What happens when we see? What happens when we read? Unless we are visually impaired and rely on some tactile script such as Braille, we surely use our eyes for both readings and seeing. Is it not curious, therefore, that writing is so often described as a non-visual medium? For the majority of scholars who spend long hours in the company of written texts, eye strain is an occupational hazard, and most would be as lost without their spectacles as they would be without pen and paper or, nowadays, perhaps, without a laptop. Yet they persist in the view that to see and to read are not just different but fundamentally incompatible. I want to argue that this view rests on certain assumptions about what it means to see, and about what is entailed in reading, that have their source in modern practices of image-making and type-lettering and in theories of perception and cognition that rest on them. These theories presuppose what I shall call an optical relation between mind and world. It is a relation modelled on the workings of the eye but by no means restricted to them. Long before human beings were producing images by means of optical devices that replicated these workings, however, or producing texts by imprinting letter-sequences in type, they were using their hands to draw and write. To take the practices of drawing and handwriting as our point of departure entails an alternative, haptic understanding of the mind–world relation. This relation is modelled on the workings of the hand but, again, is by no means restricted to them. The distinction between the optical and the haptic, in short, does not exactly coincide with, but actually crosscuts, that between eye and hand and the sensory registers of vision and touch. As I shall show, we can have haptic vision and optical touch, as well as haptic touch and optical vision. My principal claim, however, is that in founding both inscription and perception in the work of the hand, the apparent incompatibility of seeing and reading can be resolved, and the distinction between image and text overcome.
Historically, this does not represent a programme for the future but a return to a pre-modern past, when chirographic practices remained ascendant and when the boundaries between written text and visual image were fluid or even non-existent. The monastic writers of medieval Europe, as the historian Mary Carruthers has shown, did not separate text and image in the way that modern people are accustomed to do (Carruthers, 1998: 212–213). In their illuminated manuscripts, pictures and words were strictly equivalent and even interchangeable. Pictures were no more ‘visual’ than words; words no less so than pictures. To transition from one to the other meant crossing no ontological threshold. Indeed, the monks who would read their lovingly copied manuscripts by running their fingers along the lines of the letters, and by murmuring the corresponding sounds, would have been astonished by the question of a time traveller from modernity: ‘How can you simultaneously see and read?’ The question would seem as strange to them as it would be to ask how it is possible, at one and the same time, to listen to the melody of a song and to hear its words. Nowadays a song, such as a hymn or a carol, is typically written in two separate registers. There is the line of melody scored in musical notation and the line of text printed below in alphabetic script. Thus, melody is non-verbal, text non-melodic. Singers have to put words and sound back together again to recompose the song, and to achieve this they must learn to read the two lines in parallel. Listeners, conditioned by the same conventions, may find themselves struggling to ‘hear’ the words of song behind the distractions of melody. Their attention riveted to the sound; the words escape them. But for medieval liturgists it was just the reverse. Homing in on vocal sound was precisely the way to grasp the essence of words since, for them, words were intrinsically sonorous. The purpose of notation, then, was not to add a melodic line to the line of text but to remind the singer of the prosodic inflections of the words as they are pronounced in order that their essence might be truly realised in performance (Ingold, 2007: 18–26).
There is a certain equivalence, then, between hand and voice and, likewise, between the ‘demanualisation’ of writing and the ‘devocalisation’ of song. A world without handwriting would be tantamount to a world without song, one in which the expressive force of the bodily gesture—whether manual or vocal—has been finally decoupled from words and their meanings. Cognition and performance, or knowledge and affect, already divided in the categories of a society that ranks intellectual over manual labour, would be split irrevocably. It is undeniable that for most Western societies, this is the current direction of travel. In some countries, handwriting is no longer taught, while singing is marginal to the curriculum. We are raising future generations whose hands will no longer know what it means to shape letters and words and whose voices will be as indifferent to prosodic variation as a line of e-mail, enlivened only by the addition of emoticons. Their hands and voices, and, indeed, their eyes as well, will have atrophied, rendered devoid of feeling or sentience. Writing in the 1960s, the great anthropologist of techniques, André Leroi-Gourhan, foresaw a future in which the custodianship of feelings would be assigned to a handful of specialists—artists, poets, composers—reducing the remaining masses of humanity to insentient, voiceless and handless anonymity, destined only to consume commoditised ‘experiences’ that the feeling manufacturers would have produced for them. Should that prophecy come to pass, Leroi-Gourhan predicted, humanity will sooner or later be confronted with the problem of its “rehumanisation” (Leroi-Gourhan, 1993: 359–361). Arguably, half a century later, Leroi-Gourhan’s prediction is already well on the way to fulfilment. Is this the future we want for our descendants? If not, how can we witness the disappearance of handwriting with such equanimity? When it goes, it will take a great part of our humanity with it. For this reason I insist that the defence of handwriting and the call for a return to the haptic is not merely nostalgia-fuelled romanticism. When we see our humanity stripped away by the combined forces of technoscience and commerce, is it nostalgic to demand it back?
We have eyes to watch and look, ears to listen and noses to sniff the air. Each of these organs of perception is located in the head. They enable us to tell in one sense: that is, to recognise subtle cues in our environment and to respond to them with judgement and precision. But the verb to tell has another sense, namely to recount the stories of the world. And in this regard, ears, eyes and noses are of little help. Noses and ears cannot tell stories, nor can eyes, unless with philosopher Jacques Derrida (1993: 126–128), we hold that the proper function of the eyes is not to see but to weep. Behind the veil of tears that blurs the vision of the sighted, says Derrida, the eyes can tell not only of grief, loss and suffering but also of love, joy and elation. Even the blind can weep. Let us admit, then, that eyes can sometimes tell more in the latter sense than the former: they might not see so well, but look into them, and there’s a story. Portrait painters have always known this. But to find the most consummate organ of storytelling we have to go lower down, from head to larynx. In humans, the vocal cords function only marginally, and very much in the background, as organs of perception. Working in conjunction with the ear, they compose a system of echolocation which enables us to tell, for example in pitch darkness, whether we are in an open or enclosed space. But it is the voice that enables us to speak and sing. In earlier times, as I have already noted, it would also have enabled us to read. Medieval readers did not see the words ready-formed on paper as we moderns do. They had rather to perform from the inscriptions on the page, much as a musician performs from a score, allowing the words to emerge or ‘fall out’ from the very process of their vocal utterance so that they could then be identified by ear (Saenger, 1982: 384). It was not the voice of the reader that created these inscriptions, however. It was the hand of the scribe.
Compared with eyes, ears and nose, on one hand, and the voice box, on the other, the hand is unique insofar as it combines telling in both of its aspects. The more eloquent the eyes, the less they see; the more they see, the less they give away. But with the hand there is no such trade-off. Not only is it supreme among the organs of touch; the hand can also tell the stories of the world in its gestures and in the written or drawn traces they yield, or in the manipulation of threads as in weaving, lace-making and embroidery. Indeed, the more gesturally animate the hand, the more it feels. Regarded anatomically, the hand is a marvellously intricate arrangement of skin, bone, muscle tissue and nerves, fed with blood that pulses through the arteries of the wrist. But we should not make too much of the contrast between hand and head. Hands are not instruments operated remotely from a command and control centre located in the cerebrum. As the neurologist Frank Wilson explains, “the brain does not live inside the head, even though it is its formal habitat. It reaches out to the body, and with the body it reaches out to the world” (Wilson, 1998: 307). Thus, right down to the fingertips, and indeed beyond, the hand is an extension of the brain, not a separate device controlled by it. But if, as Wilson goes on to declare, “brain is hand and hand is brain”, then the question that has so exercised philosophers and psychologists, of whether mind and brain are the same or different, and, if different, how the one exceeds the other must be addressed to the hand as well. Adapting Wilson’s declaration, could we say that ‘mind is hand and hand is mind’? The hand of the human may be an extension of the brain but is not the humanity of the hand a phenomenon of mind?
The story has often been told of how the human hand has evolved, in tandem with bipedal locomotion, the increasing use of tools and ultimately, the expansion of the cerebral cortex, and I shall not repeat it here (Napier, 1993). There can be no doubt that compared with the hands of other primates, not to mention the paws, claws, talons and equivalent prostheses of other animal orders, the hands of human beings are truly without parallel, and for three reasons in particular. First, they have flexible fingers that can be moved independently; second, they have nails instead of claws, allowing greater play to sensitive pads at the fingertips; and, third, and most important, every hand has a thumb that can turn, thanks to a saddle joint at the base, so as to perfectly oppose the tip of the bent index finger, which is of the right relative length to receive it. This latter property allows for the precision grip of which human hands are uniquely capable, and that is involved in nearly every instance of skilled making (Tallis, 2003: 267). In the words of Sir Charles Bell, professor of surgery at the University of Edinburgh, from his Bridgewater Treatise of 1833,
in the human hand … we have the consummation of all perfection as an instrument. This, we perceive, consists in its power, which is a combination of strength with variety and extent of motion; we see it in the forms, relations and sensibility of the fingers and thumb; in the provisions for holding, pulling, spinning, weaving and constructing; properties which are found in other animals, but which are combined to form this more perfect instrument.
(Bell, 1833: 209)
Yet for all that, Bell remained convinced that the essence of humanity lay not in the hand but in the mind, in the service of which the hand is but an instrument, obedient to its every wish and command.
However in a meditation on the hand in the course of his lectures on Parmenides, delivered at the University of Freiburg in 1942–1943, the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1992) turned this view on its head. The hand, for Heidegger, is no mere instrument; rather, its role is to establish the very possibility of instrumentality, such that things can be ‘at hand’. The hand of the human may be distinguished by the precision grip; however, the humanity of the hand, Heidegger argued, lies in its possession by the word: “Man does not ‘have’ hands, but the hand holds the essence of man, because the word as the essential realm of the hand is the ground of the essence of man” (Heidegger, 1992: 80). Thus, language holds the hand, and the hand holds man. Thanks to language, and by way of the hand, the world opens up to human being in a way that it does not and cannot to the animal. It was in an earlier course of lectures on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, delivered at Freiburg in 1929–1930 but unpublished until 1983, that Heidegger set out his unequivocal stance on the question of human uniqueness. Animals, he said, are poor in world, whereas only humans are world-forming (Heidegger, 1995: 177). Caught up or “captivated” (ibid.: 239) in a world of which it knows nothing, the animal can only behave according to its bent. It is slave to its own instinctive drives, and the world exists for it only as an environment of “disinhibitors” (ibid.: 255) that trigger their release. The human, by contrast, is emancipated from the bonds that hold the animal captive but, by the same token, is cast into a world that is not simply given but must be revealed or disclosed for what it is. It is the hand that betokens this opening, that conducts what Heidegger (ibid.: 237) called a comportment towards the world, as distinct from a behaviour within it. Thanks to the hand’s humanity, to its possession by the word, humans alone can be ‘handy’, they can be world-forming, or in short, they can tell, in the sense of disclosure or revelation. But more than that, they can tell in the other sense, of recollection. In a word, they can write. It follows, for Heidegger, that writing tells only when it is written by the hand. To our eyes, writing that tells appears in the manifest form of script; hence, “the word as script is handwriting” (Heidegger, 1992: 80). This is a crucial point, and I shall return to it. At this juncture, however, I want to look more closely at what hands can do.
And what can they do? The answer, I suppose, is ‘almost anything’. The hand, as philosopher-physician Raymond Tallis (2003: 267) says, “is totipotential and so can develop in whatever direction will be of benefit”. Scholars have, from time to time, tried to come up with lists of things that hands can do—of its various grips, grasps and grabs—but every list is different. In his work on technical operations, for example, André Leroi-Gourhan (1993: 328) lists wounding with the fingernails, grasping with the fingers and palm, and gripping between the fingers. To these he adds the leverage that can be exerted by hand and forearm working together, as in throwing a spear. One cannot help but notice a certain gender bias in this list: with all its scratching, seizing, wounding and piercing, it seems to embody an ideal of masculinity that could have come straight out of classical Greece! Where, I wonder, is the squeezing employed in everything from milking cows to wringing out laundry, the pounding used for kneading dough or clay, or the digging used in grubbing up root vegetables, which in so many societies are things that women do? More recently, in his exploration of craftsmanship, Richard Sennett (2008: 151) has focused on grip and touch as the key capacities that make hands human. Referring to the work of physical anthropologist Mary Marzke (1997), he notes that there are three basic ways to grip things: pinching between the tip of the thumb and the side of the index finger (this is the precision grip involved, for example, in threading a needle), cradling an object in the palm and moving it around with pushing and massaging actions between thumb and fingers and holding the object in a rounded hand, with the thumb and index finger placed on opposite sides of the object (the cupping grip).
However, this classification, too, is hardly exhaustive. For example, not one of the three grips listed suffices to describe the way to hold a pen. This is how it is done. First rest the lower shaft in the notch between the tips of the third and fourth fingers and the upper shaft in the saddle between the base of the thumb and index finger; then bring the tips of both thumb and index finger together into the precision position, not to grip the pen between them but to bear down upon the shaft from above. Of course, though these directions work on a general level, they are no more than that—directions—indicating a way to go rather than prescribing a fixed and final destination. In its actual performance, every kind of manual gesture admits infinite variation. Thus, in the practice of drawing or handwriting each of us finds our own way to hold a pen, and every way is a little bit different. That is why it is possible to identify a person from their script. Likewise, everyone is identifiable from their voice. Phoneticians and speech therapists may direct us in the gestures and positions of the tongue and lips required to produce particular vowels or consonants, but in performance, every speaker has his or her own voice, as recognisable and distinctive as his or her face, his or her demeanour, and especially his or her handwriting.
Turning from grip to touch, and from what hands do to how they feel, it would seem at first glance that since they generally proceed fingers-first into their engagements with things, making initial contact at the extremities, the hands’ tactility lies first and foremost at the fingertips. A cellist like myself, Sennett has much to say about what he calls the ‘truthfulness’ of touch at the fingertips. On this he makes one observation that seems counter-intuitive but which certainly resonates with my own experience. Practitioners often develop calluses of thickened skin at places on the fingers or palms which constantly rub against tools or materials. Likewise, people who go barefoot develop calluses on those parts, primarily the balls of the big toes and the heels, which are most in contact with the ground. You would think that calluses would deaden touch or, at least, reduce its sensitivity: thus, for those accustomed to walk barefoot, they would act rather like the soles of shoes for the rest of us. But, in fact, Sennett suggests (2008: 153), it is just the other way around. Calluses allow greater sensitivity since they make the act of probing or treading less hesitant. The cellist can bring his or her fingers down on the fingerboard with assurance and really commit to the strings, because his or her fingers are not deterred by the anticipation of soreness. Not only that; the cellist can also lift his or her fingers with the same poise, thus ensuring a note that is pure and not rough around the edges (ibid.: 151). Likewise, the callus-footed walker can tread without hesitation where his or her normally shod counterpart, having removed his or her shoes, would step only gingerly, and is able thereby to establish a full-bodied rapport with the ground. So, too, the rower, whose initial blisters at the base of the fingers—where they wrap around the oars—have given way to hard patches, can propel his craft with confidence through the water.
As in rowing, however, and in countless other tasks from milking and doing the laundry to carpentry and stone masonry, the hands’ tactility is by no means confined to the fingertips but extends over their entire surfaces, front and back. Gnarled and weathered by the exactions of their respective tasks as are the limbs of a tree by the elements, the hands of skilled practitioners bear witness to years of repetitive effort. Not only, then, in touch and gesture, can hands tell. In their bumps and creases they can also be told, both as histories of past practice and, in the telling of fortunes, as prophecies for the future. Hands open to reveal, in their creases, the fold lines of their closing positions. With penetrating vision, the clairvoyant can enter these lines and follow them, as though they were the threads of a labyrinth, and can tell both where the hand owner has been and where he or she might be going (Hallam, 2002). But whether in telling or being told, do hands render what we know and do in forms that are explicit? Are there things we know that cannot be told, even by hand, or are there rather things that can be told by hand but which cannot, for that very reason, be explicated?
It is a fact, declared the philosopher Michael Polanyi, introducing a series of lectures on The Tacit Dimension, “that we can know more than we can tell” (Polanyi, 1966: 4). Polanyi was referring to those ways of knowing and doing that grow through the experience and practice of a craft but which adhere so closely to the person of the practitioner as to remain out of reach of explication or analysis. His argument was that knowledge of the sort that can be rendered formally and self-consciously explicit is but the tip of an iceberg compared with the immense reservoir of know-how that lies beneath the surface and without which nothing could be practicably accomplished. It was this reservoir that Polanyi had in mind in referring to the dimension of the ‘tacit’. This, however, is a word that carries many shades of meaning, ranging from the silent or still to the unspoken or unwritten (but possibly voiced or drawn) to verbal forms and formulae the significances of which remain nonetheless implicit. For Polanyi, ‘tacit’ evidently meant that which cannot be explicated through the twin operations he called specification and articulation (Polanyi, 1958: 88). To specify is to pin things down to fixed conceptual or referential coordinates; to articulate is to join these coordinates up to form an integrated assembly. What cannot be specified and articulated, in his terms, cannot be told—though it can, of course, be known.
The hands, however, do not specify when they feel, nor do they articulate when they write. Feeling does not pin things down but joins with them in their growth and movement. The cellist joins with the movement of sound that wells from his instrument. The oarsman joins with the current, the carpenter and mason with the grain, the clairvoyant with crease lines and so on. And when it comes to writing, the hand that holds the pen does not assemble letters into words or words into sentences, as does the hand of the typist or typesetter. It rather lays a trail of continuous movement—the letter line—along which words make their appearance and which the reader can subsequently follow. So it is, too, with the voice, which neither specifies as it echoes from surfaces around us nor articulates as it sings. The singer pours forth a song; he or she doesn’t join up words or notes! And yet hands can still tell, and so do voices, whether in attending to things, or in recounting their stories. They can do so because, as a modality of sentient performance that abhors specification and articulation, telling is the very opposite of what Polanyi took it to be! It is a way of going along with things, of answering to them as they answer to you, or in a word, of corresponding with them. Telling, then, is a practice of correspondence. And this practice, even though it neither specifies nor articulates, is anything but ‘tacit’, if by that is implied silence or stillness. On the contrary, it is alive with movement, and it can be noisy—especially when the voice is involved.
Indeed, nothing has silenced the word more than the operations of specification and articulation. Pinned down and joined up, as on the printed page of a textbook where all is explained, words are lifeless and inert (Ingold, 2015: 148–149). They have no room to move or breathe. It is the explicit that is tacit, not the reservoir of savoir-faire for which Polanyi reserved the term. And it is the explicit that cannot be told. As for what can be told, it may or may not be told in words, either by voice or by hand. In the first case, it depends on whether the vocalisations take the shapes or recognisable words. In the second, it depends on whether the gestures of the hand, and the traces they leave, are verbally legible. When traces are legible, we call it writing; when they are illegible we call it drawing. With André Leroi-Gourhan, to whose discussion of the capacities of the hand I have already referred, we can imagine a time in deep prehistory when speech had yet to crystallise from the inflections of the voice and writing from the inflections of the line. In those days, there were just vocalisation and what Leroi-Gourhan (1993: 187–190) called “graphism”, issuing from gestures respectively oral and manual, each commenting upon or amplifying the other. But that time is no more, and now we have writing and drawing, as we have speech and song. How then, are they distinguished? How do writing and drawing differ as varieties of graphism?
There can be no image, it could be argued, that cannot also be read, and no written text that cannot be seen. Yet as I noted at the outset, modern scholars often remark that it is difficult if not impossible to do both at once. This argument has been proposed, on the side of text, by the literary scholar Jean-Gérard Lapacherie. “It is impossible to read a text in a sustained fashion”, Lapacherie writes (1994: 65), “and at the same time look at the printed characters”. These characters can be regarded, on one hand, as signs representing units of language (phonemes) and, on the other, as graphs—that is as characters that have their own proper and autonomous meaning. But if you stop to focus attention on the typography of the characters—on their expressive shape or calligraphic form—your reading will be interrupted and you will lose the track. If, conversely, you concentrate on reading, then it is the typography that will evade your attention. On the side of images, art historian James Elkins (1999: 91) has proposed something rather similar. Just as there can be no ‘pure writing’, uncontaminated by non-verbal meaning, so—Elkins argues—the ‘purely visual picture’ is also a fantasy. Pictures are always comprised of signs which can be read. These signs may be disordered, or even layered over one another so as to make them virtually indistinguishable. But they are necessarily there, else the image would make no sense. Every inscription we might come across, then, is a mixture of the pictorial and the textual, in proportions that vary along a continuum between the practically unrealisable poles of pure picture and pure text. “Any sufficiently close look at a visual artefact”, Elkins concludes (1999: 84), “discloses mixtures of reading and seeing”.
On this continuum, however, seeing and reading have to be understood in very specific ways. Seeing means looking at, as when we look at an image on a screen. What happens when we see, in this understanding, is the precise reverse of what happens in the formation of the image. If the image—or what Elkins calls the ‘visual artefact’—is a formal projection from mind to world, seeing is a back-projection from the world, leading to the formation of an equivalent image in the mind. What is not thus fixed, in some kind of lasting mental representation, is not seen. This is to set up an optical relation between the viewer and the viewed. And with this understanding of vision, it is scarcely any wonder that a scholar like Lapacherie or Elkins claims not to see when he reads. For if seeing is the reverse of projection, reading is the reverse of articulation. As we have already observed, to articulate is to connect up, into an integrated syntactic assembly, a chain of fixed and discrete verbal or literate elements. To read such a chain one has first to disarticulate the elements so that each is individually recognisable, and then to reconnect them so as to recover the structure. If you focus on a single element you lose the structure; if you focus on the structure you lose the elements. However, both projection and articulation, I have argued, are inimical to telling. So let us ask: What would happen to the continuum if we were to substitute, for seeing, the looking with (or watching) of telling and, for reading, a sensibility that would follow the line of writing rather than breaking it down into segments and reassembling the pieces?
For a clue to the answer, we could return to the parallel case of song. Imagine yourself once again as a time traveller, attending to the practices of medieval liturgists. Do you find that to hear the words of liturgical chant, you cannot help but lose track of the melody? Or that in listening to the melody, you lose track of the words? Of course not! But this is because you have learned from your informants that listening means harnessing your awareness to the current of sound. This is the aural analogue of looking with, of watching, not of looking at. And the words of the song are gestures of the voice launched on this current. To hear the song is to hear the words because the words are sound, in specific modulations and inflections. Likewise, the words of handwriting or calligraphy are specific modulations and inflections of the letter line, as it is traced by the dexterous hand of the writer. To read is to retrace the line, once again to ‘go over’ the movements of its formation. This is a reading that is at once haptic and visual. Indeed, there is experimental evidence from neuropsychology, using made-up scripts composed of ‘pseudo-letters’, that subjects trained to write the letters by hand were better able to read them than were their counterparts whose experience was limited to typing them on a keyboard. Clearly, reading for these subjects was a matter of rehearsing movements, not of re-articulating elements (Longcamp, Zerbato-Poudou, and Velay, 2005; James and Atwood, 2009).
Yet just as the words of the song are brought forth in singing, so letters and words are brought forth in the inscriptive practice of drawing the line, with its multiple twists, turns and loops (Ingold, 2011: 188–189). Drawing, therefore, slides easily into handwriting and as easily out of it. There is no great barrier to be overcome (Tisseron, 1994). Nor does it present itself as a mix that requires us to do two things simultaneously—look and read—which cannot practicably be combined. We need do only one thing—follow the hand-drawn line—and if that line is a letter-line of writing, then the words will ‘fall out’ from it. Many analysts, however, have a curious blind spot when it comes to vision: they seem to assume that there can be only one kind of looking, namely looking at. The assumption is that vision can only be optical, never haptic; that there is no vision other than the spectacular. This is what leads Martine Reid, introducing a collection of papers on the theme of writing and drawing, to insist that there is a conflict between legibility and visibility, as though writing that “drifts off course” (Reid, 1994: 7) and reverts to drawing—as in doodling, scribbling, marginal sketching or the excessive embellishment of letters—at once breaks out into the realm of visibility, only to sink back into invisibility at the moment when the writing becomes legible again. If even ordinary writing is invisible when we read it, then how invisible, I wonder, is writing in invisible ink? And if you have to stop reading, as Lapacherie (1994: 65) claims, in order to see words on paper, then what are we to make of the sign language of the deaf? You cannot stop a sign to look at it. Are signs, then invisible? If so, by what mysterious sense do deaf people communicate?
For Elkins (1999: 81), built into every image is a vacillation between showing and saying—that is between ‘pure visuality’ and ‘legible systems of signs’—which pull in opposite directions. It is as though the eyes found employment only in the fixating of images and not in the reading of signs. Indeed, Elkins (1996: 222) is convinced that we are all blind to a degree, insofar as much of what we see passes in our wake and is not fixed in memory in the form of what he calls a ‘final image’. In rather similar vein, Derrida (1993: 3) claims that not just the eye of the reader but the hand of the writer, too, is blind: “it feels its way, it gropes, it caresses as much as it inscribes … as if a lidless eye had opened at the tip of the fingers … right next to the nail” (idem.). Even drawing, at that moment when the hand with its inscribing point ventures forth upon the surface of the page, must necessarily proceed in the night. On the threshold of emergence—in its inaugural or pathbreaking aspect—drawing, Derrida tells us, “escapes the field of vision”. Our eyes are opened, it seems, only when we can turn and look back on lines already drawn, or on what remains of them. For only then do they enter the realm of what he calls “spectacular objectivity” (ibid.: 45).
How come, then, that the slide in the work of the drawing hand both in and out of writing has been transmuted into a continuum from picture to text, where every gradation figures as an incongruous hybrid—part picture, part text, in varying proportions—the comprehension of which depends on twin operations, of seeing and reading, or showing and saying, which are fundamentally incompatible? The answer, I believe, lies in our modern tendency to assimilate the picture to the photograph and the text to the typewritten or printed word. Hand and eye have been replaced by keyboard and camera. In drawing, the pencil serves as a transducer, converting the kinaesthetic awareness of the draughtsman into the flow and inflection of the line. But the camera, according to writer and critic John Berger (2005: 124), arrests a moment in both the consciousness of the photographer and the things that hold his attention, and effects an instantaneous capture of the latter by the former. It is as if the camera has torn drawing from the ductus of the hand, only to re-establish it as a projected image. The typewriter, according to poet Billy Collins, does something similar, breaking up the flow of manual gesture and the corresponding letter line into discrete and momentary ‘hits’, only to reassemble them as an articulation of jointed segments. “The keyboard, to me, makes everything kind of look done”, writes Collins, “writing on a page gives me a feeling of fluidity” (cited in Pallasmaa, 2009: 111). A return to drawing, then, would also be a return to handwriting, replacing the antimonies of projection and articulation, image and text, with a continuum of inscriptive practices, or processes of line-making, ranging from handwriting through calligraphy to drawing and sketching, with no clear points of demarcation between them (Ingold, 2011: 225).
Heidegger, too, has no time for the typewriter, and this is the point at which we can return to his aforementioned credo that the hand is the cradle of our humanity. It holds our humanity, he thought, as it holds a pen. When the pen writes, it tells. It discloses a way of sentient being. Yet “modern man”, observes Heidegger (1992: 80) with scarcely contained revulsion, “writes ‘with’ the typewriter”. He puts the ‘with’ in scare quotes to indicate that typing is not really a writing with at all. It is merely the mechanical transcription of words to paper. What is lost, in this transcription, is the ductus of the hand itself. The very movement by which the hand tells, when it holds a pen, is annihilated when it strikes the keyboard, for it leaves no trace upon the page. The correspondence of gesture and inscription, of hand and line, is broken. The words of the typescript may, of course, tell you how to move and even how to feel. They may instruct, like a diagram. However, as assemblies of letters, the shapes of which bear no relation to the percussive or impressive gestures entailed in their transfer to the page, they are static and immobile. The typescript is inhuman because the words spelled out upon the page are devoid of manual movement and feeling. Or as Heidegger puts it, “the typewriter tears writing from the essential realm of the hand” (ibid.: 81). Anyone who thinks that there is no difference between a typed word and a handwritten one, Heidegger implies, has failed to understand the essence of the word. This is to let us be in the world and, in being, to feel, and in feeling, to tell. Rather than carrying the current of human being-feeling-telling, which the pen picks up and converts into the inflexions of the handwritten line, words are reduced in the operation of the typewriter to mere ‘means of communication’ whose function is to transmit encoded information.
Heidegger was of course an incorrigible pessimist who missed no opportunity to moan about how technology was eating away at the very foundations of our humanity. In this regard, he was the very opposite of another key commentator on how human futures are bound up with writing and technology, namely Leroi-Gourhan. For Leroi-Gourhan was a technological optimist who revelled in the thought of what humans could become once they had cast aside the sluggishly evolving, physiological bodies that had held them captive for so long, and had managed to ‘exteriorise’ their being into the mechanical and computational prostheses of their own creation. They might by then have come to the end of the line as a zoological species, but with the centre of gravity of human being shifted from the body to the extra-somatic apparatus, imagine what else they could do! Nevertheless Leroi-Gourhan shared with Heidegger a profound respect for human craftsmanship—a respect that owed much to his observations of the work of sword makers and potters in the course of his early ethnological research in Japan. It was this that led him to question the assumed superiority of head over hands that had underpinned mainstream accounts of the rise of human civilisation, and eventually to adopt a ‘third-track’ approach which attributed the origination of artefactual forms not to the priority of intellectual conception over mechanical execution but to the generative potential of rhythmic manual activity. Whilst Heidegger’s humans wrapped themselves up in the homely embrace of the word, Leroi-Gourhan’s were always up to something, whether using tools, talking, gesticulating, writing or just walking around. But it was above all in the handiwork of artisans, he thought, that the essence of their humanity was to be found.
What is found, however, can also be lost. Having spelled out the technological progression leading from manipulation with bare hands, through the hand’s directly (as with a handheld instrument) or indirectly (by way of a pulley or crank) working a tool, to its initiating a motor process (driven by water, wind, or animal power) and eventually to its merely pushing a button to set off a preprogrammed process (as in the automatic machine), Leroi-Gourhan concludes that by end of it, something is indeed lost as well as gained. Imagine a machine for producing standard pieces of parquet flooring. You could feed wood into it without having to pay any attention to the grain or knots, and out would come perfectly shaped blocks. The machine, says Leroi-Gourhan (1993: 254), “undoubtedly represents a very important social advance”. And yet, he goes on, it leaves us with no other option than “that of ceasing to be sapiens and becoming something else, something that may perhaps be better but will certainly be different”. Post-human, perhaps? Indeed, there is a sense, Leroi-Gourhan concludes, in which “not having to ‘think with one’s fingers’ is equivalent to lacking a part of one’s normally, phylogenetically human mind”. In short, the button-pushing finger which operates the automatic machine is part of a hand that, although still anatomically human, has lost something of its humanity. Herein lies the problem of regression of the hand. Technicity has become “demanualised” (ibid.: 255).
Comparing handwriters to typists, or the makers of prehistoric hand axes to the push-button operators of the parquet flooring machine, we might suppose that the overall trend of technological progress has been from hands to fingertips. “The hand holds”, wrote Heidegger in his essay of 1951, What Calls for Thinking. “The hand carries” (Heidegger, 1993: 381). With our hands, we can keep things fast and take them along with us. Above all, we can hold the hands of others, and in this way both guide and be guided in the conduct of life: this is what medieval rhetoric knew as manuduction (Candler, 2006: 5). The hand that holds and carries is a retentive and caring hand. Fingertips, by contrast, while they can touch, are unable either to hold or to carry—not, at least, without calling the thumb to their aid. This contrast, however, is not sufficiently precise. The key question is whether the hands, or the fingertips, can feel. We cannot deny feeling to the pianist as she presses or strokes the keys with her fingertips. There is, here, an uninterrupted continuity from the technically effective gesture to the ensuing sound. Even the fingers of the cellist’s left hand, when they stop the strings on the fingerboard, continue to oscillate in the practice of vibrato, so as to yield a sound that is registered by listeners as full of feeling. But does the driver of a fork-lift truck feel the weight of the load he or she is lifting? Does the parquet-machine operator feel the bite of the saw as it slices the wood? Does the typist feel the different shapes of the letters he or she is typing? If the answer, in each case, is no, then the touch of the finger, however sensitive and precise, is without feeling. The fingertip interacts with the machine, through the ‘interface’ of button or key, but its gestures do not correspond with the material movements or traces that ensue. The finger is but a ‘prod’, and its contact with the interface, a ‘hit’. Every hit establishes a relation that is optical rather than haptic, rational rather than sentient.
The drift of technological enhancement has been for the haptic to give way to the optical, in the registers of touch as well as vision. It has been to substitute touch sensitivity at the fingertips for the sentient correspondence of telling by hand. In this substitution, handling, reach and grasp become metaphors of understanding, modelled on bodily experience, rather than animate movements in their own right (Johnson, 2007: 166; Brinkmann and Tanggaard, 2010: 249). We say we ‘reach’ a certain level of knowledge by ‘handling’ ideas and ‘grasping’ concepts, not however by doing anything constructive with our hands. Likewise, while we academics are fond of convening so-called workshops to discuss our ideas, you can be sure that apart from much earnest tapping on keyboards and optical data projection, no handwork ever gets done in them. In an act of sheer, short-sighted vandalism, university managements have even commanded the removal of blackboards and chalk from classrooms, to make way for sleek white screens, so that even that final possibility of telling by hand is removed. We are not allowed to get our hands dirty by mixing them with materials, even if we wanted to! Sensitivity and sentience—touch and feeling—need not however be in inverse ratio. We could, for example, handwrite with a sensitive pen, rather than abandoning the pen for a touch-sensitive keyboard, and get the best of both worlds. A technologically enhanced sensitivity, brought into the service of hands-on engagement with materials in making, could genuinely enlarge the scope of humanity, rather than further eroding it.
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