difference between a beginner's "twinkle, twinkle little star" and a master player like Boulez, even if the notes were the same.

What happens in these parallel "Heideggerian resistances" to typewriters and keyboards? Part of the answer, I believe, lies in the phenomenological notion of embodiment. Before a technology can become transparent or withdraw from being more objectlike or resistant, the human who interacts and learns to "play" the instrument or technology, there has to be a learning and accommodation/resistance process. This is to say that if "present at hand slag" can occur with breakdown or absence, that there is also a sense in which at the beginning something new also presents a kind of resistance or object-likeness that also must be surpassed. Heidegger's description of the typewriter as "mechanized pressure of the hand" precisely applies to the beginner, the novice, who has not yet experienced the "flow" of composition through the keyboard. The typewriter, for Heidegger, had not yet become transparent; neither had it withdrawn to become an embodied means of expression. For that matter, Heidegger does not recall that this same process had to acquire withdrawal and transparency with the pen. Had he looked at the acquisition process, he might have noted that when he first learned to write he had to master two standardizations. The first was the standardization of the alphabet itself. The English version has twenty-six letters, with other variants having from twenty-two to twenty-eight letters. To have readable text, he had to learn to comply with his cultural version of the alphabet. The second standardization he learned, along with all others in elementary school, was the practice of "penmanship." He learned to make standard sizes and standard shapes, else, again, his script would not be readable. (The typewriter makes this task easy; its letters are already sized and shaped, not needing a hand. Each writing technology makes certain actions harder and others easier, depending upon the human-technology interface.) These now-forgotten attainments make withdrawal and transparency possible. Then, second, once a skill has been acquired and the instrument has become transparent, a shift to a new instrument or technology calls again for the same process in a new set of acquisitions—and while the highly skilled musician, or word processor user, can perhaps easily shift from one technology to another, that is not always the case. A striking example known in science circles is Stephen Hawking. His very badly restricted motility has reduced him to pecking with a mouth-held pointer onto a keyboard, a process he has mastered. Although computer programmers have pointed out that there are now better and more flexible programs for him, he simply does not want to learn a new and differently patterned set of movements. Is he "Heideggerian"? What I am suggesting here is that any new


124 ■ Heidegger's Technologies: One Size Fits All


Don Ihde - Heidegger's Technologies - Postphenomenological Perspectives