Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines.
Gitelman joins a chorus of scholars (including Kittler, Sterne, and Camlot) asking: which cultural, philosophical, and technological preconditions made the phonograph possible? Writing in 1999, four years before Sterne’s publication of The Audible Past, Gitelman anticipates many of his complaints. She considers the phonograph not as a catalyst for change, but as a reciprocal part of a “climate of representation” in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. While she sees her work as “less determined, [and] less deterministic” (4) than Kittler’s, she follows him in seeing “mechanized inscription” as “integral” (3) to this climate. Gitelman takes the scene of Edison’s invention of the phonograph as the point of departure for each of her chapters. The phonograph’s invention is not her destination, but rather launching pad—a way of starting various lines of inquiry concerning reading and writing in the Edison era. In this way, Gitelman paradoxically takes the phonograph as the center of her analysis in order to decenter the phonograph. She sees the invention as merely a part of nineteenth-century discourses on textuality, the relationship of speech and print, authorship, ownership, and constructs of subjectivity more generally.
Does this sound like an impressively large scope? Perhaps too large. In her discussion of the proliferation of documentation in verbatim reporting, Gitelman states, “too much textuality…can be a bad thing” (45). So, perhaps, can too much archival research and supporting evidence. The best aspect of Gitelman’s study is also its most frustrating: in describing something as wide-reaching as “the climate of representation,” Gitelman makes connections between the QWERTY keyboard, spiritualist mediums, Plessy v. Ferguson, commercial labels, Patent Office divisions, and shorthand. It’s awesome, but it’s also unwieldy. This is an important reminder for me, as I am also someone who loves to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena. Most useful for my own work is her first chapter on Pitman’s phonography and other shorthand systems. Edison’s phonograph, she claims, intervened in Victorian shorthand systems, “in which sounds and mouths were variously and textually inscribed on paper…and in which reading texts was the one way to reproduce speech” (61). Gitelman argues that early Victorians saw the process of first writing and then reading that written text aloud as a means of sound reproduction.
