Reflections on the Typewriter 2: How Derrida Put Down His Pen and Learned to Love a Keyboard

He may have bought a computer, but nothing 

could convince Derrida to get a desk lamp

Photo: Joel Robine / Staff AFP

Derrida certainly takes a more relaxed position on the question of handwriting and technology than Heidegger and, as we shall see, his experience of moving from pen to Mac via a typewriter, is a familiar one.

Whilst conceding that Heidegger's reaction to the typewriter is perfectly understandable within the context of his philosophical project, Derrida also describes it as dogmatic and makes two very obvious points that Heideggerians might like to consider:

Firstly, when writing in a traditional manner we are still using technology - be it a pen, pencil, or piece of chalk. And secondly, typing is also a manual activity and using a typewriter or laptop doesn't, therefore, negate or bypass the hand. Have anyone's fingers ever moved with more joy and speed and than those of a skilled touch-typist?

It might therefore be argued that typing doesn't diminish thinking, degrade the word, or threaten being to the extent that Heidegger asserts and that the typewriter is not some kind of doomsday machine.*

Finally, Derrida makes the following (rather touching) confession: 

"I began by writing with a pen, and I remained faithful to pens for a long time [...], only transcribing 'final versions' on the machine, at the point of separating from them [...] Then, to go on with the story, I wrote more and more 'straight onto' the machine: first the mechanical typewriter; then the electric typewriter in 1979; then finally the computer, around 1986 or 1987. I can't do without it any more now, this little Mac, especially when I'm working at home; I can't even remember or understand how I was able to get on before without it."

Apart from the dates, this is essentially the story of my own progression in writing. It took me a long time to make the transition from pen and paper to screen - I wrote a Ph.D. thesis and made over half-a-million words of notes in the old-fashioned manner before I bought my first laptop - but, like Derrida, I eventually came to love the machine for both the amazing amount of time it saves and the freedom it brings "that we perhaps wouldn't have acquired without it".

I'm not sure I agree with Derrida, however, when he says that working on a computer doesn't fundamentally change what is written, even if it does modify the way of writing - and I must admit this remark surprises me, suggesting as it does that we can separate content and style and that the former is somehow resistant to mechanical transformation.

If, as Derrida also says, we know very little, if anything, of the internal demon of the new writing-machines, how can we know what changes they are capable of instigating?

*Note: Heidegger himself concedes that "the typewriter is not really a machine in the strict sense [...] but is an 'intermediate' thing, between a tool and a machine". Having said that, however, he does also note that it's production is conditioned by machine technology. See: Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 1992). 

Jacques Derrida, 'The Word Processor', in Paper Machine, trans. by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 19-32. Click here to read as a pdf online.

To read part one of this post on Heidegger, click here. 

To read part three of this post on Nietzsche, click here.