De–Black Boxing Media

Abstract

Reading Avital Ronell’s unconventionally designed The Telephone Book implies reading material form as well as semantic content. Such a reading emphasizes the book’s typographical illegibilities, which become the figure for the space between person and thing. These illegibilities manifest as unreadable noise, interventions on the print page that produce a technological feminine. Situated alongside ANT (actor-network theory), media theory, and cyborg feminism, the technological feminine gestures at the limits of these attempts to de–black box media, insisting on an irreducible noise or static in communication.