Friedrich Kittler: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

Friedrich Kittler: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

Translators introduction

Media awakenings: the usual suspects

1960s interest in media / Focus on the materialities of communication: Lévi-Strauss, McLuhan, Mayr, Ong.
The material and technological aspects of communication > psychogenetic and sociogenetic impact of changing media ecologies.
Predecessors / Walter Benjarmin, Harold Innis. First attempts to outline the world history according to the developments of media technologies.
Kittler on mediality / to explain the how, what and why of media. The intrinsic technological logic of media.
Parallels to the work of McLuhan.
> Enzensberger
> Baudrillard: a media theory inspired by structuralism and semiotics.
Intellectual trajectory / Reconceptualize the media issue in terms of recent theoretical developments, ‘French theory’.
Combination of discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis and first-generation media theory.
> Media discourse analysis

‘Lacancan and Derridada’: the French across the Rhine

Late 1970s: post-structuralism in Germany / Reluctantly received.
Resistance from the Left: Irrationalismusvorwurf.
Resistance from the Right and Center, German traditional hermeneutics.
Revisiting French post-structuralism / Kittler: moves Lacan into the post-hermeneutic realm of information theory.
Parallels to the American association of French post-structuralims and new literary theory: Landow, Ultmer. Poster on Foucaul’s surveillance techniques.
‘What hypertext and hypermedia are to post-structuralism, cybernetics was to structuralism and semiotics’ (p: xix).
Re-read pages xix and xx: difficult

Discourse networks: from mother tongues to matters of inscription

Kittler’s intellectual career / 1970s: discourse analysis
1980s: the technologizing of discourse by electronic media.
1990s: digitalization.
Discourse Network (1990)
1980s: media and discourse analysis / begins by registering texts as material communicative events in historically, interdiscursive networks that link writers, archivists, addresses and interpreters. Exhibit regularities that point to rules programming what people can say and write.
Standardized interpretation / possible in the early 1800s. People were programmed to operate upon media in ways that enabled them to elide the materialities of communication. But media have their own biases and messages that must be taken into account.
How do media operate upon people.
Discourse-analysis with media-technological feet.
The discursive field of 1800 / Described in terms of the spiritualized oralization of language.
Muttermund.
Writing as the sole, linear channel for processing and storing information.
Phonography and film / Sounds and pictures were given their appropriate channels > differentiation of data streams and the virtual abolition of the Gutenberg Galaxy.
Discourse network of 1900 / Demystifies the animating function of Woman and the conception of language as naturalized inner voice.
Writers increasingly aware of the materiality of language and communication.

Marshall McNietzsche: the advent of the electric trinity

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter / Detailed accounts of the ruptures brought about by the differentiation of media and communication technologies.
Post-Gutenberg methods / Record visual and acoustic effects of the real.
Kittler relates phonography, cinematography and typing to Lacan’s registers of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic.
Coincidence of psycho-analysis and Edisonian technology.
Nietzsche / Unser Schreibzeug arbeitet mit an unseren Gedanken.
Kittler’s reading of Nietzsche / - technologically informed, post-structuralist reading.
Key-concepts such as Subject, Authorship, Truth as effects that arises from and proceeds to cover up underlying discursive operations and materialities. Kittler: these effects are bracketed through a shift of focus toward certain external points – in particular bodies, margins, power structures, and media technologies (p: xxix).
> Turing world / The third stage of Kittler’s intellectural career.
Reintegration of differentiated media technologies and communication channels by the computer; the medium to end all media.
Only connect: theory in the age of intelligent machines
1. Back to the ends of Man / Kittler’s rhetoric as a throwback to the heady days of militant anti-humanism.
‘Der sogenannte Mensch is about to disappear as a cognitive and self-determining agent and be subsumed by the march of technological auto-sophistication.
> Disenchantment
2. The stop and go of history / Obvious technological determinism.
Kittler emphasises technological breakthroughs on the expense of other causative factors.
But: our situation can determine our media >
Technomaterialism / Dialectic exchange between the media-technological base and the discursive superstructure > conflicts and tensions that result in transformations at the level of media.
3. Arms and no man / Fetishism of technological innovations produced by military applications.
4. Hail the conquering engineer / Engineers (Edison, Muybridge, Mary, Lumière) have made a world in which technology reigns supreme.
5. Reactionary postmodernism? / Unquestioning admiration of (media)-technological innovations. But with Kittler, there is traditional right-wing rhetoric of soul, Volk.
Somewhat determination to sever the connection between technological and social advancement; install Technology as the new, authentic subject of history.

Introduction

Kittler on convergence / Book published in 1986.
Entertainment media as a by-product of war technology.
On digitalisation of media: will erase the concept of medium.
On McLuhan / Accurate understanding of McLuhan’s the medium’s content is always another medium?
Prior to the electrification of media / Mechanical apparatuses: silent film, phonograph/gramophone
“We need a coincidence in the Lacanian sense: that something ceases not to write itself” (page: 3).
Storage technologies / Record and reproduce the time flow of acoustic and optical data. Autonomous ears and eyes. “Media define what really is.”
Text and scores / Based on a writing system whose time is symbolic (Lacan). The bottleneck of the signifier. But not possible to encode real time.
Foucault: “the last historian or the first archaeologist. Writing as a communication medium. History as “wavelike successions of words.”
The regime of the symbolic / Only what is written exists (beyond time?),
But does Kittler claim that writing is more symbolic than photographs, gramophones, computers?
“the body, which did not cease not to write itself, left strangely unavoidable traces.” (page 8).
Memory capacity / Before optical and acoustic storage media, words and books strongly connected to human memory capacity.
The need for the powers of hallucination.
Reproductive power of media / Not only resembling the object, but guarantee the resemblance < a product of the object. A reproduction authenticated by the object itself. Refers to the bodily real, escapes all symbolic grids.
Typewriters / 1865/1868
Thus a historical synchronicity in the development of the typewriter, phonograph and cinema – separated optical, acoustic and written data flows, autonomous.
(to again be recombined with electronic media),
Lacan’s “methodological distinction” / The real; the imaginary; the symbolic
- as the theory or historical effect of that differentiation.
The symbolic encompasses linguistic signs in their materiality and technicity.
The imaginary – the optical illusion of cinema.
“Of the real nothing more can be brought to light than what Lacan presupposes – that is, nothing.”
Modern psychoanalysis / Distinctions of media technology – methodological distinctions of psychoanalysis.
This is where the phonograph fits in: the real has the status of the phonograph.
The McLuhanesque Kittler / The technological differentiation of optics, acoustics and writing > the essence of Man escapes into apparatuses. Machines take over functions of the central nervous system.
Clear differentiation of (the so-called) Man into physiology and information technology.
1950 Alan Turing / “Computing machinery and intelligence”.
“All data streams flow into a state n of Turing’s universal machine.” (page 19).

Gramophone

1877: Edison’s phonograph / (record and play)
records overtones: (frequency) vibrations per second.
Frequency / -  Time as an independent variable.
-  Quantifies movements too fast for the human eye.
-  The real takes the place of the symbolic.
Synthetic production of frequencies / Noise as a scientific research object
Mechanical language reproduction > automata.
1857: Scott’s phonautograph / The first machine to record sound: i.e. converting sound into visible traces.
“Thus came into being autographs or handwritings of a data stream that heretofore had not ceased not to write itself”. (page 26).
> Phonetics and speech physiology.
> Edison’s phonograph / A result of the synthetic production of frequencies combined with their analyses.
“A telegraph as an artificial mouth, a telephone as an artificial ear- the stage was set for the phonograph. Functions of the central nervous system had been technologically implemented”. (page 28).
Jean-Marie Guyau: Memory and phonograph / Uses the phonograph as a metaphor for the human mental abilities. Delboeuf: “The soul is the notebook of phonographic recordings.” The analogy between the phonograph and the human brain.
Time axis reversals / > allow ears to hear the unheard-of:
Kittler seems to emphasize both with the phonograph and film/cinema that these apparatuses make sensible, reality beyond our directly perceived reality.
> Psychoanalysis / How is this relevant for Kittler’s history of the phonograph?
“And lyrics fulfilled what psychoanalysis – originating not coincidentally at the same time – saw as the essence of desire: hallucinatory wish fulfilment”. (page 37).
Freud on hallucinations: memory as sensory perception and psychic apparatus as its own simulacrum.
Rainer Maria Rilke, “Primal sound” (1919) / Of the similarities between the skull, more precisely the coronal suture of the skull and the wavy line engraving needle of the phonograph. The skull reduced to a cerebral container. The coronal suture as a writing of the real.
Writing without a subject / Since the invention of the phonograph.
Lothar (1924) / The relationship between noise and signals.
Our capacity for illusion > forget about the mechanical interference.
Shannon and Turing’s vocoder / (1942-1945). Encodes any given data stream A with the envelope curves of another sound sequence B. Modulates one signal with another.
What significance does Kittler mean the vocoder has?
Maurice Renard: “Death and the shell” (1907) / Again, a story showing how technological media apparatuses like the phonograph extend our senses. Bringing us voices of the dead. Also, the analogy of the phonograph and the seashell. But why does Kittler include this story?
“Once technological media guarantee the similarity of the dead to stored data by turning them into the latter’s mechanical product, the boundaries of the body, death and lust, leave the most indelible traces”. (page 55).
Rewriting eroticism / Under the conditions of gramophony and telephony. How? Why? What sense does these paragraphs make?
> psychoanalysis? / Partial objects that can be separated from the body and excite desires prior to sexual differentiation: breast, mouth, feces (Freud). Lacan added: the gaze and the voice > psychoanalysis in the media age: cinema restores the disembodied gaze; the telephone restores the disembodied voice.
Does this make any sense and how?
Friedlander: “Goethe speaks into the phonograph” (1916) / Intriguing short story. Seems to make sense, and again illustrates the connection between the phonograph and the reality beyond our senses (prior in time. Thus the common time-space distance.
Flesh and machines / In the founding days of media technology: Implementing the function of the central nervous system into the media technologies – reconstructing bodily functions.
> Scott’s phonautograph
> Bell’s telephone
The interchangeability of an instrument both as a transmitter and a receiver.
Anatomical and technical reconstructions of language.
Saussure’s linguistics / Based on the difference between langue and parole/language and speech.
> speech analyses and production without the flesh?
“A Turing machine no longer needs artificial flesh. The analogue signal is simply digitized”. (page 75).
> Foucault: The archaeology of knowledge based on Saussure: a finite body of rules that authorizes an infinite number of performances. Discursive events however as limited (to the linguistic context).
Philosophy and media technology / Back to Friedlander: inspired by the technified version of Kant’s pure forms of intuition (sense knowledge). Spatial and temporal forms of intuition.
Friedlander’s philosophy follows in the wake of media technology.
Otto Wiener: the extension of senses / (1900): The extension of our senses by instruments.
Declares the Kantian notions of a priori perception of time and space as unnecessary. Media render Man.
Nietzsche on poetry / A mnemotechnology : “it was noticed that men remember a verse much better than ordinary speech” (79).
A solution that came about under oral conditions > increased the storage capacity.
(writing did not change this).
Technological sound storage / Obliterated the necessities of poetry as memory.
Technology triumphs over mnemotechnology.
> “Records turn and turn until phonographic inscriptions inscribe themselves into brain physiology” (80).
High and low culture / With the invention of technical sound storage > the new lyrics of hits and charts. High and low culture as the two options of modern media.
Science: the third party / Technological media register distinguishing particulars (again then the real beyond our senses (and memory?)).
The shift in technologies of power follows the switch from writing to media. Limited self-control in the public (media) reality. Data and signs beyond our control.
> Science is for the first time in possession of a machine that records noises regardless of so-called meaning. Writing: always (un)intentional selections of meaning.
The epoch of nonsense / “Mechanization relieves people of their memories and permits a linguistic hodgepodge”. (86)
> psychoanalysis / Talking cure, unconscious cerebration. Segmentation of speech. Uncovering minor symptoms in the flow of speech.
Psychoanalytic case studies as media technologies < consciousness and memory as mutually exclusive. ??
Psychoanalysis as phonograph (sort of), as writing interposes itself between the unconscious and its storage.
“Only psychoanalysis can write what does not cease not to write itself” (94).
Sound storage and transmission as mass media / The record mass market. Mass-produced sound storage + mass-produced communication + recording media > global ascendancy.
The uniting of the phonograph and the radio.
The radio / Kittler couples the development with the world war
Realism in sound / Coupled with WWII.
Development of hi-fi: frequency reaching both limits of the audibility range.
> The principle of feedback
> The development of stereo records (EMI 1957).
1966: Yellow submarine / The coincidence of hypnosis and recording technology
Hypnotic sound detection: Hi-fi stereophony simulating any acoustic space: real space or psychedelic spaces.
The FM vs. AM radio / FM: technical superiority and relative cheapness as an investment medium.
Multiplexing via FM: broadcast separate signals simultaneously > hi-fi via radio.
Here also coupled with military innovations.
The magnetophone