In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

82 ARRAYS
taries: "At a table near the big desk sit three secretaries. With a jerk, they
come to life in unison and take down in large ledgers everything the
Master says ... Though they are as still as statues and move only the
fingers of their right hand, each one, with sweat-covered brow and
parted lips, seems the personification of breathlessness" (Lang, 36). The
position of agency that is denied the secretaries is filled by a male voice
giving dictation. Recording the Master's words makes the secretaries
"breathless" and brings sweat to their brows because they can be held
responsible for whatever goes wrong. So strongly and exclusively do the
secretaries' bodies react to the pressures of their task that their interaction
with the Master hardly ever displays an erotic dimension. Only in
external business relations does a secretary's sex appeal shine throughbut
then it is used to further the interests of her employers: "The secretary
enters. She is very attractive. And since her employer is either
immune to this appeal or a purely platonic admirer, [the visitor] will
glance at her more than once; and she knows how to turn this to her
boss's advantage" (Benjamin, 133).
Besides these asymmetries of agency and gender, secretaries incarnate
an ambivalence which is characteristic of the employee's role in general.
Different in this respect from proletarian labor, secretaries' word-related
labor can be regarded as a "mental" or "spiritual" activity. At the same
time, however, the secretary's body, like the body of the proletarian [see
Assembly Lines], is usually coupled to a machine-specifically, a typewriter.
Although the typewriter itself does not set the rhythm for the
secretary's movements (as industrial machines do for assembly-line
workers), the rhythm of the dictation serves as the exterior determinant
of her activity. Even the textual document she composes is the impersonal
product of a typewriter. It is a text lacking in that very quality of
subjective expression which makes handwriting an unavoidable object
of interpretation (Kittler, 355f£.). Like the assembly-line worker, who is
but a tiny part of a complex production process, the secretary has neither
control nor ownership over her tools and her product. She does not even
own her typewriter. Conversely, the secretary's body is often subsumed
by the typewriter to such a degree that it is the dyadic unit-and not the
technical device alone-which is considered to be the "writing machine. "
This is why an advertisement in Caras y Caretas (September 18) can
depict a young woman embracing a typewriter, under the heading "This
is the perfect typewriter!" Whenever male protagonists play secretarial