I can imagine that much of what today seems obvious in Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter felt thrilling and innovative in 1986, when the work was published. Although many of Kittler's insights now are "given" assumptions in media theory, there was still plenty here to excite me.
Kittlers work bears out Benjamin's insights concerning the mechanical reproducibility of art and its radical reframing of the human sensorium. The distinct areas of acoustics, optics, and writing transformed by the media of gramophone, film, and typewriter are at the heart of Kittler's formal inquiries into new systems of graphic notation that supersede the dominant mode of symbolic, alphabetical writing in Western history. He even sharpens Benjamin's thesis about reproducibility by postulating that the absence of so-called human reflexivity makes technological recording devices such as the phonograph, the cinematograph and the typewriter possible. As Kittler puts it (in mock-Cartesian terms), "Phonographs do not think, therefore they are possible" (33). Cultic remains of art such as what we love to call aura or could also call 'soul' are not merely suspended in technological reproductions but escape these new writing systems all together. It is in the nature of technology to record manifestations of human and social reality in absolute indifference to the concerns of man. For Kittler, this radical departure from Western humanism constitutes the avant-garde core of technology that reinvents our sense perception from beyond ourselves.
For the most part, I buy these general ideas and especially appreciate what Kittler has to say about humanism in the face of technology. But in the book's last chapter, "Typewriter," Kittler makes a sweeping claim about gender that I'm hesitant to get behind. He writes: "The typewriter cannot conjure up anything imaginary, as can cinema: it cannot simulate the real, as can sound recording; it only inverts the gender of writing. In so doing, however, it inverts the material basis of literature" (183). While I don't dispute the fact that the invention and proliferation of the typewriter gave birth to a gendered workforce of secretaries and typewriters (were were at first also called "typewriters") I find it difficult to accept Kittler's premise that writing was initially and perhaps innately a "male" endeavor and that "typescript amounts to the desexualization of writing, sacrificing its metaphysics and turning it into word processing" (187). Even if the typewriter does withdraw the process of writing from the body (a point which itself remains contestable), I'm still puzzled by how Kittler can so easily assume that the material basis of literature is gendered (male).
One place we might turn in order to think about these questions is genre: gift-books, letters, and elegies, for instance, have long been considered gendered female, both in their production and reception. Perhaps this line of thinking is unhelpful though, because they don't help me get through to Kittler's claim that it is the letter itself which falls under the masculine sign.
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More on this very interesting question later--but right now, very briefly, it seems that masculinity has often been ascribed to writing by those who are particularly concerned with valorizing it (and the opposite approach can, here as always, be taken). Which is to say: if I read one more Renaissance poem punning on the word 'pen'...
I've been reading Woolf's The Years (1937) which at first was meant to be a "novel-essay" and grew out of her lecture "Professions for Women." There, Woolf, in her characteristic facetious/deadly serious tone, points out that writing is a "profession which, owing to the cheapness of writing paper, and the fact that pens scarcely make any noise, women have practiced for many years with some success." She's contrasting her profession to that of a female composer or architect or barrister or doctor, someone who must always practice her profession in the public eye, but you can't get much more material about writing than this. Typewriters are loud and expensive, and when I picture this female army of secretaries typing away, they're typing away for a public purpose, and aren't they employed by men? This is a far cry from a woman scratching away at a novel in a room of her own, centuries of pen puns notwithstanding.
I suppose what I meant in the earlier comment is that of course there are material and ideological bases for ascribing a gendered basis to the physical act of writing, and of course the two are far from separable, but the latter will come to the fore insofar as authors are particularly anxious about the merit of writing (Sidney, who constantly, unsuccessfully, tries to represent himself as primarily a soldier, simply dallying with verse).
But it seems Kittler is talking about the material basis of writing in some slightly purer sense, and at least in a provisional way, I think the distinction and conclusions are largely valid. I'd imagine the percentage of literate people who were women was absolutely tiny in the classical and medieval periods, and very likely up until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. If the gendered basis of writing shifted, though, that can't be ascribed purely to the typewriter, but also to the printing press. By demarcating print as public (and therefore mss. as private), I'd think the printing press must have made pen & paper more acceptable as a medium of female writing--as you note, Sarah, there are some forms demarcated as female, and these are primarily forms never intended for the press. But this still had to have been a comparatively recent development, and always one dependent on female literacy. Doesn't Woolf note, after all, that the first professional female writer was Aphra Behn, who was writing a pretty long time after a Platonist/Jewish/Christian association of writing with masculine authority?
I take your point about the ideological basis to the physical act of writing, Julianne, but I still think that in order for Kittler's chapter to hang together, he needs to prove that there is something inherently 'male' about the written letter itself--if block print represents the "inversion of the gender of writing," than how is the ink upon the page that makes up a handwritten letter masculine. I guess Kittler might make this point simply by citing the literacy facts to which you've alluded-- that the letter was most likely *written* by a man. But I can't get past my sense that Kittler is suggesting that the act of writing, and the material fact of writing has some sort of mysterious 'masculine' essence. Which I find pretty weird.
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