A Typewriter?

In "Technology & Ethos" (1971), Amiri Baraka writes

A typewriter?--why shd it only make use of the tips of the fingers as contact points of flowing multidirectional creativity. If I invented a word placing machine, an '"expression-scriber," if you will, then I would have a kind of instrument into which I could step & sit or sprawl or hand & use not only my fingers to make words express feelings but elbows, feet, head, behind and all the sounds I wanted, screams, grunts, taps, itches, I'd have magnetically recorded, at the same time, & translated into word--or perhaps even the final xpressed though/feeling wd now be merely word or sheet, but itself, the xpression, three dimensional--able to be touched, or tasted or felt, or entered, or heard or carried like a speaking singing constantly communicating charm. A typewriter is corny!!

The passage streamed into our first meeting of Afrofuturism last night, framed some of our early thinking about innovation and technological promise. We're leading things off with the special issue of Social Text on Afrofuturism (Summer '02); and I'm volunteer no. 1 for leading the discussion, so I've got to wrap up Thomas Masters' Practicing Writing for 712 and get moving with how to frame this thing. I don't know when I'll return to this xcerpt from Baraka, but I wanted to set it aside, share it. The "entered" bit reminds me of Lanham's at/through, although Baraka is pushing toward something more bodily than the perceptual oscillations Lanham gives us. And I can think of ways this could connect with Hansen, particularly on point with the "body's framing function," even if the machine proper is "a kind of instrument."