Better late than never: here are the sticky-note ancestors of the literary computer. If you can’t read them, that’s OK: you’re not necessarily supposed to.

Part 1

Part 2

Zoomed-in cross-section of Part 1

Layers of the Archaeology

In other news, I found this ad for AmpLab in the Gazette (8 Dec. 2012):

— Kevin Kvas

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— Christopher Chaban

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“…A machine that can think remains the dream.”

— Genevieve Robichaud

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Kevin,
I too am an awe with this “machine” you’ve created!  Is this the “digital us”, I wonder?
In a chapter entitled “The Digital You: What the Digital Explosion is Doing to Your Brain,” Judith Horstman investigates the effects of the internet (among others) on brain power.  In the aforementioned chapter, the suggestion is made that we should, bref,

“forget book learning, physical classrooms, and didactic teaching, even physical books themselves. Brains today learn through internet interaction, wirelessly at lightning speed and all the time, networked globally across social, political and geographical boundaries. Scientists aren’t sure exactly what that’s doing to our brains, but they’re sure it’s doing something, and that microprocessors that will WiFi our brains directly to the Internet are next up” (55).

Does the graph/ web, then, point to the manner in which our brains parcel out information and digest digital activity? Ranging from “greater connectivity, more interactive learning, a heightened visual senses, to more interactive learning and shorthand communication,” the digital native is supposedly one that “absorbs information quickly and in small bites (bytes)” (58). But what about the computer’s relationship to error? To production?  To the typist? Who’s dictating who? (Of course, in respect to this question, we might also think of Chris’s maps/grid works from last week).

Like Jon, I am not entirely sure where to go with this. I was moved by your mapping project, Kevin, and it alone made me want to compose, but my response is perhaps less a response than a mere gesture of appreciation.

Works Cited
Horstman, Judith. “Digital You.” The Scientific American Brave New Brain: How Neuroscience, Brain-Machine Interfaces, Neuroimaging, Psychopharmacoloy, Epigenetics, the Internet, and Our Own Minds are Stimulating and Enhancing the Future of Mental Power. Wiley, 2010. accessed 27 November 2012.

— Genevieve Robichaud

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I don’t even know how to properly go about beginning to cognize that chart.  I’m in awe and as such this post is more motivated by affect than intellect.  Perhaps that’s the point.   Henry James wanting to hear the sound of typing without want or care for the words being produced, the Officer’s enthusiasm and our horror towards the machine in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” Bill Lee’s intimate and bodily relationship to his bugmachines; the typewriter in all its iterations and varied instantiations seems to prompt an affective response in the face of an inability to precisely ‘pin down’ definitively what the typewriter is, what it does and what it wants us to do with it.

Or, y’know, that’s kind of what I was thinking anyways.

On a related, but more or less entirely unrelated, note.  Here’s Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” which I think speaks to a lot of what has been said in the last couple of weeks and is just generally a lovely read.  It’s right here.

— John Casey

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OBJECTS

MaximumPartyZone. “Hemingway.” YouTube. 28 May 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHod5qMaJuA. Accessed 23 Nov. 2012.

Morrissey, Ed. “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.” YouTube. 11 Aug 2008. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdA__2tKoIU. Accessed 23 Nov. 2012.

N+7 Generator. http://www.spoonbill.org/n+7/ Accessed 23 Nov. 2012.

Queneau, Raymond. A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems.  Bevrowe. http://www.bevrowe.info/Queneau/QueneauRandom_v4.html. Accessed 23 Nov. 2012.

Stefans, Brian Kim. Star Wars, one word at a time. Eliterature. 2005. http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/stefans__star_wars_one_letter_at_a_time.html. Accessed 23 Nov. 2012.

CRITICAL OBJECTS

Baudrillard, Jean. The intelligence of evil or the lucidity pact. [2004] Trans. Chris Turner. New York: Berg, 2005.

Bök, Christian. ’Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002.

Emerson, Lori. “A Brief History of Dirty Concrete by Way of Steve McCaffery’s Carnival and Digital D.I.Y.” Breakthrough Nostalgia: Reading Steve McCaffery Then and Now. Open Letter 14^th ser. 7 (fall 2011): 120-29.

Flusser, Vilém. “The Gesture of Writing.” Manuscript. Flusser Studies 08 (May 2009). Flusserstudies.net. Accessed 23 Nov. 2012.

Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 76-100.

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. [1986] Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Writing Science. Standford: Stanford UP, 1999.

Ramsay, Stephen. Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011.

— Kevin Kvas

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There are numerous points of con- and divergence between PKD’s Exegesis and the diaries produced by Schmitt’s buribunkologist. While the clearest contemporary analogue to Schmitt’s buribunk is, well, all of us. Tweeters, Facebookers, consumers/producers of social media are always in the act of autopoiesis and, in Schmitt’s estimation, consequently become the particular instantiations of the movement of world history. PKD, by contrast, wholly abstracts and/or overdetermines the auto- in his poiesis. The Exegesis is, arguably, about everything that ever has been or ever will be with one notable exception: the individual, autonomous human subject. PKD’s originary worry is made clear fairly early on. “Am I losing touch with reality?” PKD writes, “Or is reality sliding towards a Phil Dickian type of atmosphere? And if the latter, then for god’s sake why? Am I responsible? How could I be responsible? Isn’t that solipsism?” (22). Reality is is, he believes, undergoing some atmospheric change that resembles the metaphysical technoscapes “he” created. (The scare-quoted “he” will be explained and elaborated upon below). This serves as a strong counterpoint to Schmitt’s buribunk who is writing and being written by world history (q. in Kittler 242). The buribunk is made immortal, is pacified by the guarantee that the diary participates in something greater than itself. “What is the great engine that elevates me out of the complacent circle of egohood? History!” This is the buribunk’s call and response. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ says the buribunk, ‘history will sort everything out.’ PKD, on the other hand, is not comforted by what is being made manifest in/through him, nor is he content to accept that it all devolves back into his ego. This is PKD’s negative dialectic. The Phil Dickian atmosphere is a threat to and a problem for PKD. We should briefly pause to note the ambiguity of the threat PKD has identified. It is an atmosphere, some nebulous and amorphous area/mood, and it is Phil Dickian, that is, it shares some qualities of the vast and labyrinthine texts that can be attributed in some way or another to Philip K. Dick. [I should note here for clarity’s sake that my use of PKD as a sort of stand-in for Philip K. Dick is an attempt to create some distance between the historically situated person who goes by ‘Phil Dick’ and the sci-fi author ‘Philip K. Dick.’ It is my contention that something, not someone, new comes about in the writing of the Exegesis and I have decided that the easiest way to refer to that something is as PKD.]

“I feel I have been a lot of different people,” PKD writes, “Many people have sat at this typewriter, using my fingers. Writing my books. // My books are forgeries. Nobody wrote them. The goddam typewriter wrote them; it’s a magic typewriter. Or like John Denver gets his songs: I get them from the air. Like his songs, they – my books – are already there. Whatever that means.” (22). The books and, thus, the Phil Dickian atmosphere is always-already there, but nobody authored or authorized these things. No world history, no buribunk, no dialectic; just the damn typewriting machine. The Dickian atmosphere is not localizable in any one individual and certainly not in any one text. Where, for Schmitt, “the mental region in which these numerous and contradictory elements, this bundle of negated negations, are synthesized – the unexplainable, absolute, essential that is part of every religion – that is nothing but the Buribunkological” (236). There is no synthesis for PKD, no resolution or closure to the dialectic. There are no final negations of the negations that lead to sublimation. The buribunk writes whatever in dutiful service to the homogenizing force of humanity and world history. PKD is, on the other hand, “always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles. What I write doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. There is fun and religion and psychotic horror strewn about like a bunch of hats” (324). PKD is a buribunk, in that he writes about himself and events that he has undergone in some form or another, but a buribunk with a difference and the method that is imminent in the Exegesis offers us a way out of the world-historical Tweeter, the diary-keeping buribunk, and, most importantly, Kittler’s apocalyptic visions of technology’s endstage.

Kittler proposes a technological eschatology where “literature has nothing more to say” (263). As though the typewriter were extinct, extant only in archived advertisements of the past. As if the typewriter were merely some link on the great chain of technological progress. Granted, digitalization gives every indication that it is a totalizing force, but there must remain gaps, points of rupture. One of these gaps is the typewriter. As Erik Davis notes, PKD “made philosophy a kind of transcendent punk-rock machine music: repetitive, incessant, sometimes hysterically Romantic, but also a work that can be appreciated, not as rigorous argument, but as a flowing pattern of variation, affect, rhythm, and return” (434n). Outside the intellect, the totalizing force of the dialectic, and bizarre notions of linear progress and obsolescence, there is a way of maneuvering. PKD does just that.

Schmitt’s promise that “no second peeling off of the future is getting lost, no hit of the typewriter key will miss the page” parallels Kittler’s guarantee that digitalization “transforms sources of accidental noise into absolute all-or-none organs” (242, 250). Against these assertions, here’s PKD:

“If you recall the weird word found on deserted Roanoke Island in 1591, which was CTOSYOAN, carved on a tree and everyone mysteriously gone, – well, look I did it just then; I had my fingers one key to the right on my keyboard: the word is CROATOAN; I was copying it from my text book and had my eyes away from my hands. Thus marvelously proving my point. But for centuries scholars have been trying to figure out what “Croatoan” means. Probably it means nothing; the terrified colonists of the island, faced by one or more hostile forces (famine, Indians, plague, etc.), had an inspiration and left the island from some other sanctuary, believing that those letters spelled out something meaningful. Perhaps the Cosmic Teletype Operator turned his head for a moment, as I did, and erred” (12).

Contingency over necessity. Accident that is mistaken for an “all-or-none organ,” but can be read as accident all the same. Negative dialectics over dialectics. Agon over rigid binary. The cosmological over the world historical. PKD allows us to rethink what seemed so certain. The use of vestigial technology allows for a re-orientation. The typewriter, not as ante-computer but anti-computer, allows us to change the coordinates of writing. The means of writing dictate what is written, but there are ways to pervert the means and distort the message. Out of PKD’s typewriter, a supposedly restrictive technology, comes a kaleidoscopic, gnostic wikipedia before the internet. The typewriter which, to PKD, was a “dream machine that models cosmic processes,” gives us a site to think otherwise about our given discursive formation.  PKD’s typewriter and the Exegesis that came out of it demands that we think of the typewriter in a new fashion and not as some intermediary between pen/paper and keyboard/screen.  The typewriter, symbol of the bureaucrat and the beatnik, does not coalesce into one singular object, but rather is an open technology that can be used and abused.

The typewriter is not a precursor to the computer since the typewriter is not any one thing, nor does it inaugurate any one type of speech. We need some way to move beyond the Buribunk, to move outside the linear, dialectical idea of technological progress, and, most importantly, away from some “I” that writes/thinks/speaks itself into being. There is no need for another reformulation of Descartes ever-enduring ‘I think, therefore I am,’ which has become, as a former professor of mine liked to say, “a statement of lifestyle and void of any philosophical worth” (cf. T-Shirts carrying the slogan “I surf, therefore I am” or some other such derivative). Perhaps we need an “It is, we think,” the opposite of Descartes stabilizing gesture of providing an ontological foundation via an “I’s” doubt. The typewriter is and we continue to wonder about it, question it, probe it.  The possibility opened up by PKD’s typewriter is the revelation of a fundamentally unstable ontology via some thing’s material certainty. Not subjects and ideas, but objects and matter. Not existentially appeasing doubt, but phenomenologically disruptive certainty. (Our cri de coeur could be, pace Husserl, “<em>From</em> the things themselves!”). PKD, typewriting the cosmos on his punk-rock dream machine, gives us an entry point to exploring such a possibility.

Works Cited

Dick, Philip K. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Eds. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.

— John Casey

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There was a study published earlier this year on the possible effects of the QWERTY keyboard layout on word usage rates. The theory is that the proximity of certain keys encourage users toward words requiring easier/fewer finger movements (in the same way as we tend toward economy in speech). This linguist summarizes and refutes the theory, arguing that the influence of keyboard arrangement on word choice is so small as to be negligible.

I would point out that another consideration neglected by the study is dictated text, of which some portion of their sampling may have been. If you are getting a typist to do all the work, then obviously what you say won’t be affected by the keyboard.

I wonder if the story might be different for the layout of the Chinese Typewriter. Thomas Mullaney speculates as much in his video explaining how he was lead to do his research on the Chinese Typewriter by way of the idea of character disappearances caused by the demands of printing-presses…

— Kevin Kvas

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Wishbone is a children’s television show about a dog who not only can read, but about a dog who has a particular taste for canonical literature. Associating a dog with appropriated literary references serves to implicate his “otherness.” He acts out the tales as if he were human, speaking in the dialects of the characters (usually British) and mimicking human actions. But there are limitations, he is after all a dog and he cannot sip water out of a glass as people do; producers and directors have modified sets and props to accommodate this. Wishbone does have similarities to the Oriental, in that he is created by Western culture, marked as distinctly different, has ties to literary dominance and is a part of a larger discursive network. Ultimately Wishbone becomes embroiled in power politics, he takes on the role of the hero, the crime solver, yet the humans end up saving the day, with Wishbone taking a secondary role.

In this episode, cleverly titled Pup Fiction (though the literary counterpart is “Northanger Abbey”), Wanda receives mysterious typewritten notes in present day. These notes are originally perceived to be a potential love letters but are quickly assumed to be haunting and threatening. Wanda even remarks that these notes are specifically typewritten, pointing out the care that was taken to produce the notes. The haunted becomes implicitly implied with typewritten text. Furthermore in the “literary” story the haunted is also portrayed in the Gothic novels read, the stormy background, and the story about the dead mother. Haunted texts become an undercurrent that specifies not only the mode of the story but the physicality of it. The menacing qualities has characters looking over their shoulders, dropping objects, physically manifesting fear. The Gothic books for Catherine and the letters for Wanda both act as mediums for which the hauntings emerge.

The relationship between these two lies in the fact that Wishbone often scares the children who are also reading ghost stories in modern day. Wishbone, the other, frightens them, haunts them by accident. His otherness is illustrated when he puts his bony paw through the tent in which the children are sitting, paralleling their reading of a ghost/skeleton reaching through a door. Haunting is related to his otherness, his otherness related to haunting; a relationship within the larger discursive network. It turns out that the notes were a false trail intended to distract Wanda from a surprise party in her honour. Wishbone does not solve the mystery and the humans bond while Wishbone is scolded for prematurely eating the cake (aside from the fact that if he ate chocolate cake in real life he would be dead). The link is that Wishbone retains his otherness through his lack of crime solving ability. He acts as a tool to reinforce human relations, just as the Oriental reinforces notions of the West. Wishbone is held under the power of the humans and ultimately reminds viewers that he is a silly dog who just wants food. Furthermore at the end of the episode plays a short about the creation of Wishbone, negating the possibility for children that Wishbone can actually comprehend and read literature. The message that Wishbone is a construction is placed at centre stage then.

— Jaime Kirtz

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Batman comics of the early days (circa 1940-60) recurringly featured giant-sized everyday objects, usually business-related. Villains had a habit of establishing hideouts in the factories of companies that had inexplicably found a market for giant functional versions of their usual products, whether those be cash registers, adding machines, globes, record players, coins . . . or typewriters. As well as providing uniquely interactive backdrops for fight scenes, these objects often served as villains’ death traps (the elaborate torture device that grants the hero time to escape).

Just as often, though, the object was militarized to the heroes’ advantage – carriage return becomes battering ram, typebars become crowbars – and concurrently caused anyone who touched it to come down with a severe case of Ponty Pool– and The Shining-esque glossolalia. Batman and Robin start speaking in puns and using performative language, narrating their own actions (“X marks the spot!”), blurring the line between lip-smacks and onomatopoeic pun/ches.

Robin shows who’s boss by censoring his assailant’s claim to the potency of authorship: “[se]X marks the spot”

Fastforward to the 1970s…

The Selectric writing ball: throwback to the Victorian writing ball, or just another symbol of male potency?

It’s the typewriter, naturally, after which this Big Object trope is now named: the “Giant Typewriter,” like the Big Dumb Object of science fiction or the derogatory sense of the term “Chinese Typewriter.” It’s the unwieldy, too-complex contraption that flagrantly contradicts rational engineering and cost-benefit analysis. (See the estimated cost of building the Death Star.) Its true purpose is solely to fascinate, intimidate, be incomprehensible: in short, to be other; hence its association, as here, with the Villain.

The real is the nitty-gritty mechanics of how such an object would actually work (like the cost-benefit math to a math-phobe); the imaginary is its glossy black boxiness, or if there is no black box, our refusal to try to understand what the mass of blinking buttons on the Star Trek control panel actually does (and the writer’s refusal to explain — and our refusal to care once we do understand what they are: Big and Dumb); the symbolic is its classification as other.

In the case of the Batman objects, though, they’re not truly other (they’re not the imperial Death Star, the Great Wall of China, or the impenetrable black box of 2001: A Space Odyssey), rather they’re uncanny. Like the grotesque worlds of sensational travel and explorer narratives beginning from Gulliver’s Travels, the familiar is magnified or miniaturized as a means of othering that familiarity, only to reflect it back to us unfamiliarly. In other words, as Batman and Robin’s performance poetry would seem to run in hand with, these Giant Typewriter battle-surfaces are abstract art objects, defamiliarizing (perhaps more so now, to us). Batman and Robin go native, xeno-glossy, in the presence of them, and weaponize them no differently than the Bad Guys do. In that sense, these early comics prefigure Alan Moore’s mature 1980s Batman comic The Killing Joke, which deconstructs the master-slave dialectic between Batman and Joker, rationality and irrationality. These giant objects represent moments in which (to reference an image from Moore’s comic) the beam of dividing light disappears: both between Good and Bad and between text and material context (the two, apparently, are aligned) as the writer writes about what’s on his desk, has his characters dance glitchy poems across it, and renders his own typewriter as the weapon – truth, the Big Other – to be fought with and fought over: to itself be othered.

In another sense, though, these are just little dumb comics with Big Dumb Uncanny Objects in them. These are decidedly discursively different from Big Dumb Uncanny Objects That Sometimes Get Called “(sm)Art.”

As it so happens, Bill Finger, the creator of the Giant Typewriter trope, reportedly wasn’t making this stuff up (or rather, was not so lost for ideas as to write about his typewriter): he was influenced by such (sm)art objects, or at least by the dumb billboard-esque equivalents of them (like Lard Lad’s giant donut).

In reference to one modern such object, incidentally related to the typewriter – Claes Oldenburg’s Typewriter Eraser – Bill Brown muses about its double-remove from an order of familiarity: not only is it useless,* being giant, but young viewers won’t even know what it’s a giant version of, such that “this abandoned object attains a new stature precisely because it has no life outside the boundary of art – no life, that is, within our everyday lives” (p.15). If we were to find that giant typewriter eraser in an old Batman comic, however (“Don’t make me erase you to the death, Deadshot!”), would the unexpected context of an old comic book place it at yet another remove, or would it just be kind of laughably cheesy/donutty nostalgic kitsch? How is it that Big Dumb Uncanny Objects (or even, perhaps, just Big Dumb Objects) can serve as well for the scene for a 1950s Batman comic-book battle, a sculptural billboard for a donut shop (real or cartoon), and as 1999 art outside the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.? By re-reading, albeit with at least some of our age’s inevitable irony, the Giant Typewriters of Batman as materialist Art, it would seem I’m merely elevating them into the art gallery, as it were, of this context-mixing blog post…

Batman confesses to having feelings for Deadshot.

* “useless” is always a highly qualified term, of course. This is also another way in which the Big Objects of Batman are peculiar, though: they’re actually functional.

Sources

Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28:1 (2001), 1-22.

Comic Treadmill

Oz and Ends

— Kevin Kvas

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