No More Learning

e. an algorithm. In contrast to both mechanisms and theories, algorithms are defined in two ways: unlike mechanisms they do not merely run a course, but rather undergo specific jumps and loops; but they must nevertheless, unlike theories and despite all jumps and loops, come to an end in finite time.
Next close the door of the frame and mark the spot where the threads cross on the tablet. After this, open the door again and continue with another point, moving from point to point until the entire lute has been scanned and its points have been transferred to the tablet. Then connect all the points on the tablet and you will see the result.
Forthe painters and fortress builders of the Renaissance, whether their names were Brunelleschi, Alberti, or Diirer,the linguistic ruling since Kantthat art is not technology and technology not art was hardly valid. Quite the contrary: Diirer's algorithmic linear perspective has as its counterpart only the algorithms that today
are run as computer graphics or computer music. Not coincidentally, following the algorithm yields not quite the musical instrument called a lute, but only a finite number of outline points. Otherwise, for instance, in an attempt to create the out- line itself through an endless number of points, the algorithm would have to end up in an unallowable infinite loop. Thus the painter does exactly what a digital- analog converter does in the input stages of our computer monitors or sound systems nowadays: it changes a discrete amount of points to a constant function.
In Enzensberger's poem about the inventor of the mechanical clock it is said:
Different
words and wheels. But
the same sky.
That's the Dark Age we still
live in today. 15
We still live in these middle ages not because movable type and linear-perspec- tival images necessarily follow from the laws of technology or even from the nature of things. We live in the space of these inventions only because they were
Kittler J Perspective and the Book 47
? ? Right:Agostino Ramelli. Engraving from Diverse et Artificiose Machine, 1588.
Opposite: Anonymous. Woodcut from Johann Schreck
and Philip Wang Zheng, Yuan-xiQiqi Tu-shuo, 1627.
contingent. They are a European legacy, upon which all Europe's power was based. Even
the fact that book printing and linear per-
spective are today as unremarkable as they St
arewidespread is a consequence of this power. The artillery ships, Bible societies, and machine guns of the nineteenth century have finally managed to recast the world in mov- able type and perspectival vanishing points.
This was not always the case. 16 Around
1620, immediately after the founding of their
papal propaganda ministry, the Jesuits decided to give all nations and empires the
gift of the new union between the media of printing and technical perspectival
drawing. Consequently, a Gutenberg-like printing press was founded in Peking, the center of the empire of the center. As if paper had found its way home after
its long travels from China via Arabia and Sicily to Mainz, the Jesuits set to work
on converting the "simple" Chinese with simply illustrated Bibles. However, this
technology apparently seemed too weak for the son of heaven himself. For the
conversion of the Emperor, only one technology was considered for the presen-
tation of Europe's higher technology. Thus, Father Johannes Adam Schall von
Bell, successor to Matteo Ricci, imported a purely scientific library from Rome to
Peking, containing nineteen titles on linear perspective alone. With this, every-
thing seemed ready for bestowing China with the favor not only of reproducible
texts but also of equally reproducible technical drawings. But, perhaps due to blindness and/or hubris, the mission officials-not in Peking, but in faraway
Rome-made a remarkable mistake: as natives to be instructed in copper etching and perspectival drawing they chose not Chinese but rather Japanese from the Christian enclave that in 1945 would become world-famous as Nagasaki. 17In
Nagasaki, though-you guessed it-there were absolutely no tracts by, say, Alberti or Diirer.
And so the inevitable happened. Father Schall von Bell, in order to confront
the Emperor of China with superior European technology, decided to put four ambitious volumes "with diagrams and explanations of curious machines from the
FarWest"through Peking's printing presses. 18The so-called TheatraMachinarum, a book genre not coincidentally flourishing since the Renaissance, generally con- tained exact perspectival copper etchings or woodcuts of existing or else only fictive machines-drawings, that is, that were supposed to make it possible for
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cut makers, got to work. They had the Europeanmachine-theater books complete with a Chinese translation right before
eyes, but were nevertheless com-
pletely unable to copy correctly the per-
spectivally correct ratios of the original.
Worse the Chinese draftsmen did yet,
seem to notice that medieval ~not they-like
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manuscript copyists once upon a time- had smuggled in any number of errors in the reproduction. Deluxe editions, too, tended, to contain entirely unbuildable mills and saw works, which no one would have suspected, nor did anyone find out. This kind of unintended parody of
printed graphics was printed over and over in the Empire of China (as proved by Samuel Edgerton) until the first decades of the nineteenth century--in encyclo-
pedias and scientific-technological handbooks. The results are well known. China, the high-technological model of the world during the middle ages,19remained at a stage that made it easy for the English and other European powers to win one colonial war after another after 1840. The Chinese simply could not become sub-
jects-and that means quite literally underlings-of linear perspective. They pre- ferred to remain loyal to Confucius or Lao Tse.
This was the sad end of the transfer of technology from West to East. Only in the opposite direction-from East to West-did everything run smoothly. It was a technology transfer from Peking to Hanover that first put the new geometry of book printing and print technology into words. The same Jesuits who vainly pro- moted European print technology also read ancient Chinese manuscripts and described them to a philosopher in Germany. What Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz found then in his world-wide mail was not the content of the I-Ching but its sign. He read, in other words, that twenty-six alphabetical signs or even ten Indo- Arabic numerals are far too much effort in describing Being as a whole. The I-Ching or "Book of Changes" comes out, as we know, with the yin and yang, the whole and unbroken line.
Fromthis economy of signs, as the Jesuit fathershad described it to him, Leibniz drew the daring conclusion that all signs are replaceable, even, or especially, the Indo-Arabic numerals he had once so praised. In a dedication to his absolute lord,
^ -
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Kitter I Prspective and the Book 49
? the Duke of Hanover, he explained how the world could be completely explained
using just two signs. These two signs, however, were no longer called yin and
yang, the straight and uninterrupted line, but zero and one. There were good rea-
sons for this, both theological and typographic. Leibniz, who as a rule checked all
mathematical signs against Gutenberg's place value logic and corrected them in case of error,saw in "zero"the nothing that had prevailed before God's act of
creation, and in "one" the divine creation itself. How can we be surprised, then, that his binary numeral system should be able to describe Being as a whole.
Zero and one describe something else, as well. Even Descartes, not only as a
philosopher but also as the founder of analytical geometry, had declared the
world a three-dimensional space that the thinking subject faces, literally, as a zero-dimensional point. Leibniz went a step further. His monadology imagines
the subject as a paradox, a point-shaped architecture without windows, within which the entire world nevertheless appears. And this is simply because the monad has no windows but is a camera obscura. 20Creation, or "one,"can only collapse into the monad or "zero,"insofar as this "zero"figures as the always-already eye-
point of a linear perspective.
In other words, typography and linear perspective, since Leibniz, not only rule
so-called nature, but also so-called thinking. A geometry of a second order, as China taught it to that most mathematical of all philosophers, recreates the signs
themselves as technologies. This typographical mathematics-as Sybille Krimer designates it-is powerful enough to dissolve the very union of media that it his- torically had enabled. Diirer's wondrous lute-algorithm was based on a joining of book printing, linear perspective, and practiced painterly craft; as a result it had to be written up in straightforward Early New High German. Leibniz replaced movable type with the even more mobile signs of his algebra and linear-perspec- tival nature with linear-perspectival thinking. Thus he was also able to write down algorithms produced without handcrafting or any work of man. The calcu- lator Leibniz brought to members of London's Royal Society automatically ran additions and subtractions, multiplications and divisions. A machine existed in the world whose end product came out without paper or book printing-not that this prevented the machine itself from ending up in print, like many another modern apparatus, as a construction drawing. Leibniz's successors had only to consult a reference work in order to render the gap between human language and the science of technology ever wider. The media-union between printing and lin- ear perspective enabled the outdoing of the technological media themselves; that is, it enabled its own outdoing. From the camera obscura have come the photographic camera and the computer screen; from movable type, movable electrons in silicon
50 Grey Room 05
? chips or, soon, even quantum transistors.
But that would mean that the books we understand and the images we recog-
nize form mere subsets of sign sentences, a mockery of all hermeneutics. We are dealing with a second-order geometry in which the signs or atomic states configure
themselves. This was announced, ironically and threateningly, in the last geom- etry produced in Europe, the culmination of its two-thousand year history since Euclid. David Hilbert's Foundations of Geometry, which appeared in Leipzig in 1899, starts with the principle that the time-honored view-that is, the pictorial quality-of points, lines, and planes is entirely superfluous. In place of points, lines, and planes, wrote Hilbert, he could just as easily have spoken of "'chairs,' 'tables,' and 'tankards. '"21This so-called formalism nevertheless did not exclude a graphics of a second order,that is, the signs themselves; in fact, it necessitated it. Hilbert, behaving for all the world as if Regiomontanus's Euclid edition had
become the accepted thing, called his signs "discrete objects that are visibly pre- sent as immediate experience before all thought. "Even more concise, because just as theological, that is to say, as atheistic as Leibniz's approach, was his sentence
"Inthe beginning was the sign. "
The word that was at the beginning has, of course, become flesh. As such it went
into print in Gutenberg's Bible and into the camera obscura with Brunelleschi's linear perspective. On the other hand, the sign that was at the beginning has also been incarnated, during Hilbert's lifetime and indeed to his dismay, in digital computers. Alan Turinghad only to take his mentor at his word and feed "discrete objects" that are present "before all thought" to machines, instead of to mathe- maticians, in order to end the history of Europe not quite two years before the out- break of World War II.
You already guessed it: All my excursions into early Renaissance legends were just a detour, a short-circuit between then and today. I just did not want to have
to repeat the same thing again and again, namely, that machines are taking over
(according to Turing'sprophecy of 1948) and how they are doing it. But hopefully these excursuses have not proved as redundant as the alphabet and base-10 num-
bers, even though they may be attributed to the same. In the nightmares of those who would be happiest if we were bombed back into the ecologically safe stone ages, computers loom like homeless monsters over a culture of books and images that they can only vampirize. In the wish-fulfillment dreams of trans-Atlantic
software magnates, books and images are just lying there as a gigantic, exploitable
mass of resources that has yet to be digitally reproduced or digitally copyrighted. Both phantasms, be it for reasons of pedagogy or of economics, forget that culture cannot be had without technology nor technology without culture. The "end of art,"
Kittler I Perspective and the Book 51
? to speak with Hegel, could only originate in art itself. One sentence of Aristotle's, slightly modified, is still true despite both of these phantasms: "Tragedyand com- edy,"wrote the philosopher, "aremade of the same letters. "The element as such,
not its changeable implementations, has determined our history. A brief narra- tive of the history of European technology should entail nothing less.
52 Grey Room 05
? Notes
1. See Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text:
A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
2. Michael Giesecke, Der Buchdruck in der friihen Neuzeit: Eine historische Fallstudie iiber die Durchsetzung neuer Informations- und Kom-
munikationstechnologien (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 140-42.
3. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works,vol. 4/5, ed. Anna Freud et al. , trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press/Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953), 278.
4. Stephane Mallarm6, "Un coup de des," in Oeuvres completes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 453-477.
5. Sybille Kramer, Berechenbare Vernunft: Kalkul und Rationalismus im 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988).
6. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "J. G. G. (1935-
1468),"inMausoleum:Thirty-sevenBalladsfrom
the History of Progress, trans. Joachim Neugro- schel (New York:Urizen Books, 1976), 4.
7. David Kahn, The Codebreakers:The Story of Secret Writing(New York:Macmillan, 1967), 127.
8. Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, trans. Catherine Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2000), 28 (onJuliusCaesar),88 (onAugustus).
9. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 1, trans. Gaston Du C. de Vere (London: Medici Society/ Philip Lee Warner, 1912-1914), 494.
10. Giorgio Vasari, "Das Leben des floren- tinischen Baumeisters Leon Battista Alberti," in
Vasari, Leben der ausgezezeichnetsen Maler,
Bildhauer und Baumeister von Cimabue bis an express difference between Chinese and Euro-
zum Jahre 1567, ed. Julian Kleimann (Worms: Werner'sche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1983), 347.
11. Giesecke, 145.
12. Hermann von Helmholtz, "On the Relation of Optics to Painting," in Popular Lectures on
pean perspective.
21. Hilbert's quotations here and following
are found in Bettina Heintz, Die Herrschaft der
Regel: Zur Grundlagengeschichte des Computers (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1993), 58-91.
Scientific Subjects, trans. E. Atkinson (London: Longmans, Green and Co. , 1881), 84-85. "If we look at houses, or other results of man's artistic activity, we know at the outset that the forms are for the most part plane surfaces at right angles to each other, with occasional circular or even spheroidal surfaces. And in fact, when we know so much, a correctperspective drawing is sufficient to produce the whole shape of the body. . . . The best perspective drawing is however of but little avail in the case of irregular shapes, rough blocks of rock and ice, masses of foliage, and the like. "
13. Albrecht Diirer, The Painter's Manual: A Manual of Measurement of Lines, Areas, and Solids by Means of Compass and Ruler, trans. Walter L. Strauss (New York: Abaris Books, 1977), 393.
14. Diirer, The Painter's Manual, 391-93. Translation slightly modified.
15. Enzensberger, "G. de' D. (1318-1389)," in Mausoleum, 3.
16. SeeSamuelY. Edgerton,TheHeritageof Giotto's Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of
the Scientific Revolution, 2nd ed. (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1993), 260-80.
17. Edgerton, 266.
18. Edgerton, 271.
19. See William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of
Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A. D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
20.
See, for example, Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz, NewEssays on Human Understanding, ed. and trans. PeterTemnantand JonathanBennett
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
145.