Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines (review)

Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Lisa Gitelman. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. $49.50 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Lisa Gitelman's book is a useful addition to recent studies of the confluence of print and nonprint media and the very idea of textuality. Unlike more schematic or deterministic accounts of the reciprocities between text and nonprint media, which frequently "jump from the logic of print in the sixteenth century to a new logic for digital communications in the twenty-first" and hence assume a rather homogeneous experience of textuality, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines offers a more nuanced understanding of the reading and writing machines emerging in the second half of the nineteenth century (2). The book seeks to "interject a corrective portion of the missing detail" by investigating how the "genealogies of inscription" in the Gilded Age became crucial enabling conditions for contemporary hypertextual applications (2, 3). Invoking Jürgen Habermas's notion of the public sphere, Gitelman argues that the inscription technologies emerging in the nineteenth century, such as shorthand, the gramophone, and the typewriter, among others, collectively ushered in a more properly modern public sphere of mass mediation and consumption and, correspondingly, produced a new subjectivity. But instead of granting technology autonomous agency in the (post)modernist pursuit of maximized information processing and thereby banning human agency to the footnotes of a metaphysical media history, Gitelman observes that the tastes and inclinations of humans do play crucial roles in the making and storing of meaning.

This is nowhere more evident than in what one might call the primal scene of Scripts: Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877, a device that he envisioned as a fundamentally stenographic machine but that public opinion quickly changed into a medium of mass entertainment. Each chapter takes the phonograph as its central "character" and establishes the broad cultural resonances of this new recording technology for writing, inscribing, and storing in the nineteenth century. Chapter one locates the phonograph in the media history preceding and surrounding it, particularly the competition among various shorthand systems in mid-nineteenth-century America (which one of its preeminent practitioners, Isaac Pitman, termed "phonography" to claim full equivalence between shorthand signs and phonetics); the widespread recognition of shorthand records as verbatim documents recapturing the aural (and oral) quality of public/Congressional debates; and the "unstable authorial parameters" brought about by the composite authorship of corporate and administrative apparatuses (50). Only against such a multivectored background, Gitelman argues, could the phonograph be seen as desirable and, more importantly, textual. Chapter two discusses the public redefinition of the phonograph from a proposed office machine to a mass entertainment technology by looking closely at Edison's papers and the thousands of so-called idea letters sent to him that together map a historically specific "climate of representation" (63). In their entirety, Gitelman rightfully argues, these letters (which, in effect, envision various "language machines") delineate the horizon of technological possibility and reveal the "rapprochement between technology and textuality" (82). Chapter three positions the phonograph in relation to the turn-of-the-century rhetoric of patent and copyright law, showing that the Copyright Act of 1909 implicitly defined phonographs and gramophones as "reading machines" rather than simply, in the then common phrase, "talking machines": "For the first time reading aloud was explicitly severed from the human subject" (145). Suggestively, this chapter also shows how the once-common link between the eye and the page or stage--what Gitelman calls the "visuality of reading"--was displaced coincident with an erasure of a different sort: "the displaced visuality of racial identity" in the popular "coon" records of the day, which capitalized on the conventions of minstrelsy while removing performers from view (17). Chapter four offers a detailed reading of the labeling and packaging practices used to advertise phonographic recordings and early films as inventions crossed the threshold from the laboratory to the marketplace. As such, the chapter...