As the first mechanized philosopher,
Nietzsche
was also the last.
Kittler-Gramophone-Film-Typewriter
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. Technological media needed technological (or hysterical) media. In the German Reich, this was initially understood only by Undersecretary of the Interior and Major General von Budde, chief of the railroad division within the Great General Staff, who dictated flawless orders to his secretaries every day and who committed subordi- nate agencies to "an increased appropriation of typewriters. "52 But the German dream of men as civil servants and women as mothers weighed heavily: what had to be created for girls involved in typing, telegraphing, and telephoning was a special, temporary, civil-servant status that was immediately revoked upon marriage. 53 Understood that way, communi- cations technology amounted to "the disintegration of the old family structure"54 and "denied" its female machine operators "a return to any role in the family. "55
Global forms of disintegration put an end to the German dream. In 19 1 7, when the Army High Command built up its arsenal to prepare for the Ludendorff offensive and screened the civil-service corps for battle readiness, in a letter Hindenburg established the "principle" that, regard- less of sex, "whosoever does not work, shall not eat. " One year later, the Zeitschrift fur weibliche Handelsgehilfen (Journal for female clerks) re-
? 1 9 6 Typewriter
? ? Jan Tschichold writing, 1948. " . . . to substitute the innervation of guiding fingers for the continuous movement of the hand" (Benjamin).
ported full compliance. "The offices of all manufacturers central to the war effort have been occupied with female workers; they have conquered even the orderly rooms of the army administration; shift work was al- ways understaffed, and there was a constant demand for them. They were absorbed in large quantities by the occupied territories; domestic admin- istrative agencies of all kinds hired them in large numbers, let alone com-
? Olivetti M 2 0 . Poster by Piramo, Italy, 1920.
? I 9 8 Typewriter
panies in the private sector central to the war effort. "56 "A state-it is," Heidegger observed in I93 5 . But only in order to doubt whether this " be- ing" consists in the "fact that the police arrest a suspect, or so-and-so- many typewriters are clattering in a government building, taking down the words of ministers and state secretaries. "57
Only his winter semester in Stalingrad revealed to the thinker-much to the surprise of his listeners-the relationship among Being, Man, and typewriter.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER ON THE HAND AND THE TYPEWRITER ( I942-43 )
Man himself acts [handelt] through the hand [Hand]; for the hand is, to- gether with the word, the essential distinction of man. Only a being which, like man, "has" the word (1-1'680<;", ",oY0';;), can and must "have" "the hand. " Through the hand occur both prayer and murder, greeting and thanks, oath and signal, and also the "work" of the hand, the "hand-work," and the tool. The handshake seals the covenant. The hand brings about the "work" of destruction. The hand exists as hand only where there is disclosure and concealment. No animal has a hand, and a hand never originates from a paw or a claw or talon. Even the hand of one in desperation (it least of all) is never a talon, with which a person clutches wildly. The hand sprang forth only out of the word and together with the word. Man does not "have" hands, but the hand holds the essence of man, because the word as the es- sential realm of the hand is the ground of the essence of man. The word as what is inscribed and what appears to the regard is the written word, i. e. , script. And the word as script is handwriting.
It is not accidental that modern man writes "with" the typewriter and "dictates" [diktiert] (the same word as "poetize" [dichten]) "into" a ma- chine. This "history" of the kinds of writing is one of the main reasons for the increasing destruction of the word. The latter no longer comes and goes by means of the writing hand, the properly acting hand, but by means of the mechanical forces it releases. The typewriter tears writing from the essential realm of the hand, i. e. , the realm of the word. The word itself turns into something "typed. " Where typewriting, on the contrary, is only a transcrip- tion and serves to preserve the writing, or turns into print something al- ready written, there it has a proper, though limited, significance. In the time
? ? Typewriter 1 9 9
of the first dominance of the typewriter, a letter written on this machine still stood for a breach of good manners. Today, a handwritten letter is an anti- quated and undesired thing; it disturbs speed reading. Mechanical writing deprives the hand of its rank in the realm of the written word and degrades the word to a means of communication. In addition, mechanical writing provides this "advantage," that it conceals the handwriting and thereby the character. The typewriter makes everyone look the same. . . .
Therefore, when writing was withdrawn from the origin of its essence, i. e. , from the hand, and was transferred to the machine, a transformation occurred in the relation of Being to man. It is of little importance for this transformation how many people actually use the typewriter and whether there are some who shun it. It is no accident that the invention of the print- ing press coincides with the inception of the modern period. The word-signs become type, and the writing stroke disappears. The type is "set," the set becomes "pressed. " This mechanism of setting and pressing and "printing" is the preliminary form of the typewriter. In the typewriter we find the ir-
ruption of the mechanism in the realm of the word. The typewriter leads again to the typesetting machine. The press becomes the rotary press. In ro- tation, the triumph of the machine comes to the fore. Indeed, at first, book printing and then machine type offer advantages and conveniences, and these then unwittingly steer preferences and needs to this kind of written communication. The typewriter veils the essence of writing and of the script. It withdraws from man the essential rank of the hand, without man's experiencing this withdrawal appropriately and recognizing that it has transformed the relation of Being to his essence.
The typewriter is a signless cloud, i. e. , a withdrawing concealment in the midst of its very obtrusiveness, and through it the relation of Being to man is transformed. It is in fact signless, not showing itself as to its essence; perhaps that is why most of you, as is proven to me by your reaction, though well intended, have not grasped what I have been trying to say.
I have not been presenting a disquisition on the typewriter itself, re- garding which it could justifiably be asked what in the world that has to do with Parmenides. My theme was the modern relation (transformed by the typewriter) of the hand to writing, i. e. , to the word, i. e. , to the unconcealed- ness of Being. A meditation on unconcealedness and on Being does not merely have something to do with the didactic poem of Parmenides, it has everything to do with it. In the typewriter the machine appears, i. e. , tech- nology appears, in an almost quotidian and hence unnoticed and hence sign- less relation to writing, i. e. , to the word, i. e. , to the distinguishing essence of man. A more penetrating consideration would have to recognize here that
200 Typewriter
the typewriter is not really a machine in the strict sense of machine technol- ogy, but is an "intermediate" thing, between a tool and a machine, a mecha- nism. Its production, however, is conditioned by machine technology.
This "machine," operated in the closest vicinity to the word, is in use; it imposes its own use. Even if we do not actually operate this machine, it de- mands that we regard it if only to renounce and avoid it. This situation is constantly repeated everywhere, in all relations of modern man to technol- ogy. Technology is entrenched in our history. 58
" Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts, " Nietzsche wrote. 59 "Technology is entrenched in our history," Heidegger said. But the one wrote the sentence about the typewriter on a typewriter, the other de- scribed (in a magnificent old German hand) typewriters per se. That is why it was Nietzsche who initiated the transvaluation of all values with his philosophically scandalous sentence about media technology. In r882, human beings, their thoughts, and their authorship respectively were re- placed by two sexes, the text, and blind writing equipment.
As the first mechanized philosopher, Nietzsche was also the last. Typescript, accord- ing to Klapheck's painting, was called The Will to Power.
Nietzsche suffered from extreme myopia, anisocoria, and migraines (to say nothing of his rumored progressive paralysis). An eye doctor in Frankfurt attested that Nietzsche's "right eye could only perceive mis- shapen and distorted images" as well as "letters that were virtually be- yond recognition," whereas the left, "despite its myopia," was in r877 still capable of "registering normal images. " Nietzsche's headaches there- fore appeared to be "a secondary symptom,"60 and his attempts to phi- losophize with a hammer the natural consequence of "an increased stim- ulation of the site in the prefrontal wall of the third ventricle responsible for aggression. "61 Thinkers of the founding age of media naturally did not only turn from philosophy to physiology in theory; their central ner- vous system always preceded them.
Nietzsche himself successively described his condition as quarter blindness, half-blindness, three-quarter blindness (it was for others to suggest mental derangement, the next step in this mathematical se- quence). 62 Reading letters (or musical notes) distorted beyond recognition became painful after twenty minutes, as did writing. Otherwise, Nietz- sche would not have attributed his "telegram style,"63 which he developed
? ? ? Konrad Klapheck, The Will to Power, 1959. (Reproduced courtesy of the artist)
while writing the suggestively titled The Wanderer and His Shadow, to his eye pain. To direct the blindness of this shadow, he had been planning to purchase a typewriter as early as r879, the so-called "year of blind- ness. "64 It happened in r881. Nietzsche got "in touch with its inventor, a Dane from Copenhagen. "65 "My dear Sister, I know Hansen's machine quite well, Mr. Hansen has written to me twice and sent me samples, drawings, and assessments of professors from Copenhagen about it. This is the one I want (not the American one, which is too heavy). "66
Since our writing tools also work on our thoughts, Nietzsche's choice followed strict, technical data. En route between Engadine and the Riv- iera, he decided first for a traveling typewriter and second as the cripple that he was. At a time when "only very few owned a typewriter, when
Typewriter 20r
? 2 0 2 Typewriter
there were no sales representatives [in Germany] and machines were available only under the table,"67 a single man demonstrated a knowledge of engineering. (With the result that American historians of the typewriter elide Nietzsche and Hansen. )68
Hans Rasmus Johann Malling Hansen ( r 83 5-90), pastor and head of the royal D? vstummeinstitut in Copenhagen,69 developed his skrivekugle/ writing ball / sphere ecrivante out of the observation that his deaf-mute patients' sign language was faster than handwriting. The machine "did not take into account the needs of business"7o but rather was meant to compensate for physiological deficiencies and to increase writing speed
(which prompted the Nordic Telegraphy Co. to use "a number of writing balls for the transfer of incoming telegrams"). 71 Fifty-four concentrically arranged key rods (no levers as yet) imprinted capital letters, numbers, and signs with a color ribbon onto a relatively small sheet of paper that was fastened cylindrically. According to Burghagen, this semispheric arrangement of the keys had the advantage of allowing "the blind, for whom this writing ball was primarily designed, to learn writing on it in a surprisingly short time. On the surface of a sphere each position is com- pletely identifiable by its relative location. . . . It is therefore possible to be guided solely by one's sense of touch, which would be much more diffi- cult in the case of flat keyboards. "72 That is precisely how it could have been stated in the assessments of professors from Copenhagen for a half- blind ex-professor.
In r 8 6 5 Malling Hansen received his patent, in r 8 67 he started serial production of his typewriter, in r 8 7 2 the Germans (and Nietzsche ? ) learned o f it from the Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung. 73 Finally, i n r 8 8 2 the Copenhagen printing company of C. Ferslew combined typing balls and women-as a medium to offset the nuisance that "their female typeset- ters were significantly more preoccupied with the decoding of handwrit- ten texts than with the actual setting of text. " 74 McLuhan's law that the ? typewriter causes "an entirely new attitude to the written and printed word" because it "fuses composition and publication"75 was realized for the first time. (Today, when handwritten publisher's manuscripts are rar- ities, "the entire printing industry, via the Linotype, depend[s] upon the typewriter. " ) 76
In the same year and for the same reasons, Nietzsche decided to buy. For 375 Reichsmarks (shipping not included)77 even a half-blind writer chased by publishers was able to produce "documents as beautiful and standardized as print. "78 "After a week" of typewriting practice, Nietz- sche wrote, "the eyes no longer have to do their work":79 ecriture au-
? ? ? Typewriter 2 0 3 tomatique had been invented, the shadow of the wanderer incarnated. In
March r 8 8 2, the Berliner Tageblatt reported:
The well-known philosopher and writer [sic] Friedrich Nietzsche, whose failing eyesight made it necessary for him to renounce his professorship in Basel three years ago, currently lives in Genoa and-excepting the progression of his afflic- tion to the point of complete blindness-feels better than ever. With the help of a typewriter he has resumed his writing activities, and we can hence expect a book along the lines of his last ones. It is widely known that his new work stands in marked contrast to his first, significant writings. 80
Indeed: Nietzsche, as proud of the publication of his mechanization as any philosopher,81 changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style. That is precisely what is meant by the sentence that our writing tools are also working on our thoughts. Malling Hansen's writing ball, with its operating difficulties, made Nietzsche into a laconic. "The well-known philosopher and writer" shed his first attribute in order to merge with his second. If scholarship and thinking, especially toward the end of the nineteenth century, were allowed or made possible only after extensive reading, then it was blind- ness and blindness alone that "delivered" them from "the book. "82
Good news from Nietzsche that coincided with all the early type- writer models. None of the models prior to Underwood's great innovation of r897 allowed immediate visual control over the output. In order to read the typed text, one had to lift shutters on the Remington model, whereas with Malling Hansen's-notwithstanding other claims83-the semicircular arrangement of the keys itself prevented a view of the paper. But even Underwood's innovation did not change the fact that typewrit- ing can and must remain a blind activity. In the precise engineering lingo of Angelo Beyerlen, the royal stenographer of Wiirttemberg and the first typewriter dealer of the Reich: "In writing by hand, the eye must con- stantly watch the written line and only that. It must attend to the creation of each sign, must measure, direct, and, in short, guide the hand through each movement. " A media-technological basis of classical authorship that typewriting simply liquidates: "By contrast, after one briefly presses down on a key, the typewriter creates in the proper position on the paper a com- plete letter, which is not only untouched by the writer's hand but also lo- cated in a place entirely apart from where the hands work. " With Under- wood's models, too, "the spot where the next sign to be written occurs" is "precisely what . . . cannot be seen. "84 After a fraction of a second, the act of writing stops being an act of reading that is produced by the grace
204 Typewriter
? Mailing Hansen, Writing Ball, 1 8 67, a model of Nietzsche's typewriter. " Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts" (letter to Peter Gast). (Repro- . duced courtesy of the Stiftung Weimarer Klassik, Goethe-Schiller-Archiv)
of a human subject. With the help of blind machines, people, whether blind or not, acquire a historically new proficiency: ecriture automatique. Loosely translating BeyerJen's dictum that "for writing, visibility is as unnecessary today as it has always been,"85 an American experimental psychologist (who in I904 measured the "Acquisition of Skill in Type- Writing" and who obliged his subjects to keep typed test diaries) recorded
documentary sentences like those of Andre Breton:
? Self-advertisement of the medium-a typewriter with visible type.
24th day. Hands and finger are clearly becoming more flexible and adept. The change now going on, aside from growing flexibility, is in learning to locate keys without waiting to see them. In other words, it is location by position.
25th day. Location (muscular, etc. ), letter and word associations are now in progress of automatization.
38th day. To-day I found myself not infrequently striking letters before I was conscious of seeing them. They seem to have been perfecting themselves just be- low the level of consciousness. 86
"A Funny Story About the Blind, etc. " (Beyerlen's essay title) was also the story of the mechanized philosopher. Nietzsche's reasons for pur- chasing a typewriter were very different from those of his few colleagues who wrote for entertainment purposes, such as Twain, Lindau, Amytor, Hart, Nansen, and so onY They all counted on increased speed and tex-
Typewriter 2 0 5
? 2 0 6 Ty p e w r i t e r
tual mass production; the half-blind, by contrast, turned from philosophy to literature, from rereading to a pure, blind, and intransitive act of writ- ing. That is why his Malling Hansen typed the motto of all modern, high- brow literature: "Finally, when my eyes prevent me from learning any- thing-and I have almost reached that point! I will still be able to craft verse. " 88
1889 is generally considered the year zero of typewriter literature, that barely researched mass of documents, the year in which Conan Doyle first published A Case of Identity. Back then, Sherlock Holmes managed to prove his claim that the typed love letters (including the sig- nature) received by one of London's first and ostensibly myopic typists were the work of her criminal stepfather engaging in marriage fraud. A machine-produced trick of anonymization that prompted Holmes, seven- teen years prior to the professionals in the police, to write a monograph entitled On the Typewriter and Its Relation to Crime. 89
Our esteem for Doyle notwithstanding, it is nonetheless an optical- philological pleasure to show that typewriting literature began in 1 8 8 2- with a poem by Friedrich Nietzsche that could well be titled On the Type- writer and Its Relation to Writing.
In these typed, that is, literally forged or crafted, verses, three mo- ments of writing coincide: the equipment, the thing, and the agent. An author, however, does not appear because he remains on the fringes of the verse: as the addressed reader, who would "utilize" the "delicate"90 writ- ing ball known as Nietzsche in all its ambiguity. Our writing tool not only works on our thoughts, it "is a thing like me. " Mechanized and automatic writing refutes the phallocentrism of classical pens. The fate of the philosopher utilized by his fine fingers was not authorship but feminiza- tion. Thus Nietzsche took his place next to the young Christian women of Remington and the typesetters of Malling Hansen in Copenhagen.
But that happiness was not to last long. The human writing ball spent two winter months in Genoa to test and repair its new and easily mal- functioning favorite toy, to utilize and compose upon it. Then the spring on the Riviera, with its downpours, put an end to it. "The damned writ- ing," Nietzsche wrote, self-referentially as always, "the typewriter has been unusable since my last card; for the weather is dreary and cloudy, that is, humid: then each time the ribbon is also wet and sticky, so that every key gets stuck, and the writing cannot be seen at all. If you think about it! ! "91
? ? ? A facsimile of Nietzsche's Mailing Hansen poem, February-March 1 8 8 2 . The text reads, "THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME: MADE OF / IRON / YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS. / PATIENCE AND TACT ARE REQUIRED IN ABUNDANCE, / AS WELL AS FINE FINGERS, TO USE US. " (Reproduced courtesy of the Stiftung Weimarer Klassik, Goethe-Schiller-Archiv)
? ? ? ? 2 0 8 Typewriter
And so it was a rain in Genoa that started and stopped modern writing- a writing that is solely the materiality of its medium. "A letter, a litter, " a piece of writing, a piece of dirt, Joyce mocked. Nietzsche's typewriter, or the dream of fusing literary production with literary reproduction, instead fused again with blindness, invisibility, and random noise, the irreducible background of technological media. Finally, letters on the page looked like the ones on the right retina.
But Nietzsche did not surrender. In one of his last typewritten letters he addressed media-technological complements and/or human substitu- tion: the phonograph and the secretary. "This machine," he observed in another equation of writing equipment with writer, "is as delicate as a lit- tle dog and causes a lot of trouble-and provides some entertainment. Now all my friends have to do is to invent a reading machine: otherwise I will fall behind myself and won't be able to supply myself with sufficient intellectual nourishment. Or, rather: I need a young person who is intelli- gent and knowledgeable enough to work with me. I would even consider a two-year-long marriage for that purpose. "92
With the collapse of his machine, Nietzsche became a man again. But only to undermine the classical notion of love. As with men since time im- memorial and women only recently, "a young person" and a "two-year- long marriage" are equally suitable to continue the failed love affair with a typewriter.
And so it happened. Nietzsche's friend Paul Ree, who had already transported the Malling Hansen to Genoa, was also searching for its hu- man replacement: somebody who could "aid" Nietzsche "in his philo- sophical studies with all kinds of writing, copying, and excerpting. "93 But instead of presenting an intelligent young man, he presented a rather no- torious young lady who, "on her path of scholarly production," required a "teacher":94 Lou von Salome.
And so a defunct typewriter was replaced by the most famous me? nage a trois of literary history. The question of whether, when, and in what grouping Professor Nietzsche, Dr. Ree, and Ms. von Salome went to bed with one another may be amusing to psychologists. But the question as to why young women of the Nietzsche era could replace his writing ball and even his proverbially rare students is of priority to us. The locally known sister of the globally known brother (as Pschorr put it) gave an an- swer to that question. In her monograph, Friedrich Nietzsche and the
Women of His Time, Elisabeth Forster described how professors at the University of Zurich "very much appreciated having emancipated women of the time at universities and libraries as secretaries and assistants"95 (es-
? ? Typewriter 209
pecially once emancipation had "gradually taken on more temperate forms" and was no longer synonymous with gender war). With the logi- cal consequence that young women from Russia or Prussia (where the management of discourse and higher education was to remain a male mo- nopoly until 1908) had every reason to enroll, as did Lou von Salome, at the philosophical faculty of Zurich. With the further logical consequence that former professors of the University of Basel had every reason to wel- come them as secretaries and assistants. At any rate, the die had long been cast before an impassioned philosopher and his Russian love climbed Monte Sacro . . .
Nietzsche's philosophy simply implemented the desexualization of writing and the university. Since no colleague and hardly a student in Basel could be enthused about Nietzsche's most deeply felt wish, namely, to establish a Zarathustra chair, Nietzsche dismantled the elementary bar- rier of philosophical discourses. He recruited his students from the women who had just recently been admitted to the universities. Lou von Salome was only one of many students of philosophy in Zurich who con- tacted him: aside from her, there were the forgotten names Resa von Schirnhofer, Meta von Salis, and especially Helene Druskowitz, who suc- ceeded (and competed with) Nietzsche all the way to her death in an in- sane asylum. Curiously enough, what Nietzsche called The Future of Our Institutions ofHigher Education began, of all places, in the quiet and re- moved Engadine. Beginning in 1 8 8 5 , emancipated women students trav- eled to Sils Maria "only to get to know better Prof. Nietzsche, who ap- peared to them as the most dangerous enemy of women. "96
But that's how it goes. Just as the hundred-year-Iong exclusion of women from universities and philosophy led to the idealization of grand Dame Nature, so their renewed inclusion altered philosophy as such. What Hegel in his youth called Love (and a Love that was one with the Idea), Nietzsche in Ecce Homo notoriously transvalued into the definition that "Love in its means, [is] war; at bottom, the deadly hatred of the sexes. "97 And if the new philosopher, following such insights, fought against emancipation as a form of conscientious objection and even de- fined Woman as both truth and untruth, only female philosophers had an answer. The hatred for males of Helene Druskowitz, Nietzsche's former student, even outdid his hatred for women. The escalation of positions in the work of two writers, a man and a woman, gave proof of Nietzsche's media-specific notion of heterosexuality.
Nietzsche and Lou von Salome's honeymoon would have been nice and forgotten. Their ceaselessly escalating gender war is what started
? ? 2 1 0 Typewriter
Nietzsche's fame. Women (and Jews) brought an almost completely si- lenced ex-professor back into the public. Whether out of hatred, as with Druskowitz, or love, Nietzsche's private students became writers, and their careers in turn afforded them the opportunity to write books on Nietzsche. "With all kinds of writing, copying, and excerpting," as de- sired, women did their secretarial work.
That is just how precisely Nietzsche registered discursive changes. Even if the system of higher education had attuned him, as it did all oth- ers, to handwriting and academic homosexuality, he himself started some- thing new. The two relayed innovations of his time, writing machines and writing women, recorded his speech.
"Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts. " Hence Nietz- sche's next thought-four years after the malfunctioning of his type- writer-was to philosophize on the typewriter itself. Instead of testing Remington's competing model, he elevated MaIling Hansen's invention to the status of a philosophy. And this philosophy, instead of deriving the evolution of the human being from Hegel's spirit (in between the lines of books) or Marx's labor (in between the differential potential of muscular energy), began with an information machine.
In the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, knowledge, speech, and virtuous action are no longer inborn attributes of Man. Like the animal that will soon go by a different name, Man derived from for- getfulness and random noise, the background of all media. Which sug- gests that in 1 8 8 6, during the founding age of mechanized storage tech- nologies, human evolution, too, aims toward the creation of a machine memory. Guyau's argument presupposes the phonograph, Nietzsche's, the typewriter. To make forgetful animals into human beings, a blind force strikes that dismembers and inscribes their bodies in the real, until pain itself brings forth a memory. People keep promises and execute orders only after torture.
Writing in Nietzsche is no longer a natural extension of humans who bring forth their voice, soul, individuality through their handwriting. On the contrary: just as in the stanza on the delicate MaIling Hansen, humans change their position-they turn from the agency of writing to become an inscription surface. Conversely, all the agency of writing passes on in its violence to an inhuman media engineer who will soon be called up by Stoker's Dracula. A type of writing that blindly dismembers body parts and perforates human skin necessarily stems from typewriters built before 1897, when Underwood finally introduced visibility. Peter Mitterhofer's Model 2, the wooden typewriter prototype of 1 8 66, unlike the MaIling
? ? ? ? ? Hansen did not even have types and a ribbon. Instead, the writing paper was perforated by needle pins-inscribing, for example, in a rather Nietzschean manner, the proper name of the inventor.
Such is the solidarity among engineers, philosophers, and writers of the founding age of media. Beyerlen's technical observation that in typ- ing, everything is visible except the actual inscription of the sign, also de- scribes On the Genealogy ofMorals. Neither in Nietzsche nor in Stoker can the victims see and hence read what the "most dreadful sacrifices and pledges," "the most repulsive mutilations," and "the cruelest rites"98 do to their body parts. The only possible, that is unconscious, kind of read- ing is the slavish obedience called morals. Nietzsche's notion of inscrip- tion, which has degenerated into a poststructuralist catch-all metaphor, has validity only within the framework of the history of the typewriter. It designates the turning point at which communications technologies can no longer be related back to humans. Instead, the former have formed the latter.
Under conditions of media the genealogy of morals coincides with the genealogy of gods.
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. Technological media needed technological (or hysterical) media. In the German Reich, this was initially understood only by Undersecretary of the Interior and Major General von Budde, chief of the railroad division within the Great General Staff, who dictated flawless orders to his secretaries every day and who committed subordi- nate agencies to "an increased appropriation of typewriters. "52 But the German dream of men as civil servants and women as mothers weighed heavily: what had to be created for girls involved in typing, telegraphing, and telephoning was a special, temporary, civil-servant status that was immediately revoked upon marriage. 53 Understood that way, communi- cations technology amounted to "the disintegration of the old family structure"54 and "denied" its female machine operators "a return to any role in the family. "55
Global forms of disintegration put an end to the German dream. In 19 1 7, when the Army High Command built up its arsenal to prepare for the Ludendorff offensive and screened the civil-service corps for battle readiness, in a letter Hindenburg established the "principle" that, regard- less of sex, "whosoever does not work, shall not eat. " One year later, the Zeitschrift fur weibliche Handelsgehilfen (Journal for female clerks) re-
? 1 9 6 Typewriter
? ? Jan Tschichold writing, 1948. " . . . to substitute the innervation of guiding fingers for the continuous movement of the hand" (Benjamin).
ported full compliance. "The offices of all manufacturers central to the war effort have been occupied with female workers; they have conquered even the orderly rooms of the army administration; shift work was al- ways understaffed, and there was a constant demand for them. They were absorbed in large quantities by the occupied territories; domestic admin- istrative agencies of all kinds hired them in large numbers, let alone com-
? Olivetti M 2 0 . Poster by Piramo, Italy, 1920.
? I 9 8 Typewriter
panies in the private sector central to the war effort. "56 "A state-it is," Heidegger observed in I93 5 . But only in order to doubt whether this " be- ing" consists in the "fact that the police arrest a suspect, or so-and-so- many typewriters are clattering in a government building, taking down the words of ministers and state secretaries. "57
Only his winter semester in Stalingrad revealed to the thinker-much to the surprise of his listeners-the relationship among Being, Man, and typewriter.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER ON THE HAND AND THE TYPEWRITER ( I942-43 )
Man himself acts [handelt] through the hand [Hand]; for the hand is, to- gether with the word, the essential distinction of man. Only a being which, like man, "has" the word (1-1'680<;", ",oY0';;), can and must "have" "the hand. " Through the hand occur both prayer and murder, greeting and thanks, oath and signal, and also the "work" of the hand, the "hand-work," and the tool. The handshake seals the covenant. The hand brings about the "work" of destruction. The hand exists as hand only where there is disclosure and concealment. No animal has a hand, and a hand never originates from a paw or a claw or talon. Even the hand of one in desperation (it least of all) is never a talon, with which a person clutches wildly. The hand sprang forth only out of the word and together with the word. Man does not "have" hands, but the hand holds the essence of man, because the word as the es- sential realm of the hand is the ground of the essence of man. The word as what is inscribed and what appears to the regard is the written word, i. e. , script. And the word as script is handwriting.
It is not accidental that modern man writes "with" the typewriter and "dictates" [diktiert] (the same word as "poetize" [dichten]) "into" a ma- chine. This "history" of the kinds of writing is one of the main reasons for the increasing destruction of the word. The latter no longer comes and goes by means of the writing hand, the properly acting hand, but by means of the mechanical forces it releases. The typewriter tears writing from the essential realm of the hand, i. e. , the realm of the word. The word itself turns into something "typed. " Where typewriting, on the contrary, is only a transcrip- tion and serves to preserve the writing, or turns into print something al- ready written, there it has a proper, though limited, significance. In the time
? ? Typewriter 1 9 9
of the first dominance of the typewriter, a letter written on this machine still stood for a breach of good manners. Today, a handwritten letter is an anti- quated and undesired thing; it disturbs speed reading. Mechanical writing deprives the hand of its rank in the realm of the written word and degrades the word to a means of communication. In addition, mechanical writing provides this "advantage," that it conceals the handwriting and thereby the character. The typewriter makes everyone look the same. . . .
Therefore, when writing was withdrawn from the origin of its essence, i. e. , from the hand, and was transferred to the machine, a transformation occurred in the relation of Being to man. It is of little importance for this transformation how many people actually use the typewriter and whether there are some who shun it. It is no accident that the invention of the print- ing press coincides with the inception of the modern period. The word-signs become type, and the writing stroke disappears. The type is "set," the set becomes "pressed. " This mechanism of setting and pressing and "printing" is the preliminary form of the typewriter. In the typewriter we find the ir-
ruption of the mechanism in the realm of the word. The typewriter leads again to the typesetting machine. The press becomes the rotary press. In ro- tation, the triumph of the machine comes to the fore. Indeed, at first, book printing and then machine type offer advantages and conveniences, and these then unwittingly steer preferences and needs to this kind of written communication. The typewriter veils the essence of writing and of the script. It withdraws from man the essential rank of the hand, without man's experiencing this withdrawal appropriately and recognizing that it has transformed the relation of Being to his essence.
The typewriter is a signless cloud, i. e. , a withdrawing concealment in the midst of its very obtrusiveness, and through it the relation of Being to man is transformed. It is in fact signless, not showing itself as to its essence; perhaps that is why most of you, as is proven to me by your reaction, though well intended, have not grasped what I have been trying to say.
I have not been presenting a disquisition on the typewriter itself, re- garding which it could justifiably be asked what in the world that has to do with Parmenides. My theme was the modern relation (transformed by the typewriter) of the hand to writing, i. e. , to the word, i. e. , to the unconcealed- ness of Being. A meditation on unconcealedness and on Being does not merely have something to do with the didactic poem of Parmenides, it has everything to do with it. In the typewriter the machine appears, i. e. , tech- nology appears, in an almost quotidian and hence unnoticed and hence sign- less relation to writing, i. e. , to the word, i. e. , to the distinguishing essence of man. A more penetrating consideration would have to recognize here that
200 Typewriter
the typewriter is not really a machine in the strict sense of machine technol- ogy, but is an "intermediate" thing, between a tool and a machine, a mecha- nism. Its production, however, is conditioned by machine technology.
This "machine," operated in the closest vicinity to the word, is in use; it imposes its own use. Even if we do not actually operate this machine, it de- mands that we regard it if only to renounce and avoid it. This situation is constantly repeated everywhere, in all relations of modern man to technol- ogy. Technology is entrenched in our history. 58
" Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts, " Nietzsche wrote. 59 "Technology is entrenched in our history," Heidegger said. But the one wrote the sentence about the typewriter on a typewriter, the other de- scribed (in a magnificent old German hand) typewriters per se. That is why it was Nietzsche who initiated the transvaluation of all values with his philosophically scandalous sentence about media technology. In r882, human beings, their thoughts, and their authorship respectively were re- placed by two sexes, the text, and blind writing equipment.
As the first mechanized philosopher, Nietzsche was also the last. Typescript, accord- ing to Klapheck's painting, was called The Will to Power.
Nietzsche suffered from extreme myopia, anisocoria, and migraines (to say nothing of his rumored progressive paralysis). An eye doctor in Frankfurt attested that Nietzsche's "right eye could only perceive mis- shapen and distorted images" as well as "letters that were virtually be- yond recognition," whereas the left, "despite its myopia," was in r877 still capable of "registering normal images. " Nietzsche's headaches there- fore appeared to be "a secondary symptom,"60 and his attempts to phi- losophize with a hammer the natural consequence of "an increased stim- ulation of the site in the prefrontal wall of the third ventricle responsible for aggression. "61 Thinkers of the founding age of media naturally did not only turn from philosophy to physiology in theory; their central ner- vous system always preceded them.
Nietzsche himself successively described his condition as quarter blindness, half-blindness, three-quarter blindness (it was for others to suggest mental derangement, the next step in this mathematical se- quence). 62 Reading letters (or musical notes) distorted beyond recognition became painful after twenty minutes, as did writing. Otherwise, Nietz- sche would not have attributed his "telegram style,"63 which he developed
? ? ? Konrad Klapheck, The Will to Power, 1959. (Reproduced courtesy of the artist)
while writing the suggestively titled The Wanderer and His Shadow, to his eye pain. To direct the blindness of this shadow, he had been planning to purchase a typewriter as early as r879, the so-called "year of blind- ness. "64 It happened in r881. Nietzsche got "in touch with its inventor, a Dane from Copenhagen. "65 "My dear Sister, I know Hansen's machine quite well, Mr. Hansen has written to me twice and sent me samples, drawings, and assessments of professors from Copenhagen about it. This is the one I want (not the American one, which is too heavy). "66
Since our writing tools also work on our thoughts, Nietzsche's choice followed strict, technical data. En route between Engadine and the Riv- iera, he decided first for a traveling typewriter and second as the cripple that he was. At a time when "only very few owned a typewriter, when
Typewriter 20r
? 2 0 2 Typewriter
there were no sales representatives [in Germany] and machines were available only under the table,"67 a single man demonstrated a knowledge of engineering. (With the result that American historians of the typewriter elide Nietzsche and Hansen. )68
Hans Rasmus Johann Malling Hansen ( r 83 5-90), pastor and head of the royal D? vstummeinstitut in Copenhagen,69 developed his skrivekugle/ writing ball / sphere ecrivante out of the observation that his deaf-mute patients' sign language was faster than handwriting. The machine "did not take into account the needs of business"7o but rather was meant to compensate for physiological deficiencies and to increase writing speed
(which prompted the Nordic Telegraphy Co. to use "a number of writing balls for the transfer of incoming telegrams"). 71 Fifty-four concentrically arranged key rods (no levers as yet) imprinted capital letters, numbers, and signs with a color ribbon onto a relatively small sheet of paper that was fastened cylindrically. According to Burghagen, this semispheric arrangement of the keys had the advantage of allowing "the blind, for whom this writing ball was primarily designed, to learn writing on it in a surprisingly short time. On the surface of a sphere each position is com- pletely identifiable by its relative location. . . . It is therefore possible to be guided solely by one's sense of touch, which would be much more diffi- cult in the case of flat keyboards. "72 That is precisely how it could have been stated in the assessments of professors from Copenhagen for a half- blind ex-professor.
In r 8 6 5 Malling Hansen received his patent, in r 8 67 he started serial production of his typewriter, in r 8 7 2 the Germans (and Nietzsche ? ) learned o f it from the Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung. 73 Finally, i n r 8 8 2 the Copenhagen printing company of C. Ferslew combined typing balls and women-as a medium to offset the nuisance that "their female typeset- ters were significantly more preoccupied with the decoding of handwrit- ten texts than with the actual setting of text. " 74 McLuhan's law that the ? typewriter causes "an entirely new attitude to the written and printed word" because it "fuses composition and publication"75 was realized for the first time. (Today, when handwritten publisher's manuscripts are rar- ities, "the entire printing industry, via the Linotype, depend[s] upon the typewriter. " ) 76
In the same year and for the same reasons, Nietzsche decided to buy. For 375 Reichsmarks (shipping not included)77 even a half-blind writer chased by publishers was able to produce "documents as beautiful and standardized as print. "78 "After a week" of typewriting practice, Nietz- sche wrote, "the eyes no longer have to do their work":79 ecriture au-
? ? ? Typewriter 2 0 3 tomatique had been invented, the shadow of the wanderer incarnated. In
March r 8 8 2, the Berliner Tageblatt reported:
The well-known philosopher and writer [sic] Friedrich Nietzsche, whose failing eyesight made it necessary for him to renounce his professorship in Basel three years ago, currently lives in Genoa and-excepting the progression of his afflic- tion to the point of complete blindness-feels better than ever. With the help of a typewriter he has resumed his writing activities, and we can hence expect a book along the lines of his last ones. It is widely known that his new work stands in marked contrast to his first, significant writings. 80
Indeed: Nietzsche, as proud of the publication of his mechanization as any philosopher,81 changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style. That is precisely what is meant by the sentence that our writing tools are also working on our thoughts. Malling Hansen's writing ball, with its operating difficulties, made Nietzsche into a laconic. "The well-known philosopher and writer" shed his first attribute in order to merge with his second. If scholarship and thinking, especially toward the end of the nineteenth century, were allowed or made possible only after extensive reading, then it was blind- ness and blindness alone that "delivered" them from "the book. "82
Good news from Nietzsche that coincided with all the early type- writer models. None of the models prior to Underwood's great innovation of r897 allowed immediate visual control over the output. In order to read the typed text, one had to lift shutters on the Remington model, whereas with Malling Hansen's-notwithstanding other claims83-the semicircular arrangement of the keys itself prevented a view of the paper. But even Underwood's innovation did not change the fact that typewrit- ing can and must remain a blind activity. In the precise engineering lingo of Angelo Beyerlen, the royal stenographer of Wiirttemberg and the first typewriter dealer of the Reich: "In writing by hand, the eye must con- stantly watch the written line and only that. It must attend to the creation of each sign, must measure, direct, and, in short, guide the hand through each movement. " A media-technological basis of classical authorship that typewriting simply liquidates: "By contrast, after one briefly presses down on a key, the typewriter creates in the proper position on the paper a com- plete letter, which is not only untouched by the writer's hand but also lo- cated in a place entirely apart from where the hands work. " With Under- wood's models, too, "the spot where the next sign to be written occurs" is "precisely what . . . cannot be seen. "84 After a fraction of a second, the act of writing stops being an act of reading that is produced by the grace
204 Typewriter
? Mailing Hansen, Writing Ball, 1 8 67, a model of Nietzsche's typewriter. " Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts" (letter to Peter Gast). (Repro- . duced courtesy of the Stiftung Weimarer Klassik, Goethe-Schiller-Archiv)
of a human subject. With the help of blind machines, people, whether blind or not, acquire a historically new proficiency: ecriture automatique. Loosely translating BeyerJen's dictum that "for writing, visibility is as unnecessary today as it has always been,"85 an American experimental psychologist (who in I904 measured the "Acquisition of Skill in Type- Writing" and who obliged his subjects to keep typed test diaries) recorded
documentary sentences like those of Andre Breton:
? Self-advertisement of the medium-a typewriter with visible type.
24th day. Hands and finger are clearly becoming more flexible and adept. The change now going on, aside from growing flexibility, is in learning to locate keys without waiting to see them. In other words, it is location by position.
25th day. Location (muscular, etc. ), letter and word associations are now in progress of automatization.
38th day. To-day I found myself not infrequently striking letters before I was conscious of seeing them. They seem to have been perfecting themselves just be- low the level of consciousness. 86
"A Funny Story About the Blind, etc. " (Beyerlen's essay title) was also the story of the mechanized philosopher. Nietzsche's reasons for pur- chasing a typewriter were very different from those of his few colleagues who wrote for entertainment purposes, such as Twain, Lindau, Amytor, Hart, Nansen, and so onY They all counted on increased speed and tex-
Typewriter 2 0 5
? 2 0 6 Ty p e w r i t e r
tual mass production; the half-blind, by contrast, turned from philosophy to literature, from rereading to a pure, blind, and intransitive act of writ- ing. That is why his Malling Hansen typed the motto of all modern, high- brow literature: "Finally, when my eyes prevent me from learning any- thing-and I have almost reached that point! I will still be able to craft verse. " 88
1889 is generally considered the year zero of typewriter literature, that barely researched mass of documents, the year in which Conan Doyle first published A Case of Identity. Back then, Sherlock Holmes managed to prove his claim that the typed love letters (including the sig- nature) received by one of London's first and ostensibly myopic typists were the work of her criminal stepfather engaging in marriage fraud. A machine-produced trick of anonymization that prompted Holmes, seven- teen years prior to the professionals in the police, to write a monograph entitled On the Typewriter and Its Relation to Crime. 89
Our esteem for Doyle notwithstanding, it is nonetheless an optical- philological pleasure to show that typewriting literature began in 1 8 8 2- with a poem by Friedrich Nietzsche that could well be titled On the Type- writer and Its Relation to Writing.
In these typed, that is, literally forged or crafted, verses, three mo- ments of writing coincide: the equipment, the thing, and the agent. An author, however, does not appear because he remains on the fringes of the verse: as the addressed reader, who would "utilize" the "delicate"90 writ- ing ball known as Nietzsche in all its ambiguity. Our writing tool not only works on our thoughts, it "is a thing like me. " Mechanized and automatic writing refutes the phallocentrism of classical pens. The fate of the philosopher utilized by his fine fingers was not authorship but feminiza- tion. Thus Nietzsche took his place next to the young Christian women of Remington and the typesetters of Malling Hansen in Copenhagen.
But that happiness was not to last long. The human writing ball spent two winter months in Genoa to test and repair its new and easily mal- functioning favorite toy, to utilize and compose upon it. Then the spring on the Riviera, with its downpours, put an end to it. "The damned writ- ing," Nietzsche wrote, self-referentially as always, "the typewriter has been unusable since my last card; for the weather is dreary and cloudy, that is, humid: then each time the ribbon is also wet and sticky, so that every key gets stuck, and the writing cannot be seen at all. If you think about it! ! "91
? ? ? A facsimile of Nietzsche's Mailing Hansen poem, February-March 1 8 8 2 . The text reads, "THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME: MADE OF / IRON / YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS. / PATIENCE AND TACT ARE REQUIRED IN ABUNDANCE, / AS WELL AS FINE FINGERS, TO USE US. " (Reproduced courtesy of the Stiftung Weimarer Klassik, Goethe-Schiller-Archiv)
? ? ? ? 2 0 8 Typewriter
And so it was a rain in Genoa that started and stopped modern writing- a writing that is solely the materiality of its medium. "A letter, a litter, " a piece of writing, a piece of dirt, Joyce mocked. Nietzsche's typewriter, or the dream of fusing literary production with literary reproduction, instead fused again with blindness, invisibility, and random noise, the irreducible background of technological media. Finally, letters on the page looked like the ones on the right retina.
But Nietzsche did not surrender. In one of his last typewritten letters he addressed media-technological complements and/or human substitu- tion: the phonograph and the secretary. "This machine," he observed in another equation of writing equipment with writer, "is as delicate as a lit- tle dog and causes a lot of trouble-and provides some entertainment. Now all my friends have to do is to invent a reading machine: otherwise I will fall behind myself and won't be able to supply myself with sufficient intellectual nourishment. Or, rather: I need a young person who is intelli- gent and knowledgeable enough to work with me. I would even consider a two-year-long marriage for that purpose. "92
With the collapse of his machine, Nietzsche became a man again. But only to undermine the classical notion of love. As with men since time im- memorial and women only recently, "a young person" and a "two-year- long marriage" are equally suitable to continue the failed love affair with a typewriter.
And so it happened. Nietzsche's friend Paul Ree, who had already transported the Malling Hansen to Genoa, was also searching for its hu- man replacement: somebody who could "aid" Nietzsche "in his philo- sophical studies with all kinds of writing, copying, and excerpting. "93 But instead of presenting an intelligent young man, he presented a rather no- torious young lady who, "on her path of scholarly production," required a "teacher":94 Lou von Salome.
And so a defunct typewriter was replaced by the most famous me? nage a trois of literary history. The question of whether, when, and in what grouping Professor Nietzsche, Dr. Ree, and Ms. von Salome went to bed with one another may be amusing to psychologists. But the question as to why young women of the Nietzsche era could replace his writing ball and even his proverbially rare students is of priority to us. The locally known sister of the globally known brother (as Pschorr put it) gave an an- swer to that question. In her monograph, Friedrich Nietzsche and the
Women of His Time, Elisabeth Forster described how professors at the University of Zurich "very much appreciated having emancipated women of the time at universities and libraries as secretaries and assistants"95 (es-
? ? Typewriter 209
pecially once emancipation had "gradually taken on more temperate forms" and was no longer synonymous with gender war). With the logi- cal consequence that young women from Russia or Prussia (where the management of discourse and higher education was to remain a male mo- nopoly until 1908) had every reason to enroll, as did Lou von Salome, at the philosophical faculty of Zurich. With the further logical consequence that former professors of the University of Basel had every reason to wel- come them as secretaries and assistants. At any rate, the die had long been cast before an impassioned philosopher and his Russian love climbed Monte Sacro . . .
Nietzsche's philosophy simply implemented the desexualization of writing and the university. Since no colleague and hardly a student in Basel could be enthused about Nietzsche's most deeply felt wish, namely, to establish a Zarathustra chair, Nietzsche dismantled the elementary bar- rier of philosophical discourses. He recruited his students from the women who had just recently been admitted to the universities. Lou von Salome was only one of many students of philosophy in Zurich who con- tacted him: aside from her, there were the forgotten names Resa von Schirnhofer, Meta von Salis, and especially Helene Druskowitz, who suc- ceeded (and competed with) Nietzsche all the way to her death in an in- sane asylum. Curiously enough, what Nietzsche called The Future of Our Institutions ofHigher Education began, of all places, in the quiet and re- moved Engadine. Beginning in 1 8 8 5 , emancipated women students trav- eled to Sils Maria "only to get to know better Prof. Nietzsche, who ap- peared to them as the most dangerous enemy of women. "96
But that's how it goes. Just as the hundred-year-Iong exclusion of women from universities and philosophy led to the idealization of grand Dame Nature, so their renewed inclusion altered philosophy as such. What Hegel in his youth called Love (and a Love that was one with the Idea), Nietzsche in Ecce Homo notoriously transvalued into the definition that "Love in its means, [is] war; at bottom, the deadly hatred of the sexes. "97 And if the new philosopher, following such insights, fought against emancipation as a form of conscientious objection and even de- fined Woman as both truth and untruth, only female philosophers had an answer. The hatred for males of Helene Druskowitz, Nietzsche's former student, even outdid his hatred for women. The escalation of positions in the work of two writers, a man and a woman, gave proof of Nietzsche's media-specific notion of heterosexuality.
Nietzsche and Lou von Salome's honeymoon would have been nice and forgotten. Their ceaselessly escalating gender war is what started
? ? 2 1 0 Typewriter
Nietzsche's fame. Women (and Jews) brought an almost completely si- lenced ex-professor back into the public. Whether out of hatred, as with Druskowitz, or love, Nietzsche's private students became writers, and their careers in turn afforded them the opportunity to write books on Nietzsche. "With all kinds of writing, copying, and excerpting," as de- sired, women did their secretarial work.
That is just how precisely Nietzsche registered discursive changes. Even if the system of higher education had attuned him, as it did all oth- ers, to handwriting and academic homosexuality, he himself started some- thing new. The two relayed innovations of his time, writing machines and writing women, recorded his speech.
"Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts. " Hence Nietz- sche's next thought-four years after the malfunctioning of his type- writer-was to philosophize on the typewriter itself. Instead of testing Remington's competing model, he elevated MaIling Hansen's invention to the status of a philosophy. And this philosophy, instead of deriving the evolution of the human being from Hegel's spirit (in between the lines of books) or Marx's labor (in between the differential potential of muscular energy), began with an information machine.
In the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, knowledge, speech, and virtuous action are no longer inborn attributes of Man. Like the animal that will soon go by a different name, Man derived from for- getfulness and random noise, the background of all media. Which sug- gests that in 1 8 8 6, during the founding age of mechanized storage tech- nologies, human evolution, too, aims toward the creation of a machine memory. Guyau's argument presupposes the phonograph, Nietzsche's, the typewriter. To make forgetful animals into human beings, a blind force strikes that dismembers and inscribes their bodies in the real, until pain itself brings forth a memory. People keep promises and execute orders only after torture.
Writing in Nietzsche is no longer a natural extension of humans who bring forth their voice, soul, individuality through their handwriting. On the contrary: just as in the stanza on the delicate MaIling Hansen, humans change their position-they turn from the agency of writing to become an inscription surface. Conversely, all the agency of writing passes on in its violence to an inhuman media engineer who will soon be called up by Stoker's Dracula. A type of writing that blindly dismembers body parts and perforates human skin necessarily stems from typewriters built before 1897, when Underwood finally introduced visibility. Peter Mitterhofer's Model 2, the wooden typewriter prototype of 1 8 66, unlike the MaIling
? ? ? ? ? Hansen did not even have types and a ribbon. Instead, the writing paper was perforated by needle pins-inscribing, for example, in a rather Nietzschean manner, the proper name of the inventor.
Such is the solidarity among engineers, philosophers, and writers of the founding age of media. Beyerlen's technical observation that in typ- ing, everything is visible except the actual inscription of the sign, also de- scribes On the Genealogy ofMorals. Neither in Nietzsche nor in Stoker can the victims see and hence read what the "most dreadful sacrifices and pledges," "the most repulsive mutilations," and "the cruelest rites"98 do to their body parts. The only possible, that is unconscious, kind of read- ing is the slavish obedience called morals. Nietzsche's notion of inscrip- tion, which has degenerated into a poststructuralist catch-all metaphor, has validity only within the framework of the history of the typewriter. It designates the turning point at which communications technologies can no longer be related back to humans. Instead, the former have formed the latter.
Under conditions of media the genealogy of morals coincides with the genealogy of gods.
