No More Learning

It is a whole lot easier to show where another scholar went off the rails than to invent a new style of thought. There is a growing body of sound and interesting scholarship on media history in all its flavors; but there is very little thinking that is as breathtakingly imaginative as Kittler's. His mammoth work comes with some nasty little gnats flying around it, but we shouldn't let the gnats blind us to the magnificence of the shaggy beast he has brought on to the scene.
Context and Overview of Optical Media
Optical Media distills many of the theses of Discourse Networks and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. It is not meant to be the pre- sentation of cutting-edge research; it is a kind of popular exposition of a body of work. The lecture, as Erving Goffman points out, is a form of talk that is in cahoots with what he calls the "cognitive establishment. ,,7 Every lecture ultimately makes the promise that the world can be made sense of, and Kittler does not fail in his end of the bargain. Though much has rightly been made of his links to French poststructuralism (a term he dismisses), Kittler has none of the epistemological hypochondria that some Anglo-American followers - especially of Derrida - take away from the movement. Kittler has no interest in "interrogating" our "responsibility" for the "aporias" of "undecidability" (to "deploy" several deconstructionist cliches); he charges full steam ahead with the business of enlightenment. Wielding a scalpel of Hegelian sharpness Kittler confidently slices truth from nonsense. Unlike some practitioners of cultural studies,
10
? ? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
he seems unembarrassed to be a professor, although he always dis- cusses that role with a sly irony. Indeed, one context for Optical Media is the establishment of media studies at Humboldt University, which, as the former University of Berlin, is the ground zero of the modern research university. Kittler's book from the same period, Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaft (2001), is a lecture series on the intellectual history of university life; in Optical Media, the lecture as a medium is always a topic for self-reflection along with rnnning in-jokes about professors and universities. Optical Media does not agonize about the inherent terror of reason; it gets on with the task of dispensing knowledge to students.
The lectures are relatively easy to follow and do not require any extensive summary; here I simply sketch the narrative arc. Kittler's exposition follows a more or less threefold narrative of artistic, analog, and digital media. The history is quite conventional in its basic periodization - Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment, Romanticism, etc. The revisionism occurs, rather, inside the well-worn categories as Kittler insinuates media into them, showing how much media explain what we think we already know. The era of artistic media is governed by the hand and reaches its peak in the linear perspective of the Renaissance. This is not a hand innocent of technique, but rather one tutored by perspective's discipline of geometry or the inverted tracings of light itself in the camera obscura. As always, these artistic media are in cahoots with state, religious, and military power (especially the magic lantern and other techniques of projection). The era of analog media - that of optical media proper - frees the act of visual depiction from the human hand and the act of visual perception from the human eye. A series of photographic devices allows for a kind of direct transcrip- tion of the sunshine without intervention of the pencil or brush, and liberates the realm of the visible from the physiology of the eye. The human being is no longer the lord of the record or of the know- able nniverse. Machines take on tasks - drawing, writing, seeing, hearing, word-processing, memory, and even knowing - that once were thought unique to humans and often perform them better. (That the "uniquely human" recedes before the onslaught of new media is one of Kittler's characteristic claims. ) The great breakthrough of analog media is the storage and manipulation of temporal process; the great problem is the lack of interoperability between systems. Kittler's account of cinema and television is a rather teleological story about how the optical and acoustical tracks got patched together in various configurations along the road to compatibility and
11
? ? ? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
convertibility. That great apotheosis had to await the digital moment. Now we await the utopian possibility, as be concludes, of working witb light as light, not just light as effect or trace. There is something almost millenarian in this culmination of media history. The end of history returns us to the beginning, when the light was separated from the darkness.
The Love of Light
What does require comment are the ways these lectures act out a number of key themes and gestures of Kittler's larger media theory. Seven is a good number:
1. Abstraction
Kittler makes clear that his subject is optical media and not, say, film and television history. He does not want to identify media with any particular incarnation and places "general principles of image storage, transmission, and processing above their various realizations. " More specifically, the computer provides Kittler with a handy device for rewriting the history of all hitherto existing media. Media are data- processors: this is his starting point. These lectures foreground the primacy of telecommunications - from the telegraph to the computer - as the foundation of modern optical media, along with the accom- panying three functions of storage, transmission, and processing. Kittler's abstraction may shave off the edges of historical complexity, but he is always first and foremost a philosopher of media history rather than a media historian. His aim is to use history to inform philosophical reflection about techniques of sending, saving, and calculating. The camera obscura receives images; the magic lantern sends them; the camera stores them. Kittler loves rigorous schemas, especially if they have three parts.
2. Analogy
Media studies has a long history of showy displays of miscellaneous reference and magpie learning. One of McLuhan's favorite tricks was to create a surrealist juxtaposition of two distinct historical items, one usually highbrow and canonic, the other usually modern and popular. We see something similar in Kittler's claims that Baroque candles illuminate Sunday night talk shows, the positive-negative process in
12
? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
photography IS an early Boolean CIrcuit or transIstor, or poetry and dance, due to their basic periodicity, are susceptible to cylindrical storage devices like the phonograph. The first requirement for any good structuralist is a gift for discovering surprising categories and stunning analogies, and Kittler has this gift in spades. The greatest of all historical analogists, Hegel, frankly admitted that every analogy is wrong in some way, and Kittler shares with Hegel a delight in "the negative," precisely the part that does not fit and thus forces thought forward. This is part of his willingness to make msightful mistakes. Yet many of Kittler's analogies are clearly brilliant. His point that in 1840 the letter IS to the telegraph what the painting is to photo- graphy clearly captures the epochal shift between manual and machine writing. Wagner as early cinema is abundantly suggestive. Taking Renaissance perspective as a variant on ballistics is smashingly good, even if it is slightly overcalculated to upset hnmanist pieties.
3. Writing
Literary study is the historical nexus of media studies in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and Italy (but not the United States). The difference is that German philology for important historical reasons always took itself seriously as Wissenschaft, as a contribu- tor to knowledge, whereas English literary criticism has often (not always) been happy to be edifying, an enhancement of sensibility rather than a kind of science. Kittler not only brings the full force of the German philosophical tradition to media stndies; he also brings the full resources of the German philological tradition. Kittler was trained as a philologist, and a papyriological sleuthing through an archive of docnments remains his central method. Media philology, as conducted by Kittler, starts from the fundamental fact of writing - which he takes to be the mother of all media. Writing should be understood in the expanded sense of inscription - a notion Kittler got equally from the French obsession with the practice of ecriture as from computer lingo about writable and readable storage. Photo- graph, phonograph, telegraph - the threefold historical mutation of light, sound, and word-processing in the nineteenth century explored in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter - all pay implicit tribute to writing in their names as do numerous other electrical media practices. Kittler's skill at reading what was never written is at the core of his media analysis.
One of his key concepts is "the monopoly of writing" (note the Innisian accent). Before the nineteenth century, the only possible
13
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
form of cultural storage was the watery stuff of memory or writing. Writing had a monopoly on recording. The phonograph and film break this grip, since both allow for the writing of new kinds of mate- rial- sound and light. More specifically, they allow for the recording and thus manipulation, of time in its flow. Slow-motion, time-lapse, back-masking, jump-cuts, collage - modern acoustic and optical media - make temporal events available for editing. Kittler, again, takes the ability to play with the time axis as definitive of technical media. Even writing is a kind of incursion into time (storing words for later), though in a less radical way than film or phonograph.
4. Reading
Kittler is also a theorist of reading, especially of how what Habermas calls the "bourgeois public sphere" came into being, although Kittler's analysis is opposed in every way to Habermas's. Kittler's original analysis of Romantic literature is on full display in Optical Media. Romanticism for Kittler is not an attitude towards love, yearning, death, or distance; it is a particular use of book technol- ogy. Here, Kittler is in full arch debunker mode as he reprises some basic arguments of Discourse Networks. Reading is an "inner hal- lucination" by which the reader, who learned the technique on his or her mother's lap, decodes the text into a stream of sounds and images, even smells and tastes. Romantic poetry is the last gasp of the monopoly of writing before its nineteenth-century meltdown into audiovisual media. After that, writing could no longer bear the burden of holding sound and image, rival media having stripped it of those functions. Romantic reading is a kind of proto-film viewing, a lonely egotistical position within a simulating apparatus, not unlike the position of the fighter pilot or the video game player. Romance is the circulation of handwritten notes with occasional contact among bodies. In one of his dourly wonderful quips, Kittler notes that there can be media techniques without love, but no love without media techniques. Although he always disdains the humanist body that is so dutifully governed by its mind, Kittler always returns to the erotic body. The erotic, for Kittler, is always the first register of a media innovation. With his interest in excess and intoxication we find a window to a certain strange kind of agency. The most radical of all his claims is to reread all human organs as kinds of media apparatus; these organs are not only the eyes and ears. In Music and Mathematics, he sees the Greeks as the first explorers of the erotic effects of a new media regime (the alphabet in their case),
14
? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
which provides yet another way of making the ancient Greeks our
contemporaries.
5. The Medium is the Message
Media for Kittler are always about themselves. In this, he subordinates content to form, quite in the spirit of McLuhan. Thus, the Horspiel (or German radio drama) is about the conditions of radio listening. Cinema is about flying or seeing. He nicely begins Optical Media with a reflection on the medium of the lecture - a system made up of text and voice on the sending end, ears and half as many hands on the receiving end, and not (yet) interrupted by visual media. (His lectures were blessedly free of PowerPoint, a bacillus that has now all but entirely colonized the habitat. ) Kittler is aggressively formalist in his analysis, and enjoys inducing the defamiliarizing shock of not caring about what a medium says. He is interested above all in a kind of engineering analysis of carrying capacities. Art has style, media have standards; artistic reproduction yields similar versions, while media copies are identical; art cannot inscribe evidentiary detail, while media are forensic and provide data for witnessing; and art is less easily automated than media (this is not necessarily praise for art, of course). Here lies a whole collection of architectonically crucial distinctions.
6. War
Kittler has recently said that after studying war for so long, he has decided to study love instead. This turn is clear in Music and Math- ematics. But in Optical Media, war is still the mother of all things. ' He gets remarkable mileage out of the military context of media in these lectures. In general, I find Kittler's emphasis on war a useful antidote to a myopically civilian approach that has marked most of our media histories. He produces lots of cool connections - cel- luloid as a kind of plastic explosive, the Counter-Reformation as a media battle, or the historic importance of blinding in both battle- field and ballroom, bedazzlement being both an aristocratic privilege and military tactic. The idea that the trenches of World War I were a kind of media laboratory for experimenting with the first mass audience of guinea-pigs/conscripts or that war itself has increas- ingly become a kind of media simulation are key Kittlerian points developed at greater length in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. His notion of "the arming of the eye" owes something to Paul Virilio and is certainly relevant in an age of camera-guided missiles. Next time
15
? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
you have your eyes checked, your ophthalmologist may ask you to "track" a "target. " But all good analogies can get pushed too far. Of Kittler's link of the Colt revolver and film, Frank Kessler puckishly asks whether the sewing machine wouldn't serve Kittler as a better harbinger of serial processing, knowing that he would never warm to such a lowly, unwarlike domestic device. Kittler's fascination with war can sometimes seem slightly unhealthy, but there is no doubt that media history without the military-industrial complex is ultimately deeply misguided.
7. Light
Optical Media begins by praising the sun - a basic and brilliant fact before us that none of us directly see - courtesy of Dante and Leonardo. The sun is the condition of all seeing. It is a medium: we do not see it, but we see everything by way of it. (Media take the instrumental or ablative case: tbey are things by which something occurs. ) The sun is both obvious and profound, and this beginning features Kittler at his most elemental, in his guise as a devotee of Mediterranean light, a celebrant of illumination and its intoxication. (It also reprises, in a curious way, McLuhan's claim about the electric light as an arch-medium. ) If the eye is the light of the body, then the great star - the sun - as Dante says, is the light of the intelligence. In the end, what I like best about Kittler is his sheer love of intelligence and his commitment to delirious delight as a path to higher wisdom. Like all of us, Friedrich Kittler can be blind, but like very few of us, he can also be absolutely dazzling. '
Notes
1 The best introductions to Kittler's work in English are Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, "Translator's Introduction: Friedrich Kittler and Media Discourse Analysis," in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. xi-xxxviii, and the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society 23
(2006), nos. 7-8. I have not attempted to provide a full listing of
sources on Kittler in English in these notes.
2 For a more sustained discussion of this turn, see Claudia Breger,
"Gods, German Scholars, and the Gift of Greece: Friedrich Kittler's Philhellenic Fantasies," Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006): 111-34.
16
? ? ? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
3 See my "Strange SympathIes: HOrIzons ot MedIa Theory In America and Germany," American Studies as Media Studies, eds. Frank Kelleter and Daniel Stein (Heidelberg: Universitiitsverlag Winter, 2008), pp. 3-23.
4 Sybille Kramer, "The Cultural Techniques of Time Axis Manipu- lation: On Friedrich Kittler's Conception of Media," Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006): 93-109.
5 Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, "SIlIcon Sociology, or Two Kings on Hegel's Throne? Kittler, Luhmann, and the Posthuman Merger of German MedIa Theory," Yale Journal of Criticism 13 (2000): 391-420.
6 See Frank Kessler, "Bilder in Bewegung: Fur eme nicht- teleologische Mediengeschichtsschreibung," Apparaturen beweg- ter Bilder, ed. Daniel Gethmann and Christoph B. Schulz (Munich: Lit Verlag, 2006), pp. 208-20, and "Medienhistorische Erleuch- tungen," KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des fruhen Films 13 (2005): 177-9.
7 Erving Goffman, "The Lecture," Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), pp. 160-96; see espe- cially p. 195.
8 See Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, "Drill and Distraction in the Yellow Submarine: On the Dominance of War in Friedrich Kittler's Media Theory," Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 825-54.
9 For helpful commentary I would like to thank Gina Giotta, Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Frank Kessler, Benjamin Peters, John Thompson, and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, without incriminating them in any of my opinions.
17
? ? ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copy- right material:
Professor Giuseppa Saccaro Del Buffa, Battisti for an extract from Brunelleschi: The Complete Works by Eugenio Battisti, 1981, originally published by Electa Editrice, reproduced with permission; Georg Olms Verlag AG for an extract from Der Weg des Films Fried- rich von Zglinicki, 1979 copyright (C) Georg Olms Verlag AG; Piper Verlag GmbH for 14 words from the poem "To the Sun" ("An die Sonne") by Ingeborg Bachmann, first published in "Merkur. Deutsche Zeitschrift fiir europiiisches Denken. " Vol. 10, Nr. 6, June 1956, p. 534. Copyright Piper Verlag: included in a collection of poems called "Anrufung des GroRen Baren"; Suhrkamp Insell0 words from Hans Magnus Enzensberger's poem "J. G. G. (1395-1468}". First pub- lished in a collection of poems called "Mausoleum. SiebenunddreiRig Balladen aus der Geschichte des Fortschritts" ("Mausoleum. Thirty- seven ballads from the history of progress") Frankfurt I Main, 1975, p. 9 copyright Suhrkamp Verlag.
In some instances we have been unable to trace the owners of copyright material and we would appreciate any information that would enable us to do so.
18
? ? ? ? PREFACE
o glariose stelle, 0 lume pregno Di gran virtu, dal quale io riconosco Tutto, che si sia, 10 mio ingegno. Dante, Paradiso XXII
To be purely truthful, every lecture coucerning optical media should begin by praising the star that first made it possible to see earthly things at all. "There is nothing more beautiful under the sun than to be under the sun," wrote Ingeborg Bachmann from the humble view- point of this Earth (Bachmann, 1994, p. 219). Leonardo da Vinci, an older and more arrogant European, said the same thing from the viewpoint of the sun itself: "II sole non vide mai nessuna ombra - The sun never sees a shadow. " (Codex Atlanticus, 300 r. b. )
But in a world whose everyday life is determined by science and technology rather than the sun, lectures are always already on the other side of light. The optical media in my title all act and operate in that shadow, which the sun, according to Leonardo, does not see. In other words, art and technology represent two different ways of shifting the boundaries of visuality, so to speak, by either misusing or circumventing the sun. At first, these lectures will look at European painting since the Renaissance in a traditional or aesthetic way, in order to discern the principles according to which modern visual perception was organized. In this artisanal, hand-crafted phase of optical media, however, it should already become clear that they would not have been conceivable without calculations, and thus they also required a technical-scientific foundation.
The technical appara- tus could therefore detach itself from the eyes and hands of so-called
artists and form those absolutely autonomous spheres - optical media 19
? ? PREF ACE
technologies - that surround us or even determine us today. The path
of the lecture leads, to sum it up in one sentence, from Renaissance
linear perspective, past the almost already old-fashioned technolo- gies of photography, film, and television, to late twentieth-century computer graphics.
In doing so, however, I am taking on an apparently impossible task: I am using texts to speak about relatively recent lived realities, which are by definition neither language nor text, neither oral nor written. Photographs, films, and television screens normally have no place in the humanities. Indeed, they had no place in academic lectures at all, no matter what the discipline, so long as universities were universities, meaning that the German state was not yet com- mitted to installing audiovisual technology at precisely the same time in courts, prisons, and traffic intersections for police surveillance, as well as in academic lecture halls. The state agreed to supply video cameras and monitors - I am citing from official documents - as "a necessary technical adaptation of public education iustitutions to the communication level of the times and its financial, organizational, and politico-educational effects. " This is how it came about that the great art historian Heinrich Wi:ilfflin - according to a comment by Horst Bredekamp - attributed his greatness above all to the fact that Wi:ilfflin or one of his assistants invented the dual projection of all the images dealt with in his lectures.
Before this technical break, on the other hand, lectures were not visual at all. One hundred and twenty years ago, as a young philoso- phy ptofessor in Basel, Friedrich Nietzsche described how classical German universities functioned. In the last of his five lectures entitled On the Future of Our Educational Institutions he writes:
If a foreigner desires to know something of the methods of our uni- versities, he asks first of all with emphasis: "How is the student con- nected with the university? " We answer: "By the ear, as a hearer. " The foreigner is astonished. "Only by the ear? " he repeats. "Only by the ear," we again reply. The student hears. When he speaks, when he sees, when he is in the company of his companions, when he takes up some branch of art: in short, when he lives, he is independent, i. e. not dependent upon the educational institution. The student very often writes down something while he hears; and it is only at these rare moments that he hangs to the umbilical cord of his Alma Mater. He himself may choose what he is to listen to; he is not bound to believe what is said; he may close his ears if he does not care to hear [. . . J The teacher, however, speaks to these listening students. Whatever else he may think and do is cut off from the student's perception by
20
? ? ? ? PREFACE
an immense gap. The professor often reads when he is speaking. As a rule he wishes to have as many hearers as possible; he is not content to have a few, and he is never satisfied with one only. One speaking mouth) with many ears, and half as many writing hands - there you have to all appearances, the external academical apparatus; the uni- versity engine of culture set in motion. (Nietzsche, 1964, pp. 125-6)
This is Nietzsche's incredibly precise, because it is ethnological, description of our workplace, whose audiovisual future he could not yet have foreseen. As you can see, or rather hear, the absence of visual pleasure in the old universities was no small source of pride. A lecture, therefore, via the ear, or eventually even on the radio, remained totally within the classical framework; the realm of the old European universities wasn't conclusively blown open until optical media, i. e. that which "the student" (and since the Prussian educa- tional reforms of 1908 this also included the female student) sees, became a subject.
I confess, however, that all of Nietzsche's irony cannot bring me to elevate the theme of these lectures to its medium. In other words, I will make no use of the state's offer of video recorders, monitors, and projectors for pedagogical or other purposes. If it turns out to be possible - that is, above all, if someone manages to find an interface between computer and television monitors during the course of the semester - visual examples should be woven in, but I would prefer the experimental rather than the entertaining, silent film or com- puter graphics rather than blockbusters. Otherwise, the medium of the lecture will generally remain the same mixture of acoustics and textuality that Nietzsche so ironically and precisely described. This at least has the methodological advantage that it looks at contemporary optical media from the exact same outside and ethnological perspec- tive that Nietzsche applied to the activity of lecturing in his own day.
I thus come to the question of the subject matter and methods that you should expect here. In order not to disappoint latecomers (like myself this semester), the remainder of today's general lecture will discuss first the subject matter, second its possible practical relevance, and third the methods.
Concerning the subject matter - as I said, the lecture will convey an ethnological look at the wealth of man-made images of the last hundred years, and it will therefore precisely fill in the time between Nietzsche's diagnosis and the present. To do that, though, we must first go further afield, and the first step of all is to tackle the long prehistory of contemporary optical media, in which images were
21
? PREFACE
actually painted but could neither be stored nor transmitted, let alone move. In this prehistory, images appeared together with literary texts - as book illustrations or diagrams, as pictures of mythological models, or finally as imaginary images produced by literature in the so-called inner eye of the reader. In this respect, there were centu- ries at least that already belonged to the history of optical media, as they dreamed of modern technologies and developed mechanical devices, whose scientific realization was finally made possible in the nineteenth century through photography and film. The most signifi- cant among these apparatuses are above all the camera obscura as a device for recording images and the lanterna magica as a device for reproducing images. These devices were more than mere technical aids for perspectival painting since the time of the Renaissance, and their connections to the basic technology of the printing press, as well as the role they performed in the media war between the Reforma- tion and the Counter-Reformation or between the printing press and church imagery, will be thoroughly dealt with. For film did not fall from heaven, but rather it can only be understood through the fan- tasies and the politics that its invention was responding to. The fact that television, as far as I can see, was not once seriously imagined until its factual development also calls for analysis.
In the second step, after a run-through of the prehistory, we will examine the history of how images first learned to be stored and then also to move. As we know, both happened in the nineteenth century, which began with the development of photography and ended with the development of film. To understand this long nineteenth century, as Martin Heidegger called it, media historically we must address the question of how the new image technologies especially affected the old arts, which had been handed down for centuries or millen- nia. The competitive relationship between photography and painting is well known, but less is known about the relationship between film and theater. With the exception of a single theater historian, little light has been shed on how ballet, opera, and theater - at least since the nineteenth century, but also in innovations like the baroque proscenium or "picture-frame" stage - evolved from ele- ments that would later constitute cinema. This can be seen above all in Babbage and Faraday's lighting engineering, but it was epitomized in Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk. Proof should therefore be offered that Wagnerian opera is really and truly cinematic, as Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy already predicted.
The local aim of such arguments is also to prove clearly that Humboldt University is fully justified in joining the disciplines of
22
? ? PREFACE
media history, art history, musicology, and theater studies into a single faculty. Central is the question of the effects that the develop- ment of film in particular had on the ancient monopoly of writing itself. Theater and opera are only examples of art forms that func- tioned in parasitical dependence on the monopoly of writing; think about the role of role in theater or score in opera. On the other hand, the introduction of technical media disrupts this monopoly as such, and it therefore works on a level that is more radical than competi- tion. The issue thus becomes not only which forms of competition film provoked for novelists - since 1910 they are all somewhere between the extremes of having their work adapted or rejected by the film industry - but also the new status of books themselves under audiovisual conditions. The range of possibilities is quite diverse: there are books whose letters form themselves into images, other books that are written such that they can be hallucinated as films, and yet others (like Kafka's story The Judgment) that refuse every illustration. And when one considers that contemporary novelists like Thomas Pynchon (who will play the role of a principal witness for film and television in these lectures) have had all photographs of themselves destroyed, it is possible to measure the abyss between literature and optical media.
But to come back to the media themselves: in the third step, these lectures will attempt to derive the structures of film and cinema from the history of their development. In the sequence from silent film to sound and color film - three stages that oddly enough cor- relate fairly closely with the outbreak of two world wars - we see the emergence of different media-specific solutions (if not outright tricks). On the one hand, I will attempt to present these solutions in a technical way in order to incorporate what film analysis and film semiotics normally have to teach concerning montage, focus, light- ing, directing, etc. Elementary facts concerning the film material, the film apparatus, and the lighting and sound recording system simply must be mentioned. On the other hand, I will also explain how the phases in the development of film are connected to media history in general- not only with the history of other entertainment media, like radio, but also with the development of science and technology and their military applications more generally. This part of the lecture will no longer be concerned only with registering the reactions of writers to film, but rather it appears - according to the work of Thorsten Lorenz - as if cinema, this new ostentatious form of technical display, called the meaning of modern theory itself into question. After all, apart from the old ritualistic meaning of "carnival procession," the
23
? ? ? PREFACE
word "theory" - the primary word of the Greek philosophers - meant
nothing other than "look," "observe," "a feast for the eyes," "a spectacle," or even "pageantry," and it first assumed the meaning of "scholarly teaching" after or through Plato. This is the reason why theorists - who, like Bergson and Sartre, Freud and Benjamin, have hecome contemporaries of cinema - are confronted with the question of what has hecome of their spectacles, which exist only as letters in books, under audiovisual conditions. As you have probably already guessed, the technical spectacle did not sit well with the theoretical one.
Like every victory, however, it should not be forgotten that the triumph of film in the twentieth century was temporary. In contrast to the forgetfulness or nostalgia of many film scholars (whereby for- getfulness and nostalgia probably coincide), it should be emphasized that in the eyes of technicians film was already from the start, long before its heyday, seen as only provisional. Mechanical-chemical image recording, mechanical storage, and mechanical playback are out of place in a century that is defined primarily through the conver- sion of traditional media to electricity. Without Edison's invention of the electric light bulb his film equipment would surely also not have been built, but light bulbs still are not electrical telecommunications. I will therefore show next how electrical telecommunications enabled the transition from silent to sound film - with consequences, inciden- tally, that extended far beyond technology to the financial structure of the film market. In the second part of these lectures, howeveJ; the central issue will be the fully electronic visual medium, and this will require an understanding of the electron tube, which was produced from Edison's light bulb literally behind his back. The fully electronic optical medium, in so far as it has not already been superseded by LCD screens, was based for almost a century on Braun electron tubes: I am speaking of course about television.
As a fully electronic medium, television - if you will pardon this necessary truism - is just as ubiquitous as it is mystifying, and therein lies its much heralded power. I don't know how many of you would be able to operate a television studio or even repair a television set. This technology is so extremely complicated in comparison to film that we are also required to pursue television history in order to learn anything about the modus operandi of electronic image- processing from its first tentative steps to today's image standard. These lectures must therefore deal step by step with cable television prior to World War II, black-and-white television after 1945, and finally the three color standards that exist today, without overlook-
24
? ? PREFACE
mg qUIte unentertammg, namely mliltary devices ilke radar, which made civilian television possible. The legal, social, and political dimensions of the prevailing programming structures are then only consequences of these technical solutions. I recall an American presi? dent who came out of the film industry and who governed with television interviews.
With the way things are today, however, that is not the end of the matter, and these lectures will not end there. As an electronic medium, television is to us (that IS, to consumers) only the outward face of an empIre that IS already now beginmng to stnke back. I recall yet again that president, who not only governed with television inter- views but also formulated plans for an optical-electronic future war. With the introduction of video recorders and video cameras in private households - and most apparent in the case of computer screens, which are also in the process of revolutionizing the offices and desks of lecturers and students - this empire casts out at least a silhouette of its power. In ten years' time, it is higbly unlikely that feature films will be on celluloid at all, but rather there will only be one form of standardized opto-electronics, a universal discrete signal processing tbat coincides with the universal discrete data-processor known as the computer. It is my professed goal to conclude this lecture not with the oldest preserved silent film or with the latest program from RTL,
but rather with computer simulations of optical worlds, no matter if they enable us to visualize the unreality of mathematical formu- las like Benoit Mandelbrot's "apple men" or they hyperrealistically reconfigure our so-called reality like raytracing or radiosity. ' And because such simulations are also the only conceivable future of film and television for practical and economic reasons, it is important in this lecture at least to understand the principles according to which computer programs allow such images to move.
That is all concerning the content of these lectures and the expla- nation of its title. I have not forgotten the seemingly more obvious title Film and Television History, but rather I have simply avoided it. Many newly established media institutes at German universities concentrate or insist on film and television, but this appears to me as a risky simplification of media technology in general in favor of its most entertaining and user-friendly effects. In contrast, the title Optical Media should signal a systematic problem and place the general
lIGttler develops the contrast between raytracing and radiosity in "Computer Graphics: A Semi-Technical Introduction," trans. Sarah Ogger, Grey Room 2 (Winter 200n 30-45.
25
. . . .
? PREFACE
principles of image storage, transmission, and processing above their various realizations. This general and systematic approach does not result in philosophical abstractions, but rather it reveals underlying structures: when it is made clear first that all technical media either store, transmit, or process signals and second that the computer (in theory since 1936, in practice since the Second World War) is the only medium that combines these three functions - storage, transmis- sion, and processing - fully automatically, it is not surprising that the endpoint of these lectures must be the integration of optical media and the universal discrete machine known as the computer.
This overview has hopefully already shown that the connection of old traditional arts like literature, painting, and theater, on the one hand, with technical media on the other hand should not be mere addition. I am therefore attempting a first, if you will, system design. At Humboldt University, when it was still called by its proper name, Friedrich Wilhelm University, a certain Hegel met every week in lecture room six to put all of the arts that could exist under the conditions of the book monopoly in systematic order according to their form and content, genre and historical progression. And that was indeed a flight of Minerva's owl, which is seen only at sunset: less than ten years after Hegel's death the storage monopoly of books (and thus of philosophical lectures) came to an end with the public presentation of photography. We are therefore confronted today with the insane and probably impossible task of developing a historical and systematic knowledge base for an art and media system under highly technical conditions that would be comparable to the one that Hegel, in an incomparable way, was able to construct under consider- ably more limited conditions.
This systematic question, and the attempt to resolve it through historical analysis, also comes with a warning: please do not expect a history of directors, stars, studios, and celebrities; in other words, please do not expect a history of film and television, which in the end remains organized around a sequence of titles, just like most literary histories. Apart from the theoretical question as to whether technical media make concepts like the author and the subject obsolete, such a history would be practically useless for me, as I have seen far fewer films than most of you. There are enough special courses in cultural studies that provide film and television histories focused directly on the feature film, which could then also be supplemented by courses in media production.
That is all for my preliminary sketch of how these lectures relate to the subject. As a former Germanist, howeve! ; I would also like to
26
? ? PREF ACE
address the students of literature and German among you. It should have already become implicitly clear - but to allay any fears I will say it again - that the problems posed by writing and its aesthetics will certainly not be left out. An analysis that examines both the intersec- tions and dividing lines between writing culture and image technol- ogy within a historical context is precisely a methodical preparation for the pressing question of what the status of writing or literature can be today.
We know the familiar twentieth-century answers. Under the massive primacy of audiovisual entertainment electronics, which according to many media theorists like Walter J. Ong "brought us into the age of secondary orality" that resembles archaic and therefore allegedly non-literate cultures (Ong, 1991, p. 136), droves of "authors" have taken over the functions of screenplay suppliers or the writers of technical instruction manuals. Others have opted for the opposite approach by claiming that the only serious modern criterion for literature is its structural unfilmability.
While such options require the ability to write and read fluently, we know that audiovisual media have led to a new illiteracy. Like Hiilderlin's notion that salvation lies close to danger, however, this new illiteracy may also be the answer to the current status of writing. According to American surveys conducted eight years ago in con- nection with former president Bush's extremely fruitless educational reform plans, an astonishing percentage of high school graduates are unable to write their own names. Don't ask me what kinds of simulations such students employed to pass their final examinations. The ability to write one's own name was certainly important in the case of Faust, as he signed the pact with the devil, and the ability to sign checks also counts in economic terms; the mere absence of this ability, however, does not explain the horror that accompanied the spread of the new illiteracy. Indeed, the industry that complained about such deficiencies among high school graduates did not seem interested in providing students with a further proficiency in the 26 letters, but rather it devised (typically enough under the overall control of Kodak, the largest photography and film company in the world) an entirely different future for writing. In factories, which in
the meantime have all been re-equipped with CAD and Computer Aided Manufacturing, it would be a glaring impossibility to continue employing workers who were unable to master the following literacy skills: to read or draw the flow chart of an electronic circuit, to under- stand or write a small computer program, to read or even program the graphic display on a computer screen. That is quite literally the
27
? ? ? PREFACE
job description that the industry Itself provided for graduates, and thus also for America itself, in the 1990s.
These lectures, to put it with the requisite innocence, were fornm- lated with a knowledge of this job description. There is every reason to believe, namely, that the educational program they outlined will be implemented throughout at least half of the world. Someonc able to master both the old craft of writing and the recently developed technology of digital image-processing would therefore have better career prospects. And for me, that job description of the future serves as a welcome justification for the risky undertaking of dealing not only with conventional film and television but also with the newest technologies like imaging. It appears as if opportunities in the fnture are expected to be better in the field of video, which will explode through the link to compnter technology, than they are for the practi- cally obsolete dream of becoming the last and greatest of all feature film directors. The linking up of a fiber-optic cable network, which will replace the notoriously narrow bandwidth of copper wires, will increase the need for transmittable and processable images just as the need for mythical stories about Hollywood's mythical stories will decrease. It is not without reason that Bill Gates attempted in the last few years to realign his quasi-monopoly on computer operating systems with yet another monopoly on digital images. A Micro- soft snbsidiary by the name of Corbis travels around all possible museums, archives, and picture collections, generously abstaining from buying any of the stored originals, but receiving for a trifling sum the digital rights for those copies that Corbis itself has scanned (Schmiederer, 1998). And because you can imagine that cities like Florence or even Berlin have more beautiful pictures than Tallahas- see or Petaluma, the liou's share of Corbis' loot comes from Europe, which has not yet learned enough about optical media to protect its own digital rights from Microsoft.
More cannot be said about the practical relevance of these lec- tures. But this also provides a transition to the third point to be dealt with today: the theoretical assumptions and basic concepts I will be working with.
28
? -1-
THEORETICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS
The basic concept in the following history and analysis is the concept of the medium in the technical sense, which was developed above all by Marshall McLuhan, whose work was based on the fundamental historical groundwork laid by Harold Adams Innis. This Canadian school, as it was christened by Canadian insider Arthur Kroker (Kroker, 1984), attempted to examine the technical media and the immediacy with which they were let loose on the population of the western hemisphere following the Second World War. According to McLuhan, media are the intersecting points (Schnittstellen) or interfaces between technologies, on the one hand, and bodies, on the other. McLuhan went so far as to write that under audiovisual conditions our eyes, ears, hands, etc. no longer belong to the bodies they are associated with at all, let alone to the subjects that figure in philosophical theory as the masters of the aforementioned bodies, but rather to the television companies they are connected to. This connection between technology and physiology, which is not simply dialectical but rather direct, should be recorded and extended. Only McLuhan, who was originally a literary critic, understood more about perception than electronics, and therefore he attempted to think about technology in terms of bodies instead of the other way around. According to the analytical stress model, which had just been discovered at that time, technical prostheses of a sensory organ - in other words, media - were said to have replaced a natural or physiological function, and the biological function itself acted as the subject of the replacement: an eye that is armed with lenses or glasses (a beautiful expression) performs a paradoxical operation, according to McLnhan, as it extends and amputates itself at the same time. In this way, McLuhan is part of a long tradition that can be traced back
29
-
? OPTICAL MEDIA
to Ernst Kapp and Sigmund Freud, who conceived of an apparatus as a prosthesis for bodily organs.
In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud above all formulated very drastically how, on the basis of telescopes, microscopes, gramo- phones, and telephones - as always, Freud does not mention film - so-called modern "[m]an has, as it were, become a kind of a prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent," yet he is abject without them because "those organs have not grown on to him" (Freud, 1953-74, XXI, pp. 91-2).
Nothing against this mixture of power and powerlessness, the sub- limity and the absurdity of people according to Freud and McLuhan; but their unquestioned assumption that the subject of all media is naturally the human is methodologically tricky. For when the development of a medial subsystem is analyzed in all of its historical breadth, as the history of optical media is being analyzed here, the exact opposite suspicion arises that technical innovations - follow- ing the model of military escalations - only refer and answer to each other, and the end result of this proprietary development, which progresses completely independent of individual or even collective bodies of people, is an overwhelming impact on senses and organs in general. McLuhan, who converted to Catholicism long before his international career, hoped to gain something like the redemption of all literature or literary studies from the electronic media of the present and the future. To verify this point, which is cardinal for our context, I cite the following passage:
Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower of Babel" by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code Of language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to bypass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness. (McLuhan, 1964, pp. 83-4)
In contrast to such an arch-catholic media cult, which simply con- fuses the Holy Spirit and Turing's machine, it is hopefully sufficient to point out that the development of all previous technical media, in the field of computers as well as optical technology, was for purposes directly opposed to cosmic harmony - namely, military purposes.
But such a lack of clarity in McLuhan's concept of media should not prevent further work on his fundamental theses. You are
30
? ? ? THEORETICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS
presumably familiar with the famous formula that the medium is the message. Without this formula, which virtually prohibits lookiog for something else behind technically manufactured surfaces, media studies would actually continne to have a subject - just as mysteri- ous fields like theology or World Ice Theory' have subjects - bnt media studies itself would not exist as snch in isolation or with any methodological clarity. To determine the concrete subject of media studies one need only connect McLuhan's formula "the medium is the message" - as well as the mock formnla he himself came up with in his later years, "the medium is the massage" - with its lesser-known explication that the content of a medium is always another medium. It is therefore obvions that, to take the first example that comes to mind, in the relationship between feature film and television the most popular content of television broadcasts is film, the content of this film is naturally a novel, the content of this novel is naturally a typescript, the content of this typescript, etc. , etc. , until at some point one returns back to the Babylonian tower of everyday languages.
Taking up McLuhan seems even more advisable because German media studies typically proceeds on entirely different grounds and with entirely different fundameotal hypotheses. As Werner Faulstich, one of its leading representatives, repeatedly emphasizes, this media studies sees itself as a direct continnation of the research areas of popular fiction, on the one hand, and the sociology of literature, on the other hand, which both rose to prominence in the 1960s (Faulstich, 1979, p. 15).
Literary scholars who do not forget media would have thus been permitted to remain safely in the native realm of their own intel- lects; it is doubtful, however, whether such a trivial, content-based approach to media, which are themselves already the message accord- ing to McLuhan's contrary thesis, comes near enough to their techni- cal complexity. We would always only be able to grasp the external fa,ade that the electronics industry consciollsly displays, while the interior of the apparatus would remain concealed beneath its cover, whose instructions permit it to be opened only by an expert. Perhaps
1 A cosmological theory proposed by Hans Horbiger and Philipp Fauth, which was first published in their 1912 book Glazial-Kosmogonie (Glacial Cosmogony). Horbiger and Fauth claimed that the Milky Way was composed of blocks of ice, and over time these blocks of ice collided and formed planets.