Presentation on Derida's 'The Word Processor'.

1. the word processorJacques Derrida how a change of medium has affected our experiences

2. heidegger According to Heidegger, Handwerk (work done by "the hand) is not concerned with public usefulness or making a profit. In this way, it is similar to the work of ‘the thinker or the teacher who teaches thinking.’ Heidegger also thought that Handwerk‘is always in danger of being demeaned by the machine’. Thisdanger for the ‘thinker’ was - in Heidegger's view - the typewriter.

3. watch Machine that Made Us http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/machine-that-made-us/ Video 2. 3:20

4. derrida Derrida correctly points out that ‘when we write by hand we are not in the time before technology; there is already instrumentality, regular reproduction, and mechanical inerrability. So it is not legitimate to contrast writing by hand and mechanical writing... and then on the other side what we call ‘typed’ writing is also manual...having recourse to the typewriter or computer doesn't bypass the hand, therefore, it is not handless writing, as dictating into a tape recorder might be.’

5. watch the evolution of ‘writing’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3p5Z_qGHY0e Are we just changing our ‘pens’ or are we changing the way we interact?

6. derrida ‘The word processor saves us an amazing amount of time; we acquire a freedom that we perhaps wouldn't have acquired without it. But the transformation is economic, not structural. There are all these time-saving devices in the finishing off or polishing stages: playing with italics; separating paragraphs; intervention directly in lexical statistics ...’

7. derrida The internet as a public and published sphere: ‘We imagine... that everything recorded in this way [internet] then counts as a publication. What circulates on the internet, for instance, belongs to an automatic space of publication: the private/public distinction is increasingly being wiped out.’

8. derrida ‘A new freeing up of the flow can both let through anything at all, and also give air to critical possibilities that used to be limited or inhibited by the old mechanisms of legitimation – which are also, in their own way, word-processing mechanisms.’

9. question In relation to the question of changing mediums as a whole – from typesetting, to typewriters, to word processors, to the internet – are we doing the same thing in a different way? OR are we experiencing a shift in how we experience the world and organise our thoughts and understand ourselves?

10. shift

11. mcluhan Is the medium the message? Writing: The message was knowledge and education Typesetting: The message was consistency and efficiency Typewriters: The message was mechanical efficiency and self-publishing Word Processors: The message was ease of modification or self-publishing Internet: The message is?

12. apply What causes the shift in how we are experiencing the world? Is there a change in how our thoughts are organised? Are we seeing a shift in how we understand ourselves? www.wefeelfine.org

13. link http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2008/10/derrida-on-word-processor.html http://www.theoreti.ca/?p=1298 http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/frame/text/fox.html http://faculty.washington.edu/farkas/TC510/ChandlerOnMontaigne.pdf http://www.flusserstudies.net/pag/06/wells-ancestral.pdf