In her discussion of the relationship between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and his friend and assistant, the writer Johann Peter Eckermann (the German Boswell), Avital Ronell develops a theory of dictation which can be expanded to describe several important aspects of the machinic assemblage I’m calling “typewriting.” While the overall tone and focus of Ronell’s writing is more deconstructive than discursive, what interests me is the discursive aspect of her argument – the relationship that is being outlined and the rules under which the process of dictation occurs. Ronell recognizes that what she is describing is outside of the purview of close reading and textual analysis when she writes that “there can be nothing simply and exclusively literary where the parasitical asserts itself.” [Dictations: On Haunted Writing (Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 1993)] Dictation is not speech, not writing, but an assemblage that determines the conditions under which writing takes place.
Every time I wish to write words, visual images come up, images of the fruitful countryside, the open sea. the islands veiled in a haze, the smoking mountain, etc., and I lack the mental organ which could describe them.
Goethe, Naples, March 17, 1787, Italian Journey
One of the questions that arises when considering the applicability of Ronell’s theory of dictation to typewriting is, why begin from a model of dictation based on Goethe? Friedrich Kittler, in his chapter on the typewriter in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, uses the epithet “the age of Goethe” to characterize the period immediately preceding the invention of the typewriter. For Kittler, Goethe’s name serves as a synecdoche for the rules that govern not only German Romanticism, but the production of discourse in general from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century: “authority and authorship, handwriting and rereading, the narcissism of creation and reader obedience.”
It is only a pity that, at the moment, I have nobody with whom I can share my thoughts. Tischbein is with me, to be sure, but, both as a man and an artist, his mind is the shuttlecock of a thousand ideas, and hundreds of people have a claim on his time. His is a curious case: a man who cannot take an unforced interest in the existence of anyone else because he feels so frustrated in his own efforts.
Goethe, Naples, March 17, 1787, Italian Journey
During Goethe’s own lifetime (1749–1832), many new writing-machines were being invented. While, as Kittler observes, many of these machines, especially those based on pantographic principles, only reified the rules governing discourse “in the age of Goethe,” but cumulatively, they were a major factor in the creation of a new discursive formation, one that held sway until the emergence of the computer. Goethe is thus the ideal place to start.
For four weeks Tischbein has been a loyal and useful partner in all my excursions into the realm of nature and art. When we were at Portici [the museum at Herculaneum] yesterday we had a talk and both of us came to the conclusion that his artistic career, his duties at court and in the city, which may lead to a permanent post in Naples, were incompatible with my plans and particular interests. Helpful as ever, he suggested as a possible companion a young man whom I have seen a lot of ever since we arrived, and not without interest and sympathy.
His name is Kniep. […] In Rome I had already often heard that his draftsmanship was admirable, though the same could not be said for his willingness to work. Now that I have got to know him pretty well, I think that this fault for which he is blamed is really a lack of self-confidence which can certainly be overcome if we spend some time together.
Goethe, Naples, March 19, 1787, Italian Journey
Ronell’s Dictations: On Haunted Writing presents dictation as an assemblage that links at least two figures together in a kind of “radical copulation” (Ronell compares it to a DNA double helix) which renders the writing styles of the figures involved as indistinguishable from each other. Citing Derrida, Ronell summarizes the dictatorial relationship as “an experience of quasi-possession” in which one party “is given over to the other, to the extent, indeed, of being prey to the other.” The party that becomes prey – the secretary/amanuensis, or, in our case, the typist – is the more “shadowy” of the two and acts as a “conduit” for the other, dictating party. A kind of death or diminishment is omnipresent. The party taking dictation begins as already subordinate, “double and half-dead or at least presumed dead” – echoes of the opening of William T. Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels: “Oh, my bright and risen angels, you are already in your graves.” However, the dictatorial relationship functions even (especially?) when the dictating party is absent or dead, because the amanuensis incorporates and objectifies it. The question is, which party is possessed and which is doing the possessing?
My relationship with Kniep has been put to a practical test and promises to give great satisfaction to us both. We made an excursion to Paestum together, and he proved himself a most hard-working draughtsman. The fruits of our journey are some superb sketches, and he is very happy because he finds that this exacting busy life stimulates his talent, which he had come to doubt.
Goethe, Naples, March 23, 1787, Italian Journey
Although dictation is a “parasitical” relationship, the parties are obligate parasites – neither can exist without the other. Further, though the dictatorial relationship is dissymmetrical, in the classic mode of Derrida’s logic of the supplement, it is always also reversible. To drive the point home with a labyrinthine series of dictatorial reversals, I cite Ronell’s citation of Eckermann reciting to Goethe a line that Mephistopheles speaks in Goethe’s own Faust: “in the end we do indeed depend on the creatures we have created.”
And all that flows unfixed and undefined
In glimmering phantasy before the mind,
Bid Thought’s enduring chain for ever bind!
Goethe, Faust (der Herr speaking)
This chain of assemblages demonstrates that the dictating party is far from sovereign or singular because it is always an assemblage connected to other assemblages to what Guattari would undoubtedly call its own mad vectors.
Moreover, it is the assemblage that produces the text, rather than the individuals. For both Ronell and Derrida (of whom the former, it should be noted, is implicitly comparing her relationship as the latter’s sometime translator and frequent commentator to that of Eckermann and Goethe), the scene of dictation informs the conditions under which all writing takes place: “writing always comes from elsewhere, at the behest of another, and is, at best, a shorthand transcription of the demand of this Other whose original distance is never altogether surmounted.”
What I propose to insert into this assemblage (Ronell’s model of dictation) is the typewriter, itself another assemblage that functions on a variety of levels to create the conditions under which typing takes place.
First, the typewriter functions as a conduit that joins together the dictator and the amanuensis. The conduit is not necessarily one-way; either party can take turns typing or dictating. Nor is the model binary or even bipartite; multiple parties can dictate, and multiple parties can type, synchronically or asynchronically, centrally spatialized or totally decentralized. The typewriter also links other assemblages into this relationship: tape machines, dictaphones, and broadcast technologies such as intercoms, telegraph, radio, and television; carbon paper and the apparatus of duplication; the office and typing pool, and so on.
Second, reinforcing its importance in the assemblage of writing, the typewriter-as-machine tends to absorb both the dictator and the amanuensis into itself. The term “typewriter” itself is a metonymy, but a reversible one. At one point, “typewriter” signified the machine’s operator (the amanuensis); the machine itself was the “typewriting machine.” As the machine claimed the name, the amanuensis was seemingly absorbed whole into its operation. On the other side of the circuit, the dictator in the scene of typing is, as is the case in writing/dictating in general, often either absent or internal. When a writer sits “alone” at their machine, who is dictating? Writers who type will repeatedly use the same trope to describe this situation: the writing comes from or through the typewriter itself, indicating that the typewriter – a plural noun – is somehow haunted.
Third, these connections to voices “outside” the typewriting assemblage, point to another aspect, the desiring aspect of the machine: a longing for connection with other typewriters. This is the point at which the logic of typewriting begins to lose sway and the logic of the computer keyboard, a logic of networks, and connectivity, begins to replace it.
Facts dramatized, say, rather - action - plot -
Sentiment, everything the writer’s own,
As it best fits the web-work of his story…
Goethe, Faust (Faust speaking)
Darren Wershler-Henry / Technologies of Dictation: Typewriting and the Toronto Research Group
other islands in this text-fed stream
