Typology: A Phenomenology of Early Typewriters
Richard Polt’s essay:
The typewriter is in the process of becoming a thing of the past, along with dial phones and vinyl records. “Things of the past” are still present, of course — it’s their world that is absent (as Heidegger says somewhere about museum pieces). The context in which these things once fit, which gave them their appropriateness and integrated them into human lives, has slipped away — disappearing, piece by imperceptible piece, until one day we recognize that the Gestalt has already changed, that we live in a new world. This doesn’t mean that the things of the past, these ambassadors from a world that has sunk like Atlantis, have been reduced to merely useless chunks of matter, merely “present-at-hand entities.” Again, Heidegger’s phenomenology of the “ready-to-hand” is instructive: when a piece of equipment loses its smooth integration into a practical environment, it doesn’t immediately become a mere object, but instead, the environment as such is lit up. When a spoke breaks on my bicycle, the entire “world” of bicycle riding, its purposes and requirements, is made annoyingly evident. In the case of typewriters, the problem is not that they have broken and no longer fit in their world — instead, the world to which they belong is breaking up like a melting iceberg, to be replaced by a new configuration which we are only beginning to grasp under the name “cyberspace.” But like the broken spoke, the typewriter draws attention to its world. A thing of the past evokes its world, speaks of it, by appealing to our imagination — by pleading that we draw analogies between what we do now and what once was done with this thing. A thing of the past has magical power because it is a window — a hole in the wholeness of our world (which is never a seamless wholeness), through which we can imagine another world.
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(via wood’s lot)