Kittler Now

Current Perspectives in Kittler Studies

Stephen Sale, Laura Salisbury

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745653013, 9780745653006
• eBook ISBN: 9780745663968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Friedrich Kittler was one of the world's most influential, provocative and misunderstood media theorists. His work spans analyses of historical 'discourse networks' inspired by French poststructuralism, influential theorizations of new media, through to musings on music and mathematics. Always controversial and relentlessly unpredictable, Kittler's work is a major reference point for contemporary media theory, literary criticism and cultural studies.

This is the only book of essays currently available in English on an important thinker whose influence across disciplines is growing. The volume situates Kittler's ideas, explaining and critiquing his sometimes difficult writing, and using his theories to undertake innovative readings of old and new media. It also includes previously untranslated work by Kittler himself. Contributors include Caroline Bassett, Steven Connor, Alexander R. Galloway, Mark B. Hansen, John Durham Peters and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young.

Part I
Grecian 2000

1
The God of Ears

Friedrich A. Kittler

Translated by Paul Feigelfeld and Anthony Moore

The Greeks had a god who dwelt in the acoustic realm. With no warning whatsoever, when shepherds dreamt and the midday silence was overwhelming, Pan buzzed in every ear.

Pan, a cove of the auditory space [eine Wöhlbung des Hörraums], had always been closer to the Great Goddess than all her desperate lovers, those who pursued her by sight alone. Full of envy, Actaeon said:

At times it seemed to me I saw, up there on the rock, the back of old Pan, who was also lying in wait for her. But from afar one might have taken him for a stone, or for some stunted old tree trunk. Then he was no longer discernible, though his pipes still rang out in the air. He had become melody. He had passed into the sighing of the wind, where she was sweating, where breathed the fragrance of her underarms and lower body, when she undressed. (Klossowski 30)¹

‘To look at a room or landscape’ (no longer to speak of goddesses), ‘I must move my eyes from one point to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every direction: I am at the centre of my auditory world which envelopes me. You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight’ (Ong 72).²

The Great Pan, it is said, is dead. Yet gods of ears cannot pass away. They return under the guise of our amplifiers and PA systems. They come back as rock song.

Pink Floyd: Brain Damage

The lunatic is on the grass

The lunatic is on the grass

Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs

Got to keep the loonies on the path

The lunatic is in the hall

The lunatics are in my hall

The paper holds their folded faces to the floor

And every day the paper boy brings more

And if the dam breaks open many years too soon

And if there is no room upon the hill

And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too

I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon

The lunatic is in my head

The lunatic is in my head

You raise the blade, you make the change

You re-arrange me ‘til I’m sane

You lock the door

And throw away the key

There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me

And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear

You shout and no one seems to hear

And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes

I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.

(Words and music: Roger Waters)

The Dark Side of the Moon, Harvest LP I C 072–05–259: between 1973, when it was first released, and 1979, 8 million copies were sold. According to the latest reports sales have reached 45 million. When streams of sound merge into streams of money, books and their editions become ridiculous. ‘Brain Damage’ doesn’t need any description. The damage is done.

And yet everything started so easily – Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Richard Wright, three students of architecture in the 1960s, touring through England’s suburban theatres with guitars and old Chuck Berry numbers. Their forgotten name: The Architectural Abdabs. Until, one day in the spring of 1965, a lead guitarist and singer invents Pink Floyd – the name and the sound. Overloaded amplifiers, the mixing desk as fifth instrument, tones circulating through the room and everything else made possible by a combination of deep-frequency technology and opto-electronics – with eyes like black holes, Syd Barrett exposes rock ‘n’ roll to the domain of astronomy.

The star above the London underground blazed for two years. We know Andy Warhol’s words that in the age of electronic media we shall all become famous – everybody for 15 minutes. At Barrett’s last gigs, if they took place at all, his left hand hung down while the right struck repeatedly on the same open string.³ Monotony as the beginning and end of music, like dripping water torture. Then the man who invented Pink Floyd disappears from all stages somewhere into the diagnostic no-man’s-land between LSD-psychosis and schizophrenia. Pink Floyd finds a new guitarist and the formula for their worldwide success. Furthermore, with record sales in seven figures, it remains true that the capitalist machine with its streams of money is fed by the decoded, deterritorialized current of madness which, in fact, is no more than electrical current.⁴

For six years Pink Floyd remained silent about the exclusion which made them possible. However, ‘Brain Damage’ speaks openly about outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion, and their annihilation. In the beginning all is well. There, in the house, is an owner, key in hand, being informed by newspapers of daily drivel. Here, on the lawn, possibly one of the beautiful lawns of southern England’s countryside mansions and of Gottfried Benn’s dreams,⁵ the lunatic(s). This exclusion is required by a territorializing law, a law which tells the mad to stay on fenced paths and, above all, to keep out. It is the law of architects,⁶ and in 1980/1 the former architecture student, Waters, will construct the barrier, materializing it as a giant wall across Earl’s Court and the Westfalenhalle. That was my first visit to the region of the Ruhr.

Yet in the acoustic realm, things are not quite as simple as in show business. After all, ‘[i]n the field of the unconscious, the ears are the only orifice that cannot be closed’ (Lacan 24).⁷ Starting from the lawn, through the hallway and into the head – the irresistible advance of lunacy takes place via ears which are unable to defend themselves. By the end of the song, whether it is ‘Brain Damage’ or ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, the dam breaks, the head explodes and there is only howling with no reception. Because sound is the unwritable in music and is immediately its technology, no word, no wall, no barrier between the inside and the outside can resist it.

Foucault wrote A History of Madness, Bataille wrote Story of the Eye. But we have to thank Roger Waters who wrote the lyrics of ‘Brain Damage’ for the short history of the Ear and Madness in the Age of Media.

When the multiple inventor Edison built the first gramophone, following an idea of Charles Cros, the playback was merely a shadow of the recording. Even the insertion of a horn between source and cylinder could not reproduce mechanically recorded and mechanically played back vibrations louder than the original. It was not only Edison’s near deafness that caused him to shout into his phonograph on that remarkable 6 December in 1877.⁸ And it was only in the science fiction fantasies of the symbolists of that time that the magician of Menlo Park, using sound-space technology, connected his phonographs to arrays of loudspeakers to transport the singsong of his children into his office from the lawn outside.⁹ In fact, the gramophone-loving citizens and emperors of the fin de siècle were more interested in voices than in the ‘ritornello’ which makes voices and identities dance. When in 1897 the Wilhelminian state poet Wildenbruch was, above all others, granted acoustic immortality, he (after lengthy explanations about how voices in contrast to faces cannot deceive and thus are ideal sources for psychologists) spoke the following sweet verse into the horn:

Vernehmt denn aus dem Klang von diesem Spruch
die Seele von Ernst von Wildenbruch.¹⁰

Hear, from the sound of this utterance,
the soul of Ernst von Wildenbruch.

From the sound to the saying, from the saying to the soul: Wildenbruch tried so eagerly to reduce the real (his recorded, but transient voice) to the symbolic (the articulated discourse on lyric) and the symbolic to the imaginary (a creative poet’s soul). Thank God, the technicians chose precisely the other way around. Time and fundamental research led to the drowning out of the last breath of soul in sound and phon.¹¹

Human voices were dominant only as long as recordings were made and played back mechanically – no wonder, with a limited frequency spectrum of just 200–2,000 Hertz. But with the wave of innovation during the First World War that introduced the principle of amplification, Edison’s mechanical equipment could become electrified. For the first time, frequency spectrum and sound dynamic were in record grooves and loudspeaker coils. In 1926, in Respighi’s ‘Pini di Roma’, a nightingale, electronically recorded and amplified, stood its ground against the philharmonic orchestra of Toscanini.¹²

To bring the magic of sound to perfection, just one more World War had to break out. Its wave of innovation caused German engineers to invent the tape machine, and British engineers the hi-fi record, which made audible even the most subtle differences in timbre between German and British submarine motors – initially, of course, only apparent to the ears of aspiring RAF officers.¹³ Infused with war booty, America’s record industry (sluggish through having been engaged with entirely different duties between 1942 and 1945) was, thereafter, able to set a new standard: tape recording. And only this allowed for acoustic manipulation in the space between record production and reproduction.

British industry, around the same time, understood that its war-driven progress in locating submarines had paved the way for a peaceful application. In 1957, Electrical and Mechanical Industries (EMI), which by no coincidence have Pink Floyd under contract, released their first stereo record.¹⁴ Since then, the two ears human beings happen to have are no longer just a caprice of nature, but a source of money: they are permitted to locate single voices and/or instruments between two living-room loudspeakers. And if these ears should happen to fail in locating where the sound is coming from, then this is only because a leading sound engineer had been even more artful. When John Culshaw, in 1959, produced Solti’s wonderfully overloaded Rheingold,¹⁵ every god and goddess found its audible place in the stereo mix. But...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Editors’ Introduction
• Part I Grecian 2000
• Part II ‘Our Writing Tools are also Working on our Thoughts’
• Part III Turingzeit
• Index
• End User License Agreement