In “The Afterword to the Second Printing,” Kittler summarizes his project in Discourse Networks as follows:
What remain to be distinguished, therefore, are not emotional dispositions but systems. Information networks can be described only when they are contrasted with one another. The source, sender, channel, receiver, and drain of streams of information, Shannon’s five functions, in other words, can be occupied or left vacant by various agents: by men or women, rhetoricians or writers, philosophers or psychoanalysts, universities or technical institutes. Whereas interpretation works with constants, the comparison between systems introduces variables. If the latter pursues historical investigations, then “at least two limiting events” are indispensable, for which either systemic differentiation or communicational technique can be considered criteria. (370)Such explains his nonlinear approach to history and the isolation of two historical epochs around the turn of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth century. By excluding the middle, as it were, Kittler is able to treat Romanticism and Modernism as two distinct systems characterized by different agents – or, in Kittler's terms, variables – in the makeup of the social and media network. Discourse Networks is, at base, non-hermeneutic. Instead, it takes hermeneutics, or a genealogy of hermeneutics, as its object, seeking the conditions of possibility for statements in two distinct historical epochs. Above all, Kittler treats media – both the material devices and the social organizations surrounding them – as a network that, in Foucauldian terms, gives to people what they can say.
An annotation for this book could never really do justice to the detail and complexity of Kittler’s work, so I’ll limit myself to only a few observations about psychophysics, the typewriter, and the emergence of minimal material units in modernity. Whereas in the time of Goethe the word was guaranteed a fullness of meaning and reference by the maternal voice based on an entire system of education and socialization organized around maternal instruction, by the time of Nietzsche letters have become free agents. With the implementation of new technologies of writing, the relationship between words and letters changes. No longer are words the “translators of prelinguistic meanings,” no longer are they associated with the fullness of Voice: they are now merely selections of characters, inscriptions of technical media—specifically the typewriter: “spatially designated and discrete signs—that, rather than increase in speed, was the real innovation of the typewriter” (193).
“In the discourse network of 1900, discourse is produced by RANDOM GENERATORS. Psychophysics constructed such sources of noise; the new technological media stored their output” (206). For Kittler, the research of Hermann Ebbinghaus in psychophysics meant the end of the dream of the discourse network 1800. In effect, Ebbinghaus single-handedly tore asunder the relationship between signifier and signified, showing that sense or meaning had really no bearing on mnemonic technique. The result of Ebbinghaus’ work in psychophysics is a discovery of “the naked, elementary existence of signifiers” (209). In terms of efficiency, meaning actually becomes a disturbance in the process of transmission and storage (211). The new media of modernity – typewriters, phonographs, cinema – are indifferent selectors. They simple record, store, and transmit whatever phenomena they are designed to select, irrespective of meaning or sense. “The discourse network of 1900 is a dice game with ‘serially ordered discrete unities’” (213).
“A medium is a medium is a medium. As the sentence says, there is no difference between occult and technological media. Their truth is fatality, their field the unconscious. And because the unconscious never finds and illusory belief, the unconscious can only be stored” (229). Kittler notes that the emergence of random generators in psychophysics and in other cultural fields involves a tendency toward increasing speed. Hands cannot keep up with dictation, and eyes cannot keep up with the increased flow of signifiers. The only things that can store such a glut of information are new technological media. Kittler focuses on the two great media inventions of Edison: film and the gramophone. (It seems strange that Kittler continually refers to Edison’s phonograph by the name of Berliner’s gramophone. I don’t know what to make of this.) For Kittler, these inventions mark a radical shift in the discourse network 1900 in that they inscribed real phenomena and not merely symbolic registrations. And since “technologically possible manipulations determine what in fact can become a discourse,” a whole new set of variables entered the discourse network 1900: sound and image were now discursive; they entered the realm of representability, terminating a centuries-long stay in the Gutenberg Galaxy (232).
No comments:
Post a Comment