DISCOURSE NETWORKS 1800/1900

DISCOURSE NETWORKS 1800/1900

Friedrich A. Kittler defines a discourse network as:

“[T]he network of technolo­gies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and pro­cess relevant data. Technologies like that of book printing and the institu­tions coupled to it, such as literature and the university, thus constituted a historically very powerful formation, which in the Europe of the age of Goethe became the condition of possibility for literary criticism.”

[discourse networks link]

“pysical, technological, discursive and social systems in order to provide epistemic snap-shots of a culture’s administration of power and knowledge.”

ANNOTATION

|...| John Johnston, forward to Literature, Media, Information Systems Essays by Friedrich A. Kittler Edited and Introduced by John Johnston, Routledge, 1997.

|...| Geoffrey Winthrop Young & Michael Wutz - Introduction to Kittler, Friedrich, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford, 1999

|...| Saul Ostrow Preface to Literature, Media, Information Systems Essays by Friedrich A. Kittler Edited and Introduced by John Johnston

|...||...| David E. Wellbery. Forward to Friedrich A. Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900

In Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Friedrich Kittler identifies two discourse networks: the discourse network of 1800 is defined by the technologies of the alphabet and printing which make writing the dominant medium of communication.

The 1800s witnessed a shift toward the discourse network 1900, in which the monopoly of the alphabet is broken by new technologies of storage and transmission – principally the camera, gramophone and typewriter. Each discourse network produces different subjectivities (a different relation of the subject to the world).

The annotations below discuss the notion of discourse networks in greater detail and also posit the possibility that we are living through a new discourse network (“DN 2000”), which proceeded to eclipse the discourse network 1900 around the time of the Macy conferences on cybernetics and the subsequent digitisation of discourse.

ANNOTATION

|...| John Johnston, forward to Literature, Media, Information Systems Essays by Friedrich A. Kittler Edited and Introduced by John Johnston, Routledge, 1997.

Friedrich A. Kittler’s Discourse Networks1800-1900 (1985) sets nineteenth century romanticism and twentieth century modernism apart.

Romanticism is embedded within a discourse of pedagogy and philosophy whilst modernism draws on psycophysics and psychoanalysis “what an author is, and what define reading and writing are all historically determined aspects of a larger communication system” Literature becomes “a form of data processing” “texts receive and store, process and transmit information in a way not structurally different from computers.” […] “methodologically, literary texts constitute ‘a discourse on discourse’ a reflection of the very hardware of cultural data processing and its historical variables”. At this point literature requires other discourses (scientific and/or institutional) “in order to make so-called sense.”

With the advent of new storage and transmission systems, such as film and photography (c.1900) discourse analysis can no longer suffice, “literary criticism must come to terms with the materiality of its objects” The monopoly of written texts is broken.

Note: texts were always storage systems and transmission “hardware”. In the discourse network 1800- the illusion that literature was not a technical media was preserved because literature was understood to be the “translation of a silent, wordless nature” and invested with “spiritual” properties. Film and photography (as new storage systems) disrupt this illusion as they store information with superhuman efficiency and fidelity. After the advent of film and photography writing becomes a medium amongst many. At the same time “intransitive writing" develops, "the writing down of delirium coincides with what science and media are doing” Psyco-science and psychoanalysis accompany this development in writing as attendant discourses. Technologies of inscription and record emerge along with the “talking cure”.

Turing’s Universal Machine (theorised in 1936), ups the stakes, allowing for the translation of any medium to any other. the media separation of Discourse Network 1900 (optical, acoustic and writing automata) will come back together: “all media in a digital base will erase the idea of the media”

DISCOURSE NETWORK 2000?

Is a new Discourse Network, “DN 2000," already looming on the event horizon?

Kittler acknowledges that his own work "has become part of an information network that describes literature as an information network". But does this indicate an increase of system complexity, a cultural version of re-normalization, or an immanent mutation of the network?

In order to describe discourse networks as differentiated and contrasting systems, "at least two delimiting events" are indispensable. For the two networks Kittler analyses in Discourse Networks 1800/1900, "universal alphabetization circa 1800 and technological data storage circa 1900 constitute just such turning points, for which there is sufficient evidence within about fifteen years." […] “methodological constraints determine that an event inaugurating another discourse network can only be identified retrospectively. Despite intriguing possibilities raised by the current telecommunications assemblage and computer chip architectures, Kittler must therefore remain silent about DN 2000.”

“[A]mbiguity in the communications model itself, insomuch as the computer’s capacity for automated calculation tends to subsume and displace communications” the work on Wiener, Von Neumann and Shannon allowed for an “epistemological break which is only now becoming apparent.”

I note that, the elements which allow a shift into the discourse network 1900 include: Shannon’s communications theory (the fact that information becomes a measurable entity and that the content of the message and the message are divorced from each other); Von Neumann’s games theory (which places the subject in exterior relation to the game); Wiener et al’s teleological concept in which feedback is linked to purpose; the development of command line code Computers complete the triad of communication theory: data storage, transmission through calculation. Digitisation, however, brings to an end medial difference.

[…]

Johnston links to Foucault's scheme of Epistemes, as outlined in The Archaeology of Knowledge. Foucault does not go beyond the mid-nineteenth century in his discourse analysis. This is why Foucault has difficulty accounting for the modern period – “data -processing methods and technologies destroy ‘the alphabetical storage transmission monopoly, that old-European basis of power.”bringing home the truth that “all books [or libraries] are discourse networks, but not all discourse networks are books”

In Foucault’s Order of Things: epestemes = renaissance, classical and modern compared to Kittler’s Discourse Networks = republic of letters, Discourse Network 1800, Discourse Network 1900 (the last matches Foucault's emergent post modernism)

Silent reading: optical and auditory data stored with silent reading, due to alphabetisation and the educational methods instituted by Heinrich Stephani (and others) around 1800. “effects how language is produced and perceived, and links “to non-discursive [non-textual] domains - the human body principally”

Phonic methods (such as sub-vocalisation) dematerialized the linguistic sign “one no longer de-cyphers but hears with an inner voice” (the voice, for instance, of the mother, reading to the child in infancy, is internalised) With woman under erasure, nature assumes organic continuity with the poet who communes with it through non-naturalised voice of the text. In Discourse Network 1800 woman is excluded - “she cannot be both source and medium. Faust serves and the exemplary text in transition as Faust (the scholar poet) attempts to communicate with the republic of letters which was passing. Poetry dominates the new discourse (1800), watched over by the state which is itself closed off to “every hermeneutic” [...] “it cannot get behind the speech act that instituted it”[...] “the translator Faust is watched over by the devil in poodle’s garb” […] “the poet must also work as functionary of the state, or as school teacher. Discourse Network 1800 denies its own status as a network.”

This illusion comes to an end as the discourse network 1900 introduces new media which challenge the ideology of the text. Electricity “brings to an end the classic-romantic experience of reading and writing” Nietzsche’s typewriter was a Malling Hansen (Danish made) bought in 1880 for 450 richemarks [Kittler’s claim as to the provenance of the typewriter has since been challenged]. With the advent of the typewriter, writing was no longer a “continuous translation from nature to culture” “but a violent inscription or mnemotechnique”

In the era of the typewriter, Kittler claims “rather than presenting the subject with something to be deciphered [writing] makes the subject what it is.” As we move into the discourse network 1900 Nietzsche experiments with the “telegraphic style”, writing is no longer a “spiritualised expression” but “the transposition of signs […] against an empty ground”.

Kittler argues that the disconnection of hand and eye to meaning (breaking the writer from the physical, bodily connection with meaning, which in the discourse network 1800 would provide a direct contect between the writer and nature) and with orality (which also provides connection to the natural world). Nature is no longer a continuity which includes Man Once this connection is broken woman –who had in discourse network 1900 been confined to the role of the muse – now becomes a secretary. The typwriter becomes a central mechanism in the operations of discourse network 1900.

Alan Turing (a typist) preferred ‘discreet’ machines to ‘continuous’ machines. For him the discreet typewriter avoids the confusion between writing and experience. For Heidegger the typewriter alters our relationship to being. the typewriter, for him, was “somewhere being a tool and a machine”

Nietzsche’s aesthetic language theory splits the optical and acustic which can only be bridged by metaphor. This anticipates the separation of the eye and ear engendered by phonography and film. Consequently, for Nietzsche: “language has nothing to do with truth and falsehood, it expresses the relation between humans and things.” The use of daring metaphors expresses this relation- language is literary in its foundations

Pink noise and psychophysics. In Discourse Network 1900 nature is psychophysical. Nerve impulses in the brain function independently of consciousness (like a typewriter). In 1900 children were taught to “read without understanding and write without thinking” This represents aphasia in production.

Gertrude Stein (a student of William James) conducted experiments in Harvard which “measured the parameters of memory, sensory and motor responses by excluding meaning as an independent variable” Psychoanalysis, therefore, sets the condition of the office, to type and take dictation without linking these operations to meaning. This aphasic mode also sets the ground for Saussure [and Shannon] and allows Freud to distinguish “thing recognition” and “word recognition”

Charles Bell Idea of a New Anatomy of the Brain = establishes that electric stimulus can “solicit taste, vision and eating responses without proximity to the referent” Hermholtz posits that nerves are related to telegraphy </ref>Johnston in Friedrich A. Kittler Discourse Networks 1800/1900 p.17</ref>: Nerves in the human body have been accurately compared to telegraph wires. Such a wire conducts one single kind of electric current and no other; it may be stronger, it may be weaker; it may move in either direction; it has no other qualitative differences. Nevertheless, according to the different kinds of apparatus with which we provide its terminations, we can send telegraphic dispatches, ring bells, explode mines, decompose water, move magnets, magnetise iron, develop light, and so on. The same thing with our nerves. The condition of excitement which can be produced in them, and is conducted by them, is ... everywhere the same.”

ANNOTATION

|...|

Geoffrey Winthrop Young & Michael Wutz - Introduction to Kittler, Friedrich, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford, 1999

1962-63 saw the publication of a number of texts on orality – Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato being central amongst them, along with books by C. Levi-Strauss, M. McLuhan, Jack Goody & Ian Watt. All were produced at a time where print-based media had lost its dominance (.

The theme of orality would be central to media theory as it emerged through the 1960s and to structural linguistics, structural anthropology and post-structuralism. Because central to the issue of orality are the themes of medially, storage systems and memory. These writers drew on the themes of orality as much as they did on information theory and cybernetics - indeed the cybernetic explanation became the means by which to deal with the issue of orality.

Walter Ong uses the term “secondary orality” […] “every exploration of orality is the renegotiation of the limits of literacy.” Andre Leroi Gourhan’s Gest et Parol (1964-65) McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964) drew closer attention to the materialites of communication “All the smart things to be said about computers can be spelled out in Plato’s Phaedrus” . Harrold Innis’ Empire and Communication and Bias and Communication (1950 and 1951), which were influencial on McLuhan, were the first books to attempted to account for world history in terms of media and communication, but for the most part media theory emerged in the 1960-s alongside the attendant subjects of orality and literacy – which, because of the introduction of technical media such as film, TV and video into discourse, were in crisis.

Consequently for Jakobson: “the object of the science of literature is not literature, but literariness - that is that which makes a given work a work of literature [using literary masterpieces as ] defective, secondary documents.” For Kittler, media studies should centre on ‘mediality’ to explain why media do what they do, focussing on an intrinsic “technological logic, the changing links between body and medium, the procedures of data processing, rather than evaluate them from the point of view of social usage.” This is why McLuhan is a central voice in Kittler.

The French across the Rhine. The reception of post structuralist writers came from the margins of academia in Germany. BUT.. “who could take Marcuse seriously after reading Lacan?”, although for many detractors, “ what was good about post structuralism was not new and what was new was not good.”

Kittler observes that the development of structuralism (structural linguistics) is concurrent with the invention of the typewriter. Answering the shortcomings of Foucault’s discourse analysis, Kittler states: “Even writing itself, before it ends up in libraries, is a communications medium which the archaeologist [Foucault] simply forgot. […] discourse analysis cannot be applied to sound archives or towers of film rolls”

Kittler’s career can be split into three decades: 1970s– discourse analysis; 1980s– technologies of discourse (by electric media)and; 1990s– digitisation of discourse. from the renaissance to the romantic era the family was not a fact of social history but a code. German literature in 1800 becomes a way of programming people – a recoding enterprise. With the spread of the nuclear family came the spread of literacy from which the notion of “authorship” arose.

In the 1980s Kittler introduced media into his vocabulary, from that point discourse analysis registers as “material communicative events in historically contingent, inter-discursive networks that link writers, archivists, addressees and interpreters.” [such networks] “exhibit regularities which program what people can say.”

At this point a new breed of German media theorists – Kittler, Boltz and Horisch – played “Marx to Foucault’s Hegel: they pulled discourse analysis off its textual and discursive head and on its media-technological feet.”