Of Automatics: Sophie von La Roche and the Life of the Writer's Desk

This essay explores the desk as an important figure through which to understand the genre of life-writing and the life of writing at the close of the eighteenth century. Through a discussion of Sophie von La Roche's My Writing Desk (1799), the desk and its biography emerge as key instruments for working out the automaticity and the machinality of writing—the way writing and its instruments could produce more writing. In so doing, the biography of the desk rewrites one of the founding tropes of autobiographical narrative—that of conversion. Instead of being understood in the sense of a personal crisis, conversion assumes a new meaning in the nineteenth century as a means of exploring the discursive and technological transformations that allow for writing's movement between different types of material and epistemic spaces.