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Building Blocks

In the television show Fringe, Fauxlivia, the parallel universe version of the Fringe’s protagonist Olivia, sits at the typewriter, a Selectric 251, and communicates with another world. The Selectric 251, based off the IBM Selectric II electric typewriter, allows agents from a parallel universe to communicate with “the other side,” that is, transuniversal spies relay messages across space-time using the Selectric 251. One cannot simply email or txt another universe, one types to another universe. What is striking about the use of the Selectric 251, a “quantum entangled telegraph” as it is later called, is the manner in which it dissipates and disorganizes our notion of authorship and how it complicates and compliments our attempt to think the typewriter in 2012.

Each page of the transuniversal text is co-authored, double-blind. Objectives failed or successfully completed by spies from a parallel universe are followed by new orders. There is no mark on the page denoting another author or mode of authorship. If we consider the military context of these transuniversal messages, hierarchy and power are effaced on the page. The Selectric 251 somehow reorganizes the stage upon which the power relation is played out. The page does not record its author, or, in this case, its authors, nor does it record their relationship to one another. (We can take this as, in some ways, a parallel to the disappearance of the amenuensis, but in this case there are explicitly two authors.) The transuniversal statements mitigated/inaugurated by the Selectric 251 creates a difficult and generative new topography of typewriting and its subjects. “Statements are not words, phrases or propositions, but rather formations thrown up by the corpus in question only when the subjects of the phrase, the objects of the proposition and the signifieds of the words change in nature: they then occupy the place of the ‘One speaks’ and become dispersed throughout the opacity of language,” Deleuze says (18). But this “one” who speaks is not “one” at all, could we not say that the “change in nature” that arises from the typewriter is the refusal of the “one speaks”? The typewriter seems to be continually testifying to Nietzsche’s “us” (he and the “writing ball”) or the “more we-full than I-less” of the Toronto Research Group (207, 11). The typewriter, as the Selectric 251 demonstrates, does not create a “one speaks,” but a “two (or more) type.”

The elision of the co-author on the Selectric 251 and the amenuensis in more traditional accounts of typewriting, highlights a larger problem. We assume there to be an author. Barthes pronounced the death of the author and the birth the reader. Perhaps it is time we kill the singular and generate the multiple. Deleuze states that “[t]he subject is the product of phrases or dialectic and has the character of a first person with whom discourse begins, while the statement is an anonymous function which leaves a trace of subject only in the third person, as a derived function” (15). A “one” that emerges from an anonymous murmur, but here, with the Selectric 251, we see a “two type,” a two that is juxtaposed on the page and made one. If the subject is a derived function of the statement or the ensuing discursive formation, why do we continue to imply one author, a subject, a function? Would it not be more accurate to say, given the multiplicity of affective and material causes that are at work in and through the typewriter, that “they speak”? Not the “third person,” but the third person plural. That “they,” those unknown typing functions, both create/are created by the statement/discursive formation? “They” serves not only as a plural address, but a formal one which underlines that the subject forms/is informed by the typewriter and vice versa. “[P]recisely because different individuals can intervene in each case,” Deleuze says, “a statement accumulates into a specific object which then becomes preserved, transmitted or repeated” (4). The anonymous plural individuals sit at the Selectric 251 and enable it to become a statement.

Fringe’s “quantum entangled telegraph” also serves to articulate several other aspects of Deleuze’s reading of Foucault. The page typed by the Selectric 251 is co-authored and acts somehow as a thing that unites two radically different universes but also maintains their separation, their difference. Note that the keypresses on “the other side” do not correspond to the keyboard on “this side.” The text is both transuniversal and transversal. Foucault’s archaeology is a transversal method. Acting out an “atonal logic,” it charts the difference and similarity, the combination and separation of elements across and against time (1). As Foucault puts it, when doing archaeology “one must characterize and individualize… the coexistence of these diverse and heterogeneous statements; the system that governs their division, the degree to which they depend on one another, the way in which they interlock or exclude one another, the transformation that they undergo, and the play of their location, arrangement, and replacement” (38).

The Selectric 251 is “skimming along on the diagonal” (1). Deleuze notes that “a diagonal movement creates a third possibility: discursive relations become associated with non-discursive milieux, which are not in themselves situated either inside or outside the group of statements but form the above-mentioned limit, the specific horizon without which these objects could neither appear nor be assigned a place in the statement itself”(10). The Selectric 251 is associated with the discursive relation it helps create (i.e. transuniversal espionage), but is not altogether absorbed into this discursive relation. There is a correspondence between two agents and it occurs in a simultaneously identical and radically different space. The agents are separate, but together. The letters pressed correspond to the letters on the page, but not entirely. There is a rupture of both the author function, as outlined above, and between two very different historical strata (e.g. on “the other side” the WTC never fell). Discursive formations arise, Deleuze says, “like a series of ‘building blocks,’ with gaps, traces and reactivations of former elements that survive under the new rules” (21-2).

Gaps, Traces, and Reactivations

How does the Selectric 251 reactivate our notions of authorship? Is the molar, singular subject a mere trace that is left over as we think through the typewriter in 2012? We are, in the clip provided, only shown a female author, but considering the author function(s) are rendered anonymous by the statement, does that render gender moot? Is there a gap between the author function and gender? Are traditional power structures collapsed on the page or are they reinforced in a new way? Is it possible that authority lies not in the agents typing, but in the machine that types? If we think of Foucault’s archaeology as forever generating and regenerating new statements, is any given discursive formation stable for long enough to be (accurately) described? How do we reject the logic of “the singular over the multiple” (i.e. we conceive of the typewriter as one thing, but it is really multiple objects assembled coherently e.g. keys, gears), how can we consistently rethink the multiple so that it does not become subsumed by the one? Can we think of the typewriter not as proto-computer, but as anti-computer (cf. the mirror in the clip above acts as an anti-screen, that is, rather than hiding the labour of production (of words) it reveals it)? Can we think the typewriter qua anti-computer as a transparent technology (contra the black box of the computer)? The typewriter reveals itself in breaking (i.e. it shows itself to be an assemblage of parts when a key malfunctions) whereas the computer only obfuscates itself and its practices further when it malfunctions (e.g. “the blue screen of death”), does this play into our association of mechanical=real/digital=virtual?

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009.

—. “Michel Foucault’s Main Concepts” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. Ed. David Lapoujade. Trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), 2007.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 2008.

— John Casey