Introduction: Aesthetics of the Tool—Technologies, Figures, and Instruments of Literature and Art

At first glance, the tool belongs to the sphere of that which Martin Heidegger has characterized as the "subservience" (Dienlichkeit) of the thing. ¹ An object with decidedly utilitarian functions, it does not achieve the status of a work of art, yet at the same time, through its instrumental pragmatism, the tool is elevated above nonpurposive things. In a gray area between the aesthetic and technical, the tool leads a double existence: it participates in the discourse of the beautiful, yet remains a foreign body. The tool therefore operates on the threshold of an unshaped thing and product and exists in the ambivalent zone of the "becoming of the work" both as art and artifact. To paraphrase Richard Sennett, one could characterize the tool—the intermediary between the pragmatic and the artistic—as sublime in a special way. For Sennett, a sublime tool invites a plurality of possible applications that are not necessarily derivable from its form, and thus allows more room for playing with the tool and extending its limits. Even those moments of resistance when activity grinds to a halt, however, can lead to a beneficial "reformatting" that produces a "leap of the imagination," as well as a temporal reorienting and new knowledge gleaned from "identification" with the cause of resistance itself. ²

An "aesthetics of the tool" needs to encompass theories of production and usage. To understand precisely how tools operate as objects of an aesthetics and what their relevance is, there are two basic approaches. The first one involves the study of manual and mechanical equipment, such as that of writing and printing, of making and taking pictures, of the analog and digital processing of images and texts, of shaping and sculpting. This is a field that has been amply explored by media theorists, ³ for whom the concept of the tool might be relegated to that of the medium or even to a peculiar anachronism, regarding the typologies of hard and soft, hot and cold, and opaque and transparent media. To speak of the tool in relation to the discursive and material dominance of the medial means to direct one's attention to forms of use, possibilities of manipulation, and zones of hands-on experience and activity. Such an instrumentally focused approach explores the process of the work, be it either handmade or machine-made. An aesthetics of the tool is then, according to this approach, an aesthetics of practices, operation, and handling.

If one were to take the case of writing tools, for example, then the first association might well be with an inventory of pencils, pens, hands, typewriters, printing presses, and computers, as well as materials like the carbon ribbon and toner and perhaps even the fluidity and color of inks. All these tools constitute the "with what?" of the writing act, the medial aspect of the writing scene. They are the first to help produce the text in its materiality, the first to facilitate the visibility of writing and thereby its legibility as well. To focus on these tools of writing is to foreground literature as a practice of specific media usage. At the same time, in keeping with this example, one cannot only speak of tools of writing in the sense of the whole variety of historically implemented writing media; when writing is released from its material relations and instrumental parameters it also can achieve the function of a tool. Action and creation occur with, in, and through writing; its specific potential thereby has less to do with registering things in a virtually neutral inventory of signs. Writing distinguishes itself above all by operating as a graphic system, which means that it can be epistemically and performatively implemented and applied. By writing, we not only record things that have already been thought or said, but knowledge and data are produced or created through the specific abstraction of the notational system. Writing is instrument of thinking and acting. ⁴

The second approach, through which our volume augments the work of media theorists as it is...