The Literal Shape of Things

Time for a confession: I love talking about things I don't understand just as much as the next aspiring scholar. It's fun! It's frustrating! It often feels like painting while wearing a blindfold! But we all have limits, right? Sometimes I just want to create moments where my academic comfort zones work for me. (Incidentally, if you ever need to know about the deaths of American modernist novelists, or innovations in mid-19th century prosthetics, you know who to ask....)

So, as I read Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter this week (incidentally another text translated from German, thankfully not nearly so dense or so inscrutable as Heidegger), I was thrilled to see not just one, but many avenues for connecting what I know of writing and what Kittler knows and theorizes of technology.

It would be presumptuous and inaccurate to reduce Kittler’s book to just one, or even several, “big ideas,” but he does return, in all three sections of his book, to the idea of form: the form of emerging technology as a re-purposing of a human neurological phenomenon, the form of technology as it shapes the content it creates, form as impetus to the pendulum that swings between real and imagined.

Now, poets generally know a thing or two about form. Even people who profess a profound indifference about poetry generally know a thing or two about poetic form—you know what a sonnet is, or a haiku, or—come on now—a limerick? You probably have a handle on stanzas, too: basic division of parts, an idea we share with music.

To write poetry is to inherently interact with the concepts of form. Even the most free-wheeling of free-verse poets, even the Beats, even Whitman’s sprawling lines and occasional disregard for margins are working with form; to disregard a convention is still to have a relationship with it, if only in the sense that whatever you’ve done will be first understood by others in the context of those conventions.

So, then, how to connect this back to Kittler? I want to start with a Gottfried Benn quote that he uses:

The poem impresses itself better when read….In my judgment, its visual appearance reinforces its reception. A modern poem demands to be printed on paper and demands to be read, demands the black letter; it becomes more plastic by viewing its external structure (228).

In some ways, this seems a perfunctory observation: the visual appearance of poetry has been up for discussion for centuries—since Blake’s illuminated manuscripts, since ornamental drop caps first adorned copies of the Bible, in some way since poetry began to transition from a primarily verbal to a primarily written art. Even Shakespeare was thinking about it:

O fearful meditation! where, alack,

Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?

Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?

Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

O, none, unless this miracle have might,

That in black ink my love may still shine bright. (from Sonnet 65)

There’s something to this, then, to the physical act of putting words down. Kittler is arguing that the typewriter, specifically, is a game-changer. I think that he’s right, and not only because I think that the phrase “discursive machine-gun” is brilliant. But if he’s right about that, if the mechanization of the previously manual task of writing has fundamentally altered the future content of writing, then oughtn’t it go all the way back? We know that the rise of water-powered paper mills impacted the availability of writing, but did it also impact what was being written? Of course, if only because it impacted who was writing…

You can see how this gets digressive, and how all these ideas are tightly bound in one another. I’m still chasing the ultimate why of this, trying to figure out what it is about the set of constraints that make up the typewriter that does something to us. Is it the “automated and discrete steps” of the typing process? Is it that somehow building from letters is different than building from words?

And, to end by going forward: what about the incarnations of these basic sensory experiences that were still in the future when Kittler’s book was published? I’m especially curious about the idea of touchscreens. If to build letter by letter, keystroke by keystroke, is a fundamental shift, then what of building without any tangible representations of letters? If writing letters is to commune with ghosts, as Kafka implied in his letters, then what is it when the letters themselves are ghosts?