In an effort to unpack the notion of the Chinese typewriter as emblematic of an unassailably perverse difference in ontological positioning, it is essential to consider the manner in which the threat that the typewriter represents is situated (where, in other words, the discourse machine-gun is pointing). Rather than simply limit the Chinese typewriter’s cultural significance to its representation of the Other by the adoption and adaptation of processes typically considered Western/normative, the artefact is here taken as a cultural object so thoroughly Othered, not due to its foreign composition, but because it threatens to accomplish the collapse of “Occident” and “Orient” that Said imagines and hopes for (Said 28). The popular conception of a Chinese typewriter as an overly complex, if not physically overwhelming, device (Mullaney) suggests a fundamental and persistent failure to acknowledge Chinese scribal/linguistic expression as possessing a coherent logical structure which demands appropriate technologies of inscription. From an Occidental (Orientalist) perspective, the problem of the Chinese typewriter is simply that its purpose – efficient, standardised inscription – is at odds with what is understood to be the structure native to Chinese languages, and that this disparity suggests a profound failure in inventive logic, producing “curiosities at best and absurdities at worst” (Mullaney). The supposition is that the most effective iteration of a Chinese typewriter would be a machine that is linguistically conservative and accurate, with a key-tray so massive that it threatens to tip the device into absurdity. (If we were to subject the English typewriter to similar scrutiny we might well ask, “Where is the yogh-key? The thorne?”)

Failing to acknowledge various attempts to parse-down Chinese typing suggests an effort to characterise Chinese thought as always-already compromised, overwhelmingly antiquated. Concerns similar to those of Orientalists arise in considering the typewriter from a vantage point less concerned with maintaining “flexible positional superiority” (Said 8), although with a less fatalistic outcome. From the inventor’s perspective, the effort to condense, synthesise, and (re)organise a complex ideogrammatic language might have less to do with questions of linguistic or cultural authenticity/purity as with the mechanical problem of joining an organic group of ideograms with a technology whose inception subdivides the page following grid-logic and demands that each character occupy a uniform space. Indeed, the “brilliance of the solutions devised” (Mullaney) points towards a complexity of thought countering the facile presentation of the Chinese typewriter in Occidental (pop)media (Mullaney). Following from Said’s affirmation that Orientalism functions through “[…] a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts […]” (Said 12), here the Chinese typewriter will be taken as a machinic metonymic expression of Orientalist impulses “extend[ed …] to geography” (5), in considering ties between the typewriter and urban planning practices of the early/mid twentieth century.

This gesture of comparing the machine to the places of its use takes the object and its surrounding geographies as complementary material “texts”, and attempts to map their “referential power” in what Said identifies as a strategic formation (20). Admittedly, the process commits a certain anachronistic violence, as over two decades separate the two maps, yet the object of this consideration is to nuance contextual understanding of the typewriter, rather than account fully for the formation of urban centers…

Milwaukee, circa 1920

Shanghai, circa 1944

When juxtaposed, the maps of Milwaukee and Shanghai here presented demonstrate the manner in which the Modern grid-network of city streets might be implemented with varying degrees of success; Milwaukee is relentlessly formal in its attention to grid networks, quelling even the occasional curved road in favour of bisecting diagonals, Shanghai, alternatively, demonstrates a much less rigid road system, still using a grid-overlay, but fitting strict angles to pre-existent curves. One of the more noteworthy details on the map of Shanghai is the disparity, in the image’s center, between the (historically) British/Occidental enclaves and, to the south, the “Chinese City”. The Occidental here, as in Milwaukee, endeavours to hold-fast to a formal grid, while the Oriental resists this, most forcibly in the ring-road which attracts the map-reader’s eye. Again, while this may be taken as a hesitancy to fully implement modern planning and constructive techniques to their fullest, it might also be cast as a mediation of those methods, a softening of that logic to account for pre-existent structures. While the rationale behind such a symbiotic mode of urban organisation is not readily apparent (ranging from practical concerns such as infrastructure and the costliness of construction, to questions of aesthetics, to simple conservatism), it acknowledges the existence of various sites and spaces, rather than reducing the entire spread of urban spaces to a single grid.

Similarly, the Chinese typewriter does not operate following the impression/assemblage process of the direct key-to-(gridded)page system of its English correlative, complicating the grid formation not only in the marking of the page, but the marks themselves (the complex and combinatory nature of Chinese ideograms renders the basic, single-stroke uniformity of glyphs problematic). Instead of a device designed to navigate a strictly defined grid, the Chinese typewriter featured either a tray of selectable typeface or a seventy-two key system which could produce thousands of Chinese characters (Mullaney). Both formulations of the Chinese typewriter attempt to mechanise a writing process with the awareness that the machine itself will, in all probability, be incapable of encompassing all the nuances of that process’ language – the only positive formulation of this awareness is to foreground the potential of the Chinese typewriter to function within set parameters, within specialised conditions. It is this last point, that the Chinese typewriter is not inadequate, but rather configured to work within constraints, that demonstrates not only its appropriation by adaptation (launching the typewriter into another linguistic context), but also that the Chinese typewriter might be justifiably characterised as a “better” inscription device – reserved for the sorts of writing that a machinic process might be useful for…
The Chinese typewriter, then, threatens to undermine, if not destroy, the conception of a superlatively modern West in demonstrating the failure of bureaucratic technologic to adaptively re-configure itself, or provide tools commensurate for (exclusively) bureaucratic work. The ability of the Chinese typewriter to transpose an ancient scribal system into a new machinic iteration suggests a sort of ultramodern nostalgia that denounces the naïve Occidental assumption of unidirectional progress that serves as the impetus for the development of “new” processes of inscription.

Works Cited

Mullaney, Thomas. “The Chinese Typewriter.” China Beat. 5/14/2009.
http://thechinabeat.blogspot.ca/2009/05/chinese-typewriter.html. Accessed 14 November 2012.

Said, Edward. “Introduction.” Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. 1-28.

Map Images: Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas at Austin.
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/. Accessed 16 November 2012.

— Christopher Chaban