Gramophone, Film, and

Typewriter (1987) Friedrich Kittler

 1943-2011
• He was born on 12 June 1943, in Rochlitz, a
small town in East Germany, as the son of two
fathers.
• His real father, a teacher, had lost most of his
students to the war and took to lecturing his
children instead, with the result that, already at
the age of 7, Kittler was able to recite long
passages from Goethe’s Faust off by heart.
• The other father, as it were, was his elder half-
brother, a former wireless operator who drew on
his wartime expertise to assemble illegal radios
using parts scavenged from abandoned military
aircraft.
• His life and work was to integrate these two
influences and one reality.
• Literature and Technology- War.
• Educated in 1960s University and its radical
influences.
 Work
• His work is a dense and detailed mediation on the interface between media and
culture.
• Kittler’s work is a sequence made up of three stages.
• The first stage, characterized by an innovative mix of poststructuralist theorems (in
particular, the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and the discourse analytical work of
Michel Foucault), was primarily concerned with literary texts.
• The second stage, which emerged in the early 1980s, focused on media: in
particular, phonography, cinematography, the typewriter induced mechanization of
writing, and the computer.
• The third stage is often referred to as "cultural technologies," which is a translation of
the German term "Kulturtechniken." This term encompasses a broad approach that
examines various aspects of communication, including media technologies, institutional
structures, and bodily practices. Additionally, it involves detailed examinations of sign
systems such as alphabets, mathematical notation systems, and musical notation systems.
• He can be called as a ‘technological determinist’.
• Kittler’s central concern is with control – that is, his determined focus
on historically differentiated instances of disciplining, inscription and
programming, which, tied to varying discursive and technological
regimes, shape human and machine subjects.
• Another pivotal issue (and indispensable for an understanding of
Kittler’s combative stance) is that of discontinuity – a forceful, at
times polemical emphasis on ruptures, breaks and caesuras designed to
obliterate any attempt to infuse history with gradualist, progressive,
teleological or dialectical notions. History is not smooth; it doesn’t
lead out of the cave of early illusions into the mature blaze of
enlightenment; it does not exhibit any growing intelligibility; and it
cannot be reduced to a fanciful relay of revolutionary subjects.
• The shift that concerned him most in his middle, ‘media’ stage, the
emergence of the ‘Discourse Network 1900’ is linked to the arrival of
new, analog Edisonian recording and storage technology.
• What is ‘Discourse Network’?
• "The network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to
select, store, and process relevant data."
• But what exactly is the difference between a book and a phonograph?
• The obvious answer is that writing operates in a symbolic realm by pressing
data through ‘the bottleneck of the signifier’ (Kittler, 1999: 4), while analog
media capture physical traces of the real in the shape of light or sound waves.
• This, no doubt, is a substantial rupture that changes the very basis of
representation and thus the expectations we have of reproductions.
• How developments technology- specially media technology- shift the
human experience and technological management of time-
• time –the irreversibility of which has always structured human experience – is
now increasingly open to technological manipulation:
• ‘What is unique about the technological era (from the gramophone to the
computer) is that these technologies allow one to store “real time” . . . and, at
the same time, to process “real time” as a temporal event.’
• At the same time, however, digital technologies now work at such speed that
increasingly their operation escapes human perception.
 Gramophone
• Thomas Alva Edison’s gramophone (1877) holds a privileged place in
Kittler’s media history because as a medium it inaugurates the storage of
the real.
• According to Kittler, the phonograph (unlike the book) registers the flow
of actual sound waves, real acoustic “data streams” -- the “data flow of
the real”.
• The real (as opposed to the imaginary and the symbolic) has its proper
birth with the advent of the gramophone.
• Unlike previous media forms that primarily dealt with symbols or
abstractions, the gramophone directly imprinted time or signal onto
physical matter, making matter itself a storage medium.
• The gramophone, with its capacity to record and reproduce sound,
represented a rupture in the unity of the subject that heard itself speak
or saw itself write.
• In the recording process, the gramophone acted as an artificial ear and
mouth, reconstructing the apparatus of speech and audition in a crude
manner.
• With the gramophone, music was no longer solely tied to live
performances or individual musicians. Instead, recorded music
divorced the auditory experience from the presence of performers,
leading to new modes of listening and experiencing music.
• Kittler's mediaology traces a progression from storage to transmission
to calculation or manipulation of data.