The Temporal Logic of Digital Media Technologies

Kurt Cavender (bio)

Brandeis University

kcavende@brandeis.edu

A review of Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.

Digital Memory and the Archive represents the first collection in English of Wolfgang Ernst’s particular brand of media theory. As such, the volume necessarily attempts to satisfy three distinct demands: to outline the “media archeology” that characterizes Ernst’s work, to sample instances where this broad logic engages various technologies with particularly productive results, and to establish Ernst’s relation to a so-called “Berlin school” of German media theory that began to emerge with the work of materialist thinkers such as Friedrich Kittler, and in which Ernst is a central figure. The result is a collection of essays in which the hand of the editor, Jussi Parikka, is remarkably present. In addition to an extensive introduction, in which Parikka articulates the media-archeological method in the context of Ernst’s career and the German media theory of Kittler, Bernhard Siegert, and Wolfgang Schaffner, Parikka introduces each of the three bundles of essays that compose the book—”The Media-Archeological Method,” “Temporality and the Multimedia Archive,” and “Microtemporal Media”—carefully curating the conceptual unity of the volume. In this sense, Digital Memory and the Archive is as much a triumph of Parikka’s own clear theoretical and editorial vision as it is a presentation of Ernst’s work.
 
To speak of German media theory or a Berlin school is, Parikka concedes, to rely on “a catch-all term that does not account for the variety of disciplinary perspectives that fit the category” (3). This might be useful, but such a broad generalization risks ignoring real and important theoretical or methodological differences. In his own book, What Is Media Archeology?, Parikka suggests that the apparent unity of Ernst’s, Kittler’s, and others’ individual concerns emerges from two common impulses: first, “a critical reaction to the Marxist analyses of media by the Frankfurt school, and . . . a desire to differentiate from British cultural studies”; and second, a materialist insistence that “it is mathematics and engineering that concretely construct worlds through modern technology” (66-7). These twin concerns—to liberate media studies from the narrativizing tendencies of historical analysis, and to privilege the material forms of technology hardware and scientific apparatus over merely cultural content—become the clear foundation of Ernst’s own program for media archeology, offered in the second essay, “Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus the History and Narrative of Media”:

The term media archeology describes modes of writing that are not human products but rather expressions of the machines themselves, functions of their very mediatic logic. . . . Technological media that operate on the symbolic level (i.e., computing) differ from traditional symbolic tools of cultural engineering (like writing in the alphabet) by registering and processing not just semiotic signs but physically real signals. The focus shifts to digital signal processing (DSP) as cultural technology instead of cultural semiotics.

(58)

In moments like this, the affinity between Ernst’s media archeology and Kittler’s media discourse analysis is most strongly felt. Indeed, Ernst’s insistence that reality is in some sense constituted by media technology rather than by a mediated circulation of signs strongly resonates with Kittler’s claim, in the introduction to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, that “we [are] in possession of storage technologies that can record and reproduce the very time flow of acoustic and optical data. Ears and eyes have become autonomous. And that changed the state of reality. . . . Media ‘define what really is’; they are always already beyond aesthetics” (3).

 
If anything distinguishes Ernst’s own project, it is his consistent foregrounding of the agency of archival technologies themselves (not entirely ignored, but perhaps underdeveloped in Kittler’s work), and his persistent focus on the mechanical conditions of temporal perception. Here, Ernst’s reliance on Foucault’s argument that archeological or archival excavation of the epistemic conditions of knowledge can liberate the past from the narrativizing logic of historical discourse becomes clear—not in the materialist-technologist commitments, but in its account of historical rupture: “a Foucault-driven media archaeology accentuates discontinuities and primordial differences” (24). Foucault’s innovation in The Archaeology of Knowledge is to reconceptualize the archive as “the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events” (129), but also as
 

that which determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity, nor do they disappear at the mercy of chance external accidents; but they are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities. . . . that which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration.

(129)

For Ernst, the critical connection in Foucault’s thought is between discursive accounts of temporality—linearity, duration, chronology, history—and the set of laws, rules, protocols, and algorithms that organizes knowledge. Parikka’s arrangement and framing of Ernst’s work emphasizes this connection as a generative insight for media archeology: “temporal ontology offers a way to understand how all computer-based, calculational media are temporal, and this forces us to rethink the spatial emphasis of older regimes of memory” (77). The digital revolution in archival technologies—from the old media of film, print, and record to a new “technomathematical media” of “read-only and random access, registers, accumulators, buffers, cycle and access times, and latency” (77)—constitutes not just a technological shift, but a materialization of an always latent temporal dimension of the archive.

 
The sense that the algorithms and protocols that govern digital archives are merely a continuation of the governing logic of the Foucaultian archive makes one point of contact between German media theory and Anglo-American thinkers. It is hard not to hear intimations here of Marshall McLuhan’s proposal that the content of media is always only other media, or even Matthew Fuller’s claim, in Media Ecologies, that “a technology is a bearer of forces and drives . . . is composed by the mutual intermeshing of various other forces that might be technical, aesthetic, economic, chemical” (56). Indeed, Fuller’s theorization of media ecologies as Deleuzian assemblages of forces, processes, and techniques that support and animate the technological artifact might be understood as a dialectical negation of the Berlin school’s articulation of the determinative power of the technological artifacts themselves.
 
But what does Ernst mean by suggesting, against a prior spatial understanding of the archive, that a latent temporality is activated by new digital media technologies? And more importantly, what is at stake in such a claim? The answer begins with the media phenomenon known as time-shifting, the recording of programming to a storage medium for viewing at a later time. Ernst writes in the fourth essay, “Archives in Transition: Dynamic Media Memories,” that the implication of, for instance, online archival storage of recently broadcast television programming is that “the old opponents ‘past’ and ‘present’, ‘archive’ and ‘immediate event’, become submerged in time shifting, which is the temporal essence of digital media operations” (99). This archive-enabled dislocation of the broadcast event from the structure of its programmed context becomes, for Ernst, the characteristic operation of digital media technologies.
 
In the following essay, “Between Real Time and Memory on Demand: Reflections on Television,” he writes: “Minimal-delay memories are at work in time-based and time-critical media, especially if we do not notice them. Dramatically, these binary micromemories dissimulate apparent live transmission by calculation in real time” (100). More than just one of a set of functions made available by digital media technology, this memory-supported disruption of linear programming, and the “increasing spatiotemporal entanglement” that follows (100), become the defining operation of new archival technologies. The necessary result, for Ernst, is not just a shift in the way we perceive temporality in the present—from linear narrative progression to multi-tiered, anti-sequential sets of interchangeable protocols—but a discursive challenge to the very regimes of historical knowledge that Foucault first excavates in The Archaeology of Knowledge. What Foucault achieves with a sociological approach to knowledge production, Ernst intends to supplement and affirm through the study of technomathematical media structures in which the discontinuities, gaps, absences, silences, and ruptures that constitute the unspoken real of historical discourse are materialized.
 
The question that remains, then, is what sort of temporal model the archive offers in place of narrative discourse. Ernst suggests in the seventh essay, “Telling versus Counting: A Media-Archeological Point of View,” that the key function of the archive has always been quantification, sequential ordering, and the raw accumulation of data-points without positing the kind of relational connectivity that generates narrative: “Historical imagination asks for iconic coherence, to be separated from the organization of knowledge about the past in the form of naked data banks. But registering time does not necessarily require the narrative mode to organize the factual field in a form that we call information” (150). The linear coherence of historical discourse is not the necessary or inevitable form that temporal information assumes; rather, it is imposed upon historical knowledge by discursive imagination. The digital data bank is, in its temporal arrangement, a rematerialization of an historical technology that precedes the discourses of modernity, the medieval annales:
 

When all sensual dimensions are quantifiable, even the temporal resolution, telling gets liberated from the narrative grip—a media-archeological amnesia of cultural techniques like that of the early medieval annales, sequential notations of temporal events with no metahistorical, narrative prefiguration. We get a glimpse of a way of processing cultural experience that does not need stories (not yet? not anymore?).

(149)

For Ernst, the power of digital memory technologies is twofold. First, embedded within their protocols, processes, and algorithms is a material privileging of pure sequential quantification over the “iconic coherence” of the narrative impulse. The alphabet and even more-so its successor, binary code, exist as memory operations of pure “diachronic clustering,” where “data exist not for themselves but in relation to the series that in each case precedes or follows— without being subjected to romance, where causality and the foregrounding/backgrounding of events are expressed through explicit narrative subordination” (150-51). The full range of media technologies that emerge from and depend upon these operations are therefore predisposed to a particular, anti-historical temporal logic. The second power of digital technologies is that, by manifesting this operational logic in the present, they rewrite or restructure the very history of archival technologies themselves. The passage from epic discourse of listed knowledge (such as Homer’s “Catalogue of Ships”) to medieval annales to the digital hard drive is no longer a narrative of progression, but a series of iterations of the same temporal logic – what Ernst calls “a way of processing cultural experience that does not need stories” (149).

 
In his brief introduction to “Temporality and the Multimedia Archive,” the volume’s second and most theoretically substantial bundle of essays, Parikka articulates the stakes of Ernst’s project. The essays and articles collected here form a necessary program of reading, not just for media theorists, but also for cultural studies thinkers and archival professionals, because they present a compelling argument that “we need to update our notions of the archive in order to understand the specific technicity of contemporary culture” (78). It is here, perhaps, that we encounter the limit of the Berlin school’s media archeological project. Parikka argues that “if we fail to address the time-critical, technomathematical modulation of what comes out as the almost like [sic] metaphoric surface effect . . . we fail to understand where power lies in contemporary culture” (78-9). Parikka’s claim, echoing the arguments of Ernst, Kittler, and their colleagues, is that only by studying the digital technologies that constitute modern media societies can we uncover the deep system of discursive rules that structure modern cultural experience. It is too easy, I think, to raise the obvious objections—that such a claim seems to simplistically assume an evenly distributed level of global technological penetration into daily life, that it seems to focus too much on the technology itself and not enough on the technological practices and habits of persons or institutions, that it approaches a reductive technological determinism that does not account for the ways in which a technology might embody multiple contradictory logics—but these are all critiques of which Ernst is aware and which he attempts, to some extent, to anticipate in his work.
 
The most significant limitation to the essays presented in this volume seems to emerge in their relationship to Foucault’s project, from which they draw substantial methodological and theoretical support. Fuller, writing about Friedrich Kittler, voices a critique that seems equally appropriate here because it addresses some of the broad theoretical priorities that characterize the Berlin school as a whole. The critical excavation of deep discursive formations, he writes,
 

is crucial to Foucault’s project, and it is what allows it to be so readily taken up as a political tool: The variability and power that Foucault’s approach in its various forms allows is recapitulated by Kittler, but with something of a sense in which this readily political aspect has itself been attenuated. Kittler’s glee at the displacement of “so-called man” from a universe that cradled him at its center tends occasionally toward a relocation of Hegelian Geist from the human to the technical object.

(60-61)

In Ernst’s work, as in Kittler’s, this “relocation of Hegelian Geist from the human to the technical object,” an almost celebratory attention to emerging techno-agencies as actors and determiners of human social relations, seems to leave very little room for the social effects of economics, politics, or culture. This is not to say that Ernst is a non-political thinker, merely that his work is far abstracted from its own explicitly political implications. Indeed, in the interview with Ernst that constitutes the final chapter of the volume, he says: “I want to be concerned with a reentry of economical, political, and cultural aspects into this media-archeological field—without giving up to cultural studies, though, which has overly neglected a precise analysis of technologies” (198). It may be most appropriate, then, to understand Digital Memory and the Archive not only as a self-contained work of materialist media theory, but also as a corrective text, an intervention into an Anglo-American media studies discourse that, Ernst suggests, is dominated by the technology-indifferent legacies of the Frankfurt school and British cultural studies.

 
If Digital Memory and the Archive has a weakness, then, it is an occasional tendency to under-appreciate current trends in established media-focused fields such as Film Studies and the Digital Humanities, and emerging fields such as software studies and platform studies, all of which counter traditionally poststructuralist readings of digital cultural texts with various kinds of materialist reconsiderations of the role of hardware and software in shaping culture. For instance, N. Katherine Hayles’s work on “the cultural perception that information and materiality are conceptually distinct” suggests that human consciousness always exists in a dialectical relationship with technology (18), and her articulation of a post-liberal posthumanism posits a marked shift in postmodern cultural treatment of the material-consciousness relation. This seems to imply a distinctly historicist understanding of technoculture that, while sharing Ernst’s investment in technicity and technology, draws productively different conclusions about the temporality of technomathematical apparatus in ways that would only strengthen Ernst’s work if engaged. On the other hand, D.N. Rodowick’s study of the ontological shift from film cinema to digital cinema as a site for reconceptualizing virtuality and the imaginary seems to share Ernst’s anti-historicist impulse—new digital technologies disrupt the linear narrative by revealing a latent virtual dimension already present in celluloid film—without explicitly articulating Ernst’s sequential temporality. Lev Manovich’s Software Studies Initiative at UCSD and CUNY and the platform studies work of Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost represent similar emerging projects which do not seem to fit into Ernst’s characterization of Anglo-American neglect of technological analysis.
 
These thinkers are connected with German media archeology not so much by methodological practices or theoretical commitments as by a set of motivating questions: What happens if, instead of analyzing the content of media, we interrogate media technologies, processes, and practices themselves? How might these technological conditions influence the shape of emerging human consciousness and self-consciousness? Can we expand our narrow, subject-oriented understanding of agency to include the kinds of tendencies and properties exhibited by complex machinic entities? Does the transition from analogue to digital technologies constitute an ontological shift from material reality to virtual informatics, or is there a deep unifying media logic? If Ernst is offering some sort of corrective intervention into a cultural studies approach to media studies, it is as part of a larger, trans-Atlantic challenge to humanistic, language-focused analysis that excludes or minimizes the real material conditions in which culture emerges. The result is an invaluable addition to a growing body of media scholarship willing to push beyond the insights of post-structuralism and cultural studies.
 

Works Cited

• Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Harper Colophon, 1976. Print.
• Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Print.
• Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Print.
• Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Print.
• Parikka, Jussi. What is Media Archeology? Malden: Polity Press, 2012. Print.