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The story goes that new media, new technologies, new and faster Other
methods of transferring information, democratization of Journals
technological luxuries, diversication of access to digital networks, Categories
the standardization of data formats, the proliferation of networked
relations - the story goes that these advances will help usher in a
I NFO R MAT I O N
new era marked by greater personal freedom, heightened
For Readers
interpersonal communication, ease from the burden of
For Authors
representation, new perspectives on the problem of the body, For
greater choice in consumer society, unprecedented opportunities Librarians
for free expression, and above all, that they will give us speed.

Where are those points in society today where complicity is not FO N T SI Z E

read as such, where decisions are not seen as being either political
or apolitical but just a choice? Where are those points where a
utopian sense of technological progress comes to us
uninterrogated? Surely these are points worthy of greater
attention. And surely these points overlap with those above.

With the advent of computers comes the phrase "real time." This
phrase is used when a digitized event (such as an online interactive
broadcast) proceeds as if it were in a non-virtual setting. An event
happens in "real time" if it prints, broadcasts, displays, animates,
plays using the same timing and event-durations as the non-virtual
world. Computational rhythms (be they too short or too long) are
masked or subordinated to the duration of events in the "real"
world. Real time, therefore, indicates that there has emerged
concurrent with computers some sort of digital time or
compressed time not parallel with traditional concepts of time.
What is the nature of this temporality?

Even if new technological advances do not give us sheer speed, I

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venture to say that they are indicative of a new form of

temporality, a contemporary sense of timing. As a product of the
electro-digital transfer of textual information, this contemporary
temporality is a twofold sense of time as read through registration,
tracking, recording, documentation, playback, scanning,
connection, and protocol. Once, it is a sense of timing, like a
playing, a sculpted inection, or a phrasing of notes; it is a
phrasing. And twice, it is no time, a singularity, a zero-wait, the
utter collapse of temporal distance; it is an instancy.

I argue here that this timing is a product of two general

phenomena: a split in the nature of the signier caused by fonts
and the electro-digital transfer of textual information, and the
phrasing of certain elements of popular society through cultural
slogans and corporate trademarks. These two senses of time must
be regarded as concurrent systems that emerge "at once," so to
speak, and are by no means mutually pre-emptive.

The manipulation of textual information over computer networks

in contexts such as email and the internet, and specically their
mark-up in design layouts and computer fonts tells us something
about the nature of contemporary culture. The nature of computer
fonts, network structures, and the interpretation of digital
information is one that evaporates traditional notions of temporal
and corporal sizings. Consequently, the incorporation of the
electronic text has been divorced from any notion of activities
requiring actual labor time: texts are loaded (derived from a
pre-existing copy), displayed, saved, and erased with no
connection to their traditional labor and time intensive
counterpart procedures of researching, printing, copying, and
archiving. To this extent, computer fonts are connected to our
contemporary, electronic sense of time. It is not a continuum. The
temporal dierence separating fonts and texts is a no-time, a
singularity.

A font is not analogous to a signier. Rather it renders the signier

itself internally complex. It is a sub-element of the signier. A
computer font cannot be thought of, therefore, as a genetic
element of the sign. In text for example, a font must be thought of
independently from content, written markings, etc. Fonts are
indicative of what is known in the digital text as a protocol. They
regulate representation.

The concept of zero-wait transfer governs contemporary ideas

regarding textuality. In a digital network, much like previous types
of value economies, information is produced in order to be

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exchanged or transferred. However, under digital transfer texts

are exchanged according to an atemporal logic and through digital
means. (Digital texts are those whose very content has been
quantized. So-called analog texts are those whose value alone has
been quantized.)

As one contemporary critic has noted, this transfer of textual

information occurs through a process of "immediation."
Immediation means both immediate and mediated. Texts are
therefore both instantaneous and second-order. They are heard
with both static and clarity. In Baudrillardian fashion, each digital
text is derived and yet also real. Time is seemingly no longer a
textual component.

Fonts mediate and incorporate (put-into-a-body) zero-wait

transferred texts. Virtuality is that state where texts or discourses
are no longer bound by traditional space/time laws. As Paul Virilio
has recently noted, it is time itself that is rendered instantaneous
by virtuality. And thus, at this turn, computer fonts illustrate a
break in traditional notions surrounding temporality, and
representation.

Font faces appear at the intersection. They are the veneer of

representation. The font is always the rst thing you read and the
last thing you write. Fonts have no body. They buer the act of
reading. They protect the reader from the shock of virtual transfer.
And fonts are those elements that are so commonly not read.

Fonts are closely connected to textual standardization and thus

the very nature of the internet. The standardization of data
formats as a result of hegemony or negotiated dominance (i.e. GIF
format for images, character-based formats for text, dominance of
English over other natural languages, etc.) is the conceptual
framework behind HTML, or Hypertext Mark-up Language.

What are the constraints of HTML? By far still the fundamental

computer language used on the internet, HTML and the browsers
that interpret it constitute a quantitative structure of exchange
that both directs textual or discursive ow, and regulates its
dissemination - if that indeed is the manner in which it is
distributed. This dynamic constitutes a true information (or
textual), economy. Ebb and ow are governed by specic
protocols. Connection is established according to certain
hierarchies. And like the logic of traditional political economy all
elements conform to formal standardization. Computer networks
are not a heterogeneity.

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Computer fonts are an indication of a type of technological

complexity that allows for wide varieties of font faces, sizes,
shapes, distortions, and types of mark-up. However, this type of
quantitative diversity is not equivalent to a real diversication of
the conditions of digital texts, including distribution networks,
virtuation apparatuses (browsers, VR hardware, and other
interfaces), and mediative machinery (routers, dial-up protocols,
displays).

By way of illustration, allow me to compare these two elements.

Computer fonts do the same work in the digito-semiotic world that
HTML does in the virtual world. They both are a set of instructions
for the compilation of contents. Fonts compile and represent
digitized texts, while HTML compiles and displays hypertextual
elements. Like HTML, a computer font displays textual information
"all at once," and virtually. On load a derivative of each element is
placed. On unload that copy is discarded. However, computer
fonts are not representation per se. They are governing principles
for representation. They are at once totally crucial in the transfer
of textual information and yet they are completely disposable,
contingent and atemporal. They are a readable example of
protocol.

Fonts, trademarks, and misspellings - ground zero for

contemporary negotiations concerning textuality. Today, language
is negotiated and marked through complex protocols that govern
one's ideological relationship to digital texts. We recognize
Netscape, but do we recognize their encryption protocol licensed
from RSA? (Althusser rolls in his grave.)

It is on the corporate stage where font faces, a method of visually

representing language, are regulated as an element of corporate
trademarks an symbols. They are patented, trademarked,
controlled, owned, regulated, as the way that words are
formulated as readable. It is important to note that historically this
was not always the case.

Equally responsible therefore for the constitution of temporality

today is what I term the "phrasing" of certain elements of popular
society through cultural slogans and corporate trademarks.
Phrasing here should be taken quite literally, to the extent that it
refers to a constructive aestheticization, or textualization, of
everyday life. An action is "phrased" - like a trumpet solo is
phrased. It is translated into articulated gestures; it is conducted.
Phrasing also means to articulate into language. This therefore
refers to a more gestural temporality, one with a certain inuence

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over the "tempo of life." It is not instantaneous or singular, but

complex and multiple. It is a non-linear aect, a systemic inuence
that controls both action and discourse.

As it happens, a coincidence of current modes of gestural

phrasing takes the form of a sort of lowest possible denominator
for ontological claims. Take for example GE's "We bring good
things to life," Coke's "Coke is it," Nike's "Just do it," and Calvin
Klein's brilliantly simple "Be." These ideological campaigns share a
conuence of strategy within which certain social relationships are
naturalized. The primary tactics here are content-evacuation and
the simplication of complex social relationships.

Similar to the collapsing of temporal distances as seen in

electronic transfer of information, there is a collapsing of
conceptual distances through the mating of the nostalgic or
familiar with the futuristic or alien. This is an example of the
top-down phrasing or aestheticization of everyday life.
Technologico-corporate progress (a fetishization of time) is
naturalized through the phrasing of language, especially the
juxtaposition of disparate elements in slogan-type phrases. Here,
the familiar and the techno-alien are phrased, they are lyricized
into a gestural subject fabric. The phrase is sentimentalized, it is
repeated, it is printed on children's pyjamas.

We remember "A long time ago/in a galaxy far, far away." It is a

perfect example of this ideological mating of the alien and the
familiar. This type of phrasing is a real example of "repetition with
a dierence." It creates a spooky epilogue to Benjamin's
"Storyteller."

The story goes that theory knows the power of slogans. We have
Althusser's "hey you there!" or "I've strangled my wife," and
Derrida's "I've forgotten my umbrella." ...The story goes that theory
can use slogans. But we have "E.T./phone home," and "Beam me
up, Scotty" - both examples of the equating of dissimilar semantic
elements as part of a denite strategy. These are our political
slogans. This type of gestural language is ideologically constitutive.

The electro-digital transfer of textual information coupled with a

general multiplication of media sources changes the manner in
which we conceive of temporality, itself a social discourse. This
new discourse relating to time is marked by new protocols, and as
articulated above these protocols may be understood through a
reading of digital texts.

Alexander Galloway is Director of presse media, and editorial

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assistant at RHIZOME INTERNET. He has written on Tel Quel and

the French avant-garde.

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