No More Learning

"I WILL LEARN HOW TO COMPUTE ON MY TYPEWRITER," writes an in- mate of Gugging (on his red device for this red and black book). Alan Turing did nothing else. Instead of learning his public school's prescribed handwriting, he reduced typewriters to their bare principle: first, storing or writing; second, spacing or transferring; third, reading (formerly re- served for secretaries) or computing discrete data, that is, block letters and figures. Rather than conclude that humans are superior, as did his colleague Godel, with whom he jointly refuted the Hilbert program (in support of a complete, consistent, and decidable mathematics, that is, a mathematics that could in principle be delegated to machines),173 Turing was suicidal-in life as well as in his job. He dropped the unpredictable in order to relieve mathematicians of all predictable (or recursive) func- tions and to construct the machine that Hilbert had presumed as a for- malism. The hypothetical determinism of a Laplacian universe, with its humanist loopholes (1795), was replaced by the factual predictability of finite-state machines. Rather full of pride, Turing wrote:
The prediction which we are considering is, however, rather nearer to practicabil- ity than considered by Laplace. The system of the "universe as a whole" is such
Typewriter 2 4 5
? 24 6 Typewriter
that quite small errors in the initial conditions can have an overwhelming effect at a later time. The displacement of a single electron by a billionth of a centime- tre at one moment might make the difference between a man being killed by an avalanche a year later, or escaping. It is an essential property of the mechanical systems which we have called "discrete state machines" that this phenomenon does not occur. Even when we consider the actual physical machines instead of the idealised machines, reasonably accurate knowledge of the state at one mo- ment yields reasonably accurate knowledge any number of steps laterY4
The overwhelming effects of this predictability have since reached Man's employment statistics. The consequences of Turing's politics of sui- cide: "As Victorian technology had mechanised the work of the artisans, the computer of the future would automate the trade of intelligent think- ing. . . . The craft jealously displayed by human experts only delighted him. In this way he was an anti-technocrat, subversively diminishing the authority of the new priests and magicians of the world. He wanted to make intellectuals into ordinary people. " 175
The first to be affected were of course stenotypists. After eleven years, Turing's Universal Discrete Machine fulfilled the prophecy that an appa- ratus " also renders superfluous the typist. " His simulation game, in which a censor is to but cannot actually decide which of two data sources A and B is human and which is a machine, significantly has a precursor. According to Turing, computer B replaces the systemic position of a woman who-in competition or gender war with a man A-seeks to per- suade the data gap C that she is the real woman. But since both voices are severed from the "written, or, better still, typed" flow of information, Remington's secretary gives her farewell performance. Whenever trans- vestite A insists that he has strands of hair "nine inches long," the human predecessor of the computer writes to her censor, as mechanically as fu- tilely, "I am the woman, don't listen to him! "176
With which the homosexual Turing raised to the level of technology Dionysus's sentence, "Must we not first hate ourself if we are to love our- self? " With the added observation that against total desexualization, protest will "avail nothing. "177 Computers write by themselves, without secretaries, simply with the command WRITE. (Anyone who would like to see the phallus in the 5 volts of a logical I, and the hole in the 0. 7 volts of an 0, confuses industrial standards with fiction. ) Only those intersec- tions between computers and their environment that, following ASCII code (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), are net- worked bit by bit with typewriter keys178 will continue to offer women jobs for a while. When ENIAC, "the first operational computer," accord-
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ing to misleading American accounts, calculated projectile trajectories and A-bomb pressure waves during the Second World War, one hundred women were hired in addition to male programmers. Their job: "to climb around on ENIAC's massive frame, locate burnt-out vacuum tubes, hook up cables, and perform other types of work unrelated to writing. " 179
By contrast, Turing, with an eye toward "computers and guided pro- jectiles," predicted good times for men, programmers, and mathemati- cians. 180 But it was a strange kind of mathematics into which he imported the elegance and complexity of classical analysis. What disappeared in the split-up of binaries was not only the continuity of all graphs and tra- jectories examined since Leibniz, and which Fourier's theory and Edison's phonographs simply followed. What was much more drastic than such primitive step functions was his crucial innovation: the abolition of the difference between numbers and operational symbols, data and com- mands. For even if numbers stood for data relationships, the signs + or - were still inhabited by a human spirit who appeared to give the command to add or subtract. Turing's Universal Discrete Machine, however, con- verted these (and all other) letters into their monotonous rows of bina- ries. In machine language, the command ADD is neither a human enun- ciation nor a letter symbol, but just one of many series of bits. (In a Z80, the command "Increase the number in the accumulator by 2" would be IlOO OlIO/00000010. )ItwasnotG6del'shumanistbeliefbutratherhis simple trick of Godelization that once again emerged victorious: only af- ter commands, axioms, or, to put it briefly, sentences had been converted into numbers were they as infinitely manipulable as numbers. End of lit- erature, which is made up of sentences.
Every microprocessor implements through software what was once the dream of the cabala; namely, that through their encipherment and the manipulation of numbers, letters could yield results or illuminations that no reader could have found. Computers are endless series of numbers only whose relative position decides whether they operate as (verbal) commands or (numeric) data or addresses. If John von Neumann, the mathematician of the Second World War, had not taken certain precau- tions for his machines, a command sequence of numbers such as ADD could also add up, aside from the usual data, command sequences them- selves, until no programmer would be able to comprehend the starry mathematics to which that take-off had abducted their computer.
The neat separation of data, addresses, commands-that is, of stor- age contents, points of transfer, and processing steps-by contrast, as- sures that for each address, there is only one command or datum on the
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bus. A box of numbered paper slips that can log on not only (as with the Buribunks) to certain books, chapters, pages, terms, but to any individual bit of the system. Computer algorithms, instead of simply reproducing a logic, consist of "LOGIC + CONTROL. "181 No wonder that govern- mental ingenuity invented the impossible job of the data security special- ist to camouflage the precision of such data control.
On the other hand, since Turing, the possible job of a programmer has run the risk of forgetting mathematical elegance. Today, prior to the conquest of digital signal processors, the hardware of average computers is at a kindergarten level: of all the basic forms of computation, it barely manages addition. More complex commands have to be reconverted into a finite, that is, serial, number of cumulative steps. An unreasonable chore for humans and mathematicians. Where recursive, that is, automa- tizable, functions succeed classical analysis, computation works as a treadmill: through the repeated application of the same command on the series of interim results. But that's it. A Hungarian mathematician, after he had filled two whole pages with the recursive formulas according to which a Turing machine progresses from I to 2 to 3, and so on, observed in German as twisted as it was precise: "This appears as an extraordinar- ily slowed-down film shot of the computation processes of man. If this mechanism of computation is applied to some functions, you start living it, you begin to compute exactly like it, only faster. "182 Consolation for prospective programmers . . .
Slow-motion shots of the spirit will exorcise it. Chopped up like movements in front of the camera, equations finally solve themselves without intuition because every discrete step during storage, transfer, and calculation takes place with bureaucratic precision. The discrete machine forms a solitary union with cinema and typewriter, but not with neuro- physiology. That is what distinguishes it from the dream typewriter con- structed by Friedlaender's Dr. Sucram, who in his main line of work took care of the Gray Magic [Graue Magie1 of three-dimensional cinema.
The doctor concentrated on his experiments with a curious little machine model. He put a metal helmet on his head; fine wires connected the helmet to the key- board of the typewriter. Without any movement on the doctor's part, the levers of the machine started moving. It was a ghostly sight to behold.
"What kind of a device is that? " [BosemannJ pointed to the helmet from which emerged the wires connecting to the keyboard.
"An extraordinarily comfortable typewriter, Mister Bosemann. It saves me a typist. I am in the process of letting the ethereal emanations of the brain work for me directly. Up to now, our thoughts, no matter how practical, have been moving
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the world only in indirect ways. Our machines do not yet work under the direct influence of our thoughts, our will. I plan a direct transmission. "! 83
The typing, computing, and sewing machines in the brains or books of Nietzsche and KuRmaul hence became reality. The founding myth of a media landscape, which would only be the worldwide unfolding of neu- rophysiology, reached its peak in Friedlaender's machine fiction. Fourteen years later, it ends in Turing's machine, which was also never built but is mathematically conceivable. The computer and the brain are functionally compatible, but not in terms of their schematics. Since the nervous sys- tem, according to Turing, is "certainly not a discrete-state machine," that is, not infinitesimally precise, all the unpredictabilities of a Laplacian uni- verse loom over it. 184 Thus, "the real importance of the digital procedure lies in its ability to reduce the computational noise level to an extent which is completely unobtainable by any other (analogy) procedure. " And even if-following Neumann's elegant simplification-the neural, but not the hormonal, conduits operate according to a digital model, their information flow is still five thousand times slower than that of comput- ers. 18S The brain, however, compensates for this loss of transmission through the parallel processing of whole sets of data; statistical breadth (presumably based on majority gates) for which computers can compen- sate only through serial processing and recursive functions. What remains unrealized, at any rate, is Dr. Sucram's desire for "letting the ethereal em- anations of the brain work for me directly. "
The white noise of brains, of the ether, of the globe: the total type- writer has nothing to do with that. But everything to do with trenches/ blitz/stars.
Even if "there is little in our technological or physiological experience to indicate that absolute all-or-none organs exist,"186 the oldest knowl- edge of gods, ghosts, and generals knows better. The language of the up- per echelons of leadership is always digital. In the scriptures of the priests, Yahweh distinguishes for seven days between day and night, morning and evening, sun and moon, earth and heaven, land and water (not to mention good and bad). That is what the priests, who have edited and continue to administer this holy scripture, call God's creation. But "it is nothing but the creation of nothing other than signifiers. "187 Earth and heaven can do without Elohim's inscription; it exists, prior to God's creation and after God's death, in another holiness, for which the Holy Bible only has the word tohu bohu:188 the random noise of events. The language of the up- per echelons of leadership, by contrast, is digitalization; it transforms
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sources of accidental noise into absolute all-or-none organs. Otherwise, commands and censures, those two antisymmetrical instruments of lead- ership, could not be communicated.
And if the invading of communication channels by scrambling noises makes it necessary, the language of the upper echelons goes so far as to overcode the binary opposition with another, that is, redundant, binary opposition. In the German General Staff,
a military language practice that was exercised and used for decades . . . aimed strictly at distinguishing between "western" and "eastward" in military briefs and reports. The reason was that one wanted to establish a distinct sound differ- ence between the two terms, because otherwise messages and dictates delivered orally or over the phone might easily have resulted in fateful mix-ups. . . . The layman might think of this as a triviality, but every soldier is surely cognizant of the far-reaching implications of this regulation.
For planning wars on two fronts, the opposition between east and west is as fundamental as that between heaven and earth for the gods of creation. Therefore, when Major General Alfred JodI, the last chief of an illustri- ous short (hi)story, "used the word 'eastern' rather than, as was common protocol, 'eastward' in an army report ofJune 14, 1940, during the west- ern offensive of 1940 . . . even though he himself had emerged from the ranks of the army . . . he violated without much ado a time-tested prac- tice and triggered widespread and intense indignation in the officers' corps. "189
The tohu bohu and, in its wake, analog media run through all the various types of conditions except the NO. 190 Computers are not emana- tions of nature. Rather, the universal discrete machine, with its ability to erase, negate, and oppose binary signs, always already speaks the lan- guage of the upper echelons. On the transmitting side, the general staffs of the Axis, just as, on the receiving end, those in London or Washington.
Whether or NOT the Japanese empire took seriously the resource em- bargo threatened by Roosevelt (that is, attack the United States), whether or NOT Vice Admiral Nagumo's flotilla would sink the Pacific battleships at Pearl Harbor with carrier-bound aircraft, whether or NOT he would maintain silence in his areas of operation off the Aleutian Islands (he did): these were precisely the digital puzzles of 194 1 , solvable only through the interception and decoding of necessarily discrete sources of information. And since the machine mathematics of the current century endowed gen- eral staffs with the ability to encrypt their orders automatically, that is,
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immeasurably more efficiently than by hand, decoding had to be done by machines as well. The Second World War: the birth of the computer from the spirit of Turing and his never-built principal relay.
This escalation between senders and receivers, weapons and anti- weapons, is told quickly and most precisely in the words of Guglielmo Marconi, which were broadcast from a gramophone record on Radio Roma by the inventor of the radio immediately after his death (as if to un- derscore the new acoustic immortality). Marconi, a senator and marchese of fascist Italy, "confessed" that
forty-two years ago, when I achieved the first successful wireless transmission in Pontecchio, I already anticipated the possibility of transmitting electric waves over large distances, but in spite of that I could not hope for the great satisfaction I am enjoying today. For in those days a major shortcoming was ascribed to my invention: the possible interception of transmissions. This defect preoccupied me so much that, for many years, my principal research was focused on its elimination.
Thirty years later, however, precisely this defect was exploited and turned into radio-into that medium of reception that now reaches more than 40 million listeners every day. l9l
Which unnamed circles feared the interception of transmissions is not hard to guess. Which circles charged Marconi with the elimination of this defect, that is, with the construction of a wooden iron, is even easier to guess. Nothing in the analog medium of the radio allows the negation of signals, their spy-proof inversion into their opposite, or nonsense. Hence, general staffs, who were afforded perfect communication to the front and possibilities for blitzkrieg by Marconi's invention, had to rely on the de- velopment of discrete encoding machines. Immensely inflated flows of in- formation demanded a form of text processing as automatic as it was dis- crete-the typewriter.
Since 1919, the engineer Arthur Scherbius had experimented in Berlin- Wilmersdorf with a "secret typewriter. " In 1923, he himself thus founded Chiffriermaschinen A. G. (Encoding Machines Corporation) and secured for his model the promotion of the world postal club. l92 For the first time, Remington'S typewriter keyboard was no longer the boring and unequiv- ocal one-way link between input and output, softened only by typos. For the first time, hitting a letter key offered numerous combinatory surprises. The 26 letters of the alphabet ran over electric conduits into a distribution system consisting of three (later, four or five) rotors and an inversion ro- tor, which always selected other substitute letters. With each strike of the
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Typewriter
? ? ? RLMNE
o
o0000
o0 000
1 - Walzen
2 - Steckerleiste und
? 000000000 00000 00 000000000
(C)(C)(C)@(C)(C)(C)o(C) (C)(C)(C)(C)@(C)(C)(C) (C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)
Blockdiagramm dcr EDigma-Mascbinc
A= 5NMLRL-lM-lN-I5-1 B = 5 P N M L R L-l
D= 5p3NMLRL-IM-IN-lp-35-1 Pcrmutationcn dcr Bucbstabcn A, B, C, 0, E, F.
Block diagram of the Enigma machine: Above, ( r ) rotors, ( 2 ) connector tray and connectors, ( 3 ) lamps, ( 4 ) battery, and ( 5 ) keyboard. Below, permutations of the letters A-F.
typewriter key, the rotors (just like the second, minute, and hour hands of clocks) advanced by one revolution, only to return to their original posi- tion not until 267, or 8 billion, hits later.
That is how Scherbius, with his machine mathematics, liberated cryp- tographers from their manual work. The sender, instead of having to la- bor for hours with pencil, tables, and graph paper, sat in front of a regu-
Steckerverbindungen
? ? 3 - Lampen
5 - Tastatur
? ? ? -1 N-l p-I 5-1 F= 5pSNMLRL-IM-lN-Ip-S5-1
C = 5 pZ N M L R L-l M-I N-l p-2 5-1
E = 5 p4 N M L R L-I M-l N-I p-4 5-1
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lar typewriter keyboard and typed in the orders of his general staff in plain text. The letter output, however, which he could read from the flashing of 26 bulbs and which he copied in accordingly, looked like pure letter salad. Radio as well, with its large defect, could translate that salad in spy-proof fashion, until an antisymmetrical, secret typewriter on the receiving end converted the almost perfect white noise back into plain text, simply because the machine was calibrated on the basis of a daily command to start at the same rotor.
Year after year since the First World War, the German army had torpe- doed Bredow's plans to set up a civilian radio network, despite all the horror of a communist radio specter and the abuse of army equipment. Its own information flow, especially on long wave, was given priority. In November I922, however, postal secretary Bredow could inform the Ministry of Defense that "the switch of the official radio services to wire- less telegraphy and the use of encoding machines would soon provide suf- ficient security to protect the privacy of telegraphy. " 193 That's how pre- cisely information was exchanged between industry and the state. In I923, General von Seeckt also granted radio entertainment to Germans, but not without prohibiting with draconian regulations any misuse of civilian receivers for purposes of transmission. But the order of discourses in the current century was restored: a few public transmission frequencies thus permitted (to the joy of literary and media sociologists) the mass re- ception that Marconi posthumously welcomed; Scherbius, however, pre- vented the interception of the military-industrial complex's numerous fre- quencies, which Marconi was worried about. Since then, people have been doused in the glamor of analog media only to remove the grammar of the typewriter, the prototype of digital information processing, from their minds.
In I926, the German navy used the first encryption machines. 194 Three years later, soon after Major Fellgiebel, the subsequent chief of Army Communications, had taken over the Abwehr's cryptography divi- sion,195 the army followed. The secret typewriter of Wilmersdorf was equipped with yet more secret rotors, as well as the name of secrecy itself: ENIGMA. For a decade, it lived up to that name.
But other states also did their shopping at Scherbius. Modified Enigma models were the standard between the world wars. All classified exchanges between Tokyo and the Japanese embassy in the United States (including all the planning for Pearl Harbor), for example, took place in the machine code Angooki Taipu B, which the American counterpart re-
? General Guderian on the Enigma in his general's tank.
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named Purple for reasons of security. l96 Three months prior to Vice Ad- miral Nagumo's blitzkrieg, William F. Friedman, chief of the Signal Intel- ligence School (SIS), pulled a cryptoanalytical stunt. In mathematical pu- rity, that is, without having captured and subsequently evaluated a Purple code (following the black-box rules of the Second World War), he man- aged to retrace the infinite permutations of the secret typewriter. The last victory of humans over communication technologies, which Friedman paid for with a nervous collapse and months of psychiatric treatment. 197 But as always, it was precisely at the site of madness that machines orig- inated. Their superhuman computation capability allowed the U. S. pres- ident to listen in on Japan's plans for attack. That Roosevelt allegedly did not warn his two commanding air and sea officers in the Pacific is an al- together different story . . .
The escalation of weapons and antiweapons, of cryptography and cryptoanalysis (as Friedman renamed writing and reading under the con- ditions of high technology), at any rate urgently required the automatiza- tion of decoding. And for that need, a universal discrete machine, which could replace any other machine, was a perfect fit. "The most compli- cated machines are made only with words. "198 Turing, soon after nega- tively solving Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem), de- scribed to his mother "a possible application" of the new and seemingly infinite mathematics at which he was
working on at present. It answers the question "What is the most general kind of code or cipher possible," and at the same time (rather naturally) enables me to construct a lot of particular and interesting codes. One of them is pretty well im- possible to decode without a key, and very quick to encode. I expect I could sell them to H. M. Government for quite a substantial sum, but I am rather doubtful about the morality of such things. What do you think? 199
The answer came not from his mother but from the government. Ger- many's "Enigma machine was the central problem that confronted the British Intelligence Service in 1938.
But they believed it was unsolv- able,"20o until the Government Code and Cipher School hired Alan M. Turing (notwithstanding his moral doubts) three days after the outbreak of the war.
Bletchley Park, the bombproof site of British cryptoanalysis during the war, was in a better position than its American colleagues: young mathematicians of the Polish secret service had already constructed a de- coding machine, the so-called Bombe, based on captured Enigmas. But when Fellgiebel's Army Communications increased the number of rotors
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to five, even the Bombe could not follow suit. The I50,738,274,937,250 possible ways of electrically connecting ten pairs of letters exceeded its capacity, at least in real time, on which blitzkrieg commands and their timely countermeasures depend. The overwhelmed Poles donated their files to the British and Turing.
From this primitive Bombe, Turing made a machine that the head of Bletchley Park not coincidentally named the Oriental Goddess: a fully au- tomatized oracle to interpret fully automatized secret radio communica- tion. Turing's recursive functions laid the groundwork for the enemy's ability to decode Enigma signals with a mere 24-hour delay beginning in May I94I, and thus, to paraphrase Goebbels, to eavesdrop on the enemy. The German army did not want to believe it until the end of the war: it was "fully convinced that the decoding of Enigma was, even with the aid of captured machines, impossible given the overwhelmingly large number of calibrating positions. "201 However, only nonsense, white noise without information and hence of no use for the upper echelons, provides com- plete proof against spying. Whereas "the very fact that the Enigma was a machine made mechanical cryptoanalysis a possibility. "202 As a pseudo- random generator, the secret typewriter produced nonsense only relative to systems whose revolutions did not match its own. Turing's goddess, however, found regularities in the letter salad.
For one thing, Enigma had the practical advantage or theoretical dis- advantage that its cipher consisted of a self-inverse group. In order to be encoded or decoded on the same machine, letter pairs had to be inter- changeable. For example, when the OKW encoded its 0 as a K, the K in- versely turned into an O. From that followed "the very particular feature that no letter could be enciphered by itself. "203 Not even the OKW was capable of writing its own name. Turing subjected these few yet revealing implications to a sequential analysis that weighted and controlled all the probabilities of solution. With automatized judgment, the Oriental God- dess ran through permutation after permutation, until the letter salad be- came plain text again. War of typewriters.
And since from " I 5 to a maximum of 29 percent"204 of the German radio traffic ran through Enigma, the spy war reached a new level: inter- ception yielded "not just messages, but the whole enemy communication system. "205 The midrange levels of command-from army and division headquarters to individual blitzkrieg weapons on land, in the air, or at sea-betrayed their addresses, which are, all spy novels notwithstanding, more revealing than data or messages. Sixty different Enigma codes and 3,000 classified radio messages per day, with all of the specs for their
? ? senders and receivers, recorded the war like a typewriter the size of Eu- rope. Under the conditions of high technology, war coincides with a chart of its organizational structure. Reason enough for the Government Code and Cipher School to model, in miniature, its organization after that of the German army, that is, after the enemy. 206 Turing's game of imitation became a reality.
It is only one step from the flowchart to the computer. The addresses, data, commands that circulated between humans and typewriters in the German army or its British simulacrum could finally turn into hardware. This last step was undertaken in I943 by the Post Office Research Station at Bletchley Park. One thousand five hundred tubes were expropriated and converted into overloaded switches and, instead of reinforcing radio analog signals, simulated the binary play of Boolean algebra. Transistors did not make it into the world until I949, but even without them the uni- versal discrete machine-including data entry, programming possibilities, and the great innovation of internal storage mechanisms207-saw its first implementation, for which Turing's successors could find no other name than COLOSSUS. Because the strategic secrets of the Fuhrer's headquar- ters, Wolfsschanze, could, as is logical, only be cracked by a monster computer.
COLOSSUS began its work and decoded an additional 40 percent of the German radio traffic-everything that for reasons of security was transmitted not via Enigma and wireless but via the Siemens Cryptwriter. As a teleprinter running the Baudot-Murray Code, this typewriter no longer required cumbersome manual operation with its human sources of error; its fully digitized signals consisted of the "yes" or "no" of ticker
Typewriter 257
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tape, which, through the binary addition of plain text and pseudo- random generator, could be encoded much more efficiently than with Enigma. Moreover, radio interception became possible only once signals were sent through a radio link rather than a telegraph cable. 20s That is how well upper echelons pick their typewriters.
Obviously, COLOSSUS beat binary addition with binary addition, but even the first computer in the history of science or warfare would have been nothing but a several-ton version of Remington's special type- writer with a calculating machine209 had it not observed conditional jump instructions. 21o
Conditional jumps, first envisioned in Babbage's unfinished Analyti- cal Engine of 1 83 5 , were born into the world of machines in 193 8 in Kon- rad Zuse's apartment in Berlin, and this world has since been self-identi- cal with the symbolic. In vain, the autodidact offered his binary calcula- tors to use as encryption machines and to surpass the supposedly spy-proof Enigma. 2l1 The opportunity missed by Army Communications was seized by the German Aviation Test Site in 194 1-for the purposes of "calculating, testing, and examining cruise missiles. "212 Yet Zuse made only the most sparing use of the IF-THEN commands of his brilliant "plan calculation": Godel's and Turing's insight oftranslatingcommands, that is, letters, into numbers was a concern for him:
Since programs, like numbers, are built from series of bits, it was only a matter of course that programs be stored as well. With that it was possible to make condi- tional jumps, as we say today, and to convert addresses. From the point of view of schematics, there are several solutions for it. They all rest on a common thought: the feedback of the result of the calculation on the process and on the configura- tion of the program itself. Symbolically, one can envision that through a single wire. I was, frankly, nervous about taking that step. As long as that wire has not been laid, computers can easily be overseen and controlled in their possibilities and effects. But once unrestricted program processing becomes a possibility, it is difficult to recognize the point at which one could say: up to this point, but no further. 2J3
A simple feedback loop -and information machines bypass humans, their so-called inventors. Computers themselves become subjects. IF a preprogrammed condition is missing, data processing continues accord- ing to the conventions of numbered commands, but IF somewhere an in- termediate result fulfills the condition, THEN the program itself deter- mines successive commands, that is, its future.
In the same way, Lacan, making a distinction with animal codes, de-
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fined language and subjectivity as human properties. For example, the dance of bees, as it has been researched by von Frisch, "is distinguished from language precisely by the fixed correlation of its signs to the reality that they signify. " While the messages of one bee control the flight of an- other to blossoms and prey, these messages are not decoded and trans- mitted by the second bee. By contrast, "the form in which language is ex- pressed . . . itself defines subjectivity. Language says: 'You will go here, and when you see this, you will turn off there. ' In other words: it refers itself to the discourse of the other. "214
In yet other words: bees are projectiles, and humans, cruise missiles. One is given objective data on angles and distances by a dance, the other, a command of free will. Computers operating on IF-THEN commands are therefore machine subjects. Electronics, a tube monster since Bletchley Park, replaces discourse, and programmability replaces free will.
Not for nothing was Zuse "frankly, nervous" about his algorithmic golems and their "halting problem. " Not for nothing did the Henschel Works or the Ministry of Aviation assign the development of cruise mis- siles to these golems. On all fronts, from top-secret cryptoanalysis to the most spectacular future weapons offensive, the Second World War de- volved from humans and soldiers to machine subjects. And it wasn't by much that Zuse's binary computers missed doing the programming of free space flight from its inception, rather than determining in the bunkers of the Harz the fate of the V2 at the last moment. 215 The "range of charges" that the Peenemiinde Army Test Site assigned to German uni- versities in 1939 included (aside from acceleration integrators, Doppler radar, onboard calculators, etc. ), in a rather visionary way, what Wernher von Braun described as "the first attempt at electric digital computa- tion. "216 The weapon as subject required a corresponding brain.
But since the commander in chief of the German army (whom Syber- berg has called the "greatest filmmaker of all time")217 did not believe in self-guided weapons on the actual rocket testing site, but only during their demonstration on color film at the Wolfsschanze,218 the entropies of the Nazi state emerged victorious over information and information machines.
At any rate, cybernetics, the theory of self-guidance and feedback loops, is a theory of the Second World War. Norbert Wiener testified to that when he introduced the term:
The deciding factor in this new step was the war. I had known for a considerable time that if a national emergency should come, my function in it [sic] would be
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determined largely by two things: my close contact with the program of comput- ing machines developed by Dr. Vannevar Bush, and my own joint work with Dr. Yuk Wing Lee on the design of electric networks. . . . At the beginning of the war, the German prestige in aviation and the defensive position of England turned the attention of many scientists to the improvement of anti-aircraft artillery. Even be- fore the war, it had become clear that the speed of the airplane had rendered ob- solete all classical methods of the direction of fire, and that it was necessary to build into the control apparatus all the computations necessary. These were ren- dered much more difficult by the fact that, unlike all previously encountered tar- gets, an airplane has a velocity which is a very appreciable part of the velocity of the missile used to bring it down. Accordingly, it is exceedingly important to shoot the missile, not at the target, but in such a way that missile and target may come together in space at some time in the future. We must hence find some method of predicting the future position of the plane. 219
With Wiener's Linear Prediction Code (LPC), mathematics changed into an oracle capable of predicting a probable future even out of chaos- initially for fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft guidance systems, in between the wars for human mouths and the computer simulations of their dis- courses. 220 Blind, unpredictable time, which rules over analog storage and transmission media (in contrast to the arts), was finally brought under control. With digital signal processing, measuring circuits and algorithms (like an automated sound engineer) ride along on random frequencies. To- day this form of cybernetics ensures the sound of most reputable rock bands; in actuality, however, it was only a "new step" in ballistics. Ma- chines replaced Leibniz in the analysis of trajectories.
With the consequence that COLOSSUS gave birth to many a son, each more colossal than its secret father. According to the ministry of supply, Turing'S postwar computer ACE was supposed to calculate "grenades, bombs, rockets, and cruise missiles"; the American ENIAC "was to simulate trajectories of shells through varying conditions of air resistance and wind velocity, which involved the summation of thousands of little pieces of trajectories. " John von Neumann's EDVAC was being designed to solve "three-dimensional 'aerodynamic and shock-wave prob- lems, . . . shell, bomb and rocket work, . . . [and] progress in the field of propellants and high explosives"'; BINAC worked for the United States Air Force; ATLAS, for cryptoanalysis; and finally, MANIAC, if this sug- gestive name had been implemented in time, would have optimized the pressure wave of the first H-bomb. 221
Machines operating on the basis of recursive functions produce slow- motion studies not only of human thinking but also of human demise.
Typewriter 261
According to the insight of Pynchon and Virilio, the blitzkrieg and the flash-bulb shot (Blitzlichtaufnahme) coincide in the bomb that leveled Hiroshima during rush hour on August 6, 1945. A shutter speed of 0. 000000067 seconds, far below Mach's projectile-like, pioneering cine- matic feat of 1 8 83 , melted countless Japanese people " as a fine-vapor de- posit of fat-cracklings wrinkled into the fused rubble" of their city. 222 Cin- ema to be computed in computer processing speeds, and only in computer processing speeds.
On the film's manifest surface, everything proceeds as if the "mar- riage of two monsters"223 that John von Neumann had arranged between a German guided missile and an American A-bomb payload (that is, by saving both conventional amatol and conventional bomber pilots) by it- self had been the step from blitzkrieg to the strategic present. What speaks against that is that both guided missiles and nuclear weapons sur- mounted the iron and bamboo curtains with extraordinary ease-partly through espionage, partly through the transfer of technology. Different from the machine subject itself, the innocuous but fully automated type- computing machine. With the fiat of the theory that is omnipotent be- cause it is true, Stalin condemned the bourgeois aberration of cybernetics. As if materialism, in the espionage races with its other half, had been blinded by the disclosed secrets of mass extermination, the smoke trail of rockets and the flash of bombs.
Annihilation is still called determining the outcome of the war. Only 40 years later, classified archives have gradually revealed that Bletchley Park was presumably the most suitable candidate for this title. During the Second World War, a materialist who materialized mathematics itself emerged victorious. Regarding COLOSSUS and Enigma, Turing's biogra- pher writes that "intelligence had won the war"224 with the British liter- ality that does not distinguish among reason, secret service, and informa- tion machine. But that is exactly what remained a state secret. During the war, a whole organization emerged for the purpose of delivering the re- sults of fully automatized cryptoanalysis in coded form to the command- ing officers at the front. Otherwise, the most vital secret of the war (through seized documents, traitors, or treacherously revealing counter- measures) possibly would have filtered through to the German army, and Enigma would have been silenced. Hence it became secret agents' last his- torical assignment to invent radiant spy novels in order to camouflage the fact that interception and the type-computing machine respectively ren- der secret services and agents superfluous. ( Which is what spy novels con- tinue to do to this very day. ) The mysterious "Werther," who allegedly
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Hiroshima before and after August 6, I94 5 .
transmitted many plans of attack from the Wolfsschanze via Swiss dou- ble agents to Moscow, but who has yet to be located historically, may well have been one of the simulacra that systematically screened Bletchley Park from the Red Army. 225 Then, at any rate, Stalin's theory would have had a material basis-nonproliferation of the flow of information.
On August 28, 1945, three weeks after Hiroshima, four weeks after Potsdam, U. S. President Truman issued a secret decree on secret service interception, an information blockage on information machines. War- determining cryptoanalysis became a matter of ultimate classified mate- rial-in the past and the present, technology and method, successes and results, Bletchley Park and Washington, D. C. 226 As a result of which the same, but now cold, war could start again immediately: in the shadow of Truman's decree, COLOSSUS and its American clones learned Russian instead of German. Hermetically sealed, "the legacy of a total war, and of the capture of a total communications system, could now turn to the con- struction of a total machine. "227
The success of this strategy of dissimulation is proved by its only leak. A writer, who not only knew the typewriter from secretaries but also reproduced it on the printed page, communicated in letter form to the warlords gathered in Potsdam that the symbolic has, through Enigma and COLOSSUS, become a world of the machine.
? ? ? Arno Schmidt , " Offener Brief "
An die Exzellenzen Herren
Truman (Roosevelt) , Stalin,
Churchill (Attlee ) Jalta, Teheran , Potsdam
8 c 357 8xup ZEUs !
id 21v18 Pt 7 gallisc 314002a 17 ? V 31 GpU 4a 29, 39, 49 ? rnz 71Fi16 34007129 pp 34 udil19jem 13349 bubu WEg !
aff 19 exi: 16 enu 070 zIrn 4019 abs12c 24 spil, 43 asti siv 13999 idle 48, 19037 pem 8 pho 36. 1012
sabi FR26a FlisCh 26:iwo - 18447 g7 gg !
Glent 3 1 , glent 14 Po Arno Schmidt 228
Under the conditions of high technology, literature has nothing more to say. It ends in cryptograms that defy interpretation and only permit in- terception. Of all long-distance connections on this planet today,229 from phone services to microwave radio, 0. 1 percent flow through the trans- mission, storage, and decoding machines of the National Security Agency
(NSA), the organization succeeding SIS and Bletchley Park. By its own ac- count, the NSA has "accelerated" the "advent of the computer age," and hence the end of history, like nothing else. 230 An automated discourse analysis has taken command.
And while professors are still reluctantly trading in their typewriters for word processors, the NSA is preparing for the future: from nursery school mathematics, which continues to be fully sufficient for books, to charge-coupled devices, surface-wave filters, digital signal processors in- cluding the four basic forms of computation. 231 Trenches, flashes of light- ning, stars-storage, transmission, the laying of cables.
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? ? REFERENCE MATTER
? NOTES
TRANSLATORS' NOTE: The citation format for Kittler's text closely follows that of the German edition. When two publication dates are given, the first refers to the date of original publication, the second, either to a later edition used by Kittler or to an English translation. Page numbers refer to the latter date, which corresponds to the edition given in the Bibliography, pp. 299-3 1 5 .
TRANSLATORS' INTRODUCTION
? 1. Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to\Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), 3 2.
2. Ibid.
3 . Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1988), 136.
4. See ibid. , 79-8 1, and Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Cul- ture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993 ), 3-20.
5. Quoted in Boris Eichenbaum, "The Theory of the 'Formal Method,'" in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 803.
6. Friedrich Kittler, "Die Laterna magica der Literatur: Schillers und Hoff- manns Medienstrategien," in Athenaum: Jahrbuch fur Romantik I994, ed. Ernst Behler, Jochen Horisch, and Gunther Oesterle (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1994), 2 19 .
7. See, for example, Michael Heim, "The Computer as Component: Hei- degger and McLuhan," Philosophy and Literature 16. 2 (1992): 304-18; Judith Stamps, Unthinking Modernity: Innis, McLuhan and the Frankfurt School (Mon- treal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 19 9 5 ) ; and Glenn Willmott, McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1996).
8. Theodore Roszak, "The Summa Popologica of Marshall McLuhan," in McLuhan: Pro & Con, ed. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968), 257-69.
'"
I
? 9. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory ofthe Media," in
268 Notes to Pages xv-xvii
The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Poetics and the Media, ed. Michael Roloff (New York: Seabury, 1974), lI8. See also Enzensberger's hilarious retrac- tion, "The Zero Medium, or Why All Complaints About Television are Point- less," in Mediocrity and Delusion: Collected Diversions, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Verso, 1992), 59-70. In an interesting twist, Klaus Theweleit has speculated that the German Left discarded McLuhan because his focus on bodies and media, extensions, narcosis, and self-amputation was more materialist than Marxism had ever been. See Theweleit, Buch der Konige I: Orpheus und Eury- dike (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 1988), 383,
10. Enzensberger, "Constituents," 97.
II. Jean Baudrillard, "Requiem for the Media," in For a Critique ofthe Po- litical Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St.