Kittler explains that a certain typewriter from 1886 pierced paper with needle pins in the same way the vampire inscribed bodies. The fact also that the typewriter made everything visible, apart from the inscription of the sign, is also consistent with Stoker’s vampire and Nietzsche’s mnemotechnics where the victims cannot see or read what the mutilations do to their bodies. Like the typewriter, Dracula’s act of inscription is invisible and passes undetected. Humans then are no longer the agents of writing but become a surface to be inscribed by new technologies, like the typewriter, which changes them, shaping their thoughts and writing.
— Aspasia Stephanou, Inhuman Materiality in Gothic Media, 2019.
it really is like. a document of a tragedy exists as a record of the documenter’s guilt, their complicity in inaction, their choice to record rather than to prevent or alter what they witness. the photojournalists who win awards for their pictures of people experiencing starvation and sickness, ghost quartet’s photograph of the woman about to get hit by the subway train, the magnus archives’ archivist’s shelves and shelves of statements from people who came in looking for help and didn’t get any because the archivist isn’t interested in helping, but rather observing, recording, understanding. the more you interfere with a field site the more you disrupt it, the more you muddy the results. to help someone is to ruin them as a subject of study, and so you don’t help; you just watch, and wait.
[ID: Screenshot of genius lyrics that read: All: The driver zones out. The victim plays a game. The pusher screams out. The photographer doesn’t help. / End ID]
the photographer as defined in opposition to the hero because you simply can’t be both…
[ID: Screenshot of genius lyrics that read Chorus: How did Rose lose her camera? Gelsey/Pearl: She threw it to the ground, disgusted by what she had done. Chorus: What had she done? Gelsey: She had taken a photograph of something inappropriate, or rather, a photograph at an inappropriate time, or rather, a photograph instead of being a hero. / End ID]
