Media After Kittler
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Media After Kittler
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Overview
In the wake of the field-defining work done by Friedrich Kittler, this important collection of essays takes a philosophical approach to the end of the media era in the traditional sense and outlines the implications of a turn that sees media become concepts of the middle, of connection, and of multitude—across diverse disciplines and theoretical perspectives. An expert panel of contributors, working at the cutting edge of media theory, analyze the German thinker's legacy and the possibilities his thought can unfold for media theory. This book examines the present and future condition of mediation, within the wider context of media studies in a digital age.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783481231 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/22/2015 |
| Series: | Media Philosophy |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 405 KB |
About the Author
Eleni Ikoniadou is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Kingston University and executive member of the London Graduate School. Her writing has appeared in journals such as Body & Society, Senses and Society, Culture Machine, and Leonardo and she is the author of The Rhythmic Event (Technologies of Lived Abstraction series, 2014).
Scott Wilsonis Professor of Media and Psychoanalysis at Kingston University. His most recent books include The Order of Joy; Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment (2008) and Stop Making Sense: Music from the Perspective of the Real (2015).
Read an Excerpt
Media After Kittler
By Eleni Ikoniadou, Scott Wilson
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Eleni Ikoniadou, Scott Wilson and ContributorsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-123-1
CHAPTER 1
Secret Passages
Martin McQuillan
Media After Kittler and the Typeface of Love Letters
A POST CARD FOR KITTLER
Sam came to pick me up at the station, and then we went for a long walk in the forest (a man came up to greet us thinking that he recognized me, and then excused himself at the last moment — he must be suffering, as I am, more and more, from prosopagnosia, a diabolical impulsion to find resemblances in faces, to recognize, no longer to recognize). I said a few words about my post cards, asking him to keep it as secret as possible. This morning, in Freibourg, to which he accompanied me by car, I understood that he had immediately spoken of it to Kittler, my host here, and perhaps to his wife (psychoanalyst). The secret of the post cards burns — the hands and the tongues — it cannot be kept, q.e.d. It remains secret, what it is, but must immediately circulate, like the most hermetic and most fascinating of anonymous — and open — letters. I don't cease to verify this.
S. was to summarize and translate my lecture (at the studium generale). I stopped at the places that he himself had chosen and checked off in my text (still on 'La folie du jour,' the title this time), and he took this as a pretext to speak longer than I did, if not, I couldn't judge, to divert the public's attention, or even the sense or letter of my discourse. We laughed over it together and between us laughter is a mysterious thing, that we share more innocently than the rest (somewhat complicated by the strategies), like a disarming explosion and like a field of study, a corpus of Jewish stories. On the subject of Jewish stories: you can imagine the extent to which I am haunted by Heidegger's ghost in this city. I came for him. I am trying to reconstitute all his paths, the places where he spoke (this studium generale for example), to interrogate him, as if he were there, about the history of the posts, to appropriate his city for myself, to sniff out, to imagine, etc. To respond to his objections, to explain to him what he does not yet understand (this morning I walked with him for two hours, and then I went into a bookstore, I bought several cards and reproductions, as you can see (I'm also bringing you back an album, Freiburg in alten Ansichtskarten), and I fell upon two books of photographs that cost me a great deal, one on Freud, very rich, the other on Heidegger, at home, with Madame and the journalists from the Spiegel in 1968). So that there it is, back at the Hotel Victoria (that's where I called you from), I laid down to flip through the albums and I burst out laughing when I found that Martin has the face of an old Jew from Algiers. I'll show you.
This is the entry marked as 9th May 1979 in Jacques Derrida's 'Envois' section of La Carte Postale (Derrida, 1987: 188). It describes a trip by the narrator to a conference in Freiburg at which he meets someone called Sam Weber and is hosted by a character with the name of Kittler. I could rehearse all the means by which the text of the 'Envois' offers every opportunity and no possibility to be read as a roman à clef, as if there really was someone called Sam Weber or a real person called Kittler. Let us not be so naive. Upon inspection, and not very close inspection at that, all of the dates and locales of the 'Envois' are out of synch, it is as much about the production of a convincing and undecideable reality as it is a confession of the autobiographical. The affirmation of the undecideable would be the quality of the pretense. So, let us not imagine that in this passage we are confronted with the real Sam Weber, Friedrich Kittler and Jacques Derrida.
The last time I sat at this desk in the Bolivar Hall in the Venezuelan Embassy in London, I was speaking on the issue of debt, sitting next to the real Samuel Weber. At least I think it was the real Samuel Weber, he spoke about the onto-theological origins of the so-called credit crunch although like the man in the forest who approaches the narrator of the 'Envois' I may have been suffering from prosopagnosia, an inability to recognize faces. I might have been sitting next to the 'S' of the 'Envois', this avatar who acts as confidante to the narrator and who betrays his secret within minutes to Kittler. Perhaps, it was an entirely different Sam, the son of Sam, another theoretical Sam, a Beckettian character, or the ghost of another Weber, a name maxed out by the theoretical family. I can no longer remember. I am unable to recognize the face. Like the solitary walker in the forest at Freiburg I can only come up close to Sam and to Kittler and to Derrida and then excuse myself at the last moment. As much as I would like to find or have a 'diabolical impulsion to find resemblances' in these faces, I am forced to turn away rather than risk an introduction. A simple greeting would be too much to venture. Perhaps, for fear of rejection; perhaps to avoid a social awkwardness, perhaps out of genuine uncertainty. The introduction is impossible. How to begin a conversation with figures such as these? It would be the madness of the day, the madness of the everyday, an everyday madness. I cannot introduce myself or introduce them. Instead bashfully I will turn away and carry on my lonely walk through this passage. The narrator says that he is also increasingly suffering from prosopagnosia. The turn away is mutual. We might approach either other, convinced that we see a resemblance in one other only to withdraw at the last moment, performing a swerve or a U-turn, our steps creating the loop of the invaginated fold that Derrida describes in his reading of 'La folie du jour' as the structure of narrative, a story with a single permeable skin, with no inside and no outside and only inside and only outside (see Derrida, 1980). This madness, this neurotic compulsion to narrativize results in misrecognition or a failure to connect, a meeting in a clearing [holzweg] that does not go anywhere.
So, instead let me say a few words about my post cards. Not the same words that the narrator of the 'Envois' asks Sam to keep secret and which he so quickly passes on to Kittler. Here we might ask the question, what would it mean to betray a confidence to Kittler, to tell Kittler our secrets, to speak to Kittler today and to make a revelation or to pass on some gossip? As soon as we are among the post cards we are once more in the question of media, one more method of inscription and circulation, another mediation, in media res, in-betweeness, the human condition from Socrates to Freud and beyond. The secret of the narrator passes around the academics of Freiburg like a post card, from one facteur to another, each reading it in turn before its next posting. At the same time it remains 'as secret as possible', as if secrecy were possible, and not the impossible condition of all media. 'As secret as possible' which is to say that the narrator has a doubt concerning the absolute secrecy of the secret. This might have more to do with the garrulous nature of his chosen confidante than it does with the possibility of absolute secrecy: 'I understood that he had immediately spoken of it to Kittler, my host here, and perhaps to his wife (psychoanalyst)'. Derrida's wife was also a psychoanalyst. The psychoanalytic partner, the silent observer of an everyday madness, a keeper of secrets, as well as a reader of symptoms, of messages and envois. The one who always receives even if they are not the intended or final destination. The producer of the domestic-analytic scene, or the one who turns the domestic scene inside out into an analytic moment: a site of transference and countertransference, of media and mediation. 'The secret of the post cards burns — the hands and the tongues — it cannot be kept'. There can be no possibility of keeping the secret of the post card, it must by definition be passed on to the next facteur who in turn will read it and move it along. And yet it remains secret, unreadable, undecideable, like the relation between Kittler and Derrida, Kittler and philosophy, Kittler and media. This media that we say comes after Kittler, or that Kittler is in some way after, a mediation that is in the manner of Kittler, after Kittler as we say a painting is in the style of an old master, media after Kittler. This relationship burns the hands and the tongue, it cannot be held and yet it must be spoken. 'Media after Kittler' must circulate among us like a post card that we must pass on from one to another but do not hold on to it for too long, pass the parcel and do not be caught out when the music stops. Never cease to verify this impossibility.
Media will always accompany Kittler like Sam Weber accompanies the narrator in the 'Envois', chauffeur and acolyte, driver and driven, automobile and autobiographer, translator and transformer: 'S was to summarize and translate my lecture', a trans that contains within itself the sense of beyond (from Socrates to Freud and beyond) a movement from one side to the other but which never arrives at its destination, the in-betweeness of translation, another form of media, a beyond that is only ever mediation. No jump from media to Kittler, no beyond or after, only the in-between of a sustained thinking of media and the object itself. The object that is also the vehicle of its analysis, no outside to this scene of analysis. No media after Kittler. Here the after or the beyond is only another mediation. Let us not speak of 'Media after Kittler', rather if this after is just another stage or posting of an extended and interminable in-between, then let us say 'Media media Kittler'. Kittler in media res, Kittler in the middle, Kittler between philosophy and media studies, Kittler as the third term of an interminable and impossible analysis, Kittler as the in-between, a post that receives the secrets of the post card, the secrets of media that burn the hands and the tongue. Kittler, pass it on. Kittler as a mediation between philosophy and media. Let us not then speak of Kittler after media or of 'Kittler media media' but of 'media, media, media'. The three terms of our scene today all turn around the same impossible secret that there is no outside to the scene of analysis, nothing but the endless exchange of the letter, from one burned hand to another, media, like a hot potato, passed on without end.
Here the translation lasts longer than the original address, like Sam's summary of the narrator's text: the critique outweighs the object. The in-between stretches as far as the eye can see. Like the two characters in the 'Envois' we can laugh about this and this laughter between us will be a mysterious thing. The narrator describes it as being 'like a disarming explosion and like a field of study'. One could read this sentence too quickly, the analogy is not 'like a disarming explosion in a field of study', the field of study is equivalent to the explosion: a 'disarming explosion', one that demilitarizes all ordinance. As elsewhere in the 'Envois' we must take this order of metaphoricity seriously. Derrida is at pains to note that the post card is not a mere metaphor for meaning, the relationship is not to be understood in an allegorical way with one half of the metaphor subordinate to the description of the other. Rather, the circulation of meaning is as much an analogy for the passage of the post card as vice versa. Equally, the field of study and the explosion are equivalent. What if we were to understand media studies as just such an explosion? A 'disarming explosion' that left us with no more weapons. Media studies would be the only field of study that identified its own impossible condition as its object. Here I am not referring to a media studies that concerned itself with the weak anthropology of the popular, something like television and film studies in which the idea of study is merely the application of established academic protocols to a new object, often unable to justify the weight of an academic scrutiny. Rather, this would be an understanding of media after Kittler, the most profound engagement with the conditions of mediation, inscription, technology and the abyssal prosthetic origin of thought, human and nonhuman life. A field of study that recognized only the field and understood study to be the active and critical practice of being within that field without horizon or boundary. This media after Kittler would be a dis-enclosure, to use a term translated from Nancy [la déclosion] (see Nancy, 2008), of all the borders and categories of academic classification, running the question of media, mediation, and mediatisation through the university as a problem for the university, perhaps the very condition of the university and of academic life. We might say, following the narrator of the 'Envois' that: in the beginning was media and I will never get over it. No university without media studies, equally no media studies without the university, no approach to the wider field of digital, celluloid, print media without a critical framework for understanding. No media studies without Kittler. No media studies without the philosophy of media. Not that philosophy can be asked to speak to media or be used to explain media in a utilitarian way, because media itself is a philosophical concept, perhaps the only philosophical concept, the only thing worth thinking since Khora and since the cave. If the narrator and Sam share the mysterious laughter of a corpus of Jewish stories it is because at their best such stories are a philosophy, they are a repository for a knowledge of their object, a mediation of that object in which the object becomes the media itself as an articulation of its own understanding. Equally, with Kittler today we might share the laughter of a mysterious thing called 'media after Kittler', a disarming explosion, a corpus of philosophical stories, a field of study that would not be recognizable as the media studies in our universities today. That media studies, so often the bête noir of ill-informed politicians and media commentators who in an act of self-loathing cannot recognize their own work as a suitable object for academic study and so decry the corruption of academic purity by the study of their own practice. Perhaps, such denunciations of media studies are a warning, an attempt to make the academy back off from its enquiry into the media: a smokescreen of indignant verbiage that says, do not look behind the curtain, do not inquire further into the construction of globalized meaning and how we the media produce it. While such a media studies is absolutely necessary if we are to stay alert to our present conditions of artificatuality, media after Kittler is something more. It is more than the toolkit of ideology critique and semiotic analysis that media studies so often contents itself with. Certainly, this 'after' is not a 'beyond' that will transport us to the other side of media studies, but it is a critical mediatisation that takes us through media studies as just another symptom of the mediatic effects that it first diagnoses. Study here is just one more mode of the in-between, a mediatisation that acts as if it stands on one side of a divide when in fact it is the very act of division itself. Let us not speak of 'Media Studies', rather of 'Media Media', media's own mediatised scene.
What would it mean then to pass on a secret to Kittler today? To do so too quickly, fresh out of the car from the forest of Freiburg like the loquacious Weber. Media after Kittler, today Kittler is our host just as he was for the narrator of the 'Envois'. As the etymology runs he is both our host, the one who brings us all together here, and our guest, the one that we invite into our midst and whom we must treat with the upmost hospitality. He is host and guest and ghost today. You can imagine the extent to which I am haunted by Kittler's ghost in this city. Kittler plays host to the narrator of the 'Envois' not just in any city but in Freiburg, the scene of so much of Heidegger's media effect. Here the narrator seeks out the haunting effects of Heidegger and walks with his ghost ('this morning I walked with him for two hours, and then I went into a bookstore'). The setup here is one of classic elegy in which the poet is reunited with the dead in the landscape with which their lives were most keenly lived, and the poet walks with the dead until dawn. The deceased loved one must always return to the underworld before dawn breaks or the narrator turns into a bookstore, one more false exit into a world of media. He buys two books of photographs, one of Freud and one of Heidegger, as well as a book for his lover of Freiburg in old post cards. Between Freud and Heidegger he introduces a slip worthy of comment. He says of the Heidegger book that it shows the philosopher 'at home, with Madame and the journalists from the Spiegel in 1968'. Once again we are in the scene of the domestic and the observant, analytic spouse. However, this living arrangement is shared with journalists. That is to say, with the media.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Media After Kittler by Eleni Ikoniadou, Scott Wilson. Copyright © 2015 Eleni Ikoniadou, Scott Wilson and Contributors. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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