Kittler

Works

Two books carry the argument and a third is where it overreaches.

• Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1985) sets out the concept of a writing-down system — the technologies and institutions by which a culture selects, stores and processes what counts as data.
• Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) maps three technical media onto a Lacanian triad, arguing that what writing had held together was split across separate machines around 1900.
• Optical Media and the essays on information systems extend the analysis to computation and to the military origins of media technology.
• The late work on the Greek alphabet and on music is generally regarded, including by sympathetic readers, as having come loose from its evidence.

Central ideas

Four, and the first two are a single move stated twice.

• Media determine our situation. The medium is not a channel carrying a message but the condition of there being a message — what can be inscribed precedes what can be said, and what cannot be recorded does not survive to be interpreted.
• Anti-hermeneutics: he wanted to drive the spirit out of the humanities. Meaning is not the object of study; the material arrangements that make an utterance storable are.
• The discourse networks of 1800 and 1900: the earlier one organised around the voice, the alphabetised child and an interiority that poetry could express; the later one around gramophone, film and typewriter, where that interiority becomes technically unnecessary because the machines record the real directly.
• Technical media store noise. A gramophone captures what nobody meant, which writing never could, and that difference is what makes 1900 a different situation rather than a better-equipped 1800.

Distinctive vocabulary

Three terms that are technical and are used loosely everywhere.

• Discourse network: the technical and institutional system by which a culture records and processes data. Not discourse, not a communication network, and not a professional field.
• Media: recording, storage and transmission technologies. Not the press and not communications as an industry.
• The real: in his Lacanian usage what escapes symbolisation, which technical media capture and writing cannot. Not reality.

Debates and disagreements

The two objections are the determinism and the self-contradiction.

• Whether the determinism is a claim or a stance. Stated flatly it is vulnerable to everything usually said against technological determinism — that technologies are socially shaped, that uses diverge from affordances, that people act. He declined to qualify it, and critics reasonably read that as evasion rather than rigour.
• Whether an anti-hermeneutic programme can be carried out through sustained close reading of Goethe, Nietzsche and Rilke, which is what he actually does. The charge of performative contradiction is the standing one and it has force.
• Whether claims about the discourse network can rest on a canonical Germanophone literary archive.

Intellectual relationships

He extends one predecessor downward and defines himself against another.

• Foucault's archaeology of discourse is the model, extended below the level Foucault worked at — the objection that an archive stops at the library is the whole programme in one line.
• Lacan supplies the triad of real, imaginary and symbolic that the three media are mapped onto.
• McLuhan is the precursor he rejects: media as extensions of man is exactly the humanism the programme is written against.
• Shannon's information theory and Turing supply the technical vocabulary and the computational horizon.
• Ong, in this same lens lineage, works the same terrain from orality and literacy rather than from hardware.

How it changes this reading

Kittler is named in the lineage of the Media-theoretic lens, and his presence argues against another lens this work uses.

• He supplies the hardest version of the lens's claim: a medium is not a channel for content but a condition of what can be recorded and therefore of what can later be read at all.
• For a work that exists as a structured digital artifact assembled from a conversational record, that is a claim about its own substrate. What the medium permitted to be captured is prior to anything a reading can find in it, and no amount of interpretive care recovers what was never storable.
• The tension with the Hermeneutic lens is real and this entry states it rather than letting the two sit side by side unremarked. Kittler's programme is explicitly against reading for meaning; a work that runs both lenses is running an argument, not a toolkit.
• It is not evidence about how any particular record was produced or about anyone's use of any medium.

Useful comparisons

The lens names four figures with four different objects.

• Marshall McLuhan: media as extensions of human faculties, aphoristic and fundamentally humanist.
• Friedrich Kittler: media as material conditions, archival and anti-hermeneutic.
• Lev Manovich: new media and software studies, worked empirically on cultural data and interfaces.
• Walter Ong: orality and literacy, and the claim that writing restructures consciousness.

Where the ideas meet

None of the four treats a medium as a neutral pipe.

• None treats a technology of inscription as indifferent to what passes through it.
• All four hold that a change of medium changes what is possible rather than only what is convenient.
• Each treats the material conditions of recording as belonging to the analysis rather than preceding it.

Where they part

The four are not four versions of one thesis.

• McLuhan's media extend a human being; Kittler's are not extensions of anyone, and the rejection of that humanism is explicit rather than a difference of emphasis.
• Ong's claim is about consciousness — writing restructures thought — while Kittler's is about the channel and is indifferent to consciousness. Ong's divide thesis and Kittler's determinism are both contested, and they are contested for different reasons.
• Manovich works empirically on software and data; Kittler works archivally on hardware and literature, and their evidence is not commensurable.
• Across lenses: Kittler's programme is an argument against the hermeneutic reading this work also runs, which makes the two lenses opponents rather than complements.

Limits

• A claim about media conditions establishes nothing about how any particular text was produced or about what it contains.
• The determinism is an unqualified stance rather than a demonstrated finding and cannot be cited as one.
• The periodisation rests on a canonical European literary archive and does not generalise on its own authority.

Criticisms

The objections are substantial and one is structural.

• The technological determinism is left deliberately unqualified, which makes it rhetorically powerful and analytically hard to use.
• The anti-hermeneutic programme is conducted through close literary reading, which is the performative contradiction his critics press and which he never resolved.
• The archive is narrow, canonical and Germanophone, and claims about a culture's writing-down system are correspondingly bounded.
• The late work on the Greek alphabet and music is widely regarded as unmoored from evidence.
• The prose is deliberately difficult and the aphorisms are asked to carry weight the arguments do not supply.

Common misreadings

Four uses this placement does not license.

• Citing that media determine our situation as an established finding rather than as the unqualified provocation it was written as.
• Using discourse network for discourse, or for a communications network.
• Reading him as a rigorous McLuhan, when the rejection of McLuhan's humanism is the point of the programme.
• Using the framework to explain what a particular text means, which is exactly the question it declines to ask.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish anything about how a particular record was made or about who made it.
• It cannot convert a claim about media conditions into a fact about a life.