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, connectionism 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:

Note transcription work in progress