases in paper use and typewritten materials.41
Undoubtedly, the user-friendly interface of typing via QWERTY facilitated this paper boom, but
this material output of QWERTY and typewriters, paired with the word new invention of carbon
paper and triplicate copies, resulted in the need for a new storage technology for the pages now
in continuous production. According to Nikil Saval, filing cabinets began to appear in
workplaces in the 1880’s (less than half a decade after the commercially viable typewriter, I
might add), obsolescing the old method of storing papers in cubby holes within a clerk’s desk.42
The earliest filing cabinets were designed so as to store stacks of paper laying horizontally,43 but
soon were designed so that paper could be stacked on an edge.44 In the vast majority of media
histories, McLuhan seems to be the only thinker to explicitly claim that the typewriter begat the
filing cabinet, however, many writers understand them to relate in that the typewriter belonged to
a class of technologies and social practices which spurred on the need for storing documents in a
more efficient and accessible fashion.45 In some sense, the relationship between QWERTY and
the filing cabinet demonstrates one of the insights from chapter 1: that consequences are nearly
always necessary causes but not sufficient ones. While the typewriter facilitated the increase of
written material in offices, other ostensive and performative objects played a part as well.
On a more obvious level, the design of a number of technologies incorporates the QWERTY
keyboard as an input device or an interface feature. The electronic word processor (as a physical
41 Robertson, Craig. “Learning to File: Reconfiguring Information and Information Work in the Early Twentieth Century.” Technology and Culture 58, no. 4 (2017), 956-958 42 Saval, Nikil. Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. New York: Doubleday, 2014, 41-42 43 Amberg, William A. Letter-File Cabinet. 171,495. Chicago, Illinois, filed July 24, 1875, and issued December 28, 1875. This is an example of a patent for a horizontal filing cabinet 44 Saval, Cubed, 41 45 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964, p. 262; Saval, Cubed, 41-42; Yates, JoAnne. Control Through Communication. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, 39-63
48
machine, not as a software downloaded on a computer) is probably the simplest of this sort of
consequence, the personal computer somewhere in the middle, and the multi-touch screen
probably relates least directly, at least among the examples I subsequently explore.
Some histories of word processors, or even histories of typewriters, would fail to make a
clear, categorical distinction between typewriters and word processors because in some senses,
word processors were simply electronic typewriters (instead of mechanical ones). This being
said, studying a technology in terms of motives and consequences presents us with several
reasons for considering typewriters and word processors as different technologies. First, because,
as explored in 1.2.2, the typewriter served as an ostensive motive for the QWERTY keyboard,
which, historically, cannot be true for the word processor. Second, the word processor itself
emerges as the ostensive consequence of very different ostensive objects than the typewriter,
which is to say, progress in the field of electrical engineering, as opposed to the mechanical
constructions of type bars, ink ribbons, keys, and hammers. In other words, the QWERTY
keyboard was a consequence of the typewriter because it provided the answer to the problem of
how to create a compositional writing machine with individual key input, whereas it was a
motive of the word processor because it was already designed and simply re-utilized in the
context of electronic text composition. In this way, even though they share the input mechanism
of the QWERTY keyboard and the output of text printed on paper, the process between these
stages differs entirely. This is not to say that their histories do not intertwine or that typewriters
did not influence word processors, but that, for our purposes, they ought to be considered as
separate technologies. This being said, the QWERTY keyboard undoubtedly plays a crucial role
as an ostensive motive to the word processor, not only as a combinatorial part, but also as an
object which facilitates the user’s access to the technological advances which sets apart the word
49
processor from the typewriter.
The personal computer relates to the QWERTY keyboard in a manner slightly more
complicated than the word processor. Admittedly, QWERTY keyboards and typewriters were not
introduced to the history of computing for the first time in the 1970’s with the goal of
commercializing computing. The US Navy’s Project Whirlwind in 1955, for example, was the
first computing machine to enter commands directly to the machine through a keyboard.46
However, even with the proven benefits of inputting commands to a mainframe keyboard many
early iterations of personal computers lacked this feature. Some early personal computers
demonstrate exceptions to the rule, such as the IBM 610 in 1957 and the Datapoint 2200 in 1970,
however, even in these cases, QWERTY keyboard input was not considered an important
industry standard. A number of contributing factors can explain the delay in widespread
acceptance for input via QWERTY in personal computers, including hobbyist culture and
unsettled interface design questions. Furthermore, at this stage in the history of computing,
computers were not considered to be related to writing technologies like the (hardware) word
processor or the typewriter. So even when a QWERTY keyboard was used for textual input, the
conceptual leap required to consider computers as compositional machines, as opposed to logic,
or data machines, had not yet been made. Along with the mouse, however, the QWERTY
keyboard became one of the crucial interface features which disillusioned the public from seeing
computers as complex, inoperable machines.47 Certainly, the QWERTY keyboard facilitated
much of the success of the personal computer outside of hobbyist circles, particularly
46 Redman, Kent C., and Thomas M. Smith. Project Whirlwind: The History of a Pioneer Computer. Bedford: Digital Equipment Corporation, 1980. 47 Campbell-Kelly, Martin, William Aspray, Nathan Ensmenger, and Jeffrey R. Yost. “The Shaping of a Personal Computer” in Computer: A History of the Information Machine. 3rd edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2013.
50
considering the commercial difficulties encountered by personal computers such as the Altair
8800.
If, in the case of the word processor, the QWERTY keyboard acted as an ostensive motive
which facilitated the technological advance of the soon-to-be-obsolesced practice of typewriting,
and, in the case of the personal computer, it was incorporated to solve the problem of input and
user interface, then in the case of the multi-touch screen, the QWERTY keyboard acted as an
ostensive motive by means of its physical limitations for which contemporary user interfaces had
decisively failed. The multi-touch screen emerged as a direct consequence of Apple’s ventures
into smartphone design. Upon expansion to this market, Apple’s design team immediately
concerned themselves with the product design, and particularly the perceived shortcomings of
products like Blackberry, given the smallness of the keyboard, and the difficulty to maneuver the
tracking ball.48 According to Isaacson, Apple proceeded with two prototypes for what would
eventually become the iPhone: a version that incorporated the track wheel from iPod and one
which depended on touch screen technology as the primary input device.49 Although multi-touch
technology predated smartphones by decades (IBM first began experimenting with it in the late
1960’s), it failed to break into mainstream use through any widespread product. Instead, products
with touchscreens tended to employ resistive touch technology, whereby a touch was registered
as input by physical pressure on a screen. Such technology worked best with a stylus — an input
device famously despised by Steve Jobs — and suffered from imprecise and clumsy tapping,
wherein the wrong “key” was registered as being touched, or input was not registered at all.
Apple partnered with the company Fingerworks, which had already developed touch screen
keyboards, to equip their iPhones with the first commercially produced product with a multi-
48 Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011, 469 49 Ibid., 468
51
touch screen (Isaacson 2011).50 In a certain sense, this history of multi-touch retrieves the history
of typewriters, wherein both technologies predated their manifestations in relation to the
QWERTY keyboard, but the QWERTY keyboard facilitated their mainstream adaptation. So,
even though Apple’s claims to have invented the multi-touch screen can be demonstrated as
patently false, its implementation on the iPhone was a technological development in direct
response to difficulties created by scaling down a physical QWERTY keyboard to fit on an
object as small as a smartphone (as in the case of the Blackberry).
In the interest of describing a wide range of ostensive objects as they relate to the QWERTY
keyboard, I will briefly discuss emoticons as another ostensive consequence of QWERTY. The
emergence of emoticons on the Carnegie Mellon intranet at the suggestion of Scott Fahlman is
widely known and well documented. As the story does, Fahlman suggested to denote jokes using
the emoticon, :-), and to denote serious comments using the emoticon, :-(.51 As is the case with
any new human artifact, the QWERTY keyboard did not solely cause the emergence of this sort
of pseudo-punctuation. However, it did provide material conditions wherein this kind of notation
was formally possible.52 In other words, the possibility to reconfigure symbols as iconic
representations of the human face emerged under conditions of a writing technique which
considered individual characters as unique bits of visual information — i.e., under conditions of
the typing keyboard. However, the QWERTY keyboard, in its first technological iteration, which
is to say, as manifested on the typewriter, failed to produce any need for this sort of semiotic
innovation. So, even while emoticons would only emerge under conditions of instantaneous,
50 Ibid., 469 51 Houston, Keith. Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. 1st Edition. edition. New York ; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013, 233-235 52 Lindia, Matthew S. “Colon. Hyphen. Closed Parenthesis. Formal Causes of Figure and Ground in Punctuation.” Explorations in Media Ecology 17, no. 4 (2018), 403
52
highly contextual, and abbreviated messages, as made possible by networked computing, the
QWERTY keyboard worked as a necessary, material and ostensive precondition for this
phenomenon. In other words, even though the emergence of emoticons occurred only under the
conditions of another performative motive – Internet chats – the QWERTY keyboard provided
the material conditions of an input technology which afforded individual input of characters, and
subsequently made possible typographical experimentation with spelling and alternate uses of
letter forms and punctuation marks, as made prevalent by emoticons.
1.2.4 Performative Consequences of the QWERTY Keyboard
Figure 12: Performative Consequence of QWERTY
Insofar as it relates to non-perceptible, performative consequences, the QWERTY keyboard
resulted in a number of roles, practices, and systems, both as a function of its own material
design, as well as due to its privileged position as a crucial component of a technology as well-
PC:- Rise of female typist- Touch-typing- Filing systems
PM OM
OC
53
used as the typewriter. The rise of the female typist, or female secretary, remains one of the most
widely noted among these phenomena. In particular, Friedrich Kittler, Darren Wershler-Henry,
and Margery W. Davies give a great deal of attention to both the historical process by which the
QWERTY keyboard and the typewriter facilitated the emergence of this role, as well as to
abstract theorizing on the symbolic significance of this phenomenon. Kittler even goes so far as
to trace the decline of the male secretary as coinciding with the decline of the phallic pen as a
writing utensil, in favor of the typewriter, which, being more closely associated with dictation,
involves the process of sound penetrating the ear.53 Several historical phenomena tend to be
identified with the initial association of women and typewriting, as well as contemporary
narratives created which justified the new position of women in the workplace. Admittedly, the
language of addressing the emerging role of the female typist as a “consequence” of the
QWERTY keyboard and/or of the typewriter opens up this analysis to criticisms leveled against
Kittler and others, which claim that these accounts strip agency from the human actors involved
and view the typewriter as entirely deterministic.54 By discussing the female typist as a
consequence of the QWERTY keyboard, then, I do not mean to imply that the keyboard pre-
determined the role of the female typist in a way which disregarded her involvement in the
invention of this role, but instead that the keyboard was a single, but necessary, motive among a
number of other motives which all contributed to the actualization of this role. For example,
most historians locate the initial emergence of the female typist to coincide with a course offered
by the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) of New York which promised to educate
women on the intricacies of typing, particularly touch-typing.55 Over the course of the following
53 Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, 183-187 54 Wånggren, Lena. “Typewriters and Typists: Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle.” In Gender, Technology, and the New Woman. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017, 34-35 55 Keep, Christopher. “The Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl.” Victorian Studies 40, no. 3 (1997), 401-403
54
decades (and not without a little controversy), such courses became more and more common, in
more and more locales. The emergence of such courses, however, points to the relation of female
typists with another performative consequence of the QWERTY keyboard: touch-typing. This
technique of typing highlights how a profession of typists (male or female) could only manifest
by creating a class of workers who had acquired the proper knowledge and skill-set required for
the job. In the terms of Akrich and Latour, the typewriter (and the typist by extension) pre-
inscribed a particular method of use which, as it turned out, required a relatively formal system
of education for its acquisition.56
At the same time, the growth of record keeping, correspondence, and written material in the
workplace in general gave rise to the need for a class of workers which produced these texts.
Margery W. Davies even goes so far as to connect this rise in written office material with another
performative motive which contributed to the adaptation of the typewriter: the transition from
many, small firms before the Civil War to corporations “integrated vertically and horizontally in
the merger movement that swept through industry during the 1890’s.”57 She later states that, “it
was not until the 1880’s, when offices grew by leaps and bounds, that the typewriter began to
sell.”58 Davies further highlights the female clerical worker as a necessary prefiguring of the
female typist.59 The lack of male clerical workers for the US treasury during the Civil War due to
wartime appointments as soldiers forced Francis Elias, the US Treasurer General, to seek female
56 Akrich, Madeleine and Bruno Latour. “A Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies.” In Inside Technology, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, 259–64. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992, 261. Akrich and Latour define pre-inscription as “the competences that can be expected from actors before arriving at the setting that are necessary for the resolution of the crises between prescription and subscription.” 57 Davies, Margery W. 1982. A Woman’s Place Is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers 1870-1930. Philedelphia: Temple University Press, 28 58 Ibid., 38 59 Ibid., 51-55
55
employees to fill these positions.60 By breaking the barrier for women’s entry into the office,
these wartime clerics eased the transition to typing positions at the turn of the century. Davies
carefully points out that it was not the typewriter which caused women’s new presence in the
office — that across all positions, gender diversity in the workplace was increasing during that
time period. In her words,
Although the typewriter was not responsible for the employment of women as clerical workers, its existence probably facilitated or eased the entrance of women into offices. It was such a new machine that it had not been “sex-typed” as masculine. Thus women who worked as typists did not face the argument that a typewriter was a machine fit only for men.61
Ultimately, histories such as Davies’, Keeps’, and others illustrate the many factors at work in
the emergence of the female cleric, and more specifically, the female typist. However, to
overlook the QWERTY keyboard in playing a significant role in producing this effect is to ignore
the role of non-human actors in the emergence of new roles. In other words, to identify the
female typist as a performative consequence of the QWERTY keyboard is not to claim it as a
pre-determined or inevitable effect of the keyboard, but to highlight the keyboard’s role in
achieving that historical reality.
Given the pre-inscription of the skill of typing for both the typewriter and the typist, touch-
typing also warrants consideration as a performative consequence of the QWERTY keyboard. As
Bruce Bliven charmingly comments, “By today’s standards, no one knew how to type for fifteen
years after the typewriter came onto the market.”62 By this, Bliven means to highlight that
typewriters and typewriting did not emerge simultaneously, but the technology of the typewriter
emerged first, and the technique of typewriting was developed subsequently. Touch-typing, as
60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 55 62 Bliven, The Wonderful Writing Machine, 111
56
the technique of typing with four fingers per hand is called, was developed uniquely in relation
to the QWERTY keyboard, although similar methods can and have been devised for other
keyboards (AZERTY, Dvorak, etc.). Darren Wershler-Henry points out that touch-typing seems
to have been invented independently by two individuals, each without knowledge of the others’
innovation.63 Seemingly not coincidentally, both inventors (Mrs. L.V. Longley and Frank
McGurrin), both typed on Remington machines using a QWERTY keyboard. However,
McGurrin’s achievement received greater acclaim due to his participation in a famous typing
contest which solidified his place in typing lore. His competitor in this contest, Charles Taub,
used a Calligraph typewriter. The differences of keyboard layouts used by McGurrin and Taub in
this contest, however, are indicative of the inclination of the QWERTY keyboard for a method
such as touch typing as opposed to other keyboard layouts.64 The Sholes and Glidden typewriter
only had 44 keys arranged in four rows of 11, unlike the Calligraph, which sported a keyboard of
six rows with twelve keys per row, totaling in 72 keys. The greater number of keys allowed for
the Calligraph to include lowercase letters — a feature which the Sholes and Glidden machine
lacked — but greatly increased the surface area with which the typist deals in moving from key
to key. Furthermore, the theoretical touch-typist for this machine would be required to memorize
not one, but two sets of locations for each letter: one uppercase and one lowercase. This obstacle,
almost certainly, would not be insurmountable. However, one must assume that typing speeds
would diminish as the result of assigning different locales to upper/lowercase characters, by
63 Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim, 231 64 Ihde, Don. Technics and Praxis. Pallas Paperbacks edition. Holland/Boston, Pallas Paperbacks/D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979, 42. Ihde offers a helpful way of talking about the effects of technologies without stripping humans of agency, by introducing the language of “inclinations,” by stating that technologies frequently have “telic inclinations which are made possible through the use of instruments, inclinations which favor certain, rather than other directions.”
57
forcing the typist to move their hand to the outer edge of the typewriter for the first word of
every sentence and proper noun (the capital letters surrounded the lowercase letters at the left
and right extremes of the keyboard). Now, this is not to say that touch-typing could only ever
develop under conditions of the QWERTY keyboard, but instead to highlight that the QWERTY
keyboard afforded specific formal properties — a small number of keys which remained in close,
horizontal proximity to one another — which made the practice of touch typing especially
viable.
The combination of a work force dedicated to creating typewritten material, as well as an
efficient practice of typing (among other factors) resulted in another performative object, which
intimately relates to one of the ostensive consequences discussed in the previous section: filing
systems. As discussed in section 1.2.3, filing cabinets and filing systems were novelties at the
end of the 19th century, and the practices which would become commonplace and ubiquitous
were being worked out for the first time. It seems entirely possible that the first filing systems
have been lost to history, being objects too mundane for extended reflection. One early notable
filing system, however, comes from the Library Bureau — a late 19th century business dedicated
to supplying libraries with necessary equipment. In a 1903 pamphlet entitled “Library Bureau
Systems of Vertical Filing with Interchangeable Unit Cabinets,” the Library Bureau outlines a
method which some have identified as not only innovating the first fully articulated filing
system, but also the practice of filing papers vertically in manila folders. The difference between
the ostensive consequence of the filing cabinet and the filing system is, for the Imbrication
Model, subtle but important. Both filing cabinets and filing systems respond to the increase in
material information (namely paper) associated with the introduction of the typewriter and
QWERTY keyboard into office spaces. The filing cabinet, however, stores this material
58
organization whereas the filing system organizes it. Although perhaps tedious, this distinction
must be made in order to emphasize the differences between filing cabinets as ostensive objects
and filing systems as performative ones. The fact that they arise in unison with one another, and
in some senses, for one another, does not negate the fact that they are independent objects
themselves.
Like ostensive consequence of file folders themselves, filing systems emerged under the
influence of the QWERTY keyboard due to the same abundance of written material which
contributed to the emergence of female typists and to the filing cabinet itself. The filing cabinet,
however, unlike other sorts of cabinets and storage units, stores material containing information,
therefore requiring more elaborate organization than, say, a bedroom dresser. The Library Bureau
system involved filing papers, memos, and correspondence in manila folders, standing on edge in
the cabinet, and labelling them using index cards. The system also included guide cards and tabs
organized numerically, alphabetically, or geographically. The significance of such a system
relates to its emergence in relation to the materiality of information as made manifest by the
typewriter and the QWERTY keyboard, and not so much in relation to any novel methods for
organizing information. In other words, the organization of material numerically, alphabetically,
or geographically decidedly did not emerge for the first time with the invention of typewritten
material, file folders, or the 19th century office place. However, the combination of these (and
other) factors, led to the necessity for a system of materially organizing the information
contained in these documents.
59
1.2.5 The Imbricated QWERTY Keyboard
Figure 13: The Imbrication of QWERTY
Having examined both existing research and archival sources as arrived at through each of
the interrelated quadrants of the Imbrication Model, the model itself graphically organizes them
as demonstrated above. Of course, each bullet point within each quadrant distills down a
complex object with complex motives and consequences to a single phrase. This is not to suggest
that any of the complexities dealt with in the earlier sections ought to be disregarded or forgotten,
but simply to highlight their relations to other objects which relate to the object of the QWERTY
keyboard in similar or different ways through similar or different processes. In other words, each
of the analyses done in the previous four sections, which follows the relations of specific objects
in individual quadrants, traces networks and histories on their own terms and in great detail. The
analysis done through the graphic representation of the Imbrication Model takes a proverbial
“30,000 foot” perspective, making note of large processes and trends, and seeking to establish
60
new connections, complications, or contradictions. In particular, this allows for new
opportunities to see compare objects in each of the four quadrants and how clusters of objects,
techniques, and technologies relate to one another over time.
By organizing the history of the QWERTY keyboard through ostensive and performative
motives and consequences, two clusters of technologies and objects arise to the forefront which
offer the opportunity for original and new commentary: the relation of typing keyboards to
pianos in both their technical construction as well as the socially constructed narratives around
typing keyboards, and the relation of filing and filing systems to the implementation of
keyboards on both typewriters and personal computers. In the case of keyboards relating to
pianos, the analysis of ostensive motive and the technical construction of the QWERTY
keyboard brought research and archival records which demonstrate the technology of the piano
hammer as crucial to the QWERTY keyboard’s development. Comparatively, research on the
performative consequence of female typists reveals a socially constructed mythology that women
were more suited as typists because women played piano in greater percentages than men, and
the skill set would transfer. The QWERTY keyboard did, in fact, share a real, technological
connection through the technology of the hammer striking the paper or piano string in response
to pressing a key. This technological similarity, however, had nothing to do with the skill sets
required to use either sort of keyboard successfully. By considering both phenomena within the
model, however, one can easily see them in relation to one another and trace the relation of the
QWERTY keyboard to the piano through history and across types of objects.
Similarly, tracing the connection of the QWERTY keyboard’s presence on the typewriter
with the invention and emergence of filing cabinets and systems, as well as its connection to the
emergence of the personal computer, opens up new opportunities for research and connection
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between the materiality of typewritten information and computer information insofar as they
share “filing” practices and systems. Of course, the skeuomorphic continuity between physical
filing in an office and iconic filing through a computer interface has been oft noted, and even
played an important role in GUI design. However, the connection of these of filing technologies
and systems, either in relation to paper material information produced by the typewriter, or
digital material information produced by a computing system, remains largely unexplored. In
other words, by using the Imbrication Model to explore the histories of the keyboard in relation
to paper filing as well as the keyboard in relation to the personal computer raises new questions
about the significance about the continuity of both filing systems and the QWERTY keyboard
across these technologies, and their shared emergence across fundamentally different
technologies.
Finally, the design of the Imbrication Model, which so intentionally separates out objects
which precede a technology (motives) and those which come after it (consequences) helps to
bring some clarity about one of the more popular apocryphal tales of Sholes’ QWERTY design:
that he was primarily concerned with preventing keys sticking together through the course of
typing. In recent decades, this question has become central to a popular debate, which questions
whether the dominance of the QWERTY design typifies a case of technological lock-in, wherein
a design remains dominant because switching costs are higher than switching benefits.65 The
question of QWERTY lock-in emerges in relation to a popular story told about the development
of the QWERTY keyboard: that Sholes designed the keyboard with a layout which failed to
achieve maximum typing speeds so as to avoid the collision of keys frequently used in
65 David, Paul A. “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY.” The American Economic Review 75, no. 2 (1985): 332–37: This seminal article discusses the QWERTY keyboard as indicative of a tendency for technologies to create systems of practice around them, which perpetuate their long-term dominance. Although some of the historical specifics of this article are contested, the general principle holds fast.
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immediate succession of one another (such as ER or RE). In this telling of the development of
QWERTY, the frequency of use in letters in English spellings served as a performative motive
for keyboard layout. The story of the keyboard design, unfortunately, is not so simple as has been
traditionally represented. Scholars have refuted both whether Sholes ever intended to design the
keyboard to slow down typing and jamming of keys,66 as well as whether the QWERTY
keyboard does in fact lead to slower typing practices.67
And while it may be impossible to definitively conclude whether or not Sholes intended for
the design of the QWERTY keyboard to achieve this effect because he never wrote or discussed
the subject, the Imbrication Model offers strong evidence that he did not because this theory
requires confusing a performative consequence of the QWERTY keyboard – touch-typing – as a
performative motive. In other words, the problem of jamming keys because of typing in rapid
succession, if it ever was, in fact, a serious hindrance to a typist, could only possibly emerge
under conditions of touch-typing, or speed-typing, which emerged sometime in the first decade
and a half after Remington’s purchase of Sholes’ design in 1873, as evidenced by Frank Edward
McGurrin’s famous typing contest victory by touch-typing in 1888. By McGurrin’s own account,
he devised his method of touch typing in 1878, while using a Remington typewriter.68
Additionally, similar method of touch-typing was simultaneously developed by Mrs. L.V.
Longley during the same time period, although McGurrin’s method more closely resembles the
one used today.69 At any rate, it seems that typing with such speed so as to even warrant
66 Yasuoka, Koichi, and Motoko Yasuoka. “On the Prehistory of QWERTY.” Zinbun 42 (2011), 162 67 Liebowitz, Stan, and Stephen E. Margolis. “The Fable of the Keys.” Journal of Law and Economics 33, no. 1 (1990), 2-3 68 Wyckoff Seamans & Benedict. The History of Touch Typing. New York: Guilbert Putnam, 1900. 69 Wershler-Henry, Darren. The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005, 232
63
consideration of keys jamming was a consequence of the QWERTY design, and not a motive of
it. Certainly, the hunt-and-peck method which pre-dated touch-typing would rarely result in
speeds which warranted concern about keys jamming. The myth then, that the QWERTY
keyboard was designed so as to afford keys not jamming due to quick typing speeds makes the
mistake of assuming that a consequence of the QWERTY keyboard (touch-typing) must in some
way also contribute as a motive. Additionally, Sholes’ silence in his patents concerning the
benefit of the QWERTY layout, as well as continued tinkering with keyboard layouts up until a
year before his death (even after the popularization of touch-typing) suggest that he failed to
connect keyboard layouts with typing speed and/or jamming keys, in the same way which is
common in late 20th and early 21st century literature.
Just as any of the histories explored in any quadrant represent a selection of possible
histories, these three instances of imbrication are only a fraction of the new questions raised by
considering performative and ostensive objects in relation to a technology as motives or
consequences. One of the advantages of this graphic representation is visually presenting
historical trends in processes so that these questions can be raised and explained more fully.
Theoretically, however, considering motives and consequences presents both the challenge and
the opportunity that this classification inherently exists in relation to the object at hand. For
example, if the multi-touch screen relates to the QWERTY keyboard as one of its ostensive
consequences, the QWERTY keyboard relates to the multi-touch screen as one of its ostensive
motives. This relational nature of motive and consequence allows for the model to be expanded
beyond that which is represented above, and allows it to become a historiographical tool, not
only for a single technology, but for illustrating the process of technological change. In this light,
the chapter is simply the first step in a larger project of seeing the development of multiple
64
human artifacts in relation to one another. In this way, the Imbrication Model works as a tool, not
for the history of technology, but for the history of technologies.
65
2. TESSELLATIONS
This chapter expands the case study of the QWERTY keyboard by examining how
tessellating the Imbrication Model continues to contribute new insight, provoke non-obvious
questions, and organize complex ideas and histories. In section 2.2.1-2.2.4, one object from each
of the four quadrants of the QWERTY keyboard’s Imbrication Model is considered as its
historical inverse. In other words, if the object is a motive for the QWERTY keyboard, the
question is raised, to what is it a consequence? If it is a consequence of the QWERTY keyboard,
to what is it a motive? The model then generates another fourfold, which takes into account the
historical situation of the technology which answers these questions. By considering historical
inverses in all four quadrants, I hope to show how technological evolution is always a process of
multiple contributing factors, with any number of possible conclusions. To this end, the
technologies selected as relevant for comparison to the QWERTY keyboard are by no means the
only technologies which might occupy the positions ascribed to them. Tessellating the model in
this way does not necessarily suggest that two technologies share inverse relationships to all of
the objects which might occupy a given quadrant, but instead that through one of these objects a
historical pivot occurs where the consequence of one technology becomes a motive of another.
In other words, if one were to tessellate from the ostensive motives of the QWERTY keyboard,
the related technology need only relate to one ostensive object which contributes to the
emergence of QWERTY, not to all of them. In order to maintain continuity from the previous
section, the following tessellations of the QWERTY keyboard list all of the objects in their
related quadrants as discussed above. The object on which the tessellation pivots – which is to
say relates to one technology as a motive and the other as a consequence – is isolated from the
rest of the list at the top of the center tile in bold italics. The other objects which relate to the
66
history of the QWERTY keyboard remain in brackets at the bottom of the center tile in order to
recall the work done concerning applying the fourfold to QWERTY, not to suggest that they
relate to both technologies.
The comparison of two technologies in this way highlights their indirect relation, which
might otherwise be overlooked. In this way, the tessellating model illustrates the historical
evolution from one technology to another, but not necessarily the full process of a particular
technology’s emergence. In the same way that the four quadrants of the Imbrication Model build
on pre-existing theory and philosophy, the concept of technological evolution integral to
tessellations of the Imbrication Model builds on the work of media ecology, and in particular, of
Paul Levinson. Levinson proposes a way of reading McLuhan’s tetrads as dynamic through time,
which sets a precedent for understanding motive and consequence as constantly reversing into
one another.
2.1. TRAJECTORY: ON HARMAN’S THIRD QUESTION
Having now discussed the two dualisms present in the Imbrication Model and the ways in
which those four poles relate to one another through the history of the typewriter, we come to
Harman’s third question: “Do the four poles exist simultaneously, or do one or more push us
towards some past or future moment?”70 As a middle-oriented historiography with particular
emphasis on the directionality of the motive/consequence dualism, the poles always push the
researcher to either a past or future moment (in relation to the technology), or perhaps more
properly, the poles take a past or future object and relate it to the technology. A middle-oriented
historiography of technology entirely relies on the directionality of this dualism. However,
because motive and consequence, by definition exist, not as ensconced categories, but only as
70 Harman, “The McLuhans and Metaphysics,” 103
67
descriptions of one objects historical relation to the technology at hand, they allow for the
opportunity to further develop the Imbrication Model from a middle-oriented historiography of
technology to a middle-oriented historiography of technological evolution. The major difference
between a history of technology and of technological evolution, in this case, being that a history
of technology focuses on a single technological innovation via objects it relates to as motives and
consequences, whereas a history of technological evolution focuses on how the motives and
consequences of multiple technologies inextricably connect the technologies through different
technologies inverse relations to different objects – either performative or ostensive. In the case
of media imbrication, this can be articulated by the chiasmus: the consequence of a first
technology is a motive for a second, and the motive for a second is the consequence of the first.
In some senses, histories of technological evolution require the closest type of research to the
middle-oriented approach I propose, because it requires the researcher to see the effects of one
technology as necessary (but not sufficient) causes of another. For this reason, some theories of
technological evolution offer valuable insights which contribute to expanding the Imbrication
Model. In particular, the idea of a “spiral structure of technology” put forth by Paul Levinson,71
Robert K. Logan and Izabella Oldenhof,72 and other media ecologists in the 1970’s onward,
demonstrates the chiasmatic relationship of motives and consequences to technologies in the
process of technological evolution. These thinkers, and Levinson and particular, sought to extend
the implications of McLuhan’s laws of media in identifying the laws’ historical relation to a
given medium. McLuhan’s laws stated that all media enhance some object, process, or value,
reverse into its opposite when pushed to an extreme, obsolesce a different medium, and retrieve a
71 Levinson, Paul. 1978. “Tetrad ‘Wheels’ of Cultural Evolution.” In An Inquiry into the Four Features of Human Technology and Artifact. Farleigh Dickinson University. 72 Oldenhof, Izabella Pruska, and Robert K. Logan. 2017. “The Spiral Structure of Marshall McLuhan’s Thinking.” Philosophies 2 (2).
68
medium which was previously obsolesced, these laws, he graphically organized into a model
referred to as “McLuhan’s Tetrad” or more simply, “The Tetrad.”73 By proposing these laws,
McLuhan meant to highlight how when any given medium becomes a focal point or the center of
attention, a larger periphery of effects informs its place in the world. In the tradition of gestalt
psychology, he referred to the focal point as the figure, and the periphery as the ground. By his
own admission, McLuhan’s project was not historical in nature, but he invited others to “test the
validity of [the] laws in terms of history.”74 Undoubtedly, when he issued this invitation,
McLuhan had in mind a sort of testing via case study — to see if the history of any medium
could disprove any of his laws. Levinson’s work on the tetrad, however, took up this challenge
by different means. Instead of deploying a case study, he analyzed the four laws “in terms of
history” by noting the historical trajectory, or relation, of each law to the given medium. In other
words, his work analyzed each law to assess whether it was end-oriented or beginning-oriented
and asked questions about the significance of his findings. For our purposes, I consider Levinson
to describe an unrealized attempt at creating a middle-oriented historiography of technological
evolution which offers valuable insights to inform further development of the Imbrication
Model.
2.1.1 The Spiral Structure of Technology
Levinson’s analysis of the spiral structure of technological change was first presented at the
“Tetrad Conference” in 1978 in a talk titled, Tetrad “Wheels” of Cultural Evolution. Given
73 McLuhan, Marshall. “Laws of the Media.” Et Cetera: A Review of General Semantics 34, no. 2 (1977); McLuhan, Marshall. “Misunderstanding the Media’s Laws.” Technology and Culture 17, no. 2 (1976): 263. McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric McLuhan. Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. 74 McLuhan, Marshall. “McLuhan’s Laws of the Media.” Technology and Culture 16, no. 1 (1975), 75
69
McLuhan’s claim that the tetrad is structured as a two series of figure/ground relations, Levinson
identifies the correlating figures and grounds within the tetrad, establishing enhancement and
retrieval as figures and reversal and obsolescence as ground.75 Having established the locations
of figure and ground in the tetrad, Levinson continues on to say,
The obsolesced aspect, existing before the figure, is the ground from which the figure springs, and may be thus thought of as ‘pre-ground;’ the ground that the figure reverses into obviously comes after the figure, and thus may be thought of as ‘post-ground;’ and the retrieved element, existing well before the figure, but nonetheless drawn once again into the figure, may perhaps be dubbed the ‘pre-figure’ of the system. Thus, the four modes of the tetrad may be mapped in the following double figure/ground pattern: A) Intensification [enhancement] = Figure; B) Obsolescence = Pre-Ground; C) Retrieval = Pre-Figure; D) Reversal = Post-Ground.76
Levinson further goes on to provide illustrations of this spiral structure of the tetrad, which can
be seen below, as well as my own digital renderings of his hand-drawn illustrations:
75 It is interesting to note that over a decade later, McLuhan’s posthumously published collaboration with Bruce R. Powers, The Global Village, would corroborate Levinson’s claims as to which poles of the tetrad correlated with figure and which correlated with ground, although with no reference to Levinson or his 1978 presentation. 76 Levinson, “Tetrad ‘Wheels’ of Cultural Evolution,” p. 3 (original emphases)
70
Figure 14: Levinson’s Tetrad Spirals
By identifying obsolescence as pre-ground and retrieval as pre-figure, Levinson understands
them as asking the same sort of end-oriented questions as ostensive or performative motive. In
the same way, by understanding enhancement and reversal as post-figure and post-ground,
Levinson aligns them with the end-oriented questions asked of consequences. Admittedly, while
this temporal dualism remains constant from Levinson’s tetrad spirals to the Imbrication Model,
the figure/ground dualism does not as closely match the performative/ostensive one. Even this
difference, however, the cyclical, even chiasmatic, structure of Levinson’s spirals establishes
71
important principles for developing a historiography of technological evolution.
For Levinson, because figure and ground deal with objects of attention and inattention, and
because the historical nature of the pre-/post- dualism, none of the quadrants of his spiral
remained static. For Levinson’s model, this means that each pole can transform into any of the
others: figures can become grounds and that which was pre-figure or ground for one technology
inherently was post-figure or ground for another. The Imbrication Model only builds on the latter
insight, as ostensive and performative objects don’t share the same categorical flexibility as
figure and ground.
2.1.2 The Imbrication Model as a Model for Technological Evolution
The strength of the Imbrication Model as a heuristic device comes directly from its implicit
suggestion that motives and consequences can always reverse into their opposite based on
whether or not they maintain an end-oriented or beginning-oriented relationship with any given
technology. In the example worked out in the previous chapter, for example, it would be equally
valid to explore the QWERTY keyboard as a motive of the filing cabinet instead of studying the
filing cabinet as a consequence of the QWERTY keyboard — the two claims explore the same
historical process with different foci. This means that whenever an object relates to another
object as its motive, it is simultaneously the consequence of the object which historically
preceded it (and presumably a set of unmentioned objects). In other words, the four poles of the
model need not remain in static relation to a single technology as performative and ostensive
motive or consequence. Any of the quadrants might expand to relate to one technology as a
motive and another as a consequence, related through a performative or ostensive object which
relates to both technologies. This means that if an object — either ostensive or performative —
relates to one human artifact as a consequence, and another as a motive, the model itself can
72
tesselate by allowing a quadrant to represent one artifact’s consequence and the other’s motive.
This tessellation may manifest in one of two ways, depicted below:
Figure 15: Tessellation Possibilities
Note, the goal of advancing the model through tessellations such as the ones depicted above,
the model refrains from directly comparing one human artifact to another, but instead compares
them indirectly. In other words, the model suggests that Technology A relates to a given
performative or ostensive object as a consequence in the same way that Technology B or
Technology C relate to that object as a motive. The model, in other words, does not suggest that
Technology A begat Technology B or C, but that Technology A contributed to producing one of
the necessary conditions for Technology B or C. This model further emphasizes the insight of
SCOT that the causes of any given technology tend to exist within a continuum of competing and
multiple causes by always including performative and objective motives even when the shared
object between two technologies is only one or the other.
OM
OC
PM
OM
OC PC
PC/PM
OM
PC
PM
OC/OM
OC PC
PM
Technology A
Technology B
Technology A
Technology C
73
2.2. SINGLE TESSELLATIONS
This section explores four different single tessellations of the QWERTY keyboard’s
Imbrication Model, one for each of the quadrants. Each of the following sub-sections takes a
different quadrant as its center in imbricating the QWERTY keyboard with a different
technology. Section 2.1.1 shows how the wire-toothed cotton gin imbricates to QWERTY
through QWERTY’s performative motive and the cotton gin’s performative consequence.
Section 2.1.2 shows how the alphabetic moveable type imbricates to QWERTY through
QWERTY’s ostensive motive and the moveable type’s ostensive consequence. Section 2.1.3
shows how QWERTY imbricates to the emoji keyboard through QWERTY’s ostensive
consequence and the emoji keyboard’s ostensive motive. And finally, section 2.1.4 shows how
the QWERTY keyboard relates to the modern efficiency desk through QWERTY’s performative
consequence and the desk’s performative motive. By observing four technologies in relation to
QWERTY in this way, two of the tessellations deal with technology which predate the QWERTY
keyboard, and two deal with technologies which postdate it. Each of the following four examples
are given in order to demonstrate the way in which this approach enables a researcher to uncover
new questions and relationships in long histories of technology. For this reason, the following
sections do not provide as much detail to the histories of the technologies compared to
QWERTY, as done with QWERTY in section 1.2.1-1.2.4. Instead, these sections deal with the
implications of the relations discussed and the opportunities for new research which they open.
74
2.2.1 Wire-Toothed Cotton Gin + QWERTY Keyboard
Figure 16: Wire-Toothed Cotton Gin + QWERTY Imbrication Model77
As is the case with many technologies, the cotton gin did not spring forth in its final iteration,
like Athena from the head of Zeus. As Angela Lakwete discusses, technologies which separate
seeds from cotton by use of a roller have existed in agricultural societies since antiquity spanning
a diverse list of geographical locales.78 The claim of this tessellation, however, refers to the
specific technology of the wire-toothed cotton gin, or the saw gin, invented by Eli Whitney in
1783 and patented in 1784. For technologies such as this, the middle-oriented emphasis of the
Imbrication Model proves particularly useful because it encourages the end-oriented study of the
iterative history of cotton gins which eventually led to Whitney’s invention as one of many
77 In this model and the subsequent tessellations, the pivotal object for the tessellation is bolded and italicized 78 Lakwete, Angela. Inventing the Cotton Gin. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003, 1-20
Wir
e-To
othe
d C
otto
n G
in
OM:- Typewriter- Moveable type- Individual keys- Piano Hammer- Roman Alphabet
OC:- Filing Cabinets- Word Processor- Personal Computers- Emoticons- Multi-touch screen
PC:- Female typist- Filing systems- Touch-typing
PM:- Plantation farming- Agricultural
economy- Textile trades
OM:- Cotton- Hand roller cotton gin
OC:- Seedless cotton
PM/PC:- American Civil
War
- [Literacy]- [Remington] - [Patent law]
QW
ERTY Keyboard
75
manifestations of this agricultural technology, without forfeiting the importance of the specific
properties of a single iteration in contributing to historical moments or relating to other objects.
Figure 15 relates the wire-toothed cotton gin to the QWERTY keyboard because they both
relate to the performative object of the American Civil War. As discussed in section 1.2.1, this
war contributed to the emergence of the QWERTY keyboard because, upon its conclusion, arms
manufacturers, such as Remington, looked for new technologies to manufacture in order to
maintain revenue streams similar to those experienced during a wartime boom.79 Comparatively
the cotton gin contributed as a single motive to the Civil War because of its implications for the
agricultural economy of the American South and the emerging economies of Western territories.
The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 allowed for a massive boom of slavery in the South as it
sped the process of farming cotton and allowed plantations to produce greater quantities of goods
and reap greater profits. However, this was only the immediate result of this technology, as the
efficiency introduced by the cotton gin displaced a large number of slaves who had previously
been resigned to remove seeds from cotton with less efficient gins. In this way, while the cotton
gin enhanced the total scope of cotton production, it simultaneously obsolesced agricultural
manufacture on the human scale. As the southern slave trade was predicated on the human scale
and exploitation of free human labor, the cotton gin ultimately reversed into the first of a line of
technologies which would make slavery, as it existed in the 17th and 18th centuries, an
economically unviable institution in the 19th century.80 By Eli Whitney’s own account,
[The cotton gin] may be turned by water or with a horse, and with the greatest ease and one man and a horse will do more than fifty men with the old machines. It makes the labour fifty times less, without throwing any class of People out of business.81
79 A version of this paragraph was originally presented at the National Communication Association’s 104th convention. 80 Du Bois, W.E.B. “Chapter 3: The Economic Revolution in the South.” In The Negro in the South: His Economic Progress in Relation to His Moral and Religious Development, Being the William Levi Bull Lectures for the Year 1907, 79–122. Philadelphia: G.W. Jacobs and Company, 1907, 84 81 Green, C.M. Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology. Toronto: Little, Brown, & Company, 1956, 46
76
Of course, by saying that his invention would avoid “throwing any class of people out of work,”
Whitney almost certainly referred exclusively to white landowners, giving no thought to the
economic consequences to the forty-nine field hands which the gin would allegedly displace.
Because the cotton gin allowed for more work to be done using fewer people, plantation owners
in the South, in some instances, now found themselves with more slaves than a field required,
which incentivized the selling of slaves to landowners in Western territories. This geographic
expansion of slavery – which was expedited by the arrival of the cotton gin – became one of the
primary controversies leading up to the Civil War, greatly contributing to the tension which
eventually amounted in armed conflict. This tension particularly contributed crystallizing “the
existence and expansion of plantation-slavery” as “the central and irreconcilable political
question in the 1840s and 1850s,”82 making the cotton gin and its effects a necessary, but not
sufficient, motive of the American Civil War.
By choosing to tessellate the Imbrication Model of the QWERTY keyboard to the wire-
toothed cotton gin, the scope of research moves decidedly away from writing and office
technologies and into an almost entirely different realm. Two primary insights might be gleaned
from the seeming unconventionality of comparing the QWERTY keyboard to the saw gin: the
first concerning their difference, and the second concerning their similarities. First, by relating
two objects which traditionally have not been discussed as parts of the same technological
histories, through their inverse relationships to the Civil War, we expand and elevate the role of
performative objects in technological change. In other words, the American Civil War, as a
performative object itself, is a complex object with a number of contributing forces and perhaps
an even larger number of subsequent influences. While the relationship of the saw gin to the
82 Post, C. “Social-Property Relations, Class-Conflict and the Origins of the US Civil War: Towards a New Social Interpretation.” Historical Materialism 19, no. 4 (2011): 129–168, 130
77
QWERTY keyboard is indirect and only relevant concerning the motives and consequences of
the American Civil War, their connection takes the role of performative objects in technological
change seriously. In other words, by taking the shared relation to the American Civil War of the
cotton gin and QWERTY as important, the approach of the Imbrication Model allows for one to
strike a balance between a deterministic claim such as, “the cotton gin was the cause of the
QWERTY keyboard,” to an analysis which would see their histories as too unrelated for serious
comparison. The Civil War does relate to both of these technologies, albeit with opposite
temporal orientations. The Imbrication Model offers an opportunity to explore the relation of
these technologies to the Civil War, and even to one another, without demanding one to see them
as singularly or directly related. Second, even though the wire-toothed cotton gin and the
QWERTY keyboard do not share the same similarities of QWERTY with the moveable type or
the emoji keyboard as writing technologies, they both are technologies which typify the economy
of their respective eras. There is, in considering the effects of these technologies, an interesting
symmetry, wherein even as an agricultural technology, the cotton gin contributed to the demise
of the agrarian economy of the 18th and 19th centuries in America. Comparatively, the QWERTY
keyboard ushered in an office and information economy, not only by the means of the ubiquity of
keyboards, but also by other effects, such as filing. In this way, this comparison suggests a way
to read the histories of these technologies — and even a history of the American Civil War — as
indicative of economic change in the 19th and 20th centuries. Broadly speaking, then, tessellating
the model so as to connect seemingly unrelated technologies also provides the opportunity to
situate histories of technologies alongside other parallel histories in which the technologies are
also involved.
78
2.2.2 Alphabetic Moveable Type + QWERTY Keyboard
Figure 17: Alphabetic Moveable Type + QWERTY Imbrication Model
The tessellation in Figure 17 isolates the individual key as an ostensive consequence to the
alphabetic moveable type and an ostensive motive to the QWERTY keyboard. Just as section
2.1.1 deals with the QWERTY keyboard’s relation to a technology which precedes it, the
alphabetic moveable type existed long before any iteration of the typewriter as a pivotal
development for the history of Western printing. Figure 17 lists some of the motives, both
ostensive and performative in the moveable type’s fourfold. Additionally, the model lists some of
the performative consequences of the moveable type. As already discussed, the graphic display
of the Imbrication Model visually organizes a wide range of phenomena and components of the
history of the moveable type in a way which cultivates a holistic understanding of its relations to
other human artifacts. By adding the fourfold model of the moveable type to that of the
PM:- Literacy
- Remington/
American Civil
War
- Patent law
OC:- Filing Cabinets
- Word Processor
- Personal Computers
- Emoticons
- Multi-touch screen
PC:- Female typist
- Filing systems
- Touch-typingQW
ERTY
Key
boar
d
Alphabetic M
oveable type
PM:- Metallurgy
- Manuscript culture
OM:- Codices
- Coin molds
- Lead-antimony-tin
alloy
PC:- Standardization of
letter forms
- Print industry (print
shops, printers, book
sellers, etc.)
OM/OC:- Individual keys
- [Typewriter]
- [Piano Hammer]
- [Roman Alphabet]
79
QWERTY keyboard, however, the major emphasis is the inverse relationship of the moveable
type to individual typewriter keys as compared to the keyboard’s relationship to typewriter keys.
In a historical sense, the moveable type prefigured the individual keys of the typewriter by
separating letter-forms from either pen strokes or wood blocks, and innovating writing
techniques defined by imprinting or impressing. The creation of the moveable type, by giving
letters a material form, not just on the written page, but also in writing technologies themselves,
set the precedent for a material technique of reproducing whole letters at once which eventually
led to the development of imprinting letter by letter (as opposed to page by page).
This shared relationship to the individual typewriter key not only represents both a real,
historical connection between the QWERTY keyboard and the alphabetic moveable type, but
also opens up the possibility of reading the model in innovative ways so as to highlight the
historical complexity inherent in historiographies which take into account multiple causalities
and effects. For example, one might read the material importance of metal for the innovation of
type-based writing machines, which was a particularly unpredictable historical turn in the history
of writing, given established practices and innovation in writing on paper, parchment, and vellum
with ink. Comparatively, if one reads the model horizontally through the second row of boxes,
the question might at least be raised between the emergence of mass literacy (a performative
motive of the QWERTY keyboard) and the standardization of letters (a performative
consequence of the moveable type). Ultimately, however, as with all tessellations of the
Imbrication Model, by imbricating the moveable type to the QWERTY keyboard through the
pivotal ostensive object of the individual key, the model allows for the comparison of two related
technologies without neglecting the histories and effects of either technology which have less to
do with the relation between them.
80
2.2.3 QWERTY Keyboard + Emoji keyboard
Figure 18: QWERTY + Emoji Keyboard Imbrication Model
Figure 18 isolates the multi-touch screen as an ostensive consequence of the QWERTY
keyboard that pivots to be an ostensive motive of the Emoji keyboard. The multi-touch screen,
which became a viable mainstream technology due to the low effectiveness of a physical
QWERTY keyboard with individual keys on a device as small as a smartphone. However,
because the multi-touch screen facilitates input through a graphical user interface and not
through materially physical keys or buttons, it affords innovation in input for symbol systems
which do not fit within the physical confines of the 44 keys of conventional QWERTY
keyboards. The character set of emoji, which pre-existed Apple’s implementation of multi-touch
technology on the iPhone, was constrained precisely by the limited number of keys of the
QWERTY keyboard. In 2012, when Apple introduced iOS 6, they also introduced the emoji
PM:- Literacy- Remington/
American Civil War
- Patent law
OM:- Typewriter- Moveable type- Individual keys- Piano Hammer- Roman Alphabet
OM/OC:- Multi-touch screen
- [Filing Cabinets]- [Word Processor]- [Personal Computers]- [Emoticons]
PC:- Female typist- Filing systems- Touch-typing
QW
ERTY Keyboard
Emoj
i Key
boar
d
PM:- Unicode emoji- Graphical User
Interface
PC:- Infinitely expandable
emoji set- International
iconography/ ambiguity
OC:
81
keyboard, which took advantage of the endless scroll feature of multi-touch technology, which
organized the majority of emoji off-screen, which a user could access by swiping them.
Admittedly, even though the performative and ostensive motives of the emoji keyboard are
multiple and easily identified, the ostensive and performative consequences must be considered
with an acute awareness that (at the time of this analysis) this technology can only be analyzed
from the historical perspective of less than a decade. So, while some consequences, such as an
infinitely expandable character set due to the endless scroll, can be identified, the analysis of
consequence carries with it an invisible asterisk, denoting the possibility of more consequences
to come through historical epochs associated with this technology. Particularly, meaningful or
historically significant ostensive consequences tend to not emerge in the early years of a
technology’s history, because these years tend to involve the technological and ostensive
working out of the technology itself, and generally (although not always) not the designing of
new technologies according to its affordances and constraints.
This being said, by considering the emoji keyboard as relating to the QWERTY keyboard
through their inverse relationships to the multi-touch screen, this Imbrication Model highlights
an original insight by implying that the emergence of these pictographic symbols is facilitated by
input techniques. In fact, many accounts on the emergence of emoji tie them to their immediate
symbolic predecessor (emoticons) and see the transition from re-purposed alphanumeric symbols
to pictograms of expression and other icons as a natural transition.83 By displaying the
relationship of the emoji keyboard to the technical capabilities of the multi-touch screen,
however, the Imbrication Model emphasizes how this transition from emoticons to emoji was
facilitated by specific advances in input technique.
83 Danesi, Marcel. The Semiotics of Emoji. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, 2-5; Evans, Vyvyan. The Emoji Code: The Linguistics Behind Smiley Faces and Scaredy Cats. New York: Picador, 2017, 150-155
82
2.2.4 QWERTY Keyboard + Modern Efficiency Desk
Figure 19: QWERTY + Modern Efficiency Desk Imbrication Model
Figure 19 isolates filing systems as a pivotal object for the final single tessellation of this
case study, which are a performative consequence of QWERTY and a performative motive of the
modern efficiency desk. As an important facilitator to many changes in the American office in
the beginning of the 20th century, the QWERTY keyboard can be linked to a number of ostensive
objects which define office spaces from its introduction to the present. Numbered among these
changes, one might observe the relative simplicity of desks in office spaces for all workers
(particularly clerics), compared to secretary desks, fall front desks, and other 19th century desk
designs which were riddled with cubby holes, shelves, and even bookcases. While the QWERTY
keyboard increased the amount of paper produced in the average firm so as to facilitate the
inventions of filing cabinets and filing systems, these cabinets and systems effectively moved the
PM:- Literacy- Remington/
American Civil War
- Patent law
OM:- Typewriter- Moveable type- Individual keys- Piano Hammer- Roman Alphabet
OC:- Filing Cabinets- Word Processor- Personal Computers- Emoticons- Multi-touch screen
PC/PM:- Filing systems
- [Female typist]- [Touch-typing]
QW
ERTY
Key
boar
d
OM:- Filing cabinets- Office telephones
PC:- Exaggerated office
hierarchies- Surveilled office
OC:- Inter-office
telephones- Cubicle
Modern Efficiency D
esk
83
paper from the desk of the cleric to the shared (or personal) filing cabinet, with a system which
ensured everyone could locate whatever information was desired. Once the old clerk desk was
cleared of its papers, and its papers filed away in precisely defined systems, the opportunity
emerged for the Metal Office Furniture Company (eventually to become Steelcase, Inc.) to
design a new kind of desk, and subsequently, a new kind of office space. This desk, called the
modern efficiency desk, largely abandoned the drawers and cubby holes of the older Wooten
desk and its relatives, and generally was simply comprised of a slab of metal on four legs.84
Paired with the new open layouts of offices, and the increasingly hierarchical organizational
structure, the modern efficiency desk led to an office environment, where a manager could pace
through a workspace to monitor the productivity of the staff, and then retreat back to a private
office — the new mark of a managerial position. The openness fostered by the modern efficiency
desk eventually would reverse into cubicles, wherein pseudo-walls would be constructed
between desk to at least foster the appearance of privacy.
The Imbrication Model of Figure 19 shows the pivot from the QWERTY keyboard to the
modern efficiency desk through the emergence of filing systems, implying that the increase in
paper in offices required a more standardized way of sorting material information than stacking
paper in the drawers and cubby holes of individual desks. The re-design of the common desk,
however, was not simply a result of increased paperwork, but also reflective of economic shifts
of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, wherein large numbers of workers who formerly worked
or would have worked in farms or factories began to find their seats in corporate America. The
decline of workers in the agricultural sector particularly dramatizes this point: in 1820, nearly
three fourths of the American population worked in agricultural production, but by 1949, this
84 Saval, Cubed, 42
84
number had shrunk to only one eighth.85 The nature of working in an office space, then, changed
along with the influx of office workers. In other words, just as the increase in material
information created a need for filing cabinets and systems, which then obsolesced desks as the
primary technologies of paper storage, the influx of workers into the office created a need for a
desk which was inexpensive and able to be surveilled. The imbrication of these two
technologies, then, provides opportunities to explore the matrix of technologies which materially
facilitated the emerging information economy at the beginning of the 20th century. Rather than
closing off future research, this comparison implies that these two technologies relate as a single
dyad within a larger system of many technologies and forces which altered the fabric of the
American workplace. Insofar as developing the nuances of the Imbrication Model, the relation of
the modern efficiency desk to the QWERTY keyboard serves the purpose of demonstrating how,
in many cases, the tessellation of one technology to another involves a researcher making
choices concerning how to compare which objects in order to highlight certain relationships or
phenomena. In this case, we have already established filing cabinets as an ostensive consequence
of the QWERTY keyboard and filing systems as a performative consequence.
2.3. COMPLEX TESSELLATIONS
At this point, our theoretical musings have run their course. The historiographical foundation
for the Imbrication Model has been laid in its entirety, and the only remaining question asks how
far the graphic model might itself be pushed, or at least remain useful. In other words, if we find
the tessellations of the Imbrication Model to be helpful and productive, to what extent might
tessellation continue beyond the comparison of two technologies through inverse relations, and
85 Mills, C. Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951, 16
85
might new ground be broken by continuing tessellation in this manner? The design of the
Imbrication Model allows for two types of extended tessellations without rearranging the
positions of any of the quadrants, which I will refer to as string tessellations and cluster
tessellations. Both string and cluster tessellations are more complex than single tessellations in
that, by expanding the number of technologies involved in analysis, they increase the number of
related performative and ostensive objects. String tessellations are extensions of the single
tessellations, whereas cluster tessellations push the insight of inverse relations of motive and
consequence to its extreme. Ultimately, one might tessellate the Imbrication Model ad infinitum,
considering a consequence of each technology as a motive to the next. The degree to which this
is prudent or helpful — beyond comparing the historical relations of two or three technologies —
I leave to the thoughtful evaluation of future researchers. For the purposes of this project,
however, it is useful to at least acknowledge and explain the full potential of this model.
2.3.1 String Tessellations
Of the two categories of so-called complex tessellations, string tessellations are undoubtedly
the simpler. A string tessellation simply continues tessellating in any direction so as to compare
more than two technologies. Generally speaking, this might occur along either of two themes:
either the model continues to tessellate according to inverse relations of objects of the same
quality (either performative or ostensive) or the model continues to tessellate in either direction,
in one instance demonstrating the inverse relation of two technologies to a performative object
and demonstrating inverse relations to an ostensive object in another. For the sake of giving these
sorts of string tessellations names, and therefore making them easier objects of reference, I will
refer to the first sort of string tessellation as object-specific string tessellations and the second
sort as object-indiscriminate string tessellations. For continuity’s sake, I will demonstrate these
86
possibilities by organizing the technologies tessellated in sections 2.1.1-2.1.4 according to string
tessellations. In these examples, the tessellations only extend to three technologies, but there is
no reason to limit them to this number in further research or use.
2.3.1a Object-Specific String Tessellations
Figure 20: Object-Specific String Tessellation86
Object-specific string tessellations, as demonstrated by the alphabetic moveable type +
QWERTY keyboard + emoji keyboard model in Figure 20, connects a series of technologies as
they exclusively relate either to ostensive objects or performative objects. In this sense, ostensive
86 In this model, as with all of the subsequent complex tessellations, I have added color to the distinct fourfolds so as to make them more readily identifiable.
OM/OC:- Individual keys
- [Typewriter]- [Piano Hammer]- [Roman Alphabet]
QWERTY Keyboard
Alphabetic Moveable typePM:- Metallurgy- Manuscript culture
OM:- Codices- Coin molds- Lead-antimony-tin
alloy
PC:- Print industry (print
shops, printers, book sellers, etc.)
OM/OC:- Multi-touch screen
- [Filing Cabinets]- [Word Processor- [Personal Computers]- [Emoticons]
Emoj
i Key
boar
d
PM:- Unicode emoji- Graphical User
Interface
PC:- Infinitely expandable
emoji set- International
iconography/ ambiguity
OC:
PM:- Literacy- Remington/
American Civil War
- Patent law
PC:- Female typist- Filing systems- Touch-typing
87
object specific string tessellations tend to generate histories with technical and material
emphases, whereas performative object-specific string tessellations tend to generate histories
with social and immaterial emphases. In this case, Figure 20 maps the relations of QWERTY to
the alphabetical moveable type and to the emoji keyboard through their inverse relations to
ostensive objects. As with single tessellations, this mapping serves the purpose of demonstrating
indirect relations of multiple (in this case three) technologies without minimizing or ignoring the
fact that each technology relates to a number of other phenomena (the objects listed in the
quadrants not “shared” by inverse relations connecting two technologies). Generally speaking,
the advantage of illustrating technological histories in object-specific string tessellations is to
emphasize either the role of performative or ostensive objects in these history without entirely
foregoing a technology’s relation to the un-emphasized set of objects. In this way, such a
tessellation retains the complexity of a middle-oriented historiography which understands
technologies to always be actualized due to a combination of performative and ostensive motives
and that they contribute to a number of performative and ostensive consequences, while crafting
a study which highlights the importance of one class of objects as particularly important for
understanding a history or historical theme.
In this diagram, the tessellation includes the alphabetic moveable type, the QWERTY
keyboard, and the emoji keyboard, which pivot through the objects of the individual key and the
multi-touch screen, respectively. This succession in particular reveals a theme of discrete
material information shared between these technologies. Just as the moveable type turned letters
into discrete, reproducible objects, the multi-touch screen turned the physical touch of an LCD
screen into a unique bit of information. Ultimately, however, the emoji keyboard was designed
along the same lines as the ostensive consequence of the moveable type – the individual key – as
88
each emoji is, when using the emoji keyboard, both input and output as a unique bit of visual
information.
2.3.1b Object-Indiscriminate String Tessellations
Figure 21: Object-Indiscriminate String Tessellation
Object-indiscriminate string tessellations, unlike object-specific string tessellations, do not
OC/OM:- Individual keys
- [Typewriter]- [Moveable type]- [Piano Hammer]- [Latin Alphabet]
OC:- Filing Cabinets- Word Processor- Personal Computers- Emoticons
QW
ERTY
Key
boar
d
Alphabetic Moveable typePM:- Metallurgy- Manuscript culture
OM:- Codices- Coin molds- Lead-antimony-tin
alloy
PC:- Print industry (print
shops, printers, book sellers, etc.)
- [Standardization of letter forms]
PC:- Exaggerated office
hierarchies- Surveilled office
Modern Efficiency Desk
PC/PM:- Filing systems
- [Female typist]- [Touch-typing]
OM:- Filing cabinets- Office telephones
OC:- Inter-office
telephones- Cubicle
PM:- Literacy- Remington/
American Civil War
- Patent law
89
tessellate based on inverse relations to objects of the same type. Instead, tessellations extend in
either direction according to the choices made by a researcher. Whereas object-specific string
tessellations might be used to demonstrate the importance of ostensive or performative objects in
the relations of several technologies, object-indiscriminate string technologies simply emphasize
the relations of technologies and place less focus on the nature of the relations insofar as they are
determined by classes of objects. In other words, an object-specific tessellation either tessellates
along inverse relationships of either performative objects or ostensive objects, while an object-
indiscriminate tessellation imbricates to other technologies through inverse relations to both
types of objects. Histories which make use of this sort of tessellation focus instead on the fact
that the technologies in question are indeed related and glean new insights from this
historiographical approach. In the example above, the tessellation occurs on the right-hand side
of the model, however, tessellation on the left-hand side could certainly pursued. In the example
put forth in the case study of this thesis, a tessellation to the left side would compare the
QWERTY keyboard to the cotton gin and the emoji keyboard, as opposed to the moveable type
and modern efficiency desk. Presumably, an object-indiscriminate string tessellation could also
be pursued by tessellating the lower two quadrants (OC and PC) or the upper two (PM and OM).
Finally, like the object-specific string tessellation, this sort of model requires a minimum of three
technologies but can certainly continue tessellating to include as many technologies as deemed
useful.
Creating a model which compares the moveable type to QWERTY to the modern efficiency
desk provides a unique opportunity to expand the understanding of the systems in which these
technological relations are embedded. The earlier analyses establish that, among other things, the
relation of the alphabetic moveable type to the QWERTY keyboard demarcates a transition in
90
writing technologies from copying to composition, and that the relation of QWERTY to the
modern efficiency desk typifies the transition into economic organization of the modern office.
Putting these insights into conversation with one another highlights the compositional nature of
the modern office, dependent on memos, notes, and writing of many other sorts. Similarly, like
the object-specific string tessellation of the alphabetic moveable type + QWERTY + the emoji
keyboard, the object-indiscriminate tessellation in Figure 21 also draws attention to the
importance of a paradigm shift which allowed for letters, and subsequently paper documents to
be understood as discrete material information, which facilitated the emergence of filing cabinets
and systems, and subsequently, desks with fewer drawers, such as the modern efficiency desk.
2.3.2 Cluster Tessellations
Cluster tessellations involve four technologies at minimum and are built off object-
indiscriminate string tessellations. These tessellations occur when each of the fourfolds of at least
four technologies share at least two inverse relations with any of the other technologies in the
cluster. Because cluster tessellations are built by extending object-indiscriminate string
tessellations, the forthcoming example takes the tessellation from Figure 21 as its base, adding
the fourth technology of teleprinters. This complex tessellation can be seen in Figure 22 below.
91
Figure 22: Cluster Tessellation
Particularly because the cluster tessellation in Figure 22 builds off the object-indiscriminate
tessellation of Figure 21, this example demonstrates the emphasis of the Imbrication Model on
multiple causes and multiple effects. In other words, by adding the teleprinter to this diagram, the
model extends the idea that any of the four quadrants of any given technology share inverse
relations with any other technology. So, even though Figure 21 traces a series of relations from
the alphabetic moveable type to the QWERTY keyboard to the modern efficiency desk, these
three technologies neither exhaust the total number of technologies to which any of them relate
nor is the QWERTY keyboard the only technology which was influenced by the alphabetic
moveable type that then contributed to the emergence of the modern efficiency desk. Adding
technologies to the model in this way, then, subverts simplistic interpretations of cause and effect
PM:- Metallurgy- Manuscript culture
PM:- Literacy- Remington/
American Civil War
- Patent law
OC:- Filing Cabinets- Word Processor- Personal Computers- Emoticons
QW
ERTY
Key
boar
d
Alphabetic Moveable type
PC/PM:- Print industry (print
shops, printers, book sellers, etc.)
- [Standardization of letter forms]
Modern Efficiency Desk
OM:- Telegraph- Telephone circuits
PC: - Fax Machines- Computer terminals
Teleprinter
OM/OC:- Filing cabinets
- [Office telephones]
PC:- Exaggerated office
hierarchies- Surveilled office
OC:- Inter-office
telephones- Cubicle
OC/OM:- Individual keys
- [Typewriter]- [Moveable type]- [Piano Hammer]- [Latin Alphabet]
PC/PM:- Filing systems
- [Female typist]- [Touch-typing]
OM:- Codices- Coin molds- Lead-antimony-tin
alloy
92
(moveable type caused QWERTY which cause the modern efficiency desk), and instead
encourages technologies and their effects to be interpreted as contributing factors of future
conditions within matrices of a number of other contributing factors.
Ultimately, the ability of Imbrication Model to expand in this way, in as many directions and
to as many technologies which a researcher might choose, implies that technologies always exist
within systems. It also implies, however, that technological systems are not just defined by
technologies designed for one another, but also involve the conditions created by earlier
technologies out of which later technologies emerge. In other words, understanding the historical
dimension of sociotechnical systems brings to the fore the importance of indirect relations in the
development of technologies. So, while the modern efficiency desk and the teleprinter are
indirectly related through the teleprinters contribution to increasing paperwork so as to create a
need for filing cabinets in office spaces, and the modern efficiency desk responds to the presence
of filing cabinets by understanding they make cubby holes in desks obsolete, the Imbrication
Model implies that they coexist historically within the same sociotechnical system, whereas a
synchronous analysis of a sociotechnical system would not relate the two. In this way, cluster
tessellations of the Imbrication Model imply that, at its most fundamental level, the middle-
oriented approach of the model presents a novel way to diachronically analyze sociotechnical
systems. This diachronic analysis primarily rests on the multiplicity of indirect relations to other
objects exhibited by any single technology.
93
3. CONCLUSION
The structure of this thesis has been driven by Harman’s questions to ask of any fourfold,
repeated once more below:
1. “What are the two dualisms that generate it?
2. Do its four poles interrelate, and transform or are they static? If the former, then how
does this happen?
3. Do the four poles exist simultaneously, or do one or more push us towards some past or
future moment?
4. Do the four poles apply to every corner of reality, or only a limited class of entities? If a
limited class, then we are not dealing with a philosophy strictly speaking, but a more
specialized type of knowledge.”87
The theoretical discussions of the motive/consequence and ostensive object/performative
object dualisms in section 1.1 answers Harman’s first question (what dualisms generate the
fourfold?) and derives the dualisms from established schools of thought. Section 1.2 addresses
Harman’s second question, which asks how the dualisms relate to one another, by discussing the
interaction of the elements of either dualism with the elements of the other dualism in the terms
of the four quadrants of performative motive, ostensive motive, performative consequence and
ostensive consequence. These quadrants are not only the foundational elements of the
Imbrication Model, but they also guide the case study of the QWERTY keyboard, which
demonstrates the usefulness of research along these dualisms. Chapter 2 deals with Harman’s
third question, which asks about the so-called trajectory of a fourfold — whether the fourfold
exists within time or outside of it, and, in the case of the former, what the historical implications
87 Harman, “The McLuhans and Metaphysics,” 103
94
of the fourfold demand of the researcher. Because the Imbrication Model is intentionally
historical in nature, this question is implicitly answered throughout this thesis. However, chapter
2 takes the historical dualism of motive/and consequence to their furthest conclusions by
exploring theories of technological evolution and by emphasizing the significance of relativity in
motive and consequence. This relativity allows for the extension of the Imbrication Model from
single fourfold to tessellations which compare two or more technological objects through single
tessellations, string tessellations, or cluster tessellations.
3.1. ON HARMAN’S FOURTH QUESTION
Having answered these three questions, Harman’s final question offers a chance for
retrospect and summary. It provides an opportunity to look back on the intellectual project
proposed in the preceding pages and to discuss its value from the perspective of having followed
the project in its entirety. Harman’s fourth and final question asks, “Do the four poles apply to
every corner of reality, or only a limited class of entities? If a limited class, then we are not
dealing with a philosophy strictly speaking, but a more specialized type of knowledge.”88 Seeing
as the goal of media imbrication is to contribute to a specialized type of knowledge
(historiographies), the immediate answer to Harman’s fourth question is “The four poles apply
only deal with a limited class of entities, so therefore we are dealing with a more specialized type
of knowledge.” Even more, the Imbrication Model is a specialization of this specialization:
historiographies of technology. More still, a specialization of this specialized specialization: a
middle-oriented historiography of technology. Limitation and specialization generate the unique
and innovative contributions of this model. Instead, then, of assessing whether or not this model
only applies to a limited class of objects, Harman’s fourth question provides the opportunity to
88 Harman, “The McLuhans and Metaphysics,” 103
95
close this chapter by reviewing the specialization for which this model is designed and how this
contributes to the ongoing conversation of histories of technology.
In its first specialization, as mentioned above, the Imbrication Model proposes a way of
writing about history, which is to say, it proposes a historiography. As media studies deeply
influenced the initial iterations of this model, the historiographical focus immediately separated
it from the content-based approach of film studies, literary studies, or the like, as well as the
formal analysis of media ecology and some approaches to book and print history. The
historiographical focus further implied unique epistemological consequences which defined the
purpose of the model itself. In other words, the model proposes sets of questions to ask, and does
not argue for closed off or settled answers.
Additionally, by describing this sort of analysis as specialized for technologies, the
Imbrication Model is designed so as to be applied to objects in the world created by human
individuals and human cultures. This conversation is relevant both to the discussion on the
classification of human artifacts as objects — of which we find two kinds, performative objects
and ostensive ones — as well as to give instruction concerning for which objects the Imbrication
Model can be used as a historiographical tool. Even more, the technological specialization of the
Imbrication Model also derives from the epistemological fact that, by and large, the theories
from which the dualisms arise (namely, Media Ecology and Social Construction of Technology)
are themselves theories of technology, technological relations, technological effects, and
technological history. Concepts from these theories are not abstracted from the objects of their
original application (i.e. technology) in order to construct something new, but instead are
considered to analyze the same subject, and are therefore synthesized to create a new approach
for studying the same topic.
96
This new approach, of course, is the final specialization mentioned above: the middle-
oriented specialization. This quality contrasts from other historiographies, which I refer to as
either end-oriented or beginning-oriented, meaning that they either take into account the process
by which a technology emerges or is adapted or that they take into account the process by which
elements of material or immaterial culture change due to the technology’s use. The middle-
oriented historiography sees a technology as the connecting tissue between these two processes
and posits that by situating the end-oriented and beginning-oriented processes in relation to one
another, new insights about a given technology become notable. This approach highlights
processes of technological change and technological relations, instead of the histories of single
technologies.
3.2. IN MEDIA RES
In a certain sense, this thesis itself is designed so as to be part of a middle-oriented history.
However, as it is written, it is an end-oriented collection and summation of ideas, theories, and
histories of technology, which have culminated in — although they do not singularly culminate
in — the Imbrication Model. If the Imbrication Model is a human artifact, then as the author, I
have described the process of its actualization through the influence of other thinkers, of other
theories, and of other historiographies. These are the motives of the model. The next chapter in
the history of the Imbrication Model, however, is not one of motive, but one of consequence. The
next chapter requires criticism, construction, and application — actions which fall on future
readers to evaluate and apply the merits of this historiography. Only through a process such as
this, might the Imbrication Model become a historical middle between the theories which came
before it and those yet to come after. And so, even at the end of this thesis, it seems proper to
remind the reader that the ideas herein and the model proposed are by no means the ends of
97
things, but instead, my aspiration is that they are quite in the middle — that they become in
media res. I find that Kenneth Burke expressed this sentiment quite well in his famous parlor
allegory, and I will let him speak for himself:
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.89
I have attempted to summarize the discussion which went on long before my entrance, and I
even hope that I have added something to it. However, the time has come for me to depart the
parlor, at least temporarily, although it is my hope that the discussion will indeed continue
vigorously — that the next thinker will make my contributions a historical middle.
89 Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. 3rd edition. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1974, 110-111
98
GLOSSARY
Motive: the principle derived primarily from SCOT. Concerned with the emergence and
adaptation of a human artifact to a culture or historical moment. Basic tenets below:
1. Motives exist in an ecosystem of competing motives, varying in degrees of difference to
one another.
2. A medium emerges and is adopted as the actualization of a single possible solution to a
motive, or a number of motives, leaving any number of potentialities (which were
possibly equally viable) unrealized.
3. Motives themselves emerge as the result of a network of human and non-human actors.
Consequence: the principle derived primarily from media ecology. Concerned with the change
causally related to a human artifact. Basic tenets below:
1. The changes which occur in the world which can be traced to being causally related to a
medium (i.e. its consequences) are very likely necessary causes and not sufficient ones,
which is to say that a number of factors unrelated to a medium may work in unison with
it to achieve a certain consequence.
2. An existing environment contributes to determining how a medium is used and therefore
what consequences arise as a result of it. In other words, actualized consequences of a
medium in one context, even when accompanied by compelling evidence for causal
relation, cannot always be assumed to be replicable given a different set of
circumstances.
3. Consequences of an object are neither restricted to semiotic/communicative processes or
procedural/technical processes but encompasses both in the hopes to cast the widest net
which includes all manners of relations to other human and non-human objects.
99
Object: A phenomenon which can neither be reduced to its components or to its function
Human artifact: A subset of an object. An object which was created by humans. Humans create
two types of artifacts: ostensive ones and performative ones
Medium: A subset of an object synonymous with human artifact. Use this terminology to
emphasize the “middleness” of a human artifact (i.e. how it is situated between
constructivism/motive and determinism/consequence; how it is between the processes by which
from which it emerges and is adapted, and those which it effects and influences as an actor)
Performative object: An object lacking perceptible qualities, such as rules and systems, the
Dewey Decimal System, law, sport, and more.
Ostensive object: An object which can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched.
Performative motive (PM): A performative object acting as a contributing factor to the
actualization of a medium
Ostensive motive (OM): An ostensive object acting as a contributing factor to the actualization of
a medium
Ostensive consequence (OC): An ostensive object whose actualization depends on the formal
structure of a medium
Performative consequence (PC): A performative object whose actualization depends on the
formal structure of a medium.
Imbrication Model: the model derived from the dualisms of motive/consequence and
performative/ostensive
100
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