She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: 
“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”
When lovely woman stoops to folly and / Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone   

                                      The Waste Land 249-256.

I find it interesting that while Kitler mentions T.S. Eliot as a figure “composing” The Waste Land on the typewriter there is no mention of Eliot’s use of the “gramophone” that figures in the poem he was composing. And, even though that Kitler notes that “those typographic poems,” referring to the works of Mallarme and Apollinaire, “attempt to bring writers on par with film and phonography”—emphasis mine (229), there is no mention of the very technology that appears in Eliot’s creative work—a work created using the technology informs so great a concern for Kitler.

Whether or not examples of Eliot’s specific work enter into Kitler’s discourse is of no real importance. What is of importance is what is implied in the relationship between Eliot, his typewriter, and the masterpiece he produced. At first blush it appears that what Kitler is suggesting is that the media (the technology) is an influencer of thought—not simply an influencer of style. But Kitler carries this even further to the degree that technology is not simply an extension of man, as is with McLuhan—as Aden notes in his post—but becomes an influencer of our thoughts to where, at some point, it actually becomes our thought.

No longer do I think and therefore I am, now “I write, therefore I am; I am, therefore I write” (241). Kitler further this argument: “I am thus a letter on the typewriter of history. I am a letter that writes itself. Strictly speaking, however, I write not that I write myself but only the letter that I am.” What, does this mean? Simply meaning itself for “I am not only the reader of world history but also its writer.”

Ultimately, can we suggest that media are the a priori of our thinking?