Typewriter Psyche: Office Media, Modernism and the Creation of the Unconscious, 1880--1930

"Typewriter Psyche," is an investigation of modernism and its connection to the typewriters, dictaphones, steno pads, carbon papers, vertical filing cabinets, and other media that make up the writing culture of the modern office. Drawing on the deconstructive concept of the archive and the media theoretical account of modern inscriptive technologies developed by Friedrich Kittler, I argue that the modernization of the office plays a crucial role in engendering the subliminal, involuntary, and mechanical domains of thought and memory out of which the unconscious arises at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The term "typewriter psyche" is a shorthand expression for this technological reconfiguration. It denotes the historico-cultural emergence of new social relations between individuals, as well as a new experience of the self created by modern writing media. By tracing the material contours of this medial environment as they run through the various facets of modernist thought, I show that the unconscious is a product of a certain confluence of history, culture, and technology that is neither timeless nor universal.