Ghost in the Wire

Moment One: In the same year that he publishes The Gay Science and declares the death of God, Friedrich Nietzsche’s failing eyesight leads him to purchase an early prototype of the typewriter. Able to learn the letter placement through feel and routine, Nietzsche becomes the first philosopher to experience ecriture automatique, print inscription without the attention-demanding slowness of the handwritten word.

Moment Two: During the long winter of 1942/43, with the Battle of Stalingrad deciding the future of the Third Reich’s eastern front, Martin Heidegger delivers a lecture course on the fragments of Parmenides at the University of Frieburg, in which he surprises his audience by bursting into a random discussion of how the typewriter is eclipsing the experience of Being. Dust off those quills and bust out the inkwells, because handwriting is the real deal when it comes to living in the house of Being. Or so he says.

Moment Three: A student revolution in France fails the same year in which Roland Barthes publicly declares the death of the author and the advent of the scriptor, a figure who no longer believes in the innate, corporeal connection of hand and voice and who celebrates the accelerated speed of modern writing.

Moment Four: One year later, another Frenchman by the name of Michel Foucault explores the strange, spectral status of the author, recognizing that God and the author pretty much died coterminous deaths. Foucault, the last and perhaps greatest philosophical archivist, links the emergence of the modern author function to particular historical contingencies, even if, like most of his work, he touches only lightly on his own scribal machinations.

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Not necessarily a moment in its own right, more of a connective mutation, today's contribution to the thinking of writing: We Are Smarter Than Me.