printed editions into Heidegger's hands. Arendt, concerned that Heidegger's manuscripts ought to remain in Germany—particularly with respect to his claims about the philosophical nature of the German language—thus advised that he place the manuscript with the Schiller Literatur Archiv in Marburg. This did become the ultimate location, eventually for all his manuscripts, but Arendt's initial suggestion was turned down by the Heideggers! They argued that the Americans would pay more money and for a while considered the University of Texas as most likely to have the most. Apart from the hypocrisy implied, the commodification of Being and Time also becomes the means for making it into a modern art object placed in a literary museum.

Before leaving writing by hand, valorized by Heidegger as the onehanded writing by pen, I want to point to a delicious contemporary example that relates to the typewriter. As noted, by even the early twentieth century most literary producers had shifted to the typewriter, and later most of these had shifted to the word processor. One writer slow to make the second shift was Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy is a very prolific writer, with one of his recent works, No Country for Old Men, now a popular movie made by the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen. McCarthy purchased his typewriter in 1963—before word processors, to be sure—after finding a light portable Lettera 32 Olivetti in a pawnshop for $50. He ended up writing more than five million words of manuscript on this favorite machine, by which time it was worn out. One can imagine the loose clackety-clack left if one were to try writing. A friend working with him at the Santa Fe institute found and bought him a virtually unused but identical model, which cost $19.95, with shipping at $11.00. (I wonder if it was on eBay.) And so McCarthy may continue his archaic attachment to the mechanical typewriter even today. As for his old model: He put it up for auction, now as a commodified art object. It sold for $245,500, with proceeds donated to the Santa Fe Institute.9 Heidegger was not the only person to become fixed upon a preferred but antiquated writing technology.

I do not want to dwell upon or get caught in a war ofHeidegger-interpretation, but instead want to push a second, related anti-essentialist critique, this time more implied by postphenomenology. I claim that technologies are multistable, that is, they have structured ambiguities that allow what first appears as a "same" technology to be differently situated and have different trajectories. I return to Heidegger' s printed Being and Time. I have previously suggested that without Being and Time's having been "reduced" to standardized print and the printing press, Heidegger could not have become Heidegger. Imagine, for example, if he had to


126 ■ Heidegger's Technologies: One Size Fits All


Don Ihde - Heidegger's Technologies - Postphenomenological Perspectives