The disappearance of literature: Friedrich Kittler’s path to media theory

On 22 March 1982, in Berkeley, California, a young Friedrich Kittler looks out at the Golden Gate Bridge and fixes his gaze firmly on ‘our hyper-realistic future’. With some emphasis he notes that readers and people in general are ‘from now on subject to gadgets and instruments of mechanical discourse processing’ (Kittler 1997a: 84). At this point in time, the postdoctoral professorial dissertation Aufschreibesysteme 1800–1900 had already been submitted, if not yet accepted or published. In a piece of work which aimed at acquiring the venia legendi in German Philology, and which begins and ends with an analysis of Faust, we find, alongside the names of great poets, sentences which would strike anyone in German Literary Studies as unusual. Sentences such as: ‘Technologically possible manipulations determine what in fact can become a discourse’ (Kittler 1990: 232). So it is not the author of hermeneutics, the genius or the creator of original works, who determines what becomes a discourse. Kafka’s text production, for instance, is not even about God or the father (who might otherwise determine what becomes a discourse) but rather about ‘the modalities of the technological channels of information – cross-talk and delay, networks and noise-levels' (1990: 363). In order to understand ‘Kafka’s correspondence with Felice Bauer, one must understand how the mail and the railroad, the telephone and the telegram, the gramophone and the typewriter work. Kafka, too, is their subject.

Subject is to be taken literally here: something ‘subjected’. Media are not instruments and tools in the hands of sovereign lords or authors, but rather the terms of our subjectification. Who we are is dictated by our Leitmedia: programmed. ‘For one writes – the “under” says it already – as a subject or underling of that company which develops and markets the operating system’ (Kittler 1997a: 156). The ‘humanist premise that language is realised in conversation and the conversation in the human being’ is turned on its head in Kittler’s hypothesis that the human being is not realized in conversation, but rather vanishes. And this ‘disappearance of the human being’ does not ‘stop at language but has always been incalculably perpetuated through scripts and media’ (Kittler 1993: 150). Languages, media, news technologies, systems of media clusters – they all share the characteristic that they ‘capture their subjects' (1993: 149).

The answer to the question of ‘whose subjects, and that means whose subordinates' we are, is provided by Kittler with reference to Jacques Lacan, who replaces Freud’s subconscious with ‘gadgets and instruments' from ‘microscopes to radio and television’, whose ‘subjects' (1993: 53) we ultimately are. Kittler’s media theory adopts and radicalizes the structuralist conviction, shared also by Lacan, that all ‘interhuman reality’ is structured by a symbolic order (Laplanche and Pontalis 1980: 440): it is not enough to claim that the symbolic is structured like language, as languages can only produce those realities which they are able to store, process and transmit (Kittler 1997b: 649). Every language, both natural and artificial, uses different operators, addresses and commands; every epoch realizes different possibilities of producing, storing, transmitting and processing data (1997b: 650). Greek is not German, as Kittler demonstrates by means of the Bible translation in Goethe’s Faust (Kittler 1990: 7ff.), and the handwritten word is a different medium to its printed or digitalized counterparts. Media make a difference. And ‘a medium is a medium is a medium. Therefore it cannot be translated. To transfer messages from one medium to another always involves re-shaping them to conform to new standards and materials' (Kittler 1990: 265). To entrust a message to different media means to change it at the same time. A medial transcription does not leave a message unaltered. It makes sense to look at medial epochs from this perspective, to re-examine those historical aprioris, whose ‘standards and materials' continually re-format the messages of the West.

The relation (here Kittler quotes Lacan) ‘between man and the signifier’ constitutes ‘the moorings that anchor his being’ (1990: 10). This relation is also maintained by media, and our being (or the historical human world, accessible to us in a specific situation) is dependent on the media clusters which first produce and manipulate Lacan’s signifiers. Or in the words of another authority: the ‘current conception’ of technology as a ‘means to an end’ and a ‘human activity’ is false, for technology is in its essence the opening up of ‘our human existence’ (Heidegger 2003: 252). According to Heidegger, technology is a ‘way of revealing’; it opens a sphere of ‘truth’ (2003: 255). This is also precisely Kittler’s premise. Our insertion into our existence can only be understood when we are familiar with the specific technology which causes this to occur. This is the context in which we must read the apodictic statement that ‘nothing actually is, that is not switchable’ (Kittler 1993: 152). We could call this in reference to Heidegger a media-ontological hypothesis.

In none of his texts does Kittler retreat from these fundamental convictions regarding the generation of both meaning and world through media, or the subjectification and subjugation of the human being. On the contrary, they are even further radicalized. For not only ‘from now on’ (in other words ever since the computer first began its victory march at the end of the Second World War) have we been subject to the media clusters surrounding us, but rather since the introduction of the Greek alphabet. ‘What remains of people is what media can store and communicate’, Kittler declares in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Kittler 1999: xl). And ‘what is' in any given situation (like Foucault with his a prioris, Kittler always thinks historically) depends on the specific state of the media. This hypothesis establishes a first epoch in the new ‘interface’ of the Ionian vowel-alphabet (Kittler 2003: 637) and progresses through the ‘printing presses or mainframe computers' (Kittler 1999: xl) all the way up to the internet (1999: 1ff.).

So it is not the ‘general digitization’ which first gave us the sounds, images, voices and texts as ‘surface effects, known to consumers as interface’ (1999: 1), but rather the alphabet. For, according to the conviction which informs Kittler’s most recent works on antiquity, ‘in early Greece the phonetic alphabet already [amalgamated] language, music and mathematics – something which would only be achieved again by the computer over two millennia later’ (Winthrop-Young 2011: 576) For Alphas and Omegas do not only record ‘speech sounds' but also ‘integers', ‘singing voices' and the ‘pitch of citharas' (Kittler 2006: 292). With one single system of notation (or ‘discourse system’) the Greeks, blessed by the muses, could therefore capture epics and tragedies, numbers and operators, melodies and pitch (2006: 120). Accordingly, ‘sound and image, voice and text’ have not reached us as consumers through one single medium only since the ‘general digitization’ (Kittler 1999: 1), but rather ever since antiquity.

What remains, however, is not what the poets bequeathed but what was written down. And what is written down, be it mathematical laws, verses, music, poems or dialogues, always has a direct relationship to the medium in which it is written – or, more precisely in Kittler’s sense, to the medium which writes itself. Kittler rejects the idea that media are channels through which poets send their messages, calling it self-aggrandizement on the side of the poets (Kittler 1990: 265ff.). That ‘media determine our situation’ is as true today as it was 2500 years ago (Kittler 1999: xxxix). Yet not the media alone. There is also the discursive reduction of what might be possible: ‘No discourse ... can manage without authorized controls. In no culture is the dice throw of discourse not steered and curbed, checked and organized’ (Kittler 1990: 16). What refers here to Goethe’s Faust, who cannot translate the Bible into all conceivable variants, holds since biblical times: ‘The immortality of the Gods – to continue speaking with Foucault – derives very simply from a discourse regulation. Discourse rules do not only dictate which sentences can be formed from which elements, but also which sentences must be omitted’ (Kittler and Vismann 2001: 18). And this has held true from antiquity up to the ‘protected mode’ of computer chips, whose access-protected systems of binary digits not only enable ‘what the system is permitted to do’, but also dictate what the ‘user software is forbidden from doing’ (Kittler 1993: 214).

From this brief overview we can perhaps derive five central hypotheses, which pervade Kittler’s writings throughout four decades:

1. Enabling: Media open up our existence. From the Gods and heroes, geometries and laws of ancient Greece to our virtual worlds of media clusters – it is media which enable ‘what is', or also what is simulated or feigned. All ‘sense perceptions had to be fabricated first’, and this occurs through media (Kittler 1999: 3).

2. Reduction: Not everything that could be possible actually comes to be. Discourse rules dictate what may not be said or what cannot be calculated. Media need not be viewed only in terms of the possibilities that they open up in order to provide the ‘senses' with ‘eyewash’ and ‘glamour’, or to produce ‘interface effects' (Kittler 1999: 1, 2). The ‘domination’ (p. 3) of technical media is only what it is because it also reduces. Power is inherent to media.

The ‘task bequeathed by Foucault’ of the ‘analysis of power systems' is taken up by Kittler and re-formulated: the task is ‘no longer, as is customary, to seek to think of power as a function of society, but, in reverse, to construct sociology from the perspective of chip architectures' (Kittler 1993: 215). Along with Foucault, Kittler conceives of power as reduction and, with Carl Schmitt, as the control of its ‘access conditions' – something which holds as much for the ‘antechamber’ (p. 215) as it does for the ‘privilege levels of a microprocessor’ (p. 215) or a symposium (Kittler and Vismann 2001: 67ff).

3. Historization: Kittler conceptualizes media techniques and discourse rules concretely and historically. He names both time and place of their appearance. He never speaks of the media, but always of specific media (Kittler 1999: 2). This holds equally for the role of war as the father of all things and all media: surface-to-air and aerial combat produce different media clusters than trench warfare or Blitzkrieg do. The concrete analyses are always, to use the fashionable word, situated. In the same manner, Kittler never speaks of the power, but always of the rules of empowerment and reduction at work within a specific culture. His media-archaeological program states: ‘Instead of seeking to simply grasp all the inscription operators existing today, it would be more prudent and methodical to first begin their archaeology and to examine when and for what purpose a specific operator was introduced, and also when and why it did not exist’ (Kittler 1993: 151).

4. Abolishing the ‘two cultures': In the introduction to the English edition of Optical Media, John Durham Peters correctly notes that Kittler is an ‘enemy of the notion that there is such a thing as “the two cultures” of sciences and humanities, as we say in English, or “Geist und Natur”, as they say in Germany’ (Peters 2010: 2). Media, cultural techniques, systems of notation not only enable and delimit what is regarded as literature or the fine arts but also the fields of mathematics, physics or chemistry. Not only poems and epics are written with alphabetic characters, but formulae and numbers as well. For Kittler, ignoring this was one of the humanities' most disastrous mistakes, something which prevents their knowledge of the most fundamental objects. This is why the first chapter of Discourse Networks (1800) begins with an equation by Euler, and the second (1900) with an algorithm by Balzano (Kittler 1990: 2, 175). The fact that Goethe of all people disrupts the media-technical unity of mind and nature is something that Kittler begrudges. He quotes and comments on one of Goethe’s letters to Karl Friedrich Naumann from 24 January 1826, in which the poet writes:

Here I am at the limit which God and nature has assigned to my individuality. I am compelled to depend upon word, language and image in the most precise sense, and am wholly unable to operate in any manner whatever with symbols and numbers which are easily intelligible to the most highly gifted minds. (in Moritz 1958: 158)

In a treatise by Naumann, Goethe’s ‘here’ marks the ‘limit’ between word and number, image and symbol. Goethe fails to continue reading because he wants nothing to do with symbols and numbers. To this Kittler comments: ‘This sacred but disastrous alliance of language and image, God and nature, father and mother has been the foundation of the humanities to this day’ (Kittler and Vismann 2001: 137).

The humanities have followed Goethe and stopped reading as soon as words and images become numbers and symbols, although both numbers and symbols on the one hand, and words and images on the other, share a common history which Kittler traces back to antiquity in his most recent texts. In many of his works Kittler demonstrates, using some of the ‘sacred’ texts of the humanities and cultural studies, how the ‘excluded’ (p. 137) numbers and algorithms re-enter and help write the text.

5. Post-hermeneutics: Kittler has favourite authors, Thomas Pynchon for instance. Others authors such as Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Benn and Jünger are frequently quoted. Or to put it more precisely: there are certain passages which are frequently quoted. These are those passages which deal not with ‘word, language and image’, as Goethe supposed, but contre coeur with numbers and symbols. The thesis that, media reflexively, even literature has always been subverted by a separation into ‘two cultures' leads to strict selectivity and to a terrible awkwardness. For Kittler a little piece by Arno Schmidt (‘Offener Brief’ from 1985) becomes a statement about literature in general. To Schmidt’s cryptogram (‘ 8 c 357 8xup ZEUs! id 21v18 Pt 7…’) Kittler remarks: ‘Under the conditions of high technology, literature has nothing more to say’ (Kittler 1999: 263). Well, actually it does, but what it otherwise has to say cannot be formulated as an observation of its media-technical preconditions. Thus it becomes uninteresting to Kittler. Whatever cannot be conceptualized as an observation of switching, operators and media lies outside of Kittler’s focus and, accordingly, has no place in his otherwise broad oeuvre. For the same reason, we find no complete interpretation of one entire work, but only analyses of specific passages. This is only consistent for Kittler leaves this particular hermeneutic category behind him. On the other hand, we can say: he has no choice. His method is not suited to one single work.

In one of his seminars in Bochum, Kittler once tore up a Reclam booklet in order to analyse individual pages without looking at the context. This grandiose renunciation of the tradition which requires two readings of any work, first the cursory reading and then the detailed perusal of individual passages, owes itself to a theory which can demonstrate its general media-historical theses only by means of selected passages of text. Of course, the reader of Kittler’s works comes to know a great deal about these passages.

Translated by Dale Adams, Melbourne University