We can’t help but digest the horrific martial potential of a nuclear war against, for the imminent now, Jung Un’s North Korea. There’s an unnerving inference, whenever I read a NYT’s article—about U.S. defense, NK’s arm’s program, Trump’s reassuring words—that post-WWII America had when they discovered Soviet Union now have nuclear capabilities. It makes me think about T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, published post-WWI in shade of all the evil that man is capable of, whether ideology had firm infrastructure, a thought that the U.S. modernist sought to pick at. Eliot’s famous line, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”, a line I’ve thought of during Kittler’s line, “The dream of a real visible or audible world arising from words has come to end.” (p.14)

He goes on to argue that the monopoly over human archives has ended since the mechanical invention of cinema, phonography, and typewriter, for they have parsed out the optical, acoustic, and written data flow that originated in the poetics of pre- & post- printing press. He makes special consideration for the typewriter; saying since it’s invention and popularity, the author’s intrinsic identity is anonymously disguised behind the uniformly calligraphic perfection, thus that “strangely unavoidable traces” (p.8) of a writer, is gone. Regarding effects of phonograph and cinema, the spirituality, or primal sensuality (as I’ll define later), which was manifested from hearer/audience’s active engagement, that’s rewarded as emotional memory thru “hallucination”(p.10) or reverie, is gone as well, from the “distracted person” (Benjamin, p.1069), at least when s/he’s not disinterested in the music or film.

But going back to Eliot’s ephemeral line, that reminds the inferring reader, that this world, cynically sourced by the Nietzschian ideology’s of man, is impermanent, and certainly vulnerable to a hydrogen bomb, prompts me to challenge the notion of that “the entertainment industry with it’s new sensuality” (p.14), and mechanical ability to capture the world, that literature writes of, is necessary. I’d argue, on the contrary to this notion, it compromises primal sensualities, or simple sensualities (that is superior over complex sensualities) subsequently compromises at-present emotional memory, which is more important than prudent memory, that mechanization promotes among other things, because the world, as war has proven, is impermanent. I’ll begin with two super brief historical antedotes that highlights the moral risk of complex sensualities, brought by exotic stimuli.

Mid-17^TH century, prior to the Dutch arriving tip of what’s considered Battery Park, the Lenape Indians who seasonally settled in the woodlands of the island, unaware of any European sensualities like distilled alcohol, vegetation, and fabrics; the Lenapes were content with the untouched flora and faun, and because they would migrate to the warmer south during winter, they never needed foreign clothes or blankets. So when the foreign Dutch introduction of such exotic materials, providing a vast array of unnecessary options, overtime became a livelihood crutch per se, thus fulfilling. in a psychological sense, a greater way to fulfill Maslow’s bottom hierarchy of needs, the resulting superfluous indulgences, especially alcohol, caused the southern Manhattan demise of the tribe. In confluence with the U.S. economic boom post-WWII many hundreds year later, where consumer consumption—driven by commercial ads on TV, billboard, radio, about appliances, cars, and clothes—was at it’s highest, psychologically, the private dwellings of white America had a gaping hole the size of a meteor, that an array of materials could only fill. Consumption, positively reinforced by the country, was, and still is, therefore the interminate culture.

It is this manufactured narcissism, that historically, on a mass scale, this American dream had numbed the primal sensual self, that, again, is more important during a nuclear age, than human mechanical archiving. The solution is not to become a luddite, because technological advancements, in general, helps further distance society from the prehistoric wilderness. And I’m not proposing any transcendentalist retirement from urban America either. But to first be aware such exotic and mechanized stimuli as an inevitable sensual crutch, and two, to engage in sensual primal simplicity, because of three reasons: (1) leisurely, it’s the greatest way to interact with yourself and others casually or intimately, (2) morally, it’s the greatest way to keep a society from developing crutches, as witness from the Lenapes, and (3) psychologically, it possibly ends this anxious rat race of becoming “independently successful”, through greater emphasis on community, through the primal sensuality that bornes empathy, as the Lenapes had prior to trading with the Dutch. Knowing that such, if our nuclear-era consumer culture could, to put it simply, do more with less, we can return to what matters more than the mechanization of the human footprint, as Shelly’s Ozymandias writes, “The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The introduction of Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum starts by telling of an interview between the Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin and Conan O’Brien. Through this encounter, the world seemed shocked to find out that Martin uses WordStar to write his books, mainly to avoid any distractions that come along with having a computer that is connected to the number one mode of procrastination: the internet. Though I have never used WordStar, this alone almost sells me on using this outdated DOS-era computer. I remember using websites to block any social media usage on my computer when writing papers in high school, solely for this reason.

Kirschenbaum goes onto describe how on top of that, Martin prefers WordStar for other reasons too. Martin spoke about how WordStar does exactly what he wants it to do, and nothing more, which is very important for writers: everything they write is important and purposeful, so of course they do not want a word processing program to correct something that was not a mistake to begin with. This brought Kirschenbaum to writing about the bigger idea of the way people get accustomed to ways of writing. He writes:

“ Martin’s intimate knowledge of WordStar’s functions and keyboard patterns might be best characterized as tacit  knowledge, the extraordinary combination of muscle memory and unarticulated experience that enables is to perform very complex tasks without conscious effort or consciously knowing how to do them. Tacit knowledge is necessary for the flow states many writers cite as characteristics of their most productive sessions, and they deeply resent anything that jolts them out of that zones.” (10)

A deep connection to and necessity of modes of writing seems a little dramatic, but without a doubt does exist. It is interesting to notice the way in which writing with a pen as opposed to writing on a computer changes the way that people write, along with the way they feel when writing. To connect it back to Martin, imagine if he was for some reason forced to switch from WordStar to Microsoft Word. Who knows how his writing would change. Of course the words may not be dramatically different, but the act of writing and the feeling of the writer to the writing would very much be different.

It is very interesting to think about the significance of the modes of writing. Of course it has been something I have noticed on a small-scale, like, for example, I have a pen that is made by one of my favorite musical artists, Mod Sun, and on the pen he has written “Write when it’s Right,” and even though it is not a great pen, very cheap quality, if I am going to write in a journal or write a poem, that is THE pen I use. It just has some personal significance that makes me feel totally different about what I am writing. But, even though that noticeable difference of meaning connected to that pen is something I have thought about, I never really thought about how far that extends. I never thought about Google Docs versus Microsoft Word as an area of change in what people write. Kirschenbaum does a great job exploring a seemingly basic thing, and making people think more about how much meaning exists in the different modes of writing.

In the excerpt from Gramophone, Film, Typewriter by Friedrich Kittler the reader takes a look into the evolution of new media technologies in todays society that alter the way we look at how the message flows between the addresser and the addressee. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, we see the hegemony of the printed word change to new technologies that offers new ways to communicate and store data. Before digital technology came into the mainstream, physically writing operated as a symbolic meditation in a way. All data passes through the pencil which is the signifier. For instance, photography stores the actual physical effects of the real in the shape of the actual image. From there, the typewriter changed the perception of writing from that of a unique expression of a literate individual than that of seeing the image as a material signifier.

The typewriter symbolizes a momentous shift in the history of technological advancement. Using the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan there is an analysis of the technological shift that the Typewriter caused. There is a combination of discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory that adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which us humans are controlled by our technologies.

There is a further comparison between Mechanical Media and Digital Media, with Mechanical Media being the break of the 1900’s , and Digital Media arising at the break of the 2000’s. During the 1900’s there was almost a monopoly of culture that was wielded by the book, if it is not in the book then it did not happen in a sense. The most famous book, the bible, can be seen in this manner. Some people believe that the only thing that can be known for certain in the bible is the written commandments on the tablets. There is almost an aura around the commandments because it is written. With written material there is a scarcity amongst them because it is the only existing form of that representation. As Benjamin theorized, the rise of mechanically reproduced art strips the aura of the original object. This is the same with media. With the introduction of digital media, media is ubiquitous and it is everywhere. The aura is stripped and it is no longer a scarce form of information. The evolution of these media outlets allows different interpretations of the message between the addresser and the addressee.

In Matthew G Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes, the author explores the relationship between the human art of writing and the form of the writing instrument. Like Kittler, again we see a theorist who thinks in terms of McLuhan’s famous aphorism: “The medium is the message”. Kirschenbaum begins his introduction by considering the recently revealed writing process of George R. R. Martin. Martin’s use of an outdated word processor gains the attention of his fans, and for good reason, says Kirschenbaum. The word processor may hold some insights about the authors work. At the very least, Martin’s adherence to it goes to show that “we can become habituated to something like a piece of software just as we do a favorite pen or a particular weight of paper” (2).

As Kirschenbaum begins, he first clarifies that the works of art that he intends to examine “are not reducible to a single explanatory agent or element” (6). This is an important principle to remember going forward, so that we do not confuse the authors focus on technology for a belief in its primacy. However, Kirschenbaum does not wish that we undervalue the effect of technology either. He quotes literary scholar Evija Trofimova, who analyses the ways in which the environment that Paul Aster wrote in affected his work, and comments, “all of this … can only become visible is one dares to turn away, for a moment, from the centered intent of the human author and to look more closely at the work of ‘things'” (9). If we are to compose a more complete understanding of an author, we should consider all of the influences on his or her writing.

In the age of digital technology, such as word processing, this observance of the “work of things” becomes less obvious. Many theorists follow what Kirschenbaum calls as “emancipatory logic” (5), which views electronic media as a dematerialization of many technological apparatus. From this perspective, word processing somehow transcends the physical limitations of writing. This reminds me of the novel You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier. Lanier, once a programmer in the upstart Silicon Valley of the 1980’s, discusses the philosophy with which the “world wide web” was created. They all believed that they were created a technology that would make the world immune to tyranny, for there would always and forever be a free flow of information, unrestricted by the material constraints of past technologies. Lanier has since split from this philosophy, and uses his novel to explore the ways in which Web 2.0 (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) creates very narrow channels through which people communicate digitally. The idealistic freedom that they envisioned did not survive the materiality of the technology.

Kirschenbaum, Like Lanier, does not buy into the “emancipatory logic” that considers electronic media as dematerialized communication. He argues that word processing does have materiality. One way this materiality is evidenced is through the development of “tacit knowledge,” or, “the extraordinary combination of muscle memory and unarticulated experience that enables us to perform very complex tasks without conscious effort or consciously knowing how to do them” (10). At the very least, the technology is effecting the writer in particular ways. This begs the question: Can the effects of this technology can be found in the literary work itself? For Kirschenbaum, the search for this technological materiality is an important aspect of literary criticism.

In Judith Halberstam’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Men, Women, and Masculinity,” Judith tries to deconstruct masculinity. Masculinity is usually applied to men and feminism is generally applied to females. Masculinity is similar to a hegemony, it shows leadership and dominance. Halberstam describes masculinity and feminism in such a way that it connotes a negative feelings towards femininity. The way she constructs her argument about masculinity, she empowers masculinity and states there are different forms of masculinity even within females and homosexual men. The question is, why is there such a negative connotation with femininity, why do we need to identify female masculinity as masculine to be empowered?

Halberstam describes masculinity in a way which masculinity dominates and while doing so, takes power from femininity. She describes, “As masculinity is ever more naturalized in hererosexual, homosexual and transexual male bodies, femininity becomes ever more degraded as a subject position and female masculinity becomes simply unimaginable” (2643). Here, Halberstam is stating how all forms of masculinity are recognized yet the female masculinity is not only seemingly shameful, it is also impossible to be understood in this (white) male dominated culture.

Halberstam describes throughout her writing that white males are the dominant group in society. She goes onto explain that having a penis is equivalent to having social power. According to Freud, we can generate social power in other body parts that become phallic and can access the social power reserved for white males. She mentions that lesbians can attain power as well, through Lacan’s framework of the “Lesbian Phallus.” Lesbianism has always been associated with female masculinity which is ultimately, undesirable and linked to female ugliness. Lesbians do however threaten heterosexual men because of the attractive lesbian who rejects them and the butch lesbian who rivals their masculinities (2652).

While deconstructing Halberstam’s words and thoughts, I can say that she identifies as a masculine female but I feel that she is using the non-masculine females, the feminine females as a stepping stone to have herself and those that identify as a masculine female get ahead in the patriarchal society. She complains that the dominant systems must be updated in order to remain relevant to the social and political systems, which I agree is true but identifying as a masculine–anything to get ahead in society is just reinforcing the patriarchal dominated culture. Females, transexuals, and homosexuals should not have to identify as anything to have their voices heard and to be taken seriously. Heterosexual white men should be stripped of the “masculine” title. Identifying as anything masculine creates the divide of social groups and creates this disparity among us. Women should strive to empower through other means, instead of ultimately backing the patriarchal system.