The Keyboard I

Abstract

This chapter argues that alongside the historical rise of ontological descriptions of time, a new regime of inscription also emerged: typography. Just as the ontologically descriptive regime of force was inscribed in the tensional regime of the book, so the rise of the descriptive regime of time, from the late eighteenth century to the present, was predominantly inscribed in an elastic regime of the keyboard. Writing and books did not disappear during this time, of course, but were instead taken up and modified within a new kinographic regime defined by the elastic oscillations of the keyboard.