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.
