D.E. Wittkower
By David Simpson
In this electronic utopia we live in, maybe we can be excused for equating "technology" with "digital devices." But lest we forget, "technology" applies to hammer, chisel and stone tablet as well as to your iPad.
That's where D.E. Wittkower, a philosopher of technology at Â鶹¹ú²úAV, comes in. He's fascinated with writing instruments from the past, his goal not to revive those tools but to explore what was lost when new technologies outstripped them.
From 4:30 to 6 p.m. April 16 at the Executive Dining Room of Webb Student Center, he'll present a lecture and workshop called Material Practices of Writing: A Participatory Workshop on Writing Instruments of the Last 150 Years.
After his lecture, participants will be invited to circulate among numerous writing stations and try using a variety of writing instruments from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Center for Faculty Development reached Wittkower with a few questions ahead of the event.
What appeals to you about old-fashioned writing instruments? How does this interest fit into your scholarly purview?
Narratives of improvement and innovation necessarily contain within them a hidden counter-narrative of loss and forgetting. Every "new" and "better" takes hold at the expense of an old way whose virtues are never fully replicated in the practices that replace it, and doing it "the hard way" carries within it a set of social and individual practices and disciplines that technological fixes remove first from our experience, and next from our memory. I'm not interested in going back to the old ways, and I'm not nostalgic about the past, but I am interested in rediscovering lost elements of antiquated practices in order to better understand our own current experience and its limits, and in order to better imagine different futures by seeing how narrow and contingent our current practices are.
To give a simple example, we can look at how the difficulty and tedium of writing with a dip pen forced writers to consider carefully what they were writing, resulting in a tendency toward greater introspection and precision. Material experience with this contrast helps to throw into relief the tendencies to which our composition is subject in our current technical environment.
Tell us what to expect from your lecture and workshop.
I'll talk for maybe 15 or 20 minutes about topics in philosophy of technology — how material engagement affects our thought and sense of meaning and purpose; how technology develops in culturally situated branching-off of possibilities, despite the myth of "progress" that holds that each technology has a set purpose that it simply becomes more efficient at doing; stuff like that. After that, I'll demonstrate a few things so that everyone knows how to use the writing instruments, and then everyone will circulate around and try things out. I'll have Victorian and Edwardian dip pens and mechanical pencils, fountain pens from every decade going back to the 19-teens, desk pens, wearable ring-top pens and pencils, and some other stuff. Everything I'm bringing in will be usable. I've taught myself how to service, repair, and restore these instruments.
The event is co-sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities and the Art History Department, and is free and open to the public. Space is limited, so please R.S.V.P. to Terri Hughes (tjhughes@odu.edu) if you want to attend.