No More Learning

Bewundert viel und viel gescholten (much admired and much ad- monished): Helen's iambic self-diagnosis in the second part of Goethe's Faust comes to mind when assessing the reception of Discourse Net- works. To some, it is more than a book of genius and inspiring breadth; it is a watershed beyond which the study of literature and culture must follow a different course. In a discussion of Nietzsche, the mechanized philosopher who more than any other heralded the posthermeneutic age of the new media, Kittler quotes the poet-doctor Gottfried Benn: "Nietz- sche led us out of the educated and erudite, the scientific, the familiar and good-natured that in so many ways distinguished German literature in the nineteenth century. " Almost exactly one hundred years later, Kittler's work appears to some, particularly among the younger generation, as what is leading us out of the similarly stagnant pools of erudition and fa- miliarity that have come to distinguish German, and not only German, lit- erary scholarship. To others it is a sloppy mosaic that runs roughshod over more nuanced, contextualized, and academically acceptable research undertaken in cultural studies, literary history, and the history of science, not to mention feminism. Critics might instead be tempted to apply the second half of Benn's statement (not quoted by Kittler) to Kittler's role in contemporary scholarship: "Nietzsche led us . . . into intellectual refine- ment, into formulation for the sake of expression; he introduced a con-
? ? ? Translators' Introduction XXVll
ception of artistry into Germany that he had taken over from France. "48 And finally, there is a third reaction, one Helen could not complain of: the book is much ignored. This is, no doubt, partly due to the difficulties in- volved; to an audience outside of German studies, the exclusively German focus of the first part, describing the discourse network of I800, poses considerable problems. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, however, is far more accessible by virtue of its focus on the Mediengriinderzeit-a coinage derived from the historiographical term Griinderzeit, which de- notes the first decades of the Second German Empire founded in I87I, and which Kittler reappropriates to refer to the "founding age" of new technological media pioneered by Edison and others during the same time period.
MARSHALL MCNIETZSCHE: THE ADVENT OF THE ELECTRIC TRINITY
At first glance, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter appears to be a lengthy ad- dendum to the second part of Discourse Networks ("I900"), providing further and more detailed accounts of the ruptures brought about by the differentiation of media and communication technologies. The book could be understood as a relay station that mediates-Kittler uses the more technical term verschalten (to wire)-various forgotten or little- known texts on the new electric media and the condition of print in the age of its technological obsolescence. Kittler reprints, in their entirety, Rilke's essay "Primal Sound," the vignettes "Goethe Speaks into the Phonograph" and "Fata Morgana Machine" by Salomo Friedlaender (a. k. a. Mynona), Heidegger's meditation on the typewriter, and Carl Schmitt's quasiphilosophical essay "The Buribunks, " among others, pass- ing from one to another through his own textual passages. In that sense, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter is engineered to function as a kind of in- tertextual archive, rescuing unread texts from oblivion. Because these texts were written between the I 890S and the I940s, that is, in the imme- diate presence of a changing media ecology, they registered with particu- lar acuity the cultural effects of the new recording technologies, including the erosion of print's former monopoly. Print reflects, within the limits of its own medium, on its own marginalization.
The overall arrangement is simple. As the title indicates, the book comprises three parts, each dedicated to one of the new information channels. What distinguishes the post-Gutenberg methods of data pro- cessing from the old alphabetic storage and transmission monopoly is the
? ? ? ? XXVlll Translators' Introduction
fact that they no longer rely on symbolic mediation but instead record, in the shape of light and sound waves, visual and acoustic effects of the real. "Gramophone" addresses the impact and implications of phonography, "Film" concentrates on early cinematography, and "Typewriter" ad- dresses the new, technologically implemented materiality of writing that no longer lends itself to metaphysical soul building. For those more inter- ested in theoretical issues, and technological extensions of poststruc- turalism in particular, it will be important to keep in mind that Kittler re- lates phonography, cinematography, and typing to Lacan's axiomatic reg- isters of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. In brief, writing in a postprint environment is associated with the symbolic, with linguistic signs that have been reduced to their bare "materiality and technicity" and comprise a "finite set without taking into account philosophical dreams of infinity" ( 1 5 ) . The imaginary, by contrast, is linked with the technology of film, because the sequential processing of single frames into a projected continuity and wholeness corresponds to Lacan's mirror stage-that is, the child's experience of its imperfect body (in terms of motor control and digestive function) as a perfect reflection, an imagined and imagistic composition in the mirror. The real is in turn identified with phonography, which, regardless of meaning or intent, records all the voices and utterances produced by bodies, thus separating the signifying function of words (the domain of the imaginary in the discourse network of 1 800) as well as their materiality (the graphic traces corresponding to the symbolic) from unseeable and unwritable noises. The real "forms the waste or residue that neither the mirror of the imaginary nor the grid of the symbolic can catch: the physiological accidents and stochastic disor- der of bodies" (16). Hence, the distinctions of Lacanian psychoanalysis, what Bolz calls a "media theory of the unconscious," appear as the "the- ory" or "historical effect" of the possibilities of information processing existent since the beginning of this century. 49
Readers will find much that is familiar from Discourse Networks: Kittler continues to pay sustained attention to the coincidence of psycho- analysis and Edisonian technology, and includes a suggestive discussion of "psychoanalytic case studies, in spite of their written format, as media technologies" (89), since they adhere to the new, technological media logic positing that consciousness and memory are mutually exclusive. He further develops the contradictory and complicated relays between gender and media technology, including a "register" of this century's "literary desk couples" (2I4)-couples who, according to Kittler, have exchanged lovemaking for text processing. And once again, Kittler questions a mot-
? ? ? Translators' Introduction XXIX
ley crew of friendly and unfriendly witnesses-among them Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Rilke, Ernst JUnger, Roger Waters, and William Bur- roughs-to ascertain what exactly happened when the intimate and stately (that is, increasingly quaint and cumbersome) processing technol- ogy called writing was challenged, checked, modified, and demoted by new storage and communication technologies. Nietzsche in particular takes on a key role as the first philosopher to use a typewriter and thus as the first thinker to fully recognize that theoretical and philosophical spec- ulations are the effects of the commerce between bodies and media tech- nologies. Nietzsche had this recognition in mind, Kittler suggests, when he observed in one of his few typed letters that "Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts" (Unser Schreibzeug arbeitet mit an unseren Gedanken). When the progressively myopic retired philologist began us- ing a typewriter-a Danish writing ball by Malling Hansen that did not allow him to see the letter imprinted at the moment of inscription-he not only anticipated ecriture automatique but also began to change his way of writing and thinking from sustained argument and prolonged reflection to aphorisms, puns, and "telegram style. " After abandoning his malfunc- tioning machine, Nietzsche elevated the typewriter itself to the "status of a philosophy," suggesting in On the Genealogy ofMorals that humanity has shifted away from its inborn faculties (such as knowledge, speech, and virtuous action) in favor of a memory machine. Crouched over his me- chanically defective writing ball, the physiologically defective philosopher realizes that "writing . . . is no longer a natural extension of humans who bring forth their voice, soul, individuality through their handwriting. On the contrary, . . . humans change their position-they turn from the agency of writing to become an inscription surface" (210).
Nietzsche-or, better, this technologically informed, poststructural- ist reading of Nietzsche-points to an elementary trope governing Kit- tler's narrative. Regardless of its convictions or ideological direction, poststructuralism claims to reveal many key concepts (such as the Sub- ject, Authorship, Truth, Presence, "so-called Man," and the Soul) to be a kind of conceptual vapor or effect that arises from, and proceeds to cover up, underlying discursive operations and materialities. In posthermeneu- tic scholarship such as Kittler's, these effects are not so much denied as bracketed through a shift of focus toward certain external points-in par- ticular, bodies, "margins," power structures, and, increasingly, media technologies-in the interstices of which those phantasms had come to life in the first place. Thus, both Nietzsche's and Kittler's intellectual ca- reers consist in pushing the brackets together, until everything that had
? xxx Translators' Introduction
frolicked between them is squeezed out of existence. When a camera (as in Lacan's example) does all the registering, storing, and developing on its own, there is no need for an intervening Subject and its celebrated Con- sciousness; when the inspiring maternal imago of Woman turns into a secretary, there is no need for binding Love; when the phonograph merci- lessly stores all that people have to say and then some, there might be an unconscious but no meditating Soul. The sad spectacle of the allegedly in- sane Nietzsche in the last ten years of his life, "screaming inarticulately," mindlessly filling notebooks with simple "writing exercises," and "'happy in his element' as long as he had pencils,"50 is where the converging brackets meet. It is, as it were, the ground zero of all hermeneutically in- clined theorizing: on the one hand, a body in all its vulnerable nakedness; on the other, media technologies in all their mindless impartiality; and be- tween them nothing but the exchange of noise that only a certain amount of focused delusion can arrange into deeper meanings.
But as we know only too well, the switch from the Gutenberg Galaxy to Edison's Universe has been followed by the more recent move into the Turing World. With obedience to this succession, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter begins with Edison's phonograph and ends with Turing's COLOSSUS, a move already hinted at in the first paragraph of "Gramo- phone. " Shifting from tinfoil and paraffin paper to charge-coupled de- vices, surface-wave filters, and digital signal processors, the book moves away from "technological media" such as the gramophone and kineto- scope to the computer, and it thus signals the beginning of the third stage in Kittler's intellectual career (during which he was installed as Professor of Aesthetics and Media History at Berlin's Humboldt University). If Kitt- ler's passage from the 1970S to the 1980s, with his progressive grounding of discourse in the materialities of communication, is analogous to the switch from the symbol-based discourse network of 1 800 to the technol-
ogy-based discourse network of 1900, then his passage from the 1980s to the 1990S approximates the switch from the electric discourse network of 1900 to an electronic "systems network 2000," with its reintegration of formerly differentiated media technologies and communication channels by the computer, the medium to end all media. Once again, his essays sig- nal an increasing movement of interest toward computer hardware and software, the archeology of the digital takeover (Kittler edited and intro- duced the German translation of Alan Turing's works), and military tech- nology and strategy. 51 All of this first appears, fully orchestrated, in the
concluding passages of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.
Finally, a word about style. A book on the materialities of communi-
Translators' Introduction XXXI
cation can hardly be oblivious to its own materialities and historical situ- atedness, so it comes as no surprise that Gramophone, Film, Typewriter itself carries the imprint of the media of which it speaks. The mosaic-like qualities of much of the text, for instance, the sometimes sudden shifts from one passage or paragraph to another and, alternately, the gradual fade-outs from Kittler's own texts to those of his predecessors, derives, in both theory and practice, from the jump-cutting and splicing techniques fundamental to cinema. But media technologies could also be invoked to explain Kittler's idiosyncratic stylistics on the micro-level of the individ- ual sentence or paragraph. Long stretches are characterized by a quality of free association-not to say, automatic writing-that once again could be labeled cinematic, with one idea succeeding the other, strung together by a series of leitmotifs. One such leitmotif is the aforementioned dictum by Nietzsche, "Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts," which Kittler quotes repeatedly, suggesting certain stylistic and intellec- tual affinities with his mechanized predecessor. (And who could question their similarities? Nietzsche was the first German professor of philology to use a typewriter; Kittler is the first German professor of literature to teach computer programming. ) Certainly, Kittler's prose is somewhat Nietzschean in that syntactic coherence frequently yields to apodictic apen;;us, sustained argument to aphoristic impression, and reasoned logic to sexy sound bites. This enigmatic prose is further exacerbated by styl- istic peculiarities all Kittler's own. Most noticeable among these is the frequent use of adverbs or adverbial constructions such as einfach, ein- fach nur, bekanntlich, selbstredend, or nichts als (variously translated as "merely," "simply," "only," "as is known," and "nothing but"), as in this explanation of the computerized recording of phonemes: "The analog sig- nal is simply digitized, processed through a recursive filter, and its auto- correlation coefficients calculated and electronically stored" (75). Such sentences (call them Kittler's Just So Stories) are, with casual hyperbole, meant to suggest the obvious, bits of common knowledge that don't re- quire any elaboration, even though (or precisely because) their difficult subjects would urge the opposite. Similarly, Kittler is fond of separating consecutive clauses (in the German original, they tend to lead off with weswegen) from their main clauses, as in this explanation of the physio- logical bases of the typewriter: "Blindness and deafness, precisely when they affect speech or writing, yield what would otherwise be beyond each: information on the human information machine. Whereupon its replace- ment by mechanics can begin" ( r 89 ) . Despite their casual, ostensibly un- polished, conversational qualities, these clauses almost always refer to im-
? ? ? ? ? XXXll Translators' Introduction
portant points. Which is why sentences like this simply deserve special attention.
Not surprisingly, Kittler's rhetorical bravado has drawn sharp criti- cism. One critic attributed the paradox that Kittler confidently employs writing to ferret out superior and more advanced media technologies to "stylistic means consciously used for the production of theoretical fantasy literature. "52 To Robert Holub, the
single most disturbing factor of Kittler's prose [is] the style in which it is written. Too often arguments seem obscure and private. One frequently has the impres- sion that its author is writing not to communicate, but to amuse himself. His text consists of a tapestry of leitmotifs, puns, and cryptic pronouncements, which at times makes for fascinating reading, but too often resembles free association as much as it does serious scholarship. 53
As with McLuhan, Kittler's prose carries a flashy dexterity that makes many claims seem invulnerable to substantive critique precisely because of their snappy and elegant phrasing. To this litany one could add Kittler's penchant for maneuvering between engineering parlance and medical jar- gon, as well as his use of a whole register of specialized terminologies that, in Holub's estimation, suggest "a semblance of profundity"54 but do not ultimately contribute to a sustained argument. To top it off, a grow- ing number of younger scholars have modeled their writing on Kittler's very personal style: to the delight of connoisseurs of German academese, Kittlerdeutsch is already as distinct an idiom as the equally unmistakable Adornodeutsch.
Rather than take Kittler to task for his virtuoso play on the keyboard of poststructuralist rhetoric, we would urge consideration of his writing style in the larger context of the tradition he writes in-and, more im- portant, against. Clearly, he cultivates a cool, flippant, and playful style to subvert the academic ductus of German university prose, a tongue-in- cheek rhetoric to thumb his nose at the academic establishment. If style, as Derrida reminds us (not coincidentally, in his analysis of Nietzsche's writing) is always "the question of a pointed object . . . sometimes only a pen, but just as well a stylet, or even a dagger,"55 then Kittler is certainly twisting his own stylus into the body of German intellectual discourse, which has kept alive for far too long what he feels to be the obsolete hermeneutic tradition. To counteract the widespread use of stiff and lugubrious academic prose, he indulges in stylistic jouissance, a spirited playfulness meant to assault and shock conventional scholarly sensibili- ties. And indeed, what better way is there to debunk highfalutin theories
? Translators' Introduction XXXlll
than a wry recourse to the materialities of comunication? 56 No less than the philosopher with a hammer of a century ago, who smashed notions of selfhood and forged a style of his own by hammering on the keys of his writing ball, Kittler plays the enfant terrible of the German humanities who pummels literary-critical traditions with a rhetorical freestyle all his own. Indeed, to paraphrase Nietzsche, the inscription technologies of the present have contributed to Kittler's thinking.
ONLY CONNECT: THEORY IN THE AGE OF INTELLIGENT MACHINES
But Friedrich Nietzsche is not the real hero of Gramophone, Film, Type- writer. That part goes to Thomas Alva Edison, a casting decision that Kitt- ler believes will appeal to a North American audience: "Edison . . . is an important figure for American culture, like Goethe for German culture. But between Goethe and myself there is Edison. "57 Indeed, Kittler credits his sojourns in California-in particular, the requirement that he furnish Stanford undergraduates with updated, shorthand summaries of German history-with providing the impetus to focus on technological issues. Much could be said about the history behind this alleged dichotomy be- tween the United States and Germany, or of the implied distinction be- tween technology and culture, but there can be no doubt that North American readers will find much of interest in Gramophone, Film, Type- writer. They will, however, also find cause for irritation beyond the ques- tion of style. In conclusion, we will briefly point to five particularly promis- ing or problematic issues for the North American reception of Kittler.
I. Back to the ends ofMan. After years of "antihumanist" rhetoric, a lull appears to be settling in. A spirit of compromise is afoot in the hu- manities, and "subjects" are being readmitted into scholarly discourse, provided they behave themselves and do not suffer any self-aggrandizing Cartesian or Kantian relapse. In the face of such imminent harmony, Kittler's rhetoric may seem like a throwback to the heady days of mili- tant antihumanism. His work no doubt invites the plotting of a historical graph in which the human being is reduced from its original function as homo faber to an accessory in a scenario of technological apocalypse, in which the "omnipotence of integrated circuits" will lead to a fine-tuning of the self-replicating Turing machine that relegates human ingenuity and idealism to the junkyard of history. Implicit in much of Gramo- phone, Film, Typewriter is the belief that "so-called Man" (der soge- nannte Mensch-a mocking phrase repeated like a mantra throughout
? ? ? XXXIV Translators' Introduction
the book) is about to disappear as a cognitive and self-determining agent (if such an agent ever existed) and be subsumed by the march of techno- logical auto-sophistication. We are faced with the Aufhebung of human processes into silicon microprocessors, the dissolution of human soft- ware into computer hardware, for if computer technologies, beginning with the earliest storage facilities, ultimately substitute for physiological impairments and extend the sensory apparatus, then technology's pros- thetic function could allow for the complete replacement of the human. Heidegger's notion of technology as Gestell, a supportive framing of hu- man being, turns out to be an entire Ersatz for human being. Further- more, it is not only a question of so-called Man disappearing now; He was never there to begin with, except as a figment of cultural imagina- tion based on media-specific historical underpinnings. To appropriate Max Weber's famous term, Kittler's work contributes in radical fashion to the ongoing process of Entzauberung, or disenchantment.
As we have already indicated, some of Kittler's rhetoric of epater l'humaniste bourgeois must be seen against the background of specifically German poststructuralist debates, but we would nonetheless invite read- ers to consider the possibility that Kittler, especially when viewed in con- junction with North American discussions of subject formation under electronic conditions, is highlighting a crucial point: that the question of the subject has not been answered yet, for as long as we are not address- ing it in its media-technological context, we are not even able to come up with the right question.
2. The stop and go of history. Not surprisingly, Kittler has been charged with a cavalier attitude toward the vicissitudes of historical change. Instead of tracing and assigning value to the agencies and contin- gencies that explain the unfolding transformation from one historical moment to another, his broad typologies tend "to obscure those subter- ranean disturbances that can build into a paradigm shift. "58 His descrip- tive and nonevolutionary model favoring sudden ruptures and transfor- mations at the expense of genetic causalities is derived from Foucault, but it takes on a certain edge because epistemological breaks are tied to tech- nological ruptures. The emphasis on discontinuity, however, is less prob- lematic than the obvious technological determinism. As Timothy Lenoir has noted, Kittler explicitly rejects any characterization of his work as
"'new historicism' or sociology of literature," opting instead to describe his project in terms that "frequently invoke McLuhan's deterministic me- dia theories. "59
? ? ? ? Translators' Introduction xxxv
Certainly, Kittler's emphasis on technological breakthroughs to the exclusion of other causative factors is indicative of a sometimes facile ne- glect of the dynamic complexities of development and evolution-tech- nological or otherwise. But there are important exceptions, most notably his ingenious description of the discourse network of r 800 as the conflu- ence of social practices, such as the role of speaking mothers in the social- ization of children, the publicly mandated methodologies of language ac- quisition, the training of civil servants, and the beginning of hermeneutic literary criticism, among others. The media environment of r 800, there- fore, particularly in the forms of writing and interpretation, is clearly seen as a historically specific contingency; it is not, as McLuhanites would have it, part of the makeup of the Gutenberg Galaxy by default. Media deter- mine our situation, but it appears that our situation, in turn, can do its share to determine our media. In some of his more recent essays, Kittler argues that the discourse network of r 800 itself prepared the ground for the technological developments associated with its successor: "Romantic literature as a virtual media technology, as it was supported by the com- plicity between author, reader, and hero, contributed itself to the subver- sion of the unchallenged monopoly of print in Europe and to the change of guards from image-based literature to the mass media of photography and film. "60 Here Kittler appears to retrace the well-known theoretical footsteps of Walter Benjamin, who observed that every historical era
"shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard. "61 At the risk of oversimplifying matters, we could say that Kittler espouses a type of technomaterialism that, albeit only on a formal level, bears some re- semblance to Marxism's historical and dialectical materialism. Out of the dialectical exchange between the media-technological "base" and the dis- cursive "superstructure" arise conflicts and tensions that sooner or later result in transformations at the level of media. At a given point in time, that is, during the discourse network of r 800, a widely used storage tech- nology-the printed book-forms the material basis for new, hermeneu- tically programmed reading techniques that enable readers to experience an "inner movie"; subsequently, a desire arises in these readers to invent, or at least immediately select, the new cinematographic technology that provides images for real.
3 . Arms and no Man. One element that may strike some readers as disturbing is Kittler's virtual fetishism of technological innovations pro- duced by military applications, spin-offs that owe their existence to mil-
? XXXVI Translators' Introduction
itary combat. Along with Paul Virilio and Norbert Bolz, Kittler derives a veritable genealogy of media in which war functions as the father of all things technical. In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter and related essays, he argues that the history of film coincides with the history of automatic weapons technology, that the development of early telegraphy was the re- sult of a military need for the quick transmission of commands and in- telligence, that television is a by-product of radar technology, and that the computer evolved in the context of the Second World War and the need both to encrypt and decode military intelligence and to compute missile trajectories. Modern media are suffused with war, and the history of communication technologies turns out to be "a series of strategic es- calations. "62 Needless to say, humans as the subjects of technological in- novations are as important as the individual soldier in the mass carnage of the First World War or the high-tech video wars of the present. If we had to name the book that comes closest to Kittler in this respect, it would be Manuel De Landa's eminently readable War in the Age of In- telligent Machines, a history of war technology written from the point of view of a future robot who, for obvious reasons, has little interest in what this or that human has contributed to the evolution of the machinic phylum. 63
But such a unilateral war-based history of media technology would not meet with the approval of all historians and theorists of communica- tion. James Beniger, for example, has argued that the science of cybernet- ics and its attendant technologies-the genesis of which Kittler locates in the communicative vicissitudes of the Second World War-is ultimately the result of the crisis of control and information processing experienced in the early heyday of the Industrial Revolution. In the wake of capitalist expansion of productivity and the distribution of goods, engineers had to invent ever-more refined feedback loops and control mechanisms to en- sure the smooth flow of products to their consumers, and more generally to regulate the flow of data between market needs and demands (what cy-
bernetics would call output and input). "Microprocessors and computer technologies, contrary to currently fashionable opinion, are not new forces only recently unleashed upon an unprepared society. " On the con- trary, "many of the computer's major contributions were anticipated along with the first signs of a control crisis in the mid-nineteenth cen- tury. "64 Building upon Beniger, Jochen Schulte-Sasse for one has taken Kittler to task for conflating the history of communication technologies with the history of warfare while ignoring the network of enabling con- ditions responsible for breakthroughs in technological innovations. 65
? ? Translators' Introduction XXXVll
4- Hail the conquering engineer. Kittler's work tends to champion a special class of technologists that made both the founding age and the digital age of modern media possible: the engineer. Edison, Muybridge, Marey, the Lumiere brothers, Turing, and von Neumann have left behind a world-or rather, have made a world-in which technology, in more senses than one, reigns supreme. And one of their fictional counterparts, Mynona's ingenious Professor Pschorr, even manages to "beat" Goethe and get the girl in the short story "Goethe Speaks into the Phonograph. " As we have mentioned, Kittler contrasts his "American" attitude to the purported technophobia of German academics, but it may serve readers well to point out that Kittler is speaking from a long German tradition of engineer worship reaching as far back as the second part of Goethe's Faust and including immensely successful science fiction novels by Do- minik and Kellermann, the construction of the engineer as a leader into a new world in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century technocratic utopias (including Thea von Harbou's Metropolis), and, above all, the apotheosis of the engineer at the conclusion of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. 66 In turn, Kittler's somewhat quaint portrayal of the United States as a haven of technophilia also has easily recognizable German roots: it harks back to the boisterous "Americanism" of the Weimar Re- public that saw a Fordist and Taylorized United States as a model for overcoming the backwardness of the Old WorldY
5. Reactionary postmodernism? The Fordism of the Weimar Re- public was related to a cultural current that was to have considerable in- fluence on conservative and, subsequently, Nazi ideology. Labeled "reac- tionary modernism" by Jeffrey Herf, it was an attempt to reject Enlight- enment values while embracing technology in order to reconcile the strong antimodernist German tradition with technological progress. In spite of all the unrest and disorientation caused by the rapid moderni- zation of late nineteenth-century Germany, the reactionary modernists claimed that "Germany could be both technologically advanced and true to its sou1. "68 One of reactionary modernism's key components was to sever the traditional-and traditionally unquestioned-link between so- cial and technological proBress. No longer ensnared by the humanist ide- ology of the Enlightenment, the technological achievements of the mod- ern age could be made to enter a mutually beneficial union with premod- ern societal structures. Among the most important thinkers to contribute to this distinctly German reaction to the travails of modernization were Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jiinger, Werner Sombart, and Mar-
? ? ? XXXVlll Translators' Introduction
tin Heidegger, some of whom figure prominently in the writings of Kittler and Bolz. To be sure, writing about the likes of ]Unger, Benn, and Hei- degger is anything but synonymous with endorsing the extremist political ideologies they may have held at one time or another. Nevertheless, read- ers of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter and Kittler's related essays might be left with the impression that in spite of all distancing maneuvers, Kittler seems to feel a certain reverence, if not for the writers themselves, then certainly for their largely unquestioning admiration of (media-)techno- logical innovations. Junger-who features prominently in "Film"-is a case in point: the way in which the workers and soldiers of his early nov- els and essays are dwarfed by productions and weapons technologies that dissolve their Innerlichkeit, or inner experience of being, into a spray of media effects is distinctly reminiscent of Kittler's poststructuralist erasure of the subject.
Of course there is a major difference: Kittler is as far removed as one can be from the traditional right-wing rhetoric of "soul," " Volk" and the "national body"; if these or related terms appear, they do so only as ex- amples of the crude historical conceptualizations of the growing connec- tivity and communication spaces established by modern media technolo- gies. But the question remains whether certain affinities exist that might suggest that some of Kittler's work be labeled a "postmodern" variant of the old reactionary modernism-most prominently, the determination to sever the connection between technological and social advancement, to jettison the latter in favor of the former and install, as it were, Technol- ogy as the new, authentic subject of history. What gives this approach an additional edge, however, is the growing awareness of the degree to which the French poststructuralists from whom Kittler takes his cue were them- selves influenced by these right-wing German thinkers. 69 (Naturally, Hei- degger comes to mind, but one should not underestimate Junger. ) But if it is true that the "antihumanists" of French poststructuralism owe a last- ing debt to Nietzsche as well as to the Weimar thinkers of the Right, then Kittler's media discourse analysis, with its insistence that media determine our situation and that our situation changed decisively during the Medi- engriinderzeit, exposes their intellectual origins as well as technological matrix that shaped them.
? PREFACE
Tap my head and mike my brain, Stick that needle in my vein.
-THOMAS PYNCHON
Media determine our situation, which-in spite or because of it-de- serves a description.
Situation conferences were held by the German General Staff, great ones around noon and smaller ones in the evening: in front of sand tables and maps, in war and so-called peace. Until Dr. Gottfried Benn, writer and senior army doctor, charged literature and literary criticism as well with the task of taking stock of the situation. His rationale (in a letter to a friend): "As you know, I sign: On behalf of the Chief of the Army High Command: Dr. Benn. "1
Indeed: in I94 I , with the knowledge of files and technologies, enemy positions and deployment plans, and located at the center of the Army High Command in Berlin's Bendlerstraf5e, it may still have been possible to take stock of the situation. 2
The present situation is more obscure. First, the pertinent files are kept in archives that will all remain classified for exactly as many years as there remains a difference between files and facts, between planned ob- jectives and their realization. Second, even secret files suffer a loss of power when real streams of data, bypassing writing and writers, turn out merely to be unreadable series of numbers circulating between networked computers. Technologies that not only subvert writing, but engulf it and carry it off along with so-called Man, render their own description im- possible. Increasingly, data flows once confined to books and later to records and films are disappearing into black holes and boxes that, as ar- tificial intelligences, are bidding us farewell on their way to nameless high commands. In this situation we are left only with reminiscences, that is to say, with stories. How that which is written in no book came to pass may
? ? ? ? XXXIX
xl Preface
still be for books to record. Pushed to their margins even obsolete media become sensitive enough to register the signs and clues of a situation. Then, as in the case of the sectional plane of two optical media, patterns and moin? s emerge: myths, fictions of science, oracles . . .
This book is a story made up of such stories. It collects, comments upon, and relays passages and texts that show how the novelty of techno- logical media inscribed itself into the old paper of books. Many of these papers are old or perhaps even forgotten, but in the founding age of tech- nological media the terror of their novelty was so overwhelming that lit- erature registered it more acutely than in today's alleged media pluralism, in which anything goes provided it does not disturb the assumption of global dominance by Silicon Valley. An information technology whose monopoly is now coming to an end, however, registers this very informa- tion: an aesthetics of terror. What writers astonished by gramophones, films, and typewriters-the first technological media-committed to pa- per between 1 8 80 and 1920 amounts, therefore, to a ghostly image of our present as future. 3 Those early and seemingly harmless machines capable of storing and therefore separating sounds, sights, and writing ushered in a technologizing of information that, in retrospect, paved the way for to- day's self-recursive stream of numbers.
Obviously, stories of this kind cannot replace a history of technology. Even if they were countless they would remain numberless and thus would fail to capture the real upon which all innovations are based. Con- versely, number series, blueprints, and diagrams never turn back into writing, only into machines. 4 Heidegger said as much with his fine state- ment that technology itself prevents any experience of its essence. s How- ever, Heidegger's textbook-like confusion of writing and experience need not be; in lieu of philosophical inquiries into essence, simple knowledge will do.
We can provide the technological and historical data upon which fic- tional media texts, too, are based. Only then will the old and the new, books and their technological successors, arrive as the information they are. Understanding media-despite McLuhan's title-remains an impos- sibility precisely because the dominant information technologies of the day control all understanding and its illusions. But blueprints and dia- grams, regardless of whether they control printing presses or mainframe computers, may yield historical traces of the unknown called the body. What remains of people is what media can store and communicate. What counts are not the messages or the content with which they equip so- called souls for the duration of a technological era, but rather (and in
Preface xli
strict accordance with McLuhan) their circuits, the very schematism of perceptibility.
Whosoever is able to hear or see the circuits in the synthesized sound of CDs or in the laser storms of a disco finds happiness. A happiness be- yond the ice, as Nietzsche would have said. At the moment of merciless submission to laws whose cases we are, the phantasm of man as the creator of media vanishes. And it becomes possible to take stock of the situation.
In 1945, in the half-burned, typed minutes of the Army High Com- mand's final conferences, war was already named the father of all things: in a very free paraphrase of Heraclitus, it spawns most technological in- ventions. 6 And since 1973, when Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow was published, it has become clear that real wars are not fought for peo- ple or fatherlands, but take place between different media, information technologies, data flows? Patterns and moin? s of a situation that has for- gotten us . . .
But no matter what: without the research and contributions of Roland Baumann this book would not have been written. And it would have not have come about without Heidi Beck, Norbert Bolz, Rudiger Campe, Charles Grivel, Anton (Tony) Kaes, Wolf Kittler, Thorsten Lorenz, Jann Matlock, Michael Muller, Clemens Pornschlegel, FriedheIm Rong, Wolf- gang Scherer, Manfred Schneider, Bernhard Siegert, Georg Christoph (Stoffel) Tholen, Isolde Trondle-Azri, Antje Weiner, David E. Wellbery, Raimar Zons, and Agia Galini.
F. K. SEPTEMBER 1985
? ? GRA MOPHONE, FILM, TYPEWRITER
? ? ? ? INTRODUCTION
? Optical fiber networks. People will be hooked to an information channel that can be used for any medium-for the first time in history, or for its end. Once movies and music, phone calls and texts reach households via optical fiber cables, the formerly distinct media of television, radio, tele- phone, and mail converge, standardized by transmission frequencies and bit format. The optoelectronic channel in particular will be immune to disturbances that might randomize the pretty bit patterns behind the im- ages and sounds. Immune, that is, to the bomb. As is well known, nuclear blasts send an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) through the usual copper ca- bles, which would infect all connected computers.
The Pentagon is engaged in farsighted planning: only the substitution of optical fibers for metal cables can accommodate the enormous rates and volumes of bits required, spent, and celebrated by electronic warfare. All early warning systems, radar installations, missile bases, and army staffs in Europe, the opposite coast,l finally will be connected to comput- ers safe from EMP and thus will remain operational in wartime. In the meantime, pleasure is produced as a by-product: people are free to chan- nel-surf among entertainment media. After all, fiber optics transmit all messages imaginable save for the one that counts-the bomb.
Before the end, something is coming to an end. The general digitiza- tion of channels and information erases the differences among individual media. Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface. Sense and the senses turn into eyewash. Their media-produced glamor will survive for an interim as a by-product of strategic programs. Inside the computers themselves everything be- comes a number: quantity without image, sound, or voice. And once op- tical fiber networks turn formerly distinct data flows into a standardized
? I
2 Introduction
series of digitized numbers, any medium can be translated into any other. With numbers, everything goes. Modulation, transformation, synchro- nization; delay, storage, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping- a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium. Instead of wiring people and technologies, absolute knowledge will run as an endless loop.
But there still are media; there still is entertainment.
Today's standard comprises partially connected media links that are
still comprehensible in McLuhan's terms. According to him, one me- dium's content is always other media: film and radio constitute the con- tent of television; records and tapes the content of radio; silent films and audiotape that of cinema; text, telephone, and telegram that of the semi-media monopoly of the postal system. Since the beginning of the century, when the electronic tube was developed by von Lieben in Ger- many and De Forest in California, it has been possible to amplify and transmit signals. Accordingly, the large media networks, which have been in existence since the thirties, have been able to fall back on all three stor- age media-writing, film, and photography-to link up and send their signals at will.
But these links are separated by incompatible data channels and dif- fering data formats. Electrics does not equal electronics. Within the spec- trum of the general data flow, television, radio, cinema, and the postal service constitute individual and limited windows for people's sense per- ceptions. Infrared radiations or the radio echoes of approaching missiles are still transmitted through other channels, unlike the optical fiber net- works of the future. Our media systems merely distribute the words, noises, and images people can transmit and receive. But they do not com- pute these data. They do not produce an output that, under computer control, transforms any algorithm into any interface effect, to the point where people take leave of their senses. At this point, the only thing being computed is the transmission quality of storage media, which appear in the media links as the content of the media. A compromise between engi- neers and salespeople regulates how poor the sound from a TV set can be, how fuzzy movie images can be, or how much a beloved voice on the tele- phone can be filtered. Our sense perceptions are the dependent variable
of this compromise.
A composite of face and voice that remains calm, even when faced
during a televised debate by an opponent named Richard M. Nixon, is deemed telegenic and may win a presidential election, as in Kennedy's
Introduction 3
case. Voices that an optical close-up would reveal as treacherous, how- ever, are called radiogenic and rule over the VE 301, the Volksempfanger of the Second World War. For, as the Heidegger disciple among Ger- many's early radio experts realized, "death is primarily a radio topic. "2
But these sense perceptions had to be fabricated first. For media to link up and achieve dominance, we need a coincidence in the Lacanian sense: that something ceases not to write itself. Prior to the electrification of media, and well before their electronic end, there were modest, merely mechanical apparatuses. Unable to amplify or transmit, they nevertheless were the first to store sensory data: silent movies stored sights, and Edi- son's phonograph (which, unlike Berliner's later gramophone, was capa- ble both of recording and reproducing) stored sounds.
On December 6, 1877, Edison, lord of the first research laboratory in the history of technology, presented the prototype of the phonograph to the public. On February 20, 1 892, the same lab in Menlo Park (near New York) added the so-called kinetoscope. Three years later, the Lumiere brothers in France and the Skladanowsky brothers in Germany merely had to add a means of projection to turn Edison's invention into cinema.
Ever since that epochal change we have been in possession of storage technologies that can record and reproduce the very time flow of acoustic and optical data. Ears and eyes have become autonomous. And that changed the state of reality more than lithography and photography, which (according to Benjamin's thesis) in the first third of the nineteenth century merely propelled the work of art into the age of its technical re- producibility. Media "define what really is";3 they are always already be- yond aesthetics.
What phonographs and cinematographs, whose names not coinci- dentally derive from writing, were able to store was time: time as a mix- ture of audio frequencies in the acoustic realm and as the movement of single-image sequences in the optical. Time determines the limit of all art, which first has to arrest the daily data flow in order to turn it into images or signs. What is called style in art is merely the switchboard of these scannings and selections. That same switchboard also controls those arts that use writing as a serial, that is, temporally transposed, data flow. To record the sound sequences of speech, literature has to arrest them in a system of 26 letters, thereby categorically excluding all noise sequences. Not coincidentally, this system also contains as a subsystem the seven notes, whose diatonics-from A to G-form the basis of occidental mu- sic. Following a suggestion made by the musicologist von Hornbostel, it is possible to fix the chaos of exotic music assailing European ears by first
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 4 Introduction
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