Chronopoetics

The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technological Media

Wolfgang Ernst, Anthony Enns

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783485727
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Wolfgang Ernst has demonstrated that the knowledge of time-giving (‘chrono-poetical’) media and their temporal essence enriches the tradition of philosophical inquiry into the nature of ‘time’. This book, a translated and abridged edition of Ernst’s two major volumes, Chronopoetik and Gleichursprünglichkeit, undertakes this on three levels: a close analysis of time-critical moments within media technologies; descriptions of how media temporalities affect and disrupt the traditional human sense of time; and questioning the traditional position of media time within cultural history. The book brings together two fields of inquiry: the technological analysis of media time processes and the venerable tradition of philosophical inquiry into the nature of time. Ernst argues that the scientific inquiry into the nature of time is enriched by the media-technological context. The book exposes a media theoretical approach to contemporary media culture that derives from the combination of philosophical reflection on the essence of technology and a close analysis of technological devices themselves. Ultimately Ernst addresses a fundamental concern of past, contemporary and future media culture: the position of technology in culture under the focused perspective of its tempor(e)alities.

Part I

ELECTROTECHNICAL MICROTEMPORALITIES

Chapter 1

Time-Critical Media Processes

LEVELS OF MEDIA-ARCHEOLOGICAL TIME ANALYSIS

Technological media always take place in the temporal dimension, regardless of whether they are understood through epistemological reflection. Technical constellations are only operative when actualized in time. Time-critical processes—such as delicate electronic synchronization between image senders and receivers (“television”) and the exact orchestration of binary instruction cycles (“computer”)—occur in electro-technical (commonly called “analog”) and techno-mathematical (commonly called “digital”) media. The signal-technical discovery of time-critical processes through measuring media (like chronophotography) revealed for the first time a corresponding epistemological sensitization.1 A second level of investigation involves the temporal affects in people that are induced by the re-play of stored recordings. People are addressed through media in their existential (not historical) sense of time. Lastly, the question concerning the cultural ways in which media process time does not seek to prove “medial historiographies”2 or the role of media as a history-making power acting in concert with the historical discourse; rather, it reflects on the proper time of media. Technical media are not only reconfigured repeatedly in the course of time; they also serve as models for the conception of emphatic time itself through their timing specifications, which is how the concept of “real time” came into our current vocabulary. While the role of media as agents in historical processes has been sufficiently examined,3 time-critical analysis focuses on the genuine event-like nature of media on both sides of the concept of history. It thus encompasses signal-technical, electro-mathematical, and media-epistemological time series analyses. Such studies do not approach this structure historiographically; rather, they allow media-induced temporal processes themselves to be addressed.

Technical time critique reveals a microcosm of time figures that are usually concealed in media apparatuses; it is assisted by a phenomenology of the temporal affects that media induce in people. This raises the question of which representational form of the temporality of technical media is expected, and thus how not to write media history. The operative linking of these different levels of temporal knowledge, whose agents are often technical media themselves, calls for differentiations. “A micro-temporal level of physical and techno-physical processes, a meso-level of psychic-cognitive processes, and a macro-level of social systems and discursive formations as well as macro-physical processes.”4 Gilbert Simondon thereby systematically divides the temporal modes of existence of technical objects into intrinsic machine realities, human-machine relations, and the genesis of technicity.5

Time-critical media processes are first and foremost dedicated to analyzing the specific ways of processing time that were and are introduced into culture through techno-mathematical media. This includes the smallest temporal events, which are essential for the realization of sound, image, and computing processes as well as the cognitive disruption of the human awareness of time through media of time axis manipulation. This also includes the challenge not to write media archeology and genealogy exclusively according to the model of history, as this ignores their unique chronopoetics.6 That “technical objects embody complex temporalities” is an insight of Simondon’s philosophy of technology.7 Instead of describing how technical media are part of cultural history, media-induced alternatives to history itself thus emerge.

A MEDIA THEORY OF THE TIME-CRITICAL

The time-critical is a field of knowledge originated by media and their analysis. It includes concepts like real time, time axis manipulation, as well as the actualization of stored time signals and the temporalizing variants of Aristotelian metaxy, which in this sense means not only the spatial in-between as media channel, but also media-technically the temporal in-between, the smallest memory buffers and signal delays. Time-critical processes, interpreted literally, determine the overall process and success of systems in electronics and informatics; on a functional level, the concept is familiar enough in all related disciplines. In industrial process control, the time-critical is understood simply in terms of punctuality. Heathrow Airport in London advises arriving guests to “follow the time-critical flight connection streams”; as with Internet communication, connections are not only spatial but also temporal nodal points. For a long time, however, the time-critical element, which is characteristic of operative systems, has lacked a fundamental media-epistemological meaning. Signals, defined electrophysically as genuine time events, are the chief subject of media studies in contrast to a cultural semiotics of sign relations. A premise of cybernetics, which still remains current, is thus also evoked for the technosphere. “No analysis of natural science, whether it be physics or biology, is complete unless we possess a proper analysis of its appropriate time-concept.”8 Media archeology, which is based not only on philosophy but also on the mathematical and natural sciences and thus belongs to the humanities as much as it understands itself as a science, drew the obvious conclusion from this insight. The literally critical point here is the category of time, which oscillates between micro- and macro-temporal levels, between moment and history. “We observe a temporal sequence of events, and our experiments are attempts to reproduce at various times that which we have observed at one particular time. Therefore, all the improvements and modifications which have been made in the theory of time itself are relevant in the study of all the sciences.”9 A theory of measuring media is thus always also a theory of time.

If media events are firmly understood as micro-time-critical processes, then they refer to processes on this side of the “historical” field. Media history deals with the actual implementation and thus the temporalization of logical relations in physical materiality in the double sense of techno-logy. If the implementation turns a technical-symbolic constellation into a media process, then being-in-the-world means being-in-time. This also applies to cellular automata. Every binary switch of discrete information consumes a minimal time interval, which can literally be counted on and which tends toward infinitesimally small moments. “Switching time is inversely proportional to the energy expended. . . . This theorem has consequences for the geometry of spacetime and the computing power of the universe.”10 In addition to this binary moment of time, signal analysis primarily deals with time series, which Wiener formulated for the electronic anti-aircraft predictor under wartime conditions: the lightning-fast extrapolation of measurement data for the purpose of statistical prediction, which from the outset refused to make any claim with regard to an exact predetermination of concrete events. Certainties and causalities (the event concept of history) were thus replaced by probabilities and correlations.

SIGNAL TIME

If media were for the longest time simply mechanical extensions or amputations of human organs and senses—to borrow loosely from Marshall McLuhan—electronics and their mathematization introduced a new situation: electronic media are extensions of the central nervous system itself. “The human—and also his pride: fantasy, art—is divided into physiology and data processing, which can only be reintegrated through a media theory”;11 however, this theory must be time-critical. It delineates the field in which the alliance of electronics, physiology, and data processing takes place.

Forms of time implemented in the real, thus time-critical processes, long remained undiscovered as objects of knowledge in the Western temporal economy because they were hardly measurable with human senses and mechanical instruments; Leibniz anticipated their discovery as petites perceptions. When light shined, it appeared as a pure emanation and not as a vibration in the electromagnetic spectrum. Reality, insofar as it consists of the smallest time-critical moments, eludes symbolic notation. Time analysis has long confined itself to historiography. “This indescribability only disappears when a time range is successfully transformed into a frequency range entirely without metaphysics or a philosophy of history,” wrote Friedrich Kittler, with regard to the techno-mathematical process of fast Fourier transformation, which indeed replaces the time axis as the classical abscissa of causal chains with a frequency axis, whose units are inversely proportional to its units of time as evidenced metrologically on an oscilloscope. “On this axis everything that brought even only a trace of periodicity or regularity over time appears as ordinate values.”12 Yet, in order for all of the sampled values to be calculated at the same time within a time window, they must remain temporarily stored; real time analysis is based on latency in the present. The space of the archive and the actuality of the present are thus no longer strictly separate, but rather a mutual condition. “All of the circulating theories that seek to distinguish between historical and electronic time as between delay and simultaneity are myths.”13 In ...