Click. Double click, hold and drag.
Computer keyboards and game controllers are associated with a lack of movement, though their finger-work is tricky and can yield exciting effects. Prompted by Elizabeth Grosz's call to "remake what is attributed passivity into an activity" (175) I speculate in this paper about know-how that my daughter and I share - fluency in the hand-moves of button and keyboard interfaces.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote about typing as 'knowledge in the hands'.
"It is knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effortŠ When I sit at my typewriter, a motor space opens up beneath my hands, in which I am about to 'play' what I have readŠ When the typist performs the necessary movements on the typewriter, these movements are governed by an intention, but the intention does not posit the keys as objective locations. It is literally true that the subject who learns to type incorporates the key-bank space into his bodily space."
(144-145)
As with musical keyboards (which he also discusses), a learning regime is required before the typist's knowledge is embodied. The gaming dance of buttons and joy sticks also takes time to get, before intention (and desire) drift through the hands, the prerequisite for easy maneuvering through screen space.
Merleau-Ponty describes reading and typing in sequence; writing occurs before typing. In his account, the motility of typing, its rate, is a corollary of reading.
"The reading of the word is a modulation of visible space, and the performance of the movement is a modulation of manual space, and the whole question is how a certain physiognomy of 'visual' patterns can evoke a certain type of motor response, how each 'visual' structure eventually provides itself with its mobile essence without there being any need to spell the word or specify the movement in detail in order to translate one into the other." (144)
A mind/body cleavage - writing/dictation before typing/transcription - is suggested in this description.
In 1881, when he was nearly blind, Nietzsche purchased a "writing ball", with its typewriting keyboard extruded in a half-sphere. Typewriters, in development for the blind, were very rare at that time and had to be obtained by special order. Nietzsche wrote a poem, an erotic simile between the keyboard and his responsive body -
The verse also reads like a job description, soon filled when Nietzsche gave up typing and hired a secretary to take dictation. The 'typewriter' - typist and mechanism - mediates between handwriting/dictation and the printed word. This intermediate role was assigned to women in the workplace, in an exponential proliferation of female secretaries beginning in 1890's.
Early postwar typewriting manuals seem written from the viewpoint of the typist, infused with anxiety about fusion of the typewriter with the body. My bookwork Typewriting (1978) includes some anxious typing exercises that foreshadow Cyborg uncertainties articulated by Haraway in 1991 :
"We have been converted into strange forms, run on the electric principle, and controlled by the pushing of a button. If we appear to go wild sometimes and cut wide fingers down the middle of the road, it is because we have pressed the wrong buttonŠ Nobody is safe anymore."
When I learned typing in high school in the early 1970's, this curriculum was gender-streamed-female (boys took auto mechanics and shop). Retyping the above exercise today, I felt the anxiety of life before backspaces, when accuracy was paramount and words-per-minute were the measure of grades and jobs.
Since the 1980's, advances in computer technology have had negative impacts on this female workforce; secretarial work was displaced from women to computers, as global feminised labour expanded in digital factories, interfacing an array of mechanisms with tiny hands and expert fingers."Šwomen in Third World countries are the preferred labour force for the science-based multinationals in the export-processing sectors, particularily in electronicsŠ Although he includes (this) phenomenon of literal homework emerging in connection with electronics assembly, Gordon intends 'homework economy' to mean a structuring of work that broadly has the characteristics formerly ascribed to female jobs, jobs literally done by womenŠ To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less as workers than as serversŠ" (Haraway 166)
It is an economy based on need and ability to tolerate long hours of small, repetitive movement. This feminist history is articulated by Quebecois filmmaker Sophie Bissonnette in her documentary feature "Quel Numéro, What Number, or The Electronic Sweatshop" (NFB, 1985).
The postwar cultural stereotype of secretarial techno-competence has dissipated, as the requirement of typing accuracy has diminished; it is commonplace for women to express fear of computers (technophobia), or that 'computers don't like me' (apologizing for their breakdowns). Haraway notes a continued relative scientific illiteracy among white women and people of colour (171) and that "strategic planners draw directly from and contribute to video game practices and science fiction". (254) Like the military, gaming is often coded male (i.e. Gameboy).. Though tough cyber-heroines are featured in some new games, girls are the target-market for chat-based e-mail bots, karaoke microphone interfaces, on-line neopets, and software for fashion, caregiving and solving interpersonal dilemmas that require a relatively low-frequency, linear click-touch that could be described as either/or. (1.)
Heidegger distinguishes between a machine and a mechanism, a distinction useful for mapping the shift from typewriters to touch-technologies for interfacing with computers.
"Š the typewriter is not really a machine in the strict sense of machine technology, but is an 'intermediate' thing, between a tool and a machine, a mechanism." (qtd. in Kittler, 200)
The keyboard has been severed from its "machine technology conditioning" (Heidegger qtd. in Kittler, ibid.) and grafted to the silicon of digital writing, yet it remains something other than an onscreen graphic signifier. The keyboard is a contact surface between body and computer. A residue of the typewriter/secretary axis (intermediary mechanism between man and machine) inheres in our regard of the computer keyboard. Perhaps we can begin here to account for the keyboard's theorization. Typewriting prompts expressive (excessive?) speed. Truman Capote said of Kerouac's On The Road - "That's not writing - that's typing". At the speed of automation, keyboard-driven fiction collapses into diary/life-writing. Secretarial typists are the proto-authors of this feminised and machinic (drifting, non-human) typewriting.
From the premise that "Up until Hélene Cixous, women will write that only writing makes women into women" Kittler assigns a gender to "typewriter literature", which is identified as the "desexualized" mode of the "woman author". (222)
"Word processing, somewhere amidst the relays of technological communications networks, breaks up couples and families. Precisely at this gap evolves a new job: the woman authorŠ a desexualized writing profession, distant from any authorship, only empowers the domain of text processing. That is why so many novels written by recent women writers are endless feedback loops making secretaries into writersŠ ecriture automatique is no longer difficultŠ the relay unit of human and machine exercises a pull that can even replace love. First with female typists, then with their male counterparts." (221-222)
Kittler pits machine desire in a jealous contest with reproductive love. There is anxiety in the contact zone of body and mechanism; this anxiety reverberates through theory.
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