The coffee shop in question is the Brûlerie St-Denis on rue Masson (recently styled “La Promenade Masson”). This pleasant, gentrified Rosemont neighbourhood is known for its population of young families and aging hipsters pushed out of Mile End and the Plateau by exorbitant property values. The café is known for nothing in particular. The food is crap, and so is the coffee. If the word “utopia” applies to it, it is only in the literal Greek sense—i.e., “nowhere.” It is worth mentioning here only because it’s where I happened to write the first paragraph of this probe.

Brûlerie St-Denis sur Masson

Inspired by Latour’s Laboratory Life, I’m observing the spaces in which the kind of knowledge I produce—little studies of literary works, analyses I support by ransacking the work of knowledge producers in a wide variety of fields—gets produced. As a participant in the production of this kind of knowledge and a frequent patron of cafés, I cannot claim to approach my subject, as Latour does, from a position of “anthropological strangeness” (40). I can, however, remember a time when cafés seemed strange and exotic to me.

I grew up on the outskirts of a small town where the only public establishments suited to daytime loitering were the tavern and the roadhouse. To me, cafés were fictional places where men wore berets and recited poetry (activities portrayed in American movies and TV shows as both unmanly and somehow subversive). When I moved to Montreal, I discovered that the true appeal of coffeehouses was their status as zones of public sociability. People went to relax, read, people-watch, meet friends, exchange opinions, expand their social circle. Some came to work, but this work usually consisted of taking long-hand notes in a ratty journal.

Coffee shops have changed since 1994. For one thing, there seem to be a lot more of them.

Four cafés less than a four-minute walk from my house

And a lot more people (myself included) now go to coffee shops alone, with no intention or desire to engage in any social exchanges beyond the transaction at the service counter which legitimizes, for an indeterminate length of time, their right to plop their laptop on any table they choose. They are there to work, and they’d appreciate your keeping the noise down at the next table, thank you.

Feeling a bit peckish, I’ve relocated to Café Lézard, a much superior café with better food and more attractive people than the Brûlerie. It’s retained some status as a cool local gathering place, however, and is thus probably less conducive to my work.

The development of mobile computing and the proliferation of free wi-fi enabled this transformation of the coffeehouse into a sort of communal office space. I choose to work in these spaces because they are outside of my home, where my family places constant demands on my attention, and yet nearby in case I am needed. The noise and movement of the space are dynamic enough to stave off boredom but not enough to seriously distract me. The bustle may even enhance creativity, a phenomenon that has inspired at least one silly app. Above all, there is a sense of being visible in a public space, which compels me to keep my fingers moving over the keyboard.

When we are alone in a public place, we have a fear of “having no purpose”. If we are in a public place and it looks like that we have no business there, it may not seem socially appropriate . . . so coffee-shop patrons deploy different methods to look “busy”. Being disengaged is our big social fear, especially in public spaces, and people try to cover their “being there” with an acceptable visible activity. (Gupta 49)

All of those people who claim premium tables so they can hunch over their laptops all afternoon have good reasons for doing so, and yet it’s possible that I mildly resented them before I became one of them. They seem to break an implied agreement by entering a social space and refusing to socialize.

But what if we expand our conventional understanding of the social to include our laptops and tablets, the coffee shop’s router and ISP, and the infrastructure of the Internet? Suddenly our activity doesn’t seem antisocial; it may in fact constitute a new kind of society. Wilém Flusser’s Into the Universe of Technical Images, first published in German in 1985, may offer a path toward an understanding of “the consciousness of a pure information society.” Assuming the imminent dominance of technical images over print and other media, Flusser posits two divergent trends in his near future—possibly our present—the first moving “toward a centrally programmed, totalitarian society of image receivers and image administrators, the other toward a dialogic, telematic society of image producers and image collectors.” He claims we have “the right and the duty to call this emerging society a utopia.” His also uses the word “utopia” in the literal Greek sense of “nowhere” because society “will no longer be found in any place or time but in imagined surfaces, in surfaces that absorb geography and history” (4). If I accept Flusser’s often deliberately provocative analysis of the destined state of media and culture, the coffee shop takes on a new aspect as a transcendent workspace based on the collaborative production (and reproduction) of images and texts.

The work that I and other coffeehouse denizens do is unlike that done by creative people in the past, who published works “without self-regard, from the information they have stored within themselves” (95). Flusser claims that this model of information production is over: “The time for such creative individuals, such heroes, is definitively past: they have become superfluous and impossible at the same time” (103), their status as authors done away with by technology that can faithfully reproduce all generated information. Creation based on inner dialogue will be replaced by a model in which everyone “can have outer dialogue, intersubjective conversations that are disproportionately more creative than any the ‘great people’ could ever have had, dialogues such as those that occur in the laboratory or work team, in which human memories are linked to artificial ones to synthesize information” (99-100). In this new future, anyone is potentially a creator (171). My work in the coffee shop, which seems like lonely intellectual drudgery—searching databases and constructing arguments around snippets of other people’s texts—is revealed as the new paradigm of creativity and social competence. And the scholars whose works I pillage are my interlocutors, as are the databases containing those works.

All this is so, if Flusser is correct—and his record as a prophet earns him some credibility—but as he indicates in his book’s first chapter, sensibly entitled “Warning,” he offers more questions than answers. I stare across the room at a pair of my fellow creators huddled over their MacBooks, faces lit by cold electroluminescence, and vow to do more work in bars.

Works Cited

Flusser, Wilém. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Trans. Nancy Ann Roth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Print.

Gupta, Neeti. “Grande Wifi: Understanding What Wifi Users are Doing in Coffee-Shops.” MS Thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004. Web. 4 Nov. 2015. 

Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. 1979. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986. Print.

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The orchestral piece “Briony,” part of the score composed by Dario Marianelli for the 2007 film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, is fundamentally a recent addition to the cultural landscape of typewriting. Despite its recency, the piece at its core makes a large-scale, conscious return to the “basics” of early media theory, fusing together classical music and the typewriter in a way which Marshall McLuhan had already conceived of much earlier. McLuhan’s early theories on the materiality of media, specifically from the essay “The Typewriter: Into the Age of the Iron Whim,” make a claim for the inherent connection between music and typewriting, both of which McLuhan consider to be intrinsic acts of composition that share more similarities than they might appear to at first glance.

If poetry – most explicitly in its oral form – manipulates timing, breath, suspension and syllabic rhythm to enhance the experience of both writing and reading a poem, music certainly does the same for any given composition. As McLuhan points out, Charles Olson and other mid-to-late twentieth-century poets employed vers libre to revert the state of language back to the original spoken, unrestrained circumstance of natural speech. If one agrees with Hemingway’s summing-up of the act of writing being as simple as one having to “sit down at a typewriter and bleed,” the poet becomes more like Sammy Davis Jr. than Samuel Johnson in front of his Remington. Indeed, the now-classic “Typewriter Song” by Leroy Anderson embodies the jazzy, uncontrolled essence of the connection between typewriting and music, tying in McLuhan’s and Olson’s conceptions of free verse and the typewriter as the frantic yet most honest means of writing (or “bleeding”) poetry.

However, “Briony” is not jazz, and is not a product of the cultural environment of the mid twentieth-century which, in truth, begged for a sense of freedom and escape from constraints of (largely) any kind. “Briony,” like most classical music pieces, is a deeply calculated, controlled composition which begs for a fixed and finite interpretation on the part of the listener. The piece begins primarily with interweaving notes of a typewriter and a piano. From the outset, the connection between the typewriter and the piano is established (or at least alluded to), consciously or not, by the composer.

Again, if we return back to the “basics” of the theory of writing, it becomes apparent that both acts have fundamental implications which cannot be ignored. As Vilem Flusser points out in “The Gesture of Writing,” the seeming banality of certain details regarding the gestures of written composition become more important in a larger epistemological framework. As such, beneath the banal and the undervalued lies the deeply relevant in terms of our social consciousness and, without returning to the rudimentary, it is nearly impossible to truly comprehend that social consciousness which we assume to be straightforward on a daily basis.

Flusser asserts that writing, in its most primitive and original form, is essentially a scratching or engraving with one material onto another. Though we may have lost or come quite far from the original gesture of writing as engraving, it may be that – if one looks closely – the gesture is still deeply present. In piano-playing the keys imprint, engrave or strike (though not materially or permanently, as the typewriter does) their strings, creating a particular sound which recreates the gesture of writing through musical notation. At the striking of both sets of keys sound is produced and rhythm is established. Both the piano and the typewriter involve the use of hands and fingers extended forward and rested above the keys of each respective instrument, uniting the tactile and sonic human faculties. Posture, and the way that a person places themselves in front of both the typewriter and the piano is extremely similar: both require a formal, rigid positioning of the body. As any first lesson in piano-playing will begin with posture, most early typewriter instruction manuals will dedicate an entire section to describing the ideal body positions for working on a typewriter. More complexly, however, both acts engage the mind in a linear fashion (quite literally, both instruments’ keys are arranged in ordered lines), have trained the mind to use all ten fingers rather than a fist or closed single hand, have given rise to a thought-process which functions in terms of linearity and progression, and have created a deeper connection in which the machine becomes essentially an extension of the physical human form.

What implications does this have on a social, and even on an anthropological, level? What does it mean when the introduction of the typewriter began to affect, modify and transform the way the human body physically interacts with it? Can our physical bodies actually be adjustable according to the materiality of our media?

Of course, it may be that “Briony” employs typewriter sounds in its musical score because Atonement deals largely with writing as a centralized theme within the context of its plot. Still, the continuity between the typewriter and the piano cannot be denied outright, even if the philosophical discourses of McLuhan or Flusser are ignored. To be sure, the continuity between the two goes beyond the fact that both instruments create sound.

On the basis of mood and atmosphere alone, the monotone, hard-sounding “click” of the typewriter’s keys seems to fit perfectly with the haunting, poignant nature of the film’s classical score. Indeed, the music is not only complemented but is accentuated and heightened by the typewriter sounds, adding an element of intensity that, nearly bass-drum-like in its steady rhythm, seems to resemble a death-knell sounding ominously in the background. The “scratching” Flusser associates with early writing has a sense of violence to it that seems to be translated to the typewriter, and by extension, to “Briony.” Why might this be the case? Do we inherently associate typewriting with a seriousness, coldness, monotony and rigidity that seem to shine through with “Briony”? If the gesture of writing, an equally solitary, solipsistic and serious-natured endeavor in itself, is associated with the typewriter throughout the majority of the twentieth century, does the typewriter have some inherently-associated emotional capital which marks our perspective of writing and typewriting? Might the composer be suggesting that the dichotomy between our forms of media continuously leaves ghosts of an abandoned media haunting and impacting our social consciousness? Finally, have we transitioned from the perspective of the jazzy, upbeat connotations of the typewriter which Leroy Anderson’s music seemed to propose toward one of the typewriter as inherently ominous and haunting as proposed in “Briony”?

— Stefano Faustini

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Analog or digital? Fingers or digits?

When NEO rings a bell, do you RETURN or ENTER?

Is                                                 the Final Frontier, or the Pen-Ultimate?

Writing with-out a page? Will this save autonomy from automation, belt chastity from rhythmic autofeedback excess?

Or…did you not see this as the impetus for a radicalized aesthetic practice?

Predating the release of the iPad in 2010 and the popularization of the tablet computer as hyperportable alternative to the laptop, NEO is neither tablet nor laptop but an obscure Other option of portable computer monocultured for writing in the same way the e-reader is for reading. Quite simply, it’s the severed writing appendage of the desktop computer, resurrected autonomous.

Strictly speaking, NEO isn’t a “digital typewriter.” For that, one would better refer to an Underwood USB typewriter (1, 2), the iTypewriter, or perhaps even a laptop running ClickKey (software that maps typewriter sounds to keystrokes). But this is precisely why NEO is striking: though not a typewriter, cultural memory—especially when the avatar of the target demographic is a Boomer-aged rustic—cannot but associate it with one.

For we tend to think of the typewriter teleologically, as a stand-alone keyboard just waiting to get CPU-leashed. The typewriter was eviscerated in the process, reduced to a pile of keys, peripheralized to a Machine in which both writer and writing become but one among many: “email,” “Web-surfing,” “game[s]”…. NEO, by association with the typewriter, severs the umbilical plug to distinguish the art and tool of writing once again autonomously from those of computing and (ironically) bureaucracy, and “the Writer” from the common man….

“Man”: because this stand-alone keyboard is for lone rangers, not copyists. Only boys will be (cow)boys on the Frontier delineating the white virgin page from the Wild Wild Web. The typewriter began as a symbol of female autonomy, but ends as a symbol of male autonomy/fertility as defined against the writing assembly lines that absorbed the career woman in the same way webbing and computing now absorb all writers. For the modern-day Romantic, you are only as autonomous as your keyboard. Only NEO can unplug from the Matrix; only NEO can reconnect you with Self and Nature—even if it requires an Internet metaphor (i.e., connection) to do so: NEO “instantly connects you with your thoughts.”

In fact, NEO can do all of the above even better than the real thing (true to nostalgia, it’s a hypertypewriter; “it acts like a hardcore typewriter“)—because it’s light and portable: NEO only has the psychological (whimsical) heft of a typewriter. True, part of the typewriter’s appeal is its machine-ness, but luckily NEO lets you toggle between two modes of technophobic nostalgia: 1) autonomy from modern-day technology; 2) autonomy from the Machine altogether. For, heavy machine-ness also is what chained the typewriter and writer to the bureau in the same way that the subordination of the writing tool to the computing tool chains the keyboard and writer to the computer & the Machine. Moreover, the NEO is quiet—one can bring it into the woods without adulterating Nature’s musicscape—and the battery life is so long as to make the organ seem to have a life of its own, autonomous from the Power grid, powered as though by a hidden Source (if not, environmentally friendlily, by kinetic energy from the writer’s own digits). This means the object becomes material only every 700 hours!—more than enough to write Walden. And less work, too: it’s easier to punch the buttons, and hence easier to unsee writing as labour.

This, all in the name of guarding the fragile independent creative mind from “distractions.” There is an implication, however, that the most important defensive function might be, to protect the writer from (the distractions of) the writing tool itself. The one respect in which NEO resembles neither computer nor typewriter nor Atari nor quill is that there is no screen/page proper. There is a miniscule, slight-angled screen at the top; but looking at text on this is like looking at text not on a page but through a voyeuristic mail slot, and unless you don’t mind hunching over and/or you have no keyboard memorization or typing prowess whatever, then I daresay you’ll be (your head will be) more inclined not to look at the screen/page at all and simply TYPE. Type, and look at…what?

Picture a pen of ink super-volatile once penned. Actually, such a pen is within easy grasp: the tongue, whose “writing” within an oral culture would seem page/screen-less. Or is the “screen” simply the audience? Which is to say, that the paginal equivalent of an oral audience are the scratches/impressions, visibly reacting, within the mirror page, to our performance. The page is like a performance chart or to-do list: put a check mark on each coordinate of the time-table on which you achieved your daily goal; this compels you to want to see more checks. The typewriter’s bell? That’s Pavlovian. What Flusser points to, the necessary “motive” to write and the unseen text from which the writer “copies” (pp. 2, 5-6), are thus perhaps no better represented than by the blank page itself. Moralist police of good writing Strunk & White elaborate:

When writing with a computer [“typewriter” in older editions] you must guard against wordiness. The click and flow of a word processor can be seductive, and you may find yourself adding a few unnecessary words or even a whole passage just to experience the pleasure of running your fingers over the keybaord and watching your words appear on the screen. It is always a good idea to reread your writing later and ruthlessly delete the excess. (p.74)

Enter NEO, a guard against material excesses. “Focus,” orders the Page: “Turn off your targeting computer,” to the space cowboy.

But perhaps NEO’s shown us something: The Page. To look away from the teleprompter (which NEO’s own miniscreen resembles), to a diff-errant audience.

Postscript

NEO can be loosely emulated through your own laptop by running Freedom “Internet Blocking Productivity Software” while having your screen’s brightness turned to zero. (Cf. Darkroom.) A more daring experiment is to simply turn the laptop off.

Intertexts

Flusser, Vilem. “The gesture of writing.”
McLuhan, Marshall. “Front Page.”
NEO. [Ad]. Writer’s Digest. February 2009. p.7.
Strunk, William and E.B. White. The Elements of Style. 7th Ed. p.74.

Note: This article refers to NEO. A “NEO 2” has since been released.

— Kevin Kvas

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