2
Lanterna
Magica and the Age of the World Picture 70
2.
2.
Kittler-Friedrich-Optical-Media-pdf
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?
?
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OPTICAL MEDIA: Berlin Lectures 1999
FRIEDRICH KITTLER Translated by Anthony Enns
polity
? ? ? ? ? ? ? First published in German as Optische Medien I Berliner Vorlesung 1999 (C) Merve Verlag Berlin, 2002
This English edition (C) Polity Press, 2010
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? ? ? ? CONTENTS
Introduction: Friedrich Kittler's Light Shows
by John Durham Peters 1
Acknowledgements 18
Preface 19
1 Theoretical Presuppositions 29
2 Technologies of the Fin~ Arts 47
2. 1 Camera Obscura and Linear Perspective 47 2. 1. 1 Prehistory 47 2. 1. 1. 1 Greeks and Arabs 50 2. 1. 2 Implementation 52
2. 1. 2. 1 Brunelleschi 54
2. 1. 2. 2 Alberti 61
2. 1. 3 Impact 65
2. 1. 3. 1 Perspective and Letterpress 65
2. 1. 3. 2 The Self-Printing of Nature 67
2. 1. 3. 3 Europe's Colonial Power 68
2. 2 Lanterna Magica and the Age of the World Picture 70
2. 2. 1 Magic Lanterns in Action 70
2. 2. 2 Implementation 71
2. 2. 3 Impact 72
2. 2. 3. 1 Propaganda 72
2. 2. 3. 2 Heidegger's Age of the World Picture 75
2. 2. 3. 3 Jesuits and Optical Media 76
? ? ? ? ? ? 2. 2. 3. 4 2. 2. 3. 5 2. 2. 3. 6
2. 3 2. 3. 1 2. 3. 2 2. 3. 3 2. 3. 3. 1 2. 3. 3. 2 2. 3. 4
CONTENTS
Traveling Players 81 Jesuit Churches 81 Jesuit Theater 85
Enlightenment and Image War 89 Brockes 89 Phenomenology from Lambert to Hegel 93 Ghost-Seers 98 Schiller 101 Hoffmann 109 Romantic Poetry 112
3 Optical Media 118
3. 1 Photography 118
3. 1. 1 Prehistory 118
3. 1. 2 Implementation 119
3. 1. 2. 1 Niepce and Daguerre 125 3. 1. 2. 2 Talbot 132 3. 1. 3 Painting and Photography: A Battle for the Eyeballs 136
3. 2 Film 145
3. 2. 1 Preludes 145
3. 2. 2 Implementation 154
3. 2. 2. 1 Marey and Muybridge 155
3. 2. 3 Silent Film
3. 2. 4 Sound Film
3. 2. 5 Color Film
3. 3 Television 4 Computers
Bibliography Index
160 189 202
207 225
231 237
VI
? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
John Durham Peters
Optical Media may be Friedrich Kittler's best book for the uniniti-
ated. It is breezy, has an off-the-cuff tone, and is generally free of the
distinctive, pithy, and forbidding prose style that is sometimes called
"Kittlerdeutsch. " Optical Media provides an accessible introduction
to the media theory of Kittler's middle period as it applies primar-
ily to the optical realm. (Kittler's chief interest in sound, music, and
above all time takes a back seat here. ) It is definitely not "Kittler
for Dummies," however. It assumes a minimal general knowledge
of German literature and culture, the field in which Kittler began
as a young renegade scholar in the 1970s, and it asks the reader to
follow some ambitiously bold or bald claims. It presents the leading
themes of Kittler's media theory and a few of its idiosyncrasies as
well. The English-language reader can face a number of obstacles in
a first meeting with Kittler, and this introduction seeks to ease the
1
A Different Kind of German Import
Friedrich A. Kittler was born in 1943 in what was soon to become East Germany and lived there until 1958, when his family moved to West Germany. He studied German language and literature, Romance language and literature, and philosophy at Freiburg, where he became intimately familiar with recent French thought (he still claims to speak French more comfortably than English) and the work of Heidegger. In the 1980s and 1990s he was a visiting professor at several American universities such as Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, and Columbia. He has held the chair for "aesthetics and
encounter.
1
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
media history" at Humboldt University in Berlin since 1993 and his fame and notoriety continue to grow. He is proud of the label given him by a supporteJ; "Europe's greatest media philosopher," and is sometimes called "the Derrida of the digital age" (although he would prefer to be the Foucault). Kittler is the pre-eminent theorist of ele- ments - sound, image, letteJ; number, and organ - and how they are configured into media systems. He has produced a stunningly original and often controversial body of work that anyone interested in our fate as media-saturated animals today has to wrestle with.
Kittler is not in the same line as the leading German post-1968 imports into the Anglo-American human and social sciences. Spe- cifically, his work should not be confused with hermeneutics or the Frankfurt School, which have been widely read in English, and it would be a bad mistake to see him as sharing their opinion of the degrading effects of technical rationality. Machines are our fate, according to Kittler, and to say so is not to witness to an awful downfall of the human condition; it is to properly grasp our situation.
Kittler takes great care in fact to differentiate himself from these two traditions. He is generally friendly to hermeneutics as a prac- tice of rigorous textual analysis since it is close to his own method, but he mocks the spectral hope of communion with dead minds as a failure to recognize the material, i. e. medial, conditions of the practice of reading - conditions he analyzed at great length in his first blockbuster book, Aufschreibesysteme, translated as "Discourse Networks," and in a shorter collection called Dichter, Mutter, Kind (Poet, Mother, Child). This theme continues in these lectures, espe- cially in his analysis of German romanticism.
Against the Frankfurt School, from Horkheimer and Adorno up through Habermas, however, Kittler is relentless in his scorn. Chief among many irritations is the notion of quantification as the disen- chantment of the world. Kittler is a passionate friend of mathematics and an enemy of the notion that there is such a thing as "the two cultures" of science and humanities, as we say in English, or Geist und Natur, as they say in German. The idea that numbers rob our soul or that humanities have nothing to do with counting or machines he finds outrageous. (More fundamentally, he would find the claim outrageous that we have a soul to rob. ) Music, dance, poetry - indeed all the human arts that involve time - would be nothing without counting, measure, and proportion. This is his current theme, pursued in his projected four-volume magnum opus on "Music and Mathematics. " (The first volume, on "Ancient Greece," was pub- lished in 2006, and this turn to antiquity is one part of his work
2
? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
scarcely represented in OptIcal Media. 2 ) KIttler blames the Frankfurt School for a willed blindness to our technical condition and a sen- timentality about the humanities - and humans. To an outsider, the vehemence of his attacks seems out of proportion, especially since he shares with Adorno interests in inscription systems and technologies of sound, and an understanding of music as a field of play between excess and obedience. Some of the venom stems from turf wars in the German academy; some of it stems simply from his peevishness (something that the astute reader will note IS not always absent from
Optical Media either).
In any case, one will look in vain in Kittler's work for that reassur-
ing dialectical defense of the human estate that many of us have come to expect in postwar German thought. Kittler is an altogether cooler and more ironic sort. Aesthetics he always understood in its original sense as sensation. To study aesthetics is not to study beauty per se, it is to study the materialities of our organs of perception. In this view he proudly belongs to the long Berlin tradition of psychophysi- cal research into the human sense organs pioneered by figures such as Hermann Helmholtz. As Optical Media puts it in one of those reductive dicta for which Kittler is famous: "Aesthetic properties are always only dependent variables of technological feasibility. " This is one reason the lectures are on optical and not visual media. Optics is a subfield of physics; vision is a subfield of physiology, psychology, and culture. The visible spectrum is a narrow band of a huge optical spectrum. For Kittler the subject is always subordinate to the object: human perception is an interface with physical realities. "Visual culture" is all the rage lately, but his focus on optics is a character- istic foregrounding of physical-technical conditions over perceived ones. The sense organs are signal processors, relatively weak ones at that, and Kittler rigorously refuses to take human quantities as the measure of all things; for him we cannot know our bodies and senses until they have been externalized in media. Although Kittler might be an outlier in terms of German imports, he is part of a tough-minded
lineage within Germany that has not crossed the Channel or Atlantic as readily; the chief post-1968 exhibit would be the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, which also takes vigorous distance from the Frank- furt School and the humanism of philosophical hermeneutics, and is an important source for Kittler and for all recent German-language media theory, which has turned out to be a wonderfully vital field of research and debate. Kittler is certainly not the only voice in German media theory. The publication in 1985 of Aufschreibesysteme was a watershed in the German humanities, and much in the subsequent
3
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
flowering of media theory in the German-speaking world would probably be impossible without Kittler's innovations, His developing theories of media bardware had a huge influence in the 1990s, but he has been subject to sustained and incisive criticism and oedipal rebellion since in Germany. He is a controversialist who enjoys being outrageous and he has managed to offend or annoy a wide range of spirits. He is also brilliant and remarkably original. The task, as always, is to sort out the intellectual value from the rest. A prophet, as they say, has no honor in his own country, in part due to the sound ecological principle that any local species has co-evolved with its own natural enemies. In transplantation to an English-speaking universe, Kittler's work loses some of its outrageousness, in part because we are not invested in the local skirmishes. Derrida and Foucault were always bigger in the United States than in France; the lack of co- evolved enemies usually helps a crop proliferate. 3 But the enemies also know a thing or two and can save us the trouble of finding out for ourselves. Some classic complaints about Kittler in Germany - his politics, views on people in general and women in particular, and his treatment of historical evidence - will be noted here. Martin Heidegger certainly has crossed over into English, but here again it is important to get things right. Kittler takes Heidegger as tbe godfather of technical reflection and as his philosophical master. Heidegger has been read as a technophobe, a cultural pessimist lamenting technol- ogy's spell in the age of the world picture. Kittler, like many others, vigorously and persnasively contests this reading, taking Heidegger as the great thinker of technology. For Kittler's Heidegger, techne is our lot; he simply dared to think it most fully in all its inhuman implications. Heidegger's analyses are not a sob story but a sober dis- closure of onr condition. Once known as a young Turk who helped bring French poststructuralism to Germany, Kittler has more recently redescribed his career as a steady defense of Heidegger, simply reim- porting his thought once it had been laundered offshore by thinkers snch as Derrida and Foucault, who took on the task of surgically removing it from its historical embedment in the mess of National Socialism. Kittler's recent work embraces the Hellenophilic poetics and right-wing politics of the late Heidegger with a rather stunning enthusiasm.
2 Lanterna Magica and the Age of the World Picture 70
2. 2. 1 Magic Lanterns in Action 70
2. 2. 2 Implementation 71
2. 2. 3 Impact 72
2. 2. 3. 1 Propaganda 72
2. 2. 3. 2 Heidegger's Age of the World Picture 75
2. 2. 3. 3 Jesuits and Optical Media 76
? ? ? ? ? ? 2. 2. 3. 4 2. 2. 3. 5 2. 2. 3. 6
2. 3 2. 3. 1 2. 3. 2 2. 3. 3 2. 3. 3. 1 2. 3. 3. 2 2. 3. 4
CONTENTS
Traveling Players 81 Jesuit Churches 81 Jesuit Theater 85
Enlightenment and Image War 89 Brockes 89 Phenomenology from Lambert to Hegel 93 Ghost-Seers 98 Schiller 101 Hoffmann 109 Romantic Poetry 112
3 Optical Media 118
3. 1 Photography 118
3. 1. 1 Prehistory 118
3. 1. 2 Implementation 119
3. 1. 2. 1 Niepce and Daguerre 125 3. 1. 2. 2 Talbot 132 3. 1. 3 Painting and Photography: A Battle for the Eyeballs 136
3. 2 Film 145
3. 2. 1 Preludes 145
3. 2. 2 Implementation 154
3. 2. 2. 1 Marey and Muybridge 155
3. 2. 3 Silent Film
3. 2. 4 Sound Film
3. 2. 5 Color Film
3. 3 Television 4 Computers
Bibliography Index
160 189 202
207 225
231 237
VI
? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
John Durham Peters
Optical Media may be Friedrich Kittler's best book for the uniniti-
ated. It is breezy, has an off-the-cuff tone, and is generally free of the
distinctive, pithy, and forbidding prose style that is sometimes called
"Kittlerdeutsch. " Optical Media provides an accessible introduction
to the media theory of Kittler's middle period as it applies primar-
ily to the optical realm. (Kittler's chief interest in sound, music, and
above all time takes a back seat here. ) It is definitely not "Kittler
for Dummies," however. It assumes a minimal general knowledge
of German literature and culture, the field in which Kittler began
as a young renegade scholar in the 1970s, and it asks the reader to
follow some ambitiously bold or bald claims. It presents the leading
themes of Kittler's media theory and a few of its idiosyncrasies as
well. The English-language reader can face a number of obstacles in
a first meeting with Kittler, and this introduction seeks to ease the
1
A Different Kind of German Import
Friedrich A. Kittler was born in 1943 in what was soon to become East Germany and lived there until 1958, when his family moved to West Germany. He studied German language and literature, Romance language and literature, and philosophy at Freiburg, where he became intimately familiar with recent French thought (he still claims to speak French more comfortably than English) and the work of Heidegger. In the 1980s and 1990s he was a visiting professor at several American universities such as Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, and Columbia. He has held the chair for "aesthetics and
encounter.
1
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
media history" at Humboldt University in Berlin since 1993 and his fame and notoriety continue to grow. He is proud of the label given him by a supporteJ; "Europe's greatest media philosopher," and is sometimes called "the Derrida of the digital age" (although he would prefer to be the Foucault). Kittler is the pre-eminent theorist of ele- ments - sound, image, letteJ; number, and organ - and how they are configured into media systems. He has produced a stunningly original and often controversial body of work that anyone interested in our fate as media-saturated animals today has to wrestle with.
Kittler is not in the same line as the leading German post-1968 imports into the Anglo-American human and social sciences. Spe- cifically, his work should not be confused with hermeneutics or the Frankfurt School, which have been widely read in English, and it would be a bad mistake to see him as sharing their opinion of the degrading effects of technical rationality. Machines are our fate, according to Kittler, and to say so is not to witness to an awful downfall of the human condition; it is to properly grasp our situation.
Kittler takes great care in fact to differentiate himself from these two traditions. He is generally friendly to hermeneutics as a prac- tice of rigorous textual analysis since it is close to his own method, but he mocks the spectral hope of communion with dead minds as a failure to recognize the material, i. e. medial, conditions of the practice of reading - conditions he analyzed at great length in his first blockbuster book, Aufschreibesysteme, translated as "Discourse Networks," and in a shorter collection called Dichter, Mutter, Kind (Poet, Mother, Child). This theme continues in these lectures, espe- cially in his analysis of German romanticism.
Against the Frankfurt School, from Horkheimer and Adorno up through Habermas, however, Kittler is relentless in his scorn. Chief among many irritations is the notion of quantification as the disen- chantment of the world. Kittler is a passionate friend of mathematics and an enemy of the notion that there is such a thing as "the two cultures" of science and humanities, as we say in English, or Geist und Natur, as they say in German. The idea that numbers rob our soul or that humanities have nothing to do with counting or machines he finds outrageous. (More fundamentally, he would find the claim outrageous that we have a soul to rob. ) Music, dance, poetry - indeed all the human arts that involve time - would be nothing without counting, measure, and proportion. This is his current theme, pursued in his projected four-volume magnum opus on "Music and Mathematics. " (The first volume, on "Ancient Greece," was pub- lished in 2006, and this turn to antiquity is one part of his work
2
? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
scarcely represented in OptIcal Media. 2 ) KIttler blames the Frankfurt School for a willed blindness to our technical condition and a sen- timentality about the humanities - and humans. To an outsider, the vehemence of his attacks seems out of proportion, especially since he shares with Adorno interests in inscription systems and technologies of sound, and an understanding of music as a field of play between excess and obedience. Some of the venom stems from turf wars in the German academy; some of it stems simply from his peevishness (something that the astute reader will note IS not always absent from
Optical Media either).
In any case, one will look in vain in Kittler's work for that reassur-
ing dialectical defense of the human estate that many of us have come to expect in postwar German thought. Kittler is an altogether cooler and more ironic sort. Aesthetics he always understood in its original sense as sensation. To study aesthetics is not to study beauty per se, it is to study the materialities of our organs of perception. In this view he proudly belongs to the long Berlin tradition of psychophysi- cal research into the human sense organs pioneered by figures such as Hermann Helmholtz. As Optical Media puts it in one of those reductive dicta for which Kittler is famous: "Aesthetic properties are always only dependent variables of technological feasibility. " This is one reason the lectures are on optical and not visual media. Optics is a subfield of physics; vision is a subfield of physiology, psychology, and culture. The visible spectrum is a narrow band of a huge optical spectrum. For Kittler the subject is always subordinate to the object: human perception is an interface with physical realities. "Visual culture" is all the rage lately, but his focus on optics is a character- istic foregrounding of physical-technical conditions over perceived ones. The sense organs are signal processors, relatively weak ones at that, and Kittler rigorously refuses to take human quantities as the measure of all things; for him we cannot know our bodies and senses until they have been externalized in media. Although Kittler might be an outlier in terms of German imports, he is part of a tough-minded
lineage within Germany that has not crossed the Channel or Atlantic as readily; the chief post-1968 exhibit would be the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, which also takes vigorous distance from the Frank- furt School and the humanism of philosophical hermeneutics, and is an important source for Kittler and for all recent German-language media theory, which has turned out to be a wonderfully vital field of research and debate. Kittler is certainly not the only voice in German media theory. The publication in 1985 of Aufschreibesysteme was a watershed in the German humanities, and much in the subsequent
3
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
flowering of media theory in the German-speaking world would probably be impossible without Kittler's innovations, His developing theories of media bardware had a huge influence in the 1990s, but he has been subject to sustained and incisive criticism and oedipal rebellion since in Germany. He is a controversialist who enjoys being outrageous and he has managed to offend or annoy a wide range of spirits. He is also brilliant and remarkably original. The task, as always, is to sort out the intellectual value from the rest. A prophet, as they say, has no honor in his own country, in part due to the sound ecological principle that any local species has co-evolved with its own natural enemies. In transplantation to an English-speaking universe, Kittler's work loses some of its outrageousness, in part because we are not invested in the local skirmishes. Derrida and Foucault were always bigger in the United States than in France; the lack of co- evolved enemies usually helps a crop proliferate. 3 But the enemies also know a thing or two and can save us the trouble of finding out for ourselves. Some classic complaints about Kittler in Germany - his politics, views on people in general and women in particular, and his treatment of historical evidence - will be noted here. Martin Heidegger certainly has crossed over into English, but here again it is important to get things right. Kittler takes Heidegger as tbe godfather of technical reflection and as his philosophical master. Heidegger has been read as a technophobe, a cultural pessimist lamenting technol- ogy's spell in the age of the world picture. Kittler, like many others, vigorously and persnasively contests this reading, taking Heidegger as the great thinker of technology. For Kittler's Heidegger, techne is our lot; he simply dared to think it most fully in all its inhuman implications. Heidegger's analyses are not a sob story but a sober dis- closure of onr condition. Once known as a young Turk who helped bring French poststructuralism to Germany, Kittler has more recently redescribed his career as a steady defense of Heidegger, simply reim- porting his thought once it had been laundered offshore by thinkers snch as Derrida and Foucault, who took on the task of surgically removing it from its historical embedment in the mess of National Socialism. Kittler's recent work embraces the Hellenophilic poetics and right-wing politics of the late Heidegger with a rather stunning enthusiasm. This means that Kittler is fully "out" as a German con- servative, a creature that has no exact equivalent in British or Ameri- can politics and seems to hold an enormous intellectual fascination for us, if the recent vogue in social and cultural theory of Carl Schmitt (and of course Heidegger) is any indication. Along with figures such as Derrida and Foucanlt, Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre,
4
? ? ? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Leo Strauss, Jan Patocka and even Milan Kundera, Kittler is one key interpreter of the wildly diverse Heideggerian legacy. Compared to the hegemonic left-wing populism of Commonwealth media studies over the past decades, Kittler's vision is certainly a stark contrast.
This is not Cultural Studies
This is the second key obstacle: Kittler's disdain for people, or more specifically, for the category of experience. This is not to say that Kittler is a misanthrope - personally he can be quite cheerful and charming. But he has no use for the category of "the human" or "experience. " He gives us a media studies without people. In a sense, Kittler is Mr. Anti-Cultural Studies. He rejects the entire empiricist tradition from Hobbes to Mill and beyond that is the background philosophy and intellectual orientation in the English-speaking world, with its liberal politics, its love of experience, its affirmation of agency, and its inductive method. (Although "empiricist" in media studies is sometimes used narrowly to mean quantitative research, the British empiricist tradition is the ultimate background philosophy for both cultural studies and social scientific research. ) Kittler has no room for "the people" in either the Marxist or populist sense. In Optical Media, the only figures are inventors or artists, and he even makes fun of his own tendency to worship "bourgeois geniuses. " Like the early Foucault, he is interested in historical ruptures and not the slow sedimentation of social change through everyday practices: he gives us evolution by jerks, not by creeps. He prefers to focus on turning points rather than the long state of play in between the drama. Agency Kittler tends to attribute to abstractions such as world war and not to living, breathing actors. He is not interested in audiences or effects, resistance or hegemony, stars or genres; he spends no time on subcultures, postcoloniality, gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, or class. His account of television history is quite distinct from the key narratives in Anglo-American scholarship that explain the historical conditions and political settlements that made television full of mis- cellaneous "flow" (Raymond Williams) or tell how the box became integrated into a gendered domestic economy (David Morley, Lynn Spigel, and many others). Kittler is interested in the engineering. Just what kind of media studies is this?
At first glance, his vision of media studies hardly fits any of the dominant modes - and this is one of the things that makes it so
5
? ? OPTiCAL MEDIA
bracing. Even so, there are moments in Optical Media where one can see a certain kind of political-economic analysis peeking through his account of the rise of the German film industry, and his use of liter- ary texts might seem to point to an affinity with semiology, but even here, he never revels in the pleasure of the text as such, but always tries to boil down the text to an algorithm: he always has a larger explanatory (or debunking) agenda.
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.
FRIEDRICH KITTLER Translated by Anthony Enns
polity
? ? ? ? ? ? ? First published in German as Optische Medien I Berliner Vorlesung 1999 (C) Merve Verlag Berlin, 2002
This English edition (C) Polity Press, 2010
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? ? ? ? CONTENTS
Introduction: Friedrich Kittler's Light Shows
by John Durham Peters 1
Acknowledgements 18
Preface 19
1 Theoretical Presuppositions 29
2 Technologies of the Fin~ Arts 47
2. 1 Camera Obscura and Linear Perspective 47 2. 1. 1 Prehistory 47 2. 1. 1. 1 Greeks and Arabs 50 2. 1. 2 Implementation 52
2. 1. 2. 1 Brunelleschi 54
2. 1. 2. 2 Alberti 61
2. 1. 3 Impact 65
2. 1. 3. 1 Perspective and Letterpress 65
2. 1. 3. 2 The Self-Printing of Nature 67
2. 1. 3. 3 Europe's Colonial Power 68
2. 2 Lanterna Magica and the Age of the World Picture 70
2. 2. 1 Magic Lanterns in Action 70
2. 2. 2 Implementation 71
2. 2. 3 Impact 72
2. 2. 3. 1 Propaganda 72
2. 2. 3. 2 Heidegger's Age of the World Picture 75
2. 2. 3. 3 Jesuits and Optical Media 76
? ? ? ? ? ? 2. 2. 3. 4 2. 2. 3. 5 2. 2. 3. 6
2. 3 2. 3. 1 2. 3. 2 2. 3. 3 2. 3. 3. 1 2. 3. 3. 2 2. 3. 4
CONTENTS
Traveling Players 81 Jesuit Churches 81 Jesuit Theater 85
Enlightenment and Image War 89 Brockes 89 Phenomenology from Lambert to Hegel 93 Ghost-Seers 98 Schiller 101 Hoffmann 109 Romantic Poetry 112
3 Optical Media 118
3. 1 Photography 118
3. 1. 1 Prehistory 118
3. 1. 2 Implementation 119
3. 1. 2. 1 Niepce and Daguerre 125 3. 1. 2. 2 Talbot 132 3. 1. 3 Painting and Photography: A Battle for the Eyeballs 136
3. 2 Film 145
3. 2. 1 Preludes 145
3. 2. 2 Implementation 154
3. 2. 2. 1 Marey and Muybridge 155
3. 2. 3 Silent Film
3. 2. 4 Sound Film
3. 2. 5 Color Film
3. 3 Television 4 Computers
Bibliography Index
160 189 202
207 225
231 237
VI
? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
John Durham Peters
Optical Media may be Friedrich Kittler's best book for the uniniti-
ated. It is breezy, has an off-the-cuff tone, and is generally free of the
distinctive, pithy, and forbidding prose style that is sometimes called
"Kittlerdeutsch. " Optical Media provides an accessible introduction
to the media theory of Kittler's middle period as it applies primar-
ily to the optical realm. (Kittler's chief interest in sound, music, and
above all time takes a back seat here. ) It is definitely not "Kittler
for Dummies," however. It assumes a minimal general knowledge
of German literature and culture, the field in which Kittler began
as a young renegade scholar in the 1970s, and it asks the reader to
follow some ambitiously bold or bald claims. It presents the leading
themes of Kittler's media theory and a few of its idiosyncrasies as
well. The English-language reader can face a number of obstacles in
a first meeting with Kittler, and this introduction seeks to ease the
1
A Different Kind of German Import
Friedrich A. Kittler was born in 1943 in what was soon to become East Germany and lived there until 1958, when his family moved to West Germany. He studied German language and literature, Romance language and literature, and philosophy at Freiburg, where he became intimately familiar with recent French thought (he still claims to speak French more comfortably than English) and the work of Heidegger. In the 1980s and 1990s he was a visiting professor at several American universities such as Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, and Columbia. He has held the chair for "aesthetics and
encounter.
1
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
media history" at Humboldt University in Berlin since 1993 and his fame and notoriety continue to grow. He is proud of the label given him by a supporteJ; "Europe's greatest media philosopher," and is sometimes called "the Derrida of the digital age" (although he would prefer to be the Foucault). Kittler is the pre-eminent theorist of ele- ments - sound, image, letteJ; number, and organ - and how they are configured into media systems. He has produced a stunningly original and often controversial body of work that anyone interested in our fate as media-saturated animals today has to wrestle with.
Kittler is not in the same line as the leading German post-1968 imports into the Anglo-American human and social sciences. Spe- cifically, his work should not be confused with hermeneutics or the Frankfurt School, which have been widely read in English, and it would be a bad mistake to see him as sharing their opinion of the degrading effects of technical rationality. Machines are our fate, according to Kittler, and to say so is not to witness to an awful downfall of the human condition; it is to properly grasp our situation.
Kittler takes great care in fact to differentiate himself from these two traditions. He is generally friendly to hermeneutics as a prac- tice of rigorous textual analysis since it is close to his own method, but he mocks the spectral hope of communion with dead minds as a failure to recognize the material, i. e. medial, conditions of the practice of reading - conditions he analyzed at great length in his first blockbuster book, Aufschreibesysteme, translated as "Discourse Networks," and in a shorter collection called Dichter, Mutter, Kind (Poet, Mother, Child). This theme continues in these lectures, espe- cially in his analysis of German romanticism.
Against the Frankfurt School, from Horkheimer and Adorno up through Habermas, however, Kittler is relentless in his scorn. Chief among many irritations is the notion of quantification as the disen- chantment of the world. Kittler is a passionate friend of mathematics and an enemy of the notion that there is such a thing as "the two cultures" of science and humanities, as we say in English, or Geist und Natur, as they say in German. The idea that numbers rob our soul or that humanities have nothing to do with counting or machines he finds outrageous. (More fundamentally, he would find the claim outrageous that we have a soul to rob. ) Music, dance, poetry - indeed all the human arts that involve time - would be nothing without counting, measure, and proportion. This is his current theme, pursued in his projected four-volume magnum opus on "Music and Mathematics. " (The first volume, on "Ancient Greece," was pub- lished in 2006, and this turn to antiquity is one part of his work
2
? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
scarcely represented in OptIcal Media. 2 ) KIttler blames the Frankfurt School for a willed blindness to our technical condition and a sen- timentality about the humanities - and humans. To an outsider, the vehemence of his attacks seems out of proportion, especially since he shares with Adorno interests in inscription systems and technologies of sound, and an understanding of music as a field of play between excess and obedience. Some of the venom stems from turf wars in the German academy; some of it stems simply from his peevishness (something that the astute reader will note IS not always absent from
Optical Media either).
In any case, one will look in vain in Kittler's work for that reassur-
ing dialectical defense of the human estate that many of us have come to expect in postwar German thought. Kittler is an altogether cooler and more ironic sort. Aesthetics he always understood in its original sense as sensation. To study aesthetics is not to study beauty per se, it is to study the materialities of our organs of perception. In this view he proudly belongs to the long Berlin tradition of psychophysi- cal research into the human sense organs pioneered by figures such as Hermann Helmholtz. As Optical Media puts it in one of those reductive dicta for which Kittler is famous: "Aesthetic properties are always only dependent variables of technological feasibility. " This is one reason the lectures are on optical and not visual media. Optics is a subfield of physics; vision is a subfield of physiology, psychology, and culture. The visible spectrum is a narrow band of a huge optical spectrum. For Kittler the subject is always subordinate to the object: human perception is an interface with physical realities. "Visual culture" is all the rage lately, but his focus on optics is a character- istic foregrounding of physical-technical conditions over perceived ones. The sense organs are signal processors, relatively weak ones at that, and Kittler rigorously refuses to take human quantities as the measure of all things; for him we cannot know our bodies and senses until they have been externalized in media. Although Kittler might be an outlier in terms of German imports, he is part of a tough-minded
lineage within Germany that has not crossed the Channel or Atlantic as readily; the chief post-1968 exhibit would be the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, which also takes vigorous distance from the Frank- furt School and the humanism of philosophical hermeneutics, and is an important source for Kittler and for all recent German-language media theory, which has turned out to be a wonderfully vital field of research and debate. Kittler is certainly not the only voice in German media theory. The publication in 1985 of Aufschreibesysteme was a watershed in the German humanities, and much in the subsequent
3
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
flowering of media theory in the German-speaking world would probably be impossible without Kittler's innovations, His developing theories of media bardware had a huge influence in the 1990s, but he has been subject to sustained and incisive criticism and oedipal rebellion since in Germany. He is a controversialist who enjoys being outrageous and he has managed to offend or annoy a wide range of spirits. He is also brilliant and remarkably original. The task, as always, is to sort out the intellectual value from the rest. A prophet, as they say, has no honor in his own country, in part due to the sound ecological principle that any local species has co-evolved with its own natural enemies. In transplantation to an English-speaking universe, Kittler's work loses some of its outrageousness, in part because we are not invested in the local skirmishes. Derrida and Foucault were always bigger in the United States than in France; the lack of co- evolved enemies usually helps a crop proliferate. 3 But the enemies also know a thing or two and can save us the trouble of finding out for ourselves. Some classic complaints about Kittler in Germany - his politics, views on people in general and women in particular, and his treatment of historical evidence - will be noted here. Martin Heidegger certainly has crossed over into English, but here again it is important to get things right. Kittler takes Heidegger as tbe godfather of technical reflection and as his philosophical master. Heidegger has been read as a technophobe, a cultural pessimist lamenting technol- ogy's spell in the age of the world picture. Kittler, like many others, vigorously and persnasively contests this reading, taking Heidegger as the great thinker of technology. For Kittler's Heidegger, techne is our lot; he simply dared to think it most fully in all its inhuman implications. Heidegger's analyses are not a sob story but a sober dis- closure of onr condition. Once known as a young Turk who helped bring French poststructuralism to Germany, Kittler has more recently redescribed his career as a steady defense of Heidegger, simply reim- porting his thought once it had been laundered offshore by thinkers snch as Derrida and Foucault, who took on the task of surgically removing it from its historical embedment in the mess of National Socialism. Kittler's recent work embraces the Hellenophilic poetics and right-wing politics of the late Heidegger with a rather stunning enthusiasm.
2 Lanterna Magica and the Age of the World Picture 70
2. 2. 1 Magic Lanterns in Action 70
2. 2. 2 Implementation 71
2. 2. 3 Impact 72
2. 2. 3. 1 Propaganda 72
2. 2. 3. 2 Heidegger's Age of the World Picture 75
2. 2. 3. 3 Jesuits and Optical Media 76
? ? ? ? ? ? 2. 2. 3. 4 2. 2. 3. 5 2. 2. 3. 6
2. 3 2. 3. 1 2. 3. 2 2. 3. 3 2. 3. 3. 1 2. 3. 3. 2 2. 3. 4
CONTENTS
Traveling Players 81 Jesuit Churches 81 Jesuit Theater 85
Enlightenment and Image War 89 Brockes 89 Phenomenology from Lambert to Hegel 93 Ghost-Seers 98 Schiller 101 Hoffmann 109 Romantic Poetry 112
3 Optical Media 118
3. 1 Photography 118
3. 1. 1 Prehistory 118
3. 1. 2 Implementation 119
3. 1. 2. 1 Niepce and Daguerre 125 3. 1. 2. 2 Talbot 132 3. 1. 3 Painting and Photography: A Battle for the Eyeballs 136
3. 2 Film 145
3. 2. 1 Preludes 145
3. 2. 2 Implementation 154
3. 2. 2. 1 Marey and Muybridge 155
3. 2. 3 Silent Film
3. 2. 4 Sound Film
3. 2. 5 Color Film
3. 3 Television 4 Computers
Bibliography Index
160 189 202
207 225
231 237
VI
? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
John Durham Peters
Optical Media may be Friedrich Kittler's best book for the uniniti-
ated. It is breezy, has an off-the-cuff tone, and is generally free of the
distinctive, pithy, and forbidding prose style that is sometimes called
"Kittlerdeutsch. " Optical Media provides an accessible introduction
to the media theory of Kittler's middle period as it applies primar-
ily to the optical realm. (Kittler's chief interest in sound, music, and
above all time takes a back seat here. ) It is definitely not "Kittler
for Dummies," however. It assumes a minimal general knowledge
of German literature and culture, the field in which Kittler began
as a young renegade scholar in the 1970s, and it asks the reader to
follow some ambitiously bold or bald claims. It presents the leading
themes of Kittler's media theory and a few of its idiosyncrasies as
well. The English-language reader can face a number of obstacles in
a first meeting with Kittler, and this introduction seeks to ease the
1
A Different Kind of German Import
Friedrich A. Kittler was born in 1943 in what was soon to become East Germany and lived there until 1958, when his family moved to West Germany. He studied German language and literature, Romance language and literature, and philosophy at Freiburg, where he became intimately familiar with recent French thought (he still claims to speak French more comfortably than English) and the work of Heidegger. In the 1980s and 1990s he was a visiting professor at several American universities such as Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, and Columbia. He has held the chair for "aesthetics and
encounter.
1
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
media history" at Humboldt University in Berlin since 1993 and his fame and notoriety continue to grow. He is proud of the label given him by a supporteJ; "Europe's greatest media philosopher," and is sometimes called "the Derrida of the digital age" (although he would prefer to be the Foucault). Kittler is the pre-eminent theorist of ele- ments - sound, image, letteJ; number, and organ - and how they are configured into media systems. He has produced a stunningly original and often controversial body of work that anyone interested in our fate as media-saturated animals today has to wrestle with.
Kittler is not in the same line as the leading German post-1968 imports into the Anglo-American human and social sciences. Spe- cifically, his work should not be confused with hermeneutics or the Frankfurt School, which have been widely read in English, and it would be a bad mistake to see him as sharing their opinion of the degrading effects of technical rationality. Machines are our fate, according to Kittler, and to say so is not to witness to an awful downfall of the human condition; it is to properly grasp our situation.
Kittler takes great care in fact to differentiate himself from these two traditions. He is generally friendly to hermeneutics as a prac- tice of rigorous textual analysis since it is close to his own method, but he mocks the spectral hope of communion with dead minds as a failure to recognize the material, i. e. medial, conditions of the practice of reading - conditions he analyzed at great length in his first blockbuster book, Aufschreibesysteme, translated as "Discourse Networks," and in a shorter collection called Dichter, Mutter, Kind (Poet, Mother, Child). This theme continues in these lectures, espe- cially in his analysis of German romanticism.
Against the Frankfurt School, from Horkheimer and Adorno up through Habermas, however, Kittler is relentless in his scorn. Chief among many irritations is the notion of quantification as the disen- chantment of the world. Kittler is a passionate friend of mathematics and an enemy of the notion that there is such a thing as "the two cultures" of science and humanities, as we say in English, or Geist und Natur, as they say in German. The idea that numbers rob our soul or that humanities have nothing to do with counting or machines he finds outrageous. (More fundamentally, he would find the claim outrageous that we have a soul to rob. ) Music, dance, poetry - indeed all the human arts that involve time - would be nothing without counting, measure, and proportion. This is his current theme, pursued in his projected four-volume magnum opus on "Music and Mathematics. " (The first volume, on "Ancient Greece," was pub- lished in 2006, and this turn to antiquity is one part of his work
2
? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
scarcely represented in OptIcal Media. 2 ) KIttler blames the Frankfurt School for a willed blindness to our technical condition and a sen- timentality about the humanities - and humans. To an outsider, the vehemence of his attacks seems out of proportion, especially since he shares with Adorno interests in inscription systems and technologies of sound, and an understanding of music as a field of play between excess and obedience. Some of the venom stems from turf wars in the German academy; some of it stems simply from his peevishness (something that the astute reader will note IS not always absent from
Optical Media either).
In any case, one will look in vain in Kittler's work for that reassur-
ing dialectical defense of the human estate that many of us have come to expect in postwar German thought. Kittler is an altogether cooler and more ironic sort. Aesthetics he always understood in its original sense as sensation. To study aesthetics is not to study beauty per se, it is to study the materialities of our organs of perception. In this view he proudly belongs to the long Berlin tradition of psychophysi- cal research into the human sense organs pioneered by figures such as Hermann Helmholtz. As Optical Media puts it in one of those reductive dicta for which Kittler is famous: "Aesthetic properties are always only dependent variables of technological feasibility. " This is one reason the lectures are on optical and not visual media. Optics is a subfield of physics; vision is a subfield of physiology, psychology, and culture. The visible spectrum is a narrow band of a huge optical spectrum. For Kittler the subject is always subordinate to the object: human perception is an interface with physical realities. "Visual culture" is all the rage lately, but his focus on optics is a character- istic foregrounding of physical-technical conditions over perceived ones. The sense organs are signal processors, relatively weak ones at that, and Kittler rigorously refuses to take human quantities as the measure of all things; for him we cannot know our bodies and senses until they have been externalized in media. Although Kittler might be an outlier in terms of German imports, he is part of a tough-minded
lineage within Germany that has not crossed the Channel or Atlantic as readily; the chief post-1968 exhibit would be the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, which also takes vigorous distance from the Frank- furt School and the humanism of philosophical hermeneutics, and is an important source for Kittler and for all recent German-language media theory, which has turned out to be a wonderfully vital field of research and debate. Kittler is certainly not the only voice in German media theory. The publication in 1985 of Aufschreibesysteme was a watershed in the German humanities, and much in the subsequent
3
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
flowering of media theory in the German-speaking world would probably be impossible without Kittler's innovations, His developing theories of media bardware had a huge influence in the 1990s, but he has been subject to sustained and incisive criticism and oedipal rebellion since in Germany. He is a controversialist who enjoys being outrageous and he has managed to offend or annoy a wide range of spirits. He is also brilliant and remarkably original. The task, as always, is to sort out the intellectual value from the rest. A prophet, as they say, has no honor in his own country, in part due to the sound ecological principle that any local species has co-evolved with its own natural enemies. In transplantation to an English-speaking universe, Kittler's work loses some of its outrageousness, in part because we are not invested in the local skirmishes. Derrida and Foucault were always bigger in the United States than in France; the lack of co- evolved enemies usually helps a crop proliferate. 3 But the enemies also know a thing or two and can save us the trouble of finding out for ourselves. Some classic complaints about Kittler in Germany - his politics, views on people in general and women in particular, and his treatment of historical evidence - will be noted here. Martin Heidegger certainly has crossed over into English, but here again it is important to get things right. Kittler takes Heidegger as tbe godfather of technical reflection and as his philosophical master. Heidegger has been read as a technophobe, a cultural pessimist lamenting technol- ogy's spell in the age of the world picture. Kittler, like many others, vigorously and persnasively contests this reading, taking Heidegger as the great thinker of technology. For Kittler's Heidegger, techne is our lot; he simply dared to think it most fully in all its inhuman implications. Heidegger's analyses are not a sob story but a sober dis- closure of onr condition. Once known as a young Turk who helped bring French poststructuralism to Germany, Kittler has more recently redescribed his career as a steady defense of Heidegger, simply reim- porting his thought once it had been laundered offshore by thinkers snch as Derrida and Foucault, who took on the task of surgically removing it from its historical embedment in the mess of National Socialism. Kittler's recent work embraces the Hellenophilic poetics and right-wing politics of the late Heidegger with a rather stunning enthusiasm. This means that Kittler is fully "out" as a German con- servative, a creature that has no exact equivalent in British or Ameri- can politics and seems to hold an enormous intellectual fascination for us, if the recent vogue in social and cultural theory of Carl Schmitt (and of course Heidegger) is any indication. Along with figures such as Derrida and Foucanlt, Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre,
4
? ? ? ? INTRODUCTION: FRIEDRICH KITTLER'S LIGHT SHOWS
Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Leo Strauss, Jan Patocka and even Milan Kundera, Kittler is one key interpreter of the wildly diverse Heideggerian legacy. Compared to the hegemonic left-wing populism of Commonwealth media studies over the past decades, Kittler's vision is certainly a stark contrast.
This is not Cultural Studies
This is the second key obstacle: Kittler's disdain for people, or more specifically, for the category of experience. This is not to say that Kittler is a misanthrope - personally he can be quite cheerful and charming. But he has no use for the category of "the human" or "experience. " He gives us a media studies without people. In a sense, Kittler is Mr. Anti-Cultural Studies. He rejects the entire empiricist tradition from Hobbes to Mill and beyond that is the background philosophy and intellectual orientation in the English-speaking world, with its liberal politics, its love of experience, its affirmation of agency, and its inductive method. (Although "empiricist" in media studies is sometimes used narrowly to mean quantitative research, the British empiricist tradition is the ultimate background philosophy for both cultural studies and social scientific research. ) Kittler has no room for "the people" in either the Marxist or populist sense. In Optical Media, the only figures are inventors or artists, and he even makes fun of his own tendency to worship "bourgeois geniuses. " Like the early Foucault, he is interested in historical ruptures and not the slow sedimentation of social change through everyday practices: he gives us evolution by jerks, not by creeps. He prefers to focus on turning points rather than the long state of play in between the drama. Agency Kittler tends to attribute to abstractions such as world war and not to living, breathing actors. He is not interested in audiences or effects, resistance or hegemony, stars or genres; he spends no time on subcultures, postcoloniality, gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, or class. His account of television history is quite distinct from the key narratives in Anglo-American scholarship that explain the historical conditions and political settlements that made television full of mis- cellaneous "flow" (Raymond Williams) or tell how the box became integrated into a gendered domestic economy (David Morley, Lynn Spigel, and many others). Kittler is interested in the engineering. Just what kind of media studies is this?
At first glance, his vision of media studies hardly fits any of the dominant modes - and this is one of the things that makes it so
5
? ? OPTiCAL MEDIA
bracing. Even so, there are moments in Optical Media where one can see a certain kind of political-economic analysis peeking through his account of the rise of the German film industry, and his use of liter- ary texts might seem to point to an affinity with semiology, but even here, he never revels in the pleasure of the text as such, but always tries to boil down the text to an algorithm: he always has a larger explanatory (or debunking) agenda.
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.
