Purple dotted underlines: Microsoft word and the end of writing - Features - form and rhythm - Evaluation

Microsoft Word is fundamentally different from other word processors. Word treats "information an entire page at a time, rather than as a stream of text and codes," according to the "Microsoft Word 2000 Reveal Codes White Paper" by Microsoft Product Support Service. The "White Paper" adds that Word is "based on a hierarchical formatting system that allows you to format based on the entire document, a section, a paragraph, or even one character. The hierarchical architecture of Word does not allow stream-based formatting, as does WordPerfect, but Word does allow you to control, understand, and manipulate formatting." (1) The concept of the document is hardwired into Word. Controlling the appearance and hierarchical structure of this document is what the Word interface does. Meanwhile, the Word file format remains a company secret, Friedrich Kittler's recent program of software discourse analysis reminds us that the domination of Word and Its hierarchical infrastructure cannot easily be separated. Kittler calls for us to "abandon the usual practice of conceiving of power as a function of so-called society, and, conversely, attempt to construct sociology from the chip's architecture." He continues: "it is a reasonable assumption to analyze the privilege levels of a microprocessor as the reality of precisely that bureaucracy that ordered its design and called for its mass application." (2) The functionality of Word is a mirroring and repetition of the hierarchical document structure its interface implies. Every use of Microsoft Word will invoke the differential discursive structure of the printed document.

The world runs on Microsoft Word documents. Word's WYSIWYG interface between screen and printout--which remains the software's major selling point--puts our world Into writing. Microsoft Word Is the latest onionskin layer of historical inscription surfaces-spread on top of paper, parchment, papyrus, stone tablets, cave walls, sand.... Our institutions--legal, educational, cultural and so on--are supported by the masses of paper printed from computers running Microsoft Word under the Windows environment. In fact, the historical status of these institutions is inseparable from this process of word processing. The beauty of Word, if we are to believe the marketing literature, is that it allows you the flexibility to format and edit until you arrive at the perfect printed product. Word displays a simulation of a written page, and a poor one at that. You toggle between Normal, Print and Outline View, fiddle with margins and headers, and hope for the best when you print. The hyper-mediated framework of the interfac e, with its buttons and pull-down menus, offers simple verbs that transform the basic ontology of the written page: File, Edit, Format, Help and so on. Word processing means that writing is infinitely flexible in the service of print; Word extracts and puts on display exactly what writing always meant.

But what did writing mean? Writing meant producing an image. Writing was an appearance machine. The word processor provided a convenient materialization of this appearance machine, letting the operator manipulate symbols and formatting in order to print. Microsoft Word orders a stream of markings--in this case keystrokes or mouse movements, or even the voice commands so badly implemented in Office XP--into the linearity of writing. The line of writing leads to an image. A document is an image formed by extracting a line of writing from a stream of marks. (3)

Hegel already made the point in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where writing supplies the example of the material and specific reality that cannot be referred to by language. When we seem to mean "'this' bit of paper on which I am writing, or rather have written--'this,'" we in fact do not mean what we say. If we actually "wanted to say this bit of paper...then this is impossible, because the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e. to that which is inherently universal." (4) Here, word processing technology is already functioning. In every attempt to say this--this piece of writing--writing disappears ("crumbles away") in order to make the abstraction and universalism of "this" appear. Writing is hence a machine for appearances. Language appears, with all its implications of meaning and law, through the infinite fadeout of the written in the stutter of words (this this this). The sense certainty of appearances is guaranteed by the mechanism of writi ng. The word processor is a ghost machine, a machine for producing spirit. In the beginning was Microsoft Word, and it is hard to distinguish what we mean by consciousness or history from the emergence of events out of swarming words.

"What You See Is What You Get." Is this a marketing slogan or a metaphysical principle? On the one hand, this means that what you see on the screen will look exactly the same when printed. You can choose Print Preview, Zoom In, Check the Margins, Select Print and so on. What you get, a document in your hand, will be what you saw on the screen. Seeing is getting. You see Microsoft Word and you get the printed word. The point is not that both screen and page have similar configurations of word and spacing, line and paragraph. No, what you see is what you get.

This also means seeing is a stage on the way to getting. You see the screen so that you can get the document. Sight is a part of a printing process, your seeing incorporated into the printed document. In the context of this software--but indeed, in the context of all interfaces--seeing is an adjunct to printing. The users experience is an element in a technical apparatus, in the development and printing of a text. The text must be seen before it can be printed and made material.

Finally: the document is scenic, it somehow contains your vision within it. Word processing is about producing an event, a conjunction of vision and materiality (i.e. print out). The word processor "witnesses" your seeing. In fact, this witnessing is what the word processor adds to the text in printing. The hierarchical discourse of the printed document is an outcome of a third party. This witness to the text remains always invisible but perceived nonetheless in the readability of the document.

Take this familiar experience: spell a word wrongly in Microsoft Word and you see a wavy red underline appear under the word. The same thing happens with grammatical errors, but the line assumes by default a less severe green color. Wherever spelling or grammar does not conform to attached dictionaries, Word explicitly displays the impropriety. The wavy red underlines are marks of the semantic and grammatical rules of natural language, as codified in dictionaries. The alphanumeric written line is bound to the hermeneutics of language. You are meant to look at the screen and read it, and the wavy redness of the lines reinforces this readability. The wavy red underlines refer to deviation or impropriety in relation to a virtual system of cultural codes for expression. Underlines are the memory of culture in the materiality of the page. Plato's Phaedrus addressed the mnemotechnic capacity of writing as already a mythic quality. Writing remembers but does so invisibly. The visible marks invoke an invisible memory . The archival weight of documents is the imperative to interpret, but no guarantee on how to proceed. Microsoft Word is all about bringing the printed document into appearance, ensuring that it conforms to the codified formats of materialized discourse. The infrastructural binary of Word, between WYSIWYG display and hidden file format, secretes hierarchical effects: every document mimes this infrastructure.

The underlines operate beyond your control (you can, however, suspend them while you type in the Preferences)--the wavy red appears even if the mis-spelling is intentional, even if you spelled it that way because you wanted to. It is as if the wavy red underlines exert a gravitational force on the sentence, pulling it toward correct spelling or grammar, reinforced by the suggestions offered in Word's Spelling and Grammar Wizard. But there are no mis-spellings or grammar errors, only various combinations of the appearance of Impropriety with the promise of future correctness in the form of the wavy red underline. Everything will be correct in some virtual future document.

But not all underlines are the same. Try to write www.microsoft.com as an example of a mis-spelling. No wavy red underlines, though the "word" is certainly mis-spelled. Instead, a straight blue underline, indicating an instant hyperlink. At least two systems of language are involved in Microsoft Word's underlines. The straight blue underlines, along with purple and other colored underlines, mark the visibility of underlying codes embedded in the Word document. These underlines refer to the performativity of the computer. The visibility and contrasting colors of the underlinings highlight the transformed nature of Microsoft Word. With Word 2002--and earlier, at least with Word 98--Microsoft Word became a space for writing and executing codes rather than for printing documents. While the mass of users no doubt still use Word as a fancy typewriter, the white paper surface of Microsoft Word is turning into a porously complex programming environment. The latest Word is a strange hybrid, switching rapidly between t he familiar WYSIWYG or "designer" view and the "code" view displaying lines of DHTML. The comforting margins of the familiar page become a multi-windowed, markup-laden environment of objects and commands.

Writing no longer means producing an image. Writing means producing a code. Word processing now means producing flexible codes that correspond to certain hardware operations, and stream into different outputs and modes of imaging. Yet the new code machine works precisely because these operations remain invisible. The writing machine was meant to be looked at, but the code machine disappears in its operations. What we look at is the outcome of the code, the results of the codes. Images intervene in order to produce more codes. These images are moments in the transcription of codes. Documents dissolve into the flexibility of possible document models and formats.

The new Word creates a text composed of codes rather than marks. The texture of alphanumeric symbols is transcribed from marks on a paper surface into codes in an executable computer environment. The movement from mark to code brings about a new mimeticism of the page: not of the printout but of the Web. Coding implies that we look at outcomes of writing rather than at the writing itself. Writing is no longer a mark on a surface but the visible mediation of algorithms and networks. Code authoring produces algorithms to interact with the computer. While these may be in one or another computer language, the point Is that code addresses the numeric "being" of the computer. "Good" or "well-formed" code corresponds to a virtual image of the computer and its internal functioning. Code is a purely literal set of instructions directed at the computer. Microsoft Word is now an image of possible mappings of a computer and its outputs.

In Code View, a Word document offers various windowed views open to the document code itself, but also to collections of JavaScript or VBasic objects, events and document structures. The document is now code and the code is now simply one window among others. This hypermediated relation between Windows is precisely the fate of the document structure. No longer merely a header, body and footer, a document is a dispersal of elements and relations, a set of reflections between windows. A document is the virtual image where the object window, the code window, the event window and all the other windows come to reflect each other. The windows represent the reflections and transcodings of possible images of the state of the computer.

Word 2002 means the obsolescence of writing, but Word 2002 also means the apotheosis of writing. The mixture of underlinings makes visible the transcoding of the natural language of cultural institutions into the artificial environments of code. The appearance of both language systems points to the interface between already artificial cultures and already cultural artifacts. This is a question of the sociality of code, on the one hand, and the computability of natural language, on the other; a question of code as readable text, as a document readable by people, and everyday language as computable and executable. Could it be that the code/output relationship in fact is the schematic of the image already contained in writing? Code is a new kind of Image, an image of distribution and networking. The fading of the background metaphor of the printed page means a renewed metaphoricity of writing--of code as writing. (5) The dominance of the concept and terminology of "media" is part of this end of writing. Suddenly there are enormous ranges of media forms that are in turn "like writing." The waning of text as the repository of knowledge comes with the added layer of reflexivity that finds mediated knowledge everywhere. (6) The now-banal postmodern observation of the self-reference of writing simply thematizes the increased level of self-reference or mediation now found in the world. (7) Writing loses its efficacy in a technological transfer to "media."

Microsoft Word is a black box. Where once we fed in keystrokes to produce printouts, we now feed in codes and get multiple views, The new Word no longer mimes a document, but transcodes text into algorithms and programs. In the imageless line of the new writing, we grasp the inner structure of the computer. The display is no longer metaphorically "like" the printed page but literally "shows" the structure and operations of the computer, in the form of high-level coding. Does this mean that the fade out of the written image frees code from the hierarchy of the document? The auto-implication of the document hierarchy persists in the new Word coding environment, even if this document no longer need to be printed in any fashion. In fact, Microsoft insists that HTML is the "native format" for Office, beyond and above the proprietary Microsoft binary format. Words in Word, cells in Excel, slides in Powerpoint and so on, all become objects in the new ontology of Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) program linking technologies. The object's appearance in a given application is simply a possible image of its doubled state as code--both DHTML and the proprietary Microsoft file format.

"Document" now means the seamless integration of Office Products into a single coding environment. No matter how many documents and applications are open on a Windows desktop, there can only be one code view running. All documents and applications are mediated through the code view. Since the Microsoft proprietary file format remains secret, the company is effectively enforcing the evolution of Office into a web-development suite. Every object is a combination of universal markup and secret source. This binary of public and secret ensures the repetition of a hierarchical structure within everything touched by the Microsoft world. If writing remains the enabling limit within coding, this is because we are not dealing with a simple movement from writing to code, but with a new turn to the archival and mnemotechnic structure that is writing. With the transcoding of printed text into code, the point is not the inaccessibility of this or that source code but the persistence of a differential structure of inaccessi bility--the paradox of a consistently accessible inaccessibility. This paradox may be the definition of word processing technology.

The Word-specific XML (Extensible Markup Language) tags automatically generated in every Word document are notorious among Web designers. One reason Macromedia Dreamweaver is now the industry standard for Web design is its claim to generate particularly clean HTML, including a "Clean Up Word HTML" feature. Of course, Word 2002 now offers the option to Save As Filtered HTML, removing the Word-specific tags. The debate over clean or dirty coding, with it's implications of efficient and streamlined HTML practice, is built on a background of institutional protocol that requires layers of embedded code to produce objects in the coding environment. The creation, control and naming of layers of code now determines what exists.

This means that what you see is no longer what you get. What you see and what you get are only provisional moments in the transcoding mechanism. Perception and experience, seeing and getting, are epiphenomena of networks. Word as a coding environment stretches and relays your perceptions. The screen shows what may appear in any number of forms or materializations. The user's place is transmitted, as it were, to wherever the network is connected. Your experience is no longer placed on the screen but displaced across the Web. Windows is a necessary completion of your perceptual apparatus, providing names and images for what you experience. These names, at the same time, are shorthand for vast networks. Experience is no longer a printed appearance but a link.

Of course, the Word interface already channeled the subjectivity of the user. Earlier versions included such wonderful features as Templates and Document Wizards. These provided sample documents to direct your input into already selected forms, usually oriented toward typical corporate events: sales meetings, annual reports and so on. These features, along with the more recent AutoCorrect functions, automatic error reporting, Smart Tags and even the annoying little paper clip of The Office Assistant, embed a certain amount of intelligence into the page. This intelligence is variable. AutoCorrect may persistently change a name to what seems a correct term, at least until you insert the word into a custom dictionary. "Heidegger," for example, transforms into "Head Gear," perhaps for the best. The authority of the dictionary determines the motion and fall of the text, but the dictionary is clearly only a possible substitute for the notion of intelligent language use. Other forms of automatic formatting work in c ertain contexts but not others--all a function of the document model.

The new Word reveals that intelligence is no stable thing but a morphing function of the re-configured interface. The difference with Word as a coding environment is that the embedded functions are directed toward the Web rather than toward the print out; the blue underline of the hyperlink will override the wavy red underline of the spelling mistake. The future dictionary of URLs trumps the installed dictionary of English words. What kind of subjectivity is implied by the new Word? Building objects and actions that are partly visible in documents and partly linked to the Web re-forms the subject as project: "one can engage in a sort of dialogue between one's imagination and the imagination fed into the computer," in the words of Vilem Flusser. (8) You are no longer tied to the output of a material document, your subjectivity no longer a part of this event and this object. Instead, subjectivity is constructed, coded and actively stretched across the materiality of networks. The new writing space carries the p romise of networks of communication through the intuitive immediateness of the Word.

Promises seldom deliver exactly as planned. Compare the promise of the new writing space with a bit of marketing for the ActiveDocs software from Keylogix: "No need to pay programmers. Easy to use by anyone familiar with Microsoft Word." ActiveDocs is a third-party Smart Tags add-on for Microsoft Office XP. The spec-sheet goes on to add that the software allows you to "access corporate information systems from directly inside Microsoft Word." (9) There is a beautiful symmetry in these slogans: on the one hand, programming that occurs automatically with no skill required; on the other hand, rapid access to a commercial world through the writing of Word. The equation is exact: invisibility and ease of use means instant commerce.

So what is the deal with Smart Tags, those third-party, dotted purple underlines inserted into Word documents? On June 28, 2001, a court ruled that Microsoft Corporation could continue to bundle its Internet Explorer with its Office software to the detriment of other companies' software. On the same day, the company announced it would not include the controversial Smart Tags feature in Windows XP. Of course, this did not mean that Office would not support Smart Tags, simply that the tags themselves needed to be downloaded from third-party sources. Essentially, Smart Tags instantly embed hot links Into any Microsoft Office document. In principle, Smart Tags can perform a range of macro-like actions, but in practice, Microsoft sees them as integrating the Office environment (and Microsoft itself) into the Web world. Explorer would complement the Smart Tags support with technology such as RealNames, which allows Web browsers to navigate with everyday or "intuitive" language instead of URLs. Simply type a name in to your document and the link is instantly there. There will always be a link, even if the sentence is, say, "This is not a link to Microsoft." Office currently supports the Smart Tags technology but does not include the full collection of tags--at least not yet. Right now though, Smart Tags means turning every word into a product name or a trademark. Indeed, the most widespread use of Smart Tags so far may be in the legal field, where third-party tags instantly recognize a case name in a document and insert a link to online legal database resources, such as Lexis Nexis or West Group. Typing "Roe v. Wade" instantly becomes a link to the database record on the actual case. Every word becomes a particular example of the legal case system. (10)

It seems that Smart Tags are ultimately rather insulting to our intelligence. What would it mean for Smart Tags to be smart or for the Office Assistant to truly assist us? Word processing presents a supplement for humans: only in this way can we create the documents we need for our institutions. It seems truly frustrating to be suspended between the rhetorical promises of two equally undesirable futures: one of unbound connectivity and file sharing, the other of nothing but commercial trademarks and legal binding. It must be noted, though, that if the supplementation to our human needs remains always inadequate, it is nonetheless always a supplement. That is, the interface is neither one thing nor another. An interface is a name for a circuit that emits effects and experiences. There is neither operator nor apparatus but the circuit between the two. The halves double and complete each other. You can enter the circuit or not.

In the end, Word is lighted pixels on a glass screen. Microsoft Word is a surface for lines of writing, and the technology streams this linearity in various ways. Every release of Word contains features around an interface, various implementations of what this surface makes possible. No document will ever show what its source contains, just as no code will ever perform as it is written--precisely because it is always written as well as performed. For this reason Word remains bureaucratic and commercial, but also historical. What happens comes about at the interface.

NOTES

(1.) "Microsoft Word 2000 Reveal Codes White Paper," Microsoft Support Services, 2000.

(2.) Friedrich Kittler, "Protected Mode" in Literature, Media. Information Systems, John Johnston, ed. (Amsterdam, Netherlands: G and B Arts International. 1997), p. 162.

(3.) Compare Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1962), with the more recent Jay David Bolter, Writing Space, 2nd Edition (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001) and Vilem Flusser, Writingo. Andreas Strohl, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

(4.) G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, A. V. Miller, trans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 66.

(5.) For this definition of "transcoding," see Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001 pp. 45-48.

(6.) E.g. the science studies approach so non-human actors (Bruno Latour) or the distributed cogni tion approach to the propagation of representational states across media (Edwin Hutchins).

(7.) See Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, john Bednarz and Dirk Baecker, trans. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), especially Chapters 11 and 12.

(8.) p. 115 and throughout.

(9.) See the ActiveDocs product overview at www.activedocs.com/product/tagsoverview.asp and ActiveDocs features www.activedocs.com/ product/features.asp, both at the www.keylogix.com Web site. Accessed May 5, 2002.

(10.) See Brett Burney, "That Smarts: Using Legal Specific Office XP Smart Tags" at www.law.com. Accessed May 5, 2002.

SANDY BALDWIN is Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University. He runs Windows 2000, Office XP and Word Version 10.0.2627. He has written on such topics as the mnemotechnics of interfaces, the cultural implications of nanotechnology, the aesthetics of speed, and crash test dummies. He also creates digital poetry and performance art, both solo and with groups such as Purkinge and Nine Way Mind.

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