Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. 1st ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Some brief notes on a couple chapters.

CONNECTIONS TO HEIDEGGER: Book as gathering together (7).

Critique of Heidegger’s romanticization of the artisanal hand: “But when we write ‘by hand’ we are not in the time before technology; there is already instrumentality, regular reproduction, mechanical iterability” (20).

“For what we are dealing with is never replacements that put an end to what they replace but rather, if I might use this word today, restructurations in which the oldest form survives, and even survives endlessly, coexisting with the new form and even coming to terms with a new economy—which is also a calculation in terms of the market as well as in terms of storage, capital, and reserve” (9).

Project about a book to come. Notion of book not as a technical object but a logic, ordering, or gathering together which persists with every new technological shift.

Warns against techno-pessimism and techno-utopianism. Technical change always carries marks of the past. Fetishism, sanctifying.

IMPORTANT: Addresses freedom within digital networks. Encourages the proliferation of “wild areas” (17). This view seems naive, however, of the intricacies of the technical restraints to such unrestricted areas of the internet which is of course highly standardized and governed.

PLAYING THE ALGORITHM: “With pens and typewriters, you think you know how it works, how it ‘responds.’ Whereas with computers, even if people know how to use them up to a point, they rarely know, intuitively and without thinking—at any rate, I don’t know—how the internal demon of the apparatus operates. What rules it obeys” (23).

Worth emphasizing Derrida’s emphasis that we merely think we know how a pen operates. In this way, computer technology, in it’s overt mysteriousness, forces a recontextualization of the apparent opacity of other ostensibly simple technologies