She shows him a
perfectly
typed page that reads: "I would love you, too, if you could get some real work done !
Kittler-Gramophone-Film-Typewriter
.
.
.
",.
?
y'
Lacan's scheme of the inverted vase. (From Lacan 1988a, 139; reproduced by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (C) 1975 by Les Editions du Seuil; English translation (C) 198 8 by Cambridge University Press)
Lacan's theory, which, especially as an anti-psychology, is up to date with contemporary technological developments. The symbolic of letters and numbers, once celebrated as the highest creation of authors or geniuses: a world of computing machines. The real in its random series, once the sub- ject of philosophical statements or even "knowledge": an impossibility that only signal processors (and psychoanalysts of the future) can bring under their control. Finally, the imaginary, once the dream produced by and coming out of the caverns of the soul: a simple optical trick.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud followed the positivistic "suggestion that we should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photo- graphic apparatus, or something of the kind. "177 Lacan's theory of the imaginary is an attempt truly to "materialize"178 such models. As a result of which, cinema-the repressed of Freud's year at the Salpetriere-re- turns to psychoanalysis. Lacan's optical apparatuses show a complexity that can only derive from cinematic tricks. Step by step, they go beyond the simple mirror and the (mis)recognition that induces in the small child a first but treacherous image of sensory-motoric wholeness.
Following Bouasse's Photometrie of 1934, a concave mirror initially projects the real image of a hidden vase into the same room where, in be- tween x and y, it is expected by its actual flowers. If the optic beams com-
. . . . , . . . . , . . . . ,. .
"
- vs', . . . .
,I ,
,
? Messter's Alabastra Theater.
ing out of the parabola, however, are also deflected by a plane mirror per- pendicular to the eye, then the vase, miraculously filled with flowers, ap- pears to the subject S next to its own, but only virtual, mirror image VS. "That is what happens in man," who first achieves "the organization of the totality of reality into a limited number of preformed networks"179 and then lives through his identification with virtual doppelgangers. Nar- cissism is duplicated.
Lacan, however, did not need to search for his optical tricks in the science of Bouasse. Film pioneers, who have always been dreaming of 3 -D cinema without glasses, built apparatuses of a similar nature. In 19 10 Oskar Messter, the founder of the German film industry and the person in charge of all photography and film footage taken at the front during the First World War,180 introduced his Alabastra Theater in Berlin. He re- placed the concave mirror of Bouasse and Lacan with a film projector C
Film 1 69
? 170 Film
that nevertheless had the same function as the mirror: his lenses projected real images of actors that were allowed to act only against the black back- ground of all media-on a screen E located below the stage A. The audi- ence, however, only saw the virtual image of this screen, projected by the plane mirror B. With the result that filmed female dancers appeared on the stage of the Alabastra Theater itself and gave the impression of mov- ing through three dimensions. l S I
"Hence," Lacan said, addressing his seminar participants as well as the audience of the Alabastra Theater, "you are infinitely more than you can imagine, subjects [or underlings] of gadgets and instruments of all kinds-ranging from the microscope to radio and television-that will become elements of your being. "lS2
What's missing now is for the plane mirror B to become a psychoan- alyst and, prompted by the remote control of language that occupies him,183 turn by 90 degrees, so that the subject S sacrifices all its imaginary doppelgangers to the symbolic. Then, three dimensions or media-the nothing called a rose, the illusion of cinema, and discourse-will have been separated in a technologically pure way. The end of psychoanaly- sis/es is depersonalization. ls4
Consequently, Lacan was the first (and last) writer whose book titles only described positions in the media system. The writings were called Writings, the seminars, Seminar, the radio interview, Radiophonie, and the TV broadcast, Television.
Media-technological differentiations opened up the possibility for media links. After the storage capacities for optics, acoustics, and writing had been separated, mechanized, and extensively utilized, their distinct data flows could also be reunited. Physiologically broken down into fragments and physically reconstructed, the central nervous system was resurrected, but as a Golem made of Golems.
Such recombinations became possible no later than the First World War, when media technologies, reaching beyond information storage, be- gan to affect the very transmission of information. Sound film combined the storage of acoustics and optics; shortly thereafter, television combined their transmission. Meanwhile, the text storage apparatus of the type- writer remained an invisible presence, that is to say, in the bureaucratic background. Lacan's final seminars all revolve around possibilities of con- necting and coupling the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary.
Engineers, however, had been planning media links all along. Since everything from sound to light is a wave or a frequency in a quantifiable,
? Film 171
nonhuman time, signal processing i s independent o f any one single medium. Edison perceived this very clearly when he described the de- velopment of his kinetoscope in 1894: "In the year 1887, the idea oc- curred to me that it was possible to devise an instrument which should do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, and that by a combi- nation of the two all motion and sound could be recorded and reproduced simultaneously. " 1 8 5
Cinema as an add-on to the phonograph-in theory, this applied only to storage and not to the systemic differences between one- and two-di- mensional signal processing; in practice, however, the analogy had far- reaching implications. Edison's Black Mary, the very first film studio, si- multaneously recorded sound and motion, that is, phonographic and kinetographic traces. In other words, sound film preceded silent film. But the synchronization of data streams remained a problem. Whereas in the optical realm, processing was a matter of equidistant scanning, which television was to increase to millions of points per second, in the acoustic dimension processing was based on analogies in a continuous stream of time. As a result, there arose synchronization problems similar to those of goose-stepping French regiments, problems more difficult to amend than Demeny's. Which is why Edison's master-slave relationship was turned on its head, and film, with its controllable time, took the lead. Mass-media research, with stacks of books on film and hardly any on gramophony, followed in its wake.
But pure silent film hardly ever existed. Wherever media were unable to connect, human interfaces filled the niche. Acoustic accompaniment in the shape of words and music came out of every fairground, variety show, and circus corner. Wagner pieces like the Liebestod or the "Ride of the Valkyries" posthumously proved that they had been composed as sound tracks. At first, solo piano or harmonium players fought for image- sound synchronicity in movie houses; from 1910 on, so did entire ensem- bles in urban centers. When the literati Diiubler, Pinthus, Werfel, Hasen- clever, Ehrenstein, Zech, and Lasker-Schuler saw The Adventures of Lady Glane in Dessau in 19 1 3 , the "dismal background piano clinking" was "drowned out by the voice of a narrator commenting on the action in a broad Saxon: 'And 'ere on a dark and stormy night we see Lady Glahney . . . "' 1 86 The repulsion in the progressive literati triggered by the Saxon dialect gave rise to their Movie Book. It "incited extensive and far- reaching discussions about the misguided ambitions of the newly emerg- ing silent film to imitate the word- or stage-centered theatrical drama or the ways in which novels use narrative language instead of probing the
172 Film
new and infinite possibilities inherent in moving images, and [Pinthus] raised the question what each of us, if asked to write a script, would come up with. "187
Pinthus et al. thus turned the handicaps of contemporary technology into aesthetics. Sound, language, and even intertitles were all but purged from the literary scripts they (rather unsuccessfully) offered to the film in- dustry. For the medium of silent film as for the writing medium, the guid- ing motto was appropriateness of material. (The fact that the Movie Book itself linked the two was missed by Pinthus. ) As if the differentiation of distinct storage media had called for theoretical overdetermination, early film analyses all stressed l'art pour l'art for the silent film. According to Bloem, "the removal of silence would dissolve the last and most impor- tant barrier protecting films from their complete subjugation to the de- piction of plain reality. An utterly unbridled realism would crush any re- maining touch of stylization that yet characterizes even the most impov- erished film. "188 Even Miinsterberg's psychotechnology discerned insoluble aesthetic rather than mechanical problems in the media link of film and phonograph.
A photoplay cannot gain but only lose if its visual purity is destroyed. If we see and hear at the same time, we do indeed come nearer to the real theatre, but this is desirable only if it is our goal to imitate the stage. Yet if that were the goal, even the best imitation would remain far inferior to an actual theatre performance. As soon as we have clearly understood that the photoplay is an art in itself, the con- versation of the spoken word is as disturbing as colour would be on the clothing of a marble statue. 189
The "invention of the sound film came down like a landslide" on these theories. In 1930, at the end of the silent film era, Balazs saw "a whole rich culture of visual expression in danger. "19o The International Artists Lodge as well as the Association of German Musicians, the human interfaces of the silent movie palaces, agreed and went even further in their labor dispute, turning Miinsterberg's arguments into a pamphlet "To the Audience! ": "Sound film is badly conserved theater at a higher price! " 19 1
Literature as word art, theater as theater, film as the filmic and radio as the radiophonic: all these catchwords of the 1920S were defensive mea- sures against the approaching media links. "A voluntary restriction of the artist to the technical material at hand-that results in the objective and immutable stylistic laws of his art. "l92 In strict accordance with Mal- larmes model, the filmic and the radiogenic were to import ['art pour ['art
? Film 173
into the optical and acoustic realms. But the radiogenic art o f the radio play was not killed off by the mass-media link of television; already at its birth it was not as wholly independent of the optical as the principle of appropriate material demanded. With its "accelerated dreamlike succes- sion of colorful and rapidly passing, jumping images, its abbreviations and superimpositions-its speed-its change from close-up to long shot with fade-in, fade-out, fade-over," the early radio play "consciously transferred film technology to radio. "193
The reverse passage from sound to image, or from gramophone to film, was taken less consciously, maybe even unconsciously. But only once records emanate from their electric transmission medium of radio does the rayon girl decide to "write her life like a movie. " In Bronnen's Holly- wood novel, Barbara La Marr learns from the record player all the move- ments that will make her a movie star. " We have a gramophone, that's all. Sometimes I dance to it. But that is all I know about large cities and singers and variety shows, of movies and Hollywood. "194 In turn, the gramophone (and some jazz bands) felt compelled to technologically syn- chronize a woman's body: while making love,195 inventing the strip tease,l96 taking screen tests,197 and so on. The future movie star Barbara La Marr was acoustically preprogrammed.
Two entertainment writers with Nobel prizes, Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann, followed the beaten track. Immediately prior to the in- troduction of sound film, links connecting cinema and gramophone, espe- cially when they stayed in the realm of the fantastic, were the best adver- tisement. Hesse's Steppenwolfculminates in a "Magic Theater," evidently the educated circumscription of a movie theater that uses radio records to produce its optical hallucination. From the "pale cool shimmer" of an "ear" that, as with Bell and Clarke's Ur-telephone, belongs to a corpse, emerges the music of Handel in "a mixture of bronchial slime and chewed rubber; that noise that owners of gramophones and radios have agreed to call radio. " But it is precisely this music that conjures up an optically hal- lucinated Mozart whose interpretation of Handel's music encourages con- sumers to perceive the latter's everlasting value behind the medium. 198 The stage is set for sound tracks.
Thomas Mann could already look back on one film version of Bud- denbrooks when a "very good Berlin producer" approached him in 1927 with plans for turning The Magic Mountain into a movie. Which was
"not surprising" to Mann. Ever since December 28, 1895, when the Lu- mieres presented their cinema projector, non-filmability has been an un- mistakable criterion for literature. "What might not have been made" of
174 Film
entertainment novels, particularly of the "chapter 'Snow,' with its Mediterranean dream of humanity! " 199 Dreams of humans and human- ity, whether the results of meteorological snow or of the powder of the same name, stage the mirror stage and are therefore cinema from the start. 200
The particular human in question, after escaping his dismemberment, embarks on a career in a lung sanatorium. The Magic Mountain already has at its disposal a stereoscope, a kaleidoscope, and, though demoted to the status of an amusing diversion, Marey's cinematographic cylinder. 201 In the end, however, and shortly before the First World War and its trenches, the so-called engineer Castorp also receives a modern Polyhym- nia gramophone, which he proceeds to administer as "an overflowing cor- nucopia of artistic enjoyment. "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.
Lacan's scheme of the inverted vase. (From Lacan 1988a, 139; reproduced by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (C) 1975 by Les Editions du Seuil; English translation (C) 198 8 by Cambridge University Press)
Lacan's theory, which, especially as an anti-psychology, is up to date with contemporary technological developments. The symbolic of letters and numbers, once celebrated as the highest creation of authors or geniuses: a world of computing machines. The real in its random series, once the sub- ject of philosophical statements or even "knowledge": an impossibility that only signal processors (and psychoanalysts of the future) can bring under their control. Finally, the imaginary, once the dream produced by and coming out of the caverns of the soul: a simple optical trick.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud followed the positivistic "suggestion that we should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photo- graphic apparatus, or something of the kind. "177 Lacan's theory of the imaginary is an attempt truly to "materialize"178 such models. As a result of which, cinema-the repressed of Freud's year at the Salpetriere-re- turns to psychoanalysis. Lacan's optical apparatuses show a complexity that can only derive from cinematic tricks. Step by step, they go beyond the simple mirror and the (mis)recognition that induces in the small child a first but treacherous image of sensory-motoric wholeness.
Following Bouasse's Photometrie of 1934, a concave mirror initially projects the real image of a hidden vase into the same room where, in be- tween x and y, it is expected by its actual flowers. If the optic beams com-
. . . . , . . . . , . . . . ,. .
"
- vs', . . . .
,I ,
,
? Messter's Alabastra Theater.
ing out of the parabola, however, are also deflected by a plane mirror per- pendicular to the eye, then the vase, miraculously filled with flowers, ap- pears to the subject S next to its own, but only virtual, mirror image VS. "That is what happens in man," who first achieves "the organization of the totality of reality into a limited number of preformed networks"179 and then lives through his identification with virtual doppelgangers. Nar- cissism is duplicated.
Lacan, however, did not need to search for his optical tricks in the science of Bouasse. Film pioneers, who have always been dreaming of 3 -D cinema without glasses, built apparatuses of a similar nature. In 19 10 Oskar Messter, the founder of the German film industry and the person in charge of all photography and film footage taken at the front during the First World War,180 introduced his Alabastra Theater in Berlin. He re- placed the concave mirror of Bouasse and Lacan with a film projector C
Film 1 69
? 170 Film
that nevertheless had the same function as the mirror: his lenses projected real images of actors that were allowed to act only against the black back- ground of all media-on a screen E located below the stage A. The audi- ence, however, only saw the virtual image of this screen, projected by the plane mirror B. With the result that filmed female dancers appeared on the stage of the Alabastra Theater itself and gave the impression of mov- ing through three dimensions. l S I
"Hence," Lacan said, addressing his seminar participants as well as the audience of the Alabastra Theater, "you are infinitely more than you can imagine, subjects [or underlings] of gadgets and instruments of all kinds-ranging from the microscope to radio and television-that will become elements of your being. "lS2
What's missing now is for the plane mirror B to become a psychoan- alyst and, prompted by the remote control of language that occupies him,183 turn by 90 degrees, so that the subject S sacrifices all its imaginary doppelgangers to the symbolic. Then, three dimensions or media-the nothing called a rose, the illusion of cinema, and discourse-will have been separated in a technologically pure way. The end of psychoanaly- sis/es is depersonalization. ls4
Consequently, Lacan was the first (and last) writer whose book titles only described positions in the media system. The writings were called Writings, the seminars, Seminar, the radio interview, Radiophonie, and the TV broadcast, Television.
Media-technological differentiations opened up the possibility for media links. After the storage capacities for optics, acoustics, and writing had been separated, mechanized, and extensively utilized, their distinct data flows could also be reunited. Physiologically broken down into fragments and physically reconstructed, the central nervous system was resurrected, but as a Golem made of Golems.
Such recombinations became possible no later than the First World War, when media technologies, reaching beyond information storage, be- gan to affect the very transmission of information. Sound film combined the storage of acoustics and optics; shortly thereafter, television combined their transmission. Meanwhile, the text storage apparatus of the type- writer remained an invisible presence, that is to say, in the bureaucratic background. Lacan's final seminars all revolve around possibilities of con- necting and coupling the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary.
Engineers, however, had been planning media links all along. Since everything from sound to light is a wave or a frequency in a quantifiable,
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nonhuman time, signal processing i s independent o f any one single medium. Edison perceived this very clearly when he described the de- velopment of his kinetoscope in 1894: "In the year 1887, the idea oc- curred to me that it was possible to devise an instrument which should do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, and that by a combi- nation of the two all motion and sound could be recorded and reproduced simultaneously. " 1 8 5
Cinema as an add-on to the phonograph-in theory, this applied only to storage and not to the systemic differences between one- and two-di- mensional signal processing; in practice, however, the analogy had far- reaching implications. Edison's Black Mary, the very first film studio, si- multaneously recorded sound and motion, that is, phonographic and kinetographic traces. In other words, sound film preceded silent film. But the synchronization of data streams remained a problem. Whereas in the optical realm, processing was a matter of equidistant scanning, which television was to increase to millions of points per second, in the acoustic dimension processing was based on analogies in a continuous stream of time. As a result, there arose synchronization problems similar to those of goose-stepping French regiments, problems more difficult to amend than Demeny's. Which is why Edison's master-slave relationship was turned on its head, and film, with its controllable time, took the lead. Mass-media research, with stacks of books on film and hardly any on gramophony, followed in its wake.
But pure silent film hardly ever existed. Wherever media were unable to connect, human interfaces filled the niche. Acoustic accompaniment in the shape of words and music came out of every fairground, variety show, and circus corner. Wagner pieces like the Liebestod or the "Ride of the Valkyries" posthumously proved that they had been composed as sound tracks. At first, solo piano or harmonium players fought for image- sound synchronicity in movie houses; from 1910 on, so did entire ensem- bles in urban centers. When the literati Diiubler, Pinthus, Werfel, Hasen- clever, Ehrenstein, Zech, and Lasker-Schuler saw The Adventures of Lady Glane in Dessau in 19 1 3 , the "dismal background piano clinking" was "drowned out by the voice of a narrator commenting on the action in a broad Saxon: 'And 'ere on a dark and stormy night we see Lady Glahney . . . "' 1 86 The repulsion in the progressive literati triggered by the Saxon dialect gave rise to their Movie Book. It "incited extensive and far- reaching discussions about the misguided ambitions of the newly emerg- ing silent film to imitate the word- or stage-centered theatrical drama or the ways in which novels use narrative language instead of probing the
172 Film
new and infinite possibilities inherent in moving images, and [Pinthus] raised the question what each of us, if asked to write a script, would come up with. "187
Pinthus et al. thus turned the handicaps of contemporary technology into aesthetics. Sound, language, and even intertitles were all but purged from the literary scripts they (rather unsuccessfully) offered to the film in- dustry. For the medium of silent film as for the writing medium, the guid- ing motto was appropriateness of material. (The fact that the Movie Book itself linked the two was missed by Pinthus. ) As if the differentiation of distinct storage media had called for theoretical overdetermination, early film analyses all stressed l'art pour l'art for the silent film. According to Bloem, "the removal of silence would dissolve the last and most impor- tant barrier protecting films from their complete subjugation to the de- piction of plain reality. An utterly unbridled realism would crush any re- maining touch of stylization that yet characterizes even the most impov- erished film. "188 Even Miinsterberg's psychotechnology discerned insoluble aesthetic rather than mechanical problems in the media link of film and phonograph.
A photoplay cannot gain but only lose if its visual purity is destroyed. If we see and hear at the same time, we do indeed come nearer to the real theatre, but this is desirable only if it is our goal to imitate the stage. Yet if that were the goal, even the best imitation would remain far inferior to an actual theatre performance. As soon as we have clearly understood that the photoplay is an art in itself, the con- versation of the spoken word is as disturbing as colour would be on the clothing of a marble statue. 189
The "invention of the sound film came down like a landslide" on these theories. In 1930, at the end of the silent film era, Balazs saw "a whole rich culture of visual expression in danger. "19o The International Artists Lodge as well as the Association of German Musicians, the human interfaces of the silent movie palaces, agreed and went even further in their labor dispute, turning Miinsterberg's arguments into a pamphlet "To the Audience! ": "Sound film is badly conserved theater at a higher price! " 19 1
Literature as word art, theater as theater, film as the filmic and radio as the radiophonic: all these catchwords of the 1920S were defensive mea- sures against the approaching media links. "A voluntary restriction of the artist to the technical material at hand-that results in the objective and immutable stylistic laws of his art. "l92 In strict accordance with Mal- larmes model, the filmic and the radiogenic were to import ['art pour ['art
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into the optical and acoustic realms. But the radiogenic art o f the radio play was not killed off by the mass-media link of television; already at its birth it was not as wholly independent of the optical as the principle of appropriate material demanded. With its "accelerated dreamlike succes- sion of colorful and rapidly passing, jumping images, its abbreviations and superimpositions-its speed-its change from close-up to long shot with fade-in, fade-out, fade-over," the early radio play "consciously transferred film technology to radio. "193
The reverse passage from sound to image, or from gramophone to film, was taken less consciously, maybe even unconsciously. But only once records emanate from their electric transmission medium of radio does the rayon girl decide to "write her life like a movie. " In Bronnen's Holly- wood novel, Barbara La Marr learns from the record player all the move- ments that will make her a movie star. " We have a gramophone, that's all. Sometimes I dance to it. But that is all I know about large cities and singers and variety shows, of movies and Hollywood. "194 In turn, the gramophone (and some jazz bands) felt compelled to technologically syn- chronize a woman's body: while making love,195 inventing the strip tease,l96 taking screen tests,197 and so on. The future movie star Barbara La Marr was acoustically preprogrammed.
Two entertainment writers with Nobel prizes, Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann, followed the beaten track. Immediately prior to the in- troduction of sound film, links connecting cinema and gramophone, espe- cially when they stayed in the realm of the fantastic, were the best adver- tisement. Hesse's Steppenwolfculminates in a "Magic Theater," evidently the educated circumscription of a movie theater that uses radio records to produce its optical hallucination. From the "pale cool shimmer" of an "ear" that, as with Bell and Clarke's Ur-telephone, belongs to a corpse, emerges the music of Handel in "a mixture of bronchial slime and chewed rubber; that noise that owners of gramophones and radios have agreed to call radio. " But it is precisely this music that conjures up an optically hal- lucinated Mozart whose interpretation of Handel's music encourages con- sumers to perceive the latter's everlasting value behind the medium. 198 The stage is set for sound tracks.
Thomas Mann could already look back on one film version of Bud- denbrooks when a "very good Berlin producer" approached him in 1927 with plans for turning The Magic Mountain into a movie. Which was
"not surprising" to Mann. Ever since December 28, 1895, when the Lu- mieres presented their cinema projector, non-filmability has been an un- mistakable criterion for literature. "What might not have been made" of
174 Film
entertainment novels, particularly of the "chapter 'Snow,' with its Mediterranean dream of humanity! " 199 Dreams of humans and human- ity, whether the results of meteorological snow or of the powder of the same name, stage the mirror stage and are therefore cinema from the start. 200
The particular human in question, after escaping his dismemberment, embarks on a career in a lung sanatorium. The Magic Mountain already has at its disposal a stereoscope, a kaleidoscope, and, though demoted to the status of an amusing diversion, Marey's cinematographic cylinder. 201 In the end, however, and shortly before the First World War and its trenches, the so-called engineer Castorp also receives a modern Polyhym- nia gramophone, which he proceeds to administer as "an overflowing cor- nucopia of artistic enjoyment. "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,"
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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 - -
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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.
