Friedrich Kittler

Mary Holliman

Background

• He was born in 1943 in Rochlitz, Saxony (Germany) and he died on October 18, 2011 in Berlin (Germany)

• In 1976 he earned his Ph.D. • His research/work is

focused on media, history, communications, technology, and the military

• Strongly influenced by Jacques Lacan's and Michel Foucault's writings

• Derrida of the digital age

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

• Examines the restrictive nature of Michel Foucault’s textual archive theory

• Proposes a wider media band where he examines phonographic and cinematic flows as ways of deconstructing literary writing

• Kittler uses Lacan’s notion of the real, imaginary and symbolic from the data channels of the phonograph, cinema and typewriter

Key Points • Optical Fiber Networks:

– Soon people will be connected to a communication channel which can be used for any kind of media

– The previously separate media of television, radio, telephone, and mail will become a single medium, standardized according to transmission frequency and bit format

• Since the invention of the phonograph/kinetoscope we’ve been in possession of storage technologies that can record and reproduce the time flow of acoustic and optical data

• Ears and eyes have become autonomous

Phonograph/Cinematograph

• Had the ability to store time

• A mixture of audio frequencies in the acoustic realm, as a movement of single picture sequences in the optic realm

Arguing Foucault

• History as an academic subject was only seen through literate cultures

• Only written accounts (archives) were considered as history

• Foucault argued all power comes from written archives; writing was the universal medium

• Kittler argues that this changes with the coming of the phonograph/cinematograph

• “Literature is a fragment of fragments; only the smallest proportion of what took place and what was said was written down, while only the smallest proportion of what was written down has survived.”

• Writing merely stores the fact of its authorization

Typewriter

• Writing was no longer the ink or pencil trace of the body whose optical and acoustic signals were lost

• Separation or Differentiation: – On the one hand there are

two technical media which can, for the first time, fix unwritable data flows

– On the other hand there is "something in between tool and machine" (Heidegger)

“Typewriters do not store individuals; their letters do not communicate a beyond that perfectly alphabetized readers can subsequently hallucinate as meaning…the historical synchronicity of cinema, phonography, and typewriting separated optical, acoustic, and written data flows, thereby rendering them autonomous.”

Lacan’s “Methodological Distinction”

• Symbolic: includes the signs of language in their materiality and technicity; they form, as letters and ciphers, a finite set which does not address the philosophical dream of an infinity of meaning

• The Imaginary: the mirror image of a body which appears to be more perfect as regards its motor control than the body of an infant. The imaginary thereby implements precisely that optical illusion which was being explored at the beginning of film.

• The Real: nothing more can be brought into the daylight than what Lacan had presupposed in its being given - nothing.

• Methodological distinctions of modern psychoanalysis and technical distinctions of the modern media landscape merge

• Kittler compares the typewriter to the symbolic, the imaginary to the cinema and the real to the phonograph

“Once the technological differentiation of optics, acoustics, and writing exploded Guttenberg’s writing monopoly around 1880, the fabrication of so-called Man became possible.”

The Computer • Extension of the all three inventions

Kittler talks about: gramophone, film, and typewriter

• A present example of how Kittler describes of what makes man’s ears and eyes autonomous

• Represents how man is split up into physiology and information technology