The answer that the click is simply the noise of the machine as it goes from discrete unit to discrete unit did not satisfy the philosopher.
![letterpress cube letterpress cube](https://cdn0.iconfinder.com/data/icons/toys-39/500/SingleCartoonToysOneYulia_9-512.png)
But “why do typewriters go ‘click’?”, Vilém Flusser asks in his text from 1993. Striking the key that bears a sign makes the thing go ‘click’ and the machine produces the expected outcome: the corresponding sign has been produced. Yet, on the other side, the side of the operator, the appearance and use of a calculator and a typewriter are very similar. The cyphers of the counting machines are mounted on wheels that rotate to operate the calculation, while the letters of the writing machines are placed at the ends of levers aimed towards a central point where the letter hammer hits the ink ribbon to leave a mark on the paper. Technically, the difference between the counting machines and the writing machines built by FACIT is a significant one.
![letterpress cube letterpress cube](https://i.etsystatic.com/15232658/r/il/33d154/2444453250/il_794xN.2444453250_4epm.jpg)
And if our writing instruments are also working on our thoughts, then our thinking as city dwellers might still be related to a business mode of thinking. If one believes that the origins of writing spring from the needs of the first city dwellers to count and keep account of their livestock and harvests - as proposed in the theory that has the letter ‘A’ originating as a sign representing the head of an ox - then, it is rather unsurprising that the western production of words remains a derivate practice of accountancy. These were calculators, with keyboards of just thirteen keys, that brought the work of the fingers to another level of efficiency when it came to counting. Long before producing typewriters, FACIT began to manufacture counting machines.
![letterpress cube letterpress cube](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/a2bd5d19-da00-4d15-a9f4-c3b4fbfd205c_1.aab4e375bc821f0a52687ab18b72a3d1.jpeg)
This shift in the production of words is described by Sadie Plant as follows: “An activity which had once been concentrated on a tight nexus of coordinated organs - hand and eye - and a single instrument - the pen - was now processed through a distributed digital machinery composed of fingers, keys, hammers, platterns, carriages, levers, cogs, and wheels.” Ī child learns to count on her fingers. The points of contact for digital production are ten tips connected by a complex system of nerves and muscles, a different set of tools from the arm and hand of the writer.
#Letterpress cube manual
As Sadie Plant describes in Zeros + Ones: “If handwriting had been manual and male, typewriting was finger-printing: fast, tactile, digital, and female.” The hands with their “opposing thumbs” - often associated with humanisation, the tool, and labor - retreat up the arms, ceasing to be a surface of contact between the body and the object it handles. From the end of the nineteenth century on, writings flow would falter - the movement of a line, traced by a handheld tool, would increasingly be replaced by the rhythmic staccato of tiptiptip ten fingers hitting keys. In contrast to the manufactured products of Gutenberg’s assembly lines for text, work done with the typewriter can be considered digital - as it is with the fingers that one strikes the keys. The model that we attribute to Henry Ford, and his exemplary automobile factories is an extension of the one developed by Gutenberg in the 1440s. The pre-existing letters, or type, with which one prints, correspond to the replaceable parts of industrially produced commodities.
#Letterpress cube series
It embedded the word itself deep into the manufacturing process and made it into a kind of commodity.” Etymologically, manufactured means ‘made by hand.’ Letterpress printing put the hands to work in such a way that may be thought of as paradigmatic, it introduced a new form of production, as Ong writes further: “The first assembly line, a technique of manufacture which in a series of set steps produces identical complex objects made up of replaceable parts, was not one which produced stoves or shoes or weaponry but one which produced the printed book.” In other words, the assemblage of text using moveable type provoked a change in thinking that gave way to assembly line factories a completely rationalised mode of production that made industrial capitalism into the organising principle of work and life. “Alphabet letterpress printing, in which each letter was cast on a separate piece of metal, or type, marked a psychological breakthrough of the first order. Ong, the reification of words happens not with writing, but with printing.
![letterpress cube letterpress cube](https://p1.liveauctioneers.com/355/129465/65862451_1_x.jpg)
What might be striking about the expression ‘production of words’ is that it reveals that the very stuff of our thinking is a product.