Kittler and Media

It’s hard not to be drawn into a work that characterizes the typewriter as a “discourse machine gun” (14). In an attempt to understand some of what Kittler is getting at in the introduction, let me unfurl the analogy a bit. The machine gun replaces the intimate, bodily traces of violence from the close encounter of a blade thrust by a hand. A machine, in other words, automates the violence of the aggressor and produces a mechanical mediation of violence that removes the body of the aggressor from the violence received by the victim. The mechanical mediation of a machine gun stores, processes, and delivers to a victim the violent acts of the embodied aggressor. Bodies are fully removed from the act of violence. Likewise, the typewriter removes the “trace of a body” that remained from the ink or graphite tracings of writing at the moment of production (13). The typewriter stores, processes, and delivers to a reader the communicative acts of the embodied author.

Okay, probably a pretty straightforward description here, and if you’re like me, you may be asking me so what? It seems to me that the so what is rooted in Kittler’s assertion in the preface that “Media determine our situation” (xxxix). A less generous reading might render the assertion hopelessly techno-deterministic, rail against the decline of the humanities, and admonish the self-inflicted nature of such a demise.

It seems to me, though, as we build off the proto-media theory of Benjamin and McLuhan, appropriate to situate Kittler’s arguments in context. In his analyses, it seems to me that Kittler’s work toward theorizing media stands on firmer ground. For instance, Kittler’s project seems to explicate how gramaphone, film, and typewriter mechanize aspects of the human sensorium–respectively vision, hearing, and language. That mechanization, he seems to be saying, presents a qualitative shift in human experience, a shift he explores in detail in the introduction with his exploration of writing. In other words, I find Kittler helpful in terms of challenging me to think through how media shape us at a concrete, material level.

Hassan mentioned in his reading of McLLuhan last week that perception is front and center as a theme throughout Understanding Media. I think this is where Kittler and McLuhan intersect most clearly: our sensual perceptions have fundamentally shifted in the kinds of media ecologies that we are immersed in compared to the media ecologies we experienced before the, say 19th century. And Aden, similarly, discussed McLuhan’s treatment of clocks as an extension of our eyes (end entire being) as a significant insight. I’d like to pursue those themes in class. To put it in question form, How are our sensorium and perceptions are altered by, and in turn alter, machines, materials, or media? Or how might we understand Kittler in terms of computational hardware?