A TYPEWRITTEN DREAM - PROGRESSIVE TECHNOLOGY AND BEARABLE PROGRESS
GERD DE BRUYN

Most readers will agree with me that modern human beings adapt to a world, which is constantly transformed by rapid technical progress, and which strongly influences our ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. Whether this transformation results in a basic change of our mind and cognition is not yet decided. While some theoreticians argue by anthropology in assigning few but formative characteristics to human beings, which are hardly, if at all, affected by the process of civilization, others tend to the opinion that all human externalizations (Entäußerungen) are induced by history.

In the following, I would like to describe the response of my generation to the computer without strictly acting for one of the two positions described above. Actually, it is not about my generation as a whole, but about a specific milieu I belonged to, which, in contrast to the digital bohème of today, should be called the analogue bohème. My question is: What was the relevance of the development of the personal computer to a milieu socialized with the (electric) typewriter? But wait – what is described by socialized? If socialization had been all, if the IBM of the early eighties had only framed the desktop of our work, we should have as well been fascinated by the emergence of the personal computer, as were the subsequent generations.

We were not, because it was the typewriter we linked to an experience of emancipation. In any case, I felt like this, and I suppose that it is this happenstance, which, even today, makes me recognize the finest Mac as my old IBM. That is like driving the jet fighter on the surface. Every pilot would complain the hardship. What do think my assistants, the computer experts, watching me blank-faced in front of the Mac? It will never take off with me, although I am depending on it as much as do the colleagues, who usually are computer literate. What is the reason for this?

To explain this experience, technic philosophy makes the case that, within our modern civilization, technical innovations impress strongly and permanently only if they radically revolutionize our existence. The invention of the car activated a radical change, which was not outshone by the subsequent breakthrough within car body and motor design.
But the contemporaries of Henry Ford and Ferdinand Porsche were not determined to the archetypes of automotive locomotion, we love the more the more they are antiquated. This founding generation already was curious about all automotive developments to come.

In other words: technical socialization is not reduced to one single event, one model, or product, as it is with the newly born gooses of Konrad Lorenz that would recognize a stone as their mother if it was the first thing they saw after birth. Technics socializes us by linking us with actual and subsequent developments. It defines the here-and-now-functions of a machine in form of a motorbike; at the same time it raises expectations and desire for inventions to come.
In comparison to architecture the topic is brought to the point as follows:

The Black Forrest cottage, Heidegger talked about in his famous lecture Bauen, Wohnen, Denken in 1951, leaves those who grew up there susceptible to the character and timelessness of its typology, materiality, smells and atmosphere (that does not mean that they were distressed by different, modern buildings, but that they were not endowed with a basic interest in the architecture of tomorrow). Whereas socialization in traditional buildings binds the human emotionally to a status quo, which can only be duped by more technical comfort, technical socialization commits us to processes.

To return to our example: When we make use of our first car, despite it was a DKW with a two-strike engine, we make use of all cars developed since then, including the primed machines of Audi Quattro that do not allow us any technical adjustment anymore and that do not resemble the old DKW in any part. However, that our fascination for the car washes out, is due to mainly two reasons:
1. The growing ecological consciousness recognizes the car as a technological dinosaur.
2. A lot of people collect old motor vehicles in order to fondly restore them in countless hours. They not only sentimentally assure themselves of their past, but also of the progressive gains, which were linked to their early years and which have been lost over time [1] .

But, there is another loss within the development of the car:
Control of technology, which is questioned by ongoing development, happens on two levels: firstly, on the level of expertise, which enables teams of experts to design increasingly complex machines, which themselves mount increasingly complex machines, which get out of our control despite of increasing usability. It is a long time since we commanded these machines in means of repairing them or even understanding how they work. Usually we use them very little. Whereas arts-and-crafts-ideologues thought that human creativity was humiliated by the machines of the 19th century, machines of today could in turn complain of being offended by our ignorance. It is for this scandal that they take terrible revenge in Science Fiction films.

The non-engineer usually is overstrained by the possibilities of a limited slip differential, as rejects the anti-wilderness in front of our cities the all-wheel drive. Those who get under an old Borgward, in order to do handicrafts, just try to restore the concord of the two levels of control: They want to grasp in detail the machine they are using, even if they have to turn back the clock of technic history.

Technics is control of nature and in this it is emancipation, for those who benefit from it, who know to use it adequately while hopefully keeping control. What was the meaning of young students who emancipated with the help of electric typewriters? The first answer is not simple, the more as it has to be revised immediately: It is about the disciplinary action, which asked us for calligraphy in early school days. Since we were not provoked to calligraphic peak performances by the dry letter alphabet, sharp or pleasingly rounded handwriting never really made sense to us. We entertained the suspicion that they wanted to bully us with the torture of calligraphy. But the escape of using the typewriter could not yet be called emancipation. The slide rule did not liberate us from mental arithmetic, it just released us from it.

Technics is some sort of socialization, a topic of Kulturkritik, a form of release, and a medium of emancipation. But we have to distinguish between two types of emancipation. There is a form of emancipation (in the sense of the Latin word emancipare, which means the release of a slave or a grown-up son, red.) that is factually taking place as is taking place modernization, without considering whether people wish it or not. Emancipation is liberation, which comes at a prize. For this reason modernization and emancipation produces happy winners and disadvantaged victims.

The second type of emancipation (in the sense of 17th and 18th century, meaning self-liberation, red.) is personally eked out and experienced consciously. It is part of individuation, in that a single person perceives herself as an individual, which is able to give information about her needs, wishes, character, and talents.
Emancipation is the passage and the most important leg of personal maturation. The consciousness of being a distinctive human being is due to the active contribution to liberate from paralyzing conventions.

There can thus be recognized a type of forced and a type of intended emancipation. Technics is most important to both. In the case of emancipation forced by autonomous technical progress, the individual might experience big disadvantages for her own life, and she might reject this progress. She possibly thinks to perceive the more individuality the more she objects to the technical development. Actually, we can regard the objection argued in the name of Kulturkritik, as an instrument of modern individuation, and as an emphatic affirmation of technical progress.

Intellectuals always tended to Kulturkritik. They were right in suspecting that the emancipation through rapid technological development could damage their preeminence. Since the very beginning, intellectuals pedagogically and medically blamed the television for hurting the human being and disturbing its mental development. We can recognize the same mechanism already in the 19th century, when the train and the new steel and glass architecture of train stations were sharply rejected. In retrospect this rancor hardly seems credible, and even television of the early years looks like an instrument for mass education, offering a lot of space to intellectuals who railed against it. It did not turn us thumb, lazy and thick until there were new media taking over its educational role.

The arguments intellectuals bring forward often seem intransigent, but actually they are not. They could be understood as constructive procrastination of galloping modernization, conducted by intellectual workers in order to retain control of technical development. We could argue that Kulturkritik throws an alienating spanner in the works of technical progress, and thus supports conscious adoption and emancipation through individually observed and intended technics.

There is another point I want to stress: Kulturkritik wants to slow down technical development to a limit that modernization can be interpreted as emancipation. It wants to retard the speed of technical development in order to integrate not only experts but as well laypersons. Only if technical socialization is regarded as intended emancipation, we can experience technics as a support of individuation.

If we accept this argumentation, we have to face, on the one hand, people, who reject modern machines when being confronted with them in daily life, because they experience technics as bothersome. This actually means that criticism of technics has a liberating function for their individuation. On the other hand, we face people who are openminded about technics, because they link to it a sentiment of successful maturation.

All this might sound trivial, but there is implied the counterintuitive assumption that those who are positive about technics retard progress in a similar way as those who criticize it. As I already mentioned, skeptics rarely are boycotters of progress. I moreover claim that even supporters of rapid progress throw a spanner in the works of modernization – affirmation and negation do cause the same effect? Yes, if affirmation of progress is not a product of socialization, but a result of experienced emancipation. Concerning my IBM this experience was not caused by the increase of writing speed or by the release from calligraphic obligations, but it was due to an artistic aspect: we made the
experience that typescript could produce graphical texts. We did not have to be an author and at the same time a graphic designer like Günther Grass, but we could instantly experiment with any letters and signs. This made a lot of fun, and, as one consequence, the typewritten pages of Arno Schmidt had to be used as layout for the publication, in order that the readers would not miss the best parts [2].

There also was a high mechanical fascination for the typewriter. Nostalgia for technics, which is recognized within the numerous formations of e.g. railway museums in postmodern societies still attest to this fascination. A lot of people like to experience the technical progress by means of mechanic movements. Visitors of all ages are crazy about those museums, which in my opinion, will not even have to close when there are only people socialized with computer technology. The opposite is true: old machines will be reactivated. They will use for aesthetic pleasure and they will present technics that was able to take form, and to demonstrate shapes to the traditional arts like architecture, so that even they could participate in progress [3] .

Even technophile people commit themselves to a particular technical experience, which forms them for the future. It is a commitment to experienced emancipation that is a mechanism strong enough to transform everyday technical socialization, which does not pin us down to particular technics, but makes us susceptible for infinite technical progress. The same is structurally true for a techno phobic emancipation, which, as well, represents a vow of fidelity.
We are emotionally bound to modern machines, to single events, and not to the whole technical development we are confronted with in the course of our life. I call this the bearable progress and leave it to anthropologic guesses, whether every generation is only able to stand one leap of technical development.

I suppose that only those who run clear of such bounds are able to keep pace with technics. But while I am saying this, I recognize it as constructed and unnatural. Once, a very young programmer told me that he expected ten more years in his job until the next generation would replace him. Even he was committed to a particular state of technics. Perhaps the only unbound person, in perpetuity addicted to progress is the Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil lost sight of, when his Ulrich decided to educate a ‘sense of possibility’ and to become a better human being.

[1] Revivals within fashion or music show that subsequent generations that could not experience progressive events themselves, still like to benefit from them. The reactivation
of an antiquity is a try to compensate the loss of aura, Walter Benjamin diagnosed in modernity. The distant effect between human being and object, which was destroyed by modern production technology, is regained within revival. As the old-timer is being lifted up to the pedestal in order to create spatial distance, the alienated return of past styles induces temporal distance in order to give aura even to fashion, which is the paradigm of desired closeness.

[2] See Zettel’s dream and Julia or the paintings of Arno Schmidt these are books as graphic artworks. They are the attempt to regain the magic of hieroglyphs for the dry typescript. For this genre of literature we should introduce the term typewriter poetics. A cultural history could investigate modern literature shaped by the typewriter; it could begin with Nietzsche’s typewriter and it could end with mixed feelings JL .

[3] I predict that there will be so many steam locomotives in holiday areas that we will have to simulate smoke, noise, and all other machine processes for reasons of ecology. Modern computer technology will hide in historic coverings, and the obsolete observable mechanics will be of use again. Un autre monde…