It might seem odd to bring Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fidget to bear on our discussions of the typewriter, but I think his book has a lot to offer in terms of visibility and invisibility as well as modes of authoring and inscribing. Goldsmith’s text also creates an interesting bridge between bodies and the upcoming work we will be doing on dictation.

In Fidget, dubbed poésie vérité by Marjorie Perloff, Goldsmith makes his body the central figure of the work, as he spends twelve consecutive hours documenting seemingly insignificant movements and sensations. While Fidget is an experiment in writing the body, or in translating ordinary movements into words, the lack of an “I” to whom all this fidgeting can be attributed to turns this relatively simple project into “an extremely complex investigation of the relationship between bodily functions and literary devices” (Gallo 52). While Gallo makes a good point, the investigation woven in Fidget also points to the slippage between bodies performing actions in space and “material thinking” in the Flusserian sense.

Through various bodily acts, Goldsmith transcribes the body into a ritualized act – one that is performative (transcription) and eventually prescriptive (written text). As Gallo notes, “through its use of recording technologies, Fidget bridges the abyss separating the spoken word from written text” (57). Goldsmith’s method in Fidget also subjects his body, as transcription, to a radical reduction, one that has much more in common with a machine than an actual human. By bridging two different bodies, the body with organs and the Deleuzian body-without-organs, Goldsmith’s biological body transcends its own flesh as it veers toward the automaton: Grasp. Reach. Grab. Hold. Saw. Pull. Hold. Grab. Push. Itch. Push. Push. Turn. Walk…Turn. Chew. Massage. Gather…Reach. Open. Furthermore, Gallo notes, “it is as if the narrator were operating a piece of equipment – a giant mechanical apparatus full of levers, knobs and buttons” (54). The mechanical and automatic qualities of the writing, of course, can in part be attributed to the lack of subjectivity in the text.

Among the rules for Fidget, Goldsmith states, was the avoidance of the use of the first-person “I” to describe movements. Thus, he adds, “every move was an observation of a body in space, not my body in space. There was to be no editorializing, no psychology, no emotion – just a body detached from a mind” (Fidget 91). In many ways, what is at work here, is reminiscent of Gitelman’s account of the introduction of typewriters and they offer a “self-consciously ‘managed’ imposition between the mind and the page. Typing obscured writing,” Gitelman continues, “while it provoked a new awareness of manual, visual and aural habits at the heart of vernacular literacy practices” (188-89).

The project of Fidget, through its elaborate artifice and its emphasis on transcription, obscures writing but most surprisingly, it points to a slippage between the body and the author/inscriber. The elision of the “I,” then, grants the fractured narrative a form of “mechanical objectivity” that mirrors the “work rules and the process of machinery combined to offer businesses a form of mechanical objectivity, a presumed freedom from human subjectivity and, consequently, from error” (Gitelman 189).

By attempting to “break down bodily functions into their smallest components,” the lack of an authoring I to whom all this fidgeting can be attributed to is reminiscent of “business correspondents and other writers [who] became increasingly divorced from the mechanics of producing their own authored texts” (Perloff qtd in Fidget 93; Gitelman 211). What is perhaps most interesting about Fidget, however, is the degree in which Goldsmith’s text encapsulates the typewriter’s relationship to spiritualism and business or to the sitter and the medium by being a work whose main character, the mind, is the invisible.

The mind is an interesting character to follow in Fidget. Although Goldsmith’s psychology and subjective state is supposed to disappear from view, the mind haunts the narrative in surprising ways. As Marjory Perloff notes, “faced with a welter of ceaseless and simultaneous movements, the mind censors about 99% of these movements and subjects the rest to increasing interpretation” (qtd in Fidget 93). Moreover, “what Fidget celebrates with perverse charm,” Perloff continues, “is the victory of mind over matter, and the inability to convey what we call body language except through language” (93). The strict cataloging of mechanical movements, then, reveals the complicated relationship between machines and the bodies operating them.

But the elision of the “I” is only one type of absence in the work. The medium of transcription itself has been erased. One of the most fascinating characteristics of Fidget is not only its ability to transform the biological movements themselves into quasi-mechanical reproductions, but to render the frame of the experiment invisible under the opaque quality of the words, and where ” the serial processes of speaking, recording, replaying, transcribing and editing are all hidden from view, concealed behind phrases that sound as simple as Arms drops, Grasp. Right hand rests. Fingers bend” (Gallo 58). As beaulieu suggests, “in Fidget, we are not asked to read for the evidence of presence, but rather for the residue of absence” (63).

Now, what does all this have to do with the typewriter? Admittedly, not very much other than perhaps the mechanization of the body through dictation. But I think it will prove no less rewarding to think about how Goldsmith, as typist and author, is both inside the typist and author-dictator relationship at the same time that he circumvents it. As author, there are certain textual liberties that he can take, but the conventions and constraints of bodies, inscriptions and minds seems to oddly remain on par with other models of dictation and transcription.

Works Cited

beaulieu, derek. “Fidgeting with the scene of the crime.” Kenneth Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetics. OPEN LETTER 12.7 (2005): 52-60. Web. 13 October 2012.

Gallo, Rubén. “Fidget’s Body.” Kenneth Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetics. OPEN LETTER 12.7 (2005): 52-60. Web. 13 October 2012.

Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. Fidget. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2000.

Perloff, Marjorie. “Vocable Scriptsigns: Differential Poetics in Kenneth Goldsmith.” Fidget. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2000. (90-106).

— Genevieve Robichaud