No More Learning

The one natural link of Kittler's work in extant media studies is to the Canadian tradition of Innis and McLuhan. Innis's great contri- bution was the notion of "bias" in time and space, and McLuhan's was the notion of media as human extensions (or amputations). Kittler's key contribution is the notion of "time-axis manipulation. " He is the pre-eminent thinker of time-based media and what it means to edit the flow of time with technical means. 4 Like most scholars, Kittler would rather be compared to Innis than McLuhan and this is quite fair intellectually. Kittler's materialist account of history, love of ancient Greece, and disdain for the kind of body-humanism at the heart of McLuhan's thought puts him closer to Innis. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, the most astute commentator on Kittler in English, calls Kittler "Innis in battle fatigues. " But his persona - witty, arch, devil-may-care, politically incorrect - is closer to McLuhan. In tone, Kittler also is closer to McLuhan's flamboyant vaticism than to Innis's cranky accumulation of detail. Like both Canadians, his subject is the play of media in history, but he has taken a step forward over either. Over Innis's staccato inventories of historical occurrences and McLuhan's defiance of rigor, we have in Kittler a kind of media
analysis whose method is dialectically acute and philosophically deep. Kittler brings a Hegelian ambition and lucidity to media studies. He begins Optical Media by frankly announcing his "insane and prob- ably impossible" mission of doing for media what Hegel did for aesthetics. If Kittler does not fully succeed, he certainly goes further than anyone else in producing a philosophy of media and generating a rich array of productive ideas. (Hegel is, by the way, the first in a long line of German thinkers poorly understood in English; if Kittler is baffling to anglophone readers, he has distinguished company among his countrymen. ) Is Kittler, then, a "technological determinist"? This slur is used freely and often without much nuance. If the question is, do humans have agency in the face of technology, then Kittler would be one, but not because he thinks technology is so determinant but, more radically, since he is not interested in what he persists in calling
"so-called humans" (the joke is getting a bit stale). But if the question is, does he recognize the role of historical, political, and economic
? ? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
contingency in the development of media, then he is not. Although Kittler is clearly a better media philosopher than media historian, and there are plenty of bones to pick with his historical interpretations, Optical Media is clearly interested in the development of institutions such as Edison's Lab, the ways that marketing imposes compromises between consumers and engineers, the unique historical conditions that enabled the emergence of photography in the 1830s, and the ways that war financing affected the development of television. His celebration elsewhere of the technological bricoleur who, with sol- dering gun in hand and DOS screen in view, reconfigures the user- friendly interfaces of dumbed down technologies, certainly suggests an activist role for at least those with an engineering bent. Indeed, in his 1990s campaign against Microsoft Windows, Kittler could sound a bit like a cultural studies type praising the agency of ordinary folks who rewrite the dominant code for their own purposes. This conver- gence on a DIY ethic in both cultural studies and Kittler points to a shared debt to punk culture. (At an even deeper level, Kittler and British cultural studies share a culturally Protestant love of anarchic textual interpretation by readers freed from the stupefying pictures of priestly authorities; E. P. Thompson's radical Methodists and Kittler's punk programmers might have a lot to say to each other. ') In the eud, however, people alarmed by whatever they mean by "tech- nological determinism" are likely to be alarmed by Kittler, especially his teleological claim, repeated throughout his work, that all media history culmiuates in the digital computer.
Then there is the questiou of gender. To say that people are simulations or effects of media conditions is a fine provocation that invites reflection on the moorings of human existence in an electri- cal (or any) age. Yet denying agency or subjectivity to people does not affect the two genders in the same way. For men, this might be a philosophically novel experience, but for women this is probably more of the same-old. The treatment of women in Kittler has always been problematic. Discourse Networks has remarkable insights about the role of mothers in producing romantic reading subjects - the mother serving as a kind of media relay between text and child, ear and eye, alphabet and voice - and Gramophone, Film, Type- writer has similarly stunning observations about how the typewriter desexualized the traditional division of labor in the act of writing. It is not that Kittler is not interested in gender; rather, it is that he is quite interested in sex. All of his media histories are also histories of eros, and this coupling of love and knowledge, music and media, and aphrodisiacs and mathematics is central to his story about the
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ancient Greeks; Music and Mathematics mlght be read as an alternate take on Foucault's own multi-volume history of sexuality (without the queer subtext). His books and lectures are marked by occasional bawdy comments (not to mention pictures), sometbing that reveals an uureconstructed gender politics that would be hard to find surfacing openly in a university in the US or UK in the past two decades. (It is not hard to imagine it surfacing in politics, sports, or show busi- ness, however; on this score, Kittler is, as he once said, "stinkingly ordinary. ") In Kittler's work, the default gender roles often have men as soldiers and women as pin-ups. Caveat lector. Kittler all but invites a gender-sensitive reading, and his work reminds us of the feminist adage that gender and technology are not separately consti- tuted categories. The first volume of his Music and Mathematics is full of praise for women - Aphrodite, Circe, Sappho - but they are all goddesses or legends. Ordinary ones who don't partake of what Goethe famously called the "eternal feminine" don't fare so well in his work. Here again, ordinary people of any sort don't fare well, but the grievance is clearer on one side of the divide.
Scholarly Extremities
Robert Boyle, the great experimentalist of the seventeenth century, famously invented a new kind of writing, the scientific report. In this genre, cognitive virtue was tied to a public demonstration of methods that anyone could repeat and an expository style that anyone could understand. Readers of English scholarly prose still tend to expect a basic level of reasonableness and clarity - expectations that Kittler, like most other high-flying German thinkers since Hegel - will regularly topple. His conclusions leap like lightning. He argues by anecdote rather than induction, and will always choose a dramatic narrative line over one that muddles through the complexities on the ground. He loves the trope of synecdoche, the part for the whole, and wants single instances to resonate with unspoken richness. We are meant to read the title of his book, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, for instance, as standing in for modern acoustic, optical, and word- processing techniques in general. Like auyone schooled in modern literature, he is fond of allusion. At key points in Optical Media, he does not name things that he thinks should be obvious, managing to avoid mentioning "the uncanny" in his discussion of Freud's encoun- ter with his mirror image on a train or "fractals" in his discussion of Mandelbrot's computer graphics. We are supposed to be in the
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know. He also can't resist a lame joke, an irreverent comment, or
a prodding exaggeration. Thus, Ronald Reagan is "emperor of
California," America "the country of unlimited serialism," demo-
cracy the "age of prevailing illiteracy," and poetry has been tedious for 2,000 years. The most charitable way to read his style is that he treats his audience at a high (i. e. his) level, and follows the Heideg- gerian principle that names stop tbinking. Less charitable readers can find the style arrogant or obscurantist. At least Kittler is never boring and always strives to see things afresh. Aristotle, Hegel, Mead, and Wittgenstem are among the many philosophers whose reputations profited from posthumously published lectures. Publishing lectures while one is alive changes the equation a bit. These lectures have a liberty of citation and factual reference that might be more forgiv- able as oral utterance or student transcriptions of a beloved teacher now deceased. Kittler's critics often have beefs with the details of his scholarship, and his tendency to argue in broad strokes is even more evident in these lectures than usual. Film scholars have found much to object to in his treatment of silent cinema, for instance - indeed, just as they did to his section on cinema in Gramophone, Film, Type- writer. 6 In fairness, he admits a lack of evidence for some specula- tions in Optical Media and says his treatment of film history is full of "rough cuts. " But on the other hand, Kittler himself is not always fair: he is unjustly snippy about both Friedrich von Zglinicki, on whose work he heavily relies, and the academic field of film studies, which he mocks as trading in "cultural-history gossip. " A commit- ted intellectual poacher and interdisciplinarian whose interests range from the history of mathematics to German poetry, from computer programming to warfare, from classical Greek philology to psycho- analysis, Kittler can be impatient in conforming to the standards of academic specialism. He can share something of McLuhan's stance of writing off whole areas of study as missing the boat, as simply not "getting it. " (The boat, of course, is one whose rudder both men steer, the S. S. Media. )
How damaging are Kittler's flippant tone and sometimes cavalier stance to scholarly norms? Scholarship is governed by a diversity of values such as accuracy, excitement, judgment, novelty, and fairness. Clearly, Kittler scores better on some of these than others. But there is plenty of room in the academic ecosystem for different sorts of con- tributions, and no one scores a perfect ten in everything. The German university has a long tradition of providing a platform for stylisti- cally wild and scandalously ambitious intellectual claims; it also has a long tradition of tediously thorough toil over detail. It is no secret
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that Kittler belongs to the first tradition, which he supplements with pyrotechnic methods learned from the French. Of course, it is crucial to take Kittler, like everyone else, with a pinch of salt. But if all you see are the mistakes and exaggerations, you risk missing something big if you are interested in understanding media as architectonically important to our life and times. Professional historians find Foucault wrong on many things: but that does not make him any less interest- ing or important; it leaves more work to do. (Kittler probably covers his tracks less well than Foucault. ) Many a great thinker has sur- vived an occasional howler; indeed, producing howlers may be part of the job. It takes a first-rate thinker, as Hannah Arendt noted, to produce a first-rate contradiction. In pointing out Kittler's problems, I sometimes worry that we critics risk standing on his shoulders and punching him on the ears. Scholars, like all people, measure others by their own size. Prophets are a rarer species than scribes. It is a whole lot easier to show where another scholar went off the rails than to invent a new style of thought. There is a growing body of sound and interesting scholarship on media history in all its flavors; but there is very little thinking that is as breathtakingly imaginative as Kittler's. His mammoth work comes with some nasty little gnats flying around it, but we shouldn't let the gnats blind us to the magnificence of the shaggy beast he has brought on to the scene.
Context and Overview of Optical Media
Optical Media distills many of the theses of Discourse Networks and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. It is not meant to be the pre- sentation of cutting-edge research; it is a kind of popular exposition of a body of work. The lecture, as Erving Goffman points out, is a form of talk that is in cahoots with what he calls the "cognitive establishment. ,,7 Every lecture ultimately makes the promise that the world can be made sense of, and Kittler does not fail in his end of the bargain. Though much has rightly been made of his links to French poststructuralism (a term he dismisses), Kittler has none of the epistemological hypochondria that some Anglo-American followers - especially of Derrida - take away from the movement. Kittler has no interest in "interrogating" our "responsibility" for the "aporias" of "undecidability" (to "deploy" several deconstructionist cliches); he charges full steam ahead with the business of enlightenment. Wielding a scalpel of Hegelian sharpness Kittler confidently slices truth from nonsense. Unlike some practitioners of cultural studies,
10
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he seems unembarrassed to be a professor, although he always dis- cusses that role with a sly irony. Indeed, one context for Optical Media is the establishment of media studies at Humboldt University, which, as the former University of Berlin, is the ground zero of the modern research university. Kittler's book from the same period, Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaft (2001), is a lecture series on the intellectual history of university life; in Optical Media, the lecture as a medium is always a topic for self-reflection along with rnnning in-jokes about professors and universities. Optical Media does not agonize about the inherent terror of reason; it gets on with the task of dispensing knowledge to students.
The lectures are relatively easy to follow and do not require any extensive summary; here I simply sketch the narrative arc. Kittler's exposition follows a more or less threefold narrative of artistic, analog, and digital media. The history is quite conventional in its basic periodization - Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment, Romanticism, etc. The revisionism occurs, rather, inside the well-worn categories as Kittler insinuates media into them, showing how much media explain what we think we already know. The era of artistic media is governed by the hand and reaches its peak in the linear perspective of the Renaissance. This is not a hand innocent of technique, but rather one tutored by perspective's discipline of geometry or the inverted tracings of light itself in the camera obscura. As always, these artistic media are in cahoots with state, religious, and military power (especially the magic lantern and other techniques of projection). The era of analog media - that of optical media proper - frees the act of visual depiction from the human hand and the act of visual perception from the human eye. A series of photographic devices allows for a kind of direct transcrip- tion of the sunshine without intervention of the pencil or brush, and liberates the realm of the visible from the physiology of the eye. The human being is no longer the lord of the record or of the know- able nniverse. Machines take on tasks - drawing, writing, seeing, hearing, word-processing, memory, and even knowing - that once were thought unique to humans and often perform them better. (That the "uniquely human" recedes before the onslaught of new media is one of Kittler's characteristic claims. ) The great breakthrough of analog media is the storage and manipulation of temporal process; the great problem is the lack of interoperability between systems. Kittler's account of cinema and television is a rather teleological story about how the optical and acoustical tracks got patched together in various configurations along the road to compatibility and
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convertibility. That great apotheosis had to await the digital moment. Now we await the utopian possibility, as be concludes, of working witb light as light, not just light as effect or trace. There is something almost millenarian in this culmination of media history. The end of history returns us to the beginning, when the light was separated from the darkness.
The Love of Light
What does require comment are the ways these lectures act out a number of key themes and gestures of Kittler's larger media theory. Seven is a good number:
1. Abstraction
Kittler makes clear that his subject is optical media and not, say, film and television history. He does not want to identify media with any particular incarnation and places "general principles of image storage, transmission, and processing above their various realizations. " More specifically, the computer provides Kittler with a handy device for rewriting the history of all hitherto existing media. Media are data- processors: this is his starting point. These lectures foreground the primacy of telecommunications - from the telegraph to the computer - as the foundation of modern optical media, along with the accom- panying three functions of storage, transmission, and processing. Kittler's abstraction may shave off the edges of historical complexity, but he is always first and foremost a philosopher of media history rather than a media historian. His aim is to use history to inform philosophical reflection about techniques of sending, saving, and calculating. The camera obscura receives images; the magic lantern sends them; the camera stores them. Kittler loves rigorous schemas, especially if they have three parts.
2. Analogy
Media studies has a long history of showy displays of miscellaneous reference and magpie learning. One of McLuhan's favorite tricks was to create a surrealist juxtaposition of two distinct historical items, one usually highbrow and canonic, the other usually modern and popular. We see something similar in Kittler's claims that Baroque candles illuminate Sunday night talk shows, the positive-negative process in
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photography IS an early Boolean CIrcuit or transIstor, or poetry and dance, due to their basic periodicity, are susceptible to cylindrical storage devices like the phonograph. The first requirement for any good structuralist is a gift for discovering surprising categories and stunning analogies, and Kittler has this gift in spades. The greatest of all historical analogists, Hegel, frankly admitted that every analogy is wrong in some way, and Kittler shares with Hegel a delight in "the negative," precisely the part that does not fit and thus forces thought forward. This is part of his willingness to make msightful mistakes. Yet many of Kittler's analogies are clearly brilliant. His point that in 1840 the letter IS to the telegraph what the painting is to photo- graphy clearly captures the epochal shift between manual and machine writing. Wagner as early cinema is abundantly suggestive. Taking Renaissance perspective as a variant on ballistics is smashingly good, even if it is slightly overcalculated to upset hnmanist pieties.
3. Writing
Literary study is the historical nexus of media studies in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and Italy (but not the United States). The difference is that German philology for important historical reasons always took itself seriously as Wissenschaft, as a contribu- tor to knowledge, whereas English literary criticism has often (not always) been happy to be edifying, an enhancement of sensibility rather than a kind of science. Kittler not only brings the full force of the German philosophical tradition to media stndies; he also brings the full resources of the German philological tradition. Kittler was trained as a philologist, and a papyriological sleuthing through an archive of docnments remains his central method. Media philology, as conducted by Kittler, starts from the fundamental fact of writing - which he takes to be the mother of all media. Writing should be understood in the expanded sense of inscription - a notion Kittler got equally from the French obsession with the practice of ecriture as from computer lingo about writable and readable storage. Photo- graph, phonograph, telegraph - the threefold historical mutation of light, sound, and word-processing in the nineteenth century explored in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter - all pay implicit tribute to writing in their names as do numerous other electrical media practices. Kittler's skill at reading what was never written is at the core of his media analysis.
One of his key concepts is "the monopoly of writing" (note the Innisian accent). Before the nineteenth century, the only possible
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form of cultural storage was the watery stuff of memory or writing. Writing had a monopoly on recording. The phonograph and film break this grip, since both allow for the writing of new kinds of mate- rial- sound and light. More specifically, they allow for the recording and thus manipulation, of time in its flow. Slow-motion, time-lapse, back-masking, jump-cuts, collage - modern acoustic and optical media - make temporal events available for editing. Kittler, again, takes the ability to play with the time axis as definitive of technical media. Even writing is a kind of incursion into time (storing words for later), though in a less radical way than film or phonograph.
4. Reading
Kittler is also a theorist of reading, especially of how what Habermas calls the "bourgeois public sphere" came into being, although Kittler's analysis is opposed in every way to Habermas's. Kittler's original analysis of Romantic literature is on full display in Optical Media. Romanticism for Kittler is not an attitude towards love, yearning, death, or distance; it is a particular use of book technol- ogy. Here, Kittler is in full arch debunker mode as he reprises some basic arguments of Discourse Networks. Reading is an "inner hal- lucination" by which the reader, who learned the technique on his or her mother's lap, decodes the text into a stream of sounds and images, even smells and tastes. Romantic poetry is the last gasp of the monopoly of writing before its nineteenth-century meltdown into audiovisual media. After that, writing could no longer bear the burden of holding sound and image, rival media having stripped it of those functions. Romantic reading is a kind of proto-film viewing, a lonely egotistical position within a simulating apparatus, not unlike the position of the fighter pilot or the video game player. Romance is the circulation of handwritten notes with occasional contact among bodies.
In one of his dourly wonderful quips, Kittler notes that there can be media techniques without love, but no love without media techniques. Although he always disdains the humanist body that is so dutifully governed by its mind, Kittler always returns to the erotic body. The erotic, for Kittler, is always the first register of a media innovation. With his interest in excess and intoxication we find a window to a certain strange kind of agency. The most radical of all his claims is to reread all human organs as kinds of media apparatus; these organs are not only the eyes and ears. In Music and Mathematics, he sees the Greeks as the first explorers of the erotic effects of a new media regime (the alphabet in their case),
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which provides yet another way of making the ancient Greeks our
contemporaries.
5. The Medium is the Message
Media for Kittler are always about themselves. In this, he subordinates content to form, quite in the spirit of McLuhan. Thus, the Horspiel (or German radio drama) is about the conditions of radio listening. Cinema is about flying or seeing. He nicely begins Optical Media with a reflection on the medium of the lecture - a system made up of text and voice on the sending end, ears and half as many hands on the receiving end, and not (yet) interrupted by visual media. (His lectures were blessedly free of PowerPoint, a bacillus that has now all but entirely colonized the habitat. ) Kittler is aggressively formalist in his analysis, and enjoys inducing the defamiliarizing shock of not caring about what a medium says. He is interested above all in a kind of engineering analysis of carrying capacities. Art has style, media have standards; artistic reproduction yields similar versions, while media copies are identical; art cannot inscribe evidentiary detail, while media are forensic and provide data for witnessing; and art is less easily automated than media (this is not necessarily praise for art, of course). Here lies a whole collection of architectonically crucial distinctions.
6. War
Kittler has recently said that after studying war for so long, he has decided to study love instead. This turn is clear in Music and Math- ematics. But in Optical Media, war is still the mother of all things. ' He gets remarkable mileage out of the military context of media in these lectures. In general, I find Kittler's emphasis on war a useful antidote to a myopically civilian approach that has marked most of our media histories. He produces lots of cool connections - cel- luloid as a kind of plastic explosive, the Counter-Reformation as a media battle, or the historic importance of blinding in both battle- field and ballroom, bedazzlement being both an aristocratic privilege and military tactic. The idea that the trenches of World War I were a kind of media laboratory for experimenting with the first mass audience of guinea-pigs/conscripts or that war itself has increas- ingly become a kind of media simulation are key Kittlerian points developed at greater length in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. His notion of "the arming of the eye" owes something to Paul Virilio and is certainly relevant in an age of camera-guided missiles. Next time
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you have your eyes checked, your ophthalmologist may ask you to "track" a "target. " But all good analogies can get pushed too far. Of Kittler's link of the Colt revolver and film, Frank Kessler puckishly asks whether the sewing machine wouldn't serve Kittler as a better harbinger of serial processing, knowing that he would never warm to such a lowly, unwarlike domestic device. Kittler's fascination with war can sometimes seem slightly unhealthy, but there is no doubt that media history without the military-industrial complex is ultimately deeply misguided.
7. Light
Optical Media begins by praising the sun - a basic and brilliant fact before us that none of us directly see - courtesy of Dante and Leonardo. The sun is the condition of all seeing. It is a medium: we do not see it, but we see everything by way of it. (Media take the instrumental or ablative case: tbey are things by which something occurs. ) The sun is both obvious and profound, and this beginning features Kittler at his most elemental, in his guise as a devotee of Mediterranean light, a celebrant of illumination and its intoxication. (It also reprises, in a curious way, McLuhan's claim about the electric light as an arch-medium. ) If the eye is the light of the body, then the great star - the sun - as Dante says, is the light of the intelligence. In the end, what I like best about Kittler is his sheer love of intelligence and his commitment to delirious delight as a path to higher wisdom. Like all of us, Friedrich Kittler can be blind, but like very few of us, he can also be absolutely dazzling. '
Notes
1 The best introductions to Kittler's work in English are Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, "Translator's Introduction: Friedrich Kittler and Media Discourse Analysis," in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. xi-xxxviii, and the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society 23
(2006), nos. 7-8. I have not attempted to provide a full listing of
sources on Kittler in English in these notes.
2 For a more sustained discussion of this turn, see Claudia Breger,
"Gods, German Scholars, and the Gift of Greece: Friedrich Kittler's Philhellenic Fantasies," Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006): 111-34.
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3 See my "Strange SympathIes: HOrIzons ot MedIa Theory In America and Germany," American Studies as Media Studies, eds. 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.
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? ? 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.
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? ? ? ? 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
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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
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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
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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
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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-
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mg qUIte unentertammg, namely mliltary devices ilke radar, which made civilian television possible.