medial operations » media

about medial operations

yeehaa — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 22:33:20 +0000

Medial Operations is an ad hoc publication platform for my current research-project-in-progress. The three open-ended, interrelated questions that run through the different posts and other contributions on this website are:

#1 How do technological media produce, shape and transform knowledge?

In this research project, I depart from an insight developed by (amongst others) the philosopher Walter Benjamin and the media theorist Marshall McLuhan: the technological a priori of art, culture, and – most importantly – (academic) knowledge are not secondary to their content. Media matter; they are not just the accidental and transitory shape of a necessary and eternal truth. Inside and outside, content and form, message and medium are inextricably linked. In fact, without some kind of (technological) apparatus of storage and transmission there would not be any content at all.

Since all technological media have a unique material structure, they produce, shape, and transform information in many different ways. What is data to a certain medium could therefore just as well be noise or nonsense to another. ‘Medial Operations’ is the concept that I would like introduce to designate the complex transitions between noise, nonsense, information, and knowledge. This research website questions the ontological and epistemological ramifications of such shifts between different media. Or, to avoid unnecessary abuse of philosophical jargon:

#2 What happens when data travels from one medium to another?

Through medial operations the technology of a certain era often links up. Rather than functioning in isolation, media work with and against each other. Friedrich Kittler has baptized such historically determined sets of competing and cooperating media writing systems. A writing system forms the technological a priori of an age. Each of these media-dependent epistèmes has its own singular set of operations to select and extract sections of noise and transform them into data.

Despite the plurality of writing systems, it would be a mistake to presume an unmediated outside. All data is inscribed in a medium. The only distinctions possible are those between different modes of storage, processing, and transmission. In other words, all that is left are different modes of medial expressions. Following one of Jacques Derrida’s suggestions, this research website does not make a distinction between original and mediated expressions, but aims to develop a typology of iterations … or, better yet, a topography of operations.

The concept ‘medial operations’ is chosen to indicate the similarities and differences with Michel Foucault’s ‘discursive operations’. Just like discursive operations, medial operations precede positivities. They do not directly produce content, but determine the expressive modalities and limits of knowledge in a given epistème.

Following Kittler’s critique of Foucault, though, I believe that the a priori of an epistème do not primarily depend on discourse but on technology. Whether discursive or medial, though, the word ‘operation’ is used to erase the mechanistic connotations that such transitions may invoke and emphasize their productive dimension instead. Medial operations do not happen automatically; they are creative acts. This leads to the third and perhaps most important question:

#3 How can scholars capitalize on medial operations to develop new ways of knowing?

Medial Operations tries to redefine the concepts of university, discipline, and intellectual in the age of digital media. How can academics use the possibilities of past, present, and future media to develop new ways of knowing, as well as alternative educational models? The acceptance of new media in the humanities, however, does not only depend on the availability and accessibility of the latest technology. Even more importantly, it demands an openness to change.

In order to grasp the institutional complexity of this last problem, media theory alone does not suffice; discourse analysis – in some shape or form – has to be brought back in. The study of the technological a priori of knowledge needs to be complemented with insights from poststructuralism, gender and race studies, and psychoanalysis. The discourse that needs to be critically analyzed, however, turns out to be our own. // bibliography

I use the literal translation of the german concept ‘Aufschreibesysteme’ rather than the common English translation ‘Discourse Networks’ because I find the latter to be simultaneously too loose and too specific.

The critique of linguistic presence that Jacques Derrida develops in “Signature Event Context” (1971) has become a common place in contemporary philosophy and literary theory. Often forgotten, however – not in the last place by the French philosopher himself – is the fact that this essay does not just proclaim the ‘death of metaphysics’ but also sketches a path for future philosophical research. “Signature Event Context” initiates a shift from meaningful signs to the acts, procedures, and operations that invoke them.

In ”Signature Event Context”, Derrida unfolds the radical consequences of Ferdinand de Saussure’s argument that spacing – on a material level – is a precondition for any kind of linguistic structure:

“This force of rupture is due to the spacing with constitutes the written sign: the spacing which separates it from other elements of the internal contextual chain (the always open possibility of its extraction and grafting), but also from all the forms of a present referent (past or to come in the modified form of the present or to come) that is objective or subjective. The spacing is not the simple negativity of a lack, but the emergence of the mark.” (Derrida 317)

As opposed to the aspirations of the Swiss linguist’s, “Signature Event Context” demonstrates that these constitutional gaps and breaches can never be bridged. Breaking with a context, any context, is both cause and effect of all writing and speaking. Since the emergence of these meaning-producing ruptures can impossibly be explained from the context with which they break, Derrida refers to them as events.

Due to these ruptures, statements and utterances cannot be used in an inappropriate manner. Or at least, there is no false use in respect to an original context or addressee. The intentions of an author, or the norms, values, and customs of a historical discourse, can never – not even partially – determine the proper use of an utterance. A statement has to be iterable (repeatable, citable) in any possible context in order to be legible at all.

“The possibility of repeating, and therefore identifying, marks is implied in every code, making of it a communicable, transmittable, decipherable grid that is iterable for a third party, and thus for any possible user in general” (315)

According to Derrida, every linguistic system has to consists solely of quotable marks. A system of differences – spacing – is a precondition for this radical iterability. Even speaking is therefore a form of writing. The fact, however, that these potential citations neither have an original nor an ultimate meaning, does not imply that they are completely devoid of sense. On the contrary, each utterance or statement – more precisely, each instantiation of an utterance or a statement – by definition produces its own context. Its proper use and meaning coincide with an act of writing, and it is in that very broad sense that language is performative.

To a student of Friedrich Nietzsche like Jacques Derrida, this universalizing conclusion — every statement is iterable; language is always performative — would not make sense, if it were not immediately followed by a pluralizing gesture: there are different modes of iteration. It is exactly in pluralizing and specifying these broad, abstract categories that Derrida sees opportunities for future philosophical research. Towards the end of “Signature Event Context”, he states:

“Thus, one must less oppose citation or iteration to the noniteration of the event, than construct a differential typology of forms of iteration, supposing that this is a tenable project that can give rise to an exhaustive program, a question I am holding off on here. In this typology, the category of intention will not disappear; it have its place, but from this place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and the entire system of utterances. Above all, one then would be concerned with different type of marks or chains of iterable marks, and not with an opposition between citational statements on the one hand, and singular and original statement-events on the other.” (326)

Rather than finding or constructing an origin, truth, presence, or consciousness, Derrida proposes to capitalize on the possibilities that emerge from the lack of such a foundation for knowledge. Hence, a typology of iterations. To cover this programmatic aspect of “Signature Event Context”, however, I find the terms iteration and citation an unfortunate choice. These two words suggest that Derrida’s argument is limited to linguistics, while it actually applies to all forms of writing. Each mark that emerges necessarily breaks with its context; every inscription is an event.

I would argue that Derrida’s usage of the terms iteration and citation in “Signature Event Context” is strategic. He needs them to emphasize the impossibility of singularity in language; To show that every utterance is defined by it iterability. When Derrida calls for a typology of forms iterations, however, these concepts actually obscure rather than clarify his point. Derrida does not literally wants to classify different forms of citation, he wants to explore the heterogeneous acts that invoke events. There are many ways to break with a context. In order to emphasize this broader relevance of Derrida’s critique, I propose to replace the term iteration with (medial) operation.

The ‘Intellectual Image’ conceives the image as a site where multiple so-called conceptual personae are confronted with each other. ‘Conceptual personae’ is a term introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to designate the immanent, intelligent agents that can be found in philosophical texts. In coining this term they implicitly respond to Roland Barthes’ death of the author and Michel Foucault’s claim that the the word ‘author’ refers to a “… complex variable of discourse …” Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, argue that the author – as an agent of discourse rather than a variable – is reborn inside the text, exactly at the empty space that his death left behind.

The object of the research proposed here will be the figure of the intellectual. In his essay ‘The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual’(1984), Cornel West emphasizes the critical potential of his protagonist that stems from the fact that this situated individual is always caught between two discursive practices, that of the white society and the black community. These practices force conflicting roles – in other words personae – upon the black intellectual. As a result, this figure functions as an arena in which these discursive tensions intersect and clash. In other words, not the situated individual but the conceptual personae are the actual agents of discourse.

According to this line of thinking, the fact that the intellectual is a site rather than a person implies that this concept can no longer be restricted to human beings. Differently put, a text, image, record or movie can also function as an intellectual in this new sense of the word. The situated individual has become a medium amongst others. In my research, I want to show that this so-called medial turn transforms the image from a representation to a collision point where heterogeneous conceptual personae and their corresponding discursive practices come together.

This project resulted in two articles — New Adventures in Low-Fidelity and Oh Baby, I Like It Raw – and several lectures.

Benjamin, Walter. “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 217–51.

Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982. 307–330.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer & Chris Cullens. Stanford University Press, 1992.

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Winthrop-Young Geoffrey Winthrop-Young & Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Routledge, 2001.

about ulysses lied

yeehaa — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 21:30:58 +0000

Ulysses Lied

Reading Friedrich Kittler’s Musik und Mathematik

The name Friedrich Kittler is inextricably linked to Media Theory, but in fact the rich diversity of his work exceeds this disciplinary label.

Throughout his career, Kittler has attempted to achieve “the expulsion of Spirit from the humanities,” as the title of one of his early essays—“Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften” (1980)—announces. For a contemporary English-speaking audience, a better translation of the same phrase might be “overcoming humanism.” This has been Kittler’s goal ever since, as becomes particularly evident in seminal works such as Discourse Networks (1983) and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1985), though it is also apparent in more recent texts such as “Universities: Wet, Hard, Soft, and Harder” (2000).

One of the most important but undervalued accomplishments of Kittler’s work is that he redefines the relation between humanities and science. Kittler’s emphasis on the media-technological a priori of knowledge not only allows him to criticize and reject many of the age-old dogmas in the humanities, but, conversely, poststructuralism and psychoanalysis enable him to reflect critically on technology. Kittler thereby envisions a new kind of humanities—one that can no longer bear that name, of course!

This new seminar focuses on Kittler’s latest and perhaps most ambitious project, Musik und Mathematik. This work aims to present a cultural history of the Western world in four volumes, starting in ancient Greece, then passing through Rome, the middle ages and up to the present computerized age. In 2006 the first volume appeared (Wilhelm Fink Verlag), bearing the subtitle Hellas 1: Aphrodite. Written by Kittler with the help of dozens of assistants, the book explores the early entanglement of eros, music, mathematics, and the alphabet. On the basis of an original and arguably controversial reinterpretation of the Sirens passage from the Odyssey, Kittler aims to show how Western culture was born from the notation of the vowels of the Sirens’ song. Kittler takes mathematics to refer to the moment of, and the desire for, learning implicated in this singular event.

The book’s narrative comprises a patchwork of contrasting sections, containing in-depth studies of Greek texts, references to contemporary (popular) culture, travels to the Tyrrhenean Sea, and discussions with Theodor W. Adorno, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and countless others. Balancing as it does between grand synthesis and local, rather free association, the book invites a patient and critical reading. The organizers propose to afford this strange but inspiring book the time required for such a reading. In the Fall of 2009, alternating between locations at Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam, they invite scholars from all disciplinary backgrounds to join in the reading. In view of the Homeric context of the book, specialists in ancient Greek, archeology, and other relevant fields will be asked to present their views on the books’ theses.

For more details, please visit the website or contact the organizers: //

dr. Jan Hein Hoogstad (Literary Studies, UvA): j.h.hoogstad@uva.nl
prof.dr. Sander van Maas (Musicology, UU and UvA): vanmaas@uva.nl

down the drain

yeehaa — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:12 +0000

A presentation that I gave at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis on the 29th of April 2009 for the How To Do Cultural Analysis and Why (Not) lecture series organized by Murat Aydemir.

new adventures in low-fidelity

yeehaa — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:48:49 +0000

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.

noise is the new meaning

yeehaa — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:27:55 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

A presentation that I gave on the 17th of November 2008 at the English Department of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis for the eNow! lecture series organized by Terri Sutton.