"The Sensory Regime of the Hewlett-Packard LaserJet series II Printer User's Manual"

In 1987, Hewlett-Packard released the LaserJet II, the second coming of the very first desktop printer, and, with it, a user manual emblazoned with a new version of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam—God’s hand as HP, and Adam the printer, reaching eternally toward each other. In this paper, I use the manual, along with HP advertisements and grey material, to uncover the image or idea of printing that Hewlett-Packard sought to convey in their production of the printer. What had they created? And for what kind of user? Through close reading, ANT-informed analysis, and some archaeological excavation, I identify how these materials work together to create regimes of use for the printer, and how they act in different moments as oracle, as teacher, as prosthesis. Together, these texts make up a corporate heteroglossia—producing the user as clumsy and fallible, and the printer as well-greased, perfect, neutral—masking Hewlett-Packard’s market interests. This is a historically situated, archival, materialist history; one that has repeated and will repeat again, as part of the breathless enthusiasm for and presumed apoliticism of computing and other technologies. I place the LaserJet within this broader context of global capitalism and neoliberalism, and left populist or universalist politics within the U.S., to analyze how it and its maker, HP, are embedded in tech idealism, class relations, and corporate interests.