Drill and distraction in the yellow submarine: On the dominance of war in Friedrich Kittler's media theory

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 28, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 825-854

  Winthrop Young, Geoffrey ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33845401685     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/341236     Document Type: Review

References (61)

1. "Manchmal kommt es mir so vor, als ob wir uns all die Jahre nur darum bemüht hätten, ein Erfahrungs-Äquivalent zu dem zu schaffen, was für unsere Eltern der Krieg war; vor allem mußte es intensiv, existentiell und möglichst tragisch sein" (Matthias Horx, Das Ende der Alternativen, oder, Die verlorene Unschuld der Radikalität: Ein Rechenschaftsbericht[Munich, 1989], p. 7).
2. Norbert Bolz, Am Ende der Gutenberg-Galaxis: Die neuen Kommunikationsverhältnisse (Munich, 1993), p. 130.
3. For details, see Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, "Translators' Introduction: Friedrich Kittler and German Media Discourse Analysis," in Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Winthrop-Young and Wutz (1986; Stanford, Calif., 1999).
4. See Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph 1877-1977: From Edison to Stereo, 2d. ed. (New York, 1977), pp. 286-87.
5. Brian Southall, Abbey Road: The Story of the World's Most Famous Recording Studio (Cambridge, 1982), p. 37.
6. For details on the aborted Bell Lab developments, see Mark Clark, "Suppressing Innovation: Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording," Technology and Culture 34 (July 1993): 516-38. Clark argues that AT&T's upper echelons were unwilling to market Hickmann's work because they feared that people would use their phones less if there were a possibility that their conversations could be taped.
7. Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, p. 282.
8. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, p. 103; hereafter abbreviated GFT.
9. See Jochen Hörisch, Ende der Vorstellung: Die Poesie der Medien (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), p. 170.
10. See Kittler, Draculas Vermächtnis (Leipzig, 1993).
11. Parts of this collection were translated as Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems, trans. Stefanie Harris et al., ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam, 1997).
12. Bolz, Theorie der neuen Medien (Munich, 1990), p. 82.
13. Unlike Kittler, Bolz follows McLuhan's more anthropocentric narrative by conceptualizing media as extensions and prostheses of the human body. Taking an additional cue from Walter Benjamin (in particular, from the section "To the Planetarium" at the conclusion of One-Way Street), Bolz argues that from the point of view of media technology war is nothing but accelerated technological change "that punishes humans for not adequately exploiting the massive technological means, that is: for failing to use them as extensions of themselves" (p. 99). Benjamin had described technology as a physis "through which mankind's contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form," a contact characterized by major shake-ups and disorientation. "In the nights of the annihilation of the last war, the frame of mankind was shaken by a feeling that resembled the bliss of the epileptic. And the revolts that followed were the first attempt of mankind to bring the new body under its control" (Walter Benjamin, "One-Way Street," trans. Edmund Jephcott, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 2 vols. to date [Cambridge, Mass., 1996- ], 1: 487).
14. Though Kittler correctly points out that Zuse was unsuccessful in offering to Army Communications his "binary calculator" as an encryption machine, he later claims - in line with his narrative of the World War II-driven evolution of early computers - that at the end of the war it was used to determine "in the bunkers of the Harz the fate of the V2" (GFT, p. 259).
15. In his memoirs Zuse tells a very different (and very Pynchonesque) story. The fourth machine assembled in his parents' apartment, the Z4, was also known as the "V4" (Versuchsmodell or "experimental model" [p. 91] ).
16. Because this sounded and looked a lot like V1 and V2, one of his collaborators managed to persuade the authorities to order Zuse and his fellow workers to move the Z4/V4 out of besieged Berlin to one of the underground ordnance factories near Göttingen, where thousands of concentration camp inmates were assembling the V2 rockets. The group took one look at the inhuman conditions, secured an army truck, and escaped to the South German Allgäu region to sit out the end of the war; see Zuse, The Computer - My Life, trans. Patricia McKenna and J. Andrew Ross, ed. Hans Wössner (Berlin, 1993), pp. 91-94.
17. The source of Kittler's mistake appears to be Andrew Hodges's biography of Alan Turing - a text of almost canonic status in the Kittlerian media school. Hodges claims that "Zuse calculators were used in the engineering of V2 rockets, and in 1945 Zuse himself was installed in the Dora underground factory" (Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma [New York, 1983], p. 299).
18. In a detailed analysis, Thomas Goldstrasz and Henrik Pantle use the example of Zuse to make the point against Kittler that even in the case of early digital technology some media were developed not because but in spite of the war. The authors also contacted Hodges regarding the contradiction between his and Zuse's own account, to which Hodges replied: "There is no contradiction - simply my mistake ... It is the worst mistake that has come to light .... It surprises me that no-one has noticed this error before; not even in the seven years in which it [the Turing biography] has been available in German translation" (Thomas Goldstrasz and Henrik Pantle, "Informatik und Heeresgerät: Die Entwicklung des Computers während des Zweiten Weltkriegs," at http://www.informatik. hu-berlin.de/WW2/weltkriegscomputer) .
19. See Timothy Lenoir, "All but War Is Simulation: The Military-Entertainent Complex," Configurations 8, no. 3 (2000): 289-335.
20. Wolfgang Hagen, "Mediendialektik: Zur Archäologie eines Scheiterns," in Medien und Öffentlichkeit: Positionierungen - Symptome - Simulationsbrüche, ed. Rudolf Maresch (Munich, 1996), p. 43.
21. Hörisch, Ende der Vorstellung, p. 174.
22. The second major precondition for the release of radio into the civilian sphere was the German army's ability to ensure the secrecy of its messages even if illegally intercepted. In another strategic escalation, the development and dissemination of the new communication technology led to a countermove in the shape of the ENIGMA; that is, public radio necessitated the encryption of airborne messages; see Kittler, "Media Wars: Trenches, Lightning, Stars," Literature, Media, Information Systems, p. 122. Either frequencies are inaccessible or messages are incomprehensible; if neither can be guaranteed, the technology will not be divulged.
23. Bernhard Siegert, "Es gibt keine Massenmedien," in Medien und Öffentlichkeit, p. 111.
24. For a sample of Kittler's critique of the technologically ignorant Fabrikantensöhne (manufacturers' sons) Adorno and Horkheimer, see his "Copyright 1944 by Social Studies Association, Inc.," in Flaschenpost und Postkarte: Korrespondenzen zwischen Kritischer Theorie und Poststrukturalismus, ed. Sigrid Weigel (Cologne, 1995), pp. 185-93.
25. Some of most sustained attacks on the Left's failure to comprehend the materialities of communication have come from Maresch. See Maresch, "Mediatisierte Öffentlichkeiten," Leviathan: Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft 23, no. 3 (1995): 394-416.
26. Kittler, "Media Wars," p. 117.
27. Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968), p. 237.
28. Kittler, Dichter, Mutter, Kind (Munich, 1991), p. 17.
29. See Geoffrey Wilson, The Old Telegraphs (London, 1976), pp. 124,147.
30. For the following, see Patrice Flichy, Dynamics of Modern Communication: The Shaping and Impact of New Communication Technologies, trans. Liz Libbrecht (London, 1995), pp. 7-28.
31. Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," p. 223.
32. Siegert, "Es gibt keine Massenmedien," p. 112.
33. See Frank Hartmann, "Vom Sündenfall der Software, Medientheorie mit Entlarvungsgestus: Die Medien und Der Krieg," at http://www.heise.de/ tp/deutsch/special/med/6345/1.html.
34. For a recent example of the alleged tight link between Foucault and Kittler, see Kittler's short preface and Jan Engelmann's postscript to a new, media- and technology-based Foucault reader. See Michel Foucault, Botschaften der Macht: Der Foucault Reader, Diskurs und Medien, ed. Jan Engelmann (Stuttgart, 1999), pp. 7-9 and pp. 215-26, respectively.
35. For Kittler's appreciation of Foucault, see Kittler, "Ein Verwaiser," in Anschlüsse: Versuche nach Michel Foucault, ed. Gesa Dane, et al. (Tübingen, 1985), pp. 141-46.
36. Kittler, Discourse Networks, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif., 1990), p. 369.
37. See David Wellbery, introduction to Discourse Networks, p. xix.
38. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans, pub. (New York, 1973), p. 387.
39. Kittler, "Geschichte der Kommunikationsmedien," in Raum und Verfahren, ed. Jörg Huber and Alois-Martin Müller (Frankfurt am Main, 1993), p. 188.
40. The web journal Ctheory has an English translation at http://www.ctheory.com/ga1.14.html.
41. See Kittler, "Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second World War," trans. Wutz and Winthrop-Young, in Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology, ed. Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), pp. 157-72
42. and "Unconditional Surrender," trans. William Whobrey, in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford, Calif., 1994), pp. 314-34.
43. I am here only referring to the standard appreciation of Hobbes as the philosopher of the bellum omnium contra omnes. It would be very interesting, however, to read theorists such as Kittler against the background of Hobbes as the patriarch of artificial intelligence. See George B. Dyson, Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (Reading, Mass., 1997), pp. 1-13.
44. See Kittler, Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaft (Munich, 2000), p. 208.
45. See also Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (Braunschweig, 1877), p. 74.
46. In this respect it would be interesting to compare Gramophone, Film, Typewriter with Manuel De Landa's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York, 1991), which draws on complex systems analysis to describe the evolution of the "war machine."
47. See Kittler, "Pink Floyd, 'Brain Damage,'" Europalyrik 1775 his heute: Gedichte und Interpretationen, ed. Klaus Lindemann (Paderborn, 1982), pp. 467-77.
48. For this term - not used by Kittler - see Johnston, "Friedrich Kittler: Media Theory after Poststructuralism," introduction to Literature, Media, Information Systems, pp. 4-6.
49. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1969), p. 72.
50. It is, of course, possible to turn the tables on Kittler and other poststructuralist media theorists and perform a Foucauldian analysis of the medial a priori. This was recently undertaken by Dierk Spreen, who responds to the media-theoretical take on discourse analysis with a "discourse- analytical" take on media theory. The basic point is to show how media, rather than being the ground for symbolic production, move into its place within the discursive economy and thus inherit the contradictions of the symbolic a priori. Interestingly enough, Spreen also ends up by assigning a central position to war as paradigmatic for social self-descriptions. See Dierk Spreen, Tausch, Technik, Krieg: Die Geburt der Gesellschaft im technisch-medialen Apriori (Hamburg, 1998).
51. Keith W. Hoskin, "Education and the Genesis of Disciplinarity: The Unexpected Reversal," in Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity, ed. Ellen Messer- Davidow, David R. Shumway, and David J. Sylvan (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), p. 277.
52. For a detailed analysis, see Hoskin and Richard H. Macve, "Accounting as Discipline: The Overlooked Supplement," in Knowledges, pp. 25-53.
53. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, 1986), p. 12.
54. See Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, 1977).
55. Beniger, The Control Revolution, p. 225.
56. This attempt to counter Kittler with Beniger was first suggested by Jochen Schulte-Sasse, "Von der schriftlichen zur elektronischen Kultur: Über neuere Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Mediengeschichte und Kulturgeschichte," in Materialität der Kommunikation, ed. Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), pp. 429-35.
57. I first tried this link-up by attempting to complement Kittler's reading of Bram Stoker's Dracula with a Benigerian perspective in "Undead Networks: Information Processing and Media Boundary Conflicts in Dracula," in Literature and Science, ed. Donald Bruce and Anthony Purdy (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 107-29.
58. Kittler, "Wenn die Freiheit wirklich existiert, dann soll sie doch ausbrechen," in Am Ende vorbei, ed. Maresch (Vienna, 1994), p. 127.
59. See Winthrop-Young, "Silicon Sociology, or, Two Kings on Hegel's Throne? Kittler, Luhmann, and the Posthuman Merger of German Media Theory," Yale Journal of Criticism 13, no. 2 (2000): 391-420.
60. Rolling Stones, "Sympathy for the Devil," Beggars Banquet, London PS 539.
61. "Every sphere of German society must be shown as the partie honteuse of German society; these petrified relations must be forced to dance by singing their own tune to them! The people must be taught to be terrified at itself in order to give it courage" (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, trans. Clemens Dutt et al., 49 vols. to date [Moscow, 1975-], 3:178). Possible translation with an eye to media theory: Every sphere of technology has to be shown as suffused by the military; this has to be revealed by exposing and (out) performing its military logic. The people must be made aware of the terrifying nature of their means in order to enable them to use them more courageously.