ABSTRACT
This chapter explores on Gilbert and Gubar's intuition about the alphabet in order to build upon it by suggesting that alphabetic technology is only one phase in a long progression of technological developments. It explores the relations between various writing technologies and the body by focusing on the material history of secretarial mediation exotropically; that is, by keeping one eye on the past and one eye on a not-too-distant future when, as presently seems probable given recent technological advances, the position of a human writing implement will have been eliminated. The chapter argues that in the case of writing technologies, the body - especially the reproductive body - is always already involved, and briefly revisits certain sites in the technological history of the clerical industry in order to register more fully the implications for embodied "being" when new technologies render obsolete both the hand and the scribes, typists, and word processors more often than not attached to it.
