LANGUAGE–MEDIA

LANGUAGE–MEDIA

Warren S. McCulloch and Jacques Lacan – Play Like an Idiot

]]

ANNOTATING:
|...| Geoffrey Winthrop-Young & Michael Wurtz’s preface to Fredrich A. Kittler’s Gramophone, Film Typewriter.

The notion of exteriority in relation to the code (and language) is central to Lacan’s understanding of cybernetics. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young & Michael Wurtz, in the preface to Fredrich A. Kittler’s Gramophone, Film Typewriter, write of the consequences of recognizing that language is exterior to the subject, and how the premise of exteriority extends into postmodern theory (particularly the blend of Lacan and Foucault found in F. Kittler’s media theory).

“Step 1: We understand that we are spoken by language. [Lacan]

Step 2: We understand that language is not some nebulous entity but appears in the shape of historically limited discursive practices [Foucault].

We finally perceive that these practices depend on media [Kittler].

In short structuralism begot discourse analysis, and discourse analysis begot media theory.”

We can see that the very notion of discourse, as formulated by Foucault and later elaborated into a media theory by Kittler, bears the same epistemological stamp as cybernetics (and its precursor, conjectural science). Discourse itself is always already caught in a feedback loop, a self-grounding ontology.

In Seminar II Lacan points out that conjectural science introduces processes of thought that are independent of the subject. This is parallel to Lacan’s notion of the subject who is de-centered in relation to the individual, one who is affected by processes (language/langue) which are not identical to the conscious subject. Lacan, however, argues against the reductive implication that there is only an “intersubjective coordination” and begins to reclaim that which is between us and exceeds us (the symbolic). In the first instance the symbolic might be embodied in the apparatus, but in the human subject there is a productive excess. The “proof” of this, for Lacan, is that “nothing unexpected comes out of a machine.”