Marcel O’Gorman

Director
Foreign Language Instructional Technology Environment
Tulane University
ogorman@tcs.tulane.edu

 

Friedrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays.Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997.

 

Brigadier Whitehead, a veteran of World War II, is taping his heroic adventures at the “Battle of Palermo” on a reel-to-reel, portable tape recorder. Roving about the cluttered room, he speaks animatedly into the microphone, which is plugged into the recorder by a long wire. “As you can hear, gentlemen,” the Brigadier announces portentously, “the zero hour is approaching. Invasion is imminent. We must counter-attack right away.”

 

Six antique phonographs, arranged in two rows, trumpet out the sound-effects of a massive artillery barrage, which the Brigadier orchestrates by running from one record player to another, extending his microphone to capture specific effects.

 

Just arrived in Catalia when messenger drove up. I tore open dispatch. News was bad--I'd lost my battalion commander. I had to reach O Group. I grabbed the bike from the messenger, and rode off to headquarters. Suddenly, a grenade exploded. I jumped for cover.

 

This theatrical recording session continues until a peculiar, undulating sound interrupts the narrative, enveloping the scene of virtual warfare in its electronic drone. In a blinding flash of light, Brigadier Whitehead is thrown to the floor, where he will be found lifeless, still clutching a phonograph record, his entire body bleached white by a murderous ray of light. The Brigadier is down, but the tape machine goes on recording….

 

Thus we have, in John Steed’s words, “The swan song of one Brigadier Whitehead…. Officer, gentleman, deceased Brigadier Whitehead. He died as he lived in the thick of the battle, facing the enemy.”

 

“An enemy without a face,” replies Emma Peel, with characteristic wit.

 

At least, that’s how Steed and Peel sum up this perplexing scene. And puzzled viewers have to wait out the remainder of this Avengers episode to discover the enemy’s true identity. After replaying the tape recording of the scene–a cacophony of phonograph artillery drowned out by a mysterious drone–for countless suspects and experts, the following conclusion is reached about the murder weapon:

 

Detective: “Sound of light amplification of stimulation of radiation.”

 

Steed: “In a word, a laser beam”

 

Peel: “A laser beam. Of course. It has a bleaching effect, and boils liquids.”

 

Crawford: “Plus a very distinctive sound.”

 

Peel: “Where are they used?”

 

Detective: "All over the place: dentistry, communications, eye surgery..."

 

and of course, they are used in military strategy; although such details were not yet public in 1967.

 

Digital/laser technology is recorded in analog on Brigadier Whitehead’s outdated tape machine, and it is the “eye surgery” clue that eventually leads Steed and Peel to the ultimate villain, Dr. Primble, an ocular surgeon who sneaks about with a powerful laser gun strapped to the top of his “U.F.O.,” a chrome-colored sports car.

 

Obviously, this scene has not been pulled from a bastion of the Western literary canon or from a great philosophical text. We are dealing here with a piece of pop-cultural trash, the detritus of a late-’60s Cold-War obsession with espionage, governmental conspiracy, and garishly fantastic technologies. And yet, there is still something “scholarly,” something theoretical, philosophical, even, in this scene, that invites further investigation. There is a certain intersection here of communications and warfare, information transmission and military strategy, media and artillery that permits us to view this scene as a node through which a network of discourses–historical, technological, political–all travel. I would go so far as to say that in this single scene, we might trace all the ingredients for a transdisciplinary project on the nature of media in a visual age–complete with ocular surgeon.

 

At least that’s how I sum up the scene, investigating it through the critical magnifying glass of Friedrich Kittler’s theory and practice of criticism. Kittler’s recently published collection of essays entitled Literature, Media, Information Systems provides a wide-ranging demonstration of what his followers have known all along: “the intelligibility and consequent meaning of literary texts is always and only possible because its discourse is embedded in and operates as part of a specific discourse network” (Johnston 4). And yet, in the scene mentioned above, we are not dealing with a “literary text,” but with a television episode, specifically, an episode entitled “From Venus With Love” (1967) which belongs to the British spy series The Avengers. This all too prevalent distinction between “literary text” and “cultural detritus” moves to the background, however, when we realize that Kittler’s approach to criticism may be applied to any media scene whatsoever, from Goethe’s Faust to beograd.com, a Web site supporting Yugoslavia against NATO bombing. Of course, we must first determine what a “media scene” is exactly, and what bearing it has on literary criticism, cultural studies and the history of media. I hope to answer these questions here, through a simultaneous review of Kittler’s book and an instruction manual on how to program a project in/on the discourse network of 2000.

 

“Gramophone, Film, Typewriter”

 

Step 1: Begin your project by describing a single situation, scene or image in which communications technologies play a crucial, or at least conspicuous, role. This will serve as the media scene for your entire project.

 

Faust looks up from his book of magic ideograms and sighs, “Ach!“¹ Stoker’s Mina Harker transcribes the sounds of a phonograph on her typewriter. Guy de Maupassant’s doppelganger joins him at his writing desk. Whether they be fictional or historical (is there a difference in this case?), these scenes or situations are the crux of Kittler’s work, the points of intersection from which he draws his transdisciplinary theses on the materiality of media. “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,” then, in book or essay form, is “a story woven from such stories. It collects, comments on and engages positions and texts, in which the newness of technical media has inscribed itself in outmoded book pages” (29).² Since “outmoded book pages” are the subject of Kittler’s essays, we are not dealing, here, with scenes such as Brigadier Whitehead’s anachronistic sound studio. We are dealing instead with the pages of Goethe, Hoffman, and Balzac, pages in which communications technologies, sometimes with extreme subtlety, play a determinant role. Kittler is, after all, a “literary critic,” as he asserts time and again, almost suspiciously, in his essay “There Is No Software.” And yet, his method of critique reaches far beyond the brackets of “literature,” channeling its way through contemporary culture, philosophy, history, engineering, cybernetics, and political science.

 

Hence, a chapter that we might expect to be a media-oriented commentary on a collection of literary excerpts, turns out instead to be a wide-ranging examination of the materiality of media where references to Goethe, Hoffman and Balzac are casually dispersed among technically complex observations on contemporary culture and its digital toys. In “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,” for example, in which we may trace a network of theses, the foremost may be the following: “the technological standard of today… can be described in terms of partially connected media systems” (32). The jumbo jet, according to Kittler, is a case in point, a scene of “partial connection” that contrasts with our current utopian dream of a seamless integration of media: virtual reality, television, music, the Web, etc., all delivered over fiber optic lines. On the jumbo jet,

 

The crew is connected to radar screens, diode displays, radio beacons, and nonpublic channels.... The passengers' ears are listlessly hooked up to one-way earphones, which are themselves hooked up to tape recorders and thereby to the record industry.... Not to mention the technological medium of the food industry to which the mouths of the passengers are connected. (32)

 

This is not the stuff of a literary critic who writes commentary on a “story” from Goethe or Hoffman. We are dealing here with contemporary cultural criticism, media criticism, even. Or are we?

 

Although Kittler allows himself a certain quota of McLuhanesque scenarios, his strength lies in his literary-historical perspective. Once McLuhan has been exorcised, Kittler contrasts our “partially connected” multi-media spectacle with the “homogeneous medium of writing” (38), and hence, we are instantly transported, via Foucault,³ from the jumbo jet and the Kennedy/Nixon TV debate (a contest in “telegenics”), to Goethe’s lyrical observation that literature “is the fragment of fragments, the least of what had happened and of what had been spoken was written down; of what had been written down, only the smallest fraction was preserved” (36). For us, writing is merely one medium among many, but in the age of Goethe, “writing functioned as the general medium. For that reason, the term medium did not exist. For whatever else was going on dropped through the filter of letters or ideograms” (36). This is quite a contrast to an age of camcorders and personal Web pages, an age in which recording technology is so independent of the body that Brigadier Whiteheads and Timothy Learys can accurately document the very moment of their deaths.⁴

 

In the discourse network of 1800, then, writing is the only transmission media of the Spirit, and in the case of handwriting, writing also documents the identity of the body. In an excerpt that Kittler draws from Botho Strauss’s Widmung, the hero is crushingly ashamed of his handwriting, an uneven scrawl in which “everything is emptied out…. The full man is shriveled, shrunk, and stunted into his scribbling. His lines are all that is left of him and his propagation” (qtd. in Kittler 38). This existential angst incited by poor calligraphy is possible because Strauss’s character is living in a time before gramophone, film, and typewriter. The depth of his shame “exists only as an anachronism” (38) in a world where self-propagation is available in multiple forms–forms in which the body’s trace is not so easily discernible, separated as it is by networks of circuits that translate all identity into a stream of 1s and 0s.

 

As long as the written word, hand-written or printed, reigned as the one, homogeneous medium of communication, Romanticism was possible. In Goethe’s time, “all the passion of reading consisted of hallucinating a meaning between letters and lines” (40). But, according to Kittler, technical reproduction provided a physical precision that rendered this readerly hallucination obsolete. With the advent of technical reproduction, the hallucinatory power of reading, that infernal Romantic struggle between writer and reader, Word and Spirit, is resolved indefinitely. Readerly hallucination is materialized in ghostly daguerrotypes, phantasmic phonograph records, and spectral cinema–the soul captured in, and radically embodied by, new media.

 

We thus have a fragmented history of typewriter, gramophone and film. But from where does this triad emanate? How do we justify this trinity of communications over other possible permutations, e.g., “Phonograph, Telegraph, Camera,” or “Spectroscope, Typewriter, Radio”? There is no possible justification, except to say that a comprehensive history of media is not Kittler’s intent here or anywhere. Nor would he believe that such a history is useful or even possible. His method directs him to a series of nodal points that shed light on informative media scenes, without claiming to illuminate the entire history of media.

 

The scene, then, becomes the theory itself, and the justification for Kittler’s choice of triad can thus take the form of a single, super-saturated scene. This time, Edison is the hero, or anti-hero. The scene co-stars Christopher Latham Sholes, who pays a visit to Edison (the predestined arch-developer of cinema and phonograph) with his idea of a mass-producible typewriter. As it turns out, Edison politely refuses Sholes’s offer, and the typewriter becomes the property of Remington, an arms manufacturer. Hence, film, phonograph, and typewriter cross paths in a brief constellation that justifies–more properly, generates–Kittler’s triad. A story becomes theory, and the rest is history; it drops through the filter of Kittler’s letters and ideograms. Unlike Goethe, however, Kittler doesn’t sweat it.

 

This type of historical snapshot, or sound bite, if you please, is typically Kittlerian, and it is left up to the reader to hallucinate a cohesive thesis out of these bits. It is as if Kittler himself were presenting his research materials anachronistically. He writes essays using a word processor when he would probably be more lucid in experimental film, or more appropriately, in hypertext or some other form of digital multi-media. Then perhaps, the move from a jumbo jet, to German Romanticism, to Edison, to Lacan, would be more sensible, especially since Turing’s Universal Discrete Machine is thrown into the mix. If “the age of media–as opposed to the history that ends it–moves in jerks, like Turing’s paper ribbon” (48), then maybe our age of media would best be represented in a medium that can embody its disconnective nature. Then again, Kittler’s unconventional style, a style that makes an anachronism of the conventional essay format, is living proof that “the content of each medium is another medium” (42). Kittler’s writing style seems to wriggle uncomfortably in its print-oriented skin. Is Kittler’s writing hypertextual then? He wouldn’t be the first, but we have yet to place him beside Mallarmé or Joyce. The scene of Kittler typing an (hypertextual) essay of historical/literary fragments with dated word processing software, remains to be written and unpacked.

 

“Dracula’s Legacy”

 

Step 2: In the media scene that you have chosen (see Step 1), describe the role of a particular communications technology.

 

If conventional history stands for the end of “the age of media,” then Kittler’s “jerky” version of media history threatens to sustain “the age of media,” reanimate it. The age of media is an un-dead age, for as long as we remember that media always determine the message, we will be living in the “age of media.” Leave it to Kittler then, Vampire theorist, to seek out the trace of a technologically-determined discourse system in any given media scene, and rescue that scene from the shallow grave of history. This is how Kittler, as a media theorist, fulfills “Dracula’s Legacy.” What supernatural powers does Kittler possess that allow him to raise the dead, see the unseen? Where can the trace of technology be found? The secret power of the media theorist lies, quite simply, in the following apocryphal warning from Jacques Lacan to his students: “From now on you are, and to a far greater extent than you can imagine, subjects of gadgets or instruments–from microscopes to radio and television–which will become elements of your being.” Viewed through the lens of this prophesy, any scene becomes a media scene, even when technology is not conspicuously present. The media theorist’s mandate can thus be simplified to the extreme, with Kittlerian bluntness: “Media determine our situation, which (nevertheless or for that reason) merits a description” (28).

 

It is with this supernatural power of vision that Kittler “implicitly rais[es] the question of the degree to which technology was always the impensé or blindspot of poststructuralism itself” (Johnston 8). Kittler takes for granted that the trace of technology is discernible in any text or scene. Although he would be reluctant to accept the title, Kittler is a master of writing the trace, which Gayatri Spivak has described as “the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experience” (xvi). It is one thing to proclaim the end of objectivity, the end of History and of Man, as poststructuralism has done, but quite another to make such a proclamation, accept it as an inherent element of writing, and invent ways to write that draw on this knowledge as an apriority. This is Kittler’s “post-hermeneutic”⁵ method (Wellbery ix). When Kittler writes media history, he does so with all the tools of poststructuralism at his disposal. Unlike many other theorists, however, he does not display the tools, or wield them about flagrantly;⁶ they are simply a part of his philosophical arsenal, the gears that grind away in the engine of his most apt reflections on media and culture. We can say, therefore, that Kittler does not write about the trace–he writes the trace itself. He does not write about the absence of media theory in poststructuralism–he writes the absence of media theory into poststructuralism.

 

What strikes Kittler most poignantly, then, about the multiple film adaptations of Dracula is not that this techno-sustained legacy has allowed for “ever new and imaginary resurrections” of Stoker’s famous villain, but the fact that in none of these film adaptations do we catch a glimpse of the phonograph or typewriter that are so crucial in the novel. The role of transmission played by these devices in the novel is swallowed up by the movie projector’s ability to turn words into things, to merge human and machine. Or in Kittler’s terms, “under the conditions of technology, literature disappears (like metaphysics for Heidegger) into the un-death of its endless ending” (83). It is up to the media theorist, then, to trace the presence of literature in the discourse of technology, and vice versa. Matthew Griffin sums up this Kittlerian task quite well by stating that “Literature, which was once the realm of dissident voices swelling in a babble of languages, can now be rewritten as an effect of media technologies on the alphanumeric code” (Griffin, Literary 715).

 

What role, exactly, do the gramophone and typewriter play in Stoker’s novel? According to Kittler (via Lacan), they demonstrate quite simply the extent to which “we are subject to gadgets or instruments” that have “become elements of our being” (143). For example, the typewriter, according to Kittler, so ingrained itself in the social evolution of Western Europe, that it radically and permanently altered gender roles:

 

Machines remove from the two sexes the symbols that distinguish them. In earlier times, needles created woven material in the hands of women, and quills in the hands of authors created another form of weaving called text. Women who gladly became the paper for these scriptorial quills were called mothers. Women who preferred to speak themselves were called overly sensitive or hysterical. But after the symbol of male productivity was replaced by a machine, and this machine was taken over by women, the production of texts had to forfeit its wonderful heterosexuality. (71)

 

The machine in question here is, of course, the typewriter. Paraphrasing Bruce Bliven,⁷Kittler observes that

 

the typewriter, and only the typewriter, is responsible for a bureaucratic revolution. Men may have continued, from behind their desks, to believe in the omnipotence of their own thought, but the real power over keys and impressions on paper, over the flow of news and over agendas, fell to the women who sat in the front office. (64)

 

Here, we are tantalized with the image of a cyborg woman, a woman de-sexed and empowered by a writing machine with which she is unified. We must be careful to avoid this illusion, however, since Kittler, unlike McLuhan, does not see the machine as an extension of man (or woman), but quite the opposite. And so, the female typists who write faster than most anyone can read or think are only transmission devices, extensions or reflections of the machine,⁸ word processors avant la lettre. They have no conscious influence on the news and agendas that they channel. This is in keeping with Kittler’s most poignant anti-McLuhanism: “it remains an impossibility to understand media…. The communications technologies of the day exercise remote control over all understanding and evoke its illusion” (30).

 

This gender-bending or seeming cyborgism, this cultural upheaval that occurs at the hand of the typewriter, is inscribed in Stoker’s Dracula. In the concluding scene, Mina Harker “holds a child in the lap that for 300 pages held a typewriter” (70). The classical-romantic binary of femininity is interrupted by a technological variable. From now on, a woman cannot be slotted easily into the MOTHER/HYSTERIC construction, but can also fall into a third category: MACHINE. With this third term in place, the binary or even triad model is shattered. From now on, anything is possible within the circuit of female identity. Or to use Kittler’s words, “far worse things are possible,” as is proven with the case of Lucy Westenra, anti-mother, a vampiress who sucks the blood of children for sustenance (70).

 

“Romanticism–Psychoanalysis–Film: A History of the Double”

 

Step 3: Demonstrate that the media scene you have chosen is determined by the specific historical, technological or scientific conditions of the time in which it was created.

 

At the center of Kittler’s collection of essays, we move from monsters to Münsterberg, a transition that gives us a more profound glimpse at Kittler’s understanding of cinema. If the Dracula films demonstrate the ability of the cinema to liquidate the soul of classical Romantic literature, this is because film can depict in moving pictures what literature could only describe in words, “and other storage media besides words did not exist in the days of classical Romanticism” (89). Through his brief “History of the Double,” Kittler demonstrates the extent to which film acts as a simulacrum of the human psyche, the poetic Spirit materialized in 24 frames/second. The doppelganger theme of 1800–a subject so prevalent in German Romanticism that Otto Rank could supply Freud with endless literary case studies of Narcissism–becomes a mere camera trick in 1900. But the camera’s trickiness, as we shall see, does not stop at the simulation of neuroses.

 

The hero of “A History of the Double,” rather appropriately, is Hugo Münsterberg, founder of a crossbred science known as psychotechnology and producer of the “first competent theory of film”–at least according to Kittler’s formula. Münsterberg is essential to the history of media, Kittler suggests, because he “assigns every single camera technique to an unconscious, psychical mechanism: the close-up to selective attention, the flashback to involuntary memory, the film trick to daydreaming, and so forth” (100). And this allows Kittler to make the following periodic distinction on the cusp of which the Spirit of literature dissolves into mechanical technics:

 

Since 1895, a separation exists between an image-less cult of the printed word, i.e., e[lite]-literature, on one side, and purely technical media that, like the train or film, mechanize images on the other. Literature no longer even attempts to compete with the miracles of the entertainment industry. It hands its enchanted mirror over to machines.(92)

 

Hence, in a familiar theoretical trick of displacement, the psyche is replaced by a machine, the central nervous system by a network of communications devices.

 

What is most interesting about this chapter, however, is not Münsterberg’s theory (it has been covered more extensively in other studies), not Kittler’s formula itself (the cyborgian theme now verges on cliché⁹), and not the unfashionable periodic distinction (a separation that generated enemies for Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900¹⁰); what is most interesting is the manner by which Kittler arrives at his resolute distinction between pre- and post-1895. What might appear, at first glance, as some sort of techno-deterministic formula of history is actually a far-reaching and complex theory on culture and media. The most fascinating and important element of Kittler’s work is his ability to recognize and describe the intricacy of literary and cultural phenomena, and still manage to capture this complexity in a single image. Rather than provide a technical genealogy of film, then, or a historical narrative of its invention, Kittler lays out specific historical/technological conditions that make motion pictures possible, beginning with the period that immediately preceded film, in which the technology was not possible. And he does so by a trick of condensation, encapsulating an entire theory, a viable history of media, in the image of the Double.

 

Hence, when Kittler refers to the fictional Doubles of Goethe and Fichte, Jean Paul and Hoffman (all members of Otto Rank’s Doppelganger collection), he does not stop at the uncanniness of this collective obsession with duality. He probes further into the texts in search of a common thread, a collective media scene that runs through their work and intersects with the discourse network of 1800. Naturally, he finds the trace that he is looking for, “namely, the simple textual evidence that Doubles turn up at writing desks” (87). This common denominator allows Kittler to connect the doppelganger phenomenon with writing technologies, which, in turn, opens up his study to a wider cultural phenomenon: “the general literacy campaign that seized Central Europe in [the nineteenth century]. Ever since then, people no longer experience words as violent and foreign bodies but can also believe that the printed words belong to them. Lacan called it ‘alphabêtise'” (91). Of course, Kittler mentions this campaign of a bureaucratic machine only to document its undoing at the hands of a different sort of machine, the “two-pronged” machine of film and psychoanalysis that brought the nineteenth century to a close. When the twentieth century begins, “books no longer behave as though words were harmless vehicles supplying our inner being with optical hallucinations, and especially not with the delusion that there is an inner being or a self. Along with the true, the beautiful and the good, the Double vanishes as well” (91). The nineteenth century literary fascination with the Double is brought to an end by film tricks and Freud.

 

Kittler complexifies his media histories,¹¹ then, by underscoring the fact that cultural phenomena are made possible by the chance encounter of various events or cataclysms, by the fortuitous meeting of disparate elements–umbrellas and sewing machines on operating tables. This is why Münsterberg is so important to him, for he was able to make the link between psychoanalysis and film, and it is these elements that bifurcate 1800 and 1900, bringing an end to Literature:

 

The empirical-transcendental doublet Man, substratum of the Romantic fantastic, is only imploded by the two-pronged attack of science and industry, of psychoanalysis and film. Psychoanalysis clinically verified and cinema technically implemented all of the shadows and mirrorings of the subject. Ever since then, what remains of a literature that wants to be Literature is simply écriture--a writing without author. And no one can read Doubles, that is, a means to identification, into the printed word. (95)

 

If this cut and dry equation were presented by Kittler out of hand, then it would certainly seem absurd. But the formula was not arrived at in any simple manner. On the way to this proposition, Kittler has taken us through two centuries of literature in France, England, and Germany, through optics, cybernetics, cinematography, transportation, psychoanalysis, and political science. And this list barely scratches the surface. It seems that the final equation or formula is not what really counts here, for it serves only to demonstrate the complexity of the discourse network that makes possible a single literary phenomenon of 1800, and its undoing by science and technology. Don’t be fooled; this is not an essay about the Double at all; it is a transdisciplinary journey, a careful and selective history on the interface of film and literature.

 

The Double, then, is a sort of vehicle, or better yet, a portal through which Goethe and Fichte, Jean Paul and Hoffman, Guy de Maupassant and Baudelaire, cross paths with Otto Rank and Freud, Lacan and Foucault, and a legacy of doppelganger film-makers, including Ewers, Lindau, Hauptmann, Wegener, and Wiene. By devising a formula about the simultaneous demise of Literature and the Double, Kittler creates a story and a theory where there are none, leaving behind a distinctive trace (“the mark of the absence of a presence” [Spivak xx]) that we can only call one history of media technology among many–the rest drops “through the filter” of Kittler’s “letters or ideograms” (36). At the end of the story, Kittler is gracious enough to provide a map, just in case we were uncertain, all along, what he was up to:

 

Without removing traces, traces cannot be gathered;.... In our current century which implements all theories, there are no longer any. That is the uncanniness of its reality.(100)

 

“Media and Drugs in Pynchon’s Second World War”

 

Step 4: Demonstrate that, not only is your media scene the result of specific historical or scientific conditions, but these conditions are all uncannily related in one way or another. In short, show that "everything is connected."

 

If we were to return to our initial media scene–the one in which Brigadier Whitehead performs a wartime sound-jam on his rudimentary mixing board–and attempt to apply the steps of Kittler’s method that we have covered thus far, we might find the following observations useful:

 

Step 1: The Avengers scene we have chosen involves a media anachronism: phonographs and tape recorders in an age of laser technology.

 

Step 2: Storage technology is essential for solving the mystery of the Brigadier’s murder. The face of detective work is changed forever by devices that can document our every move–and document our deaths as well.

 

Step 3: Advanced storage technology also changes the face of war by displacing it into a series of tactical strategies based on potential destruction. As the Brigadier’s demise demonstrates, war is now a staged phenomenon, a game of potentialization that can proceed without immediate corporal sacrifice. Indeed, the Brigadier is sacrificed, but at the hands of a laser, the weapon that would power virtual or “cold” warfare. “From Venus With Love” foreshadows a real, laser driven Star Wars.

 

Step 4: In 1967, IBM released the first beta version of the floppy disk, while in Britain the ISBN numerical cataloguing system for books was introduced. At the time in which our media scene takes place, digital technology and laser reading/writing devices carry the day.

 

Of course, 1967, the Summer of Love, also marks a time of immersive psychedelia. This brings us to Kittler’s essay on Thomas Pynchon, “Media and Drugs in Pynchon’s Second World War.” If the Avengers can have their Brigadier Whitehead, a living anachronism of war and technology, then Pynchon can give us Brigadier Pudding:

 

Who can find his way about this lush maze of initials, arrows solid and dotted, boxes big and small, names printed and memorized? Not Ernest Pudding--that's for the New Chaps with their little green antennas out for the usable emanations of power, versed in American politics... keeping brain-dossiers on latencies, weaknesses, tea-taking habits, erogenous zones of all, all who might someday be useful.... Ernest Pudding was brought up to believe in a literal Chain of Command, as clergymen of earlier centuries believed in the Chain of Being. The newer geometries confuse him. (77)

 

Brigadiers are the products of an outmoded discourse network, destined to fall at the hands of a system of (il)logic beyond their ken. While Brigadier Whitehead narrates his highly orchestrated version of war on analog recording machines, an interloping laser beam–master device of an invisible war and the product of a discourse network of which he is ignorant–brings his instant and unpredictable death. Similarly, when Pynchon’s Brigadier Pudding, an octagenarian soldier, volunteers for “intelligence work” in World War II, he expects to be operating “in concert… with other named areas of the War, colonies of that Mother City mapped wherever the enterprise is systematic death” (76). What he finds instead, is

 

a disused hospital for the mad, a few token lunatics, an enormous pack of stolen dogs, cliques of spiritualists, vaudeville entertainers, wireless technicians, Couéists, Ouspenskians, Skinnerites, lobotomy enthusiasts, Dale Carnegie zealots, all exiled by the outbreak of war from pet schemes and manias damned, had the peace prolonged itself, to differing degrees of failure. (77)

 

Much to the dismay of the Brigadier, the mortal combat that used to determine victory has been displaced by a psychotechnological information circus. The Brigadier’s “greatest victory on the battlefield,… in the gassy, Armageddonite filth of the Ypres salient, where he conquered a bight of no man’s land some 40 yards at its deepest, with a wastage of only 70% of his unit,” is an outmoded model. In WWII, such battlefield victories could be described as a mere diversion from the real war, a war without heroes on hilltops, a war that can only be won by near-invisible technologies (Pynchon 77). The human “wastage” of combat merely “provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world” (Pynchon 105). “To be sure,” Kittler tells us,

 

people still believed in dying for their homeland during World War II. But Pynchon, a former Boeing-engineer, makes it clear through precise details that "the enterprise [of] systematic death" (Pynchon 76) "serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War" (Pynchon 105). That is to say, "the real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms--it was only staged to look that way--but among the different technologies, plastics, electronics, aircraft," and so on. (Pynchon 521; Kittler 102-103)

 

This war of information management and data delivery (played out mostly in corporate boardrooms today) is discernible behind any media scene that we might conjure up in the twentieth century: “the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange” (Pynchon 258).

 

Evidently, there is no place in the “newer geometries” of war for hero Brigadiers or chains of command; no place for predictability, sequentiality or even narratability. And the same goes for the newer geometries of literature and criticism as well. The heroic critic or narrator has been rendered impossible by the Death of the Author. Like the Brigadiers in our media scenes, readers of Pynchon who turn the pages in search of a sequential “Chain of Command” will be assailed by a whirling circus of data, an informational jambalaya suitable in a world run by non-sequential technologies. What makes Pynchon an exceptional writer, then, (and certainly not a fiction writer) in Kittler’s eyes, is his expert use of technical data that the War’s end released from secrecy:

 

the text, as is only the case in historical novels like Salammbo or Antonius, is essentially assembled from documentary sources, many of which--circuit diagrams, differential equations, corporate contracts, and organizational plans--are textualized for the first time. (A fact easily overlooked by literary experts.) (106)

 

Much to Kittler’s delight, Pynchon is not an Author, but a data delivery agent. His goal is not to provide an entertaining narrative, or some sort of fictional closure, but information, tout court.

 

Just as Pynchon’s anti-hero, Slothrop, strived endlessly to make sense of the noise and nonsense of war, Pynchon’s readers must devise a way of making sense of the novel itself. We might learn a great deal from the ill-fated Lieutenant Slothrop, who, in the absence of sophisticated “data retrieval” machinery–the only means to “the truth”–is “thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologes, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity” (Pynchon 582). In the absence of all sense, overwhelmed by an onslaught of conflicting information, Slothrop invents his own rules of the game. Kittler astutely identifies this survivalist method of sense-making in the following way: “Slothrop’s paranoia within the novel corresponds precisely to a paranoiac-critical methodology that the novelist could have learned from Dali” (105). Might I suggest that there is a little Dali in Kittler as well?

 

Through his art and writing, Dali essentially suggested (as any good paranoid would) that everything is meaningful, and that chance encounters should not be ignored as mere co-incidence. According to Dali–and the point hits home in his paintings–even the most seemingly incidental details can be of critical importance in our understanding of an event or object. For Dali, it was (among other things) the juxtaposition of pitchfork and hunched figures in Millet’s Angelus;¹² for Pynchon, it was the supposed co-incidence of Slothrop’s erections with the explosion of V2 bombs; for Kittler, we might suggest that it is the “double at his writing desk,” the sigh of Faust, the typewriter in the lap of Mina Harker. In any case, Dali, Slothrop, and Kittler provide us with a method of dealing with information overload. With the Death of the Author, the End of History, and the impossibility of Truth, we might say that we are living in the threat of “anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long” (Pynchon 434). The antidote, as Pynchon and Kittler seem to suggest, might be a good dose of critical or perhaps conscious paranoia, a critical methodology of the trace.¹³ “When the symbolic of signs, numbers and letters determine so-called reality, then gathering the traces becomes the paranoid’s primary duty” (105-106).

 

“Media Wars: Trenches, Lightning, Stars” and “The World of the Symbolic–A World of the Machine”

 

Step 5: Having revealed that "everything is connected," submit your paranoia to reason by showing that "everything is connected" only because: a) the dual apparatus of State/Technology has made the co-incidence possible, and; b) with this power structure in place, we are destined to be the physical and psychological subjects of technologies.

 

In Lieutenant Slothrop we have the apotheosis of Kittler’s assessment of technology in culture. Not only have the political and material technologies of war crippled Slothrop’s mind with paranoia, they have also turned his body–most specifically, his penis (a cybernetic emblem of the phallic V2 rocket)–into a strategic weapon. In Slothrop, all of Kittler’s theories on technology converge: the subjection of the body and psyche to technology; the development of new technology through war; the control of technology by the State. These are the themes or theses that recur constantly in Kittler’s essays, to the point that they produce a distinct theory, a branch, even, of media studies. Nowhere are these issues more recurrent, or more pervasively explored than in the essays “Media Wars: Trenches, Lightning, Stars” and “The World of the Symbolic–A World of the Machine.”

 

In “Media Wars,” Kittler convincingly demonstrates that the strategies of persuasion that defined military success throughout history (war “came into being only when people succeeded in making others die for them” [117]) have been replaced by “technologies of telecommunication and control” (117). The point is clear in the case of Slothrop, and perhaps even more lucid in the case of the ill-fated Brigadier Whitehead. As Foucault’s theories of panopticism have suggested, forces of command are now invisible, and their formal role has been handed over to technology. Technological apparatus and State apparatus are intricately entwined to the point of being indistinguishable. In order to illustrate this point, Kittler offers a brief history of the First and Second World Wars from a media theorist’s point of view. From the storage media of Edison (phonograph and kinetoscope) to the transmission media of Hertz and Marconi (wireless telegraphy, radio), Kittler sets out to prove, in his characteristically reductive fashion, the following equation:

 

WWI:Storage Media :: WWII:Transmission Media.  

His final proof takes the following form: “Technical media have to do neither with intellectuals nor with mass culture. They are strategies of the Real. Storage media were built for the trenches of World War I, transmission media for the lightning strikes of World War II” (129). This leaves WWIII, of course, to the legacy of Alan Turing and modern computation, which has perfected the synchronization of storage and transmission media: “universal computing media for SDI: chu d’un désastre obscur, as Mallarmé would have it, fallen from an obscure disaster” (129).

 

Once again, Brigadier Whitehead’s demise at the hands of Star Wars technology, “an enemy without a face,” is a perfect case study of storage and transmission media anachronized by a computational désastre obscur. But for a more contemporary illustration of Kittler’s equation (and more in keeping with his commitment to historical detail) we need only turn to the air strikes on Yugoslavia that are taking place as this essay is being written. At the risk of jeopardizing a lasting peace process in Yugoslavia, NATO commanders have thus far decided not to employ ground troops, a move that would surely result in human sacrifice all too reminiscent of Vietnam. Instead, American F/A jets are targeting and destroying, among other things, all radio and television transmitters in Belgrade. The war is not between soldiers, but between advanced technologies of communication: Yugoslav Power Stations (Transmission Media) vs. invisible B-52 bombers and intelligent cruise missiles (Computation Media).

 

More than anything else, the bombing demonstrates the technological difference between this war and the Vietnam War, to which it is being repeatedly compared. While the B-52s continue their destruction of television transmitters–the technology that was truly responsible for making a tragedy of Vietnam–they have proved almost useless against a more recent media technology, the Internet. Just when William Cohen thought that the Central Nervous System of Yugoslavia had been disabled, neurons started firing in the form of e-mail and Web pages. For every B-52 gun camera that fails to provide evidence of civilian suffering in Belgrade at the hands of NATO, a Yugoslav e-mail message or Web page leaves traces of misery, affliction, and betrayal.¹⁴ If Vietnam was a TV war, this is an Internet war. The Yugoslav’s use of the Web and e-mail as weapons against the U.S. is extremely ironic, of course, considering the origins of the Internet. John Johnston explains these origins in his Introduction to Kittler’s essays:

 

Thanks to the military need for a communications system that could survive nuclear detonations, today we have fiber optic cables and a new medium called the Internet, which, as is widely known, grew out of ARPANET, a decentralized control network for intercontinental ballistic missiles. (5)

 

By launching an Internet counter-attack, the Belgradians are actually on a technological par with NATO. Unfortunately, bombs are more persuasive than words and digital images. The electronic traces of unsettled civilians will cease to be produced when all power sources have been destroyed in Belgrade. The moment that happens, the e-mail and Web attacks will be no more–except on hard drives, where they will exist as electronic monuments of civilian distress. This freezing is, in effect, NATO’s goal: to incapacitate the technologies of transmission in Yugoslavia, leaving them to deplete the only remaining technology of war, that of storage. Faced with a technologically dominant opponent, the only survival option for Belgradians–remnants of an obsolete war technology–is storage: entrenchment or monumentality. If only such immobilization could have been inflicted on Vietnam, or Iraq, for that matter….

 

Of course, from a Kittlerian perspective, the very notion of “monumentality” as an option for survival begs questioning, or at least complexification. Human memory may be just another media effect, the remainder of past technologies doomed to extinction by advancements in computation, storage, and transmission. This anachronism is, according to Kittler, one of the great secrets of a self-deluding humanity: “That books, mnemotechnologies, and machine memories exist, must naturally be kept a secret, so long as memory is a quality or even a property ‘of man’…. In the name of the analphabets, the confusion between the people and the memory banks in which they land must come to an end” (“Vergessen” 111). What matters for Kittler, however, is not that we are losing our memory or our minds, but that the very notions of mind and memory have been profoundly transformed by media technologies, to the extent that “it is already clear that humanity could not have invented information machines, but to the contrary, is their subject” (143).

 

This message, as we have already seen, was delivered rather forebodingly by Jacques Lacan, several decades before Kittler, when he told his students that they were already “the subjects of all types of gadgets” (143). But leave it to Kittler to uncover the trace of Lacan’s own subjection to gadgets, a trace that is exposed at the heart of Lacan’s theories. Kittler distinguishes between the theory of Freud and that of Lacan by pointing to the technological conditions that surrounded them. Since Freud was a subject of the telephone, film, phonograph and print, it makes sense, from a Kittlerian perspective, that his pre-computer psychological theories are rooted only in “the strict separation of transmission and storage functions,” or the separation of memory and consciousness (133). In Kittler’s terms,

 

Freud's materialism reasoned only as far as the information machines of his era--no more, no less. Rather than continuing to dream of the Spirit as origin, he described a "psychic apparatus" (Freud's wonderful word choice) that implemented all available transmission and storage media, in other words, an apparatus just short of the technical medium of universal-calculation, or the computer. (134)

 

The development of a computer-oriented psychology would have to wait, of course, until Jacques Lacan, who constructs the psychic apparatus not only out of storage and transmission media, but also out of computation. And hence, “nothing else is signified,” Kittler insists, “by Lacan’s ‘methodological distinction’ of the imaginary, the real and the symbolic” (135).

 

Kittler equates the “symbolic” to computational media because it demonstrates a certain switching capability (in the digital, technical sense) of the psychic apparatus:

 

Tombstones, the oldest cultural symbols, remain with the corpse; dice remain on their side after the toss; only the door, or 'gate' in technical slang, permits symbols "to fly with their own winds," that is, to control presence and absence, high and low, 1 and 0, so that the one can react to the other--sequential circuit mechanism, digital feedback. (143)

 

Lacan’s “endless chain of signifiers” corresponds, not co-incidentally, to the data-processing activity of computer circuits. And the Symbolic, like the “gates” or ports on a computer, regulates the flow of the circuits.¹⁵The “discourse of the other” may therefore be renamed as the “discourse of the circuit” (135).

 

Considering the uncanny human/machine interfacing that betrays itself in Lacan’s theories, we should not be surprised, Kittler writes, “that Lacan forbid himself from talking about language with people who did not understand cybernetics” (145). This may sound like theoretical closed-mindedness–the type that makes Luddites of some of the finest scholars. Then again, perhaps closed-mindedness is not the proper word, for Lacan is calling for an interlocutor who is versed in more than one area of specialization, and who is open to the possibility of a transdisciplinary science. Perhaps we should call it snobbery or idealism, then, for Lacan’s demands on his interlocutors are somewhat unrealistic, and based on his own desires and modes of understanding. In any case, this particular attitude, the words for which have apparently evaded me here, characterize the two final essays in Kittler’s collection.

 

“There Is No Software” and “Protected Mode”

 

Step 6: Having successfully practiced, and hopefully re-invented, the Kittlerian Method of Media Criticism, use your method to develop a project that aims to increase our awareness and understanding of the materialities of communication.

 

Since, as you must agree by now, everything is connected after all, it only makes sense to point out the uncanny co-incidence (?) of the computing term “gates” (portals which regulate all circuit flow), and the name most associated with computing today, William H. Gates. Consider this man/machine coincidence as a nodal point through which many discourses pass, including Kittler’s discourse on computer hardware, and the current Microsoft antitrust trial that accuses Gates of masterminding a media monopoly. Such a monopoly, as Kittler would gladly make clear, involves more than a few icons on a computer screen; it involves the shaping of our psychic apparatus, the regulation of human communications, and the fashioning of educational institutions, political regimes, and military arsenals. Perhaps it is for this reason that William S. Cohen has been seen networking with the Microserfs in Silicon Valley. In a recent recruitment visit to the Microsoft HQ, Cohen emphasized “the military’s role in insuring global stability that allowed companies like Microsoft to prosper” (Myers A15). Gates, on the other hand, “noted that the Defense Department was Microsoft’s largest client and discussed ways the two could do even more business together in the future” (Myers A15). The irony of this catch-22 media scene is best captured, however, by a programmer who explains why she turned down a career in the military: “The Navy kept sending me letters when I was in school, offering scholarships…. But I thought, Why would I want to give up my life when I could be creating new technology?” (Myers A15). The postmodern soldier is alive and well in Silicon Valley.

 

Those who are able to perceive an immense political network behind the Windows interface have no problem understanding Kittler’s turbulent tone in “There Is No Software.” This essay becomes all the more clear in light of the Microsoft trial, because it deals with the level of control that a computer operator possesses over the machine. In what Kittler calls a “system of secrecy,” computer and software designers have intentionally “hidden” the technology from those who use the machines:

 

First, on an intentionally superficial level, perfect graphic user interfaces, since they dispense with writing itself, hid a whole machine from its users. Second, on the microscopic level of hardware, so-called protection software has been implemented in order to prevent "untrusted programs" or "untrusted users" from any access to the operating system's kernel and input/output channels. (150)

 

All these levels of secrecy, Kittler explains, are designed to prevent the operator from really understanding media. We might know how to launch Microsoft Word and type up an essay with graphics, tables, and elaborate fonts, but, with each stroke of the keyboard or click of the mouse, do we realize what’s happening in the discourse networks of the purring, putty-colored box? This ignorance, according to Kittler, leaves us open to manipulation of the highest order. With characteristic bluntness, the final essay of Kittler’s book suggests that under the current technological conditions, “one writes–the ‘under’ says it already–as a subject or underling of the Microsoft Corporation” (156).

 

In response to Microsoft, IBM et al., who insure that technologies are “explicitly contrived to evade perception,” Kittler makes the bold pronouncement that “There Is No Software.” This is at once a rhetorical provocation to the computer corporations, and a wake-up call for those who fail to see the man behind the curtain, or the circuits behind the fruit-colored shell that Apple has recently developed in an attempt to make us “Think Different.”¹⁶ There is no software because, no matter how user-friendly an interface might be, the “hardware continues to do all of the work” (158). The Microsoft antitrust case exists only because of Microsoft’s ongoing objective of completely hiding the machine behind a single unified graphical interface. Drawing on Mick Jagger, Kittler notes that “instead of what he wants, the user always only gets what he needs (according to the industry standard, that is)” (162).

 

Neither Microsoft Windows nor the chips that really make it work–chips secured by Intel’s “protected mode”–can be reprogrammed or rewired to suit the needs of the computer operator. But then, who wants to do reprogramming anyhow? In an ironic, accidental (?) response to Kittler’s use of Mick Jagger, a recent ad campaign by Apple uses the Stones song “She’s a Rainbow” to promote the fashionable multichromatic appearance of the new iMac. Superficiality, it seems, is what the user really wants.

 

Microsoft’s success in the trial, and as a business, hinges on the following hypothetical question: Do people really want to see behind the curtain? To my knowledge, the average computer-user, let alone “literary critic” (as Kittler repeatedly labels himself) does not like to unwind in the Kittlerian fashion: “at night after I had finished writing, I used to pick up the soldering iron and build circuits” (Griffin, “Interview” 731). But if we accept Kittler’s understanding of the relationship between media technologies, government, and the military, then the question about what’s “behind the curtain” becomes increasingly pressing, and it applies to more than software monopolies and circuits in “protected mode.” “It is a reasonable assumption,” writes Kittler, “to analyze the privilege levels of a microprocessor as the reality of precisely that bureaucracy that ordered its design and called for its mass application” (162). In short, Kittler suggests that power systems can be traced within the circuits of a computer chip. And so, those who follow Foucault’s legacy of analyzing such systems might benefit from abandoning “the usual practice of conceiving of power as a function of so-called society, and, conversely, attempt to construct sociology from the chip’s architectures”(162). Maybe we should take a closer look, then, at those digital pets on our laps and desks. In the least, we should start paying more attention to the materialities of communication.

 

Conclusions and Beginnings

 

As impressive as Kittler’s ability to “see a landscape in a bean”¹⁷ may be, we cannot expect the average computer user to pull the Pentium chip out of his/her C.P.U. and examine it for traces of fascism. In the same way, we can’t expect Kittler’s version of media criticism to remedy the “blind spot” of poststructuralism by turning critics into computer geeks (I suggest we take a grain of salt with his suggestion that students of cultural studies “should at least know some arithmetic, the integral function, the sine function,.. [and] at least two software languages” [Griffin, “Interview” 740]). What we might expect, however, is for Kittler’s work to incite a campaign of awareness that, if properly disseminated, might make us more cognizant of the networks of power and discourse that intersect on our media scenes. And by integrating not just “literary texts,” but any cultural phenomena, into our projects, then we can direct our work toward intervention on a social and technological level.

 

The point here is not to create a Kittlerian cult, or to suggest that Kittler’s methods should be applied as the universal decryption key of cultural studies or literary criticism. In fact, I willingly admit that the 6 Steps described in this instruction manual essay hardly provide an accurate or comprehensive evaluation of Kittler’s critical methodology. All I have done is attempted to extract a working set of instructions out of Kittler’s imposing data banks. I have attempted to develop a mode of writing more suitable to, and aware of, our digital-oriented discourse network. What Kittler, as “structural engineer,” teaches us is to view texts and theories as complex discursive networks from which certain key components may be drawn out and soldered onto others like circuits on a motherboard. His role as a critic has less to do with archiving, transcription, and commentary (the duties of a critic of 1800 and 1900) than it does with programming, design, and invention: activities of intervention.

 

To sum up, Kittler gathers code from Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, et. al. and sets it to work on the cultural cryptography of Goethe, Pynchon, et al. In the same way, we might draw on Kittler in order to program our own critical projects on the materialities of communication. Like circuit-tinkerers and the proponents of open source software, media critics might benefit from dissecting and reprogramming their own user interface, i.e., the conventional scholarly publication. We might not not end up with a new programming language to rival Microsoft DOS, but perhaps we’ll invent a more effective and interventional method for conducting research from inside the Discourse Network 2000–whatever that may turn out to be.¹⁸

 

Notes

 

1. In the first line of Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Kittler suggests that “German Poetry begins with a sigh,” Faust’s sigh, that is (3). This provides him with a primal scene from which to discuss the discourse network of 1800.

 

2. Unless indicated otherwise, citations of Kittler are drawn from the essays in Literature, Media, Information Systems.

 

3. Foucault’s influence on Kittler is profound and pervasive, and Kittler is quick to admit this legacy. Among all discourse analysts, Foucault is the most important to Kittler “because he was the most historical” (Griffin, Interview 734). Whereas Derrida, Lacan, etc. tend to emphasize the instability of the sign, Foucault rarely abandons his archaeological digging to muse upon the shapes of the words at the surface. This devotion to the complex historicity of discourse is, according to Kittler, why Foucault is “the best to use and carry over into other fields…. [He] offers so many concrete methodologies and leaves so many historical fields open that there are endless amounts of work one can do with him” (Griffin, Interview 739).

 

4. In spite of the flurry of rumors that surrounded the incident, Timothy Leary’s death was not simulcast on the Internet. Leary had proposed the broadcast, but resolved instead to videotape his last moments. The footage has never been shown publicly. From America’s Funniest Home Videos to the recent television broadcast of Thomas Youk’s lethal injection by Jack Kevorkian, one could easily compile a lengthy catalog of media scenes that document our contemporary obsession with cataloguing and archiving anything and everything.

 

5. In reference to Discourse Networks 1800/1900, David Wellbery notes that Kittler’s book “presupposes post-structuralist thought, makes that thought the operating equipment, the hardware, with which it sets out to accomplish its own research program. In Discourse Networks, post-structuralism becomes a working vocabulary, a set of instruments productive of knowledge” (vii).

 

6. As far as poststructural methodologies, Kittler prefers the rigor and simplicity of Niklas Luhmann’s system theory over the playfulness of Derrida’s grammatology. Luhmann, says Kittler, “doesn’t make a philosophical mountain out of a molehill, unlike Derrida who, with every sentence he writes, wants to have his cake and eat it” (Griffin, Interview 733).

 

7. See Bruce Bliven, The Wonderful Writing Machine (New York: Random House, 1954).

 

8. In his Preface to Literature, Media, Information Systems, Saul Ostrow notes that “Kittler is not stimulated by the notion that we are becoming cyborgs, but instead by the subtler issues of how we conceptually become reflections of our information systems” (x).

 

9. One could argue that since Donna Harraway’s important and extensive study of the topic, there has been an inordinate abundance of cyborg theory in bookstores and at conferences. This has all led to a predictable formula regarding the human/machine interface and our increasing mechanization at the hands of computers, virtual reality and global networks.

 

10. See Thomas Sebastian, “Technology Romanticized: Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900,” MLN5: 3 (1990): 583-595, and Virginia L. Lewis, “A German Poststructuralist,” PLL 28:1 (1992): 100-106.

 

11. This reference to “media histories” consciously echoes the title of Matthew Griffin’s excellent essay on Kittler, entitled “Literary Studies +/- Literature: Friedrich A. Kittler’s Media Histories.” Like media scenes, the conspicuous plurality of Griffin’s title attempts to capture the complexity of Kittler’s historical, critical and theoretical methodology.

 

12. I am explicitly referring, here, to The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus: Paranoiac-Critical Interpretation (St. Petersburg: The Salvador Dali Museum, 1986). Robert Ray refers to this text in The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (pp.79-80), where he gives an excellent account of how Dali’s method may be used in contemporary film criticism.

 

13. In The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy, Robert Ray offers just such a methodology in the form of a classroom exercise that relies on accident and coincidence. The exercise is partly motivated by this proposition: “The [film] shot results from photography (Godard: ‘Photography is truth, and the cinema is truth twenty-four times a second’), and thus it will inevitably offer… accidental details (Barthes’s ‘Third Meaning’)” (83). This filmic version of the truth (truth equals accident or contingency) is a good antidote to Kittler’s contention that “film-goers are the victims… of a semiotechnology that deludes them into seeing a coherent and causal life story where there are only snapshots and flash bulbs” (112). The majority of film-goers, however, seem to prefer the comfort of delusion over the responsibility of organizing a series of contingencies.

 

14. At the time this essay was written, pro-Yugoslav Web sites documenting the demise of civilians at the hands (bombs) of NATO were available at the following URL’s, among others: <http://cnn.com/SPECIALS/1998/10/kosovo/email/>; <http://cnn.com/SPECIALS/1998/10/kosovo/related.sites/>; <http://www.beograd.com>.

 

15. Lacan’s L-Schema provides an excellent pictorial rendering of the psychic apparatus as circuit. In The Optical Unconscious, Rosalind Kraus offers an insightful discussion of Lacan’s model, and applies it to a critique of modern visualization.

 

16. The ironic motto “Think Different” was the crux of Apple’s advertising campaign in their 1998-99 push to compete with Microsoft’s ability to homogenize a generation of computer users. In essence, Apple managed to hide the machine from the user many years ago, but their lack of a Gates-like marketing savvy made homogenization unattainable. Interestingly, there has been a recent backlash against all the secrecy, which is manifesting itself in the growing popularity of open source software such as Linux. Open source software gives operators a greater degree of control over the interface and general functionality of their computer systems. According to the non-profit organization NetAction, “the most basic definition of open source software is software for which the source code is distributed along with the executable program, and which includes a license allowing anyone to modify and redistribute the software” (<http://www.netaction.org/opensrc/oss-whatis.html>).

 

17. In the opening sentence of S/Z, a text which demonstrates Barthes’s prowess as a builder of codes, he makes reference to “certain Buddhists whose ascetic practices enable them to see a whole landscape in a bean” (3). Although he uses the example to dismiss the idea of applying a single structure to explain all narrative, the Buddhist practice aptly describes Barthes’s own use of myth to decode all of French culture. Barthes’s Mythologies might certainly be considered as precursors to Kittler’s writerly production of media scenes.

 

18. In his interview with Matthew Griffin and Susanne Herrmann, Kittler reveals his opinion on the Discourse Network 2000: “Everyone wants to know what the discourse network 2000 looks like? I’m not in such a hurry, besides it can’t be written” (736). I would suggest that Kittler, unwittingly or not, is writing the discourse network 2000.

Works Cited

 

• Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.
• “From Venus With Love.” The Avengers. Dir. Roy Baker. Perf. Diana Rigg, Patrick Macnee, Philip Locke, and John Pertwee. Canal+, 1963.
• Griffin, Matthew. “Literary Studies +/- Literature: Friedrich Kittler’s Media Histories. New Literary History 27.4 (1996): 709-716.
• — and Susanne Herrmann. “Technologies of Writing: Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler. New Literary History 27.4 (1996): 731-742.
• Johnston, John. “Friedrich Kittler: Media Theory After Poststructuralism.” Introduction. Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays. By Friedrich Kittler. Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997.
• Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990.
• —. Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays. Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997.
• —. “Vergessen.” Discourse: Berkeley Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 3 (1981): 88-121.
• Myers, Steven Lee. “In Added Role, Pentagon Chief Is Traveling Salesman.” New York Times. 19 February, 1999, natl. ed.: A15
• Ostrow, Sal. Preface. Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays. By Friedrich Kittler. Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997.
• Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1973.
• Ray, Robert. The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.
• Spivak, Gayatri. “Translator’s Preface.” Of Grammatology. By Jacques Derrida. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
• Wellbery, David E. Forward. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. By Friedrich Kittler. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990.