No More Learning

G. G. (1395-1468}". First pub- lished in a collection of poems called "Mausoleum. SiebenunddreiRig Balladen aus der Geschichte des Fortschritts" ("Mausoleum. Thirty- seven ballads from the history of progress") Frankfurt I Main, 1975, p. 9 copyright Suhrkamp Verlag.
In some instances we have been unable to trace the owners of copyright material and we would appreciate any information that would enable us to do so.
18
? ? ? ? PREFACE
o glariose stelle, 0 lume pregno Di gran virtu, dal quale io riconosco Tutto, che si sia, 10 mio ingegno. Dante, Paradiso XXII
To be purely truthful, every lecture coucerning optical media should begin by praising the star that first made it possible to see earthly things at all. "There is nothing more beautiful under the sun than to be under the sun," wrote Ingeborg Bachmann from the humble view- point of this Earth (Bachmann, 1994, p. 219). Leonardo da Vinci, an older and more arrogant European, said the same thing from the viewpoint of the sun itself: "II sole non vide mai nessuna ombra - The sun never sees a shadow. " (Codex Atlanticus, 300 r. b. )
But in a world whose everyday life is determined by science and technology rather than the sun, lectures are always already on the other side of light. The optical media in my title all act and operate in that shadow, which the sun, according to Leonardo, does not see. In other words, art and technology represent two different ways of shifting the boundaries of visuality, so to speak, by either misusing or circumventing the sun. At first, these lectures will look at European painting since the Renaissance in a traditional or aesthetic way, in order to discern the principles according to which modern visual perception was organized. In this artisanal, hand-crafted phase of optical media, however, it should already become clear that they would not have been conceivable without calculations, and thus they also required a technical-scientific foundation. The technical appara- tus could therefore detach itself from the eyes and hands of so-called
artists and form those absolutely autonomous spheres - optical media 19
? ? PREF ACE
technologies - that surround us or even determine us today. The path
of the lecture leads, to sum it up in one sentence, from Renaissance
linear perspective, past the almost already old-fashioned technolo- gies of photography, film, and television, to late twentieth-century computer graphics.
In doing so, however, I am taking on an apparently impossible task: I am using texts to speak about relatively recent lived realities, which are by definition neither language nor text, neither oral nor written. Photographs, films, and television screens normally have no place in the humanities. Indeed, they had no place in academic lectures at all, no matter what the discipline, so long as universities were universities, meaning that the German state was not yet com- mitted to installing audiovisual technology at precisely the same time in courts, prisons, and traffic intersections for police surveillance, as well as in academic lecture halls. The state agreed to supply video cameras and monitors - I am citing from official documents - as "a necessary technical adaptation of public education iustitutions to the communication level of the times and its financial, organizational, and politico-educational effects. " This is how it came about that the great art historian Heinrich Wi:ilfflin - according to a comment by Horst Bredekamp - attributed his greatness above all to the fact that Wi:ilfflin or one of his assistants invented the dual projection of all the images dealt with in his lectures.
Before this technical break, on the other hand, lectures were not visual at all. One hundred and twenty years ago, as a young philoso- phy ptofessor in Basel, Friedrich Nietzsche described how classical German universities functioned. In the last of his five lectures entitled On the Future of Our Educational Institutions he writes:
If a foreigner desires to know something of the methods of our uni- versities, he asks first of all with emphasis: "How is the student con- nected with the university? " We answer: "By the ear, as a hearer. " The foreigner is astonished. "Only by the ear? " he repeats. "Only by the ear," we again reply. The student hears. When he speaks, when he sees, when he is in the company of his companions, when he takes up some branch of art: in short, when he lives, he is independent, i. e. not dependent upon the educational institution. The student very often writes down something while he hears; and it is only at these rare moments that he hangs to the umbilical cord of his Alma Mater. He himself may choose what he is to listen to; he is not bound to believe what is said; he may close his ears if he does not care to hear [. . . J The teacher, however, speaks to these listening students. Whatever else he may think and do is cut off from the student's perception by
20
? ? ? ? PREFACE
an immense gap. The professor often reads when he is speaking. As a rule he wishes to have as many hearers as possible; he is not content to have a few, and he is never satisfied with one only. One speaking mouth) with many ears, and half as many writing hands - there you have to all appearances, the external academical apparatus; the uni- versity engine of culture set in motion. (Nietzsche, 1964, pp. 125-6)
This is Nietzsche's incredibly precise, because it is ethnological, description of our workplace, whose audiovisual future he could not yet have foreseen. As you can see, or rather hear, the absence of visual pleasure in the old universities was no small source of pride. A lecture, therefore, via the ear, or eventually even on the radio, remained totally within the classical framework; the realm of the old European universities wasn't conclusively blown open until optical media, i. e. that which "the student" (and since the Prussian educa- tional reforms of 1908 this also included the female student) sees, became a subject.
I confess, however, that all of Nietzsche's irony cannot bring me to elevate the theme of these lectures to its medium. In other words, I will make no use of the state's offer of video recorders, monitors, and projectors for pedagogical or other purposes. If it turns out to be possible - that is, above all, if someone manages to find an interface between computer and television monitors during the course of the semester - visual examples should be woven in, but I would prefer the experimental rather than the entertaining, silent film or com- puter graphics rather than blockbusters. Otherwise, the medium of the lecture will generally remain the same mixture of acoustics and textuality that Nietzsche so ironically and precisely described. This at least has the methodological advantage that it looks at contemporary optical media from the exact same outside and ethnological perspec- tive that Nietzsche applied to the activity of lecturing in his own day.
I thus come to the question of the subject matter and methods that you should expect here. In order not to disappoint latecomers (like myself this semester), the remainder of today's general lecture will discuss first the subject matter, second its possible practical relevance, and third the methods.
Concerning the subject matter - as I said, the lecture will convey an ethnological look at the wealth of man-made images of the last hundred years, and it will therefore precisely fill in the time between Nietzsche's diagnosis and the present. To do that, though, we must first go further afield, and the first step of all is to tackle the long prehistory of contemporary optical media, in which images were
21
? PREFACE
actually painted but could neither be stored nor transmitted, let alone move. In this prehistory, images appeared together with literary texts - as book illustrations or diagrams, as pictures of mythological models, or finally as imaginary images produced by literature in the so-called inner eye of the reader. In this respect, there were centu- ries at least that already belonged to the history of optical media, as they dreamed of modern technologies and developed mechanical devices, whose scientific realization was finally made possible in the nineteenth century through photography and film. The most signifi- cant among these apparatuses are above all the camera obscura as a device for recording images and the lanterna magica as a device for reproducing images. These devices were more than mere technical aids for perspectival painting since the time of the Renaissance, and their connections to the basic technology of the printing press, as well as the role they performed in the media war between the Reforma- tion and the Counter-Reformation or between the printing press and church imagery, will be thoroughly dealt with. For film did not fall from heaven, but rather it can only be understood through the fan- tasies and the politics that its invention was responding to. The fact that television, as far as I can see, was not once seriously imagined until its factual development also calls for analysis.
In the second step, after a run-through of the prehistory, we will examine the history of how images first learned to be stored and then also to move. As we know, both happened in the nineteenth century, which began with the development of photography and ended with the development of film. To understand this long nineteenth century, as Martin Heidegger called it, media historically we must address the question of how the new image technologies especially affected the old arts, which had been handed down for centuries or millen- nia. The competitive relationship between photography and painting is well known, but less is known about the relationship between film and theater. With the exception of a single theater historian, little light has been shed on how ballet, opera, and theater - at least since the nineteenth century, but also in innovations like the baroque proscenium or "picture-frame" stage - evolved from ele- ments that would later constitute cinema. This can be seen above all in Babbage and Faraday's lighting engineering, but it was epitomized in Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk. Proof should therefore be offered that Wagnerian opera is really and truly cinematic, as Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy already predicted.
The local aim of such arguments is also to prove clearly that Humboldt University is fully justified in joining the disciplines of
22
? ? PREFACE
media history, art history, musicology, and theater studies into a single faculty. Central is the question of the effects that the develop- ment of film in particular had on the ancient monopoly of writing itself. Theater and opera are only examples of art forms that func- tioned in parasitical dependence on the monopoly of writing; think about the role of role in theater or score in opera. On the other hand, the introduction of technical media disrupts this monopoly as such, and it therefore works on a level that is more radical than competi- tion. The issue thus becomes not only which forms of competition film provoked for novelists - since 1910 they are all somewhere between the extremes of having their work adapted or rejected by the film industry - but also the new status of books themselves under audiovisual conditions. The range of possibilities is quite diverse: there are books whose letters form themselves into images, other books that are written such that they can be hallucinated as films, and yet others (like Kafka's story The Judgment) that refuse every illustration. And when one considers that contemporary novelists like Thomas Pynchon (who will play the role of a principal witness for film and television in these lectures) have had all photographs of themselves destroyed, it is possible to measure the abyss between literature and optical media.
But to come back to the media themselves: in the third step, these lectures will attempt to derive the structures of film and cinema from the history of their development. In the sequence from silent film to sound and color film - three stages that oddly enough cor- relate fairly closely with the outbreak of two world wars - we see the emergence of different media-specific solutions (if not outright tricks). On the one hand, I will attempt to present these solutions in a technical way in order to incorporate what film analysis and film semiotics normally have to teach concerning montage, focus, light- ing, directing, etc. Elementary facts concerning the film material, the film apparatus, and the lighting and sound recording system simply must be mentioned. On the other hand, I will also explain how the phases in the development of film are connected to media history in general- not only with the history of other entertainment media, like radio, but also with the development of science and technology and their military applications more generally. This part of the lecture will no longer be concerned only with registering the reactions of writers to film, but rather it appears - according to the work of Thorsten Lorenz - as if cinema, this new ostentatious form of technical display, called the meaning of modern theory itself into question. After all, apart from the old ritualistic meaning of "carnival procession," the
23
? ? ? PREFACE
word "theory" - the primary word of the Greek philosophers - meant
nothing other than "look," "observe," "a feast for the eyes," "a spectacle," or even "pageantry," and it first assumed the meaning of "scholarly teaching" after or through Plato. This is the reason why theorists - who, like Bergson and Sartre, Freud and Benjamin, have hecome contemporaries of cinema - are confronted with the question of what has hecome of their spectacles, which exist only as letters in books, under audiovisual conditions. As you have probably already guessed, the technical spectacle did not sit well with the theoretical one.
Like every victory, however, it should not be forgotten that the triumph of film in the twentieth century was temporary. In contrast to the forgetfulness or nostalgia of many film scholars (whereby for- getfulness and nostalgia probably coincide), it should be emphasized that in the eyes of technicians film was already from the start, long before its heyday, seen as only provisional. Mechanical-chemical image recording, mechanical storage, and mechanical playback are out of place in a century that is defined primarily through the conver- sion of traditional media to electricity. Without Edison's invention of the electric light bulb his film equipment would surely also not have been built, but light bulbs still are not electrical telecommunications. I will therefore show next how electrical telecommunications enabled the transition from silent to sound film - with consequences, inciden- tally, that extended far beyond technology to the financial structure of the film market. In the second part of these lectures, howeveJ; the central issue will be the fully electronic visual medium, and this will require an understanding of the electron tube, which was produced from Edison's light bulb literally behind his back. The fully electronic optical medium, in so far as it has not already been superseded by LCD screens, was based for almost a century on Braun electron tubes: I am speaking of course about television.
As a fully electronic medium, television - if you will pardon this necessary truism - is just as ubiquitous as it is mystifying, and therein lies its much heralded power. I don't know how many of you would be able to operate a television studio or even repair a television set. This technology is so extremely complicated in comparison to film that we are also required to pursue television history in order to learn anything about the modus operandi of electronic image- processing from its first tentative steps to today's image standard. These lectures must therefore deal step by step with cable television prior to World War II, black-and-white television after 1945, and finally the three color standards that exist today, without overlook-
24
? ? PREFACE
mg qUIte unentertammg, namely mliltary devices ilke radar, which made civilian television possible. The legal, social, and political dimensions of the prevailing programming structures are then only consequences of these technical solutions. I recall an American presi? dent who came out of the film industry and who governed with television interviews.
With the way things are today, however, that is not the end of the matter, and these lectures will not end there. As an electronic medium, television is to us (that IS, to consumers) only the outward face of an empIre that IS already now beginmng to stnke back. I recall yet again that president, who not only governed with television inter- views but also formulated plans for an optical-electronic future war. With the introduction of video recorders and video cameras in private households - and most apparent in the case of computer screens, which are also in the process of revolutionizing the offices and desks of lecturers and students - this empire casts out at least a silhouette of its power. In ten years' time, it is higbly unlikely that feature films will be on celluloid at all, but rather there will only be one form of standardized opto-electronics, a universal discrete signal processing tbat coincides with the universal discrete data-processor known as the computer. It is my professed goal to conclude this lecture not with the oldest preserved silent film or with the latest program from RTL,
but rather with computer simulations of optical worlds, no matter if they enable us to visualize the unreality of mathematical formu- las like Benoit Mandelbrot's "apple men" or they hyperrealistically reconfigure our so-called reality like raytracing or radiosity. ' And because such simulations are also the only conceivable future of film and television for practical and economic reasons, it is important in this lecture at least to understand the principles according to which computer programs allow such images to move.
That is all concerning the content of these lectures and the expla- nation of its title. I have not forgotten the seemingly more obvious title Film and Television History, but rather I have simply avoided it. Many newly established media institutes at German universities concentrate or insist on film and television, but this appears to me as a risky simplification of media technology in general in favor of its most entertaining and user-friendly effects. In contrast, the title Optical Media should signal a systematic problem and place the general
lIGttler develops the contrast between raytracing and radiosity in "Computer Graphics: A Semi-Technical Introduction," trans. Sarah Ogger, Grey Room 2 (Winter 200n 30-45.
25
. . . .
? PREFACE
principles of image storage, transmission, and processing above their various realizations. This general and systematic approach does not result in philosophical abstractions, but rather it reveals underlying structures: when it is made clear first that all technical media either store, transmit, or process signals and second that the computer (in theory since 1936, in practice since the Second World War) is the only medium that combines these three functions - storage, transmis- sion, and processing - fully automatically, it is not surprising that the endpoint of these lectures must be the integration of optical media and the universal discrete machine known as the computer.
This overview has hopefully already shown that the connection of old traditional arts like literature, painting, and theater, on the one hand, with technical media on the other hand should not be mere addition. I am therefore attempting a first, if you will, system design. At Humboldt University, when it was still called by its proper name, Friedrich Wilhelm University, a certain Hegel met every week in lecture room six to put all of the arts that could exist under the conditions of the book monopoly in systematic order according to their form and content, genre and historical progression. And that was indeed a flight of Minerva's owl, which is seen only at sunset: less than ten years after Hegel's death the storage monopoly of books (and thus of philosophical lectures) came to an end with the public presentation of photography. We are therefore confronted today with the insane and probably impossible task of developing a historical and systematic knowledge base for an art and media system under highly technical conditions that would be comparable to the one that Hegel, in an incomparable way, was able to construct under consider- ably more limited conditions.
This systematic question, and the attempt to resolve it through historical analysis, also comes with a warning: please do not expect a history of directors, stars, studios, and celebrities; in other words, please do not expect a history of film and television, which in the end remains organized around a sequence of titles, just like most literary histories. Apart from the theoretical question as to whether technical media make concepts like the author and the subject obsolete, such a history would be practically useless for me, as I have seen far fewer films than most of you. There are enough special courses in cultural studies that provide film and television histories focused directly on the feature film, which could then also be supplemented by courses in media production.
That is all for my preliminary sketch of how these lectures relate to the subject. As a former Germanist, howeve! ; I would also like to
26
? ? PREF ACE
address the students of literature and German among you. It should have already become implicitly clear - but to allay any fears I will say it again - that the problems posed by writing and its aesthetics will certainly not be left out. An analysis that examines both the intersec- tions and dividing lines between writing culture and image technol- ogy within a historical context is precisely a methodical preparation for the pressing question of what the status of writing or literature can be today.
We know the familiar twentieth-century answers. Under the massive primacy of audiovisual entertainment electronics, which according to many media theorists like Walter J. Ong "brought us into the age of secondary orality" that resembles archaic and therefore allegedly non-literate cultures (Ong, 1991, p. 136), droves of "authors" have taken over the functions of screenplay suppliers or the writers of technical instruction manuals. Others have opted for the opposite approach by claiming that the only serious modern criterion for literature is its structural unfilmability.
While such options require the ability to write and read fluently, we know that audiovisual media have led to a new illiteracy. Like Hiilderlin's notion that salvation lies close to danger, however, this new illiteracy may also be the answer to the current status of writing. According to American surveys conducted eight years ago in con- nection with former president Bush's extremely fruitless educational reform plans, an astonishing percentage of high school graduates are unable to write their own names. Don't ask me what kinds of simulations such students employed to pass their final examinations. The ability to write one's own name was certainly important in the case of Faust, as he signed the pact with the devil, and the ability to sign checks also counts in economic terms; the mere absence of this ability, however, does not explain the horror that accompanied the spread of the new illiteracy. Indeed, the industry that complained about such deficiencies among high school graduates did not seem interested in providing students with a further proficiency in the 26 letters, but rather it devised (typically enough under the overall control of Kodak, the largest photography and film company in the world) an entirely different future for writing. In factories, which in
the meantime have all been re-equipped with CAD and Computer Aided Manufacturing, it would be a glaring impossibility to continue employing workers who were unable to master the following literacy skills: to read or draw the flow chart of an electronic circuit, to under- stand or write a small computer program, to read or even program the graphic display on a computer screen. That is quite literally the
27
? ? ? PREFACE
job description that the industry Itself provided for graduates, and thus also for America itself, in the 1990s.
These lectures, to put it with the requisite innocence, were fornm- lated with a knowledge of this job description. There is every reason to believe, namely, that the educational program they outlined will be implemented throughout at least half of the world. Someonc able to master both the old craft of writing and the recently developed technology of digital image-processing would therefore have better career prospects. And for me, that job description of the future serves as a welcome justification for the risky undertaking of dealing not only with conventional film and television but also with the newest technologies like imaging. It appears as if opportunities in the fnture are expected to be better in the field of video, which will explode through the link to compnter technology, than they are for the practi- cally obsolete dream of becoming the last and greatest of all feature film directors. The linking up of a fiber-optic cable network, which will replace the notoriously narrow bandwidth of copper wires, will increase the need for transmittable and processable images just as the need for mythical stories about Hollywood's mythical stories will decrease. It is not without reason that Bill Gates attempted in the last few years to realign his quasi-monopoly on computer operating systems with yet another monopoly on digital images. A Micro- soft snbsidiary by the name of Corbis travels around all possible museums, archives, and picture collections, generously abstaining from buying any of the stored originals, but receiving for a trifling sum the digital rights for those copies that Corbis itself has scanned (Schmiederer, 1998). And because you can imagine that cities like Florence or even Berlin have more beautiful pictures than Tallahas- see or Petaluma, the liou's share of Corbis' loot comes from Europe, which has not yet learned enough about optical media to protect its own digital rights from Microsoft.
More cannot be said about the practical relevance of these lec- tures. But this also provides a transition to the third point to be dealt with today: the theoretical assumptions and basic concepts I will be working with.
28
? -1-
THEORETICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS
The basic concept in the following history and analysis is the concept of the medium in the technical sense, which was developed above all by Marshall McLuhan, whose work was based on the fundamental historical groundwork laid by Harold Adams Innis. This Canadian school, as it was christened by Canadian insider Arthur Kroker (Kroker, 1984), attempted to examine the technical media and the immediacy with which they were let loose on the population of the western hemisphere following the Second World War. According to McLuhan, media are the intersecting points (Schnittstellen) or interfaces between technologies, on the one hand, and bodies, on the other. McLuhan went so far as to write that under audiovisual conditions our eyes, ears, hands, etc. no longer belong to the bodies they are associated with at all, let alone to the subjects that figure in philosophical theory as the masters of the aforementioned bodies, but rather to the television companies they are connected to. This connection between technology and physiology, which is not simply dialectical but rather direct, should be recorded and extended. Only McLuhan, who was originally a literary critic, understood more about perception than electronics, and therefore he attempted to think about technology in terms of bodies instead of the other way around. According to the analytical stress model, which had just been discovered at that time, technical prostheses of a sensory organ - in other words, media - were said to have replaced a natural or physiological function, and the biological function itself acted as the subject of the replacement: an eye that is armed with lenses or glasses (a beautiful expression) performs a paradoxical operation, according to McLnhan, as it extends and amputates itself at the same time. In this way, McLuhan is part of a long tradition that can be traced back
29
-
? OPTICAL MEDIA
to Ernst Kapp and Sigmund Freud, who conceived of an apparatus as a prosthesis for bodily organs.
In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud above all formulated very drastically how, on the basis of telescopes, microscopes, gramo- phones, and telephones - as always, Freud does not mention film - so-called modern "[m]an has, as it were, become a kind of a prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent," yet he is abject without them because "those organs have not grown on to him" (Freud, 1953-74, XXI, pp. 91-2).
Nothing against this mixture of power and powerlessness, the sub- limity and the absurdity of people according to Freud and McLuhan; but their unquestioned assumption that the subject of all media is naturally the human is methodologically tricky.
For when the development of a medial subsystem is analyzed in all of its historical breadth, as the history of optical media is being analyzed here, the exact opposite suspicion arises that technical innovations - follow- ing the model of military escalations - only refer and answer to each other, and the end result of this proprietary development, which progresses completely independent of individual or even collective bodies of people, is an overwhelming impact on senses and organs in general. McLuhan, who converted to Catholicism long before his international career, hoped to gain something like the redemption of all literature or literary studies from the electronic media of the present and the future. To verify this point, which is cardinal for our context, I cite the following passage:
Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower of Babel" by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code Of language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to bypass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness. (McLuhan, 1964, pp. 83-4)
In contrast to such an arch-catholic media cult, which simply con- fuses the Holy Spirit and Turing's machine, it is hopefully sufficient to point out that the development of all previous technical media, in the field of computers as well as optical technology, was for purposes directly opposed to cosmic harmony - namely, military purposes.
But such a lack of clarity in McLuhan's concept of media should not prevent further work on his fundamental theses. You are
30
? ? ? THEORETICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS
presumably familiar with the famous formula that the medium is the message. Without this formula, which virtually prohibits lookiog for something else behind technically manufactured surfaces, media studies would actually continne to have a subject - just as mysteri- ous fields like theology or World Ice Theory' have subjects - bnt media studies itself would not exist as snch in isolation or with any methodological clarity. To determine the concrete subject of media studies one need only connect McLuhan's formula "the medium is the message" - as well as the mock formnla he himself came up with in his later years, "the medium is the massage" - with its lesser-known explication that the content of a medium is always another medium. It is therefore obvions that, to take the first example that comes to mind, in the relationship between feature film and television the most popular content of television broadcasts is film, the content of this film is naturally a novel, the content of this novel is naturally a typescript, the content of this typescript, etc. , etc. , until at some point one returns back to the Babylonian tower of everyday languages.
Taking up McLuhan seems even more advisable because German media studies typically proceeds on entirely different grounds and with entirely different fundameotal hypotheses. As Werner Faulstich, one of its leading representatives, repeatedly emphasizes, this media studies sees itself as a direct continnation of the research areas of popular fiction, on the one hand, and the sociology of literature, on the other hand, which both rose to prominence in the 1960s (Faulstich, 1979, p. 15).
Literary scholars who do not forget media would have thus been permitted to remain safely in the native realm of their own intel- lects; it is doubtful, however, whether such a trivial, content-based approach to media, which are themselves already the message accord- ing to McLuhan's contrary thesis, comes near enough to their techni- cal complexity. We would always only be able to grasp the external fa,ade that the electronics industry consciollsly displays, while the interior of the apparatus would remain concealed beneath its cover, whose instructions permit it to be opened only by an expert. Perhaps
1 A cosmological theory proposed by Hans Horbiger and Philipp Fauth, which was first published in their 1912 book Glazial-Kosmogonie (Glacial Cosmogony). Horbiger and Fauth claimed that the Milky Way was composed of blocks of ice, and over time these blocks of ice collided and formed planets. They also claimed that the moon was a block of ice, and previous moons collided with the Earth on several occa- sions, causing the great flood and the destruction of Atlantis. Because it contradicted Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, the National Socialist Party promoted World Ice Theory as an alternative to "Jewish" science.
31
? ? ? oPTICAL MEDIA
the voluntary self-control of German media studies and its particular focus on trivial or popular content was plausible for so long because on the side of media production itself content and technology fell into separate areas of competence, offices, and organizations. But it is obsolete in the age of the computer, which supersedes this separation on all levels. The only thing that remains is to take the concept of media from there - in a step also beyond McLuhan - to where it is most at home: the field of physics in general and telecommunications in particular. At the beginning of our next meeting, I will attempt to provide you with a systematic introduction to this topic by first of all presenting the basic concepts that Claude Shannon developed in his 1949 mathematical theory of communication - otherwise known as modern information theory (Shannon and Weaver, 1949). What emerges in place of a conglomeration of different media, as German media theorists always still describe it, is a systematic outline, a general connecting thread with which many individual threads could be strung together.
Second, the consequence of employing the media concept of tele- communications is that media studies cannot be limited solely to the study of media that (to be brief and clear) have a public, civilian, peaceful, democratic, and paying audience. For example, in Faul- stich's Critical Keywords in Media Studies he proposes that closed circuit television systems, like those used for department store secu- rity, are of peripheral importance compared to the television, which is more often examined in media studies. That may be statistically true, but it is methodologically unacceptable. For when it can be shown that precisely the civilian and private use of video recorders has arisen from such security systems, it also becomes clear how artificial the dividing line between mass media and high technology is and how much it hinders the analysis of connections. In the end, the catego- rization of technical media according to their price and their display in department stores only conceals what the late Albert Einstein called the general explosion of information in the present. Einstein was thus strangely (and unforeseeably) in agreement with Heidegger that the explosion of information is more dangerous than all atomic
bombs.
When one is methodologically inclined towards a general concept
of media and information, though, the problem emerges whether and how some areas can be excluded. For this lecture especially, we are confronted with the problem of acoustic media; although they are not included in the title, they are increasingly networked with optical media. Because the general concept of information is not
32
? ? THEORETICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS
philosophical but rather technical, which means that it has already ensured its own realization, it is increasingly difficult for telecommu- nications to be specified and defined through its contents or sensory fields. The development of optical media closely parallels the devel- opment of acoustic media, and in some cases they even developed in conjunction with one another. This can be seen in Edison's work on phonography and film and Nipkow's work on telephony and televi- sion. Indeed, there would be no television at all if radio technologies had not been developed, which then - after many technical contor- tions that would never have been necessary for the transmission of voice and music - were also brought to the point where they could be used to transmit images.
After attempting to separate this lecture from sociological and other approaches, what remains are the problems presented by the history of technology itself. In spite of all the metamorphoses of art scholars into engineers, can there be a history of technology at all within the context of cultural studies? In a book about early silent fihn whose title, Knowledge is Medium, is borrowed from McLuhan, Thorsten Lorenz put his finger on the problem: film is simply patent number so-and-so - the plan to build a new device that the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumiere submitted in 1895 and that was also awarded by the French government. Every additional word about film beyond this degenerates into cultural or cultural studies gossip. From this, Lorenz decides to take the next logical step and write his obviously cultural studies book not about film but rather about the cultural studies gossip about film.
In our context, however, the suggested practical relevance already excludes such radicality. I will therefore focus on the history of technology and will not exclude comments on patent specifications if only, at the very least, to convey a certain know-how. To a large extent, though, the technical explanations will be oriented towards each of the beginning stages of the development of optical media in order to avoid the difficulties associated with understanding the mathematics. For didactic reasons, it is advisable to present solu- tions to complicated technical problems at the moment they first emerged, as they are therefore in a condition where they are still easily comprehensible and apperceptible basic circuits, which the inventors themselves must first convert from everyday language into sketches of technical plans, so to speak. In contrast, a television appliance in its contemporary, practically finished form has been through so many development teams and laboratories that it is impossible for anyone to account for all of its individual parts any more.
33
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
This emphasis on solutions to early problems runs the risk, as in many histories of film, of falling under the spell of a cult of genius pioneers or inventors and so forgetting the quotidian aspects of the media industry once it is established. But when this developmental history is represented in some detail, as I will attempt, the aura of these individual geniuses dissolves. Not only is genius one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, as Edison once said, but according to McLuhan's law the development of media under highly technical conditions always requires the development of other media and thus the sweat of others as well. One must therefore consider developmental teams, subsequent developments, optimizations and improvements, altered functions of individual devices, and so on; this means, in the end, an entire history of the industry. At this point, though, I immediately recognize my own limits: the history of film and television that I will present does not include the actual history of the industry. I am neither a publicist nor an economist, so I can only deal with the economic and financial conditions of what might perhaps be called the global image trade through hints and references.
In place of the missing history of the industry, which is and remains merely suggested, these lectures will stress two other themes, which follow quite directly from my previous comments on McLuhan. The first concerns the relationship between the history of technology and the body, and the second concerns the relationship between modern technologies and modern warfare.
First, technology and the body: the naked thesis, to place it imme- diately up front, would read as follows: we knew! lothing about our senses until media provided models and metaphors. To make this brief thesis seem plausible, I will give you two extremely opposed historical examples:
a) As alphabetical writing, this new medium of Attic democracy, was standardized on a governmental level in Athens, philosophy also emerged as Socratic dialogue, which the student Plato then put into writing, as we know. Thus, the question was on the table as to which tools philosophers could actually employ. The answer was not the new ionic vowel alphabet, as a media historian like myself would have to answer; rather, the answer was that philosophers philosophized with their souls. All that remained for Socrates and his enthusiastic interlocutors (enthusiastic because they felt flattered) was to explain what the soul itself was. And 10 and behold: a definition of the soul was immediately offered by the wax slate, that tabula rasa upon which the Greeks etched their notes and correspondence with their slate pencils. Under the guise of a metaphor that was not
34
? ? ? THEORETICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS
Just a metaphor, therefore, the new medIa technology that gave flse to the soul was eventually seen as the vanishing point of this newly invented soul.
b) Around 1900, immediately after the development of film, it appears that there was an increase in the number of cases of mountain climbers, alpinists, and possibly also chimney-sweeps who, against the odds, survived almost fatal falls from mountains or rooftops. It may be more likely, though, that the number of cases did not mcrease, but rather that the number of scientists mterested in them. did. In any case, a theory immediately began to circulate among physicians like Dr. Moriz Benedict and mystical anthroposophists like Dr. Rudolf Steiner, which even you may have probably heard as a rumor. The theory stated that the so-called experience - a key philosophical concept at that time of falling (or, according to other observations, also drowning) was allegedly not terrible or frightening at all. Instead, at the moment of imminent death a rapid time-lapse film of an entire former life is projected once again in the mind's eye, although it is unclear to me whether it is supposed to run forwards or backwards. In any case, it is evident: in 1900, the soul suddenly stopped being a memory in the form of wax slates or books, as Plato describes it; rather, it was technically advanced and transformed into a motion picture.
In these lectures, however, the attempt to define the soul or the human being once more will be systematically avoided. As the two examples above quite clearly show, the only thing that can be known about the soul or the human are the technical gadgets with which they have been historically measured at any given time. That excludes the possibility of basing these lectures on the experiences of motion picture audiences and the opinions of television viewers, which most of the work in empirical German media studies continues to be based on (despite all the statistical tricks with which those experiences and opinions are then supposedly transformed into objective data). Fans will therefore not get their money's worth.
Why this disappointment? Because the historical tendency to employ technical media as models or metaphors for imagining the human or the soul, which I have just illustrated, is anything but accidental. Media have become privileged models, according to which our own self-understanding is shaped, precisely because their declared aim is to deceive and circumvent this very self-understand- ing. To be able to experience a film, as it is so wonderfully called, one must simply not be able to see that 24 individual images appear on the screen every second, images that were possibly filmed under
35
? ? ? I
entirely different conditions. This is particularly true of television, as
we know that there is a recommended optimal distance between the I slipper cinema, on the one hand, and the wing chaIr, on the other.
Eyes that fall short of this distance are no longer ahle to see shapes
and figures, but rather only countless points of light that constitute
their electronic existence and ahove all their non-existence - in the
form of moire patterns or blur.
In other words, technical media are models of the so-called human
precisely because they were developed strategically to override the
senses. There are actually completely physiological equivalents for
the methods of image production employed by film and television,
but these eqnivalents themselves cannot be consciously controlled.
The alternating images in film correspond roughly to the blinking
of eyelids, which mostly occurs entirely automatically; with some
effort, this blinking can be increased to at least half the frequency
of film's 24 frames-per-second, which very graphically simulates the stereoscopic effects of film when combined with head movements, but I the speed of 24 frames-per-second was intentionally chosen exactly
because eyes and eyelids are unable to attain it. In a similar way,
the construction of images on television corresponds to the structure I of the retina itself, which is like a mosaic of rods and cones; rods ! enable the perception of movement, while Cones enable the percep-
tion of color, and together they demonstrate what is called luminance
and chrominance on color television. Retinas are themselves seen so I rarely, howeveJ; that the place where they, and that means all of us,
see nothing whatsoever - the blind spot where the optic nerve leaves
the eye - was only first discovered by physiological experiments in
the seventeenth century.
This implies, conversely, that for technical media, if they impinge upon our senses at all like film or television, it is completely justified to conceive of them as enemies (and without the cultural pessimism that Horkheimer and Adorno's chapter on radio and film in Dialectic of Enlightenment made fashionable). For the enemy is, according to Carl Schmitt, the embodiment of our own question. There are media because man is (according to Nietzsche) an animal whose properties are not yet fixed. And precisely this relationship - not a dialectical but rather an exclusionary or adversarial one - ensures that the history of technology is not so ahuman that it would not concern people.
The name for this problem area, which has yet to be negotiated in detail, is standards or norms. Standards determine how media reach our senses. All of the films that can be bought are known to be standardized according to either DIN or ASA. I employ the term
OPTICAL MEDIA
36
I I
I 1
? THEORETICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS
"standard" to distinguish those aspects of the regulations that are intentional from the accidental or contingent. Norms, on the other hand, were and are an attempt to cling to natural constants, like the standard meter of the French Revolution, which led medical historian Canguilhem and his follower Foucault to define post-1790 Europe as a culture of norms instead of laws. In this sense, I go one step further and say that after 1880 we find ourselves in an empire of standards (the word culture, as a concept associated with agricultural growth, has to be ruled out). The use of screens for film and panel painting already makes the difference between media standards and artistic styles abundantly visible. This will still be shown in technical positivity, but beforehand I will briefly sketch out the fundamental principles.
The eye sees. Is it seeing a film, a television broadcast, a painting, or a detail from so-called nature that (according to the Greek word) it projects from within itself? This question can only be decided by 1) an observer who sees this eye see, or 2) this eye itself, if and so long as the media standards are still a commercial compromise that reveals deficits, such as black-and-white images, no stereoscopic effects, or missing colors like the American NTSC television system. Like the film director von Gall in Pynchon's great world war novel correctly said: We are "not yet" in the film (Pynchon, 1973, p. 527).
From the perspective of the year 1945, therefore, Pynchon's fic- tional director, who is really only a pseudonym for his historical col- leagues like Fritz Lang or Lubitsch, promises a standardization that will bring an end to the difference between film and life - like the subtitle of a novel by Arnolt Bronnen - while in the meantime already making some actual advances towards this goal. As you know, this convergence of mediality and reality has been discussed using the term "simulation" at least since Baudrillard. These lectures will have to take up this debate yet again, as the concept of simulation, which refers to the sublation of a separation, allows for the introduction of a sharper distinction between traditional arts and technical media than is customary in everyday language.
In the Greek tradition, there are fairly paradigmatic anecdotes about a competition between two painters, who both claimed to have absolutely fulfilled the allegedly Aristotelian postulate of a f. L(f. L1l01~ <pUCiEOl~, an imitation of nature. The first painter, who was named Zeuxis, created a painting with remarkably realistic-looking grapes. His competitor was actually able to see that these grapes were painted, but a flock of birds immediately pounced on the painting, thinking that they were indeed real. According to Kant, these two reactions
37
? OPTICAL MEDIA
exemplify the entire difference between art and life, disinterested satisfaction and desire. But the matter does not simply end there. It was left up to Zeuxis' competitor, Parrhasios, to take the painting competition to another level. When he presented his work for Zeuxis' assessment, a veil still hung over the painting. Zeuxis wanted to pull the veil away in order to take a better look, but when he attempted to extend his hand towards the veil he realized it was also painted. Tbe first-order simulation was thus able to fool the eyes of animals, while the second-order simulation was also able to fool the eyes of humans.
This anecdote actually shows quite beautifully that art and media are fundamentally about the deception of sensory organs (Lacan, 1981, p. 103), but this seems to be just as beautiful as it is problem- atic. It implies that people can deceive others ahoUl the status of their own creations through the use of manual tools and abilities, such as painting, writing, or composition. "Whoever believes it is possible to lie with words might also believe that it happened here," wrote Gottfried Benn about his early novels. He himself believed it as little as I do. When one sees the remaining Greek panel paintings today, which have admittedly been poorly preserved, the anecdote about the two painters seems very doubtful, as these paintings were obviously done using a palette that included certain colors and simply lacked others. In place of the so-called truth of nature, therefore, these paint- ings reflect a convention that one must first ignore or overlook in order to fall under the spell of the illusion. In this respect, despite its realistic veneer, painting is not so very different from other arts like music or literature, whose encoding, and this means conventionality, is more readily apparent. The thesis would thus be that traditional arts, which were crafts according to the Greek concept, only pro- duced illusions or fictions, but not simulations like technical media. Everything that was style or code in the arts registered a distinction that is quite the opposite of technical standards.
Artistic styles were certainly ways of acting on the senses of the public, but they were not based on measurements of the abilities and inabilities of visual perception like the standard use of alternating images in film; they were based on approximations, conventions, and the pure chance involved in the historical availability of raw materi- als. Certain artistic effects would not have been possible without oil- based paints, and therefore without petrochemicals and their world wars. If Foucault had been able to write his book about painting as the history of available pigments - as promised in The Discourse on Language - we would know more. But it is clear that pigments are just as visible as what they are supposed to show on the canvas. For
38
? ? ? ? THEORETICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS
this reason, European culture up to early modern times was under the control of what Hans Blumenberg called the "postulate of vis- ibility": that which exists also allows itself in principle to be seen (Blumenberg, 1983, pp. 361-75). Plato's concept of theory, which has already been touched upon, even implies that what exists in the highest state of being, namely in the realm of ideas, can itself be seen, although or because it remains absolutely invisible to the naked eye. Technical media and only technical media - according to the thesis of these lectures - destroyed this postulate of visibility. Being, in an eminent sense, allows itself in principle not to be seen today, although or because it allows the visible first to be seen. In this way, the history of optical media is a history of disappearance, which also allows me the freedom to disappear for today.
It is astonishing that the anecdote about the optically deceived birds has returned today in the form of a scientific theory: first, behaviorism has actually established that with female pigeons the ovulation necessary for fertilization occurs not only when they see a cock pigeon, but also when the laboratory deceives them with a two-dimensional dummy. In a second step, French psychoanalyst and structuralist Jacques Lacan then based an entire terminology on the experiment, which has since also made careers among film scholars, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries. For Lacan, all of the phenomena associated with figure recognition go by the method- ological title of the imaginary, and the point is actually that they are just as automatic as they are deceitful. Lacan cites both the pigeon experiment and the ancient painter to support his theory (Lacan, 2002, p. 5), but the example he offers is different: unlike animals, human infants learn from an early age, approximately in the sixth month, to recognize themselves in mirrors. The point of this early childhood figure recognition, however, is that it is also simultane- ously a misrecognition - simply because the apparently superior sensory capabilities of human infants as compared to those of baby animals, who see adversaries in the mirror rather than themselves, are inversely proportional to or compensate for their delayed motor skills. It is precisely because they are not yet able to walk and their immature central nervous systems have not yet registered the unity of their own bodies that they project a closed, visually perfect identity onto the mirror image. The tremendous joy they express upon recog- nizing themselves in the mirror conceals the reality that their bodies are still physically uncoordinated. According to Lacan, this is how the ego itself emerges from the imaginary. And the fact that Lacan found proof for his theories in a scientific experimental film that
39
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
demonstrated this process of self-(mls)recogmtion in the mirror also clearly shows how the mirror stage and the imaginary are related to film. I will return to this complex in my discussion of early German silent films, which were full of mirrors and doppelgangers.
For the moment, it is more important to emphasize the idea that the imaginary represents only one of the three methodological catego- ries of the structuralist theory. According to Lacan, the dimension of code, which I have just illustrated through artistic styles and aesthetic rules, appears under the title of the symbolic, which turns out to be essentially at home in the code of everyday language.
The third and final category is called the"real," but please do not confuse this category with common so-called reality. Le reel refers only to that which has neither a figure, like the imaginary, nor a syntax, like the symbolic. In other words, combinational systems and processes of visual perception cannot access the real, but - and this is one of the leitmotifs of tbese lectures - this is precisely why it can only be stored and processed by technical media. The present can be distinguished from every earlier period by the fact that we live at a time when, with the help of Mandelbrot's fractals, clouds can be calculated in their full randomness and then be made to appear on computer screens as calculated, unfilmed images. Practically speak- ing, however, this means that we must employ a considerable part of film theory - which usually goes by the name of film semiotics - in
order to clarify the radically new ways in which optical media handle the symbolic. This concerns, more concretely, techniques of montage and editing, and thus everything that has been regarded as specific media aesthetics since the time of Walter Benjamin. Above all, it must be made clear how media, in contrast to all of the arts, can neverthe- less include the impossible real in their manipulations, techniques, or processes, and thus treat the pure chance of a filmed object or a television camera setting as if it had the same structure as the manipu- lable codes in the arts. To shed some light on this possibly vague suggestion, I will conclude these comments on media technologies and the body with a quotation from Rudolf Arnheim's film theory. In an essay on the systematics of early cinematographic inventions, Arnheim claims that "since we have known photography" there has been a new and "more ambitions demand placed on the image": "It is not only supposed to resemble the object [as in all representative arts], but it is also supposed to guarantee this resemblance by being
the product of this object itself, i. e. by being mechanically produced by it - in the same way as the illuminated objects in reality mechani- cally imprint their image onto the photographic layer" (Arnheim,
40
? THEORETICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS
1977, p. 27). Th,s passage hopefully shows what a mampulatlOn of the real can be in contrast to all figures and cultural codes. And if the body belongs to the real, as Lacan argues, then this introduction to optical media and the body is where it should be.
In terms of methodology, it only remains to be noted that I am employing Lacan's terms as a useful set of conceptual tools, not as immutable truth - for the simple reason that over the course of the semester we must ask whether the basic concepts of current theories are absolutely independent and thus true frames of reference or rather a dIrect result of the media explosion of our own epoch. Lacan's notion of the symbolic as a syntax purified of all semantics, meaning, degrees of figuration, and thus also every conceivability could 1ll the end coincide with the concept of information in telecommunications.
The question still remains as to where the untraditional concept of information itself - the basis and goal of all technical media - origi? nally comes from.