User:Colm/RW&RS-Media-theory-after-poststructuralism

RW&RS: F. Kittler essays: Introduction by John Johnston

Media theory After Poststructuralism

Fiber Optics Networks: Connecting up the "Present"

^p1_| Collection of essays, focus on the multiple relations between 20th century technical media and litterature, psychoanalysis, war and computer technology.

Grammphon, Film, Typewriter (1986): Kittler details the technological separation and storage procedure brought about by the title objects. Meanwhile straight @ 1st chapter: the idea that as the century dawns to an end, the differences detailed before will all disappear in the digital numbers of the feedback loop.

^p2_| With the full deployment of fibre optic cables & computer technologies our "sense of perception" will devolve into a "dependant variable".

Dependent variable ⇋ a workout of a scenario between engineers and sales people.

What passes for reality (=mix of meaningful words and images) will only work until the separation of media that defines our modernity has ended. => K's example of media on a large aeroplane flight / today's example would be a smart TV (?)

« [...]For Kittler today's situation is defined by the inventors and technicians who understand the technology and know how it «constructs our sense of perception» on the one hand, and the end users and consumers increasingly depend on it who are kept distanced and ignorant by an array of user friendly devices on the other. »

^p3_|

In America there seems to be greater loyalty to industrial achievement than there is in Europe there's a morality that dictates that one should not hack or patch or copy. The result, it seems to me, is that one is that much more hopelessly surrendered to the industrially determined products while their foam packing turned to the outside sells as cyberspace ideology. I looked at a few issues of Mondo 2000 in this light. So there's one guru or prophet who writes the programs, and everyone else is a consumer who doesn't intervene in the process in any serious way, especially not at the level of hardware, but just lets it run until it has built up a largely literary science fiction phantasm on top of itself.

^p4_|

DN2000

Sets apart and contrasts two different discourse networks: the 19th century romanticism and early 20th century modernism.

Notions of what an author is, what makes a text literature. What defines the act of reading and writing are all the historically determined aspects of a larger communication system.

Literature, then, can be treated as a form of data processing: texts receive and store, process and transmit information in a way «not structurally different computers».

We progress through time → with new forms of data storage then with computers. Now thress capacities of media are interlocked: storage, transmission and calculation. So we're back at the notion of the immateriality of a digital age.

^p5_|Film, phonograph, typewriter —are all data flows of— optics, acoustics and writing. These disciplines get separated in the 20th cent with digitisation. An other way of saying it would be that electrical technologies bring them back together. <quote>Partially connected media systems</quote>

K has to come to the acknowledgement that his own work is part of his own DN.

^p6_|Questions on the arrival of a new DN2000? K has looked over the DN's of 1800 & 1900: [...] Universal alphabetisation circa 1800 and the technological datastorage circa 1900 constitute just such turning points, for which there is insufficient evidence within about fifteen years.

Communications and/or Computation

An ambiguity in K's work as to where to situate it within a DN and even, inside which one.

The questions of the status of the communication model he employs and depicts become more pressing with Kittler's later work.

^p7_|A depiction is made of how chaos theory and complexity, self organisation and emergence, connection-ism and neural networks, strides in molecular biology and artificial life all proletarianise the computational model.

^p8_|While the question of the newer work cries for help on the development of the terms to recognise the present "situation"; Kittler's work does help confront and extend a lot of the best regarded 20th century theory on technology. He includes and develops upon Heidegger, McLuhan, Baudrillard, Virillio, ...

Also an effort to recontextualise and transform french poststructuralism

• deployed to revitelise media theory
• applying media theory to litterature in the best of ways

In sum, by making discourse analysis "high tech", by providing the means for connecting scientific discourse with literacy and cultural discourse. [...]

Nervensprache: The Discourse Network Circa 1900:

The interest in the discourse of our mordernity, and more specifically it's antimony.

"Memoirs of My Nervous Illness" — Daniel Paul Schreber - 1903 Then Freud's Notes on these Memoirs, published as "Psycho-Analytics Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoïa".

^p9_|This text by F is viewed as delusional by many, is it a delusional interpretation or are the memoirs a better depiction of what only F could see at the time, than most are ready to admit?

Why should knowledge and delirium exhibit such a precise symmetry of structure? Kittler's answer: both depend on the DN of 1900.

Discourse Network ⇋ translation from German compound word: Aufschreibesystem — which is Schreber's neologism for 'notation' or 'writing-down-system' that he uses to transcribe a mysterious Nervesprache or 'nerve language' all thoughts as they arrive to him.

Kittler takes from this:

• the idea of an impersonal and automatic notation system
• the position of Scherber, both body and text, in regards to a specific DN.

1. The Aufschreibesystem: deployed by K to designate the archive of what is inscribed by a culture at a particular moment in time

^p10_| The Notion of the DN points to the fact that at any given cross-section moment in the life of a culture, only certain data (and no other) are selected, stored, processed, transmitted or calculated, all else being "noise".

So an outside is also being described here, be it implicitly or explicitly: as you make a selection of specific data you institute certain subjects as senders and otehr as recievers of discourse.

- Removing casual and expressive means for a communication does not remove material context. While a discourse net by definition has no center of origin, it serves precisely to link bodies and institutions.

Here the acknowledgement is made to the origin: Foucault's theory of Discourse -> author function -> power knowledge but also it's limits to this context, and it's limits when addressing it's time.

^p11_| With the invention of Phonograph, film, acoustics, optics [...] "writing ceased to be synonymous with the serial storage of data."

Poetic "Alphabêtise"

What must it have been like to read a book 150 years ago?
reading before dataflows got separated
hallucinating a meaning between letters and lines.
This experience of reading comes from the new phonetic teachings of langage → dematerialisation of the linguistic sign by phonetical substitution.

^p12_| Displacement of signs into phonetics enacted in Goethe's Faust: out of a series of crossed signifiers the transcendal signified emerges.
the same spirit brings Faust to Mephisto — and poetic license ends in a pact with the devil.

Kittler demonstrates that the other signatory in the pact with mephisto is actually the State.
-> while poetry, at once, means and goal of understanding, presides over the new DN of 1800, it is watched over at "a modes distance" by an apparatus of power that operates not through understanding but control.

It is a power that remains inaccessible to the new methods of reading and understanding that it supports.

^p13_|Poetry stands at the apotheosis of the DN of 1800.
this power is simply the poetic faculty of Imagination, the sense that can replace all other senses

"It was not enough that in their own domain the flow of sound rather than letters should dominate; poetic words would liquidate, that is, liquefy, stones and colors, sounds and building materials, all kinds of materialities and techniques of the body, until the Imagination could replace all senses" (DN 114).

↳ Imagination to replace all senses through the liquification from signs into sounds, liquefy, liquidate, stones and color, sounds and material.

Electricity ends the classical-romatic exploration of Reading.

↳ reproduction of this scheme in movies, later → synthetic, hallucinatory power of the word.

Litterature's essence derices from the facta that is consists of re-arrangements of 26 letters on a white page.

→ (back)to the typewriter: "our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts""

^p14_|

Nietzsche's Typewriter

The notion of style itself derives from stylus or writing instrument.

K demonstrates that the T-W's unliking of hand, eye and letter decomposes the organic shroud that in the DN1800 enclosed the speaker in the reverberating orality [...].

^p15_|

Turing calls the (tw) machine a discrete gesture — a constrast to Heidegger: something between machine and tool.

Nietzsche point's a way out: According to his theory of language we are twice removed from the continuities of the 19th century nature. ↳ or it there is a nature, it is physiological, the domain of nerve. → the jump from this to articulate language takes two jumps and two metaphors:

1. Nerve impulse → image
2. image → sound

each time there is a loop from one into a completely new one (loop)

Language, consequentlu has nothing to do with truth or adequate expression, only designates the relations of things to human beings by utilizing the most daring metaphors; it is litteraly in it's fondations.

^p16_|By rendering the eye and ear autonomous, N's theory of language anticipates in it's very formulation the difference that new technology media -Type -Film -Phono will bring out

Pink Noise, or Phychophysics

Notes still in progress