Review: The Interface Effect by Alexander Galloway

Alexander Galloway’s The Interface Effect. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.

A Book Review by David Michael Lamme

First a frank assessment: Alexander Galloway’s Interface Effect, despite an overindulgence in typological structures derived from the Jamesonian theories of the political unconscious and cognitive mapping, firmly establishes itself as one of the “very few books on new media worth reading” (1). As the capstone piece of his three volume series Allegories of Control, The Interface Effect builds on the fruitful shift in concentration from freedom to control found in Protocol and Gaming, demanding a reevaluation of digital technology and in particular the computer. Arguing against the common conception of the computer as mediator, The Interface Effect envisions the computer as a mode of mediation itself, as an ethic. In lieu of the object-oriented analyses typical to studies in new media, the book turns rather – as one might expect – to an analysis of the interface. Galloway, however, is not interested in essences but effects, and seeks not merely to unravel what a particular interface is or does, but to “tell the story of the larger forces that engender them,” to reveal the fundamentally political spaces of our modern and hopelessly mediated lives (vii). Staking his claim on the notion that, unlike other media, the computer “does not remediate other physical media” but instead “remediates metaphysics itself,” that, unlike film and other media, the computer is not an ontology but a simulator of being, Galloway firmly places the interface at the heart of his analyses of digital culture and the politics they embody (20). Calling upon modern/postmodern systems of philosophy that can often seem detached from the everyday world, The Interface Effect’s ultimate achievement lies less in its radical implications than in its ability to convincingly retell such philosophies in terms more appropriate to the times. As a thoroughly theoretical work, The Interface Effect suffers at times from a lack of empiricism, but for all that succeeds remarkably at refocusing the myopic vision of the neoliberal, digital world on its inherent politics.

The book’s opening chapter, “The Computer as a Mode of Mediation,” serves as a survey of new media and in particular the work of Friedrich Kittler and Lev Manovich, whose monograph, The Language of New Media,Galloway deals with at some length. Forming his foundations around the aforementioned notion of the computer as an ethics, Galloway culminates his introduction with a profound statement and a simple question: “If computers must be understood in terms of an ethics,” he writes, “then the discourse produced about them must also fulfill various ethical and political expectations. Else what is the good?” (24). Such reasoning underlines the efforts of the book and, in the following chapter, “The Unworkable Interface,” is immediately put to good use. Emphasizing the paradoxically problematic nature of mediation itself as either/or, either binary and dialectical, either “clear” or “complicated,” either Isis or Hermes, Galloway sets forth to reveal “the interface itself as historical” and therefore also political. In an intriguing analysis of Norman Rockwell’s “Triple Self-Portrait” (1960) that contrasts the famous painting with a satirical yet telling knock-off, Mad Magazine’s “Untitled (Alfred E. Neuman Self-Portrait)” (Richard A. Williams, Mad Art, 2002), he highlights the two fundamental paradigms for addressing the problem of the interface, namely the “neurosis of repression” in Rockwell’s case and the “psychosis of schizophrenia” in Neuman’s (34-39). Building on this finding, he advances a typology of “centers and edges” that run along similar lines of the “intraface, that is, an interface internal to the interface,” eventually leading him to another typological structure that appears through the remainder of his book: the four regimes of signification. These regimes (ideological, ethical, poetic, and truth) are split along the coherence or incoherence of their aesthetics and politics, allowing the cultural products of new media to be assessed through their individual “relationships between art and justice” (51). The remaining three chapters and postscript, which cover software and ideology, unrepresentability, disingenuous informatics, and “Chinese gold farming” respectively, flesh out Galloway’s theory, demonstrating more fully the when, how, and inevitable nature of political emergence, as well as the marked shift in the primacy of ideology toward ethics in the age of new media.

One of The Interface Effect’s strongest points comes to the fore in its analysis of Fox’s long-running and action-packed drama, 24. Beginning with the seemingly simplistic question of whether or not 24 is a political show, Galloway quickly shifts gears, asking the more poignant questions of how “this particular cultural artifact express[es] a political claim” and – perhaps even more importantly – “what hermeneutic method is appropriate to interpret the ‘meaning’ of 24 in the digital age” (102). To answer such questions, he moves beyond the simplistic notion of 24 being mere American propaganda and toward a reading of the program as a political expression of international, neoliberal capitalism. According to Galloway, 24’s “challenges…are always ‘informatic,’” and its insistence on “tick-tock urgency and a military state in which the ‘maximized good’ subsumes the very horizon of moral truth” is symptomatic of the utilitarian moral philosophy of our digital present (102-103). It is, in effect, not simply American propaganda, but more fundamentally and emphatically a testament to the “inability” of its characters “to think or dream in a non-economic manner” (105). The show  reveals the whole of modern control society with its constantly ticking clocks and insistence on “real time,” its “postfordist” representations of labor with characters that “quite literally cannot clock out,” its frequent “epistemological reversal[s],” and its perhaps most encompassing motif of interrogation, which “carries a single goal, to extract informatic data from organic bodies” and presents the body as a “database” and torture as “a query algorithm” (102-112, italics in original). In short, it clearly demonstrates not only the political nature of the cultural artifact, but underlines the cultural artifact’s importance as the site of exposure for the political unconscious itself and the necessity of ethico-political hermeneutics.

Like any book, however, Interface Effect has its weaknesses. First of all, it relies a bit too heavily on the method of cognitive mapping. Jameson’s intent with this method was to make the the historicity of our real present understandable to the limited individual, to make the immanent, global, and frankly speaking, unrepresentable totality of the modern situation somehow intelligible. While this effort is laudable, it tends to pay short shrift to the areas where borders are inevitably drawn and cuts are made; it seems to admit, but brush under the rug unavoidable opportunity costs, the inevitable and brutal violence involved in the construction of meaning.

An additional problem is that The Interface Effect’s concluding discussion on “the whatever,” which is, if anything, a demonstration of Galloway’s own politics. Continuing the discourse of scholars such as Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben on “the whatever,” Galloway is right to point out that a “new politics of disappearance” arises once the digital appears on the modern stage (138). Likewise, he hits upon the vital question that coincides with such an arrival: “what are we going to do without ourselves?” (Ibid., italics in original). He even offers a series of well advised suggestions such as “seek not the posthuman, but the nonhuman. Be not post identity, but rather subtractive of it” (Ibid.). This refrain, however, is familiar if still unpopular. As far back as 1995, do we not have Jean Baudrillard – who Galloway has published on, but curiously receives only one short mention in Interface Effect’s index – calling for much the same thing in his The Perfect Crime, where he declares “we must take something away from the accumulation of reality” (3) and where he supports a “mode of disappearance” opposed to one of production (87)? Baudrillard even has a similar, though less developed, argument for a reinvestment in the ethics of digital media in his 2001 Impossible Exchange. Yet, the ultimately disconcerting aspect of Galloway’s handling of “the whatever” is not this lack of true originality (if such a thing can even be said to exist!); the underlying issues of “the whatever” are vital, undervalued, and absolutely deserve a more prominent position in academic discourse. The difficulty rather lies in his “leaving-be,” that is not a “panacea,” nor is it a “heroic subject position,” but a “practical suggestion, an ethos” that calls for us to “demilitarize being. Stand down. Cease participating in the system of subjective predication. Stop trying to liberate your desire” (143). Such conclusions seem in direct conflict with “today’s digital class” that “has no choice but to speak, continuously and involuntarily” (Ibid.). Not only that, but they dive headlong into that “‘dirty regime’ called truth,” that Nietzschean realm of self-affirmation and individualism, but also schizophrenia. In the end, “the whatever” asks a terribly important question, namely, how does the individual achieve community. Yet the “practical suggestion” of the demilitarization of being is far from practical and even where it proves most fruitful, it seems almost naive in the face of the realities the monetarily fueled and digitally simulated, neoliberal world of today. Finally, by Galloway’s own standards, “the whatever” is – at least as of yet – not nearly political or social enough.

These difficulties – which are in fact more problems of the times than problems unique to Galloway’s text – should not disparage what is an otherwise excellent book. Galloway’s major concerns – the computer as an ethics, the demand for historicty in analyses of cultural artifacts, and, of course, his exploration of the problematic nature of the interface itself – are dealt with aptly and convincingly. Likewise, his criticisms and theories go a long way in weeding out myriad accounts of new media that are overwhelmingly object-oriented and insufficiently politicized. In the end, The Interface Effect should prove a valuable read for students of media, culture, and technology.