From the relative beginnings of the typewriter, the same major elements appear in any typewriting assemblage. There is a dictator – the source of the words that are being typed. There is a typewriter – that is, an actual writing machine of some sort. And there is an amanuensis. As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, an amanuensis is “One who copies or writes from the dictation of another,” from servus a manu “hand servant” + -ensis, “belonging to.” Though “dictator” has some negative connotations and “amanuensis” is an awkwardly latinate and stodgy-sounding word to contemporary ears, my choice of this specific terminology is deliberate. These terms allow for the various possibilities that typewriting creates, while differentiating both roles from the machine itself. When I refer to the “typewriter,” I am specifically referring to the writing machine. When I refer to “typewriting,” I mean the set of discourses, rules and practices that relate to the functioning of the entire assemblage, as opposed to “typing,” the act of using the typewriter to produce text. The need for this degree of specificity will become evident shortly, when all the terms begin to collapse into each other despite all of my best efforts.
As Emile Benveniste famously noted, in Problems in General Linguistics, the act of speaking – and, I would argue, of dictating as well – simultaneously defines the position not only of an individual, but also of their partner in the creation of discourse. These positions, flagged by the pronouns “I” and “you,” are variable empty forms which speakers occupy by turns: when I speak, I’m “I” and you’re “you,” and when you speak, it’s your turn to be “I.” McCaffery deals explicitly with this theoretical notion in Shifters, an early typewritten chapbook published by Nichol’s ganglia/grOnk press:
in us
in us as we
areyou move out to
where you are
most“you are”
(you)
in you’re here there
you’re “here”where i am
still
where “i am”
There is always an erotics to the poetry of “i” and “you,” but “i” and “you” is also always the basic diagram of a power structure. Erotics + agonism = writing. Typewriting, moreover, creates a situation where which person occupies which position (dictator or amanuensis, top or bottom) is more malleable and fluid than ever. In his analysis of Franz Kafka’s first typed letter, Friedrich Kittler spots twelve typos, over a third of which involved the German equivalents of “I” or “you,” “As if the typing hand could inscribe everything except the two bodies on either end of the … channel.”
So: despite the apparent idiosyncrasies of two avant-garde poets hunched over a typewriter (and I’ll return to the Toronto Research Group’s various typewriter-related performances later), the TRG embodies all of the basic structural elements and exemplifies the rules that are specific to the scene of typewriting.
Darren Wershler-Henry / Technologies of Dictation: Typewriting and the Toronto Research Group
other islands in this text-fed stream
