Theodore Roszak, "The Summa
Popologica
of Marshall McLuhan," in McLuhan: Pro & Con, ed.
Kittler-Gramophone-Film-Typewriter
.
The escalation of weapons and antiweapons, of cryptography and cryptoanalysis (as Friedman renamed writing and reading under the con- ditions of high technology), at any rate urgently required the automatiza- tion of decoding. And for that need, a universal discrete machine, which could replace any other machine, was a perfect fit. "The most compli- cated machines are made only with words. "198 Turing, soon after nega- tively solving Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem), de- scribed to his mother "a possible application" of the new and seemingly infinite mathematics at which he was
working on at present. It answers the question "What is the most general kind of code or cipher possible," and at the same time (rather naturally) enables me to construct a lot of particular and interesting codes. One of them is pretty well im- possible to decode without a key, and very quick to encode. I expect I could sell them to H. M. Government for quite a substantial sum, but I am rather doubtful about the morality of such things. What do you think? 199
The answer came not from his mother but from the government. Ger- many's "Enigma machine was the central problem that confronted the British Intelligence Service in 1938. But they believed it was unsolv- able,"20o until the Government Code and Cipher School hired Alan M. Turing (notwithstanding his moral doubts) three days after the outbreak of the war.
Bletchley Park, the bombproof site of British cryptoanalysis during the war, was in a better position than its American colleagues: young mathematicians of the Polish secret service had already constructed a de- coding machine, the so-called Bombe, based on captured Enigmas. But when Fellgiebel's Army Communications increased the number of rotors
? 2 5 6 Typewriter
to five, even the Bombe could not follow suit. The I50,738,274,937,250 possible ways of electrically connecting ten pairs of letters exceeded its capacity, at least in real time, on which blitzkrieg commands and their timely countermeasures depend. The overwhelmed Poles donated their files to the British and Turing.
From this primitive Bombe, Turing made a machine that the head of Bletchley Park not coincidentally named the Oriental Goddess: a fully au- tomatized oracle to interpret fully automatized secret radio communica- tion. Turing's recursive functions laid the groundwork for the enemy's ability to decode Enigma signals with a mere 24-hour delay beginning in May I94I, and thus, to paraphrase Goebbels, to eavesdrop on the enemy. The German army did not want to believe it until the end of the war: it was "fully convinced that the decoding of Enigma was, even with the aid of captured machines, impossible given the overwhelmingly large number of calibrating positions. "201 However, only nonsense, white noise without information and hence of no use for the upper echelons, provides com- plete proof against spying. Whereas "the very fact that the Enigma was a machine made mechanical cryptoanalysis a possibility. "202 As a pseudo- random generator, the secret typewriter produced nonsense only relative to systems whose revolutions did not match its own. Turing's goddess, however, found regularities in the letter salad.
For one thing, Enigma had the practical advantage or theoretical dis- advantage that its cipher consisted of a self-inverse group. In order to be encoded or decoded on the same machine, letter pairs had to be inter- changeable. For example, when the OKW encoded its 0 as a K, the K in- versely turned into an O. From that followed "the very particular feature that no letter could be enciphered by itself. "203 Not even the OKW was capable of writing its own name. Turing subjected these few yet revealing implications to a sequential analysis that weighted and controlled all the probabilities of solution. With automatized judgment, the Oriental God- dess ran through permutation after permutation, until the letter salad be- came plain text again. War of typewriters.
And since from " I 5 to a maximum of 29 percent"204 of the German radio traffic ran through Enigma, the spy war reached a new level: inter- ception yielded "not just messages, but the whole enemy communication system. "205 The midrange levels of command-from army and division headquarters to individual blitzkrieg weapons on land, in the air, or at sea-betrayed their addresses, which are, all spy novels notwithstanding, more revealing than data or messages. Sixty different Enigma codes and 3,000 classified radio messages per day, with all of the specs for their
? ? senders and receivers, recorded the war like a typewriter the size of Eu- rope. Under the conditions of high technology, war coincides with a chart of its organizational structure. Reason enough for the Government Code and Cipher School to model, in miniature, its organization after that of the German army, that is, after the enemy. 206 Turing's game of imitation became a reality.
It is only one step from the flowchart to the computer. The addresses, data, commands that circulated between humans and typewriters in the German army or its British simulacrum could finally turn into hardware. This last step was undertaken in I943 by the Post Office Research Station at Bletchley Park. One thousand five hundred tubes were expropriated and converted into overloaded switches and, instead of reinforcing radio analog signals, simulated the binary play of Boolean algebra. Transistors did not make it into the world until I949, but even without them the uni- versal discrete machine-including data entry, programming possibilities, and the great innovation of internal storage mechanisms207-saw its first implementation, for which Turing's successors could find no other name than COLOSSUS. Because the strategic secrets of the Fuhrer's headquar- ters, Wolfsschanze, could, as is logical, only be cracked by a monster computer.
COLOSSUS began its work and decoded an additional 40 percent of the German radio traffic-everything that for reasons of security was transmitted not via Enigma and wireless but via the Siemens Cryptwriter. As a teleprinter running the Baudot-Murray Code, this typewriter no longer required cumbersome manual operation with its human sources of error; its fully digitized signals consisted of the "yes" or "no" of ticker
Typewriter 257
? 258 Typewriter
tape, which, through the binary addition of plain text and pseudo- random generator, could be encoded much more efficiently than with Enigma. Moreover, radio interception became possible only once signals were sent through a radio link rather than a telegraph cable. 20s That is how well upper echelons pick their typewriters.
Obviously, COLOSSUS beat binary addition with binary addition, but even the first computer in the history of science or warfare would have been nothing but a several-ton version of Remington's special type- writer with a calculating machine209 had it not observed conditional jump instructions. 21o
Conditional jumps, first envisioned in Babbage's unfinished Analyti- cal Engine of 1 83 5 , were born into the world of machines in 193 8 in Kon- rad Zuse's apartment in Berlin, and this world has since been self-identi- cal with the symbolic. In vain, the autodidact offered his binary calcula- tors to use as encryption machines and to surpass the supposedly spy-proof Enigma. 2l1 The opportunity missed by Army Communications was seized by the German Aviation Test Site in 194 1-for the purposes of "calculating, testing, and examining cruise missiles. "212 Yet Zuse made only the most sparing use of the IF-THEN commands of his brilliant "plan calculation": Godel's and Turing's insight oftranslatingcommands, that is, letters, into numbers was a concern for him:
Since programs, like numbers, are built from series of bits, it was only a matter of course that programs be stored as well. With that it was possible to make condi- tional jumps, as we say today, and to convert addresses. From the point of view of schematics, there are several solutions for it. They all rest on a common thought: the feedback of the result of the calculation on the process and on the configura- tion of the program itself. Symbolically, one can envision that through a single wire. I was, frankly, nervous about taking that step. As long as that wire has not been laid, computers can easily be overseen and controlled in their possibilities and effects. But once unrestricted program processing becomes a possibility, it is difficult to recognize the point at which one could say: up to this point, but no further. 2J3
A simple feedback loop -and information machines bypass humans, their so-called inventors. Computers themselves become subjects. IF a preprogrammed condition is missing, data processing continues accord- ing to the conventions of numbered commands, but IF somewhere an in- termediate result fulfills the condition, THEN the program itself deter- mines successive commands, that is, its future.
In the same way, Lacan, making a distinction with animal codes, de-
Typewriter 259
fined language and subjectivity as human properties. For example, the dance of bees, as it has been researched by von Frisch, "is distinguished from language precisely by the fixed correlation of its signs to the reality that they signify. " While the messages of one bee control the flight of an- other to blossoms and prey, these messages are not decoded and trans- mitted by the second bee. By contrast, "the form in which language is ex- pressed . . . itself defines subjectivity. Language says: 'You will go here, and when you see this, you will turn off there. ' In other words: it refers itself to the discourse of the other. "214
In yet other words: bees are projectiles, and humans, cruise missiles. One is given objective data on angles and distances by a dance, the other, a command of free will. Computers operating on IF-THEN commands are therefore machine subjects. Electronics, a tube monster since Bletchley Park, replaces discourse, and programmability replaces free will.
Not for nothing was Zuse "frankly, nervous" about his algorithmic golems and their "halting problem. " Not for nothing did the Henschel Works or the Ministry of Aviation assign the development of cruise mis- siles to these golems. On all fronts, from top-secret cryptoanalysis to the most spectacular future weapons offensive, the Second World War de- volved from humans and soldiers to machine subjects. And it wasn't by much that Zuse's binary computers missed doing the programming of free space flight from its inception, rather than determining in the bunkers of the Harz the fate of the V2 at the last moment. 215 The "range of charges" that the Peenemiinde Army Test Site assigned to German uni- versities in 1939 included (aside from acceleration integrators, Doppler radar, onboard calculators, etc. ), in a rather visionary way, what Wernher von Braun described as "the first attempt at electric digital computa- tion. "216 The weapon as subject required a corresponding brain.
But since the commander in chief of the German army (whom Syber- berg has called the "greatest filmmaker of all time")217 did not believe in self-guided weapons on the actual rocket testing site, but only during their demonstration on color film at the Wolfsschanze,218 the entropies of the Nazi state emerged victorious over information and information machines.
At any rate, cybernetics, the theory of self-guidance and feedback loops, is a theory of the Second World War. Norbert Wiener testified to that when he introduced the term:
The deciding factor in this new step was the war. I had known for a considerable time that if a national emergency should come, my function in it [sic] would be
? 2 60 Typewriter
determined largely by two things: my close contact with the program of comput- ing machines developed by Dr. Vannevar Bush, and my own joint work with Dr. Yuk Wing Lee on the design of electric networks. . . . At the beginning of the war, the German prestige in aviation and the defensive position of England turned the attention of many scientists to the improvement of anti-aircraft artillery. Even be- fore the war, it had become clear that the speed of the airplane had rendered ob- solete all classical methods of the direction of fire, and that it was necessary to build into the control apparatus all the computations necessary. These were ren- dered much more difficult by the fact that, unlike all previously encountered tar- gets, an airplane has a velocity which is a very appreciable part of the velocity of the missile used to bring it down. Accordingly, it is exceedingly important to shoot the missile, not at the target, but in such a way that missile and target may come together in space at some time in the future. We must hence find some method of predicting the future position of the plane. 219
With Wiener's Linear Prediction Code (LPC), mathematics changed into an oracle capable of predicting a probable future even out of chaos- initially for fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft guidance systems, in between the wars for human mouths and the computer simulations of their dis- courses. 220 Blind, unpredictable time, which rules over analog storage and transmission media (in contrast to the arts), was finally brought under control. With digital signal processing, measuring circuits and algorithms (like an automated sound engineer) ride along on random frequencies. To- day this form of cybernetics ensures the sound of most reputable rock bands; in actuality, however, it was only a "new step" in ballistics. Ma- chines replaced Leibniz in the analysis of trajectories.
With the consequence that COLOSSUS gave birth to many a son, each more colossal than its secret father. According to the ministry of supply, Turing'S postwar computer ACE was supposed to calculate "grenades, bombs, rockets, and cruise missiles"; the American ENIAC "was to simulate trajectories of shells through varying conditions of air resistance and wind velocity, which involved the summation of thousands of little pieces of trajectories. " John von Neumann's EDVAC was being designed to solve "three-dimensional 'aerodynamic and shock-wave prob- lems, . . . shell, bomb and rocket work, . . . [and] progress in the field of propellants and high explosives"'; BINAC worked for the United States Air Force; ATLAS, for cryptoanalysis; and finally, MANIAC, if this sug- gestive name had been implemented in time, would have optimized the pressure wave of the first H-bomb. 221
Machines operating on the basis of recursive functions produce slow- motion studies not only of human thinking but also of human demise.
Typewriter 261
According to the insight of Pynchon and Virilio, the blitzkrieg and the flash-bulb shot (Blitzlichtaufnahme) coincide in the bomb that leveled Hiroshima during rush hour on August 6, 1945. A shutter speed of 0. 000000067 seconds, far below Mach's projectile-like, pioneering cine- matic feat of 1 8 83 , melted countless Japanese people " as a fine-vapor de- posit of fat-cracklings wrinkled into the fused rubble" of their city. 222 Cin- ema to be computed in computer processing speeds, and only in computer processing speeds.
On the film's manifest surface, everything proceeds as if the "mar- riage of two monsters"223 that John von Neumann had arranged between a German guided missile and an American A-bomb payload (that is, by saving both conventional amatol and conventional bomber pilots) by it- self had been the step from blitzkrieg to the strategic present. What speaks against that is that both guided missiles and nuclear weapons sur- mounted the iron and bamboo curtains with extraordinary ease-partly through espionage, partly through the transfer of technology. Different from the machine subject itself, the innocuous but fully automated type- computing machine. With the fiat of the theory that is omnipotent be- cause it is true, Stalin condemned the bourgeois aberration of cybernetics. As if materialism, in the espionage races with its other half, had been blinded by the disclosed secrets of mass extermination, the smoke trail of rockets and the flash of bombs.
Annihilation is still called determining the outcome of the war. Only 40 years later, classified archives have gradually revealed that Bletchley Park was presumably the most suitable candidate for this title. During the Second World War, a materialist who materialized mathematics itself emerged victorious. Regarding COLOSSUS and Enigma, Turing's biogra- pher writes that "intelligence had won the war"224 with the British liter- ality that does not distinguish among reason, secret service, and informa- tion machine. But that is exactly what remained a state secret. During the war, a whole organization emerged for the purpose of delivering the re- sults of fully automatized cryptoanalysis in coded form to the command- ing officers at the front. Otherwise, the most vital secret of the war (through seized documents, traitors, or treacherously revealing counter- measures) possibly would have filtered through to the German army, and Enigma would have been silenced. Hence it became secret agents' last his- torical assignment to invent radiant spy novels in order to camouflage the fact that interception and the type-computing machine respectively ren- der secret services and agents superfluous. ( Which is what spy novels con- tinue to do to this very day. ) The mysterious "Werther," who allegedly
2 6 2 Typewriter
Hiroshima before and after August 6, I94 5 .
transmitted many plans of attack from the Wolfsschanze via Swiss dou- ble agents to Moscow, but who has yet to be located historically, may well have been one of the simulacra that systematically screened Bletchley Park from the Red Army. 225 Then, at any rate, Stalin's theory would have had a material basis-nonproliferation of the flow of information.
On August 28, 1945, three weeks after Hiroshima, four weeks after Potsdam, U. S. President Truman issued a secret decree on secret service interception, an information blockage on information machines. War- determining cryptoanalysis became a matter of ultimate classified mate- rial-in the past and the present, technology and method, successes and results, Bletchley Park and Washington, D. C. 226 As a result of which the same, but now cold, war could start again immediately: in the shadow of Truman's decree, COLOSSUS and its American clones learned Russian instead of German. Hermetically sealed, "the legacy of a total war, and of the capture of a total communications system, could now turn to the con- struction of a total machine. "227
The success of this strategy of dissimulation is proved by its only leak. A writer, who not only knew the typewriter from secretaries but also reproduced it on the printed page, communicated in letter form to the warlords gathered in Potsdam that the symbolic has, through Enigma and COLOSSUS, become a world of the machine.
? ? ? Arno Schmidt , " Offener Brief "
An die Exzellenzen Herren
Truman (Roosevelt) , Stalin,
Churchill (Attlee ) Jalta, Teheran , Potsdam
8 c 357 8xup ZEUs !
id 21v18 Pt 7 gallisc 314002a 17 ? V 31 GpU 4a 29, 39, 49 ? rnz 71Fi16 34007129 pp 34 udil19jem 13349 bubu WEg !
aff 19 exi: 16 enu 070 zIrn 4019 abs12c 24 spil, 43 asti siv 13999 idle 48, 19037 pem 8 pho 36. 1012
sabi FR26a FlisCh 26:iwo - 18447 g7 gg !
Glent 3 1 , glent 14 Po Arno Schmidt 228
Under the conditions of high technology, literature has nothing more to say. It ends in cryptograms that defy interpretation and only permit in- terception. Of all long-distance connections on this planet today,229 from phone services to microwave radio, 0. 1 percent flow through the trans- mission, storage, and decoding machines of the National Security Agency
(NSA), the organization succeeding SIS and Bletchley Park. By its own ac- count, the NSA has "accelerated" the "advent of the computer age," and hence the end of history, like nothing else. 230 An automated discourse analysis has taken command.
And while professors are still reluctantly trading in their typewriters for word processors, the NSA is preparing for the future: from nursery school mathematics, which continues to be fully sufficient for books, to charge-coupled devices, surface-wave filters, digital signal processors in- cluding the four basic forms of computation. 231 Trenches, flashes of light- ning, stars-storage, transmission, the laying of cables.
Typewriter 263
? ? REFERENCE MATTER
? NOTES
TRANSLATORS' NOTE: The citation format for Kittler's text closely follows that of the German edition. When two publication dates are given, the first refers to the date of original publication, the second, either to a later edition used by Kittler or to an English translation. Page numbers refer to the latter date, which corresponds to the edition given in the Bibliography, pp. 299-3 1 5 .
TRANSLATORS' INTRODUCTION
? 1. Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to\Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), 3 2.
2. Ibid.
3 . Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1988), 136.
4. See ibid. , 79-8 1, and Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Cul- ture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993 ), 3-20.
5. Quoted in Boris Eichenbaum, "The Theory of the 'Formal Method,'" in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 803.
6. Friedrich Kittler, "Die Laterna magica der Literatur: Schillers und Hoff- manns Medienstrategien," in Athenaum: Jahrbuch fur Romantik I994, ed. Ernst Behler, Jochen Horisch, and Gunther Oesterle (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1994), 2 19 .
7. See, for example, Michael Heim, "The Computer as Component: Hei- degger and McLuhan," Philosophy and Literature 16. 2 (1992): 304-18; Judith Stamps, Unthinking Modernity: Innis, McLuhan and the Frankfurt School (Mon- treal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 19 9 5 ) ; and Glenn Willmott, McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1996).
8.
Theodore Roszak, "The Summa Popologica of Marshall McLuhan," in McLuhan: Pro & Con, ed. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968), 257-69.
'"
I
? 9. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory ofthe Media," in
268 Notes to Pages xv-xvii
The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Poetics and the Media, ed. Michael Roloff (New York: Seabury, 1974), lI8. See also Enzensberger's hilarious retrac- tion, "The Zero Medium, or Why All Complaints About Television are Point- less," in Mediocrity and Delusion: Collected Diversions, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Verso, 1992), 59-70. In an interesting twist, Klaus Theweleit has speculated that the German Left discarded McLuhan because his focus on bodies and media, extensions, narcosis, and self-amputation was more materialist than Marxism had ever been. See Theweleit, Buch der Konige I: Orpheus und Eury- dike (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 1988), 383,
10. Enzensberger, "Constituents," 97.
II. Jean Baudrillard, "Requiem for the Media," in For a Critique ofthe Po- litical Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos, 1981), 168.
12. Ibid. , 169.
13? Ibid. , 173.
14? Ibid. , 175?
15. The compound term Mediendiskursanalyse (the basis for our expression
"media discourse analysis") is occasionally used in German scholarship. Norbert Bolz may have been the first to combine its constituent parts when he outlined a program for a future "Diskursanalyse fur neue Medien. " See Bolz, Philosophie nach ihrem Ende (Munich: Boer, 1992), 172, and idem, "Computer als Medium," in Computer als Medium, ed. Bolz, Kittler, and Christoph Tholen (Munich: Fink, 1994), 15?
16. Klaus Laermann, "Lacancan und Derridada: Dber die Frankolatrie in den Kulturwissenschaften," Kursbuch 84 (1986): 36, 38, 41.
1 7 . Needless to say, the story can b e told neither impartially nor in its en- tirety: it is still going on and continuing divisions, spurred by the arrival of new approaches such as systems theory and radical constructivism, make it difficult, if not impossible, to find terms neutral enough to satisfy all parties involved. The following brief account only considers the politico-theoretical framework of the last three decades, although there are, of course, larger perspectives on postruc- turalism's hampered reception. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, for one, has argued that analytical procedures such as Derridean deconstruction, with its (potentially an- tihistorical) bias toward spatialization, did not sit easily with the traditional Ger- man bias in favor of temporalization; this may also explain why Freudian psycho- analysis fared better in France than it did in Germany or Austria. See Gumbrecht, "Who Is Afraid of Deconstruction? " in Diskurstheorien und Literaturwissen- schaft, eds. Jurgen Fohrmann and Harro Muller (Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp, 1988), 95-lI3?
1 8 . Holub, Crossing Borders: Reception Theory, Poststructuralism, Decon- struction (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 199 2 ) : 4 3 .
19. Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 172.
2 0 . Matthew Griffin and Susanne Herrmann, " Interview mit Friedrich A. Kittler," Weimarer Beitrage 43. 2 (1997): 286. Griffin and Herrmann miss the point by translating the phrase "schwarz in jeder Bedeutung" as "virtually black- listed" intheEnglishversionoftheirinterview("TechnologiesofWriting:Inter- view with Friedrich Kittler," New Literary History 27. 4 [1996]: 741). Also see
Notes to Pages xvii-xix 269
Kittler's harsh critique of the venerable Dialectic of Enlightenment, coauthored by the technologically ignorant "Fabrikantensohne" (manufacturers' sons) Horkheimer and Adorno: "Copyright 1944 by Social Studies Association, Inc. ," in Flaschenpost und Postkarte: Korrespondenzen zwischen Kritischer Theorie und Poststrukturalismus, ed. Sigrid Weigel (Cologne: B6hlau, 1995), 185-93. For a brief but informed introduction to the German theoretical debates of the 1980s, see Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Reappraisals: Shifting Alignments in Postwar Critical Theory (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 187-97.
21. In 1978 the volume Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel appeared, which contained Kaiser's "hermeneutical-dialectic" interpretation of novellas by Gott- fried Keller, Kittler's "discourse-analytical" reading of Goethe's Wilhelm Meis- ter, and a beautifully tortured preface trying to tie the two essays together. What they ultimately end up sharing is a common enemy, the "Marxist theory of the re- flection of social conditions and processes in the literary work, as well as . . . the neo-Marxist aesthetics of Adorno" (Gerhard Kaiser and Friedrich A. Kittler, Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel: Studien zu Goethe und Gottfried Keller [G6ttin- gen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978], 9).
2 2 . Manfred Frank, What Is Neostructuralism? trans. Richard Gray (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, I989 ) .
Sabine Wilke and
23. See H6risch, Die Wut des Verstehens: Zur Kritik der Hermeneutik (Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp, 1988), 50-66.
24. Urszenen: Literaturwissenschaft als Diskursanalyse und Diskurskritik, ed. Friedrich A. Kittler and Horst Turk (Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp, 1977). Con- taining essays by Kittler, Bolz, and'H6risch, this collection marks the beginning of French-inspired German literary s&olarship.
25. See Norbert Bolz, ed. , Goeth? s 'Wahlverwandtschaften': Kritische Mod- elle und Diskursanalysen zum Mythos,Literatur (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, I98 I); Jochen H6risch, Die andere Goethezeit: Poetische Mobilmachung des Subjekts um I800 (Munich: Fink, 1992); and Kittler, Dichter Mutter Kind (Munich: Fink,
I991). A well-known early example is the Lacanian reading of Kleist by Helga Gallas, Das Textbegehren des 'Michael Kohlhaas': Die Sprache des Unbewuf5ten und der Sinn der Literatur ( Reinbek: Rowohlt, 198 I ) .
26. Frank, WhatIsNeostructuralism? 313.
27. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar ofJacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Techniques ofPsychoanalysis I954-I955, ed. Jacques- Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988), 46.
28. Kittler, "The World of the Symbolic-A World of the Machine," in idem, Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays, ed. and intro. John Johnston, trans. Stefanie Harris (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, I997), 1H.
2 9 . Ibid. , 1 4 5 , referring to the following passage (Lacan, Seminar II , 89 ) : "This discourse of the other is not the discourse of the abstract other, of the other in the dyad, of my correspondent, nor even of my slave, it is the discourse of the circuit in which I am integrated. I am one of its links. "
30. George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Crit- ical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992), H. 31. GregoryUlmer,AppliedGrammatology:Post(e)-PedagogyfromJacques
Derrida to Joseph B euys (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 198 5 ) , 3 0 3 .
? 270 Notes to Pages xix-xxii
3 2 . See Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr. , "The Electronic Panopticon: Censorship, Control and Indoctrination in a Post-Typographic Culture," in Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers, ed. Myron C. Tuman (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 167-88; and Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context ( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), 69-98.
3 3 . Regis Debray, Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms, trans. Eric Rauth (New York: Verso, 1996), 54.
3 4 . Bolz, Philosophie nach ihrem Ende, 1 5 4 .
3 5 . Hans H. Hiebel, " Strukturale Psychoanalyse und Literatur, " i n Neue Literaturtheorien, ed. Klaus-Michael Bogdal (Darmstadt: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990), 69. See also Kittler, "'Das Phantom unseres Ichs' und die Literaturpsy- chologie: E. T. A. Hoffmann-Freud-Lacan," in Urszenen, 139-66.
36. See Kittler, Dichter Mutter Kind, 7-17, and Horisch's belated preface to Die andere Goethezeit, 7-9. See also Kittler's remarks in Griffin and Herrmann, "Technologies of Writing," 74 1 : " When I think of my oId literary criticism, the good essays are actually didactic pieces in programming. How did Duke Carl Eugen von Wurtemberg [sic] program Friedrich Schiller? I didn't write about Schiller's sentiments or religion, because all I had was a bare-bones model: educa- tors and princes program the novelist for a specific civil function in the state. What you need is a fundamental understanding of concepts such as hardware, programming, automatization, and regulation. "
37. Kittler, Discourse Networks, I8ooiI900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), 177.
38. All of these essays first appeared in the 1980s, but where possible we have provided an English translation: "Wie man abschafft, wovon man spricht: Der Autor von Ecce Homo," in Literaturmagazin 12: Nietzsche, ed. Nicolas Born, Jurgen Manthey, and Detlev Schmidt (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1980), 1 5 3-78; "Pink Floyd, 'Brain Damage,'" in europalyrik 1775 bis heute: Gedichte und Interpreta- tionen, ed. Klaus Lindemann (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1982), 467-77; "Das Alibi eines Schriftstellers-Peter Handkes Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter," in Das schnelle Altern der neuesten Literatur, ed. Jochen Horisch and Hubert Winkels (Dusseldorf: Claassen, 198 5 ), 60-72; "tiber die Kunst, mit Vogeln zu ja- gen: The Maltese Falcon von D. Hammett," in Phantasie und Deutung: Psychol- ogisches Verstehen von Film und Literatur, eds. Wolfram Mauser, Ursula Renner, and Walter Schonau (Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1986), 299-314; "Dracula's Legacy," Stanford Humanities Review 1. 1 (1989-90): 143-73; "The Mechanized Philosopher," in Looking After Nietzsche, ed. Lawrence A. Rickels (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1990), 195-207; "World-Breath: On Wagner's Media Technology," in Opera Through Other Eyes, ed. David J. Levin (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford Univ. Press, 1994), 215-35; and "Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second World War," trans. Michael Wutz and Geoffrey Winthrop- Young, in Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology, ed. Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell Univ. Press, 1997), 157-72.
39. Kittler, "Ein Erdbeben in Chili und PreuiSen," in Positionen der Liter- aturwissenschaft: Acht Modellanalysen am Beispiel von Kleists 'Das Erdbeben in Chili,' ed. David E. Wellbery (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1985), 24.
? Notes to Pages xxii-xxxii 271
40. As Michael Giesecke points out in his monumental study of the early print age, media theorists have themselves only recently started to pay full atten- tion to the "neglected difference" between scriptography and typography. Michael Giesecke, Der Buchdruck in der friihen Neuzeit: Eine historische Fallstudie iiber die Durchsetzung neuer Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (Frank- furt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 29.
4 I . See Kittler, "Autorschaft und Liebe," in Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften: Programme des Poststrukturalismus, ed. Friedrich A. Kitt- ler (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1980), 142-73 .
42. Griffin and Herrmann, "Technologies of Writing," 734.
43. See Wellbery, foreword to Kittler, Discourse Networks, xix.
44. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 3 69.
45. Kittler, "Benn's Poetry-'A Hit in the Charts': Song Under Conditions of
Media Technologies," SubStance 61 (1990): 6.
4 6 . Kittler, Discourse Networks, 3 4 7 .
47. Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language ofModernism
(Princeton, N. ]. : Princeton Univ. Press, 1993 ), 74.
48. Gottfried Benn, "Vortrag in Knokke," in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Dieter
Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1959), 4: 543. See also Kittler, Discourse Net- works, 177.
The escalation of weapons and antiweapons, of cryptography and cryptoanalysis (as Friedman renamed writing and reading under the con- ditions of high technology), at any rate urgently required the automatiza- tion of decoding. And for that need, a universal discrete machine, which could replace any other machine, was a perfect fit. "The most compli- cated machines are made only with words. "198 Turing, soon after nega- tively solving Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem), de- scribed to his mother "a possible application" of the new and seemingly infinite mathematics at which he was
working on at present. It answers the question "What is the most general kind of code or cipher possible," and at the same time (rather naturally) enables me to construct a lot of particular and interesting codes. One of them is pretty well im- possible to decode without a key, and very quick to encode. I expect I could sell them to H. M. Government for quite a substantial sum, but I am rather doubtful about the morality of such things. What do you think? 199
The answer came not from his mother but from the government. Ger- many's "Enigma machine was the central problem that confronted the British Intelligence Service in 1938. But they believed it was unsolv- able,"20o until the Government Code and Cipher School hired Alan M. Turing (notwithstanding his moral doubts) three days after the outbreak of the war.
Bletchley Park, the bombproof site of British cryptoanalysis during the war, was in a better position than its American colleagues: young mathematicians of the Polish secret service had already constructed a de- coding machine, the so-called Bombe, based on captured Enigmas. But when Fellgiebel's Army Communications increased the number of rotors
? 2 5 6 Typewriter
to five, even the Bombe could not follow suit. The I50,738,274,937,250 possible ways of electrically connecting ten pairs of letters exceeded its capacity, at least in real time, on which blitzkrieg commands and their timely countermeasures depend. The overwhelmed Poles donated their files to the British and Turing.
From this primitive Bombe, Turing made a machine that the head of Bletchley Park not coincidentally named the Oriental Goddess: a fully au- tomatized oracle to interpret fully automatized secret radio communica- tion. Turing's recursive functions laid the groundwork for the enemy's ability to decode Enigma signals with a mere 24-hour delay beginning in May I94I, and thus, to paraphrase Goebbels, to eavesdrop on the enemy. The German army did not want to believe it until the end of the war: it was "fully convinced that the decoding of Enigma was, even with the aid of captured machines, impossible given the overwhelmingly large number of calibrating positions. "201 However, only nonsense, white noise without information and hence of no use for the upper echelons, provides com- plete proof against spying. Whereas "the very fact that the Enigma was a machine made mechanical cryptoanalysis a possibility. "202 As a pseudo- random generator, the secret typewriter produced nonsense only relative to systems whose revolutions did not match its own. Turing's goddess, however, found regularities in the letter salad.
For one thing, Enigma had the practical advantage or theoretical dis- advantage that its cipher consisted of a self-inverse group. In order to be encoded or decoded on the same machine, letter pairs had to be inter- changeable. For example, when the OKW encoded its 0 as a K, the K in- versely turned into an O. From that followed "the very particular feature that no letter could be enciphered by itself. "203 Not even the OKW was capable of writing its own name. Turing subjected these few yet revealing implications to a sequential analysis that weighted and controlled all the probabilities of solution. With automatized judgment, the Oriental God- dess ran through permutation after permutation, until the letter salad be- came plain text again. War of typewriters.
And since from " I 5 to a maximum of 29 percent"204 of the German radio traffic ran through Enigma, the spy war reached a new level: inter- ception yielded "not just messages, but the whole enemy communication system. "205 The midrange levels of command-from army and division headquarters to individual blitzkrieg weapons on land, in the air, or at sea-betrayed their addresses, which are, all spy novels notwithstanding, more revealing than data or messages. Sixty different Enigma codes and 3,000 classified radio messages per day, with all of the specs for their
? ? senders and receivers, recorded the war like a typewriter the size of Eu- rope. Under the conditions of high technology, war coincides with a chart of its organizational structure. Reason enough for the Government Code and Cipher School to model, in miniature, its organization after that of the German army, that is, after the enemy. 206 Turing's game of imitation became a reality.
It is only one step from the flowchart to the computer. The addresses, data, commands that circulated between humans and typewriters in the German army or its British simulacrum could finally turn into hardware. This last step was undertaken in I943 by the Post Office Research Station at Bletchley Park. One thousand five hundred tubes were expropriated and converted into overloaded switches and, instead of reinforcing radio analog signals, simulated the binary play of Boolean algebra. Transistors did not make it into the world until I949, but even without them the uni- versal discrete machine-including data entry, programming possibilities, and the great innovation of internal storage mechanisms207-saw its first implementation, for which Turing's successors could find no other name than COLOSSUS. Because the strategic secrets of the Fuhrer's headquar- ters, Wolfsschanze, could, as is logical, only be cracked by a monster computer.
COLOSSUS began its work and decoded an additional 40 percent of the German radio traffic-everything that for reasons of security was transmitted not via Enigma and wireless but via the Siemens Cryptwriter. As a teleprinter running the Baudot-Murray Code, this typewriter no longer required cumbersome manual operation with its human sources of error; its fully digitized signals consisted of the "yes" or "no" of ticker
Typewriter 257
? 258 Typewriter
tape, which, through the binary addition of plain text and pseudo- random generator, could be encoded much more efficiently than with Enigma. Moreover, radio interception became possible only once signals were sent through a radio link rather than a telegraph cable. 20s That is how well upper echelons pick their typewriters.
Obviously, COLOSSUS beat binary addition with binary addition, but even the first computer in the history of science or warfare would have been nothing but a several-ton version of Remington's special type- writer with a calculating machine209 had it not observed conditional jump instructions. 21o
Conditional jumps, first envisioned in Babbage's unfinished Analyti- cal Engine of 1 83 5 , were born into the world of machines in 193 8 in Kon- rad Zuse's apartment in Berlin, and this world has since been self-identi- cal with the symbolic. In vain, the autodidact offered his binary calcula- tors to use as encryption machines and to surpass the supposedly spy-proof Enigma. 2l1 The opportunity missed by Army Communications was seized by the German Aviation Test Site in 194 1-for the purposes of "calculating, testing, and examining cruise missiles. "212 Yet Zuse made only the most sparing use of the IF-THEN commands of his brilliant "plan calculation": Godel's and Turing's insight oftranslatingcommands, that is, letters, into numbers was a concern for him:
Since programs, like numbers, are built from series of bits, it was only a matter of course that programs be stored as well. With that it was possible to make condi- tional jumps, as we say today, and to convert addresses. From the point of view of schematics, there are several solutions for it. They all rest on a common thought: the feedback of the result of the calculation on the process and on the configura- tion of the program itself. Symbolically, one can envision that through a single wire. I was, frankly, nervous about taking that step. As long as that wire has not been laid, computers can easily be overseen and controlled in their possibilities and effects. But once unrestricted program processing becomes a possibility, it is difficult to recognize the point at which one could say: up to this point, but no further. 2J3
A simple feedback loop -and information machines bypass humans, their so-called inventors. Computers themselves become subjects. IF a preprogrammed condition is missing, data processing continues accord- ing to the conventions of numbered commands, but IF somewhere an in- termediate result fulfills the condition, THEN the program itself deter- mines successive commands, that is, its future.
In the same way, Lacan, making a distinction with animal codes, de-
Typewriter 259
fined language and subjectivity as human properties. For example, the dance of bees, as it has been researched by von Frisch, "is distinguished from language precisely by the fixed correlation of its signs to the reality that they signify. " While the messages of one bee control the flight of an- other to blossoms and prey, these messages are not decoded and trans- mitted by the second bee. By contrast, "the form in which language is ex- pressed . . . itself defines subjectivity. Language says: 'You will go here, and when you see this, you will turn off there. ' In other words: it refers itself to the discourse of the other. "214
In yet other words: bees are projectiles, and humans, cruise missiles. One is given objective data on angles and distances by a dance, the other, a command of free will. Computers operating on IF-THEN commands are therefore machine subjects. Electronics, a tube monster since Bletchley Park, replaces discourse, and programmability replaces free will.
Not for nothing was Zuse "frankly, nervous" about his algorithmic golems and their "halting problem. " Not for nothing did the Henschel Works or the Ministry of Aviation assign the development of cruise mis- siles to these golems. On all fronts, from top-secret cryptoanalysis to the most spectacular future weapons offensive, the Second World War de- volved from humans and soldiers to machine subjects. And it wasn't by much that Zuse's binary computers missed doing the programming of free space flight from its inception, rather than determining in the bunkers of the Harz the fate of the V2 at the last moment. 215 The "range of charges" that the Peenemiinde Army Test Site assigned to German uni- versities in 1939 included (aside from acceleration integrators, Doppler radar, onboard calculators, etc. ), in a rather visionary way, what Wernher von Braun described as "the first attempt at electric digital computa- tion. "216 The weapon as subject required a corresponding brain.
But since the commander in chief of the German army (whom Syber- berg has called the "greatest filmmaker of all time")217 did not believe in self-guided weapons on the actual rocket testing site, but only during their demonstration on color film at the Wolfsschanze,218 the entropies of the Nazi state emerged victorious over information and information machines.
At any rate, cybernetics, the theory of self-guidance and feedback loops, is a theory of the Second World War. Norbert Wiener testified to that when he introduced the term:
The deciding factor in this new step was the war. I had known for a considerable time that if a national emergency should come, my function in it [sic] would be
? 2 60 Typewriter
determined largely by two things: my close contact with the program of comput- ing machines developed by Dr. Vannevar Bush, and my own joint work with Dr. Yuk Wing Lee on the design of electric networks. . . . At the beginning of the war, the German prestige in aviation and the defensive position of England turned the attention of many scientists to the improvement of anti-aircraft artillery. Even be- fore the war, it had become clear that the speed of the airplane had rendered ob- solete all classical methods of the direction of fire, and that it was necessary to build into the control apparatus all the computations necessary. These were ren- dered much more difficult by the fact that, unlike all previously encountered tar- gets, an airplane has a velocity which is a very appreciable part of the velocity of the missile used to bring it down. Accordingly, it is exceedingly important to shoot the missile, not at the target, but in such a way that missile and target may come together in space at some time in the future. We must hence find some method of predicting the future position of the plane. 219
With Wiener's Linear Prediction Code (LPC), mathematics changed into an oracle capable of predicting a probable future even out of chaos- initially for fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft guidance systems, in between the wars for human mouths and the computer simulations of their dis- courses. 220 Blind, unpredictable time, which rules over analog storage and transmission media (in contrast to the arts), was finally brought under control. With digital signal processing, measuring circuits and algorithms (like an automated sound engineer) ride along on random frequencies. To- day this form of cybernetics ensures the sound of most reputable rock bands; in actuality, however, it was only a "new step" in ballistics. Ma- chines replaced Leibniz in the analysis of trajectories.
With the consequence that COLOSSUS gave birth to many a son, each more colossal than its secret father. According to the ministry of supply, Turing'S postwar computer ACE was supposed to calculate "grenades, bombs, rockets, and cruise missiles"; the American ENIAC "was to simulate trajectories of shells through varying conditions of air resistance and wind velocity, which involved the summation of thousands of little pieces of trajectories. " John von Neumann's EDVAC was being designed to solve "three-dimensional 'aerodynamic and shock-wave prob- lems, . . . shell, bomb and rocket work, . . . [and] progress in the field of propellants and high explosives"'; BINAC worked for the United States Air Force; ATLAS, for cryptoanalysis; and finally, MANIAC, if this sug- gestive name had been implemented in time, would have optimized the pressure wave of the first H-bomb. 221
Machines operating on the basis of recursive functions produce slow- motion studies not only of human thinking but also of human demise.
Typewriter 261
According to the insight of Pynchon and Virilio, the blitzkrieg and the flash-bulb shot (Blitzlichtaufnahme) coincide in the bomb that leveled Hiroshima during rush hour on August 6, 1945. A shutter speed of 0. 000000067 seconds, far below Mach's projectile-like, pioneering cine- matic feat of 1 8 83 , melted countless Japanese people " as a fine-vapor de- posit of fat-cracklings wrinkled into the fused rubble" of their city. 222 Cin- ema to be computed in computer processing speeds, and only in computer processing speeds.
On the film's manifest surface, everything proceeds as if the "mar- riage of two monsters"223 that John von Neumann had arranged between a German guided missile and an American A-bomb payload (that is, by saving both conventional amatol and conventional bomber pilots) by it- self had been the step from blitzkrieg to the strategic present. What speaks against that is that both guided missiles and nuclear weapons sur- mounted the iron and bamboo curtains with extraordinary ease-partly through espionage, partly through the transfer of technology. Different from the machine subject itself, the innocuous but fully automated type- computing machine. With the fiat of the theory that is omnipotent be- cause it is true, Stalin condemned the bourgeois aberration of cybernetics. As if materialism, in the espionage races with its other half, had been blinded by the disclosed secrets of mass extermination, the smoke trail of rockets and the flash of bombs.
Annihilation is still called determining the outcome of the war. Only 40 years later, classified archives have gradually revealed that Bletchley Park was presumably the most suitable candidate for this title. During the Second World War, a materialist who materialized mathematics itself emerged victorious. Regarding COLOSSUS and Enigma, Turing's biogra- pher writes that "intelligence had won the war"224 with the British liter- ality that does not distinguish among reason, secret service, and informa- tion machine. But that is exactly what remained a state secret. During the war, a whole organization emerged for the purpose of delivering the re- sults of fully automatized cryptoanalysis in coded form to the command- ing officers at the front. Otherwise, the most vital secret of the war (through seized documents, traitors, or treacherously revealing counter- measures) possibly would have filtered through to the German army, and Enigma would have been silenced. Hence it became secret agents' last his- torical assignment to invent radiant spy novels in order to camouflage the fact that interception and the type-computing machine respectively ren- der secret services and agents superfluous. ( Which is what spy novels con- tinue to do to this very day. ) The mysterious "Werther," who allegedly
2 6 2 Typewriter
Hiroshima before and after August 6, I94 5 .
transmitted many plans of attack from the Wolfsschanze via Swiss dou- ble agents to Moscow, but who has yet to be located historically, may well have been one of the simulacra that systematically screened Bletchley Park from the Red Army. 225 Then, at any rate, Stalin's theory would have had a material basis-nonproliferation of the flow of information.
On August 28, 1945, three weeks after Hiroshima, four weeks after Potsdam, U. S. President Truman issued a secret decree on secret service interception, an information blockage on information machines. War- determining cryptoanalysis became a matter of ultimate classified mate- rial-in the past and the present, technology and method, successes and results, Bletchley Park and Washington, D. C. 226 As a result of which the same, but now cold, war could start again immediately: in the shadow of Truman's decree, COLOSSUS and its American clones learned Russian instead of German. Hermetically sealed, "the legacy of a total war, and of the capture of a total communications system, could now turn to the con- struction of a total machine. "227
The success of this strategy of dissimulation is proved by its only leak. A writer, who not only knew the typewriter from secretaries but also reproduced it on the printed page, communicated in letter form to the warlords gathered in Potsdam that the symbolic has, through Enigma and COLOSSUS, become a world of the machine.
? ? ? Arno Schmidt , " Offener Brief "
An die Exzellenzen Herren
Truman (Roosevelt) , Stalin,
Churchill (Attlee ) Jalta, Teheran , Potsdam
8 c 357 8xup ZEUs !
id 21v18 Pt 7 gallisc 314002a 17 ? V 31 GpU 4a 29, 39, 49 ? rnz 71Fi16 34007129 pp 34 udil19jem 13349 bubu WEg !
aff 19 exi: 16 enu 070 zIrn 4019 abs12c 24 spil, 43 asti siv 13999 idle 48, 19037 pem 8 pho 36. 1012
sabi FR26a FlisCh 26:iwo - 18447 g7 gg !
Glent 3 1 , glent 14 Po Arno Schmidt 228
Under the conditions of high technology, literature has nothing more to say. It ends in cryptograms that defy interpretation and only permit in- terception. Of all long-distance connections on this planet today,229 from phone services to microwave radio, 0. 1 percent flow through the trans- mission, storage, and decoding machines of the National Security Agency
(NSA), the organization succeeding SIS and Bletchley Park. By its own ac- count, the NSA has "accelerated" the "advent of the computer age," and hence the end of history, like nothing else. 230 An automated discourse analysis has taken command.
And while professors are still reluctantly trading in their typewriters for word processors, the NSA is preparing for the future: from nursery school mathematics, which continues to be fully sufficient for books, to charge-coupled devices, surface-wave filters, digital signal processors in- cluding the four basic forms of computation. 231 Trenches, flashes of light- ning, stars-storage, transmission, the laying of cables.
Typewriter 263
? ? REFERENCE MATTER
? NOTES
TRANSLATORS' NOTE: The citation format for Kittler's text closely follows that of the German edition. When two publication dates are given, the first refers to the date of original publication, the second, either to a later edition used by Kittler or to an English translation. Page numbers refer to the latter date, which corresponds to the edition given in the Bibliography, pp. 299-3 1 5 .
TRANSLATORS' INTRODUCTION
? 1. Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to\Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), 3 2.
2. Ibid.
3 . Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1988), 136.
4. See ibid. , 79-8 1, and Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Cul- ture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993 ), 3-20.
5. Quoted in Boris Eichenbaum, "The Theory of the 'Formal Method,'" in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 803.
6. Friedrich Kittler, "Die Laterna magica der Literatur: Schillers und Hoff- manns Medienstrategien," in Athenaum: Jahrbuch fur Romantik I994, ed. Ernst Behler, Jochen Horisch, and Gunther Oesterle (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1994), 2 19 .
7. See, for example, Michael Heim, "The Computer as Component: Hei- degger and McLuhan," Philosophy and Literature 16. 2 (1992): 304-18; Judith Stamps, Unthinking Modernity: Innis, McLuhan and the Frankfurt School (Mon- treal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 19 9 5 ) ; and Glenn Willmott, McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1996).
8.
Theodore Roszak, "The Summa Popologica of Marshall McLuhan," in McLuhan: Pro & Con, ed. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968), 257-69.
'"
I
? 9. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory ofthe Media," in
268 Notes to Pages xv-xvii
The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Poetics and the Media, ed. Michael Roloff (New York: Seabury, 1974), lI8. See also Enzensberger's hilarious retrac- tion, "The Zero Medium, or Why All Complaints About Television are Point- less," in Mediocrity and Delusion: Collected Diversions, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Verso, 1992), 59-70. In an interesting twist, Klaus Theweleit has speculated that the German Left discarded McLuhan because his focus on bodies and media, extensions, narcosis, and self-amputation was more materialist than Marxism had ever been. See Theweleit, Buch der Konige I: Orpheus und Eury- dike (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 1988), 383,
10. Enzensberger, "Constituents," 97.
II. Jean Baudrillard, "Requiem for the Media," in For a Critique ofthe Po- litical Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos, 1981), 168.
12. Ibid. , 169.
13? Ibid. , 173.
14? Ibid. , 175?
15. The compound term Mediendiskursanalyse (the basis for our expression
"media discourse analysis") is occasionally used in German scholarship. Norbert Bolz may have been the first to combine its constituent parts when he outlined a program for a future "Diskursanalyse fur neue Medien. " See Bolz, Philosophie nach ihrem Ende (Munich: Boer, 1992), 172, and idem, "Computer als Medium," in Computer als Medium, ed. Bolz, Kittler, and Christoph Tholen (Munich: Fink, 1994), 15?
16. Klaus Laermann, "Lacancan und Derridada: Dber die Frankolatrie in den Kulturwissenschaften," Kursbuch 84 (1986): 36, 38, 41.
1 7 . Needless to say, the story can b e told neither impartially nor in its en- tirety: it is still going on and continuing divisions, spurred by the arrival of new approaches such as systems theory and radical constructivism, make it difficult, if not impossible, to find terms neutral enough to satisfy all parties involved. The following brief account only considers the politico-theoretical framework of the last three decades, although there are, of course, larger perspectives on postruc- turalism's hampered reception. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, for one, has argued that analytical procedures such as Derridean deconstruction, with its (potentially an- tihistorical) bias toward spatialization, did not sit easily with the traditional Ger- man bias in favor of temporalization; this may also explain why Freudian psycho- analysis fared better in France than it did in Germany or Austria. See Gumbrecht, "Who Is Afraid of Deconstruction? " in Diskurstheorien und Literaturwissen- schaft, eds. Jurgen Fohrmann and Harro Muller (Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp, 1988), 95-lI3?
1 8 . Holub, Crossing Borders: Reception Theory, Poststructuralism, Decon- struction (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 199 2 ) : 4 3 .
19. Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 172.
2 0 . Matthew Griffin and Susanne Herrmann, " Interview mit Friedrich A. Kittler," Weimarer Beitrage 43. 2 (1997): 286. Griffin and Herrmann miss the point by translating the phrase "schwarz in jeder Bedeutung" as "virtually black- listed" intheEnglishversionoftheirinterview("TechnologiesofWriting:Inter- view with Friedrich Kittler," New Literary History 27. 4 [1996]: 741). Also see
Notes to Pages xvii-xix 269
Kittler's harsh critique of the venerable Dialectic of Enlightenment, coauthored by the technologically ignorant "Fabrikantensohne" (manufacturers' sons) Horkheimer and Adorno: "Copyright 1944 by Social Studies Association, Inc. ," in Flaschenpost und Postkarte: Korrespondenzen zwischen Kritischer Theorie und Poststrukturalismus, ed. Sigrid Weigel (Cologne: B6hlau, 1995), 185-93. For a brief but informed introduction to the German theoretical debates of the 1980s, see Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Reappraisals: Shifting Alignments in Postwar Critical Theory (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 187-97.
21. In 1978 the volume Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel appeared, which contained Kaiser's "hermeneutical-dialectic" interpretation of novellas by Gott- fried Keller, Kittler's "discourse-analytical" reading of Goethe's Wilhelm Meis- ter, and a beautifully tortured preface trying to tie the two essays together. What they ultimately end up sharing is a common enemy, the "Marxist theory of the re- flection of social conditions and processes in the literary work, as well as . . . the neo-Marxist aesthetics of Adorno" (Gerhard Kaiser and Friedrich A. Kittler, Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel: Studien zu Goethe und Gottfried Keller [G6ttin- gen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978], 9).
2 2 . Manfred Frank, What Is Neostructuralism? trans. Richard Gray (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, I989 ) .
Sabine Wilke and
23. See H6risch, Die Wut des Verstehens: Zur Kritik der Hermeneutik (Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp, 1988), 50-66.
24. Urszenen: Literaturwissenschaft als Diskursanalyse und Diskurskritik, ed. Friedrich A. Kittler and Horst Turk (Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp, 1977). Con- taining essays by Kittler, Bolz, and'H6risch, this collection marks the beginning of French-inspired German literary s&olarship.
25. See Norbert Bolz, ed. , Goeth? s 'Wahlverwandtschaften': Kritische Mod- elle und Diskursanalysen zum Mythos,Literatur (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, I98 I); Jochen H6risch, Die andere Goethezeit: Poetische Mobilmachung des Subjekts um I800 (Munich: Fink, 1992); and Kittler, Dichter Mutter Kind (Munich: Fink,
I991). A well-known early example is the Lacanian reading of Kleist by Helga Gallas, Das Textbegehren des 'Michael Kohlhaas': Die Sprache des Unbewuf5ten und der Sinn der Literatur ( Reinbek: Rowohlt, 198 I ) .
26. Frank, WhatIsNeostructuralism? 313.
27. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar ofJacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Techniques ofPsychoanalysis I954-I955, ed. Jacques- Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988), 46.
28. Kittler, "The World of the Symbolic-A World of the Machine," in idem, Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays, ed. and intro. John Johnston, trans. Stefanie Harris (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, I997), 1H.
2 9 . Ibid. , 1 4 5 , referring to the following passage (Lacan, Seminar II , 89 ) : "This discourse of the other is not the discourse of the abstract other, of the other in the dyad, of my correspondent, nor even of my slave, it is the discourse of the circuit in which I am integrated. I am one of its links. "
30. George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Crit- ical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992), H. 31. GregoryUlmer,AppliedGrammatology:Post(e)-PedagogyfromJacques
Derrida to Joseph B euys (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 198 5 ) , 3 0 3 .
? 270 Notes to Pages xix-xxii
3 2 . See Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr. , "The Electronic Panopticon: Censorship, Control and Indoctrination in a Post-Typographic Culture," in Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers, ed. Myron C. Tuman (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 167-88; and Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context ( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), 69-98.
3 3 . Regis Debray, Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms, trans. Eric Rauth (New York: Verso, 1996), 54.
3 4 . Bolz, Philosophie nach ihrem Ende, 1 5 4 .
3 5 . Hans H. Hiebel, " Strukturale Psychoanalyse und Literatur, " i n Neue Literaturtheorien, ed. Klaus-Michael Bogdal (Darmstadt: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990), 69. See also Kittler, "'Das Phantom unseres Ichs' und die Literaturpsy- chologie: E. T. A. Hoffmann-Freud-Lacan," in Urszenen, 139-66.
36. See Kittler, Dichter Mutter Kind, 7-17, and Horisch's belated preface to Die andere Goethezeit, 7-9. See also Kittler's remarks in Griffin and Herrmann, "Technologies of Writing," 74 1 : " When I think of my oId literary criticism, the good essays are actually didactic pieces in programming. How did Duke Carl Eugen von Wurtemberg [sic] program Friedrich Schiller? I didn't write about Schiller's sentiments or religion, because all I had was a bare-bones model: educa- tors and princes program the novelist for a specific civil function in the state. What you need is a fundamental understanding of concepts such as hardware, programming, automatization, and regulation. "
37. Kittler, Discourse Networks, I8ooiI900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), 177.
38. All of these essays first appeared in the 1980s, but where possible we have provided an English translation: "Wie man abschafft, wovon man spricht: Der Autor von Ecce Homo," in Literaturmagazin 12: Nietzsche, ed. Nicolas Born, Jurgen Manthey, and Detlev Schmidt (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1980), 1 5 3-78; "Pink Floyd, 'Brain Damage,'" in europalyrik 1775 bis heute: Gedichte und Interpreta- tionen, ed. Klaus Lindemann (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1982), 467-77; "Das Alibi eines Schriftstellers-Peter Handkes Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter," in Das schnelle Altern der neuesten Literatur, ed. Jochen Horisch and Hubert Winkels (Dusseldorf: Claassen, 198 5 ), 60-72; "tiber die Kunst, mit Vogeln zu ja- gen: The Maltese Falcon von D. Hammett," in Phantasie und Deutung: Psychol- ogisches Verstehen von Film und Literatur, eds. Wolfram Mauser, Ursula Renner, and Walter Schonau (Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1986), 299-314; "Dracula's Legacy," Stanford Humanities Review 1. 1 (1989-90): 143-73; "The Mechanized Philosopher," in Looking After Nietzsche, ed. Lawrence A. Rickels (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1990), 195-207; "World-Breath: On Wagner's Media Technology," in Opera Through Other Eyes, ed. David J. Levin (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford Univ. Press, 1994), 215-35; and "Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second World War," trans. Michael Wutz and Geoffrey Winthrop- Young, in Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology, ed. Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell Univ. Press, 1997), 157-72.
39. Kittler, "Ein Erdbeben in Chili und PreuiSen," in Positionen der Liter- aturwissenschaft: Acht Modellanalysen am Beispiel von Kleists 'Das Erdbeben in Chili,' ed. David E. Wellbery (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1985), 24.
? Notes to Pages xxii-xxxii 271
40. As Michael Giesecke points out in his monumental study of the early print age, media theorists have themselves only recently started to pay full atten- tion to the "neglected difference" between scriptography and typography. Michael Giesecke, Der Buchdruck in der friihen Neuzeit: Eine historische Fallstudie iiber die Durchsetzung neuer Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (Frank- furt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 29.
4 I . See Kittler, "Autorschaft und Liebe," in Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften: Programme des Poststrukturalismus, ed. Friedrich A. Kitt- ler (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1980), 142-73 .
42. Griffin and Herrmann, "Technologies of Writing," 734.
43. See Wellbery, foreword to Kittler, Discourse Networks, xix.
44. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 3 69.
45. Kittler, "Benn's Poetry-'A Hit in the Charts': Song Under Conditions of
Media Technologies," SubStance 61 (1990): 6.
4 6 . Kittler, Discourse Networks, 3 4 7 .
47. Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language ofModernism
(Princeton, N. ]. : Princeton Univ. Press, 1993 ), 74.
48. Gottfried Benn, "Vortrag in Knokke," in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Dieter
Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1959), 4: 543. See also Kittler, Discourse Net- works, 177.
