Kittler: Morgan, Peter, Nicholas, JS

In "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter", Friedrich Kittler works through how moving-image, sound recording, and the typewriter have overthrown the monopoly of literature and the written word. He argues that electricity has made "obsolete" the "hallucinatory power of reading and writing." That is, the "'...glowing colors, shadows, and lights'" that emerge from the "serial data flows" of 'sensual' words, or from the spaces between the words. This, he shows, "separated the data flows of optics, acoustics, and writing and rendered them autonomous". While the text was once both "film and record simultaneously", it has been fragmented by the three temporal new-media (with the typewriter as more an apparatus than a medium). Kittler also touches on a fundamental difference between media and text: media represents the real in a direct, almost 'analog' way, while text is symbolic, discrete, digital. He claims that this cleanly divides "matter and information...the real and the symbolic"; "...man becomes physiology on the one hand [(media)] and information technology on the other [(text)]".

Honestly, we had trouble distilling "There is No Software". He seems to argue that, because software comes down to "local string manipulations...to signifiers of voltage differences", that software doesn't really exist. He continues this line of thought by asserting that as we create increasingly abstracted levels in the software hierarchy, lower levels are deliberately hidden. Thus, he reasons, we don't really know what we're writing. He also argues that modern computers, in their ability to simulate nature, are limited by "artifical" hardware and software limits. As an example, he compares Turing Machines to the DOS operating system with its 8-character file-name limit. Finally, he imagines computers based more on information theory (and chaos theory) that will supersede current hardware limits (for instance in the ability to model nature and "real numbers').

Our discussion began with Kittler's statements about the temporal nature of literature and it's 'new' replacements (or derivatives), recorded sound and film. We asked, "has sound and film replaced literature?" Surely not. Diving deeper into the text revealed that literature has not been replaced, but fragmented into the three media after which the essay is named. "Electricity", claims Kittler, has rendered literature as an electrifying, imaginative experience obsolete. But hasn't the internet reunited literature, sound, and film into a single medium? Kittler addresses this directly and shows that the reintegration is irrelevant; sound, image, and word are still fundamentally fragmented. We then explored the idea that media is non-symbolic, a sort of direct or "analog" representation of the real, while on the contrary, text is symbolic, discrete; hallucination must bridge the gap between the words. A picture is worth a thousand words, but a sentence is worth a thousand pictures said Peter. In a sense, this is an analog vs. digital discussion (and Kittler addresses this indirectly in his conclusion). At first we were confused as to what was the significance of the typewriter, given the Heideggar quote...it's surely an apparatus and not a medium...but referring to Kittler's notion of the tripartite fragmentation of literature cleared this up. Back to analog vs. digital: we looked at Kittler's distinction of "physiology" (media) vs. "information" (text). What is the nature of this division (what is the nature of the physiological, the analog). Kittler brings claims that moveable type was a "muscular" extension while new-media is "nervous" extension. Is the nervous system "physiological" or "information"-based? Analog or digital? Doesn't this all become information in the end anyway in a digital computer? We finished with a discussion of typography...where does expressive typography lie in this? Is it the merging of the physiological/expressive with the informational/discrete?

Regarding software, we brought up issues of abstraction...what really is going on in there under all those layers? Why is it significant that what we do is reduced to microscope, binary code? What is the significance of abstraction, of hierarchical language?

Finally, to ask a question: Kittler seems to suggest that we need a new kind of computer, one based on information theory (cybernetics?), without "artificial" limits, and without software. What is the purpose of this? Is a radically new, but 'universal'ly useful machine a reality?