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Friedrich Kittler's Media Scenes--An Instruction
Manual
Marcel O'Gorman
Tulane University
ogorman@tcs.tulane.edu
© 1999 Marcel O'Gorman.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Friedrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems:
Essays. Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997.
1. Brigadier Whitehead, a veteran of World War II, is taping his
heroic adventures at the "Battle of Palermo" on a reel-to-reel,
portable tape recorder. Roving about the cluttered room, he
speaks animatedly into the microphone, which is plugged into the
recorder by a long wire. "As you can hear, gentlemen," the
Brigadier announces portentously, "the zero hour is approaching.
Invasion is imminent. We must counter-attack right away."
2. Six antique phonographs, arranged in two rows, trumpet out the
sound-effects of a massive artillery barrage, which the Brigadier
orchestrates by running from one record player to another,
extending his microphone to capture specific effects.
Just arrived in Catalia when messenger drove up. I tore open
dispatch. News was bad--I'd lost my battalion commander. I
had to reach O Group. I grabbed the bike from the messenger,
and rode off to headquarters. Suddenly, a grenade exploded.
I jumped for cover.
This theatrical recording session continues until a peculiar,
undulating sound interrupts the narrative, enveloping the scene
of virtual warfare in its electronic drone. In a blinding flash
of light, Brigadier Whitehead is thrown to the floor, where he
will be found lifeless, still clutching a phonograph record, his
entire body bleached white by a murderous ray of light. The
Brigadier is down, but the tape machine goes on recording....
3. Thus we have, in John Steed's words, "The swan song of one
Brigadier Whitehead.... Officer, gentleman, deceased Brigadier
Whitehead. He died as he lived in the thick of the battle, facing
the enemy."
4. "An enemy without a face," replies Emma Peel, with characteristic
wit.
5. At least, that's how Steed and Peel sum up this perplexing scene.
And puzzled viewers have to wait out the remainder of this
Avengers episode to discover the enemy's true identity. After
replaying the tape recording of the scene--a cacophony of
phonograph artillery drowned out by a mysterious drone--for
countless suspects and experts, the following conclusion is
reached about the murder weapon:
Detective: "Sound of light amplification of stimulation of
radiation."
Steed: "In a word, a laser beam"
Peel: "A laser beam. Of course. It has a bleaching effect,
and boils liquids."
Crawford: "Plus a very distinctive sound."
Peel: "Where are they used?"
Detective: "All over the place: dentistry, communications,
eye surgery..."
and of course, they are used in military strategy; although such
details were not yet public in 1967.
6. Digital/laser technology is recorded in analog on Brigadier
Whitehead's outdated tape machine, and it is the "eye surgery"
clue that eventually leads Steed and Peel to the ultimate
villain, Dr. Primble, an ocular surgeon who sneaks about with a
powerful laser gun strapped to the top of his "U.F.O.," a
chrome-colored sports car.
7. Obviously, this scene has not been pulled from a bastion of the
Western literary canon or from a great philosophical text. We are
dealing here with a piece of pop-cultural trash, the detritus of
a late-'60s Cold-War obsession with espionage, governmental
conspiracy, and garishly fantastic technologies. And yet, there
is still something "scholarly," something theoretical,
philosophical, even, in this scene, that invites further
investigation. There is a certain intersection here of
communications and warfare, information transmission and military
strategy, media and artillery that permits us to view this scene
as a node through which a network of discourses--historical,
technological, political--all travel. I would go so far as to say
that in this single scene, we might trace all the ingredients for
a transdisciplinary project on the nature of media in a visual
age--complete with ocular surgeon.
8. At least that's how I sum up the scene, investigating it through
the critical magnifying glass of Friedrich Kittler's theory and
practice of criticism. Kittler's recently published collection of
essays entitled Literature, Media, Information Systems provides a
wide-ranging demonstration of what his followers have known all
along: "the intelligibility and consequent meaning of literary
texts is always and only possible because its discourse is
embedded in and operates as part of a specific discourse network"
(Johnston 4). And yet, in the scene mentioned above, we are not
dealing with a "literary text," but with a television episode,
specifically, an episode entitled "From Venus With Love" (1967)
which belongs to the British spy series The Avengers. This all
too prevalent distinction between "literary text" and "cultural
detritus" moves to the background, however, when we realize that
Kittler's approach to criticism may be applied to any media scene
whatsoever, from Goethe's Faust to beograd.com, a Web site
supporting Yugoslavia against NATO bombing. Of course, we must
first determine what a "media scene" is exactly, and what bearing
it has on literary criticism, cultural studies and the history of
media. I hope to answer these questions here, through a
simultaneous review of Kittler's book and an instruction manual
on how to program a project in/on the discourse network of 2000.
"Gramophone, Film, Typewriter"
Step 1: Begin your project by describing a single situation,
scene or image in which communications technologies play a
crucial, or at least conspicuous, role. This will serve as
the media scene for your entire project.
9. Faust looks up from his book of magic ideograms and sighs,
"Ach!"[1] Stoker's Mina Harker transcribes the sounds of a
phonograph on her typewriter. Guy de Maupassant's doppelganger
joins him at his writing desk. Whether they be fictional or
historical (is there a difference in this case?), these scenes or
situations are the crux of Kittler's work, the points of
intersection from which he draws his transdisciplinary theses on
the materiality of media. "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter," then,
in book or essay form, is "a story woven from such stories. It
collects, comments on and engages positions and texts, in which
the newness of technical media has inscribed itself in outmoded
book pages" (29).[2] Since "outmoded book pages" are the subject
of Kittler's essays, we are not dealing, here, with scenes such
as Brigadier Whitehead's anachronistic sound studio. We are
dealing instead with the pages of Goethe, Hoffman, and Balzac,
pages in which communications technologies, sometimes with
extreme subtlety, play a determinant role. Kittler is, after all,
a "literary critic," as he asserts time and again, almost
suspiciously, in his essay "There Is No Software." And yet, his
method of critique reaches far beyond the brackets of
"literature," channeling its way through contemporary culture,
philosophy, history, engineering, cybernetics, and political
science.
10. Hence, a chapter that we might expect to be a media-oriented
commentary on a collection of literary excerpts, turns out
instead to be a wide-ranging examination of the materiality of
media where references to Goethe, Hoffman and Balzac are casually
dispersed among technically complex observations on contemporary
culture and its digital toys. In "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,"
for example, in which we may trace a network of theses, the
foremost may be the following: "the technological standard of
today... can be described in terms of partially connected media
systems" (32). The jumbo jet, according to Kittler, is a case in
point, a scene of "partial connection" that contrasts with our
current utopian dream of a seamless integration of media: virtual
reality, television, music, the Web, etc., all delivered over
fiber optic lines. On the jumbo jet,
The crew is connected to radar screens, diode displays,
radio beacons, and nonpublic channels.... The passengers'
ears are listlessly hooked up to one-way earphones, which
are themselves hooked up to tape recorders and thereby to
the record industry.... Not to mention the technological
medium of the food industry to which the mouths of the
passengers are connected. (32)
This is not the stuff of a literary critic who writes commentary
on a "story" from Goethe or Hoffman. We are dealing here with
contemporary cultural criticism, media criticism, even. Or are
we?
11. Although Kittler allows himself a certain quota of McLuhanesque
scenarios, his strength lies in his literary-historical
perspective. Once McLuhan has been exorcised, Kittler contrasts
our "partially connected" multi-media spectacle with the
"homogeneous medium of writing" (38), and hence, we are instantly
transported, via Foucault,[3] from the jumbo jet and the
Kennedy/Nixon TV debate (a contest in "telegenics"), to Goethe's
lyrical observation that literature "is the fragment of
fragments, the least of what had happened and of what had been
spoken was written down; of what had been written down, only the
smallest fraction was preserved" (36). For us, writing is merely
one medium among many, but in the age of Goethe, "writing
functioned as the general medium. For that reason, the term
medium did not exist. For whatever else was going on dropped
through the filter of letters or ideograms" (36). This is quite a
contrast to an age of camcorders and personal Web pages, an age
in which recording technology is so independent of the body that
Brigadier Whiteheads and Timothy Learys can accurately document
the very moment of their deaths.[4]
12. In the discourse network of 1800, then, writing is the only
transmission media of the Spirit, and in the case of handwriting,
writing also documents the identity of the body. In an excerpt
that Kittler draws from Botho Strauss's Widmung, the hero is
crushingly ashamed of his handwriting, an uneven scrawl in which
"everything is emptied out.... The full man is shriveled, shrunk,
and stunted into his scribbling. His lines are all that is left
of him and his propagation" (qtd. in Kittler 38). This
existential angst incited by poor calligraphy is possible because
Strauss's character is living in a time before gramophone, film,
and typewriter. The depth of his shame "exists only as an
anachronism" (38) in a world where self-propagation is available
in multiple forms--forms in which the body's trace is not so
easily discernible, separated as it is by networks of circuits
that translate all identity into a stream of 1s and 0s.
13. As long as the written word, hand-written or printed, reigned as
the one, homogeneous medium of communication, Romanticism was
possible. In Goethe's time, "all the passion of reading consisted
of hallucinating a meaning between letters and lines" (40). But,
according to Kittler, technical reproduction provided a physical
precision that rendered this readerly hallucination obsolete.
With the advent of technical reproduction, the hallucinatory
power of reading, that infernal Romantic struggle between writer
and reader, Word and Spirit, is resolved indefinitely. Readerly
hallucination is materialized in ghostly daguerrotypes,
phantasmic phonograph records, and spectral cinema--the soul
captured in, and radically embodied by, new media.
14. We thus have a fragmented history of typewriter, gramophone and
film. But from where does this triad emanate? How do we justify
this trinity of communications over other possible permutations,
e.g., "Phonograph, Telegraph, Camera," or "Spectroscope,
Typewriter, Radio"? There is no possible justification, except to
say that a comprehensive history of media is not Kittler's intent
here or anywhere. Nor would he believe that such a history is
useful or even possible. His method directs him to a series of
nodal points that shed light on informative media scenes, without
claiming to illuminate the entire history of media.
15. The scene, then, becomes the theory itself, and the justification
for Kittler's choice of triad can thus take the form of a single,
super-saturated scene. This time, Edison is the hero, or
anti-hero. The scene co-stars Christopher Latham Sholes, who pays
a visit to Edison (the predestined arch-developer of cinema and
phonograph) with his idea of a mass-producible typewriter. As it
turns out, Edison politely refuses Sholes's offer, and the
typewriter becomes the property of Remington, an arms
manufacturer. Hence, film, phonograph, and typewriter cross paths
in a brief constellation that justifies--more properly,
generates--Kittler's triad. A story becomes theory, and the rest
is history; it drops through the filter of Kittler's letters and
ideograms. Unlike Goethe, however, Kittler doesn't sweat it.
16. This type of historical snapshot, or sound bite, if you please,
is typically Kittlerian, and it is left up to the reader to
hallucinate a cohesive thesis out of these bits. It is as if
Kittler himself were presenting his research materials
anachronistically. He writes essays using a word processor when
he would probably be more lucid in experimental film, or more
appropriately, in hypertext or some other form of digital
multi-media. Then perhaps, the move from a jumbo jet, to German
Romanticism, to Edison, to Lacan, would be more sensible,
especially since Turing's Universal Discrete Machine is thrown
into the mix. If "the age of media--as opposed to the history
that ends it--moves in jerks, like Turing's paper ribbon" (48),
then maybe our age of media would best be represented in a medium
that can embody its disconnective nature. Then again, Kittler's
unconventional style, a style that makes an anachronism of the
conventional essay format, is living proof that "the content of
each medium is another medium" (42). Kittler's writing style
seems to wriggle uncomfortably in its print-oriented skin. Is
Kittler's writing hypertextual then? He wouldn't be the first,
but we have yet to place him beside Mallarmé or Joyce. The scene
of Kittler typing an (hypertextual) essay of historical/literary
fragments with dated word processing software, remains to be
written and unpacked.
"Dracula's Legacy"
Step 2: In the media scene that you have chosen (see Step
1), describe the role of a particular communications
technology.
17. If conventional history stands for the end of "the age of media,"
then Kittler's "jerky" version of media history threatens to
sustain "the age of media," reanimate it. The age of media is an
un-dead age, for as long as we remember that media always
determine the message, we will be living in the "age of media."
Leave it to Kittler then, Vampire theorist, to seek out the trace
of a technologically-determined discourse system in any given
media scene, and rescue that scene from the shallow grave of
history. This is how Kittler, as a media theorist, fulfills
"Dracula's Legacy." What supernatural powers does Kittler possess
that allow him to raise the dead, see the unseen? Where can the
trace of technology be found? The secret power of the media
theorist lies, quite simply, in the following apocryphal warning
from Jacques Lacan to his students: "From now on you are, and to
a far greater extent than you can imagine, subjects of gadgets or
instruments--from microscopes to radio and television--which will
become elements of your being." Viewed through the lens of this
prophesy, any scene becomes a media scene, even when technology
is not conspicuously present. The media theorist's mandate can
thus be simplified to the extreme, with Kittlerian bluntness:
"Media determine our situation, which (nevertheless or for that
reason) merits a description" (28).
18. It is with this supernatural power of vision that Kittler
"implicitly rais[es] the question of the degree to which
technology was always the impensé or blindspot of
poststructuralism itself" (Johnston 8). Kittler takes for granted
that the trace of technology is discernible in any text or scene.
Although he would be reluctant to accept the title, Kittler is a
master of writing the trace, which Gayatri Spivak has described
as "the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already
absent present, of the lack at the origin that is the condition
of thought and experience" (xvi). It is one thing to proclaim the
end of objectivity, the end of History and of Man, as
poststructuralism has done, but quite another to make such a
proclamation, accept it as an inherent element of writing, and
invent ways to write that draw on this knowledge as an apriority.
This is Kittler's "post-hermeneutic"[5] method (Wellbery ix).
When Kittler writes media history, he does so with all the tools
of poststructuralism at his disposal. Unlike many other
theorists, however, he does not display the tools, or wield them
about flagrantly;[6] they are simply a part of his philosophical
arsenal, the gears that grind away in the engine of his most apt
reflections on media and culture. We can say, therefore, that
Kittler does not write about the trace--he writes the trace
itself. He does not write about the absence of media theory in
poststructuralism--he writes the absence of media theory into
poststructuralism.
19. What strikes Kittler most poignantly, then, about the multiple
film adaptations of Dracula is not that this techno-sustained
legacy has allowed for "ever new and imaginary resurrections" of
Stoker's famous villain, but the fact that in none of these film
adaptations do we catch a glimpse of the phonograph or typewriter
that are so crucial in the novel. The role of transmission played
by these devices in the novel is swallowed up by the movie
projector's ability to turn words into things, to merge human and
machine. Or in Kittler's terms, "under the conditions of
technology, literature disappears (like metaphysics for
Heidegger) into the un-death of its endless ending" (83). It is
up to the media theorist, then, to trace the presence of
literature in the discourse of technology, and vice versa.
Matthew Griffin sums up this Kittlerian task quite well by
stating that "Literature, which was once the realm of dissident
voices swelling in a babble of languages, can now be rewritten as
an effect of media technologies on the alphanumeric code"
(Griffin, Literary 715).
20. What role, exactly, do the gramophone and typewriter play in
Stoker's novel? According to Kittler (via Lacan), they
demonstrate quite simply the extent to which "we are subject to
gadgets or instruments" that have "become elements of our being"
(143). For example, the typewriter, according to Kittler, so
ingrained itself in the social evolution of Western Europe, that
it radically and permanently altered gender roles:
Machines remove from the two sexes the symbols that
distinguish them. In earlier times, needles created woven
material in the hands of women, and quills in the hands of
authors created another form of weaving called text. Women
who gladly became the paper for these scriptorial quills
were called mothers. Women who preferred to speak themselves
were called overly sensitive or hysterical. But after the
symbol of male productivity was replaced by a machine, and
this machine was taken over by women, the production of
texts had to forfeit its wonderful heterosexuality. (71)
The machine in question here is, of course, the typewriter.
Paraphrasing Bruce Bliven,[7] Kittler observes that
the typewriter, and only the typewriter, is responsible for
a bureaucratic revolution. Men may have continued, from
behind their desks, to believe in the omnipotence of their
own thought, but the real power over keys and impressions on
paper, over the flow of news and over agendas, fell to the
women who sat in the front office. (64)
Here, we are tantalized with the image of a cyborg woman, a woman
de-sexed and empowered by a writing machine with which she is
unified. We must be careful to avoid this illusion, however,
since Kittler, unlike McLuhan, does not see the machine as an
extension of man (or woman), but quite the opposite. And so, the
female typists who write faster than most anyone can read or
think are only transmission devices, extensions or reflections of
the machine,[8] word processors avant la lettre. They have no
conscious influence on the news and agendas that they channel.
This is in keeping with Kittler's most poignant anti-McLuhanism:
"it remains an impossibility to understand media.... The
communications technologies of the day exercise remote control
over all understanding and evoke its illusion" (30).
21. This gender-bending or seeming cyborgism, this cultural upheaval
that occurs at the hand of the typewriter, is inscribed in
Stoker's Dracula. In the concluding scene, Mina Harker "holds a
child in the lap that for 300 pages held a typewriter" (70). The
classical-romantic binary of femininity is interrupted by a
technological variable. From now on, a woman cannot be slotted
easily into the MOTHER/HYSTERIC construction, but can also fall
into a third category: MACHINE. With this third term in place,
the binary or even triad model is shattered. From now on,
anything is possible within the circuit of female identity. Or to
use Kittler's words, "far worse things are possible," as is
proven with the case of Lucy Westenra, anti-mother, a vampiress
who sucks the blood of children for sustenance (70).
"Romanticism--Psychoanalysis--Film: A History of the Double"
Step 3: Demonstrate that the media scene you have chosen is
determined by the specific historical, technological or
scientific conditions of the time in which it was created.
22. At the center of Kittler's collection of essays, we move from
monsters to Münsterberg, a transition that gives us a more
profound glimpse at Kittler's understanding of cinema. If the
Dracula films demonstrate the ability of the cinema to liquidate
the soul of classical Romantic literature, this is because film
can depict in moving pictures what literature could only describe
in words, "and other storage media besides words did not exist in
the days of classical Romanticism" (89). Through his brief
"History of the Double," Kittler demonstrates the extent to which
film acts as a simulacrum of the human psyche, the poetic Spirit
materialized in 24 frames/second. The doppelganger theme of
1800--a subject so prevalent in German Romanticism that Otto Rank
could supply Freud with endless literary case studies of
Narcissism--becomes a mere camera trick in 1900. But the camera's
trickiness, as we shall see, does not stop at the simulation of
neuroses.
23. The hero of "A History of the Double," rather appropriately, is
Hugo Münsterberg, founder of a crossbred science known as
psychotechnology and producer of the "first competent theory of
film"--at least according to Kittler's formula. Münsterberg is
essential to the history of media, Kittler suggests, because he
"assigns every single camera technique to an unconscious,
psychical mechanism: the close-up to selective attention, the
flashback to involuntary memory, the film trick to daydreaming,
and so forth" (100). And this allows Kittler to make the
following periodic distinction on the cusp of which the Spirit of
literature dissolves into mechanical technics:
Since 1895, a separation exists between an image-less cult
of the printed word, i.e., e[lite]-literature, on one side,
and purely technical media that, like the train or film,
mechanize images on the other. Literature no longer even
attempts to compete with the miracles of the entertainment
industry. It hands its enchanted mirror over to
machines.(92)
Hence, in a familiar theoretical trick of displacement, the
psyche is replaced by a machine, the central nervous system by a
network of communications devices.
24. What is most interesting about this chapter, however, is not
Münsterberg's theory (it has been covered more extensively in
other studies), not Kittler's formula itself (the cyborgian theme
now verges on cliché[9]), and not the unfashionable periodic
distinction (a separation that generated enemies for Kittler's
Discourse Networks 1800/1900[10]); what is most interesting is
the manner by which Kittler arrives at his resolute distinction
between pre- and post-1895. What might appear, at first glance,
as some sort of techno-deterministic formula of history is
actually a far-reaching and complex theory on culture and media.
The most fascinating and important element of Kittler's work is
his ability to recognize and describe the intricacy of literary
and cultural phenomena, and still manage to capture this
complexity in a single image. Rather than provide a technical
genealogy of film, then, or a historical narrative of its
invention, Kittler lays out specific historical/technological
conditions that make motion pictures possible, beginning with the
period that immediately preceded film, in which the technology
was not possible. And he does so by a trick of condensation,
encapsulating an entire theory, a viable history of media, in the
image of the Double.
25. Hence, when Kittler refers to the fictional Doubles of Goethe and
Fichte, Jean Paul and Hoffman (all members of Otto Rank's
Doppelganger collection), he does not stop at the uncanniness of
this collective obsession with duality. He probes further into
the texts in search of a common thread, a collective media scene
that runs through their work and intersects with the discourse
network of 1800. Naturally, he finds the trace that he is looking
for, "namely, the simple textual evidence that Doubles turn up at
writing desks" (87). This common denominator allows Kittler to
connect the doppelganger phenomenon with writing technologies,
which, in turn, opens up his study to a wider cultural
phenomenon: "the general literacy campaign that seized Central
Europe in [the nineteenth century]. Ever since then, people no
longer experience words as violent and foreign bodies but can
also believe that the printed words belong to them. Lacan called
it 'alphabêtise'" (91). Of course, Kittler mentions this campaign
of a bureaucratic machine only to document its undoing at the
hands of a different sort of machine, the "two-pronged" machine
of film and psychoanalysis that brought the nineteenth century to
a close. When the twentieth century begins, "books no longer
behave as though words were harmless vehicles supplying our inner
being with optical hallucinations, and especially not with the
delusion that there is an inner being or a self. Along with the
true, the beautiful and the good, the Double vanishes as well"
(91). The nineteenth century literary fascination with the Double
is brought to an end by film tricks and Freud.
26. Kittler complexifies his media histories,[11] then, by
underscoring the fact that cultural phenomena are made possible
by the chance encounter of various events or cataclysms, by the
fortuitous meeting of disparate elements--umbrellas and sewing
machines on operating tables. This is why Münsterberg is so
important to him, for he was able to make the link between
psychoanalysis and film, and it is these elements that bifurcate
1800 and 1900, bringing an end to Literature:
The empirical-transcendental doublet Man, substratum of the
Romantic fantastic, is only imploded by the two-pronged
attack of science and industry, of psychoanalysis and film.
Psychoanalysis clinically verified and cinema technically
implemented all of the shadows and mirrorings of the
subject. Ever since then, what remains of a literature that
wants to be Literature is simply écriture--a writing without
author. And no one can read Doubles, that is, a means to
identification, into the printed word. (95)
If this cut and dry equation were presented by Kittler out of
hand, then it would certainly seem absurd. But the formula was
not arrived at in any simple manner. On the way to this
proposition, Kittler has taken us through two centuries of
literature in France, England, and Germany, through optics,
cybernetics, cinematography, transportation, psychoanalysis, and
political science. And this list barely scratches the surface. It
seems that the final equation or formula is not what really
counts here, for it serves only to demonstrate the complexity of
the discourse network that makes possible a single literary
phenomenon of 1800, and its undoing by science and technology.
Don't be fooled; this is not an essay about the Double at all; it
is a transdisciplinary journey, a careful and selective history
on the interface of film and literature.
27. The Double, then, is a sort of vehicle, or better yet, a portal
through which Goethe and Fichte, Jean Paul and Hoffman, Guy de
Maupassant and Baudelaire, cross paths with Otto Rank and Freud,
Lacan and Foucault, and a legacy of doppelganger film-makers,
including Ewers, Lindau, Hauptmann, Wegener, and Wiene. By
devising a formula about the simultaneous demise of Literature
and the Double, Kittler creates a story and a theory where there
are none, leaving behind a distinctive trace ("the mark of the
absence of a presence" [Spivak xx]) that we can only call one
history of media technology among many--the rest drops "through
the filter" of Kittler's "letters or ideograms" (36). At the end
of the story, Kittler is gracious enough to provide a map, just
in case we were uncertain, all along, what he was up to:
Without removing traces, traces cannot be gathered;.... In
our current century which implements all theories, there are
no longer any. That is the uncanniness of its reality.(100)
"Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second World War"
Step 4: Demonstrate that, not only is your media scene the
result of specific historical or scientific conditions, but
these conditions are all uncannily related in one way or
another. In short, show that "everything is connected."
28. If we were to return to our initial media scene--the one in which
Brigadier Whitehead performs a wartime sound-jam on his
rudimentary mixing board--and attempt to apply the steps of
Kittler's method that we have covered thus far, we might find the
following observations useful:
Step 1: The Avengers scene we have chosen involves a media
anachronism: phonographs and tape recorders in an age of
laser technology.
Step 2: Storage technology is essential for solving the
mystery of the Brigadier's murder. The face of detective
work is changed forever by devices that can document our
every move--and document our deaths as well.
Step 3: Advanced storage technology also changes the face of
war by displacing it into a series of tactical strategies
based on potential destruction. As the Brigadier's demise
demonstrates, war is now a staged phenomenon, a game of
potentialization that can proceed without immediate corporal
sacrifice. Indeed, the Brigadier is sacrificed, but at the
hands of a laser, the weapon that would power virtual or
"cold" warfare. "From Venus With Love" foreshadows a real,
laser driven Star Wars.
Step 4: In 1967, IBM released the first beta version of the
floppy disk, while in Britain the ISBN numerical cataloguing
system for books was introduced. At the time in which our
media scene takes place, digital technology and laser
reading/writing devices carry the day.
Of course, 1967, the Summer of Love, also marks a time of
immersive psychedelia. This brings us to Kittler's essay on
Thomas Pynchon, "Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second World War."
If the Avengers can have their Brigadier Whitehead, a living
anachronism of war and technology, then Pynchon can give us
Brigadier Pudding:
Who can find his way about this lush maze of initials,
arrows solid and dotted, boxes big and small, names printed
and memorized? Not Ernest Pudding--that's for the New Chaps
with their little green antennas out for the usable
emanations of power, versed in American politics... keeping
brain-dossiers on latencies, weaknesses, tea-taking habits,
erogenous zones of all, all who might someday be useful....
Ernest Pudding was brought up to believe in a literal Chain
of Command, as clergymen of earlier centuries believed in
the Chain of Being. The newer geometries confuse him. (77)
Brigadiers are the products of an outmoded discourse network,
destined to fall at the hands of a system of (il)logic beyond
their ken. While Brigadier Whitehead narrates his highly
orchestrated version of war on analog recording machines, an
interloping laser beam--master device of an invisible war and the
product of a discourse network of which he is ignorant--brings
his instant and unpredictable death. Similarly, when Pynchon's
Brigadier Pudding, an octagenarian soldier, volunteers for
"intelligence work" in World War II, he expects to be operating
"in concert... with other named areas of the War, colonies of
that Mother City mapped wherever the enterprise is systematic
death" (76). What he finds instead, is
a disused hospital for the mad, a few token lunatics, an
enormous pack of stolen dogs, cliques of spiritualists,
vaudeville entertainers, wireless technicians, Couéists,
Ouspenskians, Skinnerites, lobotomy enthusiasts, Dale
Carnegie zealots, all exiled by the outbreak of war from pet
schemes and manias damned, had the peace prolonged itself,
to differing degrees of failure. (77)
Much to the dismay of the Brigadier, the mortal combat that used
to determine victory has been displaced by a psychotechnological
information circus. The Brigadier's "greatest victory on the
battlefield,... in the gassy, Armageddonite filth of the Ypres
salient, where he conquered a bight of no man's land some 40
yards at its deepest, with a wastage of only 70% of his unit," is
an outmoded model. In WWII, such battlefield victories could be
described as a mere diversion from the real war, a war without
heroes on hilltops, a war that can only be won by near-invisible
technologies (Pynchon 77). The human "wastage" of combat merely
"provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that
children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle
after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world" (Pynchon
105). "To be sure," Kittler tells us,
people still believed in dying for their homeland during
World War II. But Pynchon, a former Boeing-engineer, makes
it clear through precise details that "the enterprise [of]
systematic death" (Pynchon 76) "serves as spectacle, as
diversion from the real movements of the War" (Pynchon 105).
That is to say, "the real crises were crises of allocation
and priority, not among firms--it was only staged to look
that way--but among the different technologies, plastics,
electronics, aircraft," and so on. (Pynchon 521; Kittler
102-103)
This war of information management and data delivery (played out
mostly in corporate boardrooms today) is discernible behind any
media scene that we might conjure up in the twentieth century:
"the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only
real medium of exchange" (Pynchon 258).
29. Evidently, there is no place in the "newer geometries" of war for
hero Brigadiers or chains of command; no place for
predictability, sequentiality or even narratability. And the same
goes for the newer geometries of literature and criticism as
well. The heroic critic or narrator has been rendered impossible
by the Death of the Author. Like the Brigadiers in our media
scenes, readers of Pynchon who turn the pages in search of a
sequential "Chain of Command" will be assailed by a whirling
circus of data, an informational jambalaya suitable in a world
run by non-sequential technologies. What makes Pynchon an
exceptional writer, then, (and certainly not a fiction writer) in
Kittler's eyes, is his expert use of technical data that the
War's end released from secrecy:
the text, as is only the case in historical novels like
Salammbo or Antonius, is essentially assembled from
documentary sources, many of which--circuit diagrams,
differential equations, corporate contracts, and
organizational plans--are textualized for the first time. (A
fact easily overlooked by literary experts.) (106)
Much to Kittler's delight, Pynchon is not an Author, but a data
delivery agent. His goal is not to provide an entertaining
narrative, or some sort of fictional closure, but information,
tout court.
30. Just as Pynchon's anti-hero, Slothrop, strived endlessly to make
sense of the noise and nonsense of war, Pynchon's readers must
devise a way of making sense of the novel itself. We might learn
a great deal from the ill-fated Lieutenant Slothrop, who, in the
absence of sophisticated "data retrieval" machinery--the only
means to "the truth"--is "thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes,
omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologes, all dancing on a
ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity" (Pynchon 582). In the
absence of all sense, overwhelmed by an onslaught of conflicting
information, Slothrop invents his own rules of the game. Kittler
astutely identifies this survivalist method of sense-making in
the following way: "Slothrop's paranoia within the novel
corresponds precisely to a paranoiac-critical methodology that
the novelist could have learned from Dali" (105). Might I suggest
that there is a little Dali in Kittler as well?
31. Through his art and writing, Dali essentially suggested (as any
good paranoid would) that everything is meaningful, and that
chance encounters should not be ignored as mere co-incidence.
According to Dali--and the point hits home in his paintings--even
the most seemingly incidental details can be of critical
importance in our understanding of an event or object. For Dali,
it was (among other things) the juxtaposition of pitchfork and
hunched figures in Millet's Angelus;[12] for Pynchon, it was the
supposed co-incidence of Slothrop's erections with the explosion
of V2 bombs; for Kittler, we might suggest that it is the "double
at his writing desk," the sigh of Faust, the typewriter in the
lap of Mina Harker. In any case, Dali, Slothrop, and Kittler
provide us with a method of dealing with information overload.
With the Death of the Author, the End of History, and the
impossibility of Truth, we might say that we are living in the
threat of "anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything,
a condition not many of us can bear for long" (Pynchon 434). The
antidote, as Pynchon and Kittler seem to suggest, might be a good
dose of critical or perhaps conscious paranoia, a critical
methodology of the trace.[13] "When the symbolic of signs,
numbers and letters determine so-called reality, then gathering
the traces becomes the paranoid's primary duty" (105-106).
"Media Wars: Trenches, Lightning, Stars" and "The World of the
Symbolic--A World of the Machine"
Step 5: Having revealed that "everything is connected,"
submit your paranoia to reason by showing that "everything
is connected" only because: a) the dual apparatus of
State/Technology has made the co-incidence possible, and; b)
with this power structure in place, we are destined to be
the physical and psychological subjects of technologies.
32. In Lieutenant Slothrop we have the apotheosis of Kittler's
assessment of technology in culture. Not only have the political
and material technologies of war crippled Slothrop's mind with
paranoia, they have also turned his body--most specifically, his
penis (a cybernetic emblem of the phallic V2 rocket)--into a
strategic weapon. In Slothrop, all of Kittler's theories on
technology converge: the subjection of the body and psyche to
technology; the development of new technology through war; the
control of technology by the State. These are the themes or
theses that recur constantly in Kittler's essays, to the point
that they produce a distinct theory, a branch, even, of media
studies. Nowhere are these issues more recurrent, or more
pervasively explored than in the essays "Media Wars: Trenches,
Lightning, Stars" and "The World of the Symbolic--A World of the
Machine."
33. In "Media Wars," Kittler convincingly demonstrates that the
strategies of persuasion that defined military success throughout
history (war "came into being only when people succeeded in
making others die for them" [117]) have been replaced by
"technologies of telecommunication and control" (117). The point
is clear in the case of Slothrop, and perhaps even more lucid in
the case of the ill-fated Brigadier Whitehead. As Foucault's
theories of panopticism have suggested, forces of command are now
invisible, and their formal role has been handed over to
technology. Technological apparatus and State apparatus are
intricately entwined to the point of being indistinguishable. In
order to illustrate this point, Kittler offers a brief history of
the First and Second World Wars from a media theorist's point of
view. From the storage media of Edison (phonograph and
kinetoscope) to the transmission media of Hertz and Marconi
(wireless telegraphy, radio), Kittler sets out to prove, in his
characteristically reductive fashion, the following equation:
WWI:Storage Media :: WWII:Transmission Media.
His final proof takes the following form: "Technical media have
to do neither with intellectuals nor with mass culture. They are
strategies of the Real. Storage media were built for the trenches
of World War I, transmission media for the lightning strikes of
World War II" (129). This leaves WWIII, of course, to the legacy
of Alan Turing and modern computation, which has perfected the
synchronization of storage and transmission media: "universal
computing media for SDI: chu d'un désastre obscur, as Mallarmé
would have it, fallen from an obscure disaster" (129).
34. Once again, Brigadier Whitehead's demise at the hands of Star
Wars technology, "an enemy without a face," is a perfect case
study of storage and transmission media anachronized by a
computational désastre obscur. But for a more contemporary
illustration of Kittler's equation (and more in keeping with his
commitment to historical detail) we need only turn to the air
strikes on Yugoslavia that are taking place as this essay is
being written. At the risk of jeopardizing a lasting peace
process in Yugoslavia, NATO commanders have thus far decided not
to employ ground troops, a move that would surely result in human
sacrifice all too reminiscent of Vietnam. Instead, American F/A
jets are targeting and destroying, among other things, all radio
and television transmitters in Belgrade. The war is not between
soldiers, but between advanced technologies of communication:
Yugoslav Power Stations (Transmission Media) vs. invisible B-52
bombers and intelligent cruise missiles (Computation Media).
35. More than anything else, the bombing demonstrates the
technological difference between this war and the Vietnam War, to
which it is being repeatedly compared. While the B-52s continue
their destruction of television transmitters--the technology that
was truly responsible for making a tragedy of Vietnam--they have
proved almost useless against a more recent media technology, the
Internet. Just when William Cohen thought that the Central
Nervous System of Yugoslavia had been disabled, neurons started
firing in the form of e-mail and Web pages. For every B-52 gun
camera that fails to provide evidence of civilian suffering in
Belgrade at the hands of NATO, a Yugoslav e-mail message or Web
page leaves traces of misery, affliction, and betrayal.[14] If
Vietnam was a TV war, this is an Internet war. The Yugoslav's use
of the Web and e-mail as weapons against the U.S. is extremely
ironic, of course, considering the origins of the Internet. John
Johnston explains these origins in his Introduction to Kittler's
essays:
Thanks to the military need for a communications system that
could survive nuclear detonations, today we have fiber optic
cables and a new medium called the Internet, which, as is
widely known, grew out of ARPANET, a decentralized control
network for intercontinental ballistic missiles. (5)
By launching an Internet counter-attack, the Belgradians are
actually on a technological par with NATO. Unfortunately, bombs
are more persuasive than words and digital images. The electronic
traces of unsettled civilians will cease to be produced when all
power sources have been destroyed in Belgrade. The moment that
happens, the e-mail and Web attacks will be no more--except on
hard drives, where they will exist as electronic monuments of
civilian distress. This freezing is, in effect, NATO's goal: to
incapacitate the technologies of transmission in Yugoslavia,
leaving them to deplete the only remaining technology of war,
that of storage. Faced with a technologically dominant opponent,
the only survival option for Belgradians--remnants of an obsolete
war technology--is storage: entrenchment or monumentality. If
only such immobilization could have been inflicted on Vietnam, or
Iraq, for that matter....
36. Of course, from a Kittlerian perspective, the very notion of
"monumentality" as an option for survival begs questioning, or at
least complexification. Human memory may be just another media
effect, the remainder of past technologies doomed to extinction
by advancements in computation, storage, and transmission. This
anachronism is, according to Kittler, one of the great secrets of
a self-deluding humanity: "That books, mnemotechnologies, and
machine memories exist, must naturally be kept a secret, so long
as memory is a quality or even a property 'of man'.... In the
name of the analphabets, the confusion between the people and the
memory banks in which they land must come to an end" ("Vergessen"
111). What matters for Kittler, however, is not that we are
losing our memory or our minds, but that the very notions of mind
and memory have been profoundly transformed by media
technologies, to the extent that "it is already clear that
humanity could not have invented information machines, but to the
contrary, is their subject" (143).
37. This message, as we have already seen, was delivered rather
forebodingly by Jacques Lacan, several decades before Kittler,
when he told his students that they were already "the subjects of
all types of gadgets" (143). But leave it to Kittler to uncover
the trace of Lacan's own subjection to gadgets, a trace that is
exposed at the heart of Lacan's theories. Kittler distinguishes
between the theory of Freud and that of Lacan by pointing to the
technological conditions that surrounded them. Since Freud was a
subject of the telephone, film, phonograph and print, it makes
sense, from a Kittlerian perspective, that his pre-computer
psychological theories are rooted only in "the strict separation
of transmission and storage functions," or the separation of
memory and consciousness (133). In Kittler's terms,
Freud's materialism reasoned only as far as the information
machines of his era--no more, no less. Rather than
continuing to dream of the Spirit as origin, he described a
"psychic apparatus" (Freud's wonderful word choice) that
implemented all available transmission and storage media, in
other words, an apparatus just short of the technical medium
of universal-calculation, or the computer. (134)
The development of a computer-oriented psychology would have to
wait, of course, until Jacques Lacan, who constructs the psychic
apparatus not only out of storage and transmission media, but
also out of computation. And hence, "nothing else is signified,"
Kittler insists, "by Lacan's 'methodological distinction' of the
imaginary, the real and the symbolic" (135).
38. Kittler equates the "symbolic" to computational media because it
demonstrates a certain switching capability (in the digital,
technical sense) of the psychic apparatus:
Tombstones, the oldest cultural symbols, remain with the
corpse; dice remain on their side after the toss; only the
door, or 'gate' in technical slang, permits symbols "to fly
with their own winds," that is, to control presence and
absence, high and low, 1 and 0, so that the one can react to
the other--sequential circuit mechanism, digital feedback.
(143)
Lacan's "endless chain of signifiers" corresponds, not
co-incidentally, to the data-processing activity of computer
circuits. And the Symbolic, like the "gates" or ports on a
computer, regulates the flow of the circuits.[15] The "discourse
of the other" may therefore be renamed as the "discourse of the
circuit" (135).
39. Considering the uncanny human/machine interfacing that betrays
itself in Lacan's theories, we should not be surprised, Kittler
writes, "that Lacan forbid himself from talking about language
with people who did not understand cybernetics" (145). This may
sound like theoretical closed-mindedness--the type that makes
Luddites of some of the finest scholars. Then again, perhaps
closed-mindedness is not the proper word, for Lacan is calling
for an interlocutor who is versed in more than one area of
specialization, and who is open to the possibility of a
transdisciplinary science. Perhaps we should call it snobbery or
idealism, then, for Lacan's demands on his interlocutors are
somewhat unrealistic, and based on his own desires and modes of
understanding. In any case, this particular attitude, the words
for which have apparently evaded me here, characterize the two
final essays in Kittler's collection.
"There Is No Software" and "Protected Mode"
Step 6: Having successfully practiced, and hopefully
re-invented, the Kittlerian Method of Media Criticism, use
your method to develop a project that aims to increase our
awareness and understanding of the materialities of
communication.
40. Since, as you must agree by now, everything is connected after
all, it only makes sense to point out the uncanny co-incidence
(?) of the computing term "gates" (portals which regulate all
circuit flow), and the name most associated with computing today,
William H. Gates. Consider this man/machine coincidence as a
nodal point through which many discourses pass, including
Kittler's discourse on computer hardware, and the current
Microsoft antitrust trial that accuses Gates of masterminding a
media monopoly. Such a monopoly, as Kittler would gladly make
clear, involves more than a few icons on a computer screen; it
involves the shaping of our psychic apparatus, the regulation of
human communications, and the fashioning of educational
institutions, political regimes, and military arsenals. Perhaps
it is for this reason that William S. Cohen has been seen
networking with the Microserfs in Silicon Valley. In a recent
recruitment visit to the Microsoft HQ, Cohen emphasized "the
military's role in insuring global stability that allowed
companies like Microsoft to prosper" (Myers A15). Gates, on the
other hand, "noted that the Defense Department was Microsoft's
largest client and discussed ways the two could do even more
business together in the future" (Myers A15). The irony of this
catch-22 media scene is best captured, however, by a programmer
who explains why she turned down a career in the military: "The
Navy kept sending me letters when I was in school, offering
scholarships.... But I thought, Why would I want to give up my
life when I could be creating new technology?" (Myers A15). The
postmodern soldier is alive and well in Silicon Valley.
41. Those who are able to perceive an immense political network
behind the Windows interface have no problem understanding
Kittler's turbulent tone in "There Is No Software." This essay
becomes all the more clear in light of the Microsoft trial,
because it deals with the level of control that a computer
operator possesses over the machine. In what Kittler calls a
"system of secrecy," computer and software designers have
intentionally "hidden" the technology from those who use the
machines:
First, on an intentionally superficial level, perfect
graphic user interfaces, since they dispense with writing
itself, hid a whole machine from its users. Second, on the
microscopic level of hardware, so-called protection software
has been implemented in order to prevent "untrusted
programs" or "untrusted users" from any access to the
operating system's kernel and input/output channels. (150)
All these levels of secrecy, Kittler explains, are designed to
prevent the operator from really understanding media. We might
know how to launch Microsoft Word and type up an essay with
graphics, tables, and elaborate fonts, but, with each stroke of
the keyboard or click of the mouse, do we realize what's
happening in the discourse networks of the purring, putty-colored
box? This ignorance, according to Kittler, leaves us open to
manipulation of the highest order. With characteristic bluntness,
the final essay of Kittler's book suggests that under the current
technological conditions, "one writes--the 'under' says it
already--as a subject or underling of the Microsoft Corporation"
(156).
42. In response to Microsoft, IBM et al., who insure that
technologies are "explicitly contrived to evade perception,"
Kittler makes the bold pronouncement that "There Is No Software."
This is at once a rhetorical provocation to the computer
corporations, and a wake-up call for those who fail to see the
man behind the curtain, or the circuits behind the fruit-colored
shell that Apple has recently developed in an attempt to make us
"Think Different."[16] There is no software because, no matter
how user-friendly an interface might be, the "hardware continues
to do all of the work" (158). The Microsoft antitrust case exists
only because of Microsoft's ongoing objective of completely
hiding the machine behind a single unified graphical interface.
Drawing on Mick Jagger, Kittler notes that "instead of what he
wants, the user always only gets what he needs (according to the
industry standard, that is)" (162).
43. Neither Microsoft Windows nor the chips that really make it
work--chips secured by Intel's "protected mode"--can be
reprogrammed or rewired to suit the needs of the computer
operator. But then, who wants to do reprogramming anyhow? In an
ironic, accidental (?) response to Kittler's use of Mick Jagger,
a recent ad campaign by Apple uses the Stones song "She's a
Rainbow" to promote the fashionable multichromatic appearance of
the new iMac. Superficiality, it seems, is what the user really
wants.
44. Microsoft's success in the trial, and as a business, hinges on
the following hypothetical question: Do people really want to see
behind the curtain? To my knowledge, the average computer-user,
let alone "literary critic" (as Kittler repeatedly labels
himself) does not like to unwind in the Kittlerian fashion: "at
night after I had finished writing, I used to pick up the
soldering iron and build circuits" (Griffin, "Interview" 731).
But if we accept Kittler's understanding of the relationship
between media technologies, government, and the military, then
the question about what's "behind the curtain" becomes
increasingly pressing, and it applies to more than software
monopolies and circuits in "protected mode." "It is a reasonable
assumption," writes Kittler, "to analyze the privilege levels of
a microprocessor as the reality of precisely that bureaucracy
that ordered its design and called for its mass application"
(162). In short, Kittler suggests that power systems can be
traced within the circuits of a computer chip. And so, those who
follow Foucault's legacy of analyzing such systems might benefit
from abandoning "the usual practice of conceiving of power as a
function of so-called society, and, conversely, attempt to
construct sociology from the chip's architectures"(162). Maybe we
should take a closer look, then, at those digital pets on our
laps and desks. In the least, we should start paying more
attention to the materialities of communication.
Conclusions and Beginnings
45. As impressive as Kittler's ability to "see a landscape in a
bean"[17] may be, we cannot expect the average computer user to
pull the Pentium chip out of his/her C.P.U. and examine it for
traces of fascism. In the same way, we can't expect Kittler's
version of media criticism to remedy the "blind spot" of
poststructuralism by turning critics into computer geeks (I
suggest we take a grain of salt with his suggestion that students
of cultural studies "should at least know some arithmetic, the
integral function, the sine function,.. [and] at least two
software languages" [Griffin, "Interview" 740]). What we might
expect, however, is for Kittler's work to incite a campaign of
awareness that, if properly disseminated, might make us more
cognizant of the networks of power and discourse that intersect
on our media scenes. And by integrating not just "literary
texts," but any cultural phenomena, into our projects, then we
can direct our work toward intervention on a social and
technological level.
46. The point here is not to create a Kittlerian cult, or to suggest
that Kittler's methods should be applied as the universal
decryption key of cultural studies or literary criticism. In
fact, I willingly admit that the 6 Steps described in this
instruction manual essay hardly provide an accurate or
comprehensive evaluation of Kittler's critical methodology. All I
have done is attempted to extract a working set of instructions
out of Kittler's imposing data banks. I have attempted to develop
a mode of writing more suitable to, and aware of, our
digital-oriented discourse network. What Kittler, as "structural
engineer," teaches us is to view texts and theories as complex
discursive networks from which certain key components may be
drawn out and soldered onto others like circuits on a
motherboard. His role as a critic has less to do with archiving,
transcription, and commentary (the duties of a critic of 1800 and
1900) than it does with programming, design, and invention:
activities of intervention.
47. To sum up, Kittler gathers code from Foucault, Derrida, Lacan,
et. al. and sets it to work on the cultural cryptography of
Goethe, Pynchon, et al. In the same way, we might draw on Kittler
in order to program our own critical projects on the
materialities of communication. Like circuit-tinkerers and the
proponents of open source software, media critics might benefit
from dissecting and reprogramming their own user interface, i.e.,
the conventional scholarly publication. We might not not end up
with a new programming language to rival Microsoft DOS, but
perhaps we'll invent a more effective and interventional method
for conducting research from inside the Discourse Network
2000--whatever that may turn out to be.[18]
Director
Foreign Language Instructional Technology Environment
Tulane University
ogorman@tcs.tulane.edu
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Notes
1. In the first line of Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Kittler
suggests that "German Poetry begins with a sigh," Faust's sigh,
that is (3). This provides him with a primal scene from which to
discuss the discourse network of 1800.
2. Unless indicated otherwise, citations of Kittler are drawn
from the essays in Literature, Media, Information Systems.
3. Foucault's influence on Kittler is profound and pervasive, and
Kittler is quick to admit this legacy. Among all discourse
analysts, Foucault is the most important to Kittler "because he
was the most historical" (Griffin, Interview 734). Whereas
Derrida, Lacan, etc. tend to emphasize the instability of the
sign, Foucault rarely abandons his archaeological digging to muse
upon the shapes of the words at the surface. This devotion to the
complex historicity of discourse is, according to Kittler, why
Foucault is "the best to use and carry over into other fields....
[He] offers so many concrete methodologies and leaves so many
historical fields open that there are endless amounts of work one
can do with him" (Griffin, Interview 739).
4. In spite of the flurry of rumors that surrounded the incident,
Timothy Leary's death was not simulcast on the Internet. Leary
had proposed the broadcast, but resolved instead to videotape his
last moments. The footage has never been shown publicly. From
America's Funniest Home Videos to the recent television broadcast
of Thomas Youk's lethal injection by Jack Kevorkian, one could
easily compile a lengthy catalog of media scenes that document
our contemporary obsession with cataloguing and archiving
anything and everything.
5. In reference to Discourse Networks 1800/1900, David Wellbery
notes that Kittler's book "presupposes post-structuralist
thought, makes that thought the operating equipment, the
hardware, with which it sets out to accomplish its own research
program. In Discourse Networks, post-structuralism becomes a
working vocabulary, a set of instruments productive of knowledge"
(vii).
6. As far as poststructural methodologies, Kittler prefers the
rigor and simplicity of Niklas Luhmann's system theory over the
playfulness of Derrida's grammatology. Luhmann, says Kittler,
"doesn't make a philosophical mountain out of a molehill, unlike
Derrida who, with every sentence he writes, wants to have his
cake and eat it" (Griffin, Interview 733).
7. See Bruce Bliven, The Wonderful Writing Machine (New York:
Random House, 1954).
8. In his Preface to Literature, Media, Information Systems, Saul
Ostrow notes that "Kittler is not stimulated by the notion that
we are becoming cyborgs, but instead by the subtler issues of how
we conceptually become reflections of our information systems"
(x).
9. One could argue that since Donna Harraway's important and
extensive study of the topic, there has been an inordinate
abundance of cyborg theory in bookstores and at conferences. This
has all led to a predictable formula regarding the human/machine
interface and our increasing mechanization at the hands of
computers, virtual reality and global networks.
10. See Thomas Sebastian, "Technology Romanticized: Friedrich
Kittler's Discourse Networks 1800/1900," MLN5: 3 (1990): 583-595,
and Virginia L. Lewis, "A German Poststructuralist," PLL 28:1
(1992): 100-106.
11. This reference to "media histories" consciously echoes the
title of Matthew Griffin's excellent essay on Kittler, entitled
"Literary Studies +/- Literature: Friedrich A. Kittler's Media
Histories." Like media scenes, the conspicuous plurality of
Griffin's title attempts to capture the complexity of Kittler's
historical, critical and theoretical methodology.
12. I am explicitly referring, here, to The Tragic Myth of
Millet's Angelus: Paranoiac-Critical Interpretation (St.
Petersburg: The Salvador Dali Museum, 1986). Robert Ray refers to
this text in The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (pp.79-80), where
he gives an excellent account of how Dali's method may be used in
contemporary film criticism.
13. In The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy, Robert Ray offers just
such a methodology in the form of a classroom exercise that
relies on accident and coincidence. The exercise is partly
motivated by this proposition: "The [film] shot results from
photography (Godard: 'Photography is truth, and the cinema is
truth twenty-four times a second'), and thus it will inevitably
offer... accidental details (Barthes's 'Third Meaning')" (83).
This filmic version of the truth (truth equals accident or
contingency) is a good antidote to Kittler's contention that
"film-goers are the victims... of a semiotechnology that deludes
them into seeing a coherent and causal life story where there are
only snapshots and flash bulbs" (112). The majority of
film-goers, however, seem to prefer the comfort of delusion over
the responsibility of organizing a series of contingencies.
14. At the time this essay was written, pro-Yugoslav Web sites
documenting the demise of civilians at the hands (bombs) of NATO
were available at the following URL's, among others:
;
;
.
15. Lacan's L-Schema provides an excellent pictorial rendering of
the psychic apparatus as circuit. In The Optical Unconscious,
Rosalind Kraus offers an insightful discussion of Lacan's model,
and applies it to a critique of modern visualization.
16. The ironic motto "Think Different" was the crux of Apple's
advertising campaign in their 1998-99 push to compete with
Microsoft's ability to homogenize a generation of computer users.
In essence, Apple managed to hide the machine from the user many
years ago, but their lack of a Gates-like marketing savvy made
homogenization unattainable. Interestingly, there has been a
recent backlash against all the secrecy, which is manifesting
itself in the growing popularity of open source software such as
Linux. Open source software gives operators a greater degree of
control over the interface and general functionality of their
computer systems. According to the non-profit organization
NetAction, "the most basic definition of open source software is
software for which the source code is distributed along with the
executable program, and which includes a license allowing anyone
to modify and redistribute the software"
().
17. In the opening sentence of S/Z, a text which demonstrates
Barthes's prowess as a builder of codes, he makes reference to
"certain Buddhists whose ascetic practices enable them to see a
whole landscape in a bean" (3). Although he uses the example to
dismiss the idea of applying a single structure to explain all
narrative, the Buddhist practice aptly describes Barthes's own
use of myth to decode all of French culture. Barthes's
Mythologies might certainly be considered as precursors to
Kittler's writerly production of media scenes.
18. In his interview with Matthew Griffin and Susanne Herrmann,
Kittler reveals his opinion on the Discourse Network 2000:
"Everyone wants to know what the discourse network 2000 looks
like? I'm not in such a hurry, besides it can't be written"
(736). I would suggest that Kittler, unwittingly or not, is
writing the discourse network 2000.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1974.
"From Venus With Love." The Avengers. Dir. Roy Baker. Perf. Diana
Rigg, Patrick Macnee, Philip Locke, and John Pertwee. Canal+,
1963.
Griffin, Matthew. "Literary Studies +/- Literature: Friedrich
Kittler's Media Histories. New Literary History 27.4 (1996):
709-716.
--- and Susanne Herrmann. "Technologies of Writing: Interview
with Friedrich A. Kittler. New Literary History 27.4 (1996):
731-742.
Johnston, John. "Friedrich Kittler: Media Theory After
Poststructuralism." Introduction. Literature, Media, Information
Systems: Essays. By Friedrich Kittler. Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997.
Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Trans. Michael
Metteer, with Chris Cullens. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990.
---. Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays. Amsterdam:
G+B Arts, 1997.
---. "Vergessen." Discourse: Berkeley Journal for Theoretical
Studies in Media and Culture 3 (1981): 88-121.
Myers, Steven Lee. "In Added Role, Pentagon Chief Is Traveling
Salesman." New York Times. 19 February, 1999, natl. ed.: A15
Ostrow, Sal. Preface. Literature, Media, Information Systems:
Essays. By Friedrich Kittler. Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1973.
Ray, Robert. The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy. Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1995.
Spivak, Gayatri. "Translator's Preface." Of Grammatology. By
Jacques Derrida. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
Wellbery, David E. Forward. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. By
Friedrich Kittler. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990.