He loves the trope of synecdoche, the part for the whole, and wants single instances to
resonate
with unspoken richness.
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CONTENTS
Traveling Players 81 Jesuit Churches 81 Jesuit Theater 85
Enlightenment and Image War 89 Brockes 89 Phenomenology from Lambert to Hegel 93 Ghost-Seers 98 Schiller 101 Hoffmann 109 Romantic Poetry 112
3 Optical Media 118
3. 1 Photography 118
3. 1. 1 Prehistory 118
3. 1. 2 Implementation 119
3. 1. 2. 1 Niepce and Daguerre 125 3. 1. 2. 2 Talbot 132 3. 1. 3 Painting and Photography: A Battle for the Eyeballs 136
3. 2 Film 145
3. 2. 1 Preludes 145
3. 2. 2 Implementation 154
3. 2. 2. 1 Marey and Muybridge 155
3. 2. 3 Silent Film
3. 2. 4 Sound Film
3. 2. 5 Color Film
3. 3 Television 4 Computers
Bibliography Index
160 189 202
207 225
231 237
VI
? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
John Durham Peters
Optical Media may be Friedrich Kittler's best book for the uniniti-
ated. It is breezy, has an off-the-cuff tone, and is generally free of the
distinctive, pithy, and forbidding prose style that is sometimes called
"Kittlerdeutsch. " Optical Media provides an accessible introduction
to the media theory of Kittler's middle period as it applies primar-
ily to the optical realm. (Kittler's chief interest in sound, music, and
above all time takes a back seat here. ) It is definitely not "Kittler
for Dummies," however. It assumes a minimal general knowledge
of German literature and culture, the field in which Kittler began
as a young renegade scholar in the 1970s, and it asks the reader to
follow some ambitiously bold or bald claims. It presents the leading
themes of Kittler's media theory and a few of its idiosyncrasies as
well. The English-language reader can face a number of obstacles in
a first meeting with Kittler, and this introduction seeks to ease the
1
A Different Kind of German Import
Friedrich A. Kittler was born in 1943 in what was soon to become East Germany and lived there until 1958, when his family moved to West Germany. He studied German language and literature, Romance language and literature, and philosophy at Freiburg, where he became intimately familiar with recent French thought (he still claims to speak French more comfortably than English) and the work of Heidegger. In the 1980s and 1990s he was a visiting professor at several American universities such as Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, and Columbia. He has held the chair for "aesthetics and
encounter.
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media history" at Humboldt University in Berlin since 1993 and his fame and notoriety continue to grow. He is proud of the label given him by a supporteJ; "Europe's greatest media philosopher," and is sometimes called "the Derrida of the digital age" (although he would prefer to be the Foucault). Kittler is the pre-eminent theorist of ele- ments - sound, image, letteJ; number, and organ - and how they are configured into media systems. He has produced a stunningly original and often controversial body of work that anyone interested in our fate as media-saturated animals today has to wrestle with.
Kittler is not in the same line as the leading German post-1968 imports into the Anglo-American human and social sciences. Spe- cifically, his work should not be confused with hermeneutics or the Frankfurt School, which have been widely read in English, and it would be a bad mistake to see him as sharing their opinion of the degrading effects of technical rationality. Machines are our fate, according to Kittler, and to say so is not to witness to an awful downfall of the human condition; it is to properly grasp our situation.
Kittler takes great care in fact to differentiate himself from these two traditions. He is generally friendly to hermeneutics as a prac- tice of rigorous textual analysis since it is close to his own method, but he mocks the spectral hope of communion with dead minds as a failure to recognize the material, i. e. medial, conditions of the practice of reading - conditions he analyzed at great length in his first blockbuster book, Aufschreibesysteme, translated as "Discourse Networks," and in a shorter collection called Dichter, Mutter, Kind (Poet, Mother, Child). This theme continues in these lectures, espe- cially in his analysis of German romanticism.
Against the Frankfurt School, from Horkheimer and Adorno up through Habermas, however, Kittler is relentless in his scorn. Chief among many irritations is the notion of quantification as the disen- chantment of the world. Kittler is a passionate friend of mathematics and an enemy of the notion that there is such a thing as "the two cultures" of science and humanities, as we say in English, or Geist und Natur, as they say in German. The idea that numbers rob our soul or that humanities have nothing to do with counting or machines he finds outrageous. (More fundamentally, he would find the claim outrageous that we have a soul to rob. ) Music, dance, poetry - indeed all the human arts that involve time - would be nothing without counting, measure, and proportion. This is his current theme, pursued in his projected four-volume magnum opus on "Music and Mathematics. " (The first volume, on "Ancient Greece," was pub- lished in 2006, and this turn to antiquity is one part of his work
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? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
scarcely represented in OptIcal Media. 2 ) KIttler blames the Frankfurt School for a willed blindness to our technical condition and a sen- timentality about the humanities - and humans. To an outsider, the vehemence of his attacks seems out of proportion, especially since he shares with Adorno interests in inscription systems and technologies of sound, and an understanding of music as a field of play between excess and obedience. Some of the venom stems from turf wars in the German academy; some of it stems simply from his peevishness (something that the astute reader will note IS not always absent from
Optical Media either).
In any case, one will look in vain in Kittler's work for that reassur-
ing dialectical defense of the human estate that many of us have come to expect in postwar German thought. Kittler is an altogether cooler and more ironic sort. Aesthetics he always understood in its original sense as sensation. To study aesthetics is not to study beauty per se, it is to study the materialities of our organs of perception. In this view he proudly belongs to the long Berlin tradition of psychophysi- cal research into the human sense organs pioneered by figures such as Hermann Helmholtz. As Optical Media puts it in one of those reductive dicta for which Kittler is famous: "Aesthetic properties are always only dependent variables of technological feasibility. " This is one reason the lectures are on optical and not visual media. Optics is a subfield of physics; vision is a subfield of physiology, psychology, and culture. The visible spectrum is a narrow band of a huge optical spectrum. For Kittler the subject is always subordinate to the object: human perception is an interface with physical realities. "Visual culture" is all the rage lately, but his focus on optics is a character- istic foregrounding of physical-technical conditions over perceived ones. The sense organs are signal processors, relatively weak ones at that, and Kittler rigorously refuses to take human quantities as the measure of all things; for him we cannot know our bodies and senses until they have been externalized in media. Although Kittler might be an outlier in terms of German imports, he is part of a tough-minded
lineage within Germany that has not crossed the Channel or Atlantic as readily; the chief post-1968 exhibit would be the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, which also takes vigorous distance from the Frank- furt School and the humanism of philosophical hermeneutics, and is an important source for Kittler and for all recent German-language media theory, which has turned out to be a wonderfully vital field of research and debate. Kittler is certainly not the only voice in German media theory. The publication in 1985 of Aufschreibesysteme was a watershed in the German humanities, and much in the subsequent
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flowering of media theory in the German-speaking world would probably be impossible without Kittler's innovations, His developing theories of media bardware had a huge influence in the 1990s, but he has been subject to sustained and incisive criticism and oedipal rebellion since in Germany. He is a controversialist who enjoys being outrageous and he has managed to offend or annoy a wide range of spirits. He is also brilliant and remarkably original. The task, as always, is to sort out the intellectual value from the rest. A prophet, as they say, has no honor in his own country, in part due to the sound ecological principle that any local species has co-evolved with its own natural enemies. In transplantation to an English-speaking universe, Kittler's work loses some of its outrageousness, in part because we are not invested in the local skirmishes. Derrida and Foucault were always bigger in the United States than in France; the lack of co- evolved enemies usually helps a crop proliferate. 3 But the enemies also know a thing or two and can save us the trouble of finding out for ourselves. Some classic complaints about Kittler in Germany - his politics, views on people in general and women in particular, and his treatment of historical evidence - will be noted here. Martin Heidegger certainly has crossed over into English, but here again it is important to get things right. Kittler takes Heidegger as tbe godfather of technical reflection and as his philosophical master. Heidegger has been read as a technophobe, a cultural pessimist lamenting technol- ogy's spell in the age of the world picture. Kittler, like many others, vigorously and persnasively contests this reading, taking Heidegger as the great thinker of technology. For Kittler's Heidegger, techne is our lot; he simply dared to think it most fully in all its inhuman implications. Heidegger's analyses are not a sob story but a sober dis- closure of onr condition. Once known as a young Turk who helped bring French poststructuralism to Germany, Kittler has more recently redescribed his career as a steady defense of Heidegger, simply reim- porting his thought once it had been laundered offshore by thinkers snch as Derrida and Foucault, who took on the task of surgically removing it from its historical embedment in the mess of National Socialism. Kittler's recent work embraces the Hellenophilic poetics and right-wing politics of the late Heidegger with a rather stunning enthusiasm. This means that Kittler is fully "out" as a German con- servative, a creature that has no exact equivalent in British or Ameri- can politics and seems to hold an enormous intellectual fascination for us, if the recent vogue in social and cultural theory of Carl Schmitt (and of course Heidegger) is any indication. Along with figures such as Derrida and Foucanlt, Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre,
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? ? ? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Leo Strauss, Jan Patocka and even Milan Kundera, Kittler is one key interpreter of the wildly diverse Heideggerian legacy. Compared to the hegemonic left-wing populism of Commonwealth media studies over the past decades, Kittler's vision is certainly a stark contrast.
This is not Cultural Studies
This is the second key obstacle: Kittler's disdain for people, or more specifically, for the category of experience. This is not to say that Kittler is a misanthrope - personally he can be quite cheerful and charming. But he has no use for the category of "the human" or "experience. " He gives us a media studies without people. In a sense, Kittler is Mr. Anti-Cultural Studies. He rejects the entire empiricist tradition from Hobbes to Mill and beyond that is the background philosophy and intellectual orientation in the English-speaking world, with its liberal politics, its love of experience, its affirmation of agency, and its inductive method. (Although "empiricist" in media studies is sometimes used narrowly to mean quantitative research, the British empiricist tradition is the ultimate background philosophy for both cultural studies and social scientific research. ) Kittler has no room for "the people" in either the Marxist or populist sense. In Optical Media, the only figures are inventors or artists, and he even makes fun of his own tendency to worship "bourgeois geniuses. " Like the early Foucault, he is interested in historical ruptures and not the slow sedimentation of social change through everyday practices: he gives us evolution by jerks, not by creeps. He prefers to focus on turning points rather than the long state of play in between the drama. Agency Kittler tends to attribute to abstractions such as world war and not to living, breathing actors. He is not interested in audiences or effects, resistance or hegemony, stars or genres; he spends no time on subcultures, postcoloniality, gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, or class. His account of television history is quite distinct from the key narratives in Anglo-American scholarship that explain the historical conditions and political settlements that made television full of mis- cellaneous "flow" (Raymond Williams) or tell how the box became integrated into a gendered domestic economy (David Morley, Lynn Spigel, and many others). Kittler is interested in the engineering. Just what kind of media studies is this?
At first glance, his vision of media studies hardly fits any of the dominant modes - and this is one of the things that makes it so
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bracing. Even so, there are moments in Optical Media where one can see a certain kind of political-economic analysis peeking through his account of the rise of the German film industry, and his use of liter- ary texts might seem to point to an affinity with semiology, but even here, he never revels in the pleasure of the text as such, but always tries to boil down the text to an algorithm: he always has a larger explanatory (or debunking) agenda.
The one natural link of Kittler's work in extant media studies is to the Canadian tradition of Innis and McLuhan. Innis's great contri- bution was the notion of "bias" in time and space, and McLuhan's was the notion of media as human extensions (or amputations). Kittler's key contribution is the notion of "time-axis manipulation. " He is the pre-eminent thinker of time-based media and what it means to edit the flow of time with technical means. 4 Like most scholars, Kittler would rather be compared to Innis than McLuhan and this is quite fair intellectually. Kittler's materialist account of history, love of ancient Greece, and disdain for the kind of body-humanism at the heart of McLuhan's thought puts him closer to Innis. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, the most astute commentator on Kittler in English, calls Kittler "Innis in battle fatigues. " But his persona - witty, arch, devil-may-care, politically incorrect - is closer to McLuhan. In tone, Kittler also is closer to McLuhan's flamboyant vaticism than to Innis's cranky accumulation of detail. Like both Canadians, his subject is the play of media in history, but he has taken a step forward over either. Over Innis's staccato inventories of historical occurrences and McLuhan's defiance of rigor, we have in Kittler a kind of media
analysis whose method is dialectically acute and philosophically deep. Kittler brings a Hegelian ambition and lucidity to media studies. He begins Optical Media by frankly announcing his "insane and prob- ably impossible" mission of doing for media what Hegel did for aesthetics. If Kittler does not fully succeed, he certainly goes further than anyone else in producing a philosophy of media and generating a rich array of productive ideas. (Hegel is, by the way, the first in a long line of German thinkers poorly understood in English; if Kittler is baffling to anglophone readers, he has distinguished company among his countrymen. ) Is Kittler, then, a "technological determinist"? This slur is used freely and often without much nuance. If the question is, do humans have agency in the face of technology, then Kittler would be one, but not because he thinks technology is so determinant but, more radically, since he is not interested in what he persists in calling
"so-called humans" (the joke is getting a bit stale). But if the question is, does he recognize the role of historical, political, and economic
? ? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
contingency in the development of media, then he is not. Although Kittler is clearly a better media philosopher than media historian, and there are plenty of bones to pick with his historical interpretations, Optical Media is clearly interested in the development of institutions such as Edison's Lab, the ways that marketing imposes compromises between consumers and engineers, the unique historical conditions that enabled the emergence of photography in the 1830s, and the ways that war financing affected the development of television. His celebration elsewhere of the technological bricoleur who, with sol- dering gun in hand and DOS screen in view, reconfigures the user- friendly interfaces of dumbed down technologies, certainly suggests an activist role for at least those with an engineering bent. Indeed, in his 1990s campaign against Microsoft Windows, Kittler could sound a bit like a cultural studies type praising the agency of ordinary folks who rewrite the dominant code for their own purposes. This conver- gence on a DIY ethic in both cultural studies and Kittler points to a shared debt to punk culture. (At an even deeper level, Kittler and British cultural studies share a culturally Protestant love of anarchic textual interpretation by readers freed from the stupefying pictures of priestly authorities; E. P. Thompson's radical Methodists and Kittler's punk programmers might have a lot to say to each other. ') In the eud, however, people alarmed by whatever they mean by "tech- nological determinism" are likely to be alarmed by Kittler, especially his teleological claim, repeated throughout his work, that all media history culmiuates in the digital computer.
Then there is the questiou of gender. To say that people are simulations or effects of media conditions is a fine provocation that invites reflection on the moorings of human existence in an electri- cal (or any) age. Yet denying agency or subjectivity to people does not affect the two genders in the same way. For men, this might be a philosophically novel experience, but for women this is probably more of the same-old. The treatment of women in Kittler has always been problematic. Discourse Networks has remarkable insights about the role of mothers in producing romantic reading subjects - the mother serving as a kind of media relay between text and child, ear and eye, alphabet and voice - and Gramophone, Film, Type- writer has similarly stunning observations about how the typewriter desexualized the traditional division of labor in the act of writing. It is not that Kittler is not interested in gender; rather, it is that he is quite interested in sex. All of his media histories are also histories of eros, and this coupling of love and knowledge, music and media, and aphrodisiacs and mathematics is central to his story about the
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? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
ancient Greeks; Music and Mathematics mlght be read as an alternate take on Foucault's own multi-volume history of sexuality (without the queer subtext). His books and lectures are marked by occasional bawdy comments (not to mention pictures), sometbing that reveals an uureconstructed gender politics that would be hard to find surfacing openly in a university in the US or UK in the past two decades. (It is not hard to imagine it surfacing in politics, sports, or show busi- ness, however; on this score, Kittler is, as he once said, "stinkingly ordinary. ") In Kittler's work, the default gender roles often have men as soldiers and women as pin-ups. Caveat lector. Kittler all but invites a gender-sensitive reading, and his work reminds us of the feminist adage that gender and technology are not separately consti- tuted categories. The first volume of his Music and Mathematics is full of praise for women - Aphrodite, Circe, Sappho - but they are all goddesses or legends. Ordinary ones who don't partake of what Goethe famously called the "eternal feminine" don't fare so well in his work. Here again, ordinary people of any sort don't fare well, but the grievance is clearer on one side of the divide.
Scholarly Extremities
Robert Boyle, the great experimentalist of the seventeenth century, famously invented a new kind of writing, the scientific report. In this genre, cognitive virtue was tied to a public demonstration of methods that anyone could repeat and an expository style that anyone could understand. Readers of English scholarly prose still tend to expect a basic level of reasonableness and clarity - expectations that Kittler, like most other high-flying German thinkers since Hegel - will regularly topple. His conclusions leap like lightning. He argues by anecdote rather than induction, and will always choose a dramatic narrative line over one that muddles through the complexities on the ground.
He loves the trope of synecdoche, the part for the whole, and wants single instances to resonate with unspoken richness. We are meant to read the title of his book, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, for instance, as standing in for modern acoustic, optical, and word- processing techniques in general. Like auyone schooled in modern literature, he is fond of allusion. At key points in Optical Media, he does not name things that he thinks should be obvious, managing to avoid mentioning "the uncanny" in his discussion of Freud's encoun- ter with his mirror image on a train or "fractals" in his discussion of Mandelbrot's computer graphics. We are supposed to be in the
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? ? ? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
know. He also can't resist a lame joke, an irreverent comment, or
a prodding exaggeration. Thus, Ronald Reagan is "emperor of
California," America "the country of unlimited serialism," demo-
cracy the "age of prevailing illiteracy," and poetry has been tedious for 2,000 years. The most charitable way to read his style is that he treats his audience at a high (i. e. his) level, and follows the Heideg- gerian principle that names stop tbinking. Less charitable readers can find the style arrogant or obscurantist. At least Kittler is never boring and always strives to see things afresh. Aristotle, Hegel, Mead, and Wittgenstem are among the many philosophers whose reputations profited from posthumously published lectures. Publishing lectures while one is alive changes the equation a bit. These lectures have a liberty of citation and factual reference that might be more forgiv- able as oral utterance or student transcriptions of a beloved teacher now deceased. Kittler's critics often have beefs with the details of his scholarship, and his tendency to argue in broad strokes is even more evident in these lectures than usual. Film scholars have found much to object to in his treatment of silent cinema, for instance - indeed, just as they did to his section on cinema in Gramophone, Film, Type- writer. 6 In fairness, he admits a lack of evidence for some specula- tions in Optical Media and says his treatment of film history is full of "rough cuts. " But on the other hand, Kittler himself is not always fair: he is unjustly snippy about both Friedrich von Zglinicki, on whose work he heavily relies, and the academic field of film studies, which he mocks as trading in "cultural-history gossip. " A commit- ted intellectual poacher and interdisciplinarian whose interests range from the history of mathematics to German poetry, from computer programming to warfare, from classical Greek philology to psycho- analysis, Kittler can be impatient in conforming to the standards of academic specialism. He can share something of McLuhan's stance of writing off whole areas of study as missing the boat, as simply not "getting it. " (The boat, of course, is one whose rudder both men steer, the S. S. Media. )
How damaging are Kittler's flippant tone and sometimes cavalier stance to scholarly norms? Scholarship is governed by a diversity of values such as accuracy, excitement, judgment, novelty, and fairness. Clearly, Kittler scores better on some of these than others. But there is plenty of room in the academic ecosystem for different sorts of con- tributions, and no one scores a perfect ten in everything. The German university has a long tradition of providing a platform for stylisti- cally wild and scandalously ambitious intellectual claims; it also has a long tradition of tediously thorough toil over detail. It is no secret
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? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
that Kittler belongs to the first tradition, which he supplements with pyrotechnic methods learned from the French. Of course, it is crucial to take Kittler, like everyone else, with a pinch of salt. But if all you see are the mistakes and exaggerations, you risk missing something big if you are interested in understanding media as architectonically important to our life and times. Professional historians find Foucault wrong on many things: but that does not make him any less interest- ing or important; it leaves more work to do. (Kittler probably covers his tracks less well than Foucault. ) Many a great thinker has sur- vived an occasional howler; indeed, producing howlers may be part of the job. It takes a first-rate thinker, as Hannah Arendt noted, to produce a first-rate contradiction. In pointing out Kittler's problems, I sometimes worry that we critics risk standing on his shoulders and punching him on the ears. Scholars, like all people, measure others by their own size. Prophets are a rarer species than scribes. It is a whole lot easier to show where another scholar went off the rails than to invent a new style of thought. There is a growing body of sound and interesting scholarship on media history in all its flavors; but there is very little thinking that is as breathtakingly imaginative as Kittler's. His mammoth work comes with some nasty little gnats flying around it, but we shouldn't let the gnats blind us to the magnificence of the shaggy beast he has brought on to the scene.
Context and Overview of Optical Media
Optical Media distills many of the theses of Discourse Networks and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. It is not meant to be the pre- sentation of cutting-edge research; it is a kind of popular exposition of a body of work. The lecture, as Erving Goffman points out, is a form of talk that is in cahoots with what he calls the "cognitive establishment. ,,7 Every lecture ultimately makes the promise that the world can be made sense of, and Kittler does not fail in his end of the bargain. Though much has rightly been made of his links to French poststructuralism (a term he dismisses), Kittler has none of the epistemological hypochondria that some Anglo-American followers - especially of Derrida - take away from the movement. Kittler has no interest in "interrogating" our "responsibility" for the "aporias" of "undecidability" (to "deploy" several deconstructionist cliches); he charges full steam ahead with the business of enlightenment. Wielding a scalpel of Hegelian sharpness Kittler confidently slices truth from nonsense. Unlike some practitioners of cultural studies,
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? ? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
he seems unembarrassed to be a professor, although he always dis- cusses that role with a sly irony. Indeed, one context for Optical Media is the establishment of media studies at Humboldt University, which, as the former University of Berlin, is the ground zero of the modern research university. Kittler's book from the same period, Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaft (2001), is a lecture series on the intellectual history of university life; in Optical Media, the lecture as a medium is always a topic for self-reflection along with rnnning in-jokes about professors and universities. Optical Media does not agonize about the inherent terror of reason; it gets on with the task of dispensing knowledge to students.
The lectures are relatively easy to follow and do not require any extensive summary; here I simply sketch the narrative arc. Kittler's exposition follows a more or less threefold narrative of artistic, analog, and digital media. The history is quite conventional in its basic periodization - Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment, Romanticism, etc. The revisionism occurs, rather, inside the well-worn categories as Kittler insinuates media into them, showing how much media explain what we think we already know. The era of artistic media is governed by the hand and reaches its peak in the linear perspective of the Renaissance. This is not a hand innocent of technique, but rather one tutored by perspective's discipline of geometry or the inverted tracings of light itself in the camera obscura. As always, these artistic media are in cahoots with state, religious, and military power (especially the magic lantern and other techniques of projection). The era of analog media - that of optical media proper - frees the act of visual depiction from the human hand and the act of visual perception from the human eye. A series of photographic devices allows for a kind of direct transcrip- tion of the sunshine without intervention of the pencil or brush, and liberates the realm of the visible from the physiology of the eye. The human being is no longer the lord of the record or of the know- able nniverse. Machines take on tasks - drawing, writing, seeing, hearing, word-processing, memory, and even knowing - that once were thought unique to humans and often perform them better. (That the "uniquely human" recedes before the onslaught of new media is one of Kittler's characteristic claims. ) The great breakthrough of analog media is the storage and manipulation of temporal process; the great problem is the lack of interoperability between systems. Kittler's account of cinema and television is a rather teleological story about how the optical and acoustical tracks got patched together in various configurations along the road to compatibility and
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convertibility. That great apotheosis had to await the digital moment. Now we await the utopian possibility, as be concludes, of working witb light as light, not just light as effect or trace. There is something almost millenarian in this culmination of media history. The end of history returns us to the beginning, when the light was separated from the darkness.
The Love of Light
What does require comment are the ways these lectures act out a number of key themes and gestures of Kittler's larger media theory. Seven is a good number:
1. Abstraction
Kittler makes clear that his subject is optical media and not, say, film and television history. He does not want to identify media with any particular incarnation and places "general principles of image storage, transmission, and processing above their various realizations. " More specifically, the computer provides Kittler with a handy device for rewriting the history of all hitherto existing media. Media are data- processors: this is his starting point. These lectures foreground the primacy of telecommunications - from the telegraph to the computer - as the foundation of modern optical media, along with the accom- panying three functions of storage, transmission, and processing. Kittler's abstraction may shave off the edges of historical complexity, but he is always first and foremost a philosopher of media history rather than a media historian. His aim is to use history to inform philosophical reflection about techniques of sending, saving, and calculating. The camera obscura receives images; the magic lantern sends them; the camera stores them. Kittler loves rigorous schemas, especially if they have three parts.
2. Analogy
Media studies has a long history of showy displays of miscellaneous reference and magpie learning. One of McLuhan's favorite tricks was to create a surrealist juxtaposition of two distinct historical items, one usually highbrow and canonic, the other usually modern and popular. We see something similar in Kittler's claims that Baroque candles illuminate Sunday night talk shows, the positive-negative process in
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photography IS an early Boolean CIrcuit or transIstor, or poetry and dance, due to their basic periodicity, are susceptible to cylindrical storage devices like the phonograph. The first requirement for any good structuralist is a gift for discovering surprising categories and stunning analogies, and Kittler has this gift in spades. The greatest of all historical analogists, Hegel, frankly admitted that every analogy is wrong in some way, and Kittler shares with Hegel a delight in "the negative," precisely the part that does not fit and thus forces thought forward. This is part of his willingness to make msightful mistakes. Yet many of Kittler's analogies are clearly brilliant. His point that in 1840 the letter IS to the telegraph what the painting is to photo- graphy clearly captures the epochal shift between manual and machine writing. Wagner as early cinema is abundantly suggestive. Taking Renaissance perspective as a variant on ballistics is smashingly good, even if it is slightly overcalculated to upset hnmanist pieties.
3. Writing
Literary study is the historical nexus of media studies in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and Italy (but not the United States). The difference is that German philology for important historical reasons always took itself seriously as Wissenschaft, as a contribu- tor to knowledge, whereas English literary criticism has often (not always) been happy to be edifying, an enhancement of sensibility rather than a kind of science. Kittler not only brings the full force of the German philosophical tradition to media stndies; he also brings the full resources of the German philological tradition. Kittler was trained as a philologist, and a papyriological sleuthing through an archive of docnments remains his central method. Media philology, as conducted by Kittler, starts from the fundamental fact of writing - which he takes to be the mother of all media. Writing should be understood in the expanded sense of inscription - a notion Kittler got equally from the French obsession with the practice of ecriture as from computer lingo about writable and readable storage. Photo- graph, phonograph, telegraph - the threefold historical mutation of light, sound, and word-processing in the nineteenth century explored in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter - all pay implicit tribute to writing in their names as do numerous other electrical media practices. Kittler's skill at reading what was never written is at the core of his media analysis.
One of his key concepts is "the monopoly of writing" (note the Innisian accent). Before the nineteenth century, the only possible
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form of cultural storage was the watery stuff of memory or writing. Writing had a monopoly on recording. The phonograph and film break this grip, since both allow for the writing of new kinds of mate- rial- sound and light. More specifically, they allow for the recording and thus manipulation, of time in its flow. Slow-motion, time-lapse, back-masking, jump-cuts, collage - modern acoustic and optical media - make temporal events available for editing. Kittler, again, takes the ability to play with the time axis as definitive of technical media. Even writing is a kind of incursion into time (storing words for later), though in a less radical way than film or phonograph.
4. Reading
Kittler is also a theorist of reading, especially of how what Habermas calls the "bourgeois public sphere" came into being, although Kittler's analysis is opposed in every way to Habermas's. Kittler's original analysis of Romantic literature is on full display in Optical Media. Romanticism for Kittler is not an attitude towards love, yearning, death, or distance; it is a particular use of book technol- ogy. Here, Kittler is in full arch debunker mode as he reprises some basic arguments of Discourse Networks. Reading is an "inner hal- lucination" by which the reader, who learned the technique on his or her mother's lap, decodes the text into a stream of sounds and images, even smells and tastes. Romantic poetry is the last gasp of the monopoly of writing before its nineteenth-century meltdown into audiovisual media. After that, writing could no longer bear the burden of holding sound and image, rival media having stripped it of those functions. Romantic reading is a kind of proto-film viewing, a lonely egotistical position within a simulating apparatus, not unlike the position of the fighter pilot or the video game player. Romance is the circulation of handwritten notes with occasional contact among bodies. In one of his dourly wonderful quips, Kittler notes that there can be media techniques without love, but no love without media techniques. Although he always disdains the humanist body that is so dutifully governed by its mind, Kittler always returns to the erotic body. The erotic, for Kittler, is always the first register of a media innovation. With his interest in excess and intoxication we find a window to a certain strange kind of agency. The most radical of all his claims is to reread all human organs as kinds of media apparatus; these organs are not only the eyes and ears. In Music and Mathematics, he sees the Greeks as the first explorers of the erotic effects of a new media regime (the alphabet in their case),
14
? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
which provides yet another way of making the ancient Greeks our
contemporaries.
5. The Medium is the Message
Media for Kittler are always about themselves. In this, he subordinates content to form, quite in the spirit of McLuhan. Thus, the Horspiel (or German radio drama) is about the conditions of radio listening. Cinema is about flying or seeing. He nicely begins Optical Media with a reflection on the medium of the lecture - a system made up of text and voice on the sending end, ears and half as many hands on the receiving end, and not (yet) interrupted by visual media. (His lectures were blessedly free of PowerPoint, a bacillus that has now all but entirely colonized the habitat. ) Kittler is aggressively formalist in his analysis, and enjoys inducing the defamiliarizing shock of not caring about what a medium says. He is interested above all in a kind of engineering analysis of carrying capacities. Art has style, media have standards; artistic reproduction yields similar versions, while media copies are identical; art cannot inscribe evidentiary detail, while media are forensic and provide data for witnessing; and art is less easily automated than media (this is not necessarily praise for art, of course). Here lies a whole collection of architectonically crucial distinctions.
6. War
Kittler has recently said that after studying war for so long, he has decided to study love instead. This turn is clear in Music and Math- ematics. But in Optical Media, war is still the mother of all things. ' He gets remarkable mileage out of the military context of media in these lectures. In general, I find Kittler's emphasis on war a useful antidote to a myopically civilian approach that has marked most of our media histories. He produces lots of cool connections - cel- luloid as a kind of plastic explosive, the Counter-Reformation as a media battle, or the historic importance of blinding in both battle- field and ballroom, bedazzlement being both an aristocratic privilege and military tactic. The idea that the trenches of World War I were a kind of media laboratory for experimenting with the first mass audience of guinea-pigs/conscripts or that war itself has increas- ingly become a kind of media simulation are key Kittlerian points developed at greater length in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. His notion of "the arming of the eye" owes something to Paul Virilio and is certainly relevant in an age of camera-guided missiles. Next time
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you have your eyes checked, your ophthalmologist may ask you to "track" a "target. " But all good analogies can get pushed too far. Of Kittler's link of the Colt revolver and film, Frank Kessler puckishly asks whether the sewing machine wouldn't serve Kittler as a better harbinger of serial processing, knowing that he would never warm to such a lowly, unwarlike domestic device. Kittler's fascination with war can sometimes seem slightly unhealthy, but there is no doubt that media history without the military-industrial complex is ultimately deeply misguided.
7. Light
Optical Media begins by praising the sun - a basic and brilliant fact before us that none of us directly see - courtesy of Dante and Leonardo. The sun is the condition of all seeing. It is a medium: we do not see it, but we see everything by way of it. (Media take the instrumental or ablative case: tbey are things by which something occurs. ) The sun is both obvious and profound, and this beginning features Kittler at his most elemental, in his guise as a devotee of Mediterranean light, a celebrant of illumination and its intoxication. (It also reprises, in a curious way, McLuhan's claim about the electric light as an arch-medium. ) If the eye is the light of the body, then the great star - the sun - as Dante says, is the light of the intelligence. In the end, what I like best about Kittler is his sheer love of intelligence and his commitment to delirious delight as a path to higher wisdom. Like all of us, Friedrich Kittler can be blind, but like very few of us, he can also be absolutely dazzling. '
Notes
1 The best introductions to Kittler's work in English are Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, "Translator's Introduction: Friedrich Kittler and Media Discourse Analysis," in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. xi-xxxviii, and the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society 23
(2006), nos. 7-8. I have not attempted to provide a full listing of
sources on Kittler in English in these notes.
2 For a more sustained discussion of this turn, see Claudia Breger,
"Gods, German Scholars, and the Gift of Greece: Friedrich Kittler's Philhellenic Fantasies," Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006): 111-34.
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? ? ? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
3 See my "Strange SympathIes: HOrIzons ot MedIa Theory In America and Germany," American Studies as Media Studies, eds.
CONTENTS
Traveling Players 81 Jesuit Churches 81 Jesuit Theater 85
Enlightenment and Image War 89 Brockes 89 Phenomenology from Lambert to Hegel 93 Ghost-Seers 98 Schiller 101 Hoffmann 109 Romantic Poetry 112
3 Optical Media 118
3. 1 Photography 118
3. 1. 1 Prehistory 118
3. 1. 2 Implementation 119
3. 1. 2. 1 Niepce and Daguerre 125 3. 1. 2. 2 Talbot 132 3. 1. 3 Painting and Photography: A Battle for the Eyeballs 136
3. 2 Film 145
3. 2. 1 Preludes 145
3. 2. 2 Implementation 154
3. 2. 2. 1 Marey and Muybridge 155
3. 2. 3 Silent Film
3. 2. 4 Sound Film
3. 2. 5 Color Film
3. 3 Television 4 Computers
Bibliography Index
160 189 202
207 225
231 237
VI
? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
John Durham Peters
Optical Media may be Friedrich Kittler's best book for the uniniti-
ated. It is breezy, has an off-the-cuff tone, and is generally free of the
distinctive, pithy, and forbidding prose style that is sometimes called
"Kittlerdeutsch. " Optical Media provides an accessible introduction
to the media theory of Kittler's middle period as it applies primar-
ily to the optical realm. (Kittler's chief interest in sound, music, and
above all time takes a back seat here. ) It is definitely not "Kittler
for Dummies," however. It assumes a minimal general knowledge
of German literature and culture, the field in which Kittler began
as a young renegade scholar in the 1970s, and it asks the reader to
follow some ambitiously bold or bald claims. It presents the leading
themes of Kittler's media theory and a few of its idiosyncrasies as
well. The English-language reader can face a number of obstacles in
a first meeting with Kittler, and this introduction seeks to ease the
1
A Different Kind of German Import
Friedrich A. Kittler was born in 1943 in what was soon to become East Germany and lived there until 1958, when his family moved to West Germany. He studied German language and literature, Romance language and literature, and philosophy at Freiburg, where he became intimately familiar with recent French thought (he still claims to speak French more comfortably than English) and the work of Heidegger. In the 1980s and 1990s he was a visiting professor at several American universities such as Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, and Columbia. He has held the chair for "aesthetics and
encounter.
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media history" at Humboldt University in Berlin since 1993 and his fame and notoriety continue to grow. He is proud of the label given him by a supporteJ; "Europe's greatest media philosopher," and is sometimes called "the Derrida of the digital age" (although he would prefer to be the Foucault). Kittler is the pre-eminent theorist of ele- ments - sound, image, letteJ; number, and organ - and how they are configured into media systems. He has produced a stunningly original and often controversial body of work that anyone interested in our fate as media-saturated animals today has to wrestle with.
Kittler is not in the same line as the leading German post-1968 imports into the Anglo-American human and social sciences. Spe- cifically, his work should not be confused with hermeneutics or the Frankfurt School, which have been widely read in English, and it would be a bad mistake to see him as sharing their opinion of the degrading effects of technical rationality. Machines are our fate, according to Kittler, and to say so is not to witness to an awful downfall of the human condition; it is to properly grasp our situation.
Kittler takes great care in fact to differentiate himself from these two traditions. He is generally friendly to hermeneutics as a prac- tice of rigorous textual analysis since it is close to his own method, but he mocks the spectral hope of communion with dead minds as a failure to recognize the material, i. e. medial, conditions of the practice of reading - conditions he analyzed at great length in his first blockbuster book, Aufschreibesysteme, translated as "Discourse Networks," and in a shorter collection called Dichter, Mutter, Kind (Poet, Mother, Child). This theme continues in these lectures, espe- cially in his analysis of German romanticism.
Against the Frankfurt School, from Horkheimer and Adorno up through Habermas, however, Kittler is relentless in his scorn. Chief among many irritations is the notion of quantification as the disen- chantment of the world. Kittler is a passionate friend of mathematics and an enemy of the notion that there is such a thing as "the two cultures" of science and humanities, as we say in English, or Geist und Natur, as they say in German. The idea that numbers rob our soul or that humanities have nothing to do with counting or machines he finds outrageous. (More fundamentally, he would find the claim outrageous that we have a soul to rob. ) Music, dance, poetry - indeed all the human arts that involve time - would be nothing without counting, measure, and proportion. This is his current theme, pursued in his projected four-volume magnum opus on "Music and Mathematics. " (The first volume, on "Ancient Greece," was pub- lished in 2006, and this turn to antiquity is one part of his work
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? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
scarcely represented in OptIcal Media. 2 ) KIttler blames the Frankfurt School for a willed blindness to our technical condition and a sen- timentality about the humanities - and humans. To an outsider, the vehemence of his attacks seems out of proportion, especially since he shares with Adorno interests in inscription systems and technologies of sound, and an understanding of music as a field of play between excess and obedience. Some of the venom stems from turf wars in the German academy; some of it stems simply from his peevishness (something that the astute reader will note IS not always absent from
Optical Media either).
In any case, one will look in vain in Kittler's work for that reassur-
ing dialectical defense of the human estate that many of us have come to expect in postwar German thought. Kittler is an altogether cooler and more ironic sort. Aesthetics he always understood in its original sense as sensation. To study aesthetics is not to study beauty per se, it is to study the materialities of our organs of perception. In this view he proudly belongs to the long Berlin tradition of psychophysi- cal research into the human sense organs pioneered by figures such as Hermann Helmholtz. As Optical Media puts it in one of those reductive dicta for which Kittler is famous: "Aesthetic properties are always only dependent variables of technological feasibility. " This is one reason the lectures are on optical and not visual media. Optics is a subfield of physics; vision is a subfield of physiology, psychology, and culture. The visible spectrum is a narrow band of a huge optical spectrum. For Kittler the subject is always subordinate to the object: human perception is an interface with physical realities. "Visual culture" is all the rage lately, but his focus on optics is a character- istic foregrounding of physical-technical conditions over perceived ones. The sense organs are signal processors, relatively weak ones at that, and Kittler rigorously refuses to take human quantities as the measure of all things; for him we cannot know our bodies and senses until they have been externalized in media. Although Kittler might be an outlier in terms of German imports, he is part of a tough-minded
lineage within Germany that has not crossed the Channel or Atlantic as readily; the chief post-1968 exhibit would be the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, which also takes vigorous distance from the Frank- furt School and the humanism of philosophical hermeneutics, and is an important source for Kittler and for all recent German-language media theory, which has turned out to be a wonderfully vital field of research and debate. Kittler is certainly not the only voice in German media theory. The publication in 1985 of Aufschreibesysteme was a watershed in the German humanities, and much in the subsequent
3
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
flowering of media theory in the German-speaking world would probably be impossible without Kittler's innovations, His developing theories of media bardware had a huge influence in the 1990s, but he has been subject to sustained and incisive criticism and oedipal rebellion since in Germany. He is a controversialist who enjoys being outrageous and he has managed to offend or annoy a wide range of spirits. He is also brilliant and remarkably original. The task, as always, is to sort out the intellectual value from the rest. A prophet, as they say, has no honor in his own country, in part due to the sound ecological principle that any local species has co-evolved with its own natural enemies. In transplantation to an English-speaking universe, Kittler's work loses some of its outrageousness, in part because we are not invested in the local skirmishes. Derrida and Foucault were always bigger in the United States than in France; the lack of co- evolved enemies usually helps a crop proliferate. 3 But the enemies also know a thing or two and can save us the trouble of finding out for ourselves. Some classic complaints about Kittler in Germany - his politics, views on people in general and women in particular, and his treatment of historical evidence - will be noted here. Martin Heidegger certainly has crossed over into English, but here again it is important to get things right. Kittler takes Heidegger as tbe godfather of technical reflection and as his philosophical master. Heidegger has been read as a technophobe, a cultural pessimist lamenting technol- ogy's spell in the age of the world picture. Kittler, like many others, vigorously and persnasively contests this reading, taking Heidegger as the great thinker of technology. For Kittler's Heidegger, techne is our lot; he simply dared to think it most fully in all its inhuman implications. Heidegger's analyses are not a sob story but a sober dis- closure of onr condition. Once known as a young Turk who helped bring French poststructuralism to Germany, Kittler has more recently redescribed his career as a steady defense of Heidegger, simply reim- porting his thought once it had been laundered offshore by thinkers snch as Derrida and Foucault, who took on the task of surgically removing it from its historical embedment in the mess of National Socialism. Kittler's recent work embraces the Hellenophilic poetics and right-wing politics of the late Heidegger with a rather stunning enthusiasm. This means that Kittler is fully "out" as a German con- servative, a creature that has no exact equivalent in British or Ameri- can politics and seems to hold an enormous intellectual fascination for us, if the recent vogue in social and cultural theory of Carl Schmitt (and of course Heidegger) is any indication. Along with figures such as Derrida and Foucanlt, Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre,
4
? ? ? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Leo Strauss, Jan Patocka and even Milan Kundera, Kittler is one key interpreter of the wildly diverse Heideggerian legacy. Compared to the hegemonic left-wing populism of Commonwealth media studies over the past decades, Kittler's vision is certainly a stark contrast.
This is not Cultural Studies
This is the second key obstacle: Kittler's disdain for people, or more specifically, for the category of experience. This is not to say that Kittler is a misanthrope - personally he can be quite cheerful and charming. But he has no use for the category of "the human" or "experience. " He gives us a media studies without people. In a sense, Kittler is Mr. Anti-Cultural Studies. He rejects the entire empiricist tradition from Hobbes to Mill and beyond that is the background philosophy and intellectual orientation in the English-speaking world, with its liberal politics, its love of experience, its affirmation of agency, and its inductive method. (Although "empiricist" in media studies is sometimes used narrowly to mean quantitative research, the British empiricist tradition is the ultimate background philosophy for both cultural studies and social scientific research. ) Kittler has no room for "the people" in either the Marxist or populist sense. In Optical Media, the only figures are inventors or artists, and he even makes fun of his own tendency to worship "bourgeois geniuses. " Like the early Foucault, he is interested in historical ruptures and not the slow sedimentation of social change through everyday practices: he gives us evolution by jerks, not by creeps. He prefers to focus on turning points rather than the long state of play in between the drama. Agency Kittler tends to attribute to abstractions such as world war and not to living, breathing actors. He is not interested in audiences or effects, resistance or hegemony, stars or genres; he spends no time on subcultures, postcoloniality, gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, or class. His account of television history is quite distinct from the key narratives in Anglo-American scholarship that explain the historical conditions and political settlements that made television full of mis- cellaneous "flow" (Raymond Williams) or tell how the box became integrated into a gendered domestic economy (David Morley, Lynn Spigel, and many others). Kittler is interested in the engineering. Just what kind of media studies is this?
At first glance, his vision of media studies hardly fits any of the dominant modes - and this is one of the things that makes it so
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? ? OPTiCAL MEDIA
bracing. Even so, there are moments in Optical Media where one can see a certain kind of political-economic analysis peeking through his account of the rise of the German film industry, and his use of liter- ary texts might seem to point to an affinity with semiology, but even here, he never revels in the pleasure of the text as such, but always tries to boil down the text to an algorithm: he always has a larger explanatory (or debunking) agenda.
The one natural link of Kittler's work in extant media studies is to the Canadian tradition of Innis and McLuhan. Innis's great contri- bution was the notion of "bias" in time and space, and McLuhan's was the notion of media as human extensions (or amputations). Kittler's key contribution is the notion of "time-axis manipulation. " He is the pre-eminent thinker of time-based media and what it means to edit the flow of time with technical means. 4 Like most scholars, Kittler would rather be compared to Innis than McLuhan and this is quite fair intellectually. Kittler's materialist account of history, love of ancient Greece, and disdain for the kind of body-humanism at the heart of McLuhan's thought puts him closer to Innis. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, the most astute commentator on Kittler in English, calls Kittler "Innis in battle fatigues. " But his persona - witty, arch, devil-may-care, politically incorrect - is closer to McLuhan. In tone, Kittler also is closer to McLuhan's flamboyant vaticism than to Innis's cranky accumulation of detail. Like both Canadians, his subject is the play of media in history, but he has taken a step forward over either. Over Innis's staccato inventories of historical occurrences and McLuhan's defiance of rigor, we have in Kittler a kind of media
analysis whose method is dialectically acute and philosophically deep. Kittler brings a Hegelian ambition and lucidity to media studies. He begins Optical Media by frankly announcing his "insane and prob- ably impossible" mission of doing for media what Hegel did for aesthetics. If Kittler does not fully succeed, he certainly goes further than anyone else in producing a philosophy of media and generating a rich array of productive ideas. (Hegel is, by the way, the first in a long line of German thinkers poorly understood in English; if Kittler is baffling to anglophone readers, he has distinguished company among his countrymen. ) Is Kittler, then, a "technological determinist"? This slur is used freely and often without much nuance. If the question is, do humans have agency in the face of technology, then Kittler would be one, but not because he thinks technology is so determinant but, more radically, since he is not interested in what he persists in calling
"so-called humans" (the joke is getting a bit stale). But if the question is, does he recognize the role of historical, political, and economic
? ? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
contingency in the development of media, then he is not. Although Kittler is clearly a better media philosopher than media historian, and there are plenty of bones to pick with his historical interpretations, Optical Media is clearly interested in the development of institutions such as Edison's Lab, the ways that marketing imposes compromises between consumers and engineers, the unique historical conditions that enabled the emergence of photography in the 1830s, and the ways that war financing affected the development of television. His celebration elsewhere of the technological bricoleur who, with sol- dering gun in hand and DOS screen in view, reconfigures the user- friendly interfaces of dumbed down technologies, certainly suggests an activist role for at least those with an engineering bent. Indeed, in his 1990s campaign against Microsoft Windows, Kittler could sound a bit like a cultural studies type praising the agency of ordinary folks who rewrite the dominant code for their own purposes. This conver- gence on a DIY ethic in both cultural studies and Kittler points to a shared debt to punk culture. (At an even deeper level, Kittler and British cultural studies share a culturally Protestant love of anarchic textual interpretation by readers freed from the stupefying pictures of priestly authorities; E. P. Thompson's radical Methodists and Kittler's punk programmers might have a lot to say to each other. ') In the eud, however, people alarmed by whatever they mean by "tech- nological determinism" are likely to be alarmed by Kittler, especially his teleological claim, repeated throughout his work, that all media history culmiuates in the digital computer.
Then there is the questiou of gender. To say that people are simulations or effects of media conditions is a fine provocation that invites reflection on the moorings of human existence in an electri- cal (or any) age. Yet denying agency or subjectivity to people does not affect the two genders in the same way. For men, this might be a philosophically novel experience, but for women this is probably more of the same-old. The treatment of women in Kittler has always been problematic. Discourse Networks has remarkable insights about the role of mothers in producing romantic reading subjects - the mother serving as a kind of media relay between text and child, ear and eye, alphabet and voice - and Gramophone, Film, Type- writer has similarly stunning observations about how the typewriter desexualized the traditional division of labor in the act of writing. It is not that Kittler is not interested in gender; rather, it is that he is quite interested in sex. All of his media histories are also histories of eros, and this coupling of love and knowledge, music and media, and aphrodisiacs and mathematics is central to his story about the
7
? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
ancient Greeks; Music and Mathematics mlght be read as an alternate take on Foucault's own multi-volume history of sexuality (without the queer subtext). His books and lectures are marked by occasional bawdy comments (not to mention pictures), sometbing that reveals an uureconstructed gender politics that would be hard to find surfacing openly in a university in the US or UK in the past two decades. (It is not hard to imagine it surfacing in politics, sports, or show busi- ness, however; on this score, Kittler is, as he once said, "stinkingly ordinary. ") In Kittler's work, the default gender roles often have men as soldiers and women as pin-ups. Caveat lector. Kittler all but invites a gender-sensitive reading, and his work reminds us of the feminist adage that gender and technology are not separately consti- tuted categories. The first volume of his Music and Mathematics is full of praise for women - Aphrodite, Circe, Sappho - but they are all goddesses or legends. Ordinary ones who don't partake of what Goethe famously called the "eternal feminine" don't fare so well in his work. Here again, ordinary people of any sort don't fare well, but the grievance is clearer on one side of the divide.
Scholarly Extremities
Robert Boyle, the great experimentalist of the seventeenth century, famously invented a new kind of writing, the scientific report. In this genre, cognitive virtue was tied to a public demonstration of methods that anyone could repeat and an expository style that anyone could understand. Readers of English scholarly prose still tend to expect a basic level of reasonableness and clarity - expectations that Kittler, like most other high-flying German thinkers since Hegel - will regularly topple. His conclusions leap like lightning. He argues by anecdote rather than induction, and will always choose a dramatic narrative line over one that muddles through the complexities on the ground.
He loves the trope of synecdoche, the part for the whole, and wants single instances to resonate with unspoken richness. We are meant to read the title of his book, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, for instance, as standing in for modern acoustic, optical, and word- processing techniques in general. Like auyone schooled in modern literature, he is fond of allusion. At key points in Optical Media, he does not name things that he thinks should be obvious, managing to avoid mentioning "the uncanny" in his discussion of Freud's encoun- ter with his mirror image on a train or "fractals" in his discussion of Mandelbrot's computer graphics. We are supposed to be in the
8
? ? ? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
know. He also can't resist a lame joke, an irreverent comment, or
a prodding exaggeration. Thus, Ronald Reagan is "emperor of
California," America "the country of unlimited serialism," demo-
cracy the "age of prevailing illiteracy," and poetry has been tedious for 2,000 years. The most charitable way to read his style is that he treats his audience at a high (i. e. his) level, and follows the Heideg- gerian principle that names stop tbinking. Less charitable readers can find the style arrogant or obscurantist. At least Kittler is never boring and always strives to see things afresh. Aristotle, Hegel, Mead, and Wittgenstem are among the many philosophers whose reputations profited from posthumously published lectures. Publishing lectures while one is alive changes the equation a bit. These lectures have a liberty of citation and factual reference that might be more forgiv- able as oral utterance or student transcriptions of a beloved teacher now deceased. Kittler's critics often have beefs with the details of his scholarship, and his tendency to argue in broad strokes is even more evident in these lectures than usual. Film scholars have found much to object to in his treatment of silent cinema, for instance - indeed, just as they did to his section on cinema in Gramophone, Film, Type- writer. 6 In fairness, he admits a lack of evidence for some specula- tions in Optical Media and says his treatment of film history is full of "rough cuts. " But on the other hand, Kittler himself is not always fair: he is unjustly snippy about both Friedrich von Zglinicki, on whose work he heavily relies, and the academic field of film studies, which he mocks as trading in "cultural-history gossip. " A commit- ted intellectual poacher and interdisciplinarian whose interests range from the history of mathematics to German poetry, from computer programming to warfare, from classical Greek philology to psycho- analysis, Kittler can be impatient in conforming to the standards of academic specialism. He can share something of McLuhan's stance of writing off whole areas of study as missing the boat, as simply not "getting it. " (The boat, of course, is one whose rudder both men steer, the S. S. Media. )
How damaging are Kittler's flippant tone and sometimes cavalier stance to scholarly norms? Scholarship is governed by a diversity of values such as accuracy, excitement, judgment, novelty, and fairness. Clearly, Kittler scores better on some of these than others. But there is plenty of room in the academic ecosystem for different sorts of con- tributions, and no one scores a perfect ten in everything. The German university has a long tradition of providing a platform for stylisti- cally wild and scandalously ambitious intellectual claims; it also has a long tradition of tediously thorough toil over detail. It is no secret
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? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
that Kittler belongs to the first tradition, which he supplements with pyrotechnic methods learned from the French. Of course, it is crucial to take Kittler, like everyone else, with a pinch of salt. But if all you see are the mistakes and exaggerations, you risk missing something big if you are interested in understanding media as architectonically important to our life and times. Professional historians find Foucault wrong on many things: but that does not make him any less interest- ing or important; it leaves more work to do. (Kittler probably covers his tracks less well than Foucault. ) Many a great thinker has sur- vived an occasional howler; indeed, producing howlers may be part of the job. It takes a first-rate thinker, as Hannah Arendt noted, to produce a first-rate contradiction. In pointing out Kittler's problems, I sometimes worry that we critics risk standing on his shoulders and punching him on the ears. Scholars, like all people, measure others by their own size. Prophets are a rarer species than scribes. It is a whole lot easier to show where another scholar went off the rails than to invent a new style of thought. There is a growing body of sound and interesting scholarship on media history in all its flavors; but there is very little thinking that is as breathtakingly imaginative as Kittler's. His mammoth work comes with some nasty little gnats flying around it, but we shouldn't let the gnats blind us to the magnificence of the shaggy beast he has brought on to the scene.
Context and Overview of Optical Media
Optical Media distills many of the theses of Discourse Networks and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. It is not meant to be the pre- sentation of cutting-edge research; it is a kind of popular exposition of a body of work. The lecture, as Erving Goffman points out, is a form of talk that is in cahoots with what he calls the "cognitive establishment. ,,7 Every lecture ultimately makes the promise that the world can be made sense of, and Kittler does not fail in his end of the bargain. Though much has rightly been made of his links to French poststructuralism (a term he dismisses), Kittler has none of the epistemological hypochondria that some Anglo-American followers - especially of Derrida - take away from the movement. Kittler has no interest in "interrogating" our "responsibility" for the "aporias" of "undecidability" (to "deploy" several deconstructionist cliches); he charges full steam ahead with the business of enlightenment. Wielding a scalpel of Hegelian sharpness Kittler confidently slices truth from nonsense. Unlike some practitioners of cultural studies,
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he seems unembarrassed to be a professor, although he always dis- cusses that role with a sly irony. Indeed, one context for Optical Media is the establishment of media studies at Humboldt University, which, as the former University of Berlin, is the ground zero of the modern research university. Kittler's book from the same period, Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaft (2001), is a lecture series on the intellectual history of university life; in Optical Media, the lecture as a medium is always a topic for self-reflection along with rnnning in-jokes about professors and universities. Optical Media does not agonize about the inherent terror of reason; it gets on with the task of dispensing knowledge to students.
The lectures are relatively easy to follow and do not require any extensive summary; here I simply sketch the narrative arc. Kittler's exposition follows a more or less threefold narrative of artistic, analog, and digital media. The history is quite conventional in its basic periodization - Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment, Romanticism, etc. The revisionism occurs, rather, inside the well-worn categories as Kittler insinuates media into them, showing how much media explain what we think we already know. The era of artistic media is governed by the hand and reaches its peak in the linear perspective of the Renaissance. This is not a hand innocent of technique, but rather one tutored by perspective's discipline of geometry or the inverted tracings of light itself in the camera obscura. As always, these artistic media are in cahoots with state, religious, and military power (especially the magic lantern and other techniques of projection). The era of analog media - that of optical media proper - frees the act of visual depiction from the human hand and the act of visual perception from the human eye. A series of photographic devices allows for a kind of direct transcrip- tion of the sunshine without intervention of the pencil or brush, and liberates the realm of the visible from the physiology of the eye. The human being is no longer the lord of the record or of the know- able nniverse. Machines take on tasks - drawing, writing, seeing, hearing, word-processing, memory, and even knowing - that once were thought unique to humans and often perform them better. (That the "uniquely human" recedes before the onslaught of new media is one of Kittler's characteristic claims. ) The great breakthrough of analog media is the storage and manipulation of temporal process; the great problem is the lack of interoperability between systems. Kittler's account of cinema and television is a rather teleological story about how the optical and acoustical tracks got patched together in various configurations along the road to compatibility and
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convertibility. That great apotheosis had to await the digital moment. Now we await the utopian possibility, as be concludes, of working witb light as light, not just light as effect or trace. There is something almost millenarian in this culmination of media history. The end of history returns us to the beginning, when the light was separated from the darkness.
The Love of Light
What does require comment are the ways these lectures act out a number of key themes and gestures of Kittler's larger media theory. Seven is a good number:
1. Abstraction
Kittler makes clear that his subject is optical media and not, say, film and television history. He does not want to identify media with any particular incarnation and places "general principles of image storage, transmission, and processing above their various realizations. " More specifically, the computer provides Kittler with a handy device for rewriting the history of all hitherto existing media. Media are data- processors: this is his starting point. These lectures foreground the primacy of telecommunications - from the telegraph to the computer - as the foundation of modern optical media, along with the accom- panying three functions of storage, transmission, and processing. Kittler's abstraction may shave off the edges of historical complexity, but he is always first and foremost a philosopher of media history rather than a media historian. His aim is to use history to inform philosophical reflection about techniques of sending, saving, and calculating. The camera obscura receives images; the magic lantern sends them; the camera stores them. Kittler loves rigorous schemas, especially if they have three parts.
2. Analogy
Media studies has a long history of showy displays of miscellaneous reference and magpie learning. One of McLuhan's favorite tricks was to create a surrealist juxtaposition of two distinct historical items, one usually highbrow and canonic, the other usually modern and popular. We see something similar in Kittler's claims that Baroque candles illuminate Sunday night talk shows, the positive-negative process in
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photography IS an early Boolean CIrcuit or transIstor, or poetry and dance, due to their basic periodicity, are susceptible to cylindrical storage devices like the phonograph. The first requirement for any good structuralist is a gift for discovering surprising categories and stunning analogies, and Kittler has this gift in spades. The greatest of all historical analogists, Hegel, frankly admitted that every analogy is wrong in some way, and Kittler shares with Hegel a delight in "the negative," precisely the part that does not fit and thus forces thought forward. This is part of his willingness to make msightful mistakes. Yet many of Kittler's analogies are clearly brilliant. His point that in 1840 the letter IS to the telegraph what the painting is to photo- graphy clearly captures the epochal shift between manual and machine writing. Wagner as early cinema is abundantly suggestive. Taking Renaissance perspective as a variant on ballistics is smashingly good, even if it is slightly overcalculated to upset hnmanist pieties.
3. Writing
Literary study is the historical nexus of media studies in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and Italy (but not the United States). The difference is that German philology for important historical reasons always took itself seriously as Wissenschaft, as a contribu- tor to knowledge, whereas English literary criticism has often (not always) been happy to be edifying, an enhancement of sensibility rather than a kind of science. Kittler not only brings the full force of the German philosophical tradition to media stndies; he also brings the full resources of the German philological tradition. Kittler was trained as a philologist, and a papyriological sleuthing through an archive of docnments remains his central method. Media philology, as conducted by Kittler, starts from the fundamental fact of writing - which he takes to be the mother of all media. Writing should be understood in the expanded sense of inscription - a notion Kittler got equally from the French obsession with the practice of ecriture as from computer lingo about writable and readable storage. Photo- graph, phonograph, telegraph - the threefold historical mutation of light, sound, and word-processing in the nineteenth century explored in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter - all pay implicit tribute to writing in their names as do numerous other electrical media practices. Kittler's skill at reading what was never written is at the core of his media analysis.
One of his key concepts is "the monopoly of writing" (note the Innisian accent). Before the nineteenth century, the only possible
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form of cultural storage was the watery stuff of memory or writing. Writing had a monopoly on recording. The phonograph and film break this grip, since both allow for the writing of new kinds of mate- rial- sound and light. More specifically, they allow for the recording and thus manipulation, of time in its flow. Slow-motion, time-lapse, back-masking, jump-cuts, collage - modern acoustic and optical media - make temporal events available for editing. Kittler, again, takes the ability to play with the time axis as definitive of technical media. Even writing is a kind of incursion into time (storing words for later), though in a less radical way than film or phonograph.
4. Reading
Kittler is also a theorist of reading, especially of how what Habermas calls the "bourgeois public sphere" came into being, although Kittler's analysis is opposed in every way to Habermas's. Kittler's original analysis of Romantic literature is on full display in Optical Media. Romanticism for Kittler is not an attitude towards love, yearning, death, or distance; it is a particular use of book technol- ogy. Here, Kittler is in full arch debunker mode as he reprises some basic arguments of Discourse Networks. Reading is an "inner hal- lucination" by which the reader, who learned the technique on his or her mother's lap, decodes the text into a stream of sounds and images, even smells and tastes. Romantic poetry is the last gasp of the monopoly of writing before its nineteenth-century meltdown into audiovisual media. After that, writing could no longer bear the burden of holding sound and image, rival media having stripped it of those functions. Romantic reading is a kind of proto-film viewing, a lonely egotistical position within a simulating apparatus, not unlike the position of the fighter pilot or the video game player. Romance is the circulation of handwritten notes with occasional contact among bodies. In one of his dourly wonderful quips, Kittler notes that there can be media techniques without love, but no love without media techniques. Although he always disdains the humanist body that is so dutifully governed by its mind, Kittler always returns to the erotic body. The erotic, for Kittler, is always the first register of a media innovation. With his interest in excess and intoxication we find a window to a certain strange kind of agency. The most radical of all his claims is to reread all human organs as kinds of media apparatus; these organs are not only the eyes and ears. In Music and Mathematics, he sees the Greeks as the first explorers of the erotic effects of a new media regime (the alphabet in their case),
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which provides yet another way of making the ancient Greeks our
contemporaries.
5. The Medium is the Message
Media for Kittler are always about themselves. In this, he subordinates content to form, quite in the spirit of McLuhan. Thus, the Horspiel (or German radio drama) is about the conditions of radio listening. Cinema is about flying or seeing. He nicely begins Optical Media with a reflection on the medium of the lecture - a system made up of text and voice on the sending end, ears and half as many hands on the receiving end, and not (yet) interrupted by visual media. (His lectures were blessedly free of PowerPoint, a bacillus that has now all but entirely colonized the habitat. ) Kittler is aggressively formalist in his analysis, and enjoys inducing the defamiliarizing shock of not caring about what a medium says. He is interested above all in a kind of engineering analysis of carrying capacities. Art has style, media have standards; artistic reproduction yields similar versions, while media copies are identical; art cannot inscribe evidentiary detail, while media are forensic and provide data for witnessing; and art is less easily automated than media (this is not necessarily praise for art, of course). Here lies a whole collection of architectonically crucial distinctions.
6. War
Kittler has recently said that after studying war for so long, he has decided to study love instead. This turn is clear in Music and Math- ematics. But in Optical Media, war is still the mother of all things. ' He gets remarkable mileage out of the military context of media in these lectures. In general, I find Kittler's emphasis on war a useful antidote to a myopically civilian approach that has marked most of our media histories. He produces lots of cool connections - cel- luloid as a kind of plastic explosive, the Counter-Reformation as a media battle, or the historic importance of blinding in both battle- field and ballroom, bedazzlement being both an aristocratic privilege and military tactic. The idea that the trenches of World War I were a kind of media laboratory for experimenting with the first mass audience of guinea-pigs/conscripts or that war itself has increas- ingly become a kind of media simulation are key Kittlerian points developed at greater length in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. His notion of "the arming of the eye" owes something to Paul Virilio and is certainly relevant in an age of camera-guided missiles. Next time
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you have your eyes checked, your ophthalmologist may ask you to "track" a "target. " But all good analogies can get pushed too far. Of Kittler's link of the Colt revolver and film, Frank Kessler puckishly asks whether the sewing machine wouldn't serve Kittler as a better harbinger of serial processing, knowing that he would never warm to such a lowly, unwarlike domestic device. Kittler's fascination with war can sometimes seem slightly unhealthy, but there is no doubt that media history without the military-industrial complex is ultimately deeply misguided.
7. Light
Optical Media begins by praising the sun - a basic and brilliant fact before us that none of us directly see - courtesy of Dante and Leonardo. The sun is the condition of all seeing. It is a medium: we do not see it, but we see everything by way of it. (Media take the instrumental or ablative case: tbey are things by which something occurs. ) The sun is both obvious and profound, and this beginning features Kittler at his most elemental, in his guise as a devotee of Mediterranean light, a celebrant of illumination and its intoxication. (It also reprises, in a curious way, McLuhan's claim about the electric light as an arch-medium. ) If the eye is the light of the body, then the great star - the sun - as Dante says, is the light of the intelligence. In the end, what I like best about Kittler is his sheer love of intelligence and his commitment to delirious delight as a path to higher wisdom. Like all of us, Friedrich Kittler can be blind, but like very few of us, he can also be absolutely dazzling. '
Notes
1 The best introductions to Kittler's work in English are Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, "Translator's Introduction: Friedrich Kittler and Media Discourse Analysis," in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. xi-xxxviii, and the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society 23
(2006), nos. 7-8. I have not attempted to provide a full listing of
sources on Kittler in English in these notes.
2 For a more sustained discussion of this turn, see Claudia Breger,
"Gods, German Scholars, and the Gift of Greece: Friedrich Kittler's Philhellenic Fantasies," Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006): 111-34.
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3 See my "Strange SympathIes: HOrIzons ot MedIa Theory In America and Germany," American Studies as Media Studies, eds.
