TRANSCODING THE DIGITAL
23
otics (Law and Mol 1995; Law 2009). 8 Here signifiers and signifieds, texts, codes, and discourse are not studied as pure linguistic or semiotic entities, but as material objects and translations embedded in and generating specific practices – social, cultural, professional, domestic, political, and economic. In other words, material semiotics traces semiotic relations beyond the domain of language, catching it at work in heterogeneous practices of enactments (Law 2009). As John Law and Annemarie Mol explain, Linguistic semiotics teaches that words give each other meaning. Material semiotics extends this insight beyond the linguistic and claims that entities give each other being: that they enact each other. […] In the stories that material semiotics makes possible, an actor does not act alone. It acts in relation to other actors, linked up with them. This means that it is also always being acted upon. Acting and being enacted go together. (Law and Mol 2008, 58) Hence, material semiotics investigates how meaning matters beyond language, how it matters and materializes in a linked-up network of translations. This study aims to tell such material-semiotic stories of enacting, acting, and being acted upon, stories in which metaphors are followed through various digital-material transcodings and their further translations. Armed with the above vocabulary we can refine the initial research question about the channeling role of metaphors in digital praxis. The main question of this study is still: how do metaphors channel (format, constitute, configure) digital praxis? This question implicates the following subquestions: 1. Which digital-material transcodings and material-semiotic translations can be traced when we follow metaphors as actors? 2. How do such transcodings and translations get fixated into stable taken-for-granted entities and naturalized matters of facts? 3. Which further translations are attached to the transcoding labor of metaphors; which ideologies, narratives and discourses are enabled and sustained and which are suppressed and excluded?
3 — METAPHORS WE COMPUTE BY As we will see in this study, following the trail of metaphors in digital praxis will lead us to and through various levels in which metaphors perform their translation labor. To start this endeavor the user interface seems an obvious point of departure, as metaphors are abundant here: windows, buttons, mailbox, documents, desktop, browser. Zooming in on these interface metaphors reveals already interesting differentiations. Some of them refer to interfacial operations or tools (button, browser), some refer to objects (document, mailbox), and others refer to general representational frames (windows, desktop). Moreover, interface metaphors are embedded in wider configurations and discourses which are in turn organized by their own discourse metaphors. These tropes format discourses on, for example, media (with discourse metaphors such as win-
8.
Yet, material semiotics is not invented in ANT; earlier traces can be found in Michel Foucault’s extended notion of discourse as material assemblage of the linguistic as well as the non-linguistic that organizes power, knowledge, truth, and subject positions (Foucault 1966, 1971, 1972), and in Donna Haraway’s evocations of situated knowledge and nature-culture hybrids (Haraway 1988, 1991).