The lim­i­ta­tions of tech­nol­ogy can become artis­tic tools them­selves. They can point the way.
RZA

Hardly any­thing ages as quickly as reflec­tions on tech­nol­ogy. As waves of inno­va­tion suc­ceed each other at a pace that is hard to fol­low, the rel­e­vance of such texts usu­ally van­ishes overnight. More­over, since they depend on a time-​bound tech­ni­cal lingo, these reflec­tions are des­tined to become com­pletely illeg­i­ble within a cou­ple of decades. For these rea­sons, it is noth­ing short of amaz­ing that Friedrich Kit­tler’s Gramo­phone, Film, Type­writer (1985) has man­aged to avoid this fate for a very long time. The book’s renowned intro­duc­tion pre­dicts the merg­ing of all indi­vid­ual media into a sin­gle dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion chan­nel. Kit­tler sketches an apoc­a­lyp­tic and deter­min­is­tic sce­nario in which all media strive towards their efface­ment. In opti­cal fiber net­works — a now obso­lete term for the mate­r­ial infra­struc­ture of the inter­net — the Ger­man media the­o­rist rec­og­nizes the immi­nent telos of this his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ment. Because it trans­lates all kinds of data flows into series of num­bers that can be manip­u­lated, this super-​medium has the poten­tial to replace all others.

With num­bers every­thing goes. Mod­u­la­tion, trans­for­ma­tion, syn­chro­niza­tion; delay, stor­age, trans­po­si­tion; scram­bling, scan­ning, map­ping — a total media link on a dig­i­tal base will erase the very con­cept of medium. Instead of wiring peo­ple and tech­nolo­gies, absolute knowl­edge will run as an end­less loop. (Kit­tler: 2)

Given the extremely short life cycle of the genre, Friedrich Kittler’s insight should be con­sid­ered as a truly untimely med­i­ta­tion. As I write this essay, over two decades of fran­tic tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion have strived towards the com­plete uni­fi­ca­tion of all media but failed to com­pletely real­ize this goal. Despite its extra­or­di­nary endurance, how­ever, even Gramo­phone, Film, Type­writer is now finally start­ing to show its age. If any­thing, reread­ing the book today proves that yesterday’s sci­ence fic­tion will be tomorrow’s pre­his­tory. “Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to sur­face effects, known to con­sumers as interface.

Sense and the senses turn into eye­wash. Their media-​produced glam­our will sur­vive for an interim as a by-​product of strate­gic pro­grams.” (Kit­tler: 1) After Tron, vir­tual real­ity, cyber­space, The Matrix and Sec­ond Life, the reign of dig­i­tal media has become a com­mon­place in con­tem­po­rary art, cul­ture and the­ory. Nowa­days, every­one seems to be con­vinced that com­put­ers are going to take over every aspect of every­day life; whether this is a good or a bad thing is the only remain­ing point of con­tro­versy. The idea of uni­fi­ca­tion of all media has lost its futur­is­tic appeal. The main response that one can expect to such a utopian /​dystopian proph­esy is a loud yawn. Con­sid­er­ing this col­lec­tive fatigue with regard to dig­i­tal cyber dreams, it has become almost impos­si­ble to recall the immense promise that ana­logue media once car­ried. I will take this as a challenge.

Whereas the tech­ni­cal means to pre­serve mem­o­ries con­tin­u­ously improve, the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions of stor­age media are para­dox­i­cally for­got­ten. Obliv­ion appears to be the inevitable fate of out­dated tech­nol­ogy and the nec­es­sary price that has to be paid for progress… but does it really have to be? Before seal­ing this Faus­t­ian deal, the under­ly­ing deter­min­is­tic rela­tion between tech­no­log­i­cal progress and amne­sia needs to be fur­ther inter­ro­gated. In this essay, I will there­fore exam­ine how these terms come together in the con­struc­tion of bio­graph­i­cal nar­ra­tives. Obvi­ously, tech­no­log­i­cal inven­tions open up new expres­sive modal­i­ties to con­struct such sto­ries. Nowa­days, only a techno­phobe would deny that pho­tos, videos, and audio record­ings can have a sur­plus value over mere tex­tual descrip­tions of events. Still, the pos­si­ble down­sides of these inven­tions should not be over­looked. Can and did new media destroy old pos­si­bil­i­ties to cap­ture a life? And are there events and sto­ries that are impos­si­ble to express within con­tem­po­rary or future media? These ques­tions are not spe­cific to the cur­rent dig­i­tal age but are recur­rent through­out his­tory. They emerge when one medial epis­teme is threat­ened to be replaced by another.

Just like Gramo­phone, Film, Type­writer, Ralph Waldo Ellison’s auto-​fictional story ‘Liv­ing with Music’ (1955) cap­tures such a tech­no­log­i­cal shift. The story looks back upon an era in which ana­logue media were not yet doomed to dis­ap­pear but rather pos­sessed an imma­nent promise and lurk­ing threat to take — and make — over every­day life. Ellison’s per­sonal medium of choice is the gramo­phone. The author describes in detail the prac­ti­cal, esthetic, and polit­i­cal rup­ture that the intro­duc­tion of this hi-​tech device inflicted upon his own life and work. Whereas the record player may have become a clumsy piece of low fidelity equip­ment for many, I will argue that Ellison’s implicit the­o­ret­i­cal posi­tion — which I will call media-​epistemic plu­ral­ism — has sur­vived the gramophone’s decay. In fact, his story pre­fig­ures a com­plex atti­tude towards tech­no­log­i­cal progress that man­ages to avoid the weari­some dichotomy between utopia and its inverse.