Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter is, in many ways, an elaboration of Kittler’s work on media technologies in Discourse Networks 1800/1900. The methodology is essentially the same and his conclusions are as well. The major difference involves the use of Lacan’s tripartite structure of symbolic, imaginary, and real to describe the phenomena selected by the media of typewriter, film, and gramophone, respectively. Kittler refers to these technologies as the ur-media of modernity, the analog media that would be integrated into a single technology following the invention of Turing’s universal machine.

Kittler’s story of modern media technologies begins with Edison’s phonograph. The phonograph inscribes more than simply symbols or images. It inscribes with indifference: “The phonograph does not hear the way ears do that have been trained to immediately filter voices, words and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such” (23). The invention of the phonograph marks a break with the age-old European traditions of music and verbal language. It registers not symbols or ratios but frequencies as such—pure vibrations. Kittler traces the invention of the phonograph back to the phonautograph developed by Edouard Léon Scott. The name of Scott’s device, the phonautograph, literally means, “writing sound out of itself,” which is exactly the quality that Kittler wants to emphasize. What the phonautograph “writes” is something unperceivable by the human eye and strictly unwritable by any human activity: it writes “hundreds of vibrations per second” (27).

Kittler gives perhaps the most convincing argument for the necessity of metaphorical thinking in historical research:

Reasoning by analogy is of considerable importance to science; indeed, in as far as it is the principle of induction it may well form the basis of all physical and psychophysical sciences. Discoveries frequently start with metaphors. The light of thinking could hardly fall in a new direction and illuminate dark corners were it not reflected by many spaces already illuminated. Only that which reminds us of something else makes an impression, although and precisely because it differs from it. To understand is to remember, at least in part. (30)

These claims function both as justification for Kittler’s particular brand of discourse analysis and as a gateway to understanding the types of historical claims that he will make about the phonograph. In order to understand these connections, it is necessary to recall Kittler’s repeated phrase, “so-called man.” For Kittler, “man” was something of a meaning effect made possible by the discourse network 1800 and its emphasis on inner experience. In modernity what remains of “man” is only the historical meaning effect as such. Kittler shows that the qualities that once defined “man” are at base technical characteristics: thought as information processing; memory as data storage; and various faculties of data transmission. A provocative inversion explains this well: “If the phonographic disk had self-consciousness, it could point out while replaying a song that it remembers this particular song. And what appears to us as the effect of a rather simple mechanism would, quite probably, strike the disk as a miraculous ability: memory” (31). Kittler goes on to outline a number of analogies between the phonograph and the brain. New experience is similar to the initial inscription on a phonographic disk; it cuts a groove at a particular speed and leaves an impression. When the phonograph needle or the brain retraces the original pathway it encounters less resistance, an effect that distinguishes the new experience from the original impression, resulting in an effect that we call memory. In another analogy, Kittler points out that by increasing or decreasing the speed of a phonograph, we get more or less fuzzy impressions of sound. He likens this variability of speed to the effect of concentration in recalling mental images. Perhaps the more or less focused memory images are the effect of the speed at which brain cells retrace the altered neural pathway. Based on this “always possible transformation of movement into thought,” Kittler describes the brain as “a conscious phonograph” (33).

Technics and Civilization

Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, 1934.

Mumford divides his analysis of the machine age into three overlapping periods: eotechnic (1000-1750), paleotechnic (1750-1900) and neotechnic (1900-2000). The date markers of these periods seem a little too neat, but if one considers that Mumford stresses the lack of decisive breaks between these periods and their important interpenetrations, such neatness becomes less objectionable. Also, it should be noted that Mumford is writing at a very different time with different standards for academic writing. The book lacks careful citation, footnotes and endnotes. Its main concern is not so much to function as a reference guide to the field of technological history, which Mumford was laying the foundation for, but instead to illuminate a part of history hitherto ignored: the relationships between society, culture, and technology. In order to draw out these relationships, Mumford draws on a number of different fields ancillary to technology, including art and aesthetics, psychology and philosophy, ecology, ethics, and economics. Through this holistic approach Mumford makes the claim that the seeds of the industrial revolution can be seen as early as the Middle Ages, and specifically in the monastic ordering of time.

Mumford begins with an extensive consideration of the ordering of time in medieval monasteries and the implications that it had on the organization of society. As he notes, “the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men” (14). For Mumford, seconds and minutes are not a priori units of time but instead given by the clock, the products of a mechanical function. The clock gave society seconds and minutes. It ripped time out of the hold of Eternity and introduced “time keeping” as an independent variable. The notion of “time keeping” should be considered literally. What the clock introduced was a way to keep time—to possess it as a quantity to be ordered and manipulated. Time was no longer something lived. It was separate and measurable, of the order of mathematics and science rather than religion. The far-reaching implications of this severing of time from natural human activity lead Mumford to claim, "The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age" (14).

Other characteristics of the eotechnic age beyond the introduction of mathematical time include the predominance of handicraft and the manufacturing of tools. Mumford describes the eotechnic age as a “water-and-wood complex” (11) characterized by water mills and windmills as sources of power and the use of wood as a primary building resource. (Schivelbusch cites the division between eotechnic and paleotechnic phases at the beginning of his work on the railroad and similarly concentrates on sources of power and building resources.) The paleotechnic age is characterized by the introduction of coal as a source of power and iron as a new building material. Machine tools and mass production come to replace tool manufacturing and handicraft, and new practices of standardization replace uniqueness and difference in manufacturing. Finally, the neotechnic phase is characterized as an “electricity-and-alloy complex” (110).