, and I am writing this letter under
difficulties
with my typewriter on my lap.
Kittler-Gramophone-Film-Typewriter
"202 Opportunities for self-advertisement follow swiftly, even though pathology once again stands in for future technology.
The sanatorium's own psychoanalyst and spiritualist is un- able to conjure up the spirit of Castorp's deceased cousin until the gramo- phone administrator comes up with the obvious solution.
Only when prompted by the phonographic reproduction of his favorite tune does the spirit appear,203 thus revealing this media link to be a sound-film repro- duction.
Nothing remains to keep The Magic Mountain from being made into a movie.
Entertainment writers in particular, who insist on playing Goethe even under advanced technological conditions,204 know fully well that Goethe's "writing for girls"205 is no longer sufficient: the girls of the Magic Mountain have deserted to the village movie theatre, their "ignorant red. face[s] . . . twisted into an expression of the hugest enjoyment. "206
That, too, is a media link, but an ordinary and unassuming one be- neath the dignity of Nobel Prize winners. Since 1 8 80, literature no longer has been able to write for girls, simply because girls themselves write. They are no longer taken by imagining sights and sounds between poetic lines, for at night they are at the movies and during the day they sit at their typewriters. Even the Magic Mountain has as its "business center" a "neat little office" with "a typist busy at her machine. "207
The media link of film and typewriter thoroughly excludes literature. In 1929, the editor and German Communist Party member Rudolf Braune published a miscellany on the empirical sociology of readers in the litera- ture section of the Frankfurter Zeitung. Pursuing the question "What They Read," Braune had approached "Three Stenographers" and re- ceived answers that triggered his public outcry: Colette, Ganghofer, Edgar Wallace, Hermann Hesse . . . Not even Braune's desperate attempt to in-
Film 175
terest the three office workers i n literature loyal to the party line met with success. Five weeks later, however, on May 26, 1929, the typists received a boost. Nameless female colleagues wrote or typed letters to the editors and readers of the Frankfurter Zeitung, informing them what is different about modern women:
If we stenographers read little or nothing, do you know why? Because at night we are much too tired and exhausted, because to us the rattling of the typewriters, which we have to listen to for eight hours, keeps ringing in our ears throughout the evening, because each word we hear or read breaks down into letters four hours later. That is why we cannot spend evenings other than at the movies or go- ing for walks with our inevitable friend. 20s
Whereas social engagement queries the reception or non-reception of lit- erature in sociological terms, the test subjects respond in technological terms. Typewriters that break down their input into single letters in order to deliver an output in the shape of series and columns of standardized block letters also determine historical modes of reception. As selective as a band-pass filter, the machine positions itself between books and speeches on the one hand and eyes or even ears on the other. As a result, language does not store or transmit any meaning whatsoever for stenog- raphers, only the indigestible materiality of the medium it happens to be. Every night the movie-continuum has to treat the wounds that a discrete machine inflicts upon secretaries during the day. An entanglement of the imaginary and the symbolic. The new media link that excludes literature was nevertheless committed to paper: in the shape of a screenplay that was never filmed. Pinthus's Movie Book printed plain text on cinema, books, and typewriters.
RICHARD A. BERMANN, " LYRE AND TYPEWRITER" ( 19 1 3 )
Returning home from her beloved movies, a swarthy little typist should tell her smiling friend about a movie thus:
Now there's a movie that clearly shows how important we typists are- we who copy and sometimes also occasion your poems. You see, first they showed what you poets are like when we're not around. One of you-with long hair and big tie, lots of attitude for no reason-he's sitting at home chewing on a huge pen. Maybe he's got nothing to eat, and why should he? Is he working? He nervously runs around the room. He writes a verse on a
? 176 Film
piece of paper folded in a funny way. He stands in front of the mirror, re- cites the verse, and admires himself. In a very satisfied mood, he lies down on the sofa. He gets up again and goes on chewing-he can think of ab- solutely nothing. Angrily he rips up the piece of paper. You can tell he feels ignored because he doesn't get anything done. He puts on a romantic coat and hurries to a literary cafe. It's summer, so he can sit outside on the street. Then she walks by-a very blond energetic muse. He quickly calls the waiter and with great ado does not pay for the melange. He hurries after the muse. She takes the tube. As luck has it he's got ten cents left, so he takes a ride too. He approaches her when she leaves the station, but she's not one of those and sends him packing. Well, he still follows her. She enters her house, grabs the elevator key, and takes a ride upstairs. He runs up the stairs like a madman and arrives just as she closes her door. But there's a sign on the door:
MINNIE TIPP
Typing Service Transcription ofLiterary Works D ictation
He rings the bell. The door opens. Minnie Tipp is already typing away. She wants to throw him out but he claims to be a customer with a dictation. He assumes a pose and dictates: "Miss, I love you! " She types it and the writing appears on the white screen. But she throws the scrap of paper at his feet, sits down again, and writes: "I have no time for idle sluggards. Come back when you have some literary work that needs copying. Goodbye ! "
Like, what can he do in the face ofso much virtue? He goes back home really dejected and despairs in front of the mirror. He gets paper, lots of paper, and plans to write like there's no tomorrow. But he can't do any more than chew the pen, which by now is quite short. He reclines on his infamous sofa. Suddenly, the image of Minnie appears-the upright, diligent, ener- getic typist. She shows him a perfectly typed page that reads: "I would love you, too, if you could get some real work done ! " The image vanishes and he returns to his desk. And now, you see, the boy with bow and quiver appears in a dark corner of the room. He darts to the desk at which the brooding poet is sitting and pours a quiver full of ink into his sterile inkwell. Then the boy sits down with crossed legs on the sofa and watches. The poet dips his pen-now it's running all by itself. As soon as the pen touches the paper, it is full of the most beautiful verses and whisked away. In no time the room is full of manuscripts. The poet may dictate after all. They are all love poems. The first one starts:
When first r beheld your eyes so blue
My limbs were filled with molten ore.
r work, and working am so close to you- r live once more!
She writes with long sharp fingers, but she doesn't look at the machine and leaves no spaces between the words. She is dancing a dance of love on her machine. It is a mute duet. He is a very happy lyric poet. He returns home in a rapture.
A couple of days later a man appears with a wheelbarrow and brings the poet a couple of hundred pounds of perfectly copied manuscripts. He also has a letter-a perfumed, neatly typed one. The poet kisses the letter. He opens it. The boy with the bow is back in the room again and peers over the poet's shoulder. But alas! The poet is tearing his hair-and the nice boy pulls a face, for the letter reads:
Dear Sir, you will be receiving your manuscripts with today's mail. Please allow me to inform you that r am enraptured by the fire of your verses. r also beg to draw your attention to the enclosed invoice of 200 Marks. r would be de- lighted if you were to communicate the amount to me in person, at which point we could enter into a discussion concerning the content of your verses. Yours, Minnie Tipp.
"That's what happens," the swarthy little typist tells her smiling friend, "when we women are forced to work. It makes us so eminently practical. " Well, of course the poor poet hasn't a penny to his name. He searches
the whole room and finds only manuscripts. He searches his pockets and finds only impressive holes. Amor wants to help and turns his quiver on its head-but why would Amor walk around with two hundred Marks? Fi- nally, there is nothing left for the poet to do but to get behind the wheelbar- row and cart the manuscripts to a cheese dealer. He buys them to wrap soft cow cheese. Now, the famous critic Fixfax is of a delicate nature and loves runny cow cheese. So he proceeds to the cheese dealer in person, buys a portion, and takes it home. On the street pedestrians hold their noses and bolt. But Fixfax loves smelling the cheese. As he is about to drill his nose- covered, of course, by bl? ck, horn-rimmed spectacles-into the cheese,
he happens to read a verse and is absolutely enchanted. He gets into a car and drives straight to the publisher Solomon Edition and shows him the cheese. The publisher can't stand the smell of cheese and writhes and squirms. But the critic is all over him and quotes the poet's verses. Now the publisher is enthusiastic, too. The two immediately run to the cheese dealer and bring along a huge sack stuffed with an advance. ("You have to know,"
Film 177
178 Film
the swarthy little typist tells her smiling friend, "this is a fantasy movie. ") Well, the two buy all the cheese off the dealer, hire thirteen men who all cover their noses, and proceed to the poet. The poet is standing on a chair and about to hang himself, because he can't come up with the two hundred Marks. A faint stench begins to pervade his room. Now, do you really hang yourself when it's stinking so abominably? No, you get all angry and de- velop a new zest for life. The thirteen guys march in but he throws them out with such force that the cheese trickles down the stairs. He only quiets down when the publisher and his sack full of money arrive. No stinking cheese can match the fragrance of the advance.
The poet now hurries to the typing bureau. He finds this snotty busi- nessman who is dictating snotty letters to Minnie and coming on to her. But the poet throws him out; he can afford it, he can now afford to hire the typ- ist for hours, days, and whole eternities. He immediately dictates another poem to her. But what does she write? "Stupid fellow! " she writes, "I love the hardworking and successful. " Underlined twice. On that day they did not type any further.
"It's a moral film," the swarthy little girl says. "It shows how an indus- trious woman can educate a man. "
For a moment, the friend no longer smiles. "It shows," he says, "how an industrious woman ruins a man. The film will demonstrate to writers that while this damned typewriter makes them diligent, it makes women turn cold. The film will reveal the spiritual dangers of the typewriter. Do you really think that poet's industrious manuscripts were any good? The chewing and the sofa, that was good. But you professional women will never understand that. "
The swarthy little one laughs.
And with good reason. While all the men of the time tragically collide with their filmic doubles, the swarthy typist and her colleague Minnie Tipp are united by serene harmony. Or, in more technical terms: by posi- tive feedback. One woman goes to her beloved movies starring the other; the plan was to make a movie featuring both. The logic of representation would have been perfect: one and the same woman spends her days in the real of work time and the symbolic of text processing, and her nights in a technified mirror stage. Which is exactly how Braune's three stenotypists described it.
? ? ------------------------u--
-------------------v--------
- OW - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - M - - - - - - - -
Demeny speaks "Je VOllS ai-me" into the chronophotograph.
- - - ME - -
? 180 Film
Against this film-within-a-film-within-a-film, this endless folding of women and media, literature does not have a chance. Both men, the smil- ing friend and his double, do not move beyond pens and poetry. Subse- quently, they are left with an old-fashioned mirror stage in the shape of ephemeral and unpublished authorship. You stare at empty white paper, since Mallarme the background of all words, and fight with the sterility Mallarme turned into a poem,209 until one lone verse finds its way onto the paper. But not even the elementary consolation afforded by mirrors that magically turn bodies into wholes and unconscious literates into self- assured authors is of lasting value. The verse does not carry on into the next; a hand tears up its handwriting, simply because it cannot do it with the body itself.
Poets of 19 1 3 act in old-fashioned ways. One "stands in front of the mirror, and recites the verse, and admires himself. " Twenty-two years af- ter Demeny had replaced forgetful mirrors with trace detection and snap- shots of speech, words are still lost: to declamations and torn paper. The media revenge follows swiftly. When this particular poet upgrades his mirror declamations to typed dictations, the most oral sentence of all falls into technological storage and at the speaker's feet. And to top it off, the typed "Miss, I love you! " appears on screen, published for the benefit of all of Minnie Tipp's doubles.
Such is the solidarity of film and typewriter, Demeny and Miss Tipp. Every word they hear, read, speak, or type breaks down (as the stenotyp- ists put it) into its letters. The typist turns a poetic and erotically charged flow of speech, the manifest secret of German literature, into twelve let- ters, four empty spaces, and two punctuation marks, all of which (as her correspondence makes clear) come with a price. Just as he had done with "Vi-ve la Fran-ce! " Demeny turns this declaration of love into twenty- millisecond shots of his empty and media-infatuated mouth. He positions himself in front of a camera (instead of the mirror), declaims the verse of all verses, and becomes a test subject (instead of an admired author). "JE VOUS AI-ME. "
To the poetic intellect, the unassuming media link of silent film and typewriter, image flow and intertitles, was nothing short of desecration. In order to save the Soul ofthe Film, Bloem decreed: "Emotion does not reside in the titles; it is not to be spoken, it is to be embodied mimically. Yet there are directors who do not shy away from blaring out ' I love you' (the most fiery and tender possibility of this art) in a title. "21o
A criticism that completely missed the technological, experimental, and social necessity of such prostitution. To begin with, love consists in
? ? ? ? Filmstrip: from snake to typist, I929.
r82 Film
words; therefore, silent films have to transfer them directly from type- script to screen. In addition, Demeny's experiment delivered the grand kaleidoscope of human speech, as Villiers would have put it, to the deaf and dumb, and Minnie Tipp even delivered it to writers. The decomposi- tion and filtering of love ensured that her new customer would rise to the particular work ethic that characterizes "professional women" and marks within that group a necessary, though not always sufficient, distinction between typists and whores. 211 With the result that a man, too, grasped the secular difference between poet and writer. From handwriting to typed dictation, from the loneliness in front of mirrors to the sexual divi- sion of labor and best-selling poetry: as a "moral film," "Lyre and Type- writer" shows "how an industrious woman can educate a man. " Or how, in a fine animated sequence, the old snake becomes the Eve of the twen- tieth century.
"There are more women working at typing than at anything else. "212 Film, the great media self-advertisement, has reached its target group and its happy ending.
? ? TYPE WRITER
? "Typewriter" is ambiguous. The word meant both typing machine and female typist: in the United States, a source of countless cartoons. (Typed letter of a bankrupt businessman to his wife: "Dear Blanche, I have sold all my office furniture, chairs, desks, etc. etc.
, and I am writing this letter under difficulties with my typewriter on my lap. ")1 But the convergence of a profession, a machine, and a sex speaks the truth. Bermann's word "stenotypist" gradually came to require footnotes explaining that since 1885, it has referred to women who have completed Ferdinand Schrey's combined training program in the Hammond typewriter and stenography. In the case of "typewriter," by contrast, everyday language for once matches statistics (see the accompanying table).
The table unfortunately does not distinguish between stenographic handwriting and Remington's typewriting. Nevertheless, it is clear that the statistical explosion begins in 1 8 8 1 , with the record sales of the Rem- ington II. Although the number of men dwindles like a bell curve, the number of female typists increases almost with the elegance of an expo- nential function. As a consequence, it might be possible-as we approach the threshold of infinity-to forecast the year in which typist and woman converge. Minnie Tipp will have been Eve.
An innocuous device, "an 'intermediate' thing, between a tool and a machine," "almost quotidian and hence unnoticed,"2 has made history. The typewriter cannot conjure up anything imaginary, as can cinema; it cannot simulate the real, as can sound recording; it only inverts the gender of writing. In so doing, however, it inverts the material basis of literature.
The monopoly of script in serial data processing was a privilege of men. Because orders and poems were processed through the same chan- nel, security protocols evolved. Even though more and more women were
? ? ? ? 1 84 Typewriter
Stenographers and Typists in the United States by Sex, 1 8 70-1930
Women as a percentage
Year Total Men Women oftotal
1870 147 7 4-5% 1880 5,000 3,000 2,000 40. 0 I890 33,400 I2,IOO 2I,300 63. 8 I900 II2,600 26,200 86,400 76? 7 19IO 326,700 53,400 263,300 80. 6 I920 6I5,1Oo 50,400 564,700 9I. 8 I930 8II,200 36,100 775,100
S O U R C E : U. S. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States, I940: Population (1943), as cited in Davies 1974, ro.
taught letters in the wake of general educational reform, being able to read was not the same as being allowed to write. Prior to the invention of the typewriter, all poets, secretaries, and typesetters were of the same sex. As late as 1 8 5 9 , when the solidarity of American women's unions created positions for female typesetters, their male colleagues on the presses boycotted the printing of unmanly type fonts. 3 Only the Civil War of 1 861-64-that revolutionary media network of telegraph cables and par- allel train tracks4-opened the bureaucracy of government, of mail and stenography, to writing women; their numbers, of course, were as yet too small to register statistically.
The Gutenberg Galaxy was thus a sexually closed feedback loop. Even though Germanists are fundamentally oblivious to it, it controlled nothing less than German literature. Unrecognized geniuses swung the
quill themselves, whereas national poets had personal secretaries, as in the case of Goethe, John, Schuchardt, Eckermann, Riemer, and Geist. It is precisely this media network-namely, that the Ur-author can bring forth his spirit in Eckermann-that Professor Pschorr had been able to prove phonographically in Goethe's study. s One's own or dictated script was processed by male typesetters, binders, publishers, and so on, in order fi- nally to reach in print the girls for whom Goethe wrote. As Goethe put it in conversation with Riemer (who of course recorded it), "he conceives of the Ideal in terms of female form or the form of Woman. What a man is, he didn't know. "6
Women could and had to remain an ideal abstraction, like Faust's Gretchen, as long as the materialities of writing were the jobs of men, far
? ? ? 154
95. 6
186 Typewriter
too close for them to be aware of it. One Gretchen inspired the work; her many sisters were allowed to consume it through their identification with her. "Otherwise," that is, without sales and female readers, "things would be bad" for him, the "author," Friedrich Schlegel wrote to his lover. 7 But the honor of having a manuscript appear in print under the au- thor's proper name was barred to women, if not factually then at least media-technologically: the proper name at the head of their verse, novels, and dramas almost always has been a male pseudonym.
If only because of that, an omnipresent metaphor equated women with the white sheet of nature or virginity onto which a very male stylus could then inscribe the glory of its authorship. No wonder that psycho- analysis discovered during its clean-up operation that in dreams, "pencils, pen-holders, . . . and other instruments are undoubted male sexual sym- bols. "8 It only retrieved a deeply embedded metaphysics of handwriting.
And consequently did not disclose any unconscious secrets, either. For that, the "symbols" of man and woman were too closely attached to the monopoly of writing. When, in 1889, the editors of the illustrated journal Yom Pels zum Meer (as usual) made a pitch for Hammond type- writers and Schrey, their general representative, the "writer of these lines" was thrilled by a self-study: "Already after a couple of weeks he reached a speed of 125 letters per minute. " Only two things were "lost" during this mechanization of writing: first, "the intimacy of handwritten expres- sion, which nobody is willing to relinquish voluntarily, particularly in per- sonal correspondence" ; and second, a centerpiece of occidental symbolic systems:
Machines everywhere, wherever one looks! A substitute for numerous types of la- bor, which man would otherwise do with his industrious hand, and what econ- omy of exertion and time, and what advantages in terms of flawlessness and reg- ularity of work. It was only natural that after the engineer had deprived woman's tender hand of the actual symbol of female industriousness, one of his colleagues hit upon the idea of replacing the quill, the actual symbol of male intellectual ac- tivity, with a machine. 9
The literal meaning of text is tissue. Therefore, prior to their indus- trialization the two sexes occupied strictly symmetrical roles: women, with the symbol of female industriousness in their hands, wove tissues; men, with the symbol of male intellectual activity in their hands, wove tis- sues of a different sort called text. Here, the stylus as singular needle- point, there, the many female readers as fabric onto which it wrote.
Industrialization simultaneously nullified handwriting and hand-
Typewriter 1 8 7
based work. Not coincidentally, it was William K . Jenne, the head of the sewing-machine subdivision of Remington & Son, who in 1874 devel- oped Sholes's prototype into a mass-producible "Type-Writer. " 10 Not co- incidentally as well, early competing models came from the Domestic Sewing Machine Co. , the Meteor Saxon Knitting-Machine Factory, or Seidel & NaumannY Bipolar sexual differentiation, with its defining symbols, disappeared on industrial assembly lines. Two symbols do not survive their replacement by machines, that is, their implementation in the real. When men are deprived of the quill and women of the needle, all hands are up for grabs-as employable as employees. Typescript amounts to the desexualization of writing, sacrificing its metaphysics and turning it into word processing.
A transvaluation of all values, even if it arrived on pigeon toes, as Nietzsche would have it, or on "high-buttoned shoes" (in the words of the most amusing chronicler of the typewriter). 12 To mechanize writing, our culture had to redefine its values or (as the first German monograph on the typewriter put it, in anticipation of Foucault) "create a wholly new order of things. "13 The work of ingenious tinkerers was far from achiev- ing that. In 1714 Henry Mill, an engineer with the New River Water Co. in London, received his inconsequential British patent (no. 395) "for 'a machine or artificial method, to print letters continuously one after an- other while writing, in a fashion so clean and precise that they are indis- tinguishable from the printing of letters. '" 14 The precision of this concept or premise, namely, to introduce Gutenberg'S reproductive technology into textual production, was contradicted by the vagueness of the patent's phrasing. The work of Kempelen, the engineer of phonographs, to design an appropriate writing instrument for a blind duchess was similarly in- consequential. Under the discursive conditions of the age of Goethe, the term "writing-machine" was bound to remain a non-term, as was proven rather involuntarily by another Viennese.
In 1823, the physician C. L. Muller published a treatise entitled Newly Invented Writing-Machine, with Which Everybody Can Write, Without Light, in Every Language, and Regardless of One's Handwrit- ing; Generate Essays and Bills; the Blind, Too, Can, Unlike with Previous Writing Tablets, Write Not Only with Greater Ease but Even Read Their Own Writing Afterward. What Muller meant and introduced was a me- chanical contraption that, its name notwithstanding, only enabled the blind to guide their hands across paper while writing. The mapping of the page and the concentration of ink even afforded them the possibility of rereading their writing through touch. For Muller could "not deny" an
? ? 1 8 8 Typewriter
authorial narcissism that prompts "all those so inclined," like Minnie Tipp's poet, "to reread what he has written. "IS Significantly enough, the invention was aimed primarily at educated but unfortunately blind fa- thers for the purpose of illuminating their morally blind sons with letters and epistolary truths. "How often would a man of good standing write a few lines to save a lost estate or the welfare of whole families, how often would the handwritten letter of a father steer a son back on the right track, if such men could, without restraint and prompting, write in such a way as if they had been endowed with vision. "16
The "writing-machine," in that sense, only brought to light the rules regulating discourses during the age of Goethe: authority and authorship, handwriting and rereading, the narcissism of creation and reader obedi- ence. The device for "everybody" forgot women.
Mechanical storage technologies for writing, images, and sound could only be developed following the collapse of this system. The hard science of physiology did away with the psychological conception that guaranteed humans that they could find their souls through handwriting and rereading. The "I think, " which since Kant was supposed to accom- pany all of one's representations, presumably only accompanied one's readings. It became obsolete as soon as body and soul advanced to be- come obj ects of scientific experiments. The unity of apperception disinte- grated into a large number of subroutines, which, as such, physiologists could localize in different centers of the brain and engineers could recon- struct in multiple machines. Which is what the "spirit"-the unsimulable center of "man"-denied by its very definition.
Psychophysics and psychotechnology converted into empirical re- search programs Nietzsche's philosophical and scandalous surmise that "humans are perhaps only thinking, writing, and speaking machines. " Dysfunctional Speech (Die Storungen der Sprache), following KuRmaul's insight or monograph of 1881, could only be cleared up under the premise that speech has nothing to do with the "I think":
One can conceive o f language in its initial development as a conditioned reflex. It is the character of reflected intentionality that distinguishes conditioned from in- born movements of expression, their greater ability to adapt, in appropriate form and degree, to the intended purpose. Because of this quality, we are not quite pre- pared to see in them anything but the play of mechanical circuits acquired through exercise. And yet, pantomime, the spoken word, and the written word are nothing but the products of internal, self-regulating mechanisms that are channeled and coordinated through emotions and conceptions, just as one can op- erate a sewing, typing, or speaking machine without knowing its mechanismY
Typewriter r89
When, from the point of view of brain physiology, language works as a feedback loop of mechanical relays, the construction of typewriters is only a matter of course. Nature, the most pitiless experimenter, paralyzes certain parts of the brain through strokes and bullet wounds to the head; research (since the Battle of Solferino in r859) is only required to mea- sure the resulting interferences in order to distinguish the distinct subrou- tines of speech in anatomically precise ways. Sensory aphasia (while hear- ing), dyslexia (while reading), expressive aphasia (while speaking), agraphia (while writing) bring forth machines in the brain. KufSmaul's "sound board," with its "cortical sound keys," 18 virtually conjures up the rods and levers of old Remingtons.
Disabilities or deformations therefore suggest not only Muller's "sweet hope" to be "of use to his fellow humans" and "to alleviate the suffering of many unfortunates. " 19 Blindness and deafness, precisely when they affect either speech or writing, yield what would otherwise be beyond reach: information on the human information machine. Where- upon its replacement by mechanics can begin. Knie, Beach, Thurber, MaI- ling Hansen, Ravizza: they all constructed their early typewriters for the blind and/or the deaf. The Frenchmen Foucauld and Pierre even con- structed them for the blind as blind people themselves. 20 Interest in au- thorship, or in the possibility of reading one's unconscious outpourings in
the mirror, disappeared completely.
What the typewriters for the blind in mid century were still missing
was speed. But ever since r 8 ro, the introduction of the rotary press and continuous form into the printing trade made typesetting machines desir- able in which ( " as with a piano " ) "the various types fall, through a touch of the keys, into place almost as quickly as one speaks. "21 And when Samuel Morse patented his electric cable telegraph in r 840, he introduced a communications technology whose speed of light far outpaced all forms of manual communication. "The average speed, which can be sustained for hours by hand, is about 20-25 words per minute. "22 Consequently, not long thereafter "a whole generation of telegraph operators had ap- peared who could understand code much faster than they could write it down. Stenographers found themselves in a similar fix. They could take their notations as quickly as a man could speak, and yet they couldn't transcribe faster than at a snail's pace. "23
What therefore became part of the wish list were writing instruments that could coincide with the operating speed of nervous pathways. Since aphasia researchers had figured out the number of milliseconds it takes for a letter to travel from the eye to the hand muscles via the brain's read-
1 9 0
Typewriter
t&?
I Ohr
Schematic diagram of the language subsite in the brain. A denotes the center for sound images, B, the center for visual images.
ing and writing centers, the equation of cerebral circuits with telegraphic dispatches had become a physiological standard. 24 When "the average la- tency, that is, the time between the stimulus and the pushing of the button takes about 250 milliseconds," and when, furthermore, "the typing of a given output resembles a flying projectile" because "it only needs a start- ing signal" and "then goes all by itself"25-then, the typewriter as a mass-produced article was bound to roll automatically off the production lines of a gun manufacturer.
Unconfirmed rumors have suggested that Sholes sold the Remington company a patent that he had stolen from the poor Tyrolean Peter Mit- terhofer during his studies at the Royal and Imperial Polytechnical Insti- tute in Vienna. 26 But plagiarism, or, in modern terms, the transfer of tech- nology, is of little importance in the face of circumstances. Rumor has it that, in reference to Mitterhofer's request for money, Emperor Franz Joseph allegedly remarked to his cabinet that the invention of superior war strategies would be more appropriate than that of useless typewrit- ers. Remington & Son were above such pseudo-alternatives: they trans- ferred "the standardization of the component parts of weapons, which had been widely practiced since the Napoleonic Wars," to those of civil writing instruments. 27 (Weapons manufacturers such as Mauser, Manu- facture d'Armes de Paris, and the German Weapons and Ammunitions Factory [DWF] were to follow suit. )
The technologies of typewriting and sound recording are by-products of the American Civil War. Edison, who was a young telegrapher during the war, developed his phonograph in an attempt to improve the process- ing speed of the Morse telegraph beyond human limitations. Remington
? ? ? Anton Giulio Bragaglia and Arturo Bragaglia, Datillografa, 19 1 1 .
began the serial production o f Sholes's typewriter models in September I874 simply because "after the Civil War boom things had been on the slow side," and they had "more capacity than they were using. "28
The typewriter became a discursive machine-gun. A technology whose basic action not coincidentally consists of strikes and triggers proceeds in automated and discrete steps, as does ammunitions transport in a revolver and a machine-gun, or celluloid transport in a film projector. "The pen was once mightier than the sword," Otto Burghagen, the first monogra- pher of the typewriter, writes in I 89 8 , " but where the typewriter rules," he continues, "Krupp's cannons must remain silent! "29 Burghagen is con- tradicted, however, by his own deliberations on "the significant savings of time, which endear the machine to the merchant. With its help one can complete office work in a third of the time it would take with the pen, for with each strike of a key the machine produces a complete letter, while the pen has to undergo about five strokes in order to produce a letter. . . . In the time it takes the pen to put a dot on the "i" or to make the "u" sign, the machine produces two complete letters. The striking of the keys follows in succession with great speed, especially when one writes with all fingers; then, one can count five to ten keyboard hits per second! "30 This is the epic song of a firepower whose German record as of August I98 5 stands at "773 letters per minute for thirty minutes of high-speed typing. "31
Jean Cocteau, who produced a corresponding work for each of the late-nineteenth-century media-La voix humaine for the acoustics of the
Typewriter I9 I
? ? 1 9 2 Typewriter
telephone, the script for Orphee for mirrors, doppelgangers, cinematic ef- fects, and "for car radios, secret codes, and short-wave signals"32_m lde the typewriter into the titular hero of a play in 1941. The reason was there in American idiom: for three acts, a detective chases an unknown woman who has been tormenting her community with anonymous, type- written letters, going by the title "the typewriter. "33 For three acts, he "imagines the culprit at work at her typewriter, aiming and operating her machine gun. "34 Typewriters are simply "fast," not just "like Jazz" (as Cendrars put it) but also like rapid-fire weapons. In her confession, Cocteau's anonymous letter-writer puts it this way: "I wanted to attack the whole city. All the hypocritical happiness, the hypocritical piety, the hypocritical luxury, the whole lying, egotistical, avaricious, untouchable bourgeoisie. I wanted to stir that muck, attack and reveal it. It was like a hoax! Without accounting for myself, I chose the dirtiest and cheapest of all weapons, the typewriter. "35
About which the playwright, in his preface of 1941, only remarked that he had "portrayed the terrible feudal province" of France "prior to the debacle. "36 As innocuous as they were, typewriters could still provide cover for the work of Guderian's submachine guns and tank divisions. And indeed: whereas the Army High Command supplied its war photog- raphers with "Arriflex hand-held cameras, Askania Z-tripod cameras, [and] special-assignment vehicles" and its recording specialists with "ar- mored vehicles and tanks for radio broadcasts " and with magnetophones,
"war reporters were equipped solely with typewriters, and specifically, most often with commercially available traveling typewriters. "37 Modesty of literature under conditions of high technology.
That is precisely how Remington began production. The Model I hardly sold, even though or precisely because one no less than Mark Twain purchased a Remington in 1874. He sent his novel Tom Sawyer, the first typescript in literary history, to his publisher, and sent a para- doxical letter of support to the typewriter manufacturer:
GENTLEMEN : PLEASE DO NOT USE MY NAME IN ANY WAY , PLEASE DO NOT EVEN DIVULGE THE FACT THAT I OWN A MACHINE , I HAVE ENTIRELY STOPPED USING THE TYPE- WRITER, FOR THE REASON THAT I NEVER COULD WRITE A LETTER WITH IT TO ANYBODY WITHOUT RECE IVING A
REQUEST BY RETURN MAIL THAT I WOULD NOT ONLY DESCRIBE THE MACHINE BUT STATE WHAT PROGRESS I HAD MADE IN THE USE OF IT, ETC. , ETC. I DON'T LIKE TO WRITE
? Typewriter 1 9 3
LETTERS, AND SO I DON'T WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW THAT I OWN THIS CURIOSITY BREEDING LITTLE JOKER.
YOURS TRULY , SAML L. CLEMENS. 38
The Model II of 1 8 7 8 , which allowed the switch from lower to upper case for a price of $125, initially did not fare much better. But after a slow start of 146 sales per year there came a rise that approximated a global snowball effect. 39 For in 1 8 8 1 , the marketing strategists of Wyck- off, Seamans, and Benedict made a discovery: they recognized the fasci- nation their unmarketable machine held for the battalions of unemployed women. When Lillian Sholes, as "presumably" the "first type-writer" in history,40 sat and posed in front of her father's prototype in 1 872, female typists came into existence for purposes of demonstration, but as a pro- fession and career, the stenotypist had yet to come. That was changed by the central branch of the Young Women's Christian Association in New York City, which trained eight young women in 188I to become typists and immediately received hundreds of inquiries (at $ro a week) from the corporate world. 41 A feedback loop was created connecting recruitment, training, supply, demand, new recruitment, and so on-first in the United States, and shortly thereafter through Christian women's associations in Europe. 42
Thus evolved the exponential function of female secretaries and the bell curve of male secretaries. Ironically enough, the clerks, office helpers, and poet-apprentices of the nineteenth century, who were exclusively male, had invested so much pride in their laboriously trained handwrit- ing as to overlook Remington's innovation for seven years. The continu- ous and coherent flow of ink, that material substrate of all middle-class in-dividuals and indivisibilities, made them blind to a historical chance. Writing as keystrokes, spacing, and the automatics of discrete block let- ters bypassed a whole system of education. Hence sexual innovation fol- lowed technological innovation almost immediately. Without resistance men cleared the field "where competition is as fierce as nowhere else. "43 Women reversed the handicap of their education, turning it into a "so- called emancipation"44 that, all proletarian fascination notwithstanding, wears the white collar of the employee of discourse.
In 1 8 5 3 , Hessian school regulations described knowledge of writing and arithmetic as useful for girls but not indispensable. 45 And women "without any talent for arithmetic, with terrible handwriting, with a
? I 9 4 Typewriter
Sholes's daughter at the Remington, 1 872.
highly deficient knowledge of orthography and mathematics" promptly started "in droves" to "work on the typewriter"-so says a woman who in I902 described the job of a female clerk "as building a church tower in the air because one had forgotten the foundations. "46
But in the age of information, foundations no longer count. The fact that "the female clerk could all-too-easily degrade into a mere type- writer"47 made her an asset. From the working class, the middle class, and the bourgeoisie, out of ambition, economic hardship, or the pure de- sire for emancipation48 emerged millions of secretaries. It was precisely their marginal position in the power system of script that forced women to develop their manual dexterity, which surpassed the prideful hand- writing aesthetics of male secretaries in the media system. Two German economists noted it in I 89 5 :
Today, the typist has evolved into a kind of type: she is generally very high in de- mand and is the ruling queen in this domain not only in America but in Germany as well. It may come as a surprise to find a practical use for what has become a veritable plague across the country, namely, piano lessons for young girls: the re-
? ? Typewriter 1 9 5
sultant dexterity is very useful for the operation of the typewriter. Rapid typing on it can be achieved only through the dexterous use of all fingers. If this profes- sion is not yet as lucrative in Germany as it is in America, it is due to the infiltra- tion of elements who perform the job of typist mechanically, without any addi- tional skills. 49
Edison's mechanical storage of sound made obsolete the piano key- board as the central storage device for music's scriptive logic; women were no longer asked to endow lyrical letters with a singable, ersatz sen- suality; the national plague of their dexterity could finally find a practical use on typewriter keyboards (derived from the piano). And since power after the print monopoly's collapse was diverted to cable and radio, to the recording of traces and electrical engineering, outdated security pro- tocols were dropped as well: women were allowed to reign over text pro- cessing all by themselves. Since then, "discourse has been secondary" and desexualized. 50
A certain Spinner, treasurer of the United States and a friend of Philo Remington, gave an example of this change. The attrition of males dur- ing the Civil War forced him to hire 300 women and to make the state- ment, "that I authorized the hiring ofwomen for positions in government satisfies me more than all the other achievements in my life. "51
One country after another opened the mail and wireless services as well as the railroad to typists.
Entertainment writers in particular, who insist on playing Goethe even under advanced technological conditions,204 know fully well that Goethe's "writing for girls"205 is no longer sufficient: the girls of the Magic Mountain have deserted to the village movie theatre, their "ignorant red. face[s] . . . twisted into an expression of the hugest enjoyment. "206
That, too, is a media link, but an ordinary and unassuming one be- neath the dignity of Nobel Prize winners. Since 1 8 80, literature no longer has been able to write for girls, simply because girls themselves write. They are no longer taken by imagining sights and sounds between poetic lines, for at night they are at the movies and during the day they sit at their typewriters. Even the Magic Mountain has as its "business center" a "neat little office" with "a typist busy at her machine. "207
The media link of film and typewriter thoroughly excludes literature. In 1929, the editor and German Communist Party member Rudolf Braune published a miscellany on the empirical sociology of readers in the litera- ture section of the Frankfurter Zeitung. Pursuing the question "What They Read," Braune had approached "Three Stenographers" and re- ceived answers that triggered his public outcry: Colette, Ganghofer, Edgar Wallace, Hermann Hesse . . . Not even Braune's desperate attempt to in-
Film 175
terest the three office workers i n literature loyal to the party line met with success. Five weeks later, however, on May 26, 1929, the typists received a boost. Nameless female colleagues wrote or typed letters to the editors and readers of the Frankfurter Zeitung, informing them what is different about modern women:
If we stenographers read little or nothing, do you know why? Because at night we are much too tired and exhausted, because to us the rattling of the typewriters, which we have to listen to for eight hours, keeps ringing in our ears throughout the evening, because each word we hear or read breaks down into letters four hours later. That is why we cannot spend evenings other than at the movies or go- ing for walks with our inevitable friend. 20s
Whereas social engagement queries the reception or non-reception of lit- erature in sociological terms, the test subjects respond in technological terms. Typewriters that break down their input into single letters in order to deliver an output in the shape of series and columns of standardized block letters also determine historical modes of reception. As selective as a band-pass filter, the machine positions itself between books and speeches on the one hand and eyes or even ears on the other. As a result, language does not store or transmit any meaning whatsoever for stenog- raphers, only the indigestible materiality of the medium it happens to be. Every night the movie-continuum has to treat the wounds that a discrete machine inflicts upon secretaries during the day. An entanglement of the imaginary and the symbolic. The new media link that excludes literature was nevertheless committed to paper: in the shape of a screenplay that was never filmed. Pinthus's Movie Book printed plain text on cinema, books, and typewriters.
RICHARD A. BERMANN, " LYRE AND TYPEWRITER" ( 19 1 3 )
Returning home from her beloved movies, a swarthy little typist should tell her smiling friend about a movie thus:
Now there's a movie that clearly shows how important we typists are- we who copy and sometimes also occasion your poems. You see, first they showed what you poets are like when we're not around. One of you-with long hair and big tie, lots of attitude for no reason-he's sitting at home chewing on a huge pen. Maybe he's got nothing to eat, and why should he? Is he working? He nervously runs around the room. He writes a verse on a
? 176 Film
piece of paper folded in a funny way. He stands in front of the mirror, re- cites the verse, and admires himself. In a very satisfied mood, he lies down on the sofa. He gets up again and goes on chewing-he can think of ab- solutely nothing. Angrily he rips up the piece of paper. You can tell he feels ignored because he doesn't get anything done. He puts on a romantic coat and hurries to a literary cafe. It's summer, so he can sit outside on the street. Then she walks by-a very blond energetic muse. He quickly calls the waiter and with great ado does not pay for the melange. He hurries after the muse. She takes the tube. As luck has it he's got ten cents left, so he takes a ride too. He approaches her when she leaves the station, but she's not one of those and sends him packing. Well, he still follows her. She enters her house, grabs the elevator key, and takes a ride upstairs. He runs up the stairs like a madman and arrives just as she closes her door. But there's a sign on the door:
MINNIE TIPP
Typing Service Transcription ofLiterary Works D ictation
He rings the bell. The door opens. Minnie Tipp is already typing away. She wants to throw him out but he claims to be a customer with a dictation. He assumes a pose and dictates: "Miss, I love you! " She types it and the writing appears on the white screen. But she throws the scrap of paper at his feet, sits down again, and writes: "I have no time for idle sluggards. Come back when you have some literary work that needs copying. Goodbye ! "
Like, what can he do in the face ofso much virtue? He goes back home really dejected and despairs in front of the mirror. He gets paper, lots of paper, and plans to write like there's no tomorrow. But he can't do any more than chew the pen, which by now is quite short. He reclines on his infamous sofa. Suddenly, the image of Minnie appears-the upright, diligent, ener- getic typist. She shows him a perfectly typed page that reads: "I would love you, too, if you could get some real work done ! " The image vanishes and he returns to his desk. And now, you see, the boy with bow and quiver appears in a dark corner of the room. He darts to the desk at which the brooding poet is sitting and pours a quiver full of ink into his sterile inkwell. Then the boy sits down with crossed legs on the sofa and watches. The poet dips his pen-now it's running all by itself. As soon as the pen touches the paper, it is full of the most beautiful verses and whisked away. In no time the room is full of manuscripts. The poet may dictate after all. They are all love poems. The first one starts:
When first r beheld your eyes so blue
My limbs were filled with molten ore.
r work, and working am so close to you- r live once more!
She writes with long sharp fingers, but she doesn't look at the machine and leaves no spaces between the words. She is dancing a dance of love on her machine. It is a mute duet. He is a very happy lyric poet. He returns home in a rapture.
A couple of days later a man appears with a wheelbarrow and brings the poet a couple of hundred pounds of perfectly copied manuscripts. He also has a letter-a perfumed, neatly typed one. The poet kisses the letter. He opens it. The boy with the bow is back in the room again and peers over the poet's shoulder. But alas! The poet is tearing his hair-and the nice boy pulls a face, for the letter reads:
Dear Sir, you will be receiving your manuscripts with today's mail. Please allow me to inform you that r am enraptured by the fire of your verses. r also beg to draw your attention to the enclosed invoice of 200 Marks. r would be de- lighted if you were to communicate the amount to me in person, at which point we could enter into a discussion concerning the content of your verses. Yours, Minnie Tipp.
"That's what happens," the swarthy little typist tells her smiling friend, "when we women are forced to work. It makes us so eminently practical. " Well, of course the poor poet hasn't a penny to his name. He searches
the whole room and finds only manuscripts. He searches his pockets and finds only impressive holes. Amor wants to help and turns his quiver on its head-but why would Amor walk around with two hundred Marks? Fi- nally, there is nothing left for the poet to do but to get behind the wheelbar- row and cart the manuscripts to a cheese dealer. He buys them to wrap soft cow cheese. Now, the famous critic Fixfax is of a delicate nature and loves runny cow cheese. So he proceeds to the cheese dealer in person, buys a portion, and takes it home. On the street pedestrians hold their noses and bolt. But Fixfax loves smelling the cheese. As he is about to drill his nose- covered, of course, by bl? ck, horn-rimmed spectacles-into the cheese,
he happens to read a verse and is absolutely enchanted. He gets into a car and drives straight to the publisher Solomon Edition and shows him the cheese. The publisher can't stand the smell of cheese and writhes and squirms. But the critic is all over him and quotes the poet's verses. Now the publisher is enthusiastic, too. The two immediately run to the cheese dealer and bring along a huge sack stuffed with an advance. ("You have to know,"
Film 177
178 Film
the swarthy little typist tells her smiling friend, "this is a fantasy movie. ") Well, the two buy all the cheese off the dealer, hire thirteen men who all cover their noses, and proceed to the poet. The poet is standing on a chair and about to hang himself, because he can't come up with the two hundred Marks. A faint stench begins to pervade his room. Now, do you really hang yourself when it's stinking so abominably? No, you get all angry and de- velop a new zest for life. The thirteen guys march in but he throws them out with such force that the cheese trickles down the stairs. He only quiets down when the publisher and his sack full of money arrive. No stinking cheese can match the fragrance of the advance.
The poet now hurries to the typing bureau. He finds this snotty busi- nessman who is dictating snotty letters to Minnie and coming on to her. But the poet throws him out; he can afford it, he can now afford to hire the typ- ist for hours, days, and whole eternities. He immediately dictates another poem to her. But what does she write? "Stupid fellow! " she writes, "I love the hardworking and successful. " Underlined twice. On that day they did not type any further.
"It's a moral film," the swarthy little girl says. "It shows how an indus- trious woman can educate a man. "
For a moment, the friend no longer smiles. "It shows," he says, "how an industrious woman ruins a man. The film will demonstrate to writers that while this damned typewriter makes them diligent, it makes women turn cold. The film will reveal the spiritual dangers of the typewriter. Do you really think that poet's industrious manuscripts were any good? The chewing and the sofa, that was good. But you professional women will never understand that. "
The swarthy little one laughs.
And with good reason. While all the men of the time tragically collide with their filmic doubles, the swarthy typist and her colleague Minnie Tipp are united by serene harmony. Or, in more technical terms: by posi- tive feedback. One woman goes to her beloved movies starring the other; the plan was to make a movie featuring both. The logic of representation would have been perfect: one and the same woman spends her days in the real of work time and the symbolic of text processing, and her nights in a technified mirror stage. Which is exactly how Braune's three stenotypists described it.
? ? ------------------------u--
-------------------v--------
- OW - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - M - - - - - - - -
Demeny speaks "Je VOllS ai-me" into the chronophotograph.
- - - ME - -
? 180 Film
Against this film-within-a-film-within-a-film, this endless folding of women and media, literature does not have a chance. Both men, the smil- ing friend and his double, do not move beyond pens and poetry. Subse- quently, they are left with an old-fashioned mirror stage in the shape of ephemeral and unpublished authorship. You stare at empty white paper, since Mallarme the background of all words, and fight with the sterility Mallarme turned into a poem,209 until one lone verse finds its way onto the paper. But not even the elementary consolation afforded by mirrors that magically turn bodies into wholes and unconscious literates into self- assured authors is of lasting value. The verse does not carry on into the next; a hand tears up its handwriting, simply because it cannot do it with the body itself.
Poets of 19 1 3 act in old-fashioned ways. One "stands in front of the mirror, and recites the verse, and admires himself. " Twenty-two years af- ter Demeny had replaced forgetful mirrors with trace detection and snap- shots of speech, words are still lost: to declamations and torn paper. The media revenge follows swiftly. When this particular poet upgrades his mirror declamations to typed dictations, the most oral sentence of all falls into technological storage and at the speaker's feet. And to top it off, the typed "Miss, I love you! " appears on screen, published for the benefit of all of Minnie Tipp's doubles.
Such is the solidarity of film and typewriter, Demeny and Miss Tipp. Every word they hear, read, speak, or type breaks down (as the stenotyp- ists put it) into its letters. The typist turns a poetic and erotically charged flow of speech, the manifest secret of German literature, into twelve let- ters, four empty spaces, and two punctuation marks, all of which (as her correspondence makes clear) come with a price. Just as he had done with "Vi-ve la Fran-ce! " Demeny turns this declaration of love into twenty- millisecond shots of his empty and media-infatuated mouth. He positions himself in front of a camera (instead of the mirror), declaims the verse of all verses, and becomes a test subject (instead of an admired author). "JE VOUS AI-ME. "
To the poetic intellect, the unassuming media link of silent film and typewriter, image flow and intertitles, was nothing short of desecration. In order to save the Soul ofthe Film, Bloem decreed: "Emotion does not reside in the titles; it is not to be spoken, it is to be embodied mimically. Yet there are directors who do not shy away from blaring out ' I love you' (the most fiery and tender possibility of this art) in a title. "21o
A criticism that completely missed the technological, experimental, and social necessity of such prostitution. To begin with, love consists in
? ? ? ? Filmstrip: from snake to typist, I929.
r82 Film
words; therefore, silent films have to transfer them directly from type- script to screen. In addition, Demeny's experiment delivered the grand kaleidoscope of human speech, as Villiers would have put it, to the deaf and dumb, and Minnie Tipp even delivered it to writers. The decomposi- tion and filtering of love ensured that her new customer would rise to the particular work ethic that characterizes "professional women" and marks within that group a necessary, though not always sufficient, distinction between typists and whores. 211 With the result that a man, too, grasped the secular difference between poet and writer. From handwriting to typed dictation, from the loneliness in front of mirrors to the sexual divi- sion of labor and best-selling poetry: as a "moral film," "Lyre and Type- writer" shows "how an industrious woman can educate a man. " Or how, in a fine animated sequence, the old snake becomes the Eve of the twen- tieth century.
"There are more women working at typing than at anything else. "212 Film, the great media self-advertisement, has reached its target group and its happy ending.
? ? TYPE WRITER
? "Typewriter" is ambiguous. The word meant both typing machine and female typist: in the United States, a source of countless cartoons. (Typed letter of a bankrupt businessman to his wife: "Dear Blanche, I have sold all my office furniture, chairs, desks, etc. etc.
, and I am writing this letter under difficulties with my typewriter on my lap. ")1 But the convergence of a profession, a machine, and a sex speaks the truth. Bermann's word "stenotypist" gradually came to require footnotes explaining that since 1885, it has referred to women who have completed Ferdinand Schrey's combined training program in the Hammond typewriter and stenography. In the case of "typewriter," by contrast, everyday language for once matches statistics (see the accompanying table).
The table unfortunately does not distinguish between stenographic handwriting and Remington's typewriting. Nevertheless, it is clear that the statistical explosion begins in 1 8 8 1 , with the record sales of the Rem- ington II. Although the number of men dwindles like a bell curve, the number of female typists increases almost with the elegance of an expo- nential function. As a consequence, it might be possible-as we approach the threshold of infinity-to forecast the year in which typist and woman converge. Minnie Tipp will have been Eve.
An innocuous device, "an 'intermediate' thing, between a tool and a machine," "almost quotidian and hence unnoticed,"2 has made history. The typewriter cannot conjure up anything imaginary, as can cinema; it cannot simulate the real, as can sound recording; it only inverts the gender of writing. In so doing, however, it inverts the material basis of literature.
The monopoly of script in serial data processing was a privilege of men. Because orders and poems were processed through the same chan- nel, security protocols evolved. Even though more and more women were
? ? ? ? 1 84 Typewriter
Stenographers and Typists in the United States by Sex, 1 8 70-1930
Women as a percentage
Year Total Men Women oftotal
1870 147 7 4-5% 1880 5,000 3,000 2,000 40. 0 I890 33,400 I2,IOO 2I,300 63. 8 I900 II2,600 26,200 86,400 76? 7 19IO 326,700 53,400 263,300 80. 6 I920 6I5,1Oo 50,400 564,700 9I. 8 I930 8II,200 36,100 775,100
S O U R C E : U. S. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States, I940: Population (1943), as cited in Davies 1974, ro.
taught letters in the wake of general educational reform, being able to read was not the same as being allowed to write. Prior to the invention of the typewriter, all poets, secretaries, and typesetters were of the same sex. As late as 1 8 5 9 , when the solidarity of American women's unions created positions for female typesetters, their male colleagues on the presses boycotted the printing of unmanly type fonts. 3 Only the Civil War of 1 861-64-that revolutionary media network of telegraph cables and par- allel train tracks4-opened the bureaucracy of government, of mail and stenography, to writing women; their numbers, of course, were as yet too small to register statistically.
The Gutenberg Galaxy was thus a sexually closed feedback loop. Even though Germanists are fundamentally oblivious to it, it controlled nothing less than German literature. Unrecognized geniuses swung the
quill themselves, whereas national poets had personal secretaries, as in the case of Goethe, John, Schuchardt, Eckermann, Riemer, and Geist. It is precisely this media network-namely, that the Ur-author can bring forth his spirit in Eckermann-that Professor Pschorr had been able to prove phonographically in Goethe's study. s One's own or dictated script was processed by male typesetters, binders, publishers, and so on, in order fi- nally to reach in print the girls for whom Goethe wrote. As Goethe put it in conversation with Riemer (who of course recorded it), "he conceives of the Ideal in terms of female form or the form of Woman. What a man is, he didn't know. "6
Women could and had to remain an ideal abstraction, like Faust's Gretchen, as long as the materialities of writing were the jobs of men, far
? ? ? 154
95. 6
186 Typewriter
too close for them to be aware of it. One Gretchen inspired the work; her many sisters were allowed to consume it through their identification with her. "Otherwise," that is, without sales and female readers, "things would be bad" for him, the "author," Friedrich Schlegel wrote to his lover. 7 But the honor of having a manuscript appear in print under the au- thor's proper name was barred to women, if not factually then at least media-technologically: the proper name at the head of their verse, novels, and dramas almost always has been a male pseudonym.
If only because of that, an omnipresent metaphor equated women with the white sheet of nature or virginity onto which a very male stylus could then inscribe the glory of its authorship. No wonder that psycho- analysis discovered during its clean-up operation that in dreams, "pencils, pen-holders, . . . and other instruments are undoubted male sexual sym- bols. "8 It only retrieved a deeply embedded metaphysics of handwriting.
And consequently did not disclose any unconscious secrets, either. For that, the "symbols" of man and woman were too closely attached to the monopoly of writing. When, in 1889, the editors of the illustrated journal Yom Pels zum Meer (as usual) made a pitch for Hammond type- writers and Schrey, their general representative, the "writer of these lines" was thrilled by a self-study: "Already after a couple of weeks he reached a speed of 125 letters per minute. " Only two things were "lost" during this mechanization of writing: first, "the intimacy of handwritten expres- sion, which nobody is willing to relinquish voluntarily, particularly in per- sonal correspondence" ; and second, a centerpiece of occidental symbolic systems:
Machines everywhere, wherever one looks! A substitute for numerous types of la- bor, which man would otherwise do with his industrious hand, and what econ- omy of exertion and time, and what advantages in terms of flawlessness and reg- ularity of work. It was only natural that after the engineer had deprived woman's tender hand of the actual symbol of female industriousness, one of his colleagues hit upon the idea of replacing the quill, the actual symbol of male intellectual ac- tivity, with a machine. 9
The literal meaning of text is tissue. Therefore, prior to their indus- trialization the two sexes occupied strictly symmetrical roles: women, with the symbol of female industriousness in their hands, wove tissues; men, with the symbol of male intellectual activity in their hands, wove tis- sues of a different sort called text. Here, the stylus as singular needle- point, there, the many female readers as fabric onto which it wrote.
Industrialization simultaneously nullified handwriting and hand-
Typewriter 1 8 7
based work. Not coincidentally, it was William K . Jenne, the head of the sewing-machine subdivision of Remington & Son, who in 1874 devel- oped Sholes's prototype into a mass-producible "Type-Writer. " 10 Not co- incidentally as well, early competing models came from the Domestic Sewing Machine Co. , the Meteor Saxon Knitting-Machine Factory, or Seidel & NaumannY Bipolar sexual differentiation, with its defining symbols, disappeared on industrial assembly lines. Two symbols do not survive their replacement by machines, that is, their implementation in the real. When men are deprived of the quill and women of the needle, all hands are up for grabs-as employable as employees. Typescript amounts to the desexualization of writing, sacrificing its metaphysics and turning it into word processing.
A transvaluation of all values, even if it arrived on pigeon toes, as Nietzsche would have it, or on "high-buttoned shoes" (in the words of the most amusing chronicler of the typewriter). 12 To mechanize writing, our culture had to redefine its values or (as the first German monograph on the typewriter put it, in anticipation of Foucault) "create a wholly new order of things. "13 The work of ingenious tinkerers was far from achiev- ing that. In 1714 Henry Mill, an engineer with the New River Water Co. in London, received his inconsequential British patent (no. 395) "for 'a machine or artificial method, to print letters continuously one after an- other while writing, in a fashion so clean and precise that they are indis- tinguishable from the printing of letters. '" 14 The precision of this concept or premise, namely, to introduce Gutenberg'S reproductive technology into textual production, was contradicted by the vagueness of the patent's phrasing. The work of Kempelen, the engineer of phonographs, to design an appropriate writing instrument for a blind duchess was similarly in- consequential. Under the discursive conditions of the age of Goethe, the term "writing-machine" was bound to remain a non-term, as was proven rather involuntarily by another Viennese.
In 1823, the physician C. L. Muller published a treatise entitled Newly Invented Writing-Machine, with Which Everybody Can Write, Without Light, in Every Language, and Regardless of One's Handwrit- ing; Generate Essays and Bills; the Blind, Too, Can, Unlike with Previous Writing Tablets, Write Not Only with Greater Ease but Even Read Their Own Writing Afterward. What Muller meant and introduced was a me- chanical contraption that, its name notwithstanding, only enabled the blind to guide their hands across paper while writing. The mapping of the page and the concentration of ink even afforded them the possibility of rereading their writing through touch. For Muller could "not deny" an
? ? 1 8 8 Typewriter
authorial narcissism that prompts "all those so inclined," like Minnie Tipp's poet, "to reread what he has written. "IS Significantly enough, the invention was aimed primarily at educated but unfortunately blind fa- thers for the purpose of illuminating their morally blind sons with letters and epistolary truths. "How often would a man of good standing write a few lines to save a lost estate or the welfare of whole families, how often would the handwritten letter of a father steer a son back on the right track, if such men could, without restraint and prompting, write in such a way as if they had been endowed with vision. "16
The "writing-machine," in that sense, only brought to light the rules regulating discourses during the age of Goethe: authority and authorship, handwriting and rereading, the narcissism of creation and reader obedi- ence. The device for "everybody" forgot women.
Mechanical storage technologies for writing, images, and sound could only be developed following the collapse of this system. The hard science of physiology did away with the psychological conception that guaranteed humans that they could find their souls through handwriting and rereading. The "I think, " which since Kant was supposed to accom- pany all of one's representations, presumably only accompanied one's readings. It became obsolete as soon as body and soul advanced to be- come obj ects of scientific experiments. The unity of apperception disinte- grated into a large number of subroutines, which, as such, physiologists could localize in different centers of the brain and engineers could recon- struct in multiple machines. Which is what the "spirit"-the unsimulable center of "man"-denied by its very definition.
Psychophysics and psychotechnology converted into empirical re- search programs Nietzsche's philosophical and scandalous surmise that "humans are perhaps only thinking, writing, and speaking machines. " Dysfunctional Speech (Die Storungen der Sprache), following KuRmaul's insight or monograph of 1881, could only be cleared up under the premise that speech has nothing to do with the "I think":
One can conceive o f language in its initial development as a conditioned reflex. It is the character of reflected intentionality that distinguishes conditioned from in- born movements of expression, their greater ability to adapt, in appropriate form and degree, to the intended purpose. Because of this quality, we are not quite pre- pared to see in them anything but the play of mechanical circuits acquired through exercise. And yet, pantomime, the spoken word, and the written word are nothing but the products of internal, self-regulating mechanisms that are channeled and coordinated through emotions and conceptions, just as one can op- erate a sewing, typing, or speaking machine without knowing its mechanismY
Typewriter r89
When, from the point of view of brain physiology, language works as a feedback loop of mechanical relays, the construction of typewriters is only a matter of course. Nature, the most pitiless experimenter, paralyzes certain parts of the brain through strokes and bullet wounds to the head; research (since the Battle of Solferino in r859) is only required to mea- sure the resulting interferences in order to distinguish the distinct subrou- tines of speech in anatomically precise ways. Sensory aphasia (while hear- ing), dyslexia (while reading), expressive aphasia (while speaking), agraphia (while writing) bring forth machines in the brain. KufSmaul's "sound board," with its "cortical sound keys," 18 virtually conjures up the rods and levers of old Remingtons.
Disabilities or deformations therefore suggest not only Muller's "sweet hope" to be "of use to his fellow humans" and "to alleviate the suffering of many unfortunates. " 19 Blindness and deafness, precisely when they affect either speech or writing, yield what would otherwise be beyond reach: information on the human information machine. Where- upon its replacement by mechanics can begin. Knie, Beach, Thurber, MaI- ling Hansen, Ravizza: they all constructed their early typewriters for the blind and/or the deaf. The Frenchmen Foucauld and Pierre even con- structed them for the blind as blind people themselves. 20 Interest in au- thorship, or in the possibility of reading one's unconscious outpourings in
the mirror, disappeared completely.
What the typewriters for the blind in mid century were still missing
was speed. But ever since r 8 ro, the introduction of the rotary press and continuous form into the printing trade made typesetting machines desir- able in which ( " as with a piano " ) "the various types fall, through a touch of the keys, into place almost as quickly as one speaks. "21 And when Samuel Morse patented his electric cable telegraph in r 840, he introduced a communications technology whose speed of light far outpaced all forms of manual communication. "The average speed, which can be sustained for hours by hand, is about 20-25 words per minute. "22 Consequently, not long thereafter "a whole generation of telegraph operators had ap- peared who could understand code much faster than they could write it down. Stenographers found themselves in a similar fix. They could take their notations as quickly as a man could speak, and yet they couldn't transcribe faster than at a snail's pace. "23
What therefore became part of the wish list were writing instruments that could coincide with the operating speed of nervous pathways. Since aphasia researchers had figured out the number of milliseconds it takes for a letter to travel from the eye to the hand muscles via the brain's read-
1 9 0
Typewriter
t&?
I Ohr
Schematic diagram of the language subsite in the brain. A denotes the center for sound images, B, the center for visual images.
ing and writing centers, the equation of cerebral circuits with telegraphic dispatches had become a physiological standard. 24 When "the average la- tency, that is, the time between the stimulus and the pushing of the button takes about 250 milliseconds," and when, furthermore, "the typing of a given output resembles a flying projectile" because "it only needs a start- ing signal" and "then goes all by itself"25-then, the typewriter as a mass-produced article was bound to roll automatically off the production lines of a gun manufacturer.
Unconfirmed rumors have suggested that Sholes sold the Remington company a patent that he had stolen from the poor Tyrolean Peter Mit- terhofer during his studies at the Royal and Imperial Polytechnical Insti- tute in Vienna. 26 But plagiarism, or, in modern terms, the transfer of tech- nology, is of little importance in the face of circumstances. Rumor has it that, in reference to Mitterhofer's request for money, Emperor Franz Joseph allegedly remarked to his cabinet that the invention of superior war strategies would be more appropriate than that of useless typewrit- ers. Remington & Son were above such pseudo-alternatives: they trans- ferred "the standardization of the component parts of weapons, which had been widely practiced since the Napoleonic Wars," to those of civil writing instruments. 27 (Weapons manufacturers such as Mauser, Manu- facture d'Armes de Paris, and the German Weapons and Ammunitions Factory [DWF] were to follow suit. )
The technologies of typewriting and sound recording are by-products of the American Civil War. Edison, who was a young telegrapher during the war, developed his phonograph in an attempt to improve the process- ing speed of the Morse telegraph beyond human limitations. Remington
? ? ? Anton Giulio Bragaglia and Arturo Bragaglia, Datillografa, 19 1 1 .
began the serial production o f Sholes's typewriter models in September I874 simply because "after the Civil War boom things had been on the slow side," and they had "more capacity than they were using. "28
The typewriter became a discursive machine-gun. A technology whose basic action not coincidentally consists of strikes and triggers proceeds in automated and discrete steps, as does ammunitions transport in a revolver and a machine-gun, or celluloid transport in a film projector. "The pen was once mightier than the sword," Otto Burghagen, the first monogra- pher of the typewriter, writes in I 89 8 , " but where the typewriter rules," he continues, "Krupp's cannons must remain silent! "29 Burghagen is con- tradicted, however, by his own deliberations on "the significant savings of time, which endear the machine to the merchant. With its help one can complete office work in a third of the time it would take with the pen, for with each strike of a key the machine produces a complete letter, while the pen has to undergo about five strokes in order to produce a letter. . . . In the time it takes the pen to put a dot on the "i" or to make the "u" sign, the machine produces two complete letters. The striking of the keys follows in succession with great speed, especially when one writes with all fingers; then, one can count five to ten keyboard hits per second! "30 This is the epic song of a firepower whose German record as of August I98 5 stands at "773 letters per minute for thirty minutes of high-speed typing. "31
Jean Cocteau, who produced a corresponding work for each of the late-nineteenth-century media-La voix humaine for the acoustics of the
Typewriter I9 I
? ? 1 9 2 Typewriter
telephone, the script for Orphee for mirrors, doppelgangers, cinematic ef- fects, and "for car radios, secret codes, and short-wave signals"32_m lde the typewriter into the titular hero of a play in 1941. The reason was there in American idiom: for three acts, a detective chases an unknown woman who has been tormenting her community with anonymous, type- written letters, going by the title "the typewriter. "33 For three acts, he "imagines the culprit at work at her typewriter, aiming and operating her machine gun. "34 Typewriters are simply "fast," not just "like Jazz" (as Cendrars put it) but also like rapid-fire weapons. In her confession, Cocteau's anonymous letter-writer puts it this way: "I wanted to attack the whole city. All the hypocritical happiness, the hypocritical piety, the hypocritical luxury, the whole lying, egotistical, avaricious, untouchable bourgeoisie. I wanted to stir that muck, attack and reveal it. It was like a hoax! Without accounting for myself, I chose the dirtiest and cheapest of all weapons, the typewriter. "35
About which the playwright, in his preface of 1941, only remarked that he had "portrayed the terrible feudal province" of France "prior to the debacle. "36 As innocuous as they were, typewriters could still provide cover for the work of Guderian's submachine guns and tank divisions. And indeed: whereas the Army High Command supplied its war photog- raphers with "Arriflex hand-held cameras, Askania Z-tripod cameras, [and] special-assignment vehicles" and its recording specialists with "ar- mored vehicles and tanks for radio broadcasts " and with magnetophones,
"war reporters were equipped solely with typewriters, and specifically, most often with commercially available traveling typewriters. "37 Modesty of literature under conditions of high technology.
That is precisely how Remington began production. The Model I hardly sold, even though or precisely because one no less than Mark Twain purchased a Remington in 1874. He sent his novel Tom Sawyer, the first typescript in literary history, to his publisher, and sent a para- doxical letter of support to the typewriter manufacturer:
GENTLEMEN : PLEASE DO NOT USE MY NAME IN ANY WAY , PLEASE DO NOT EVEN DIVULGE THE FACT THAT I OWN A MACHINE , I HAVE ENTIRELY STOPPED USING THE TYPE- WRITER, FOR THE REASON THAT I NEVER COULD WRITE A LETTER WITH IT TO ANYBODY WITHOUT RECE IVING A
REQUEST BY RETURN MAIL THAT I WOULD NOT ONLY DESCRIBE THE MACHINE BUT STATE WHAT PROGRESS I HAD MADE IN THE USE OF IT, ETC. , ETC. I DON'T LIKE TO WRITE
? Typewriter 1 9 3
LETTERS, AND SO I DON'T WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW THAT I OWN THIS CURIOSITY BREEDING LITTLE JOKER.
YOURS TRULY , SAML L. CLEMENS. 38
The Model II of 1 8 7 8 , which allowed the switch from lower to upper case for a price of $125, initially did not fare much better. But after a slow start of 146 sales per year there came a rise that approximated a global snowball effect. 39 For in 1 8 8 1 , the marketing strategists of Wyck- off, Seamans, and Benedict made a discovery: they recognized the fasci- nation their unmarketable machine held for the battalions of unemployed women. When Lillian Sholes, as "presumably" the "first type-writer" in history,40 sat and posed in front of her father's prototype in 1 872, female typists came into existence for purposes of demonstration, but as a pro- fession and career, the stenotypist had yet to come. That was changed by the central branch of the Young Women's Christian Association in New York City, which trained eight young women in 188I to become typists and immediately received hundreds of inquiries (at $ro a week) from the corporate world. 41 A feedback loop was created connecting recruitment, training, supply, demand, new recruitment, and so on-first in the United States, and shortly thereafter through Christian women's associations in Europe. 42
Thus evolved the exponential function of female secretaries and the bell curve of male secretaries. Ironically enough, the clerks, office helpers, and poet-apprentices of the nineteenth century, who were exclusively male, had invested so much pride in their laboriously trained handwrit- ing as to overlook Remington's innovation for seven years. The continu- ous and coherent flow of ink, that material substrate of all middle-class in-dividuals and indivisibilities, made them blind to a historical chance. Writing as keystrokes, spacing, and the automatics of discrete block let- ters bypassed a whole system of education. Hence sexual innovation fol- lowed technological innovation almost immediately. Without resistance men cleared the field "where competition is as fierce as nowhere else. "43 Women reversed the handicap of their education, turning it into a "so- called emancipation"44 that, all proletarian fascination notwithstanding, wears the white collar of the employee of discourse.
In 1 8 5 3 , Hessian school regulations described knowledge of writing and arithmetic as useful for girls but not indispensable. 45 And women "without any talent for arithmetic, with terrible handwriting, with a
? I 9 4 Typewriter
Sholes's daughter at the Remington, 1 872.
highly deficient knowledge of orthography and mathematics" promptly started "in droves" to "work on the typewriter"-so says a woman who in I902 described the job of a female clerk "as building a church tower in the air because one had forgotten the foundations. "46
But in the age of information, foundations no longer count. The fact that "the female clerk could all-too-easily degrade into a mere type- writer"47 made her an asset. From the working class, the middle class, and the bourgeoisie, out of ambition, economic hardship, or the pure de- sire for emancipation48 emerged millions of secretaries. It was precisely their marginal position in the power system of script that forced women to develop their manual dexterity, which surpassed the prideful hand- writing aesthetics of male secretaries in the media system. Two German economists noted it in I 89 5 :
Today, the typist has evolved into a kind of type: she is generally very high in de- mand and is the ruling queen in this domain not only in America but in Germany as well. It may come as a surprise to find a practical use for what has become a veritable plague across the country, namely, piano lessons for young girls: the re-
? ? Typewriter 1 9 5
sultant dexterity is very useful for the operation of the typewriter. Rapid typing on it can be achieved only through the dexterous use of all fingers. If this profes- sion is not yet as lucrative in Germany as it is in America, it is due to the infiltra- tion of elements who perform the job of typist mechanically, without any addi- tional skills. 49
Edison's mechanical storage of sound made obsolete the piano key- board as the central storage device for music's scriptive logic; women were no longer asked to endow lyrical letters with a singable, ersatz sen- suality; the national plague of their dexterity could finally find a practical use on typewriter keyboards (derived from the piano). And since power after the print monopoly's collapse was diverted to cable and radio, to the recording of traces and electrical engineering, outdated security pro- tocols were dropped as well: women were allowed to reign over text pro- cessing all by themselves. Since then, "discourse has been secondary" and desexualized. 50
A certain Spinner, treasurer of the United States and a friend of Philo Remington, gave an example of this change. The attrition of males dur- ing the Civil War forced him to hire 300 women and to make the state- ment, "that I authorized the hiring ofwomen for positions in government satisfies me more than all the other achievements in my life. "51
One country after another opened the mail and wireless services as well as the railroad to typists.
