Nietzsche's Typewriter. Photo: Dieter Eberwein
Copyright: The Goethe and Schiller Archive, Weimar
Whilst Heidegger never learned to love the typewriter and Derrida did so only after overcoming much resistance to the idea, Nietzsche was a fan from the get-go; in fact, he was the first great philosopher to own a typewriter and even composed a four-line poem in which he compared himself to his machine:
THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME: MADE OF IRON
YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS.
PATIENCE AND TACT ARE REQUIRED IN ABUNDANCE
AS WELL AS FINE FINGERS TO USE US.
Initially, one might be surprised by this - for whilst he's never as suspicious of machines as Heidegger, Nietzsche's unable to affirm the development of science and technology without reservation, regarding it as fundamentally nihilistic in character and incapable of serving as a foundation for culture.
However, the dramatic deterioration of his vision obliged him to reconsider his reading and writing regime. As any prolonged use of his eyes caused him great distress and suffering - and by prolonged we mean for more than twenty minutes at a time - he had to find a new way to work. And so, in 1882, he purchased a portable typewriter: the Malling-Hansen Writing Ball ...
Invented in 1865 and shown at the 1878 Paris Universal Exhibition to great acclaim, the Writing Ball was the closest thing to a 19th-century laptop; small, light, fast, and easy to operate. It was also cheaper than the American typewriter manufactured by Remington.
Unfortunately, despite his initial excitement, Nietzsche never really mastered his Writing Ball and he soon got fed-up with his new contraption - particularly after it was damaged and he was unable to get it properly repaired.
Media theorist Friedrich Kittler has some interesting things to say about all this in his book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999), characterising Nietzsche as the first mechanized philosopher who produced a kind of écriture automatique without even having to read (or even look at) the page (thereby saving his poor eyes from further strain).
Kittler argues that by integrating a machine into his writing process, it profoundly changed not only his style of composition, but ultimately impacted upon his thought as well; he moved from fully developed arguments and lengthy essays comprised of logically arranged propositions to aphorisms and fragments of text that displayed a perversely non-systematic manner of thinking.
In other words, the Malling-Hansen Writing Ball enabled Nietzsche to become the postmodern philosopher - or practitioner of die fröhliche Wissenschaft - we know and love. His idiosyncratic text emerged partly from his own philosophy of language, partly from his near-blindness, and partly from his willingness to explore the horizon of possibility that new technologies afford us.
Visit: the Malling-Hansen Society website for further details on the case of Nietzsche and his Writing Ball: click here.
See: Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, (Stanford University Press, 1999). The entire text can be found online: click here.
Play: Leroy Anderson, The Typewriter (1950), a short musical composition which famously features a typewriter as a percussion instrument. The piece received its premier on September 8, 1953 during a recording made by Anderson and the Boston Pops Orchestra in NYC for Decca Records. To watch the Brandenburg Symphony Orchestra perform their version, in 2012, click here.
To read part one of this post on Heidegger, click here.
To read part two of this post on Derrida, click here.
