No More Learning

In the same way, Lacan, making a distinction with animal codes, de-
Typewriter 259
fined language and subjectivity as human properties. For example, the dance of bees, as it has been researched by von Frisch, "is distinguished from language precisely by the fixed correlation of its signs to the reality that they signify. " While the messages of one bee control the flight of an- other to blossoms and prey, these messages are not decoded and trans- mitted by the second bee. By contrast, "the form in which language is ex- pressed . . . itself defines subjectivity. Language says: 'You will go here, and when you see this, you will turn off there. ' In other words: it refers itself to the discourse of the other. "214
In yet other words: bees are projectiles, and humans, cruise missiles. One is given objective data on angles and distances by a dance, the other, a command of free will. Computers operating on IF-THEN commands are therefore machine subjects. Electronics, a tube monster since Bletchley Park, replaces discourse, and programmability replaces free will.
Not for nothing was Zuse "frankly, nervous" about his algorithmic golems and their "halting problem. " Not for nothing did the Henschel Works or the Ministry of Aviation assign the development of cruise mis- siles to these golems. On all fronts, from top-secret cryptoanalysis to the most spectacular future weapons offensive, the Second World War de- volved from humans and soldiers to machine subjects. And it wasn't by much that Zuse's binary computers missed doing the programming of free space flight from its inception, rather than determining in the bunkers of the Harz the fate of the V2 at the last moment. 215 The "range of charges" that the Peenemiinde Army Test Site assigned to German uni- versities in 1939 included (aside from acceleration integrators, Doppler radar, onboard calculators, etc. ), in a rather visionary way, what Wernher von Braun described as "the first attempt at electric digital computa- tion. "216 The weapon as subject required a corresponding brain.
But since the commander in chief of the German army (whom Syber- berg has called the "greatest filmmaker of all time")217 did not believe in self-guided weapons on the actual rocket testing site, but only during their demonstration on color film at the Wolfsschanze,218 the entropies of the Nazi state emerged victorious over information and information machines.
At any rate, cybernetics, the theory of self-guidance and feedback loops, is a theory of the Second World War. Norbert Wiener testified to that when he introduced the term:
The deciding factor in this new step was the war. I had known for a considerable time that if a national emergency should come, my function in it [sic] would be
? 2 60 Typewriter
determined largely by two things: my close contact with the program of comput- ing machines developed by Dr. Vannevar Bush, and my own joint work with Dr. Yuk Wing Lee on the design of electric networks. . . . At the beginning of the war, the German prestige in aviation and the defensive position of England turned the attention of many scientists to the improvement of anti-aircraft artillery. Even be- fore the war, it had become clear that the speed of the airplane had rendered ob- solete all classical methods of the direction of fire, and that it was necessary to build into the control apparatus all the computations necessary. These were ren- dered much more difficult by the fact that, unlike all previously encountered tar- gets, an airplane has a velocity which is a very appreciable part of the velocity of the missile used to bring it down. Accordingly, it is exceedingly important to shoot the missile, not at the target, but in such a way that missile and target may come together in space at some time in the future. We must hence find some method of predicting the future position of the plane. 219
With Wiener's Linear Prediction Code (LPC), mathematics changed into an oracle capable of predicting a probable future even out of chaos- initially for fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft guidance systems, in between the wars for human mouths and the computer simulations of their dis- courses. 220 Blind, unpredictable time, which rules over analog storage and transmission media (in contrast to the arts), was finally brought under control. With digital signal processing, measuring circuits and algorithms (like an automated sound engineer) ride along on random frequencies. To- day this form of cybernetics ensures the sound of most reputable rock bands; in actuality, however, it was only a "new step" in ballistics. Ma- chines replaced Leibniz in the analysis of trajectories.
With the consequence that COLOSSUS gave birth to many a son, each more colossal than its secret father. According to the ministry of supply, Turing'S postwar computer ACE was supposed to calculate "grenades, bombs, rockets, and cruise missiles"; the American ENIAC "was to simulate trajectories of shells through varying conditions of air resistance and wind velocity, which involved the summation of thousands of little pieces of trajectories. " John von Neumann's EDVAC was being designed to solve "three-dimensional 'aerodynamic and shock-wave prob- lems, . . . shell, bomb and rocket work, . . . [and] progress in the field of propellants and high explosives"'; BINAC worked for the United States Air Force; ATLAS, for cryptoanalysis; and finally, MANIAC, if this sug- gestive name had been implemented in time, would have optimized the pressure wave of the first H-bomb. 221
Machines operating on the basis of recursive functions produce slow- motion studies not only of human thinking but also of human demise.
Typewriter 261
According to the insight of Pynchon and Virilio, the blitzkrieg and the flash-bulb shot (Blitzlichtaufnahme) coincide in the bomb that leveled Hiroshima during rush hour on August 6, 1945. A shutter speed of 0. 000000067 seconds, far below Mach's projectile-like, pioneering cine- matic feat of 1 8 83 , melted countless Japanese people " as a fine-vapor de- posit of fat-cracklings wrinkled into the fused rubble" of their city. 222 Cin- ema to be computed in computer processing speeds, and only in computer processing speeds.
On the film's manifest surface, everything proceeds as if the "mar- riage of two monsters"223 that John von Neumann had arranged between a German guided missile and an American A-bomb payload (that is, by saving both conventional amatol and conventional bomber pilots) by it- self had been the step from blitzkrieg to the strategic present. What speaks against that is that both guided missiles and nuclear weapons sur- mounted the iron and bamboo curtains with extraordinary ease-partly through espionage, partly through the transfer of technology. Different from the machine subject itself, the innocuous but fully automated type- computing machine. With the fiat of the theory that is omnipotent be- cause it is true, Stalin condemned the bourgeois aberration of cybernetics. As if materialism, in the espionage races with its other half, had been blinded by the disclosed secrets of mass extermination, the smoke trail of rockets and the flash of bombs.
Annihilation is still called determining the outcome of the war. Only 40 years later, classified archives have gradually revealed that Bletchley Park was presumably the most suitable candidate for this title. During the Second World War, a materialist who materialized mathematics itself emerged victorious. Regarding COLOSSUS and Enigma, Turing's biogra- pher writes that "intelligence had won the war"224 with the British liter- ality that does not distinguish among reason, secret service, and informa- tion machine. But that is exactly what remained a state secret. During the war, a whole organization emerged for the purpose of delivering the re- sults of fully automatized cryptoanalysis in coded form to the command- ing officers at the front. Otherwise, the most vital secret of the war (through seized documents, traitors, or treacherously revealing counter- measures) possibly would have filtered through to the German army, and Enigma would have been silenced. Hence it became secret agents' last his- torical assignment to invent radiant spy novels in order to camouflage the fact that interception and the type-computing machine respectively ren- der secret services and agents superfluous. ( Which is what spy novels con- tinue to do to this very day. ) The mysterious "Werther," who allegedly
2 6 2 Typewriter
Hiroshima before and after August 6, I94 5 .
transmitted many plans of attack from the Wolfsschanze via Swiss dou- ble agents to Moscow, but who has yet to be located historically, may well have been one of the simulacra that systematically screened Bletchley Park from the Red Army. 225 Then, at any rate, Stalin's theory would have had a material basis-nonproliferation of the flow of information.
On August 28, 1945, three weeks after Hiroshima, four weeks after Potsdam, U. S. President Truman issued a secret decree on secret service interception, an information blockage on information machines. War- determining cryptoanalysis became a matter of ultimate classified mate- rial-in the past and the present, technology and method, successes and results, Bletchley Park and Washington, D. C. 226 As a result of which the same, but now cold, war could start again immediately: in the shadow of Truman's decree, COLOSSUS and its American clones learned Russian instead of German. Hermetically sealed, "the legacy of a total war, and of the capture of a total communications system, could now turn to the con- struction of a total machine. "227
The success of this strategy of dissimulation is proved by its only leak. A writer, who not only knew the typewriter from secretaries but also reproduced it on the printed page, communicated in letter form to the warlords gathered in Potsdam that the symbolic has, through Enigma and COLOSSUS, become a world of the machine.
? ? ? Arno Schmidt , " Offener Brief "
An die Exzellenzen Herren
Truman (Roosevelt) , Stalin,
Churchill (Attlee ) Jalta, Teheran , Potsdam
8 c 357 8xup ZEUs !
id 21v18 Pt 7 gallisc 314002a 17 ? V 31 GpU 4a 29, 39, 49 ? rnz 71Fi16 34007129 pp 34 udil19jem 13349 bubu WEg !
aff 19 exi: 16 enu 070 zIrn 4019 abs12c 24 spil, 43 asti siv 13999 idle 48, 19037 pem 8 pho 36. 1012
sabi FR26a FlisCh 26:iwo - 18447 g7 gg !
Glent 3 1 , glent 14 Po Arno Schmidt 228
Under the conditions of high technology, literature has nothing more to say. It ends in cryptograms that defy interpretation and only permit in- terception. Of all long-distance connections on this planet today,229 from phone services to microwave radio, 0. 1 percent flow through the trans- mission, storage, and decoding machines of the National Security Agency
(NSA), the organization succeeding SIS and Bletchley Park. By its own ac- count, the NSA has "accelerated" the "advent of the computer age," and hence the end of history, like nothing else. 230 An automated discourse analysis has taken command.
And while professors are still reluctantly trading in their typewriters for word processors, the NSA is preparing for the future: from nursery school mathematics, which continues to be fully sufficient for books, to charge-coupled devices, surface-wave filters, digital signal processors in- cluding the four basic forms of computation. 231 Trenches, flashes of light- ning, stars-storage, transmission, the laying of cables.
Typewriter 263
? ? REFERENCE MATTER
? NOTES
TRANSLATORS' NOTE: The citation format for Kittler's text closely follows that of the German edition. When two publication dates are given, the first refers to the date of original publication, the second, either to a later edition used by Kittler or to an English translation. Page numbers refer to the latter date, which corresponds to the edition given in the Bibliography, pp. 299-3 1 5 .
TRANSLATORS' INTRODUCTION
? 1. Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to\Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), 3 2.
2. Ibid.
3 . Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1988), 136.
4. See ibid. , 79-8 1, and Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Cul- ture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993 ), 3-20.
5. Quoted in Boris Eichenbaum, "The Theory of the 'Formal Method,'" in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 803.
6. Friedrich Kittler, "Die Laterna magica der Literatur: Schillers und Hoff- manns Medienstrategien," in Athenaum: Jahrbuch fur Romantik I994, ed. Ernst Behler, Jochen Horisch, and Gunther Oesterle (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1994), 2 19 .
7. See, for example, Michael Heim, "The Computer as Component: Hei- degger and McLuhan," Philosophy and Literature 16. 2 (1992): 304-18; Judith Stamps, Unthinking Modernity: Innis, McLuhan and the Frankfurt School (Mon- treal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 19 9 5 ) ; and Glenn Willmott, McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1996).
8. Theodore Roszak, "The Summa Popologica of Marshall McLuhan," in McLuhan: Pro & Con, ed. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968), 257-69.
'"
I
? 9. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory ofthe Media," in
268 Notes to Pages xv-xvii
The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Poetics and the Media, ed. Michael Roloff (New York: Seabury, 1974), lI8. See also Enzensberger's hilarious retrac- tion, "The Zero Medium, or Why All Complaints About Television are Point- less," in Mediocrity and Delusion: Collected Diversions, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Verso, 1992), 59-70. In an interesting twist, Klaus Theweleit has speculated that the German Left discarded McLuhan because his focus on bodies and media, extensions, narcosis, and self-amputation was more materialist than Marxism had ever been. See Theweleit, Buch der Konige I: Orpheus und Eury- dike (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 1988), 383,
10. Enzensberger, "Constituents," 97.
II. Jean Baudrillard, "Requiem for the Media," in For a Critique ofthe Po- litical Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos, 1981), 168.
12. Ibid. , 169.
13? Ibid. , 173.
14? Ibid. , 175?
15. The compound term Mediendiskursanalyse (the basis for our expression
"media discourse analysis") is occasionally used in German scholarship. Norbert Bolz may have been the first to combine its constituent parts when he outlined a program for a future "Diskursanalyse fur neue Medien. " See Bolz, Philosophie nach ihrem Ende (Munich: Boer, 1992), 172, and idem, "Computer als Medium," in Computer als Medium, ed. Bolz, Kittler, and Christoph Tholen (Munich: Fink, 1994), 15?
16. Klaus Laermann, "Lacancan und Derridada: Dber die Frankolatrie in den Kulturwissenschaften," Kursbuch 84 (1986): 36, 38, 41.
1 7 . Needless to say, the story can b e told neither impartially nor in its en- tirety: it is still going on and continuing divisions, spurred by the arrival of new approaches such as systems theory and radical constructivism, make it difficult, if not impossible, to find terms neutral enough to satisfy all parties involved. The following brief account only considers the politico-theoretical framework of the last three decades, although there are, of course, larger perspectives on postruc- turalism's hampered reception. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, for one, has argued that analytical procedures such as Derridean deconstruction, with its (potentially an- tihistorical) bias toward spatialization, did not sit easily with the traditional Ger- man bias in favor of temporalization; this may also explain why Freudian psycho- analysis fared better in France than it did in Germany or Austria. See Gumbrecht, "Who Is Afraid of Deconstruction? " in Diskurstheorien und Literaturwissen- schaft, eds. Jurgen Fohrmann and Harro Muller (Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp, 1988), 95-lI3?
1 8 . Holub, Crossing Borders: Reception Theory, Poststructuralism, Decon- struction (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 199 2 ) : 4 3 .
19. Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 172.
2 0 . Matthew Griffin and Susanne Herrmann, " Interview mit Friedrich A. Kittler," Weimarer Beitrage 43. 2 (1997): 286. Griffin and Herrmann miss the point by translating the phrase "schwarz in jeder Bedeutung" as "virtually black- listed" intheEnglishversionoftheirinterview("TechnologiesofWriting:Inter- view with Friedrich Kittler," New Literary History 27. 4 [1996]: 741). Also see
Notes to Pages xvii-xix 269
Kittler's harsh critique of the venerable Dialectic of Enlightenment, coauthored by the technologically ignorant "Fabrikantensohne" (manufacturers' sons) Horkheimer and Adorno: "Copyright 1944 by Social Studies Association, Inc. ," in Flaschenpost und Postkarte: Korrespondenzen zwischen Kritischer Theorie und Poststrukturalismus, ed. Sigrid Weigel (Cologne: B6hlau, 1995), 185-93. For a brief but informed introduction to the German theoretical debates of the 1980s, see Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Reappraisals: Shifting Alignments in Postwar Critical Theory (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 187-97.
21. In 1978 the volume Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel appeared, which contained Kaiser's "hermeneutical-dialectic" interpretation of novellas by Gott- fried Keller, Kittler's "discourse-analytical" reading of Goethe's Wilhelm Meis- ter, and a beautifully tortured preface trying to tie the two essays together. What they ultimately end up sharing is a common enemy, the "Marxist theory of the re- flection of social conditions and processes in the literary work, as well as . . . the neo-Marxist aesthetics of Adorno" (Gerhard Kaiser and Friedrich A.
Kittler, Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel: Studien zu Goethe und Gottfried Keller [G6ttin- gen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978], 9).
2 2 . Manfred Frank, What Is Neostructuralism? trans. Richard Gray (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, I989 ) .
Sabine Wilke and
23. See H6risch, Die Wut des Verstehens: Zur Kritik der Hermeneutik (Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp, 1988), 50-66.
24. Urszenen: Literaturwissenschaft als Diskursanalyse und Diskurskritik, ed. Friedrich A. Kittler and Horst Turk (Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp, 1977). Con- taining essays by Kittler, Bolz, and'H6risch, this collection marks the beginning of French-inspired German literary s&olarship.
25. See Norbert Bolz, ed. , Goeth? s 'Wahlverwandtschaften': Kritische Mod- elle und Diskursanalysen zum Mythos,Literatur (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, I98 I); Jochen H6risch, Die andere Goethezeit: Poetische Mobilmachung des Subjekts um I800 (Munich: Fink, 1992); and Kittler, Dichter Mutter Kind (Munich: Fink,
I991). A well-known early example is the Lacanian reading of Kleist by Helga Gallas, Das Textbegehren des 'Michael Kohlhaas': Die Sprache des Unbewuf5ten und der Sinn der Literatur ( Reinbek: Rowohlt, 198 I ) .
26. Frank, WhatIsNeostructuralism? 313.
27. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar ofJacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Techniques ofPsychoanalysis I954-I955, ed. Jacques- Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988), 46.
28. Kittler, "The World of the Symbolic-A World of the Machine," in idem, Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays, ed. and intro. John Johnston, trans. Stefanie Harris (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, I997), 1H.
2 9 . Ibid. , 1 4 5 , referring to the following passage (Lacan, Seminar II , 89 ) : "This discourse of the other is not the discourse of the abstract other, of the other in the dyad, of my correspondent, nor even of my slave, it is the discourse of the circuit in which I am integrated. I am one of its links. "
30. George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Crit- ical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992), H. 31. GregoryUlmer,AppliedGrammatology:Post(e)-PedagogyfromJacques
Derrida to Joseph B euys (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 198 5 ) , 3 0 3 .
? 270 Notes to Pages xix-xxii
3 2 . See Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr. , "The Electronic Panopticon: Censorship, Control and Indoctrination in a Post-Typographic Culture," in Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers, ed. Myron C. Tuman (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 167-88; and Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context ( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), 69-98.
3 3 . Regis Debray, Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms, trans. Eric Rauth (New York: Verso, 1996), 54.
3 4 . Bolz, Philosophie nach ihrem Ende, 1 5 4 .
3 5 . Hans H. Hiebel, " Strukturale Psychoanalyse und Literatur, " i n Neue Literaturtheorien, ed. Klaus-Michael Bogdal (Darmstadt: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990), 69. See also Kittler, "'Das Phantom unseres Ichs' und die Literaturpsy- chologie: E. T. A. Hoffmann-Freud-Lacan," in Urszenen, 139-66.
36. See Kittler, Dichter Mutter Kind, 7-17, and Horisch's belated preface to Die andere Goethezeit, 7-9. See also Kittler's remarks in Griffin and Herrmann, "Technologies of Writing," 74 1 : " When I think of my oId literary criticism, the good essays are actually didactic pieces in programming. How did Duke Carl Eugen von Wurtemberg [sic] program Friedrich Schiller? I didn't write about Schiller's sentiments or religion, because all I had was a bare-bones model: educa- tors and princes program the novelist for a specific civil function in the state. What you need is a fundamental understanding of concepts such as hardware, programming, automatization, and regulation. "
37. Kittler, Discourse Networks, I8ooiI900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), 177.
38. All of these essays first appeared in the 1980s, but where possible we have provided an English translation: "Wie man abschafft, wovon man spricht: Der Autor von Ecce Homo," in Literaturmagazin 12: Nietzsche, ed. Nicolas Born, Jurgen Manthey, and Detlev Schmidt (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1980), 1 5 3-78; "Pink Floyd, 'Brain Damage,'" in europalyrik 1775 bis heute: Gedichte und Interpreta- tionen, ed. Klaus Lindemann (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1982), 467-77; "Das Alibi eines Schriftstellers-Peter Handkes Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter," in Das schnelle Altern der neuesten Literatur, ed. Jochen Horisch and Hubert Winkels (Dusseldorf: Claassen, 198 5 ), 60-72; "tiber die Kunst, mit Vogeln zu ja- gen: The Maltese Falcon von D. Hammett," in Phantasie und Deutung: Psychol- ogisches Verstehen von Film und Literatur, eds. Wolfram Mauser, Ursula Renner, and Walter Schonau (Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1986), 299-314; "Dracula's Legacy," Stanford Humanities Review 1. 1 (1989-90): 143-73; "The Mechanized Philosopher," in Looking After Nietzsche, ed. Lawrence A. Rickels (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1990), 195-207; "World-Breath: On Wagner's Media Technology," in Opera Through Other Eyes, ed. David J. Levin (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford Univ. Press, 1994), 215-35; and "Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second World War," trans. Michael Wutz and Geoffrey Winthrop- Young, in Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology, ed. Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell Univ. Press, 1997), 157-72.
39. Kittler, "Ein Erdbeben in Chili und PreuiSen," in Positionen der Liter- aturwissenschaft: Acht Modellanalysen am Beispiel von Kleists 'Das Erdbeben in Chili,' ed. David E. Wellbery (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1985), 24.
? Notes to Pages xxii-xxxii 271
40. As Michael Giesecke points out in his monumental study of the early print age, media theorists have themselves only recently started to pay full atten- tion to the "neglected difference" between scriptography and typography. Michael Giesecke, Der Buchdruck in der friihen Neuzeit: Eine historische Fallstudie iiber die Durchsetzung neuer Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (Frank- furt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 29.
4 I . See Kittler, "Autorschaft und Liebe," in Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften: Programme des Poststrukturalismus, ed. Friedrich A. Kitt- ler (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1980), 142-73 .
42. Griffin and Herrmann, "Technologies of Writing," 734.
43. See Wellbery, foreword to Kittler, Discourse Networks, xix.
44. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 3 69.
45. Kittler, "Benn's Poetry-'A Hit in the Charts': Song Under Conditions of
Media Technologies," SubStance 61 (1990): 6.
4 6 . Kittler, Discourse Networks, 3 4 7 .
47. Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language ofModernism
(Princeton, N. ]. : Princeton Univ. Press, 1993 ), 74.
48. Gottfried Benn, "Vortrag in Knokke," in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Dieter
Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1959), 4: 543. See also Kittler, Discourse Net- works, 177.
49. With this more nuanced account of the relationship of Lacan's registers to media technologies Kittler gpes a long way toward meeting the reviewers of Discourse Networks who charg? d him with setting up arbitrary links between the two. See, for example, Thomai Sebastian, "Technology Romanticized: Friedrich Kittler's Discourse Networks I S o o! I9 0 0 " : " Why the phonograph should have ac- cess to the real, while the film only has access to the imaginary is baffling . . . Notes emanating from a phonograph are neither more real nor less imaginary than filmed images on the screen" (MLN 105. 3 [1990]: 590).
50. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1 8 2.
5 I . Most of the computer-related essays have been translated and collected in Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems. Regarding military technology and history, and related issues, see Kittler, "Die kiinstliche Intelligenz des Welt- kriegs: Alan Turing," in Arsenale der SeeIe: Literatur- und Medienanalysen seit IS70, ed. Friedrich A. Kittler and Georg Christoph Tholen (Munich: Fink, 1989), 187-202; "Unconditional Surrender," in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, trans. William Whobrey (Stan- ford, Calif. : Stanford Univ. Press, 1994), 319-34; "Eine Kurzgeschichte des Scheinwerfers," in Der Entzug der Bilder: Visuelle Realitiiten, ed. Michael Wetzel and Herta Wolf (Munich: Fink, 1994), 1 83-89; and "II fiore delle truppe scelte," in Der Dichter als Kommandant: D'Annunzio erobert Fiume, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Friedrich Kittler, and Bernhard Siegert (Munich: Fink, 1996), 205- 25. This last advertises a forthcoming essay on Wotan and the Wagnerian pre- history of the German Storm Trooper ( 2 1 4n ) .
52. JOrg Lau, "Medien verstehen: Drei Abschweifungen," Merkur 534/535 (1993), 836.
5 3 . Holub, Crossing Borders, 103 . 54? Ibid. , 104.
? 272 Notes to Pages xxxii-xxxvi
55. Jacques Derrida, "The Question of Style," in The New Nietzsche, ed. David Allison (New York: Dell, 1977), 176.
5 6 . Witness, for instance, Kittler's take o n Habermas's theory of the origin of the enlightened public sphere: "This enlightenment ideology did not have its origin in the Enlightenment but is primarily the work of Jurgen Habermas, who, as is well known, wrote The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the book about the topic. First of all, something has to be said about this book. He claims that the private postal system, which was introduced at the time, set the whole process in motion. What Habermas completely forgets over all those lov- ing, intimate letter-writing people, who he thinks are so great because in them the bourgeois mentality is said to have constituted itself, is quite simply that states, as good mercantilist states, founded this postal system with a clear object in mind: they wanted to skim off the postal rates. For instance, 40 percent of Prussia's suc- cessful Seven Years War against Austria was financed by postal revenue. So much for the function of enlightenment or participation in the eighteenth century. " Kitt- ler, "Das Internet ist eine Emanation: Ein Gespriich mit Friedrich Kittler," in Stadt am Netz: Ansichten von Telep0lis, ed. Stefan Iglhaut, Armin Medosch, and Flo- rian Rotzer (Mannheim: Bollmann, 1996), 201.
5 7 . Griffin and Herrmann, "Technologies of Writing," 7 3 5 ?
58. Linda Dietrick, "Review of Discourse Networks r8ooir90o," Seminar 28. 1 (1992), 66. Virgina L. Lewis, among others, also observes that "Kittler's the- sis that a single unified discourse network fully characterizes each of the two epochs he discusses is hardly acceptable" ("A German Poststructuralist," PLL 28. 1 [1992], 106).
59. Timothy Lenoir, "Inscription Practices and Materialities of Communica- tion," in Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communica- tion, ed. Lenoir (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford Univ. Press, 1998), 15.
60. Kittler, "Laterna magica," 220.
61. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro- duction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 237.
62. Kittler, "Geschichte der Kommunikationsmedien," in Raum und Ver- fahren: Interventionen 2, ed. Jorg Huber and Alois Martin Muller (Basel and Frankfurt: Stroemfeld / Roter Stern, 1993 ) , 1 8 8 .
6 3 . "The robot historian of course would hardly b e bothered by the fact that it was a human who put the first motor together: for the roles of humans would be seen as little more than that of industrious insects pollinating an independent species of machine-flowers that simply did not possess its own reproductive organs during a segment of its evolution. Similarly, when this robot historian turned its attention to the evolution of armies in order to trace the history of its own weaponry, it would see humans as no more than pieces of a larger military- industrial machine: a war machine.