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Of digits and things: opening remarks
Briankle G. Chang
ABSTRACT
Unlike our eyes, which bring us a world in images, our hands and fingers put us directly in touch with things in the world. Touching things directly, but also feeling themselves being touched at the same time, our hands and fingers are our first medium. But by remaining always contemporary – that is, always ready at hand – they are also our latest medium. Taking this observation as a starting point and keeping the idea of ‘the digital’ as a constant, this essay considers a few characteristics that establish German media theory as a distinct research project. It demonstrates, first, how artefacts ‘become’ media and, second, how this ‘becoming media’ can be formulated operationally and be studied in a manner consistent with the digital passages through which media appear as what they are. It is hoped that the discussion will shed some light on why and to what extent German media theory can be understood as ‘posthermeneutical’.
The typewriter has been unusable since my last card … and the writing cannot be seen at all. If you think about it!! (Friedrich Nietzsche, letter of March 17, 1882)
The typewriter is a signless cloud … and through it the relation of Being to man is transformed. (Martin Heidegger)
… to comfortably acquire, so to speak, as many fingers as needed. (Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, True Art of Playing the Keyboard, 1753)
Figure 1. Front view, Amherst Typewriter & Computer, Amherst, MA 2014. Photo by Author.
At the centre of the small town where I live stands a scrubby store that looks out of character with its surroundings. Sandwiched between two popular restaurants, the storefront curves humbly almost a foot backward from the façades of the more prosperous-looking structures on both sides. Always dimly lit from the inside, the place appears tired of supporting the plastic banner hanging outside, a sign demurely advertising that it sells and services typewriters, computers, and the like (Figure 1). On sunny business days, passersby are likely to bump into a ragged office stand placed outside the front window, upon which rests an antique Remington clearly intended to attract everyone to stop and step inside. For almost 30 years, Amherst Typewriter & Computer has managed to keep its doors open, and the few changes made during its existence have been as unnoticeable as an old Remington is sturdy. To someone like me, who finds the Hemingwrite a truly useful (re-)invention, the storefront looks comforting and disquieting at once, as it keeps in view a slice of the world wherein evidence for the continuity between the manual and the digital is still visible and palpably at hand. The owner, I was told, can fix any computer problem. And he sells ink cartridges.
Figure 2. Interior view, Amherst Typewriter & Computer, Amherst, MA 2014. Photo by Author.
Every time I walk by the store, I stop and look in the front window; on rare occasions, the curious on the street join me (Figure 2). If looking begins with fascination, with being attracted, often unawares and unexpectedly, by what the attraction makes visible, what then is it that attracts me to look time and again, despite my knowing full well that what I am seeing is perhaps but an instance of programmed obsolescence characteristic of so many so-called useful things around us? And, being so attracted, what do I, or anyone else like me, see or wish to see? Staring at the broken telephone, used typewriters, tangled wires, sticky keyboards, discoloured shop signs, rusty cash registers, and the rest – all looking rather like castoffs more suited to a hoarder’s basement or attic – I cannot help thinking that they are much less real items for sale than objects amassed here to re-collect themselves, to tell the story of how they came to be heaped together in this place and in this way. Crowded behind a glass window precisely because they have ceased to work as they once did, these junk-like items – all nonbiodegradable and thus surviving as witnesses to their becoming obsolete – are given a new life, a second life, or afterlife, that, in their new office by the sidewalk, proves to be no less deserved and telling than their ci-devant usefulness was assured. Surviving in this way, they (re-)appear no longer as simple castoffs or refuse saved by the store owner for reasons probably known only to him, but now, rather, as window-dressing artefacts embodying the comings and goings that history has impressed upon them. Indeed, they are not merely associated or juxtaposed by chance but rather come brightly together to form what could be called a character archive, a Kunstkammer of sorts, to which they can be seen to belong and in which the story behind their belonging is symptomatically readable.
To see is to see more than one thing at once; it is to see each thing as it appears, but also, at the same time, to see things together. Looking through the store window, not only do I see all the items on display jostling together to staging the scene they do, but I also see, no less clearly, that they work jointly for an effect that each on its own would not be able to produce, an effect achieved not for the interpretation of their uses or values but, rather, by their forced yet simple juxtaposition. (It might be worth adding parenthetically that, as I look at the gadgets – all tools of communication of sorts from yesteryear, competing for my attention with equal success from behind the glass – not only do they, grouped tightly side by side, appear to look at, or speak to, one another, but, as if animated by the chorus of their own making, they also seem to look back and begin to speak to me as an interested onlooker, or to anyone who is ‘there kinetically’, to recall Aby Warburg’s keen description (see Michaud 2004, p. 325). Indeed, if things of the past can speak to us from where we too once were, then things by which we used to reach out and touch someone in earlier times shall speak all the louder when we now stop to look at them again.)
So juxtaposed and forced to cohere, though momentarily, to create a tableau, these objects, as intimated earlier, are no longer viewed as mere curious ‘fragments’ picked by chance from we-know-not-where; rather, they invite the onlookers to regard themselves as ‘details’ of a bigger picture, as parts cut (de-tailler) from a missing or absent but nonetheless discernable whole – exemplary parts (exempla), that is to say, capable of coalescing our recollections and feelings associated with them into a story of a time and place that is rapidly receding but not yet completely lost, a story that their reappearance here and now helps to bring home afresh. As active parts returning onlookers’ gaze from within the idyll they compose, these details, to use an expression few today would fail to find appropriate, ‘constellate an image’ – a flash of vision that, as if to keep alive a ‘spark of hope in the past’, reanimates pars pro toto what the onlookers still dimly remember and feel in ‘a dialectic at a standstill’ (though, I quickly add, without invoking ‘a moment of danger’ and carrying few traces of barbarism).1 ‘A strange weave of time and space’, this image rather resembles a cubist collage, a ‘force-image’, as Carl Einstein, following but going beyond Benjamin, would call it, wherein things originally not for public display are redisplayed in their present configuration, à la the most basic of cubist methods of decomposition and synthesis in simultaneity, as reverberant objects-in-formation within one syntagm. And, as an immediate result, they are no longer seen ‘as reinforcements of certainty or eternity – as “still lives” – but as “accents” in the ensemble of becoming’ (Didi-Hubermann 2007, p. 7). Dialectical in nature because autonomous and unresolved, thematic and varied, static and transient, dynamic and ossifying all at once, this image – call it ‘a crystal of crisis’ – establishes an overreaching unity of its moments that, weaving punctuations of time into one shining solid as does any ionic structure disporting minerals deep underground, renders visible in one presentation all the silent forces responsible for the formation of these fossil objects in their current context. Furthermore, on the basis of their future perfect crystallization, it shows a picture of what their fate will be. In sight, therefore, is history as an image, but also an image as history and discourse, a historical image in situ, to whose ‘momentary arrangement’ averted eyes, such as mine, may turn as a knowing nod to our shared memories of writing and typing, of communicating with one another by means of tools that by now are fit only for window dressing in a secondhand store.
I often wonder how much longer Amherst Typewriter & Computer will remain in business. Perhaps the answer to this question lies nearby and is literally staring at us. Looking around in a place that is called a ‘typewriter & computer’ store, one might be surprised to find, among the stacks of items on display, fewer typewriters and computers than old telephones, cables, weather-beaten signs, transistor radios, and whatnot. So many lines of communication, so many channels to and from the past, and, were one to listen, so many noises from as many sources and into different directions, all in a small room. While it is hard to decode the message behind the cacophony, ‘it does not seem to prevent’, as Austin approbates in another context, ‘drawing a line for our present purposes where we want one’ (1962, p. 114). The line most readily drawn is the one stretching from the typewriter to the present-day computer – a line that runs through everything one can see in the store, on which the store itself is but a point, and from which the by-now-old media come back from their own future.
The past is behind us, but images of the past may look at us from behind. Just as reality – now more than ever, thanks to digital technologies – appears as virtual so that we might see it, the so-called old media return as images from unexpected places, so that past reality may be recognized or be seen clearly anew. Keeping in view various writing instruments as telling dots along media’s historical line, we can obtain a better grasp of a particular invariant – what can be called the deep-time core – across changing forms of modern communication technology by asking what exactly can be seen in the image that the store presents. If seeing is always taking in more than what is apparently visible; if, in each instance, what is seen always brings with(in) it what lies beyond the things actually in view; if seeing, to put it simply, is to make out figures against a background, receding one after another in organizing the view, what is it that one cannot fail to see in the image seen? To phrase the question differently, what in the image is so evident, so incontrovertibly visible, so blindingly clear, as it were, that one tends to overlook or become blind to it?
One cannot see a typewriter without seeing the keyboard, which one also sees when one sees a computer (at least for now and probably into the near future). At the same time, inasmuch as the keyboard is a man-made device, a mechanical means of alleviating the manual (manuãlis) labour of writing with pen or pencil, seeing a keyboard is immediately to see the hand (manu) and the fingers (digitus), for which it is meant to be an extension and which, performing on it, write the user’s activities as ‘typing’. To see a typewriter is therefore to see the hand and its digits: a digital vision underwritten by an immediacy no less certain than the fact that when one sees the back of a hand, one also sees the palm and, by extension, the arm and the body, if not the exact colourations of the skin. In this instance, no media are involved, for nothing stands in between, not even the blinking of an eye. Like touch, vision does not infer; it reaches what is seen, the referent, immediately.
Looking into Amherst Typewriter & Computer – and this may be what attracted me to its window in the first place – one sees a snapshot of the digital age, a freeze-frame of the ongoing procession of our techno-medial world in which the widespread use of and dependence on media devices in our everyday lives are inextricably tied to the movements of our fingers, dialling, typing, keying, texting, tapping or clicking. Each of these seems to call to mind a specific media device, telephone, typewriter, data terminal, smart phone, tablet, much more readily than a lowborn pencil or other primitive writing tools which, we should not forget, must also be operated by hand when one writes. Anticipated by the store image’s command, ‘Look at me’, what I call the digital vision in this context amounts to seeing the hand and fingers as the irreducible hard core (heart-cor) of modern communication – a proto-media touching all media from the very beginning – so that what we thought could only be achieved by telepathy, mesmerism, or magic is now easily performed by its own kind of magical touch on a keyboard or touchscreen.
The hand touches things, which are always and already there. But things are there for the hand only insofar as the hand is there as well; the thereness of things and that of the hand are equi-primordial with regard to each other and to the world in which they are found and may find themselves. Touching everything it reaches, touching every touch, indeed, touching itself touching, the hand is the first and the last medium, one that, prior to memory and in advance of thinking, brings things far and wide into the nearness of being. The hand, along with language, says Heidegger, is the essential distinction of man. This is not so much because ‘word’ and ‘flesh’ must meet in making man essentially worldly as because it is through the work of the hand as the original tekhné that man first comes to being himself by finding his place on earth, that the who of man first manifests in person through a what that anchors him somewhere, that is to say, ‘by becoming exteriorized techno-logically’ (Stiegler 1998, p. 141). To the extent that man and world are the same in that they belong together, as Heidegger makes plain, to the extent that man is inescapably (a) being-in-the-world, the work of the hand is what makes the world, is the making of the world, of which it also necessarily takes care. To be, to be human, is to care for things by hand, is to be manual. All labour is essentially digital labour.
Anthropology is fundamentally digit-ology. After all, while stars in the night sky may help give us the idea of points, we still need fingers to point at them and to draw a line; while love for the other keeps her image constantly in one’s mind, one still needs a hand holing a stylus to trace the contours of her face on the wall of a cave or a finger to click the shutter before saving pictures of her in the cloud. And, closer to home, while the ‘social web’ can capture everything and everyone and put them in one’s hand, it will be neither useful nor ‘social’ at all, unless one moves one’s fing...
