Media Theory and Cultural Technologies : In Memoriam Friedrich Kittler [1 ed.] 9781443893299, 9781443850711

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Media Theory and Cultural Technologies

Media Theory and Cultural Technologies: In Memoriam of Friedrich Kittler Edited by

Maria Teresa Cruz

Media Theory and Cultural Technologies: In Memoriam of Friedrich Kittler Edited by Maria Teresa Cruz This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Maria Teresa Cruz and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5071-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5071-1 Organized by Maria Teresa Cruz Translations and Revision by Rui Azevedo and Marlene deWilde Support to the Edition: Francisco Lima Soares With the support of: - Centre for the Study of Communication and Language (CECL) at the NOVA University of Lisbon, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences (FCSH) - This volume is financed by National Funds through FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia for the project Refª: UID/CCI/04667/2013 - Translations and Revision by Rui Azevedo financed by National Funds through FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology for the project PEst-OE/COM/UI0158/2014. All chapters proofread by Marlene deWilde.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword ................................................................................................... vii Maria Teresa Cruz Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 After the Media: The Textility of Cultural Techniques Bernhard Siegert Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 22 Media and Amechania Peter Weibel Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 43 Materiality of Script and the Operation of Thoughts: Some Reflections on ‘Notational Iconicity’ and ‘Flattening Out’ as a Cultural Technique Sybille Krämer Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 57 Medium, Dispositif, Apparatus Maria Teresa Cruz Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 74 Artifice as an Aesthetic Force: A Tribute to Friedrich Kittler José Gomes Pinto Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 89 On the Materiality of Writing and the Text Maria Augusta Babo Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 99 Signs in the Machine: the Poem as Dataflow Manuel Portela Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 116 From the Fallacy of the Immaterial to Kittler’s Surface Effect Manuel Bogalheiro

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Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 129 Notes on Media Ontology Jorge Rodrigues Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 143 Genealogy of Perception and the Invention of the ‘Sogenannte Mensch’ Catarina Patrício Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 154 The Kittlerian Interference in Film as a “Constructive Extension” of Man Carlos Natálio Abstracts / Contributors ........................................................................... 161

FOREWORD

This collection results from a selection of the contributions presented at the international conference “Cultural Technologies and Media Arts”, coorganized by the Goethe Institut in Portugal and the Research Center in Communication and Language of the New University of Lisbon. The purpose behind this initiative was recognizing the importance media theory has assumed for the understanding of human experience and culture, in its broader sense, especially under the influence of Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011), and promoting the discussion of new contributions to this area, which added concepts like cultural techniques and operativity to the concept of materialities, central to a post-structuralist media theory, through essays like the ones by Bernhard Siegert, Sybille Krämer and Peter Weibel. The transformations brought about by the introduction of the computer in the plane of relations between our mind, our memory, our body and our senses, and the way these are reflected in our actions, productivity and thought are both the direct and indirect horizon of the reflections presented in this volume. Also in this respect, it pays tribute to the paths opened up by Friedrich Kittler, which lead to a profound reflection around digital culture and its archaeology in western culture. I thank the support given to this initiative by Lisbon’s Goethe Institut and the Research Center in Communication and Language, and in particular, to Dr. Joachim Bernauer and Dr. Claudia Hahn-Raabe, the collaboration for its conception and organization to Maria Augusta Babo and José Gomes Pinto and the complicity in its execution to Adriana Martins, Manuel Bogalheiro, Carlos Natálio, Catarina Patrício and Jorge Rodrigues. For the work of translation and invaluable support given in the editing of these texts, I also thank Rui Azevedo and Francisco Lima Soares. Lisbon, December 2014 Maria Teresa Cruz

CHAPTER ONE AFTER THE MEDIA: THE TEXTILITY OF CULTURAL TECHNIQUES BERNHARD SIEGERT

1. Media After Kittler Since Friedrich Kittler left this world in October 2011, numerous conferences and obituaries have been dedicated to the discussion of his legacy. The question of the past and the future of the so-called media is in this context of particular interest – especially with regard to the discipline of media studies, which is still developing, or already vanishing again. After Kittler, the meaning of media history as well as the necessity of media theory is on trial. The double meaning of after (in the Latin sense of either secundum or post) provides a useful framework for this revision. On the one hand, the question is what role after Kittler (in the sense of secundum or according to Kittler) media history and theory played in the humanities. Historical media studies, which emerged in the eighties of the last century in Germany and in the founding of which Kittler had been clearly instrumental, was not primarily concerned with the theory or history of single media. This was already the province of individual disciplines such as film studies, television studies, computer science, radio research and so on. Rather, it strove toward histories of the mind, soul and senses removed from the grasp of literary studies, philosophy and psychoanalysis and thus ready for transfer to a different domain: media. But because media were less of a focus than a change of the frame of reference for the traditional objects of the humanities – to quote Kittler’s infamous words, it was a matter of “expelling the spirit from the humanities” – the traditional objects of research that defined communication studies (e.g., press, film, television, radio) were never of great interest. Media studies deserted literary studies only to invade them again and to replace the emphasis on authors or styles with a sustained attention to

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inconspicuous technologies of knowledge such as index cards, writing tools, typewriters, discourse operators (such as quotation marks), pedagogical media such as the blackboard, media like phonographs or stereo sound technology, and disciplining techniques like alphabetization. As indicated by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s famous catchphrase “the materialities of communication”, this changing of the humanities’ frame of reference aimed to replace the hegemony of understanding, which inevitably tied meaning to a variant of subjectivity or self-presence, with power constellations or military couplings of technologies and bodies as the base and abyss of meaning.1 Therefore Kittler was never much interested in stories that told the history of such technologies for their own sake (like, for instance, in STS). Kittler had always been a genealogist in the Nietzschean sense, and firmly believed that discovering the mean origins of some highly valued concept would change that concept in a fundamental way. Thus he tried once to talk Niklas Luhmann out of his social systems by explaining to him how systems theory originated in digital switching circuits and cybernetics.

2. Media After Media But this media analysis already operated across a historical abyss that separated media technology from the genealogists, who deciphered their secret agency in the history of literature, philosophy, anthropology, art or whatever. To quote from the beginning of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter: Technologies, which not only subvert writing but absorb it and carry it away, including the so-called man, render their own description impossible. [...] Once formerly distinct data flows [are turned] into standardized series of digitized numbers, any medium can be translated into any other. With numbers, everything goes. Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay, storage, transportation; 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.2

1

See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, "Flache Diskurse," in Materialität der Kommunikation, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1988), 919; see also Gumbrecht, "A Farewell to Interpretation," in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 399. 2 Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 7–8.

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Once the distinctions between media in the plural are only a question of interface design between the so-called user and the Universal Turing Machine, which is able to simulate all other machines, media lose their ontological status as material objects. Therefore the second question is what role media history and media theory can possibly play in the humanities after Kittler – in the sense of post-Kittler – after media studies has lost the media? Are media studies left with retrospections of past media, as Kittler himself suggested? In fact there is a discourse going on that addresses media only as a thing of the past or denies their being altogether – Friedrich Kittler in 1993: "There is no software"; Eva Horn in 2007: "There are no media”; Claus Pias in 2011: “Was waren Medien? (What were media?)” Thus, there are good reasons to assume that media after Kittler are characterized primarily by their inauthenticity. Methodologically their authentic meaning never was to be found within their own history but in their "destructive character" (Benjamin): in the "exorcism of the spirit" or in "the abandoning of the Human" or in the "Stop Making Sense". Ontologically, media exist after the implementation of Turing's Universal Machine and Shannon's scanning theorem only as simulations of themselves. To this inauthenticity of the media, a number of "turns" and neologisms pay tribute, which emerged in the aftermath of the aforementioned transformation of media into interfaces: In Germany it is first of all the neologism "mediality"; in the UK we learn about the new plural of "mediums", which is meant to replace the ontologically inauthentic "media"; in France it is the concept of the "mediateur" (brought up by Antoine Hennion and recently adapted by Bruno Latour), or it is the old but modernized concept of "cultural techniques". Cultural techniques are a result of the "practical turn" in media studies, which itself is a result of the post-media effect. Kittler himself turned his back on the inauthentic media and turned towards what he called "media before media": the symbolic operations of images, writing and numbers, not to mention his late obsession with Aphrodite and the Sirens. But interestingly the ontological abasement of media to simulations in the digital age resulted in a mediatheoretical revision of ontology itself, which already very early on in Kittler's lifetime turned into technoontology. The father of techno-ontology is of course Martin Heidgeger. Modern metaphysics, Heidegger taught us, founds an epoch in which being (das Seiende) is interpreted as objectiveness. The techniques and technologies of this epoch, that have the power to call something into being, are the techniques and technologies of representation. Only what can be represented is an object. That is, only what can be represented is at

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all. Kittler's high-tech version of this techno-ontology is the formula: “Nur was schaltbar ist, ist überhaupt.” Only what can be implemented in the form of a switching circuit is at all. Implementation as a switching circuit is the pre-condition of being. If we take "wiring" (Schaltung) in its broadest possible meaning, then Kittler's techno-ontology resonates in a quite surprising way with Bruno Latour's ontology of scientific facts. Like Kittler, Latour insists on the necessity of opening up the black boxes of abstract concepts like The Social, The Spirit, Man and other philosophical generalities and demonstrating by what inconspicuous means they are fabricated, and how sociologists or philosophers are made to believe in the autonomy of concepts or facts. The Latourian version of Kittler's technoontology would read: Only what remains stable in the “wiring” of the immutable mobiles is at all. "Wiring" in Latour's terminology would be “enchaînement”, i.e., concatenation. The referent of scientific knowledge, the fact, is produced by the concatenation of immutable mobiles, and that referent remains solid or “real” as long as it survives all translations without any intolerable transformations. Such a translation would no longer carry with it the onto-historical undertone, which is audible in Kittler’s formula. It would as a consequence liberate the question of how being is made – fabricated – from onto-historical thinking in epochs. The overcoming of an onto-historical conception of media history, which was always basic to media history according to Kittler, opens up the possibility for a reconceptualization of ontology, which one could call “operative ontologies”, that asks for the concrete ontic operations and practices that produce first of all ontological distinctions – among many others, also those between image and picture, or figure and ground, or active and passive, or message and medium, subject and object, man and animal and so on. These ontic operations are called cultural techniques.

3. Cultural Techniques The concept of cultural techniques refers to the process of articulation as such. The methodological stake of a theory of cultural techniques is marked by the fact that it replaces an ontological distinction with the ontic problem of making that distinction, which may be dealt with by different cultures in different ways. Only on this level of an operative ontology does the concept of cultural techniques gain its actual strength. According to Bruno Latour, the world is not divided between material objects on the one hand and language on the other as modern science has claimed so often (in contradiction to its own practices), but language and things, signs and referents are connected with each other by chains of hybrid elements,

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which operate the articulation between matter and form. These hybrid elements, which generate the world of distinctions, are cultural techniques in the sense of operative ontologies. Geoffrey Winthrop Young has recently pointed out this concept of cultural techniques in a very smart way: The term ‘cultural techniques’ refers to operations that coalesce into entities which are subsequently viewed as the agents or sources running these operations. Procedural chains and connecting techniques give rise to notions and objects that are then endowed with essentialized identities. Underneath our ontological distinctions are constitutive, media-dependent ontic operations that need to be teased out by means of a techno-material deconstruction. To rephrase it in a more philosophical vein: the study of cultural techniques continues in a technologically more informed fashion a philosophical line of ontic-ontological questioning opened up by Martin Heidegger. If German media theory in the Kittlerian vein focused on the materialities of communication, the study of cultural techniques takes aim at the materialities of deconstruction.

In order to differentiate cultural techniques from other technologies, Thomas Macho has argued that only those techniques that involve symbolic work should be labeled cultural techniques. “Symbolic work requires specific cultural techniques, such as speaking, translating and understanding, forming and representing, calculating and measuring, writing and reading, singing and making music.”3 What separates cultural techniques from all others is their potential for self-reference or a “pragmatics of recursion”: From their very beginnings, speaking can be spoken about and communication be communicated. We can produce paintings that depict paintings or painters; films often feature other films. One can only calculate and measure with reference to calculation and measurement. And one can of course write about writing, sing about singing, and read about reading. […] Building on a phrase coming out of systems theory, we could say that cultural techniques are second order techniques.4

Without a doubt it would be very tempting to follow a proposal of such alluring simplicity, but unfortunately it is not always so easy to distinguish between first and second order techniques. It makes a difference, Macho 3

Thomas Macho, “Tiere zweiter Ordnung: Kulturtechniken der Identität und Identifikation,” in Über Kultur. Theorie und Praxis der Kulturreflexion, ed. Dirk Baecker et al. (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008), 99. 4 Macho, “Tiere zweiter Ordnung,” 100.

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writes, whether you whittle and adorn an arrow or shoot it an animal.5 But does this not ontologize and universalize an occidental rationality that always already separates two different types of knowledge: culture on the one hand and technology on the other? What if the arrow can be used only after it has been “adorned”? What if said “adornment” is part of the arrow’s technical make-up? In short, it is problematic to base an understanding of cultural techniques on a static concept of technologies and symbolic work, that is, on ontologically operating differentiations between first and second order techniques. Separating the two must be replaced by chains of operations and techniques: In order to situate cultural techniques before the grand epistemic distinctions between culture and technology, code and thing, it is necessary to elaborate a processual rather than ontological definition of first and second order techniques. We need to focus on how recursive operative chains bring about a switch from first to second order techniques (and back), how nonsense generates sense, how the symbolic is filtered out of the real or how, conversely, the symbolic is incorporated into the real.6

4. Textility as Paradigm A paradigmatic case is the art of weaving. If you adhere to the rigorous distinction between first and second order techniques, weaving will not qualify as a cultural technique because it does not exhibit any selfreferential qualities. The term only makes sense once a piece of tapestry depicts a piece of tapestry, or a garment appears on a garment. Yet the very technique, the ongoing combination of weave and pattern, always already produces an ornamental pattern that in our culture is usually blinded out as the passive medium, but that by virtue of its technical repetition refers to itself and therefore (according to Derrida) displays sign character.7 Following this insight, Gottfried Semper, who argued that "most of the decorative symbols used in architecture originated or were derived from the textile arts," conceived of the wall, a basic first-order architectural technique, as a second-order technique that came equipped with an originary self-reference.8 5

Thomas Macho, Vorbilder (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2011), 45. See Tim Ingold, “Toward an Ecology of Materials,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 41 (2012): 427–42, here 438. 7 See Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 307–30. 8 Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, transl. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: 6

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A wall in the sense of a vertical closure of a room (parede) and a wall in the sense of a support for a roof have nothing in common insofar as the function of the wall (parede) was realized originally by some kind of textile: be it by a braided mat or a woven carpet. It is important to note that the German word Wand (wall) is etymologically closely related to Gewand (garment). Thus it reminds us of the old origin of the room partition.9 “The use of rough textiles as a means to separate the interior life from the exterior life and as a formal design of the idea of space preceded the most simply constructed wall of bricks.”10 Images of textiles, for example, garments, often appear in textile media, for example, tapestries. But when a tapestry depicts a transparent fabric, there is an increased interference between ground and figure because of the particular qualities of the textile medium. This can be seen in an early fifteenth-century tapestry, showing the Passion of Christ, held by the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London (fig. 1). It is made of wool and silk with gold and silver thread; it comes from Arras in France and probably hung in front of or behind an altar.11 Next to Joseph of Arimathea, we can see Nicodemus holding up an apparently transparent shroud by the edge in order to wrap the body of Christ in it. It is a kind of “visual deception”: we see the fabric of the tapestry through the fabric of the shroud even though the fabric of the shroud is nothing other than the fabric of the tapestry. To put this more precisely, the shroud as a represented fabric is a figure on the ground of the fabric of representation. If we venture closer, the structure of the medium is so strongly perceived that the represented shroud and the shroud of representation return to the same level (fig. 2). The difference between first order and second order technique dissolves. The threads of the shroud turn out to be the same threads as those which make up the tapestry. The represented ground and the ground of representation become indistinguishable. In fabric the image can never be entirely detached from its medium; unlike the hylomorphic scheme, in which form is imposed on a passive material, a contact remains here between ground and figure, material and form, or medium and thing.

Getty Research Institute, 2004): 242. See also Bernhard Siegert, “After the Wall: Interferences among Grids and Veils” in Grazer Architektur Magazin, 9 (2012): 18–33. 9 Gottfried Semper: Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten [1860], vol. 1, Frankfurt/M./ Hildesheim/Zurich/New York 2008, 229. 10 Ibid., 228 (interpunctuation modified). 11 Victoria and Albert Museum, London, inventory number T.1-1921.

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Fig. 1: Tapestry with scenes from the passion of Christ (detail), c. 1400-1425, presumably France (Arras). Wool, silk, silver and gold threads. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Fig. 2: Tapestry with scenes from the passion of Christ (detail).

Another example is a tapestry from the famous Unicorn Series from the end of the 15th century, which today is held by the Metropolitan Museum in The Cloisters (fig. 3). The tapestry depicting the unicorn as it is attacked by the hunters shows in its left margin a hunter just about to let a dog off the leash. His right stocking or top boot features a patch (fig. 4). How shall one decide without radio carbon dating whether there was a hole in the tapestry, which at this spot has been repaired, or whether the artist wanted to depict a patched stocking? Is the hole in the carpet or is it

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in the stocking? Does the hole belong to the layer of the image or to the layer of the medium? In textile media this is an a priori unanswerable question.

Fig. 3: The Unicorn is Attacked. Tapestry, woolen warp, wool, silk, silver and gilden weft. Southern Netherlands, 1495–1505. The Metropolitan Museum, New York, The Cloisters.

Fig. 4: The Unicorn is Attacked (detail).

An altar cloth presumably from Nuremberg from around 1465, which depicts Christ as the man of sorrows among several saints, shows another kind of entanglement of image and medium (fig. 5). The side wound is represented by the body of the carpet in yet another way, by the wefts, as one can recognize if one ventures closer (fig. 6). Whether it was created like that or whether it was caused by a practice of veneration, which then

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would bring the carpet into close affinity with a relic, is hard to decide. But anyway, the wound is represented too by an oblong opening in the carpet. It is as if the carpet had replaced the represented body to make possible the gesture of the doubting Thomas. If we accept the possibility that the opening was caused by the desire of the believers to touch the wound of Christ, this would be a perfect example of an interdependent causation of two operations, where the entanglement of figure and ground causes the practice of touching and thereby produces the opening in the carpet, and vice versa the practice of touching.

Fig. 5: Altar Frontal with Man of Sorrows and Saints, c. 1465. Linen warp with woollen and silk weft, Nuremberg, Germany, presumably Lorentzkirche. The Metropolitan Museum, New York, The Cloisters

Fig. 6: Altar Frontal with Man of Sorrows and Saints (detail).

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An example from the Maghreb from the 1940s bridges the gap between my first example, the carpet from Arras, and the media art with which I will conclude. It is a carpet that was most probably knotted in the Gerouan area (near Meknes) by hand (fig. 7). I am indebted to Thomas Slunecko for bringing it to my attention and also collecting the necessary data for the determination of its date of manufacture. He drew on Prosper Ricard’s monumental collection Corpus des tapis marocains (from 1934), and on this basis the origin of the carpet can be determined with great probability: It is the product of a local factory in the Gerouan area, manufactured by a Berber woman after a design by a French merchant. If one takes a somewhat closer look, its key feature comes even more to the fore, and is one which is alien to the Berber tradition as well as to the Turkish: none of them features the little squares that structure this carpet in its complete horizontal and vertical extension. Yet the interpretation of these mysterious elements is accomplished immediately if we understand them as an echo of a cultural technique introduced into the art of drafting and design in Europe during the Renaissance, and which in the 20th century was familiar to every school kid, but obviously not to members of the Berber tribes. The craftswoman did nothing but weave the technical ornament of the gridded paper (fig. 8), millimeter paper or checkered paper, on which the design was drafted into the carpet. In other words, what had been for the commissioner nothing but a carrier medium was not blinded out by the knotter but was transferred onto the carpet on an equal footing with all the other visual elements. The knotter did not “understand” the hylomorphic separation between the medium, which was meant to be ignored, and stay absent or invisible, and the figure, the ornamental design. Tim Ingold singled out the textile as a paradigm for a non-hylomorphic model of technology.12 For Ingold, the textility model of making has been downgraded by the rule of hylomorphism, which replaced the interweaving of matter and form with the ontological distinction between the two. But Ingold uses the concept of textility in a merely metaphorical way. His conceptualization is not supported by the study of empirical textile materials.

12

See Tim Ingold, “The Textility of Making”, in Cambridge Journal of Economics 34 (2010): 92.

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Fig. 7: Berber Carpet, Marocco, Gerouan area, 1940s.

Fig. 8: Gridded paper.

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4. Interweaving of Image, Object and Medium In contrast, the work of the Berlin-based artist Veronika Kellndorfer aims exactly at revealing such a textile entanglement of image, represented object and medium.13 Art is the “setting-itself-to-work” of truth, wrote Martin Heidegger in the 1930s.14 Kellndorfer’s works, which combine the media of photography, silkscreen and glass, enact no less than a deconstruction of this term. It is not “the truth” that sets her art to work but technical displacements that set to work a disturbance of ontological certainties about what is image and what is imaged, about what is medium and what is form. Decisive for the conception of the image in modern painting, wrote Wolfram Pichler with reference to Hubert Damisch, is that the image carrier and the ground are not subordinated to the painted surface or the figure but are interwoven with them.15 But what if we “have never been modern” as Bruno Latour claims? What if we apply this statement not only to modernism but also to the image concept of the late Middle Ages, and not only to image-making but to cultural techniques and technologies in general?16 Some art historians endeavored to place Veronika Kellndorfer’s work into this or that modernist stylistic direction –minimal art or installation art, or Marcel Duchamp’s glass works, or whatever. A different observation seems more fruitful to me: her works are in a fundamental sense technical images. What I mean is that Kellndorfer’s glass works are the result of an interconnection of technical image-producing procedures based on the application of a discrete coding of image data. First a slide is transformed by a scanner into quantities of electronic energy. The disassembled image is translated into a screen, which then serves as a medium for applying variously dense dots of color onto the image carrier. The photograph printed onto the pane of glass is then sintered, causing the image to no 13 Kellndorfer's works have been exhibited in Berlin, Rome, Munich, Dresden, Los Angeles, Prague, Stuttgart, Haarlem, Santa Monica and many other cities. See Veronika Kellndorfer, Exterior and Interior Dreams, exhibition catzalogue, Ostfildern 2005 and Veronika Kellndorfer, Layers of Light and Reflection. Case Studies, Ostfildern 2012. 14 See Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge, 2002), 21 and elsewhere. 15 Wolfram Pichler, “Topologische Konfigurationen des Denkens und der Kunst,” in Wolfram Pichler and Ralph Ubl, Topologie. Falten, Knoten, Netze, Stülpungen in Kunst und Theorie (Vienna, 2009), 45. 16 See Hans Belting, Spiegel der Welt. Die Erfindung des Gemäldes in den Niederlanden (Munich, 2010).

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longer be on the carrier but in it. The technical production process manifests a visual thinking that occurs in operations, in which the artist can only intervene at the beginning of a new stage, at first through the selection of the motif then the determination of the format, and finally the choice of color. The use of a hole matrix in silk screening refers directly back to the beginnings of technical image production: namely, to the technique of image generation through coded patterns of holes that dominated industrial graphics from the late nineteenth century onward, a procedure that analyzes and transfers the halftone values of an original image. The idea of the halftone goes back much further, however: to a seventeenth-century media-theoretical model that combined the mezzotint technique, which was invented in 1642, with Descartes’s physiological theory of the processing of optically perceived data through their point-by-point fragmentation into patterns imprinted in the brain.17 But technical images do not begin with copperplate technique and the idea of neural signal analysis through pattern codes. Technical images are not restricted to modernity. The textile image had always been a technical image as it is generated by a mechanical process of distributing discrete visual points. So it is not by chance that Veronika Kellndorfer’s glass works quite often feature a layering of textile veils and rasters, especially when they appear as parts of walls or facades (fig. 9, 10, 11), and thus reflect old Semper’s thesis about the textile origins of architecture and the original connection between wall and curtain. With Kellndorfer’s work we leave behind a critical shortcoming of Ingold’s ecology of materials, namely, that Ingold restricts his concept of technology to manufactural, artisanal techniques of making (like brickmaking, forgery, carpentry) and he held that mechanical procedures had fallen irretrievably under the spell of hylomorphism.18 Veronika Kellndorfer’s work can be seen as a scheme that refers back to the beginning of the era of the image and thus asks questions about the ontology of the image – that is, the basic relationships within the triangle of image, visual medium and depicted object – under the condition of the technicity of the image. The work of deconstruction performed by Kellndorfer’s glass works can be appreciated in the fact that it is unsatisfactory to describe them as images at all. They are rather interventions into the way images exist, recursive loops that translate the depicted things into the 17

See Karin Leonhard and Robert Felfe, Lochmuster und Linienspiel. Überlegungen zur Druckgrafik des 17. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg im Breisgau and Berlin, 2006), 29–36. 18 See Ingold, Textility of Making, 98.

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mediality that underlies their existence: from the images’ apparently antecedent reality, they derive a mediality, which they combine with the image of this reality. It is not so much that they depict something in the sense of representation but rather that they are objects that intervene in the media structure of reality. They appear in buildings (fig. 12) – as integral architectural components – and what they show are metaphors, translations, scalings of their own technical being. They are empirical objects that simultaneously reflect their technical conditions of possibility and the media structure of so-called reality. And by doing so, they subvert the reliability of the objectivity of things.

Fig. 9: Veronika Kellndorfer: Bellevue (A curtain of glass), 1997. Silkscreen on glass, 275 × 170 cm each. S-Bahnhof Bellevue, Berlin © Veronika Kellndorfer.

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Fig. 10: Veronika Kellndorfer: Window of the IG-Metall Building, 2002, silkscreen on glass, Berlin © Veronika Kellndorfer

Fig. 11: Veronika Kellndorfer: Ocean Vista, 2007, 3-panel-solkscreen on glass, 293 x 357 cm, Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, USA © Veronika Kellndorfer

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Fig. 12: Veronika Kellndorfer: The Viewer Moved, 1993, silkscreen on glass, 625 × 275 cm, S-Bahnhof Bornholmer Straße, Berlin © Veronika Kellndorfer

In Alberti’s treatise on painting, the textile veil, the velum, serves as a medium of the technical construction of perspectival images. Alberti’s velum recurs in Veronika Kellndorfer’s glass works as the pattern of holes in the screen through which the image is applied to the glass. The screen itself is a polyester fabric, by the way (fig. 13), a curtain that has to be

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tightly stretched in order to disappear behind the act of imaging. What would happen if there were an accidental fold in the screen (fig. 14)? The ground of representation would then appear in the representation of the world, as in the tapestry from Arras. The curtain, said Jacques Lacan in reference to its cultic use,19 is the idol of absence.20 What is behind the curtain is doubtlessly nothing, but it has the quality of existing symbolically. However, it is not absence that is portrayed in Kellndorfer’s curtains but the medium. In place of the numinous, in the sense of the divine, there is the numinosity of media technology: the curtain is the medium of an operative ontology, which in late antiquity reveals the god; in modernity – with Johann Heinrich Füssli, for example – what has been split off from the subject, and with Kellndorfer, the technical medium as the ground of being.

Fig. 13: Veronika Kellndorfer: silkscreen, rolled out vertically, the artist's studio © Veronika Kellndorfer

19

See the curtain before the Ark of the Covenant in the Israelite’s Tent of Meeting (Exodus 26, 31–33), the curtain in the Temple of Solomon that tore at the moment of Jesus’s death (Mathew 27, 51), or the curtain that brought about the mechanical imitation of the divine epiphany in the prokypsis ceremony of the Byzantine imperial cult. See Brigitt Andrea Sigel, Der Vorhang der Sixtinischen Madonna. Herkunft und Bedeutung eines Motivs der Marienikonographie, dissertation (Zurich, 1977), 43–45. 20 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire livre IV: la relation d’objet (Paris, 1994), 155.

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Fig. 14: Veronika Kellndorfer: silkscreen with folds, the artist's studio © Veronika Kellndorfer

In their technical raster structure, the images burnt into the glass repeat the curtain they depict, as an ornament, so to speak. It is not by chance that a small work (in the studio) shows nothing but a curtain (fig. 15), and if you go up close enough to it, the curtain starts to interfere with the raster in the same way as in the tapestry from Arras in the V&A Museum (fig. 16). The recursive interweaving of image, represented object and medium is demonstrated in an exemplary way by a glass that shows a part of the Millard House by Frank Lloyd Wright in Pasadena from the year 1923 (2009) (fig. 17). The façade of the building, which belongs to a series of four houses by Wright, which he himself called “textile houses,” is itself a hole matrix. It repeats the silkscreen raster of the technical procedure with which the photograph is put onto or into the glass. Not only is the façade created from blocks of cement like a textile curtain, it is also perforated like a dot mask or a fabric. Here I rediscover my tapestry from Arras. A fabric within a fabric, a raster within a raster: the technical structure of the medium returns as an ornament of reality. The ghostly effect that such recursions bring about can also be seen in the visual object in the image of the Millard House: on its façade lies the shadow of a tree that is not itself in the picture. A shadow? Our perception continually flips back and forth between seeing a shadow to seeing a real tree behind the curtain of the façade. The trees standing behind the house, their crowns towering above the façade, are partially involved in the creation of this picture puzzle. But

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decisive to the oscillation of perception between a shadow projected onto the façade from the front and an image emerging through it from behind is the window in the top right corner. This window is a mise en abyme of a Kellndorfer glass. The eye cannot decide whether the tree whose forked trunk we see in the window is real and seen through the window, or a reflection in the glass. The eye cannot decide whether the aperture, which is additionally reminiscent of a picture because it is recessed, frames the world in front of or behind the façade. And in this coincidence of spatial determinations, the autonomous reality of the medium itself appears.

Fig. 15: Veronika Kellndorfer: Curtain, 2009, silkscreen on glass, the artist's studio © Veronika Kellndorfer

Fig. 16: Veronika Kellndorfer: Curtain, 2009, detail © Veronika Kellndorfer

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We don’t see through the glass but become entangled in layers of veils that cancel out the distinction between in front and behind, interior and exterior, image and medium. What is real? A dream within a dream. What is an image of reality? A dream within a dream within a dream. Or to put it more technically, a veil within a veil within a veil. A grid within a grid within a grid, endlessly interwoven. It is threshold phenomena of this kind that the history and theory of cultural techniques as a version of post-Kittlerian media studies is eager to conceptualize in a paradigmatic way. The approach of the study of cultural techniques does not a priori distinguish between object and meaning, represented reality and image, medium and form, but questions the ontologies that dominate a given culture by focusing on the technical and practical processing of those distinctions.

Fig. 17: Veronika Kellndorfer: Millard House, 2009, silkscreen on glass. Author's collection.

CHAPTER TWO MEDIA AND AMECHANIA PETER WEIBEL

Foreword In this communication I’ll be sharing some new ideas about the development of media in European civilization. I will take you on a journey starting from the Greeks. When you talk about culture in Europe, you always have to start from the Greeks. So that’s where we’ll start, and we’ll move forward to the present. I don’t know whether I’m right or not, but I want to propose to you some new ideas and propositions.

Media and Amechania The word “Amechania” is the starting point to rethinking the concepts of mechanics and mechanical arts. Today, when we speak about mechanics or the mechanical, it is always pejorative; we think of it as something dull and stupid. Mechanics is separated from the mind. I want to show you that maybe during the last 2,000 years, we’ve had the wrong idea about mechanics. I will show you the reasons why and at the end of the lecture, I will show you what new idea we might adopt about the concept of mechanics. “Amechania” was the name of the Greek goddess of helplessness. There has always been the idea that we are born helpless and that’s why we cry and demand help as babies. As we grow up and become adults, we remain beings with deficits who still need help. Now comes the point: the Greek element – a means negation. And so if we look at the word “Amechania” and take away the element “a”, which means negation, we end up with “Mechania” and then “Mechanics”. This is the first idea: mechanics is about help. We invented mechanics because it is a tool to help us. The first revolutionary mechanic invention, the first universal tool was, in my opinion, the alphabet. This picture Intelligente

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Produkte (figure 1) you see below is a work of mine from 1994. It consists of 28 sticks, since the alphabet has 26 letters plus the special signs.

Fig. 1. Peter Weibel, Intelligent Products, 1994

Writing is the first medium and the alphabet isn’t just a picture. As Wittgenstein’s famous phrase puts it: “The proposition is a picture of reality” (“Der Satz ist ein Bild der Wirklichkeit”).1 But writing is not just a picture, an image, of a fact. Writing is a tool that allows us to navigate our way through the world. We have memory, storage, we write down something on a carrier medium like paper. So the alphabet is the first medium. Now comes the point: words describe the world through the alphabet. The only tool we had in the beginning to describe the world was language but it doesn’t give us the world itself, just the world as we see it. It’s the possibility we have of description. There’s a famous question by cosmogenesis: “How does the world come to be?” The answer is, usually, “In the beginning was the word”. Because we had nothing other than the word to describe the world. Now we have particle physics and we describe the world with particles. We use an expression from modern particle physics to speak about the beginning of the world, what we term the “Big Bang”. To speak about a “Big Bang” when there weren’t any sound waves is a metaphorical description. It’s the same as “in the beginning was the word”. When we began to think about the origins of the world, we only had writing, so we can say that the beginning of the world was writing. The idea of the cosmo-genesis, of how the world rose, depends on the medium we use. When we change the medium, we have a different conception of the beginning of the world.

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.01. (Routledge & Kegan, London 1922), 62–63.

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Here's another example: the big questions regarding the beginnings of humankind, Anthropogenesis. How did humankind come to be? You know the answer; there was this couple, Adam and Eve. The point is that Adam, meaning “first and original man” never existed – the Hebrew word “Adam” is a generic name for man or human being. Since the Hebrew word Adam is very similar to the Hebrew word “adamah”, which means earth, soil, ground, the image was created that Adam was made from soil. Words that sound very similar were thought to hint at a special association of concepts. People thought they could make a human figure out of the earth. And therefore, since the Hebrew word for earth is Adamah, we think someone actually existed called Adam. Everything we constructed as a beginning, as an origin, was a mirror of language. We invented the medium of writing to help us, as a tool, navigate through the world. And now we learn that we have new tools to navigate and approach the world. Going back to our initial idea: Amechania, the concept of helplessness, is the root of the word mechanics. There is another source in Greek mythology. We look at the first opus, which is called Iliad, and at its sequel, which is called Odyssey. These are the oldest works of Western literature. Iliad and Odyssey are the first theories of media. The Odyssey was written maybe 700 to 800 years, or even 1200 years, before Christ. Some scholars allege that it’s impossible to give an exact date or to even say who really wrote it. Maybe it wasn’t Homer. If we look at this text, we find something interesting that usually isn’t mentioned. When people talk about the Odyssey, they don’t look at this figure in terms of media theory, and so they don’t understand the function of the epitheton ornans, of the attributes. They don’t understand who the character of Odysseus was. But if we take a closer look, we find many names. He was called “polytropos”, “polymechanos”, “polymetis”, among many other things. Poly-metis is a very important one since “metis” is a kind of cleverness. The Greek people had four systems of knowledge: one was “Episteme”, one was “Techné”, one was “Metis”, and the remaining one we’ll discuss later. Why did people have all these names for Odysseus? Why didn't they just call him a human being? Why did they call him Polytropos, Polymechanos, Polymetis? Because the attributes that describe him have to do with tools, with how he could survive. It took him ten years to get back to his home in Ithaca and so the idea was to show the capacities and tools he used to survive in this journey, and that is expressed in those names. Let’s take a closer look at these concepts. “Polytropos” means a man of many turns. You can’t trust him. He turns around and around, he changes his ideas, names and positions in order to survive. For example, Plato said

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that Achilles was a wonderful man because he was truthful and simple, but he said of Odysseus that he was polytropic and lied. So it was very clear from the beginning that media do not tell the truth. The world of media is not the same as the world of reality or truth. Another epithet for Odysseus tells us he was a various-minded man, so he had in fact a multiplicity of minds. Which is why he had all these “poly”s. Poly means many. So he was a man of multiplicity. We can see already that he was a man of many talents and the most extended talent he had was that of being poly-mechanic. Amechania, as the God of helplessness, appears when someone is helpless and has to turn mechanical or even poly-mechanical, so the opposite of helpless is mechanic, or poly-mechanical, to survive with the help of a tool. Nowadays, a “polymechanos” can be read as being a human being of many minds, of many mechanical faculties. As we call it today, cleverness means technical skill, craftiness, so the idea of polymechanos was used for someone who had skills, crafts – many crafts. When you have crafts available, then you have help. Then you are polymechanos. Therefore, the meaning of the words techniques and mechanics were very similar in the Greek times. In the late 19th century, the first polytechnic institutes were created, so this idea had been expanding for 2,000 years. But then we forgot it. The 20th century isn’t a wonderful century – it’s the century that has forgotten more than it assumes. I’ll give you one example. Around 1839, the Rosetta Stone was discovered and with it the language of Egypt. But in Europe, we spoke it until the 11th century. We knew Egyptian through the Arab language (the Arabs were here, in Portugal). We knew the Egyptian language but we forgot it, and rediscovered it in the middle of the 19th century. What I want to tell you is that the idea of mechanicos has its correct translation in the word “tool” (machine).

Fig. 2. Peter Weibel, Resistance Principle, 1971

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In figure 2, you see a piece of furniture with the alphabet. People could get closer and press the furniture. A letter would come out. And so you'd have many sentences and words. You realize that writing is a mechanical machine and you just have to push buttons. So, from the sticks to the box, my idea is to show that the alphabet is a formal system, a mechanical system with finite elements and some rules about how to press the buttons. These rules are called grammar. As you know from modern logic, everything that can be formalized in numbers or letters can be mechanized. This is called the Church-Turing Thesis, and it’s a basic principle of contemporary civilization. When we have prejudices against mechanics, I believe the prejudices start much earlier – with prejudices against language, since language is the first formal system and therefore it can be mechanized. Language is in fact a tool and it’s very important to understand this, whether you accept it or not. To demonstrate the point, I later did a lot of work around the idea of the machine, like the piece that is a typewriter, for example. And then later, when I did computer-based virtual realities, I put the alphabet as a group of red buttons on the floor so whenever people pressed a button with their feet, they'd create moving images. These buttons mirrored the alphabet and allowed the creation of different virtual worlds, of different movements in those worlds. I hope we agree that “mechané” means tool or machine and that it is very similar to “techné”. The basic idea behind mechanics, engines, machines or vehicles has been forgotten. The founder of physics, Aristotle, formulated it. He said, “Everything that happens must have a reason”. The idea is that there must be a cause before there’s an effect. This was for him the most basic principle. So, he began asking himself why do things happen in this world. There must be a reason. When we consider mechanics as something that helps us, we must task ourselves what is the reason that something happens. And then, there’s what we call “Neuzeit”, the beginning of modern science, with the addition of mathematical sciences and controlled experiments. First we have experience then we have reflection, and only then, slowly, do we have a series of experiments. I’ll give you an example. About 1864, the mathematician Maxwell proposed that light was made of electromagnetic waves. At the time, people associated light with little corpuscula, little particles. But Maxwell came up with a mathematical formula, and he said that light must be an electromagnetic wave. But that was only a mathematical equation. Nearly 20 years later, Heinrich Hertz carried out experiments. He realized that in modern science, theory comes first, and then the experiment to prove that

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the theory is correct. He did his experiments from 1886 to 1888 and he could prove, with these experiments, that the theory is right. Since then, we've known that light is made of electromagnetic waves. That discovery brought our civilization the radio, the television, the Internet, the mobile phone: all these things are based on the discovery of electromagnetic waves. Electromagnetic waves have existed for millions of years, but we didn’t know they existed. We didn't know what electricity was because we didn't have a natural organ for it. Can you imagine that electromagnetic force was only discovered 400 years ago, using the famous compass? Just like our atmosphere, electromagnetic force has existed for millions of years. And it was another mathematician, Gauss, who discovered that electromagnetic force comes from the center of the Earth. Since Faraday, we've known that we can turn magnetic force into electricity. Can you see what we do? First, we have observations. Then we have theories, and experiments to prove the theories: “Elementa Super Demonstrationem Ponderum” – we can only prove elements through experiments. There is a wonderful story that involves Lavoisier that may help you understand everything about mechanics and “amechania”. The French chemist Lavoisier did a public experiment in which he held in one hand a chemical éprouvette that was empty, with nothing to be seen in it, since it contained gas (“gas” is a neologism for chaos). He held another éprouvette with something that wasn't visible, since there was gas in it too. In one there was a gas called hydrogen; in the other was a gas called oxygen. Then he put these two invisible materials, these two invisible gases, together. What came out? A visible drop of water, H2O: H for hydrogen, O for oxygen. So you see now? He could prove, showing the evidence in public, that something that is invisible, which is gas, could be combined into something visible, material. This is mechanics, nothing else. So when people talk about mechanics, they usually have no idea – they're barbarous. For example, I was invited to found the Institute of New Media (IfNM) at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, which is a well-known art school in Germany, in 1990. There were famous painters there, like Jörg Immendorff and many others. One of the painters looked at me and said, “You are the man who’s bringing the spirit of mechanics into our art school”. But in the auditorium there was always a piano, which is something purely mechanical. And so I said, “Please take the piano out of the school. If you are against mechanics and machines, then please take it out”. The piano is a very mechanical instrument with wood, iron strings, ivory, etc., but with this hardware, you can create wonderful software. “OK, forget it” was their answer. You see? These painters had no idea of

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what they were talking about. I wanted to explain to you a little bit about the development of mechanics. Just one last example. This one concerns Al-Jazari (1136–1206), the famous Muslim historian. He published a book in 1206 called The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices. Even in the 13th century people had an idea of what mechanical devices mean. And then slowly, it took a long time as I've said, the 19th century had the idea to create new schools, the so-called polytechnic schools. This was an invention that again came from “poly-technicos”. It’s the idea behind Odysseus, which hundreds of years later generated the polytechnic institutes. In the 19th century too, we have the first philosophers of technology. And most of this philosophy, from the 19th century until today, is in fact organology. The basic idea behind it is: Mechanics is a form of help. Since human beings need help, they need extra organs. The organs we have are not enough to survive in this world. We need to do more than what our brains, hands, eyes or ears allow. That’s like the Greek idea behind Odysseus. Ernst Kapp (1808–1896) wrote a book called Principles of a Philosophy of Technology. It was published in 1877, at the same time when all these institutes were appearing, and it contained the term “organ projection”2. He was saying that technology was a projection from organs to tools. He said the hammer is like a fist, which is a phrase that was later repeated by Sigmund Freud and McLuhan. And he said that the chisel is like teeth. And when you have a telescope, it is like the eye. This is the beginning of this kind of anthropology, where people take into account the deficits and the defects of the human being: It isn’t equipped very well, just like a baby. We have to give him extra organs. These are extra tools. These are machines, mechanics and media. We come to prosthetics. We started with writing as a medium. When you talk about prosthetics today, you think about an artificial arm, artificial finger or leg. But in fact the idea doesn't come from medicine. It was only adopted by medicine in the 19th century. Before that, the word prosthetics was a concept from language; it had to do with the syllabus. It was a technical term for operations of language. As I said in the beginning, the world was only described in terms of the first available medium, as a mirror of writing. And in the very moment we expand media from tools of writing to tools of mechanics and machines, we also expand the meaning of words. First, prosthetics was a tool for the operations of language. But when we expand the medium, we expand our universe of operators. We expand the universe of our operating tools, and we also expand the 2

Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik. Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Cultur aus neuen Gesichtspunkten, George Westermann, Braunschweig, 1877, 29ff.

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meaning of the word. Subtly, prosthetics, which was usually a feature of language, becomes a feature of the body. So we see precisely what media are doing: expanding the ideas of writing into the ideas of media. Sigmund Freud, in his famous book Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), wrote that writing is the first medium of absence3 since it is a medium that can help you with events that aren't happening now, and that have been happening in another time or place. But with writing, you can report about things that happened in a prior time, in a future time, in another place. And Freud says technology is a process that continues the labor of writing, which continues this absence and this phantasm. This is an idea shared by McLuhan, Heidegger and Derrida, and it is found in McLuhan's subtitle for his book Understanding Media (1964), i.e., The Extensions of Man. Media are extensions of people. This is the continuation of “amechania”. We have invented mechanics and media as tools to help us survive in this world; it's not about pictures. We have the wrong idea about pictures. It's always about tools. And these tools are supposed to perfect our organs or help us overcome the limitations of our natural organs. The famous phrase of Freud – “Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person” – means the following: We have the telescopes, and we can see further than we would with our natural eye. We have the loudspeaker, so we can speak louder than we would with our natural mouth, etc. In this book, he described all our technical tools; we have invented these tools to remove the limits of our natural perception. When you invent a car, you don't invent it to drive slower than you walk. You invent a car so you can drive faster than you walk. And so we expand our limits. We invent the car and the plane to be faster than our walk. We go faster with the horse, then faster with the car, then faster with the plane. With a rocket we can be even faster. So the idea is always the same. We have faults; we are in a state of “amechania”. Then we have mechanics, and machines and media, etc., to improve our organs, and to surpass the limits of our organs. And that means that if you are against mechanics, if you are against media, then obviously you must be against writing. You must be in favor of helplessness. All these people who hate media and mechanics are, in fact, dehumanizing our society. They want to put us back into a state of “amechania”. They want us to go back into a state of helplessness. When you are a baby, you're not doing very well, and therefore you cry. A baby is in constant fear of being deserted. The baby is helpless when nobody comes, when nobody helps. “Amechania” and media are acquainted with phobocracy. “Phobo” means fear; “cratic” means 3 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents. Newly translated from the German a. ed. by James Strachey. (Norton & Company, New York, 1962), 38.

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to govern. That’s what America is telling us. The government puts us in a state of fear. Terrorism is nothing but a tool to put every one of us in a state of fear. There could be an object that explodes anywhere. When you go to an airport, you hear every ten minutes, “Please keep your luggage with you at all times. Any unattended luggage in the terminal will be removed by the security services and may be destroyed”. There’s a constant theater to produce fear in our environment. We have an extremely phobocratic regime. This was the idea in the first book about the modern state, Leviathan (1651) by Thomas Hobbes: the monster that puts us in a state of fear. So therefore the only tool we have against fear is mechanics and media. The people who realized it first were the Encyclopedists. The encyclopedia is all about tools – about craft, skill and tools. This was the beginning of the Enlightenment. All philosophers from this era, from D’Alembert to Diderot, were advocates of using tools and skills. And so the 60 volumes are all about tools and skills, and technical competence. So what we have is a philosophy of media, organology, saying to us we have to get out of this state of helplessness, of “amechania”. We have tools, which are extensions of our organs, or tools that take away their limits. And I give you an example taken from Freud’s famous book Civilization and Its Discontents: These things that, by his science and technology, man has brought about on this earth, on which he first appeared as a feeble animal organism and on which every individual of his species must once more make its entry […] as a helpless suckling.4

You see? He uses the world helplessness. You see the strength of my ideas about “amechania”? Freud didn't know it but I know do, so you can trust me. He goes back to the idea of “amechania”. “We are born into this world as a helpless suckling being. […] Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic of God.”5 So he tells us that with the tools of technology, we have turned from helpless suckling beings, from amechanics, to prosthetic gods. We are gods that need prostheses, that is, auxiliary artificial organs, so we can expand the limits of our natural organs. And then he says the following, “When he [i.e. man] puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent.”6 We become magnificent with these auxiliary organs and machines and media. But technical organs 4

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents. Newly translated from the German a. ed. by James Strachey, (Norton & Company, New York, 1962), 38. 5 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 38f. 6 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 39.

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have not grown onto us naturally, therefore we still have trouble. And so the idea is in Freud’s title – from my point of view a wrong, misfortunate idea. Why do we feel unhappy in this civilization? This is what's wrong about Freud’s reactionary idea. Why do we feel discontent in this civilization? We feel that way because we are gods, but we are not natural gods. We are prosthetic gods. That’s why we don't feel well when we are surrounded by technical objects, mechanics, etc. Freud writes “Motor power places gigantic forces at his [i.e. man's] disposal, which, like his muscles, he can employ in any direction.”7 So power, motors, is like muscles. Derrida continues this. And so does Bernard Stiegler, one of his followers. They call it supplementing. We need technology to supplement the human being. We always have the same idea: technology came in to help us. Even Henry Ford, who invented the assembly line, has used the word to describe these machines. They are prosthetics. The shift from prosthetics as part of a syllabus to prosthetics in medicine happened in the 16th century. That gives us the idea that modern technological time didn't start, as people tell us, in the 19th century. It started, for sure, in the 16th century, even the 15th century, during the Renaissance. So far, this is a sketch that could be expanded. All media theories come from the idea of “amechania”. This is the case with the extensions of man, of his organs, from Freud to McLuhan and to contemporary philosophers. Michel Serres goes even further. He has coined the term “exodarwinism,”8 which is not a correct term. I'd replace it with “exoevolution.” What Serres is saying is precisely the same: he sees media as organology; media and machines are a kind of externalization. Internal natural faculties like the eye and the ear are externalized; the hammer is like a fist. Now comes the interesting point, the dialectical position: He thinks that the hammer has substituted the fist. Man as a human being is something that reaches for something other than himself. Man complemented, supplemented, the fist with the hammer because it wasn’t strong enough. And when the hammer substitutes the fist and the arm, it is said that we lose the arm. This is, in my opinion, a rather irrational turn: From Serres to Derrida and Stiegler, they do not accept that we always keep the arm. When we have a new tool, it’s clear we have expanded and externalized our internal functions or organs. But that does not mean that there was something lost. Philosophers like Leroi-Gourhan 9 say that by externalizing our skills, we lose the skills. Isn't that a strange paradox? Isn't it strange to say: When you externalize 7

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 37. Michel Serres, Hominescence. Essais, Le Pommier, Paris, 2001. 9 André Leroi-Gourhan, Hand und Wort. Die Evolution von Technik, Sprache und Kunst. (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2006). 8

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your memory into the computer or into the library, you lose your own memory? This is twisted dialectics. People accept the idea of mechanics as something that help us. When you have externalized organs, like your tools, libraries, networks, etc., then it becomes very clear that you have them because you have deficits, because there's something you can't do with your natural organs. Now when you externalize your organs into devices, tools and media, they say you lose your own faculties. They don't see you actually improve your faculties when you externalize them. They think that by externalization you become inferior. You come closer to a feeble animal. Can you imagine? We invented all civilization and all tools for 2000 years, and then philosophers tell us we should get back to being feeble animal organisms. This is what we call restorative points of view. It comes from restore, which means “going back to a prior state.” As humans, when we make this kind of progress, in a technical sense, we lose – this is what some philosophers tell us. We're thrown back to our helpless beginnings by that helpless philosophy. But my explanation is that we sidestep natural evolution. It was German Idealistic philosophers, like Herder, who said Enlightenment man became, for the first time, a free man. With the hands as the first tools, as a consequence of walking upright, humans were “die ersten Freigelassenen der Schöpfung” (“the first of creation left free”).10 With the development and technology of tools, mechanics and media, we have the tools needed for our freedom. So freedom coincides with the first time we go beyond our natural perception. We go beyond the realm of nature. Therefore, Herder said, it is at this very moment that man becomes the first free man outside the realm of nature. And this is the point. Serres understood with “exodarwinism” that we bypass natural evolution. Which is a positive point. Let me now show you some examples from my own history as an artist. Figure 3 is from 1967. It’s called “Information Unit,” what we call today the iPhone. I made a photomontage to show we could develop a machine as big as a shaver, and it could be a telephone, television, a photo apparatus, a radio, a video camera and a spy pen – all in one. It could even be a shaver. That was in 1967.

10

Johann Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. Translated from the German Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit [1784]. (Bergman Publishers, New York, 1800), 92.

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Fig. 3. Peter Weibel, Information Unit, 1967

Fig. 4. Peter Weibel, Media Lung, 1968–1972

I also invented a media lung (figure 4) and a lot of other machines that we call today wearable computing. I made many inventions, e.g., how can you make a plant see something? Amplified communications (figure 5) has the same idea. It aims to amplify our language, our capacity.

Fig. 5. Peter Weibel, Concepts for Actions of Communication, 1967

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I didn’t succeed as an inventor. Sadly I had to go back to my position as an artist. And I'll show you what I did this time. In the work Imaginativer Tetraeder (figure 6), you have two cameras. One camera shows us one image, which looks like a number 1; The other camera shows lines in an interior space. We have two drawings on a wall. There are two cameras, and their information goes through a mixer. And what you see is a tetrahedron, which doesn’t exist in reality. It exists only on the screen.

Fig. 6. Peter Weibel, Imaginative Tetrahedron, 1978

We construct the world in the brain, using our two eyes. The question, “Why do we have two eyes?”11 was first addressed by Ernst Mach in the 19th century. He was a historian of mechanics, so he is an important source. We have developed our organs as tools, and even nature has done so. Mach discovered that having two eyes is what allows us to see the depth of space. If you have only one eye, you would never have this illusion. If your eyes were further apart, they would see better but you wouldn't be as beautiful. So nature made a compromise. It would be much better to have eyes like a fish, on the side of the head, however, nature put our eyes in the front of our heads. Beauty is always a compromise. So, there are two cameras, just like there are two eyes. And you can see the brain as a kind of screen, which puts things together in the correct order. 11

Ernst Mach, ”Why Has Man Two Eyes?” (1866), in Ernst Mach, Popular Scientific Lectures, translated by Thomas J. McCormack. (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1895), 66–88.

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Then I went further, and I tried to show how media go beyond our natural limits.

Fig. 7. Peter Weibel, Water-dice, 1988

In the piece Wasserwürfel (figure 7), you can see buckets of water on the floor and a dice on the screen. The dice is very important as a metaphysical tool, or in number theory, among others. God doesn't play dice, as Einstein said.12 Then, you’d see the numbers on the dice, which in fact aren’t really projected. There are the buckets of the water on the floor, and then you have a camera on the ceiling and a projector on the floor that projects the buckets as dice. And you can see a real bucket in front of you. And now you put your hand into this bucket and it comes out from the dice, like something magical. You see your own hand coming out from the screen 100 meters away. This is precisely what media can do. When I look at media work, I always ask how much further than natural perception does it go. Media that work within the limits of natural perception do not interest me. I’m not interested in what my eyes can already do. The camera has more to do with the idea of prosthesis. The car was invented to be faster, artificial eyes were invented to see better, to attain new points of view and different images, in ways that overcome the natural eye. If our camera eye replicates our natural eye, like in Hollywood, then there is no reason for me to look at it. “Technology” always means tele-technology. The keyword “tele” means far in Greek. Television allows us to see further, just like the telephone allows us to listen and to speak further. The same is true for the telefax, or the telegraph. It's always about distance, both temporal and spatial. And tele-technology is always similar to theo-technology. “Theo”, as God, is just a product, an effect of the first medium of writing, and 12

William Hermanns, Einstein and the Poet. In Search of the Cosmic Man. (Branden Books, Brookline Village,1983), 58: “As I have said so many times, God doesn’t play dice with the world.”

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religion is just an epiphenomenon of writing. Therefore, when our writing is continued into modern and contemporary media, all the ideas of “theos” come along with it. This is what Freud, who also realized this, called the “prosthesis cult”, as he said technology means humans are prosthetic gods.13 Technology is always about theo-technology. In my work All Technology is Remote-Technology (figure 8), you see technology as tools.

Fig. 8. Peter Weibel, Alle Technologie ist Ferntechnologie, 1994

On one side you have water; on the other side you have a plant (figure 9). They will never come together. Media reality is not the same as reality.

Fig. 9. Peter Weibel, When Fuji was Still a Mountain and Not Yet a Company. Re: Wind @ Fast Forward (of the Real), 1990

Why have I told you such a long story? There has been a hidden battle for the last 2000 years in terms of what we call “trees of knowledge”. The last moment of this battle can be found in the second volume of Milles 13 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents. Newly translated from the German a. ed. by James Strachey. (Norton & Company, New York, 1962), 38f.

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Plateux (1980) by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. They realized there is something wrong with our trees of knowledge. First of all, why do we call it a tree? Why don’t we call it “cloud of knowledge” or “river of knowledge”? In the first chapter of the second book, titled “Rhizomes”, they said we’ve killed the tree. There are only rhizomes. Only horizontal transversal roots across the floor. There is no vertical principle. The tree is killed and it just falls down. It might be a good solution, but maybe not the best one. I’ll try to show you another one. When you really go back in the history of trees of knowledge, the Greek’s four systems of knowledge are at the beginning: One was “Episteme”, which at the time included grammar, dialectics, rhetoric, astronomy. This is the medium of the alphabet or numbers but what links these elements is language, what we call, with Flusser, the call alphanumerical code, a language of both numbers and letters. Episteme was the true science. The second was “Techné”, which was meant for slaves. Athens was not a democracy, even if they invented the idea of it. If historians are to be believed, then Greek society was made up of citizens and slaves. The sweet smell of democracy doesn’t seem to have really existed in Greece. Another interesting failure can be found in the first sentence of the United States Declaration of Independence (1776), written by Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”. Strangely enough, women don’t seem to be considered so, nor black people. The same thing happened with the Greeks. They had indulged so much in slavery that they didn't realize it. This is precisely written in Aristotle: architecture, agriculture, sculpting, painting and music are for slaves. A free citizen should not play music because this would disturb his brain and his mind; he should hire slaves to play cithara so he can listen to music. Mechanicos, idiotas or plain barbarians would be the ones using their hands for work. From the very beginning, everything related to tools or mechanics was rejected as unworthy, occupying the lowest level on the tree’s hierarchy. Then the people of Rome adopted these hierarchies of knowledge and called the Greek Episteme “Artes Liberales”. It should not be confused with the term “art” as we use it today as it was much closer to what we call “science.” There has been a basic misunderstanding in our society. “Artes Liberales” did not mean free art (as in “do what you want”); instead it was an activity for the free citizen. Art is a kind of copy shop, which repeats mistakes. And the same happened with the Greek Techné, which Rome began calling “Artes Mechanicae.” Sometimes it would even be called “Artes Vulgares et Sordida”; “Sordida“ meaning dumb. You can see how

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technology, tools and mechanics have always been seen as vulgar and dumb, dusty. Leonardo Da Vinci was the first who did not like the idea of being a stupid painter. And indeed he was much more than a painter. Leonardo wrote a famous letter to Ludovico Sforza, Il Moro, the Duke of Milan, apprising him of his knowledge to construct solid infrastructure as well as destroy the enemy's, and also be able to design beautiful weapons: “I have the means of constructing light bridges […], adapted to pursue or escape from an enemy; […] and also the means of destroying those of the enemy. […] I am able to cast shells, mortars, and field-pieces of beautiful forms, and quite out of the common method. […] Item, I understand the different modes of sculpture, either in marble, bronze, or terra cotta. In painting also I think myself equal to any one, let him be who he may.”14 He was precisely like Odysseus, a polymechanos – he knew he had a lot of skills. Around 1500 he wrote a book he never dared to publish, and Trattato della Pittura ended up being published 150 years later. The first chapter of his book, which nobody read, is entitled “Painting is a Science.”15 He wanted painting to exit Techné and enter the domain of science. In that, he was in a sort of competition against the “dumb” people who were making music, poetry or sculpture. He said, “OK, I cannot make it so that everybody goes up in the tree of knowledge, I can only try as a painter to get up in the hierarchy”. This is a very common argument: I can’t take care of others but I’ll take care of myself. There’s no better way to get higher in the hierarchy than mocking your competitors. We can well imagine him saying “We painters, we are dealing with a cosa mentale, the spiritual things. We are like the grammar people. Our paintings are related to the mind.” Sculptors work with their hands, they work with dirt. Musicians also work with their hands. But the painter works with the eye and the mind, was the argument, even when wrong. This was “paragone,”16 the competition between the Arts in the Renaissance. And for Leonardo, painting, in competition with other “technai”, should move upward. 14

Leonardo da Vinci: Letter to the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, 1482. The original of the letter is held at the Ambrosian Library at Milan. Here quoted from pp. 207–208. 15 “Se la pittura è scienza o no” is the first chapter title of Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting (Trattato della Pittura, Codex urbinus Latinus, 1270). Leonardo, Trattato della pittura. Introduzione e apparati a cura di Ettore Camesasca. ( Milano, Tea 1995),1. 16 The term was coined in 1817 to capture the competition between the Arts in the Renaissance.

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And now we get to the famous Savonarola. He was what we today call a spin-doctor, in this case to the king of Savona. And he sketched a very interesting tree of knowledge. In 1500, we have, once again, the so-called liberal arts, which include grammar, dialectics and arithmetic. But above everything else are metaphysics and mathematics. Mechanical arts are once again at the bottom of this hierarchy and theology is missing completely. This explains why Savonarola was killed, since every other tree of knowledge had always placed theology first, at least in the centuries before. There’s another interesting aspect: poetry moves up to the second rank. Music is placed way lower. Painting and architecture do not even exist. You can see how language-based media move upwards (e.g., philosophy and poetry), and how all other mechanical arts are on the lowest level. And this is just one of many examples. There have been hundreds of these trees of knowledge, all dating from the last few centuries. The third paragraph of Leonardo Da Vinci's book reminds us of the elements in Euclid. The science of painting consists of dot, point, line and plane. These are the means of representation of the visible forms of things.17 There’s no mention of color. The panicked obsession with color only came along during the 19th century. Around 1900, people made up their minds that they did not want to represent the world anymore but instead the means of representation. We wrongly call this abstract art. Abstract art is not really abstract; it is just the representation of the means of representation. And therefore it is a kind of self-representation. That is why Kandinsky’s famous Bauhaus book is called Point and Line to Plane. Contribution to the Analysis of the Pictorial Elements (1926). Kandinsky repeats Leonardo, but only the first part of his sentence. He doesn’t repeat the line, “To show us the visible shape of things”. In the 20th century, we were left with the means of representation as self-representation. On the other side, there’s the representation of things as things, which tries to show things as things. We can take an object like the famous urinal of Duchamp and call it art. This is the self-representation of objects. The only way to get out of these two wrong solutions is media art. We’ve had more than 100 years of monochrome painting. Do we seriously want to repeat monochrome paintings for the next 100 years, remaining in the same iteration of one plane and one color? 17

See Leonardo da Vinci, 3. paragraph: “Il principio della scientia della pittura è il punto; il secondo è la linea; il terzo è la superfitie”, in: Leonardo da Vinci, Das Buch von der Malerei, hrsg. von Heinrich Ludwig, Vol. 1, Wilhelm Braumüller, Wien, 1882, 6.

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In fact, what Duchamp did was a service to the market, although he did not know he was doing it. He was innocent. But he denied the use value of the objects he used by calling them artworks. He gave them an exchange value. He founded market art, capital aesthetics. He was the founder of the first museum of modern art in 1920. He called this museum “Societé Anonyme, Inc.” because in such a company, the shareholders were anonymous and therefore you could not hold them responsible or liable for the Societé. To go back, to understand the whole problem, we must know that the most important German export was not Mercedes Benz; it was the German business idea of Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung (limited liability company), which, taking the German literally, translates to “a society with limited responsibility”. This idea, invented in its social form during the year of 1894 in Germany, has been adopted all over the world. It allows shareholders to keep their anonymity so that if something goes wrong, they don't have to pay. The same holds for an “incorporation”. Duchamp showed us this lack of responsibility, this indifference. By saying any object can become an art object, he is saying this object has no use value. It only has an exchange value, and it becomes something you can capitalize on in the market. That makes him the founder of market art, even if he wasn’t aware of it. People think that the photogram was invented by Man Ray. It's very clear that art historians are not historians of technology, not historians of science, so you can't ask too much from them. It was actually the scientist Robert Koch who, 50 years earlier, published the first photograms. And how did that happen? Leonardo used a scalpel to open the body. With his dissections he developed practical anatomy. He thought there was no way to understand the surface, the skin, without going deeper under it. Knowing the bones and muscles, he could make a perfect drawing of the surface. So he used a scalpel. But then with the microscope, X-rays, with media, we can go inside the body without a scalpel. That makes the microscope some kind of soft scalpel. It has the same function but doesn't destroy. Returning to Leonardo Da Vinci, his idea was to represent the shape of visible things, but he was only thinking of the visual things we can see with our natural eyes. Now we have invented machines, and tools, and media, to see things that are not visible to the natural eye but are visible to the machines. The scientist wanted to expand the horizon of visible things. And that's how he discovered living cells, for example. We have even constructed particle accelerators at CERN. They are assigned 3 billion dollars per annum for experiments. They have no visitors, and no public. This is what I want for Art. I don't need visitors. I don't need the market. I don’t need

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the public. I'm not television. Being a scientist is marvelous, and scientists deserve the money they get for their research. They know that they invented new media, new mechanics and new tools to expand our horizon of visible things. The painter stopped, and just went back to the standardization of the historical means of representation. This is the wrong exit. It was OK to try it out for 100 years. What we have to do today as media artists is to follow the scientists. We have to expand the horizon of visible things, with the help of tools. We have to research, too. It was Frank Lloyd Wright who coined the phrase “machinery, materials, and men” as an equation for the Industrial Revolution. Today we still have machines and material, but we have also media and data. The new age is about media and data, not about machines and materials. We still have cars and planes. But since the middle of the 20th century, we have in fact lost more or less the monopoly of the alphabetic code. What we are experiencing today is the triumph of binary, or numerical, code. How many people in this world know how to program, and how to deceive the programs? How many people understand this new code? We are about 7 billion people – my estimate is only 2 million know how to do it. This includes people from Google and National Security Agency (NSA). What we have today is a new class of priests. They have the greatest powers in the world, since they know how to use the binary, numeric, and algorithmic codes. They program the world. That’s why people like Snowden are so important. People like him are not whistleblowers. They're the first media rebels as they go against this new monopoly, this new class of high priests, who have monopolized data. NSA means just this: we are capable, like high priests, of deciphering the modern world with the digital code. There is a wonderful book by Buckminster Fuller called Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969). He was the first to come forward with the idea that we are living on this spaceship Earth. According to his conception, we have limited resources and we have an atmosphere, and therefore we must take care of our world. This comes after we have lived in the infinite grace of God, who would take care of us forever. But after discovering that there is no God, we have to take care of the Earth ourselves. We go back to the idea of mechanics: we are helpless and depend on ourselves for help. We only have the evolution of tools, machines and media. We depend on the Earth, and so we must take care of it, we must stop pollution, etc. Then Buckminster Fuller asks, “But where's the instruction manual on how to manage the Earth?” He tells us we don't have the manual, which is interesting. We only have the Bible, which is not a good manual. We are

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the ones who have to do it. He goes on to say, precisely, that up to now we’ve had the hegemony and supremacy of language-based people: philosophers, poets, etc. That leads us back to the same hierarchy of trees I’ve shown you. I told you these people couldn’t come up with such a manual. The only people who can deliver it are architects, planners, designers and artists – the people who have been on the lowest level, that of the mechanical arts. We take a new turn with Buckminster Fuller. For over 2000 years, language-based media was on the top of the tree of knowledge. And now suddenly the amateurs, the slaves, the “technocratos,” the mechanicos have the greater role. But this stemmed from a misunderstanding because the Greeks had already told us that being “polymechanos” was the best way to survive. This is, after all, the story of how you survive in exile and of how you get back. It tells us of the need to be “polymetis,” “polytechnicus” and “polymechanos.” And we’ve now brought it to Earth level. Buckminster Fuller, like a new Odysseus, tells us designers, architects and planners, and not the usual people at the top of the hierarchy, will have to come up with the manual. This is a complete reversal. This is the challenge of media: how mechanos challenges the tree of knowledge. This is a noetic turn.

CHAPTER THREE MATERIALITY OF SCRIPT AND THE OPERATION OF THOUGHTS: SOME REFLECTIONS ON ‘NOTATIONAL ICONICITY’ AND ‘FLATTENING OUT’ AS A CULTURAL TECHNIQUE SYBILLE KRÄMER

1 In 1636, Descartes’ Géometrie appeared as one of the three scientific additions to his Discours de la méthode, additions with which he wished to prove the effectiveness of his method.1 The Géometrie gives birth to a new branch of mathematics: Analytic Geometry. Since the ancient discovery of the incommensurability between figure and number, arithmetic and geometry had been completely separate branches of mathematics. Descartes invented an early form of a coordinate system, and assigned points to pairs of numbers. Thus geometric figures were translatable into algebraic forms and vice versa. Problems of construction could be solved through calculation. For Descartes, arithmetic calculability becomes a criterion for the existence of a geometric figure: only curves expressed by a solvable equation remain part of pure mathematics. The point of this short story is: The formal is raised up over the figure; written description takes precedence over geometric visualization. Descartes’ Analytical Geometry is the paradigmatic trademark of the scientific spirit in the Early Modern Period. We call this trademark “quantification,” or “formalization.” Formalization is often defined as a process of the successive elimination of the visual perceptibility of 1

René Descartes, Geometrie (dtsch. Hg. v. L. Schlesinger) (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981).

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scientific tools. The primacy of formal notation over the drawn figure is interpreted as the replacement of the imagination by abstraction. Even a thinker such as Edmund Husserl criticizes scientific progress as being a process of increasing abstraction, paid for by the loss of the anchoring its objects once had in the perceptible world.2 Descartes’ displacement of the figure by the formula seems to describe the essence of modern science: that which is scientifically understandable has to be expressed by a numerical expression or an algebraic formula. Mathematics thereby attains the status of an abstract “language” in which what becomes the object of scientific understanding can and must be articulated and expressed. But note: this “language” is in fact a script. The widespread belief is that this kind of mathematical writing abandons visual qualities and perceptual dimensions. The following remarks hope to show that the equivalence between scriptural form and loss of visibility is fundamentally mistaken. The use of formal notation does not eliminate visibility but rather transforms it: Perceptibility is not suspended but re-formulated. Fig. 1. The Circle as Figure and Formula.

2

Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1982).

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Prima facie it is self-evident that a drawn circle is an image that shares a basic characteristic with the mathematical circle: for example, the closeness of the circle curve. In contrast, the circle-formulas, made up of letters and numbers, have no figural similarity with the shape of a circle. However, they do show a direct relationship between the components of the circle – between, for example, the radius and the circumference. With the figure as with the formula, something becomes obvious: the figure shows a similarity in shape; the formula shows a relation between components of a circle. The formula represents by presenting a relation. Such showing of relations is possible because, with writing, dimensions of language and the image are bound together. In this synthesis of the discursive and the pictorial, we see the foundation of the operative potential of this kind of notation, a potential that cannot be realized by either pure language or pure image. Let me demonstrate this potential by a simple example: the possibility of written calculation by the decimal position system. Indian mathematicians invented the decimal-position system and stated rules for written calculation; Arab scholars then brought the symbolic technology of written calculation to Europe, where – after a long rivalry with Roman numerals – it became part of daily mathematical practice from the 15th century onwards.3 Fig. 2. Number, ‘Language’ and Written Calculation.

3 Cf: Sybille Krämer, Symbolische Maschinen. (Darmstadt. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1988), 54–73

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2 If we write the numbers 19798 and 16601 in Roman numerals and add them, we notice that to perform the addition on paper is laborious and multiplying these ciphers doesn’t work at all. Roman numerals are written symbols, but not a formal system. To calculate with Roman numerals requires an external tool, an abacus, for example. If, on the other hand, we pin down the calculation using the decimal system, and if we master the basic rules of addition and multiplication across columns, we can carry out multiplication with childlike ease by forming and re-forming the vertically stacked rows of numerals. The reason is that the decimal system is at the same time a representational symbol system as well as a calculating device. This type of notation, which is both symbolic medium and technical instrument, we can call “operative notation.” Operative notation makes it possible for complex mathematical operations to be carried out with the simple mechanical manipulation of signs on paper. It is not a phonographic script but rather a “mute script”; it is a written system sui generis, it does not stem from spoken language, and can be vocalized differently in different languages. In the perspective of notational creativity, six attributes are important: 1. Positionality: We cannot percept numbers; they are non-visible, theoretical objects. And yet the decimal notation visualizes numbers insofar as it positions them spatially on the paper surface. In this way numbers get a “place,” and they can be arranged and rearranged. This is as important for semantics as it is for problem solving: The meaning of a single sign results from the position it has within the configuration of signs. Placing the signs in a different position would change the value of the entire expression. With the aid of rigid positionality, calculation can be realized by the formation and transformation of signs. 2. Orientation/Two-dimensionality: Placing numbers is possible because the surface of the inscription is directed according to its own order. Above and below, right and left: notations always work in two dimensions. Operative notation transforms this two-dimensionality into a tool for mental work that resembles the way a crossword puzzle is solved: notational calculus does not exist without the possibility of the horizontal and the vertical line.

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3. Differentiality: The shape of individual numerals plays the role of a discriminating attribute in relation and distinction to the other numerals. A ‘1’ cannot not be taken as a ‘0’ or a ‘2’. Identity is created by difference. It depends not upon aesthetic richness but rather upon schematic differentiability. But we must be aware that discriminating is still a perceptual, sensorial act. The precise work of the eye is indispensable to the work of notation. 4. Operativity. The calculus of the written decimal system builds a symbolic machine: all basic arithmetic operations are reduced to simple processes of symbol-manipulation. Two aspects are of relevance: (i) The inscribed surface becomes a “representational space,” which is at the same time a thought-laboratory, which allows for analytical and experimental rearrangements of inscriptions. A paper-tool is created, which brings together eye, hand and brain. Mind is realized through the synthesis of looking, touching and reasoning; and (ii) What is originally created as a symbolic machine on paper can be transmuted into a physical machine. Written calculation allowed for mechanical calculating machines; the binary alphabet in turn is the medio-technical foundation for digitalization and computerization. 5. Constitution. Notations often constitute and prefigure what the signs represent. Operative notation is not the transcription of something that exists without this medium. The zero is a paradigmatic example for the constitutive power of writing: Invented as a place-holder which was to show the lack of a numeral in a certain position, the cipher ‘0’ became – precisely because one could calculate with it – a fully-fledged number in its own right. What is a number is no longer rooted in the activity of counting things but in the manipulation of written signs: Number is defined as the reference object of a correct arithmetical expression. 6. Interpretation-neutrality. The strict relationship between syntax and semantics, carried over from language, begins to loosen. This is already shown by the functioning of the zero: independent of what this sign means when interpreted as a number, it can be used in written reckoning. This goes for all calculized signs: when the simple and the compound multiplication table are given, we can solve arithmetical problems by mere “ornamental” graphical work, without having a consciousness of the number nature of this doing. Operation and interpretation can be separated from one another.

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3 The operative notation of early modern mathematics opened up new creative potential for the human intellect. It led to a remarkable dissemination and “democratization” of knowledge. Written calculation is a technique that can be learned with child-like ease. The cultural technology of notational calculation transforms arithmetic into an activity of daily life. The explosion of mercantile capitalism in early modern Europe is unthinkable without the simplicity and economy of written calculation. It is not incidental that the Medici were the first to replace Roman numerals with the Hindu-Arabic system in their accounting.4 Something similar occurred in the realm of higher mathematics. François Viète invented letter-algebra in the 16th century: and symbolic algebra was born.5 Expressions like “a plus b equals b plus a” are not arithmetic expressions that are true or false but rules for the manipulation of strings of signs. With letter-algebra, the rules for solving equations were for the first time made expressible in a universally valid way. Algebraic competence now was easily teachable and learnable. Algebra was no longer an ars magna et occulta but rather entered the canon of the sciences.6 Here we come upon an insight that is not limited to the realm of operative writing. Thought is not a purely mental event. Just as our physical creativity requires technical tools, so does our mental creativity require thought tools. The theory of the “extended mind” has celebrated this insight as a completely new innovation and advancement in the contemporary theory of cognition,7 but in philosophy there is a long tradition of insight into the exteriority of the human mind: authors like Plato, Nicolas of Cusa, Leibniz, Lambert, Hegel, Peirce and Wittgenstein are convinced that we cannot think without the medium of sensuously perceptible signs. Already in the 17th century, Leibniz explained that although the natural languages are an exceptional device for communication, they do not support cognition as well as drawn and written symbols – written signs, not spoken languages, are the ideal means for the task of 4

Cf: Sybille Krämer, Symbolische Maschinen., 57. François Viète, Opera mathematica (1646), ed. (F.v. Schooten, Leiden; repr. Hildesheim 1970), 1–12, Cap III, §1. 6 See: Jakob Klein, “Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra, in: Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Math., Astr. U. Phys., Bd. 3(2): 122–235. 7 John Haugeland, “Mind Embodied and Embedded” in: Acta Philosophica Fennica 58. (1995), 233–267; Andy Clark, David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” in: Analysis 58. (1998): 10–23. 5

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reasoning.8 The palaeontologist Leroi-Gourhan assumed that there is nothing in the pre-human history of evolution that prefigures the intentional marking of surfaces.9 Can we go so far as to claim that the human species is distinguished by its bilingualism, that is, by the fact that it communicates not only in a spoken language with temporal succession but also through a graphic symbolism of simultaneous presentation? Graphism in general – this is the guiding idea behind this lecture – is indispensable for the cognitive faculties.10 On this point we must broaden our field of vision. All species of writing belong to a broader class of graphical artefacts, which includes, besides writing, tables, lists, graphs, diagrams and maps. These artefacts make up a modality of visualization that can be called “schematic graphism.” Despite their differing modes of representation, these artefacts all share the characteristic of emerging out of the interaction between point, line and plane.11 Their function consists of taking the heterogeneous and homogenizing it within the graphical medium, formulating and reformulating in this way the relations between conceptually disparate objects. Let us clarify this with a simple example. We all know the constellations. With a simple line, the constellations link stars separated by millions of light-years into one single figure. In the constellation of Orion, for example, the star Betelgeuse (the left shoulder of the hunter) is 270 million light-years away from Earth; the star Rigel (the right foot of the hunter) is 540 light-years away. The constellation effaces this difference of distance and instead makes the stars topographical neighbours. This is possible because the three-dimensional realm of the stars is treated as if it is a plane. Constellations come into being through the connective power of lines. Constellations are not given but produced by cultural drawing practices. This is why different cultures populate the heavens with different figures. And yet in every culture, humans have produced an 8

Sybille Krämer, Berechenbare Vernunft. “Kalkül und Rationalismus” im 17. (Jahrhundert, Berlin, New York: de Gruyter), 220–362. 9 André Leroi-Gourhan, Hand und Wort. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980). 10 Sybille Krämer, “The Mind’s Eye. Visualizing the Non-Visual and the Epistemology of the Line” in Image and Imaging in Philosophy, Science, and the Arts, ed. E. Nemeth, R. Heinrich & W. Pichler. (Kirchberg am Wechsel: Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society 2011), 275–95. 11 Punkt, Strich, Fläche. “Von der Schriftbildlichkeit zur Diagrammatik,” in Schriftbildlichkeit. Über Wahrnehmbarkeit, Materilität und Operativität von Notationen, eds. S. Krämer, E. Cancik-Kirschbaum and R. Totzke. (Berlin: Akademie 2012), 79–101.

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elementary cartography of the heaven, which furthermore makes possible orientation and navigation on the earth. Fig. 3. Constellation: Orion.

What does the phenomenon of constellations show us? We want to discriminate three aspects: (1) That which is separate or different is homogenized insofar as it is placed onto the simultaneity of a plane. A topographical ordering is created in which positional relations become a decisive characteristic of differentiation. The “Überblick im Nebeneinander” becomes possible. (2) Relations between things are not already on hand; they are “mental entities,” produced through the analyzing and interpreting mind along with the eye that sees and the hand that draws and writes. Relations are born out of the “spirit” of graphism; only in the visibility of graphism do they find their “place.” (3) The bringing together of stars in visual configurations is no mere game but rather an instrument of orientation. The chaotic multiplicity

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of the starry sky becomes ordered, and with the help of perceptually identifiable constellations becomes recognizable. When in situations of incomprehensibility or inaccessibility, we negotiate knowledge through outlines and orientation, and when we take complex, three-dimensional relations and represent them in the form of planar relations, we want to speak of a cartographic impulse. Can we somehow link the diagnosed cartographic impulse with writing? Our assumption is that the cognitive meaning of written graphism originates in the idea of making a kind of cartographic impulse functional within knowledge practices. For the formal notation of mathematics, this is more than reasonable. But is this also true for traditional writing systems? Can we speak of alphabetic script, which is oriented to language, as possessing a “cartographic impulse”?

4 For a long time, a phonographic dogma dominated the theory of writing: writing is considered to be a fixed version of spoken language. Within the phonographic frame, writing is a legitimate object in the humanities only insofar as it constitutes a special form of language clearly distinguishable from oral discourse. This “phonographic dogma” is founded on the assumption that speech and writing share the universal validity of two linguistic principles: that of linearity and arbitrariness. Regarding linearity: the linear, temporal succession of the spoken word is preserved in the linear spatial strings of written words. Regarding arbitrariness: Conventions, not evidence or similarities, outline the regime of writing: the semantics of writing take root not in showing but saying. Within the two parameters of the linearity and the arbitrarity principles, writing qualifies as language and not as image. Its consequence is that musical notation, dance notation, numerical notation and programming languages, etc. do not count as writing. Different to the phonographic approach, the creative and distinctive potential of writing comes into view only when it is recognized that writing synthesizes the iconic and the discursive. At heart this is a question of using spatiality as a principle of representation and operation. All scripts – not only mathematical or musical notation – make use of the twodimensionality of the plane.12 12

For the non-linearity of script: Roy Harris, “On Redefining Linguistics,” in Redefining Linguistics, ed. Davis Hayley, Talbot J. Taylor. (London/New York: Routledge), 39.

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Let us dwell for a moment on this two-dimensionality, and clarify the difference between planes and surfaces: surfaces are the outermost layer of a body with volume and often possess a deep inner structure. Planes, on the other hand, are surfaces without depth; what is significant is to be found on the plane and is thus completely presented to the eye. Strictly speaking, scripts are three-dimensional phenomena: they are either engraved or laid on: graphein, the Greek for “to write,” originally means, “to engrave.” There is no true planar two-dimensionality in human experience; in the human realm, two-dimensionality – literally taken – does not exist. Nevertheless we make use of inscribed surfaces as if they were truly flat. From the perspective of cultural anthropology, the invention of empty planes that can be painted, drawn and written on is of great importance. What the invention of the wheel was for the mobility and creativity of the body, the invention of inscribed planes was for the mobility and creativity of the mind. Flatness makes it possible to install an elementary topographical system of order related to the user: above and below, right and left are used as orientating directions. For something to be an inscribed plane, it must be formatted; for something to be a script, it must be oriented. Let us now take a closer look at the cartographic impulse in alphabetical script. It can be explained by the exemplary phenomenon of ideography. “Ideography” refers to the visual characteristics of written objects that have no equivalent in speech. Apart from the beginnings of the scriptura continua, texts do not order their letters in an unbroken sequence of letters. Written texts are separated into parts, through the empty spaces between words and punctuation marks, through sectioning, titles, numberings, tables of contents and indices. One of the most significant ideographic achievements of text-culture is the footnote or margin comment. At the end of the page or of the chapter, a separate space is opened in which a secondary discourse takes place. A double voicing of the author becomes possible. The spatial principle of centre and periphery becomes the principle of text-organization. In their ideographic ordering, texts display their own conceptual architecture. Differences in content are made visible through differences in spatial arrangement and ordering. We don’t speak in discrete phonemes. The empirical phonographic recording of speech does indeed show pauses but they do not at all correspond to the empty spaces in written texts. Moreover, there is also a range of written symbols – for example, punctuation, capital and lowercase letters, parentheses, ellipses, dashes – which are semantically meaningful but at the same time unpronounceable – and in this sense also closely related to mathematical notation.

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We see: Important cognitive and semantic differences become transparent in the ideography of the text’s notational iconicity.13 Alphabetic script does not simply transcribe speaking but rather makes visible the grammatical form of the language. If texts are a kind of map of an author’s inner world of imaging and thinking, then alphabetic script delivers a cartography of language itself. It visualizes languages as a system. The alphabet script becomes the projection screen for the segmentation of sound: the grapheme becomes the model of the phoneme. Only by means of the script does language crystallize into a solitary and stable object, which is removed from prosody, mimic, gesture and physical deixis, and can be observed and analysed as a mere linguistic symbolism. Derrida’s thesis of writing as the condition of the possibility of language and of any use of signs has encountered much incomprehension and puzzlement. And yet if it is in fact the case that writing becomes the model for our conception of language, and in particular of its grammaticality, Derrida’s thesis of the primacy of writing takes on a certain plausibility.

5 Thus we see: if we view writing in its interaction with spoken language, it becomes clear that it reveals, in its role as a spatio-visual ordering mechanism, dimensions of languages which have no equivalent in speech. To understand the creative potential of writing means to open up a language-neutral perspective on communication and cognition. Bringing this perspective to the fore is the goal of the concept “notational iconicity”. This does not mean that writing systems are to be understood forms of images instead of forms of language. Rather, it encodes the claim that writing is a genuine synthesis between the linguistic and the iconic, whose form and function has no complete equivalent in either language or image. The linguistic side of written statements includes their syntax, referentiality and propositionality; the iconic side includes their visuality, two-dimensionality and their ordering character. Only the interplay between the two sides reveals the inimitable creativity of writing. In making these considerations, we must add a word of caution: categorical definitions of writing articulate only tendencies; exceptions are everywhere present. South American knot-writing contradicts the twodimensionality of writing; Braille complicates its visuality. The materiality of writing finds its boundary in the fact that each letter can only be 13 For the concept of “notational iconicity” see the contributions in: Eds. Krämer/Cancik-Kirschbaum/Totzke, 2012 (note 12)

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identified as the realization of an abstract, differential type. Monumental inscriptions, legal texts and holy books seem to veto the explorative potential of writing. Concepts – including the concept of “Schriftbildlichkeit”/ Notational Iconicity – are terminological creations. Their value lies in allowing us to establish a comprehensible order among the multiplicity of phenomena with the help of dichotomous structures. Can it be that this dichotomous structuring, which binds our conceptual work to the schema of the binary “either-or,” is itself a projection of writing as a disjunctive organized graphical artefact? Does the cognitive imprint of writing function as the model upon which our conceptual techniques for intellectual inquiry are oriented? Fig. 4. An example from Frege, Begriffsschrift und andere Aufsätze, Hildesheim 2017.

Gottlob Frege interpreted his Concept Notation (Begriffsschrift) – a two-dimensional symbolic system of graphical calculus – as a great departure from phonetically oriented writing.14 Frege characterized his notation as a strategy to liberate the mind from the dominion of words over thoughts. He hoped to depict “pure reasoning” and yet this “act of liberation” can only be realized in the medium of a radicalized notational iconicity. His cartography of the logical operation does not come about without the projection-principle of two-dimensional graphism. Without the spatiality, perceptibility and materiality of an external medium, mental creativity is poor.

14 Gottlob Frege, Begriffsschrift und andere Aufsätze, hg. v. I. Angelelli. (Hildesheim 1964).

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6. Summary 1. Schematic Graphism: The creativity of notational usage can be related to the productive functionality of a host of other artefacts within the realm of operative graphism, such as: lists, tables, graphs, diagrams and maps. These all rely upon the interconnection of the eye, hand and brain in the handling of inscribed planes. Notations synthesise language and image; in this sense, they are hybrids whose potential cannot be reduced to, and finds no equivalent in, either language or image alone. Investigation of the cognitive potential of notation may contribute to the idea of an “extended mind.” 2. The Concept of Notation: Markings and traces count as writing only insofar as they embody three aspects: reference, perceptibility and operativity. Notations are discrete and disjunctively organised graphical systems by means of which language and/or non-linguistic entities, movements and/or states can be noted. In the tension between representational transparency and aesthetical opacity, like in the case of multistable figures (Kippfiguren), attention cannot be focused on both aspects at the same time. 3. Operativity: Notation applies user-related topographic relations (right, left; top, bottom; centre, periphery) onto a formatted plane as a means of expression and operation. The order of notational signs opens a two-dimensional presentation space that gives way to a cognitive and aesthetic realm of action: methods of writing can serve as “paper tools”, as working drafts and thought laboratories. Indeed it is not unusual for notation to even bring about what it constitutes. Its systemic quality leads to a projection rule by which that which is graphically noted is also thereby brought about. However, forms of notation do not generate epistemic effects per se; this only happens when they are integrated into our knowledge practices as historically situated “writing games.” 4. Schriftbildlichkeit/Notational Iconicty: The concept of notational iconicity (Schriftbildlichkeit) articulates a (spoken) language-neutral concept of writing that is based on the three evoked theses. Language neutrality is in fact an aspect that, in various degrees, is valid for all forms of writing, even for alphabetic writing. Notional iconicity is a working concept that i) implies a distinction from

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the phonographic concept of writing; and ii) systematically contributes to a change of perspective towards operative graphism whilst at the same time taking into consideration the local and concrete situatedness of forms of notational usage and thus bearing witness to the restrictedness of defining one concept of writing.

CHAPTER FOUR MEDIUM, DISPOSITIF, APPARATUS MARIA TERESA CRUZ

“Media studies only ‘make sense’ if they focus on how ‘media make senses’” (F. Kittler, 2006)

The idea that the media shape our senses and our perception has been present in modern thought at least since Paul Valéry and Walter Benjamin. In the famous essay “The Work of Art”, Benjamin states that “the manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well” and underlines the importance of understanding this “transformation of the means by which contemporary perception is processed”1. In this text, Benjamin chooses as an epigraph a long quote of Paul Valéry, taken from the beginning of the 1928 essay “The Conquest of Ubiquity”, 2 paying homage to the French writer. In this essay Paul Valéry foresees the occurrence of major changes in the “ancient industry of Beauty” because of the “astonishing development of the means at our disposal, with regard to the level of adaptability and accuracy, and to the ideas and habits that they introduce” and highlights the fact that henceforth, “we can transport or reconstitute the sensory system in any place – or, more exactly, the excitatory system (“le système d’excitations”) – which makes any object or event available at a given place”. The ubiquity that is thus conquered is that of the acoustic and visual reconstitution of appearing, enabled by apparatuses that reproduce and transmit sensory data. Valéry gives the example of the extraordinary

1

Benjamin, Walter (1969 [1936]). “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, p. 219. 2 Valéry, Paul (1964 [1928]). "The Conquest of Ubiquity” in Aesthetics. Vol. 13 of The Collected Works of Paul Valéry. New York: Pantheon Books, p. 225.

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possibilities opened by “recorded music” to “restore a musical work anywhere on earth and at any time in accordance with our wishes”3. The classical notion of presence, namely in the form of the work of art, as well as its restitution as aesthetical experience, are re-examined by the two thinkers through a new lens: the lens of modern technique. Both have a clear understanding that the sensory is being emancipated from the space-time of experience and that aesthetical experience can be recreated again and again, at any place and time, by a technological apparatus that mediates appearance. We easily understand why the two main characteristics of this new technological age, described by Valéry and Benjamin are ubiquity (or telematics) and reproducibility. Both also agree that this technology will entail an industrialization and mobilization of sensory experience, with major cultural and political implications. Their seminal reflexion linked the notion of medium to that of a technical apparatus that shapes appearance, perception and sensibility and binds a given historical display of the world to a given gaze and a given observer. This was crucial for the analysis of photography and cinema but it wasn’t until a few decades later that this idea infected the larger framework of media theory, opening its way as media aesthetics. The development of the media landscape of the XXst century and the very designation of each of these media clearly reflect a special link with sensory data and perception: photography, gramophone, cinema, television and video are the most familiar examples. Critical discourse has also described media culture through terms that accentuate this special involvement of technology with perception, and warn of the cultural transformation through this sensory stimulation and control media framework: “shock,” “distraction,” “spectacle,” “sensationalism,” “anaesthetization,” etc. Marshall McLuhan writings, as we know, had a central role in the shaping of media theory in the second half of the XXst century, privileging the link between communication, media and technology, but also the relation between media, sensory experience and nervous system. Some of his crucial formulations view media as “prosthetic” or extension of the human being affecting sensory and psychic organization and the social and political “climate” of modern societies. This kind of assumptions greatly contributed to the development of interdisciplinary debates within media theory, under the cross influence of technological, anthropological, and philosophical perspectives. The celebrated thesis that “the medium is the

3

Valéry, 1964, idem.

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message”4 challenged the dominant place of language and made room for the previously not-so-relevant study of the technological, material and sensory dimensions of communication, or what would soon be celebrated as the Materialities of Communication5. During the second half of the 20th century, media theory was a field of broad debates integrating media history, literary studies, visual culture, philosophy of technique and aesthetic thinking, that have greatly contributed to frame a post-hermeneutical and post-structuralist approach to cultural studies. In several of his recent writings, Bernard Siegert offers a very insightful and comprehensive analysis of the significance of (German) media theory to the last decades of contemporary thinking: “German media theory shifted the focus from representation of meaning to the conditions of representation, from semantics itself to the exterior and material conditions of what constitutes semantics. Media therefore were not only an alternate frame of reference for philosophy and literature, but also an attempt to overcome French theory’s fixation on discourse, by turning discourse from its philosophical or archeological head onto its historical and technological feet”6. But media groundwork continues to be linked to the ‘making perceptible’ (“Wahrnehmbarmachen”) and the ‘making appear’ (“Erscheinenlassen”) as reminded by Sybille Krämer in Medium, Bote, Übertragung (2008). The mediatization of perception and appearing is not, however, a specifically modern issue. On the contrary, organizing and controlling sense perception and appearance has always been a central to the project of reason. It is of great significance that the foundation of metaphysics determined the first major apparatus to mediate between universal truth and mere appearances. Modern media culture, which is so strongly based on sensory experience and is also assisted by a powerful technology of echoes and reflections (the so-called “audiovisual” apparatus), seems to confirm, either the worst fears of Plato concerning the human disposition to value mere appearances or their enthusiastic Nietzschean celebration. The Platonist or anti-Platonist tone of the debate concerning modern media culture was marked by the return of the notion 4

Cf. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media – The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, p. 25–40: “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.” 5 Gumbrecht, H. Ulrich and Pfeiffer, K. Ludwig (1988). Materialities of communication. Stanford University Press. 6 Siegert, Bernard (2015). Cultural Techniques. Grids, Filters, Doors and Others Articulations of the Real, Fordham University Press, 2-3.

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of “simulacrum”7 and by an intense debate around the issue of image. A fair part of the criticism of media culture is close to that of Plato and its critique of the arts of imitation. Both warn against the danger of falling into a false stupor before a myriad of mere appearances. This stupor produces a (false) knowledge of things that competes with the amazement of the true knowledge of reality. While immersed in appearances, we have never truly abandoned the metaphysical structure of the problem of appearance, i.e., the division and connection between being and appearing, between intelligibility and sensibility, between invisibility and visibility. Metaphysics is that form of rationality from which we have not only inherited a “doctrine of ideas” but also a doctrine of the image. It is the original form of the apparatus that distinguishes between being and appearance. Since this founding structure, appearing becomes the decisive moment of control to the history of being. The critique of the sensory takes place at the very heart of the culture of images that we have since come to be. We have reinforced it through the Christian reworking of metaphysical economy to achieve a specific form of world government. Christian theology culminated in a laborious process of establishing the nature of God and the human that implies a doctrine of the image. Through the figures of the “Trinity” and of the "Incarnation," Christology established the provision of an imagery of God, which would regulate its visible forms as well as symbolic system for the writing and reading images, i.e., iconology. In Image, Icon, Economy (1996), Marie-José Mondzain evaluates the philosophical, cultural and political implications of these onto-theological roots of the image. The term “economy,” which emerged in this context of patristic doctrine, designates that which is established (as in a “dispositio” or “arrangement”) concerning the nature of the divine as well as that which ensures the injunction between divinity and earthly positivity. In What is an Apparatus? (2006) Agamben stresses the importance of this ancient “economy” in terms of understanding the modern notion of “dipositif,” stating that these roots were present in the choice of the term by Foucault himself. Referring to the “Christian economy” as “an extremely delicate and vital problem,” Agamben argues that “the ‘dispositifs’ which Foucault speaks about are somehow linked to this

7

Gilles Deleuze was one of the first to remind us of this in one of the appendices to La Logique du Sens (1969): “Apendice: “Simulacre et Philosophie Ancienne” I. “Platon et le Simulacre” Paris: Editions Minuit, pp. 292–307. See also, the edition of Plato's Republic adapted by Alain Badiou (2012). République de Platon. Paris: Fayard.

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theological legacy.”8 The “delicate and vital” problem that Foucault incessantly inquired of is that of “universals”, establishing that all forms of rationality are but a historical event linked to a given apparatus (an historical mode of knowledge, discourse, visibility system, relation of forces, etc.). “Apparatuses are, in point of fact, what take the place of the universals in the Foucauldian strategy”9. The same can be read in Deleuze: Foucault's thought implies “a repudiation of universals. A universal explains nothing; it, on the other hand, it must be explained”10. It is not surprising therefore, as Deleuze and Agamben note in their homonymic essays, that Greece and Christianity formed the two major original fields of Foucauldian inquiry. These were also the two great “archives” for analyzing that which would in turn outline the modern forms of subjectivization. That's why, Deleuze states, the form of the question that “haunted Foucault to the end” was to find “the new modes of subjectivation which we see appearing today and which are certainly not Greek or Christian … We who are no longer Greek nor even Christian”11. The classical and Christian cosmologies, and the universals established by them, thus correspond to the first major apparatuses in history. What is the distinction and link made between ideality and positivity but the creation, in the same plane, of a caesura and a duplicity: the caesura between positivity and apparatus. As Agamben further states, all apparatuses “can be in some way traced back to the fracture that divides and, at the same time, articulates … the nature or essence, on the one hand, … and the operation through which He administers and governs the created world, on the other”12. This caesura and articulation, such as the onto-theological “economy” disposes it, is the division between the multiplicity and transience of entities and its essential nature; between the sensory and the intelligible, between the visible and the invisible, between Being and image. In this 8 The argument is presented in detail, referring to Hegel's reflection about the “positive” or “imposed” aspect of a religion, as well as to the comment made by Jean Hyppolite, Foucault’s master, regarding Hegel. According to Agamben, Hyppolite would have influenced Foucault in precisely this way: first, in the choice of the term “positivity” and then in the final adoption of the term “apparatus” to the associated Christian doctrine of image. (Cf. Agamben, G. (2009). What is an Apparatus?: And Other Essays. Stanford University Press, p. 9–12). 9 Agamben, 2009, idem, p.8. 10 Deleuze, G. (1992 [1989]). “What is a Dispositif?” In Armstrong, T. (Ed.) Michel Foucault Philosopher. New York: Routledge, p. 342. 11 Deleuze, 1992, idem. 12 Agamben, 2009, idem, p.12.

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sense, the apparatus also administrates the passage from being to appearing, or the possibility of its specific manifestation in a specific image. As Marie-José Mondzain states, “the doctrine of the image and the icon is economic because it manages the possibilities of access to the manifestation and the relative intellection of the divine” and, precisely because of this, all apparatuses “designate before anything else a way of appearing within the visible field”13. The apparatus does in fact support, in the Foucauldian sense, a given visibility regime, which is literally in evidence, for example, in the analysis Foucault makes of the surveillance model of the “panopticon.” Although Foucault mainly considered discursive practices, what is at stake are always particular “light systems” and particular “lines of visibility,” as explained by Deleuze. Throughout recent decades, under the somewhat diffuse influence of Foucault, cultural studies and media studies have fully explored the archive of the apparatuses of modern vision, recognizing their central role in the regimes of modern subjectivity. The relationship between apparatuses and forms of sensibility14 has therefore been at the heart of a great number of analyses of modern media. One of the most systematic approaches in this field has been that of Jean-Louis Déotte, who also reflected on What is an Apparatus (2007), equally underlining the onto-theological roots of this question. In his vision of culture, the organization and rationalization of the sensory is the base of all “cosmetics”, that is, of all the world views, specifically that which belongs to ancient “onto-theo-cosmetics.” The basis of all “ordering in accordance to principles of the cosmos” is that of the organization and administration of sensitive experience, and it always implies a “technique of appearing”15. According to Déotte, it is this aesthetic aim of the apparatus that establishes the experience of history and of community: apparatuses “configure common sensibility… which is necessary to circumscribe a faire-monde and a faire-époque”16. His analysis focuses mainly on modern apparatuses such as “the geometric perspective,” the museum, the urban “passages,” etc., but also not forgetting the primordial example of “incarnation.” The element of appearance is central to the architecture of metaphysics and theology, which therefore comprehend strict rules for its mediation 13

Mondzain, Marie-José (2004 [1998]). Image, Icon, Economy. The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary. Stanford University Press, p. 35. 14 Title of a book by Jean-Louis Déotte (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002). 15 Déotte, J.-L. (2007). Qu’est-ce qu’un appareil? Benjamin, Lyotard, Rancière. Paris: L’Harmattan, p. 13. 16 Déotte, J.-L., 2007, p. 12.

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and control. A dispositif or apparatus is thus, first and foremost, the support for a given form of appearance and the organization of its perception. This organization of perception and appearance, and that of the human being as spectator, defines from very early on our being in the world. In this sense, the organization of perception has been at the center of human experience since the earliest times. This question is once again present in the thinking of Marie-José Mondzain in Homo spectator: de la manipulation par l'image (2008), where she underlines, through an even more archaic context – that of Paleolithic engravings – the primordial nature of the formation of the spectator that we have always been. In the example of the tattooed hands on the walls of the caves, the first selfimage of the human being of prehistory, Mondzain underlines the actual “birth of the subject” to state that “if the birth of the spectator is the birth of human beings, the death of the spectator is the death of humanity itself” and that “a world without spectators is a world threatened by barbarism”. But she also appeals to the fact that in the present we must not “give up our freedom, when faced with the violence of the audio-visual industries” and the condition of being spectators “hostages... of spectacular productions”. Her thinking reflects in every way a “concern with the spectators that we have become, frightened and too often willing hostages of spectacular productions”. Mondzain therefore appeals to the recognition that the “history of the spectator is long and winding” and it is also necessarily a complex one, concomitant with the emergence not only of the imaginary but also of the symbolic, i.e., of abstraction and organization of the sensory.17 In a recent reflection regarding the duality of abstraction and sensibility, Alain Badiou also referred to the context of the Paleolithic engravings to underline that the relationship between symbolic thought and sensory experience is truly archaic. The “relationship between the imaginary and the attempt to formalize,” he states, “is indeed very old” and therefore it is not surprising that in the classical context, “the relationship between the sensory and pure intellection” would become a central problem, especially in Plato and Aristotle, with consequences that have extended down through occidental culture18. 17

Cf. João Zilhão concerning the emergence of symbolic thought: Zilhão, J. (2011). “Simbolic” (Secção Saberes/Linguagem), in Critical Dictionary of Art, Image, Language and Culture, Section “Language”, Ed. Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Linguagens, IGESPAR, IP (www.arte-coa-pt). 18 Badiou, Alain (2011). “Mathématiques / Esthétiques / Arts”, held as part of the programme Conférence Scientifique Internationale, “Mathematics and Computation in Music”, IRACM, Paris. (https://www.youtube.com).

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The return of this major framework of anthropological and ontotheological questions in the era of the full awareness of apparatuses and mediation indicates, in some way, two things at tension. Firstly, it shows that the relationship between the sensory and the intelligible, which occupied metaphysics and theology in such a central manner and has an important anthropological foundation, remains central to human experience. The notion of apparatus reveals the insufficiency of metaphysical and transcendental categories and their incapability to deal with the question of mediation. For example, the insufficiency of the duality of “form” and “matter” that Heidegger therefore proposes to replace by the notion of “Ge-stell,”19 or the insufficiency of transcendental structures to account for historical positivity, which Foucault proposes to replace by the notion of “dispositive.”20 The processes of mediation and their apparatuses are; the very locus of experience. Because “media determine our situation” ontology may only return as “media ontology”21. As Kittler explicitly implies, philosophy has not only consigned the issue of mediation to invisibility but it also particularly erased for a long time its own medium – spoken or written language.22 The deconstruction of philosophy, as Derrida also argued, can only thus be the deconstruction of writing itself and of the logocentric structures that seek to assure us of presence and universality. The “linguistic turn” of modern epistemology has shown the fundamental role that language holds for all experience, but the logical, semiological or pragmatic investigations of language have all tended to neglect the material, technical and historical aspects that also intrinsically constitute it. These really only emerge when we consider the discursive practices that operationalize and sustain knowledge and discourse, as well as non-discursive practices supported by them, practices through which we carry out our singular or collective individuation strategies and that in themselves constitute a cohesive 19

Cf. the critique of the notions of “form” and “matter” that leads to the proposed notion of “Ge-Stell” in Heidegger, M. (1977 [1953]). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper Torchbooks, pp. 3-35. 20 Cf. “Le jeu de Michel Foucault” (1977) in Foucault, M. (1999). Dits et écrits, T. III, Paris: Gallimard, text no. 206. See also Siegert, 2015, p.3. 21 The first statement opens Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986). (Translation by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). On the idea of “media ontology” cf. Kittler, F. (2009). “Towards an Ontology of Media” in Theory, Culture & Society, 26, no. 2–3, pp. 23–31. 22 Cf. Kittler, F., idem: “Quite in contrast to illuminators, painters, scientists, historians, and poets, thinkers tend to forget their very medium. This absence of a media ontology may well have been their deepest (and that means groundless) raison d’être.”

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“discourse network.”23 In Kittler's terminology, Aufsschreibsysteme or systems of inscription are the technological possibilities of each epoch that determine the general condition of mediality and what can take shape in it. From the invention of alphabets and writing, to movable type, the press, the typewriter and the digital editor, language may not simply be considered as one and the same universal form. The differences between a predominantly oral culture and a predominantly written one have always been strongly underlined in the history of culture. Equally relevant, is the fact that ours is a vocalic alphabet. The significance of this, in turn, is not that our writing is definable by a type of original proximity to speech24. In fact, this vocalic alphabet was the result of a system of abstract notation – a system that could represent abstract notions such as numbers and be used for calculation – and that later also included numbers as signified by “numerals.” That is why language can signify speech, poetry and music, but also mathematical realities. As Kittler recalls “the Greeks developed a number system from their vowel alphabet” and this indeed characterizes “western reason.”25 The Greeks invented the logos as that which is simultaneously oratio and ratio.26 Indeed, in western culture, abstract and mathematical formalizations continue to serve the restitution and coding of sound and music, of image and the visible, ant that is why they could be technically manipulated and industrialized. It is certainly not without reason or consequence that, in founding the Academy, Plato gave a privileged place to mathematics. The modern assumption that “Nature's great book is written in mathematical language” (Galileo), as well as the contemporary conviction that there is nothing that cannot be represented by numbers and calculated whether in the field of nature or in the field of culture, seems to provide support for the idea that mathematics was, from very early onwards, the true support for 23

Cf. Kittler, F. (1990 [1986]). Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Stanford University Press. 24 Cf. Derrida, J. (1967). La Voix et le Phénomène. Paris: PUF, and Krämer, Sybille, “Sprache – Stimme – Schrift. Sieben Gedanken über Performativität als Medialität” in: Uwe Wirth (Hrsg.) (2002). Performanz, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 323-346. 25 In “Numbers and Numerals,” F. Kittler attributes a key importance to this inclusion of numbers as signified elements in Greek language and, therefore, as written representation. In his argument, mathematics only truly develops “in cultures where the numbers are present as numerals”, in Theory, Culture & Society, 23, 7–8 (2006): 51–61. 26 Cf. “Logos” by Barbara Cassin, et. alia in Cassin, B. (org.) (2004). Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophes. Dictionnaire des Intraduisibles. Paris: Éditions du Seuil and Éditions Le Robert, 727–41.

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ontology.27 The equivalence established between reality and information is itself supported by the invention of a new symbolic machine (the digital computer) that operates on the calculability of signs. Independent of future mathematical developments, it is already possible today to relate all languages and all different forms of expression and appearance through number. The mathematical theory of information has therefore served as a support for an ontology that identifies all that is as that which is capable of being described and calculated.28 Nevertheless, the history that starts with logos and leads to the computer does not compose a history of being but a history of beings, one in which we are forced to distinguish at least, as Agamben puts it, between “two large groups or classes: on the one hand, living beings (or substances), and on the other, apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured.” These are “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions or discourses of living beings”29. In fact, the history of being should be considered as a history of mediality if we accept, as Kittler says, that “‘In the middle’ of absence and presence, farness and nearness, being and soul, there exists nothing any more, but a mediatic relation”.30 This history seems to culminate, as Kittler continues, on the “media of mathematics,” which is not strange since mathematics is precisely “the relation of relationships” (Von Neumann). In any event, the media relationship is shown throughout history in different “epistemic objects” (Hans-Jörg Rheinberger): works of art, poems and artifacts, such as the lyre, poetry, the tempered piano, the press, perspective in painting, the novel, the photographic image, the telegraph, opera, the theater, rock,

27

Cf. Badiou, A. (2006). Logique des mondes. L’être et l’événement 2. Paris: Éditions du Seuil: “La détermination de l’être en tant qu’ être n’est pensée que dans la mathématique.” such that it does not possess a meaning which is hermeneutically interpretable. Badiou has insisted that “L’être, en tant qu’être, n’a aucun sens. L’Histoire ne saurait faire exception à cette dure maxime” (Interview with Alain Badiou by Nicole-Édith Thévenien (1991). “L’être, l’ Événement, la Militance”). See also the interview published in Le Point.fr (04/04/2011): Badiou, A. “Les mathématiques sont la seule discipline capable d' expliquer l' tre.” 28 A critical analysis of this metaphysics of information is undertaken in Martins, Hermínio (2011). Experimentum Humanum. Civilização Tecnológica e Condição Humana. Lisbon: Relógio d’Água. 29 Agamben, 2009, idem, p. 14. 30 Kittler, F. 2009, idem.

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the digital image, etc... .31 The connection between media and mathematics is explored by Kittler mostly in his last works, where he tries to follow the history of culture as the history of the ways in which “letters, numbers, images and tones” have been differentiated and re-integrated through the emergence of different notation systems and media technologies32. This history began with the Greek phonetic alphabet, which, for Kittler, had the particular characteristic of being used to encode letters, tones and numbers. In his view this was a determinant aspect for mathematics only developed “in cultures in which numbers are present as numerals,” and these were also the cultures that came to rest on storage and transmission media, which Kittler therefore calls “the media of mathematics”33. Media shape different ages of culture as well as the environment in which we live and the awareness that we have of it. This intertwining between the technical and the human has been present in modern anthropology since at least Leroi-Gourhan and Gilbert Simondon, who have strongly influenced contemporary views of culture and the contemporary philosophy of technique. In the vision of Stiegler (after Simondon), human beings are the result of a process of individuation, which is simultaneously psychological, social and technological. But this process is growingly taking place within a kind of total apparatus that calls for a new form of analysis that he designates as a “general organology”34. McLuhan’s analysis had already stressed, since the Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), the way media define a certain psycho-aesthetic configuration of experience. One of the interesting arguments of Gutenberg Galaxy, belying some common views on the history of culture and media, is that the decisive turning point toward a predominantly visual culture can be associated to the invention of the press and the industrialization of writing well before the invention of the optical devices of the nineteenth century35. And so one the important aspects of this generally assumed technological determinism of media analysis is that it has made the function of mediating perception (tending to be transparent or natural) visible in itself. 31 Cf. Kittler, F. (2011). “Técnicas Artísticas” in: Cruz, M. Teresa (org.) (2011). Novos Media. Novas Práticas. Lisbon: Nova Vega, pp. 20–29. 32 Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey and Gane, Nicholas (2006). “Friedrich Kittler: An Introduction” in: Theory Culture Society 2006; vol. 23; no. 7-8, p. 51. 33 Cf. Kittler, F. (2006). “Numbers and Numerals”. Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 23 no. 7-8, pp. 51-61. 34 Cf. Stiegler, Bernard (2014). Digital studies: Organologie des savoirs et technologies de la connaissance. FYP EDITIONS. 35 Mcluhan, M. The Gutenberg Galaxy. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).

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All media “are media of reality,” as Waldenfelds states, in so far that they are “media of the sensory experience of reality.”36 The same was also said by Kittler in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986): “We have storage technology that can record and play back their own temporal flow of optical and acoustic data. The ears and eyes have become autonomous. And that changed the state of reality”: the media “define what really is” (Ong)”37. At the same time, media also define the subject of perception and his relation with “observer technologies” (Crary, 1990), through psycho-aesthetic and sensory-motor models and designs of our relationship with the world. The history of culture can therefore be told through the figures of the subject that perceives the world through these different techniques: and the first manufacturer of the images of prehistory who is also the first spectator; the prisoner of the shadows of Plato's cave; the awake and gregarious listener of oral culture; the isolated reader engrossed in the world of the book; the “alienated” viewer or “the relaxed examiner” (Benjamin) of the cinema, the interactive user of digital networks, etc. The theory of modern media has increasingly stressed the constitution not only of new forms of representation but also new forms of perception and intelligibility, precisely shaped by a technology of the observer, which overlaps the entire immediate perception of the world or even the schematization of the transcendental subject. The human being is thus constituted by his or her mediations, as underlined by the ironic expression used by Kittler in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, the “so-called man”. This question has been instrumental to the transformation of a theory of image and representation into a theory and history of visuality and the observer. The work developed by Jonathan Crary, since Techniques of the Observer (1990), is a perfect example of this. In a certain sense, and indeed as Crary himself points out, this is also a revision of Kantian transcendentalism and its universal schematism of perception. Beyond the intrinsic connection that modern anthropology and archaeology had already generically established between culture and technology, modern media on the whole offer full evidence for the relationship between the sensory and the intelligible being placed in an apparatus. In most media archaeologies, cinema becomes the key example of this psycho-aesthetic dimension of technological mediation. From early on, in thinkers like Benjamin, Bergson, Epstein and others cinema poses the problem of 36

Waldenfelds, B. “Experimente mit der Wirklichkeit” in Krämer, Sybillle (hrsg.) Medien, Computer, Realität. (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), 213– 43. 37 Cf. Kittler, 1999, p. 33.

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consciousness and thought, as a competing notion to that of the logos and in his well-known philosophical inquiry on cinema Gilles Deleuze will consider it a new “image of thought”, a kind of “spiritual automaton.”38 Mediation, which was a useless and artificial concept for philosophical traditions such as idealism and phenomenology, is now at the center of numerous debates in contemporary philosophy. It is interesting to recall that the first philosophical thematization of “medium” takes place in Aristotle De Sensu, to explain the phenomenon of perception. Metaxy (“the middle” or “"in-between”) is, Aristotle states, a kind of “transparent element” (tlai)39, “a transparent medium” that is indispensable to our sensory perception. Our eyes, he states, do not see in a vacuum but rather through air, light or the water in the interior of the eye40. We may say that the reality of the medium, that is imposed by the very nature of the perceptual act, but is usually “invisible matter” became evident through technical mediation; and in turn, that technical mediations seek to achieve their own naturalization and thus tend to become invisible. This role of mediality to reveal nature while at the same time retracting and differing from it41, implies a kind of metaphysics of mediality that would have fully unfold in the era of digital media as the new universal revealing apparatus. Only language, as logos, has once played the role of an universal or “monopolistic” apparatus, in the words of F. Kittler, “alphabetic monopoly, grammatology” and “the glory of books” was only scattered in modernity, through the invention of media that allowed the storage and reproduction of acoustic an optical data. But what “began with

38

In the conclusion of Cinema 2. The Time-Image (1985), G. Deleuze makes use of the famous expression “spiritual automaton” to state that the cinema “brings to light an intelligible matter” which “consists of movements and processes of thought” and which “together form a ‘psycho-mechanics’” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 262). 39 Aristotle (1906). De sensu And De Memoria, Text and Translation with Introduction and Commentary by G.R.T. RossCambridge: University Press, 439 a 20-30, p. 53. 40 Aristotle, idem, 438 b 4, p. 55. 41 See the “massive and general partition of beings” proposed by Agamben as the partition between “living beings and apparatus” and the seemingly chaotic exemplification of the latter as: “the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones, and – why not – language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses – one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face”. Cf. Agamben, 2009, idem, p. 13–14.

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the monopoly of writing”, “will soon end in the monopoly of bits and fiber optics”42. Such is the present condition, that many others also designate as the “post-medium” condition. The post-medium condition is in fact the age of the growing ubiquity, transparency and naturalization of one dominant apparatus – the digital computer -, endowed with a system of encoding and characterized by extreme formalization, logicality, calculability and algorithmic implementation. What began with a preference for alphabetic language and then with the ascent of writing and mostly of mathematics at Plato’s Academy has finally unfolded as the monopoly of the digital computer. The revolutions of mathematics and the progressive calculability of phenomena have always been one of the key factors of western knowledge revolutions, but the highest ambition of western metaphysics has never been the solely achievement of maximum abstraction. In reality, it has always enclosed an economy of the intelligible and the sensory, inscribed at the heart of Greek culture, in the relation between eidos and image, logos and poetry, music and mathematics.43 In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, when he speaks of the monopoly of language and the alphabet Kittler also reminds us that language functions as a “unity super-sensory to all the senses” that allows for the various sensuous qualities of the world around us to be “hallucinated”44. At the heart of his own media ontology, such as he described it in “Numbers and Numerals” (2006) is the question of “the ways in which ‘letters, numbers, images and tones’ have been differentiated and re-integrated, through the emergence of different notation systems and media technologies.” 45 The digital convergence represents the effective success of a writingreading system totally integrating “letters, numbers, images and sounds” and that is why the computer interface is par excellence that medial entity where the different sensible data, although “reduced to surface effects” still allow for a new era of glittering sensuality and entertainment46. Maybe this is only “an interim… by-product of strategic programs”, 42

Kittler, 1999, idem, p. 5. In Vol. 1 of Musik und Mathematik. Band 1 Hellas, Teil1: Aphrodite (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006) F. Kittler refers to the invention of vowels and the vocalic nature of the Greek alphabet: “Das Alphabet der Griechen singt” pp. 108–21. 44 Kittler, 1999, idem, p. 16. 45 Editor's note in Kittler, F. “Numbers and Numerals,” Theory, Culture & Society, 23, 7–8 (2006): 51–61. 46 Cf. Kittler, 1999, idem, p. 1. 43

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before “absolute knowledge will run as an endless loop” inside computers themselves. The history of the computer, though, shows that the universal machine didn´t only aimed at a simulacrum of human intelligence, (“artificial intelligence”) but also at a new artificial sensibility. That the computer would eventually put on the skin of the world and process sensible data was, since the very beginning, a possibility examined by Shannon and Turing. As a machine that can simulate all other media, i.e., as “meta-media”47 the computer controls the whole appearance production apparatus and its new operations of translation of sound into graphics, time into space, 2D image into 3D space, movement into audio-visual experiences, etc. The extraordinary developments in computer science, namely in the field of algorithms, have been complemented by no less extraordinary developments in the field of interactive interfaces and computer graphics that allow for sophisticated data visualization and powerful real time interaction with virtual objects and architectures. “Virtual reality,” “augmented reality,” “sensory technologies” indicate, at least for now, that the relation between digitization and the so called dematerialization of culture does not dispense with embodiment and sensitive viability. In several of her writings, Katherine Hayles reevaluated the cybernetic scenarios of “an erasure of embodiment”: “virtuality, she says, is not about living in an immaterial realm of information”; and in “The Condition of Virtuality” (1999) she offers a very useful “strategic definition” of virtuality as “the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns”.48 All information, she adds “finds instantiation in an array of powerful technologies.” Interfaces, which are increasingly at the heart of the digital cultural experience, are the locus of this “cultural perception” “instantiation” and “viability” of the virtual. Their mediation and translation functions almost allows for their confusion with the very idea of medium, to the extent that they shelter the transactions between the sensitive and the intelligible dimensions of the digital apparatus. In an interesting essay on to the notion of the interface, Alain Renaud states that 47

The term chosen by Lev Manovich in “Understanding Meta-Media” and maybe the most accurate one within the jargon of the “post-medium” condition. Cf. Manovich, Lev (2005). “Understanding Meta-Media”, CTheory, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Editors – http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=493 48

Cf. Hayles, N. Katherine (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. The University of Chicago Press., Prologue, pp. 11–14; and Hayles, N. K. (1999). “The Condition of Virtuality” in Lunenefeld, Peter, The Digital Dialectics. Essays on New Media, MIT Press, p. 69.

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we are now placed before “an incredible epistemological and industrial challenge” which brings an “aesthetic question” once more to the center of contemporary culture: “to forge a completely original sensibility…: a meta-sensibility (...). Thought in every sense”.49 As numbers and software take command50, sensory data are constantly being processed and mobilized within cyber-industry and information is constantly being translated into all sorts of images and data visualization. This new stage of the rationalization of the visual belongs, according to Lev Manovich, to a history of “visual nominalism”51 that he describes as “the use of vision to capture the identity of individual objects and spaces by recording distances and shapes” (such as in perspective and radar), instead of the mere flux of sensory data. But this is still a chapter, as he himself states, of what Paul Virilio in turn called, a "logistics of perception."52 One of the main challenges of media theory therefore continues to be the description and understanding of transformations in the field of perception, attention and cognition associated with the process of media mutation. These have usually been slow and underground changes but they suffered a significant acceleration with modern media technologies. In the era of digital media, perception is no less at the heart of the new cultural industries, and of their specific products, then it was in the era of photography or cinema. Digital images, videos and different kinds of audio-visual objects, webpages, games and apps for all sorts of image and sound manipulation are part of our daily media environment. Our PCs and mobile devices allow us to play and manipulate all kinds of media, sensor technology feed virtual reality systems with our perceptions in real time, internet has become a rich sensory environment with an extraordinary growth of audio-visual content, Google earth allows to see every distant corner of the planet, and complex ideas and realities are translated into visual data presentation. At the same time, our perception is itself undergoing important changes, whose contours are already noticeable. An example of this change, with great impact in the field of literacy and .

49 Renaud, Alain (2003). “L’interface informationnelle ou le sensible au sens de l’intelligible”, in Poissant, Louise. Esthétiques des Arts Médiatiques. Interfaces et Sensorialité, Québec: Presses de l’ Univeristé du Québec, pp.-65-89. 50 Cf. Manovich, Lev (2013). Software Takes Command. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 51 Manovich, Lev (1993). "The Mapping of Space: Perspective, Radar, and 3-D Computer Graphics” in: Computer Graphics Visual Proceedings, edited by Thomas Linehan. New York: ACM. 52 Virilio, Paul (1989). War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso.

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education, was recently underlined by Katherine Hayles, who has pointed out the dominance of what she calls “hyper attention”: “switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom”53. Another important change in the organization of perception is the growing association of sight and touch, haptic perception, on which some influential modern thinkers had already commented since the end of the XIXth century (Riegl, Bergson, Benjamin). In “The Work of Art” (1936), Benjamin describes a haptic turn of modern perception as a way of absorbing the shock of rapid technological change, which demands new cultural and social “habits” and ultimately translates into a new economy. Within digital media, all perception potentially becomes action or interaction, deeply transforming the divide between seeing and making, reception and production. One of the most influential ideologies of the contemporary - the ideology of creativity -, seems to gravitate in all its variants (artistic, technological and economic) around this activation of reception, when it describes, as equivalent orders, a society of artists, of makers and of “prosumers”. Interactivity is the name for perception in this new stage of technoaesthetics. The more we advance in the rationalization of the visual, the more we have it at our fingertips. When the mathematization of the visual took its first major step with the invention of planar perspective in the Renaissance we also witnessed the emergence of disegno, described as a way of seeing and representing that involves imagination and intellect and allows the artist, not only to reproduce what he sees, but to perceive it. Disegno is therefore associated with graphic arts, the arts of line and contour, close to those of writing and concept. This coming together of visuality, mathematics and symbolization has consistently brought together grammatics and diagrammatics54 and enhances our capability to perceive and act upon what we sense and see. In the age of info-aesthetics, design and data visualization are two of the main aspects that drive both artistic and scientific culture and practices. The Information Age has its own apparatus, its own economy and politics of appearance. For now, there is still media aesthetics.

53

Hayles, K., (2007). “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes”, Modern Language Association Journal, 13, pp. 188-199. 54 See Sybille Krämer and Christina Ljungberg (org.) (2016). Thinking with Diagrams: The Semiotic Basis of Human Cognition. Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter.

CHAPTER FIVE ARTIFICE AS AN AESTHETIC FORCE: A TRIBUTE TO FRIEDRICH KITTLER1 JOSÉ GOMES PINTO

First of all, production neither occurs in a mythical space where signs and referents are one, nor does it take place within a subject oblivious of what it has created (and creates). Instead, languages and fictions number among the many and disparate events of corporeal being. Their lack of “truth” does not lead theory to skepticism or positivism, but to Ariadne: “the path of the body” [Leitfaden des Leibes]. (Kittler, 2014: 19)

Every one of you must remember the definition with which a new way of focusing space began. We are thinking about the well-known sentence of William Gibson in his book published in 1984, Neuromancer. This is the way in which Gibson creates one of the contemporary world’s most important conundrums: Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. (Gibson, 1995, 67)

1

Translations financed by National Funds through FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology for the project PEst-OE/COM/UI0158/2014.

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No one can doubt that cyberspace is a key concept of our times. During the past ten years, thousands of books have been written on this subject, searching for new forms of world relations, of realities. Gibson became famous as the very inventor of that concept but no one remembers that, despite the importance of the word cyberspace, the key concept was that of Neuromancer itself. Indeed, Neuromancer is not merely a name for a book – it is a word as significant as that of cyberspace, not only because it describes a particular circumstance, but also because it names a new social and epistemological context – worldly relations. Eventually, it presents a new form of envisioning the present times, constituting in fact a new access door for an alternative world-view. If we recall Kittler’s revisiting of Novalis, it can be affirmed that “If one reads in the right way,” Novalis wrote, “the words will unfold in us a real, visible world” (Kittler, 1999, 9). Neuromancer plays with the word new and the word neuron and with the ancient concept of Romance. Neuromancer is not only a new form of romance, so to speak, a new form of describing it, but a phantasmagorical form, a new reality that is unfolding ahead of us; a new form of describing a new “real” existence or ens in the Thomas Aquinas sense (Aquinas, 1254: passim): the content of the mind and the possibilities to access it by. This prefix is also used in this way in “new media”, as Lisa Giltelman suggests recalling Friedrich Kittler: “Friedrich A. Kittler’s admittedly “mournful” proposition that “the general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media” so that soon, “a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium” (1999, 1–2)” (Gitelman, 2008, 3). It is urgent, in that sense, to pay attention to the concept “new.” When Joseph Addison presents, in The Pleasures of the Imagination (Addison, 1995: 140), the figure of the “new,” of “newness,” as an engine of knowledge and source of pleasure, he is anticipating and making possible what later comes to constitute a true riddle: modernity. These reflections, although seemingly extemporaneous, are of major importance for understanding actuality since the “new,” as a structure for which no determined content is known, appears as a figure for which there is, so far, no concrete experience. The “new” announces itself as something that is still beyond all concrete knowledge. It is, in consequence, a non-positive, and therefore specific, modality of human nomination that is characterized by being a concept for which there is, so far, no representation or image. This is why it gives place simultaneously to emotions that in a euphoric way characterize the future: fear, uncertainty. The “new” is itself an ambiguous source of emotions. In this sense, the manifestation of negativity must be conceived as double-faced. Boris Groys recently

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inserted the “new” in the realm of “suspicion,” where everything came “under suspicion” (unter Verdacht) (Groys, 2012: passim). There is therefore legitimacy in assenting to and establishing the contents of “newness.” A philosopher like David Hume fully understood the dual nature of the concept, saying, in A Treatise of Human Nature: The suddenness and strangeness of an appearance naturally excite a commotion in the mind, like everything for which we are not prepar’d, and to which we are accustom’d. This commotion, again, naturally produces a curiosity or inquisitiveness, which being very violent, from the strong and sudden impulse of the object, becomes uneasy, and resembles in it fluctuation and uncertainty, the sensation of fear or the mix’d passions of grief and joy. This image of fear naturally converts into the thing itself, and gives us a real apprehension of evil, as the mind always forms its judgments more from its present disposition than from the nature of it objects. (Hume, 1975: 446)

Edmund Burke – Hume’s contemporary – preferred to emphasize the superficial character of “newness” and the curiosity that it naturally arouses. For Burke, all objects that subjugate humankind due to their “novel” character are unable to keep the spirit attentive, fixed on the object. Curiosity is then manifested as the most “superficial of human affections” (Burke, 1991: 23). At this point, the “new,” as a figure that emerges and asks for inner recognition, is something apparent, superficial and transparent. What seems clear is that the ambiguity of these emotions, and their consequent correlatives, seems to be reinforced when the production of the “new” persists, that is to say, when perception is constantly invaded by creations for which there is no time to reach understanding, becoming by this means a matter of aesthetic force. The “new” is something that cannot be “actualized.” In this sense, the real it produces seems always too strange, too unfamiliar. The “new” therefore emerges as a disturbing oddity; reality is Unheimlich [uncanny] (Freud, 2001: 33ff). The mind, moved by curiosity, goes from one idea to another, seeking to recognize what seems to be “new.” In this movement, the mind attempts to recognize what is, in the act of “appearing,” unusually odd. It is an action that we can describe as a movement of, or an attempt at, figuration in relation to something that didn’t have a “figure” yet. If, on one hand, this movement of the will involves the spirit of a positive emotion, on the other hand, and simultaneously, it will instigate fear and suspicion. This apparent ambiguity in the face of the “new” reveals the primary characteristic of actuality: the crisis that we may call, following the words of the Portuguese theoretician José Bragança de Miranda, “the essential phenomenon of so-called Modern Times” (Miranda, 1994: 69).

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In the continuum flux (which the traditional concepts cannot apprehend and which is always a concept-instrument), the object that emerges does not cease to appear as a kind of noise produced in the decoding of reality. The “new” is therefore represented not only as perplexity but also as confusion: the confusion of things. Reality is uncanny. The conceptual instruments of history cease to be operative. History and tradition are useless to identify the “new.” This confusion is nowadays taking a tragic relevance. The “new” challenges launched by information technologies are disturbing our world. Virtual reality, cyberspace, hypertext, artificial intelligence, etc., are all empty facts, concepts for which there isn’t so far any concrete representation, any history, and no possible experience. And there is only one way for us to face the crisis and to solve it: rethinking the traditional concepts, even stretching them. In fact, traditional concepts are “naturalistic” and that is, of course, the cause of the present crisis: The main difficulty to confront us with the new phenomenon of the technical (and it continues to be so with the new technologies) is that we only have “natural” concepts, which seem less and less adequate for thinking about artificial reality. The realisation of the insufficiency of the instrumental approach is increasingly adding to the evidence that the “artificial” is no longer a making of the making, but a form of the human being. The battlefield of the crisis that Western thought is experiencing today is found in the determination of the concepts of artificial, artifice and artificiality. This is the novum of modernity, our specific circumstance. To it in other words, the “new” in the present times is a matter of human construction. It repeats and casts one’s mind back to the words of Victor Hugo in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) when he states that: The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother of revolution. It is the mode of expression of humanity which is totally renewed; it is human thought stripping off one form and donning another; it is the complete and definitive change of skin of that symbolical serpent which since the days of Adam has represented intelligence. (Hugo, 2002: 168)

The artificial is not the negative correlative of the real. Myron Krueger says that what we generally call virtual reality is properly an artificial reality. The artificial must be rethought as an image determined and configured in and by the history of its confrontation with nature and natural. The task must be reduced to thinking about its status, its

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disposition in relation to nature. Hans Blumenberg pertinently pointed this out in his Imitation of Nature: For almost two thousand years, it seemed as if the conclusive and final answer to the question, “What can the human being, using his power and skill, do in the world and with the world?” had been given by Aristotle when he proposed that “art” was the imitation of nature, thereby defining the concept with which the Greeks encompassed all the actual operative abilities of man within reality – the concept of techne. With this expression the Greeks indicated more than what we today call technology [Technik]: It gave them an inclusive concept for man's capacity to produce works and form shapes, a concept comprising the “artistic” and the “artificial” (which we so sharply distinguish between today). Only in this broader sense ought we use this term we translate as “art.” “In general,” then, according to Aristotle, “human skill either completes what nature is incapable of completing or imitates nature.” This dual definition is closely tied to the double meaning of the concept of nature as a productive principle (natura naturans) and a produced form (natura naturata). (Blumenberg, 200: 17)

We shall see now how a new envisioning of the concept of “artificial” can bring new light to this phenomenon of crisis. The characteristics described by David Hume in the above quotation constitute modes of receiving reality and are extremely well-known topics nowadays. The novum of actuality is characterized as much by the proliferation as by the development of information and communication technologies, or rather, by the consequences of their widespread use in Western societies. That is, they are the very effects that are revealing the shape of actuality that these technologies are producing on individuals, on society, on life, on thought. This is a claim that is explicit in Friedrich Kittler’s writings but explicitly formulated in this way: “Precisely because the eye sees neither the air nor the water involved, media, that is, the invisible matter (ȣȜȘ), grant an unconcealed view of being or, in Aristotle’s words, they reveal the actively real (İȞIJİȜİțİȚĮ) of an unconcealed being (ȠȣıȚĮ)” (Kittler, 2006: 54). In fact, it would be a mistake to say that the real problem of actuality lies in technological instruments as particular objects. Instead, the question is what these instruments may produce and what their effects are. The theoretical justification of this statement is that technological devices are essentially means. Or, using the Latin word, we must say that technological instruments are media. In present times, inquiry about the essence of mediation has no relevance because media are already artificial. Mediation has been completely artificialized. The question about the precise meaning

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of mediation only gains force and relevance when the mediator has a natural, spontaneous status. From a natural point of view, the mediator emerges as an immediate element that it is necessary to determine. In this sense, its determination would respond and correspond to its actual function. The question regarding the meaning of mediation, from the point of view of its form, has an answer in the teleological determination of the mediator. Mediation corresponds to the purpose of Nature, according to Kant’s statement. But the actual artificialization of the mediators has deferred the question of the formal meaning of the mediator to the concrete meaning of its structure: the artifice, its artificial character. It is in this sense that we may understand the statement of Deleuze and Guattari when, in The AntiOedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they claim that “the real is not impossible, what it is, is ever more artificial” (Deleuze, 1995: 38). In other words, the mediation becomes artificial, human purpose. In this way, mediation can build events, occurrences. That’s what artificial reality is. What is “novel” is therefore that the artificial and the artifices are orders of happenings. The crisis of the traditional concepts alluded to above is born here. Nature, reality and artifice are no longer defined by their mutual relationship. From the apocalyptic visions of science-fiction literature, through their representation in film to their attempted theoretical configuration, the description of actuality is always preceded by horror, fear, the loss of density, the loss of the sense of reality. It is in this context that an established way of perceiving the human being seems to enter into collapse: humanism. Post-humanism is the novum of actuality, something that “evokes terror as much as it excites pleasure” (Hayles, 1999: 283). This is how Katherine Hayles presents the root of the problem: Post, with its dual connotation of superseding the human and coming after it, hints that the days of “the human” may be numbered. Some researchers (notably Hans Moravec but also my UCLA colleague Michel Dyer and many others) believe that this is true not only in a general intellectual sense that displaces one definition of “human” with another but also in a more disturbingly literal sense that envisions humans displaced as the dominant form of life on the planet by intelligent machines. (1999)

Tiziana Terranova describes the new and future inhabitants of the artificial world in this manner: Post-humans will be persons of unprecedented physical, intellectual, and psychological ability, self-programming and self-defining, potentially

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Chapter Five immortal, unlimited individuals. Post-humans have overcome the biological, neurological, psychological constraints evolved into humans. […] Post-humans may be partially or mostly biological in form, but will likely be partly or wholly post-biological – our personalities having been transferred into more durable, modifiable, and faster, and more powerful bodies and thinking hardware. (2000: 273)

It seems clear that, in the process of the artificialization of the structures of humankind, of the human being itself, the first to collapse are the structures that make possible the understanding of the contents of perception and of human thinking itself. For instance, and according to Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Friedrich Kittler’s preference for the concept of anti-humanism is more deeply rooted in contemporary facts: “And for the ongoing discussions of posthumanism, Kittler’s anti-humanism may turn out to be one of the most important contributions when it comes to the question of human-machine co-evolution” (2011: 145). Artificial is the structure of the real, or rather, a “new real.” This is why Peter Weibel, still departing from naturalistic conceptions, calls our age an “era of absence” (1997, passim). The absent can only be taken as a key concept if it appears as an absolute fact, clear evidence, an undeniable occurrence. In other words, absence became a real category when its visibility ceased to be transitive, mediumistic, and became original, essential. The negative path that Weibel follows in determining the appearing, as a “manifestation of the absent,” emerges from his misunderstanding of the artificial. The artifice is not merely a medium but a key concept rooted in a new table of categories, categories that allow the understanding of reality: artifice is strength, a force of production, the strength of human creation. And this is why Kittler’s first words in his Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999: xxxix) are as follows: “Media determine our situation, which – in spite or because of it – deserves a description”; which in Kittler’s German sounds much more powerful and accurate – “Medien bestimmen unsere Lage, die (trotzdem oder deshalb) eine Beschreibung verdient”). The access to the understanding of the real is thus transferred from Ontology and Epistemology (where the meaning of the constructed was rooted in mimesis) to Aesthetics, as a theory of the forms of reception, and therefore as a possibility to understand the “new” as human-created and designed and not only as a mere reflection of nature. Artificiality is therefore, using classical terminology, the essence of the “new real.” The Portuguese philosopher Fernando Gil saw the problem perfectly when he said,

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No echo of mimesis and the natural remains, calculation and programming have taken their place. The model has disappeared and its original is, from the beginning, a pure artefact. But based on it, at the same time, unprecedented confluences are taking shape, between disorder and order, chance and necessity, the technological and the artistic. In harmony with the developments that the sciences are experiencing today, perhaps the arts can open up a new chapter in the relationships between the natural and the artificial. (2001: 355)

Kittler went further by affirming, with an implicit justification of his anti-humanism, that: “First, technology and the body: the naked thesis, to place it immediately up front, would read as follows: we knew nothing about our senses until media provided models and metaphors” (2010: 42). Nowadays the critical literature on the subject echoes the growing split between artifice and reality. Jean Baudrillard, one of the most famous, and curiously one of the most popular, detractors of this “new” way of understanding technologically mediated human productions points out that: “Of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. It is the political problem of the parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation, which is posed here” (1981: 30). The conclusions that Baudrillard draws are clear: in losing the real, we also lose the imaginary. The structure of Baudrillard’s thinking is absolutely traditional, naturalistic. He inverts the meaning of the premises of the classical approach of classifying the real. In doing so, his inversion seems to be legitimatized. The imagination appears merged with, and grounded in, the real. That is to say, the teleological structure of the imagination is the true reality and active faculty whose ultimate purpose is reality. If this mimetic relationship collapses, the real is transformed into mere ruins. If its reproductive function merges with its productive power, as is happening today, the function of the imagination is displaced from the center to the periphery in the determination of reality. In this way, the imagination ceases to be a function of the real. Contrarily, the real becomes the ultimate intentionality of the imagination; and art therefore appears as its true touchstone. What alarms Baudrillard is precisely this apparent loss of foundations, but what he does not recognize is the power of that human strength: the possibility of creating new forms. The crisis of the real, which for Baudrillard is the crisis of illusion, could be superseded if we conceive that the imagination is not a function of reality, but that reality coincides with the intentionality of the imagination. In this sense, what we have is artificiality or artificial reality, not natural but human-designed purposes. This is one of the

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functions that Kittler recognizes in the typewriter: “The “writingmachine,” in that sense only brought to light the rules regulating discourses during the age of Goethe: authority and authorship, handwriting and rereading, the narcissism of creation and reader obedience” (1999: 188). We can find two very distinct stances in modernity toward technological mediations: that of the technophobes and that of the technophiles, to use Carl Mitcham’s terminology (Mitcham, 1989: passim). As a general rule, these two positions have two very distinct origins. The first one is rooted in the history of Western philosophy. The second proceeds from a new form of taking knowledge: functionalism. This second sense may be called engineering (Mitcham, 1994: passim). From an engineering point of view, we find an unconditional theoretical apology of the new advances in applied and natural sciences. Technology is seen here as the solution to the millenary problems that Western culture had posed. In these segments we place authors such as R. U. Sirius, Jaron Lanier (the creator of the first virtual reality apparatus) and, in a more literarily vehement and superficial form, Derrick de Kerckhove. Sirius and Lanier agree in the determination of technology as the real possibility of pouring the imagination into the material. Sirius says: “In terms of people interacting, one of the fundamental things about virtual reality is that it allows you to share the contents of your mind and your imagination” (1996: 57). For Lanier, however, this pouring is still merely symbolic, that is to say temporally determined. Lanier finally draws a physiological and moral distinction between “real” and “virtual” more than an ontological distinction. For Lanier, the real is that which does not obey the will and still remains in spite of it: The physical world allows us to be lazy. In other words, you can lie down on a couch and the physical world is still there. The virtual world only exists because of the magic in the way your nervous system makes things real when you interact with them. And the moment you start to space out or became lazy, the reality goes away, and it just turns into a bunch of junk in your head.” (1996: 43–4)

However, what Lanier seems to overlook is that the nervous structures and the free will are both human structures and not limits to reality. They are immanent structures, not transcendent ones. Not even the recourse to transcendent structures would throw any light on this question. Hence, the problem remains, at its roots, intact. This unconscious argumentation of Lanier’s against himself does not prevent him from going ahead with his “ideology” and taking technology as something positive: “Virtual reality is the way that people can connect with each other in the most beautiful and

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intuitive manner, using technology. It’ll become a sort of community utility in which dreams are shared and ideas concreated” (1996, 46). What for some authors is a concreation of ideas is an occurrence without facticity for others. This is what Baudrillard calls la gréve des evenements [the “strike of events”]. Baudrillard tends to take the theses of Guy Debord (Debord, 1992: passim) to their ultimate consequences, understanding technological mediation as the petition of the right of Modernity. For Baudrillard the great occurrences are simulations and simulacrum, just as Modernity is the “age of absence” for Weibel. Baudrillard calls this illusory occurrence a “simulacrum of simulation,” founded “on information, the model, the cybernetic game – it is the total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control” (1981: 177). Technological mediation is thus presented as a metaphysical laboratory, an instrument that allows us to investigate the meaning of the real (Heim, 1993: 83). For Baudrillard, technological mediation would be the niche of all philosophical problems. In short, it seems legitimate to say that the problem of technological mediation, for Baudrillard, is no more than a periphrasis of the Heideggerian diagnosis of the “forgetting of Being.” These theses are, from our point of view, completely unproductive, useless and sterile because Being is not a pre-given form but a creative process of humans in their historical development – a point of view both Blumenberg and Kittler certainly share. In the preface to his book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich Kittler gives us the key to analyse the main problems of new technological mediation: “Media determine our situation, which –in spite or because of it– deserves a description” (1999: xxxix). What we might call a form of historical contextualization of the problem is, further on in the book, presented as a principle of its ordering. Kittler, recalling the spirit of Marshall McLuhan’s theses, asserts: “Media define what really is” (1999: 3). The real is therefore tied to the media, produced by it. These are the words that clarify Kittler’s approach to Heidegger: No one can build a house for mortals unless he himself is present —unless stones are there and a model, too. Indeed, ultimately, one must be guided by a final purpose such as “holding” [Bergen]. No one can fashion a metal statue for immortals unless he himself is present—and unless bronze and a god are present [anwesen], too. Finally, an end purpose, such as illuminating [Leuchten] and releasing [Entbergen], must guide his artistic activity [Machen]. In this way, the four causes—as Aristotle enumerates them, each in turn—unite in an ontology of proximity. In order to destroy these causes, Being and Time take a single, altogether simple step. Heidegger leaves out the one cause that, rewritten into Latin, we call causa efficiens. He does not do so wholesale, yet in lieu of “making” or

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Chapter Five “producing” he speaks only of “using.” For example, shoe “equipment” [Schuhzeug] has a “whereto” [Wozu]—namely, wearing, which can also be conceived as the walking of a street. It has its “wherefrom” [Woraus] in leather, which for its part comes from the skin of animals. Third, it has a carrier and user for whom, in the best of cases, it has been tailored (even though this no longer occurs in the age of machines). Fourth and last, all equipment—especially when it is damaged, lost [abhanden], or unusable— presents a primal “whereto,” which no longer represents the “whereby” [Wobei] of any “involvement” [Bewandtnis] at all, but rather affords the “wherefore” [Worum-willen] of Dasein that, in its Being, essentially concerns this Being itself: to hou heneka (“for the sake of which”).” (2014: 291–2)

Media then give us the opportunity to determine, with precision, the real that they themselves produce. The structure of the real is thus the structure of media. It does not seem surprising to us that Kittler continues to describe his principle as follows: “They [the Media] are always already beyond aesthetics” (1999: 3). In other words, aesthetics cannot reach the meaning of reality; it can only define the structures for receiving what is real. The media thus take the form of a historical a priori. As a result, the central nucleus of the problem ceases to have a response in aesthetics, taking refuge in a Philosophy of the Media, which nowadays is the Prima Philosophia, leaving to aesthetics the place of the human “physis” (ijȪıȚȢ), a category that must be grasped as artificial processes. Recalling Mario Perniola’s statement can be of importance here: From the point of view of the aesthetics of form, the importance of this theory lies in the fact that it emphasizes the nexus between form and transcendence: forms are not enclosed in themselves, but are constantly moved by a movement that goes beyond them. One of McLuhan’s merits consists in having shown that this movement is not one-directional, but takes on an infinite variety of configurations. (1998: 79)

The structural meaning conveyed to us by the adverb “beyond,” which Kittler mentions, must be understood as the condition for a possibility of aesthetics itself and of aesthetic force. The condition of possibility that leaves aesthetics beyond the determination of the meaning of reality is embedded in the medium itself: its artificial character, its artificiality. It is therefore urgent to determine the ultimate meaning of the artificial, of the artifice. Western tradition tends to regard the artifice as a prolongation of nature. In this sense the artificial is seen as an extension and modification of nature. The artifice is regarded as an epiphenomenon of the natural, and it owes its status to nature. Its status is then determined by imitation, by

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mimesis. Nature is original in relation to all artificial creation and, in one way or another, it must be possible to reduce all that is artificial to nature: “In (Plato’s) Laws, the artistic (in the aesthetic sense of the word) constitutes the product of techniques that are situated in the wake of nature, and the artistic image will therefore not have completely broken its links with the true reality” (Gil, 201: 346). The form of the natural, if it is able to determine everything, is the condition of possibility of everything artificial. The artifice obtains its force in nature. When artifice “escapes” from the rules of the natural, from mimesis, it falls into the absolute void. Without its relation to nature, artificiality became nothing, an occurrence without facticity. Artificial is in this sense simulacrum: “But the thread that joins them is tenuous and its connection precarious: a simulacrum. The dominant idea is no longer the remote link with reality, but is now the deformation of reality in and by the simulacrum” (Gil, 2001: 347). Nature is thus understood as a force or, rather, as the power of the whole of the event. The distinction between natural and artificial then becomes universal: nature is an invisible force through which everything is created, while artifice is what is produced and designed by human hands. That is to say: causa efficiens matters! Artificial has its immanent force, the exterior part, its outside. Therefore “what is considered to be made by nature is, in the first place, what is made without humankind” (Rosset, 1974: 14). The artifice, through a reduction to the principles of artificial mimesis, must be led back to the natural by force of the human participation in nature and in its transformation. The old naturalist prejudice states that the essential and invisible difference between what is produced by “itself” and what “is manufactured,” designed, is constitutive of the very sense of Nature. The natural thus becomes a law; that is to say, nature responds to a legislated form of the event, which thus comes to form part of the domain of necessity. As a free image of human action, the artificial is eminently contingent, pure contingency. Artificial legislation must always be led back to its original power, to the natural event: humans as natural producers of artifices. As Friedrich Kittler said, aesthetics is always “beyond” the media, that is to say, one step further. But nowadays, Aesthetics is the only discipline that can bring light to these new, virtual (effective, we must say) worlds. This is the very heritage Kittler accepts and salutes from his beloved mechanized philosopher (Kittler, 1990: passim) Friedrich Nietzsche: Aesthetic “knowledge” derives from fixing borders that the body has always already transgressed when, in one, it produces and enjoys media. Aesthetics had been defined as a judgment of taste (Kant) or as “contemplative observation” that does not seek to “call forth” works but

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Chapter Five rather “to recognize scientifically, what art is” (Hegel). Nietzsche deprived such “public” conceptions of knowledge and education of their franchise [entzieht. . .das Wort]. He marked the displacement that, historically, led to the mediated public sphere. Not for nothing is The Birth of Tragedy dedicated to Wagner, whose medial Gesamtkunstwerk “no longer speaks the educated language of a caste” (Untimely IV § 10, I 428). Nor is it for nothing that talk of the Apollonian—which is “fundamentally nothing more than an image of light cast on a dark wall” (Birth § 9, I 55)—sounds like a theory of film avant la lettra. (Kittler, 2014: 22)

Romances and novels, art and reality, media, are much closer to rhetoric than they are to truth.

References Addison, Joseph, Los placeres de la imaginación y otros ensayos de “The Spectator.” (Madrid: Visor, 1991). Aquinas, Thomas (1254), “On Being and Essence” in Medieval Philosophy. Essentials Readings. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 227–49. Balsamo, Anne (2000), “The Virtual Body in Cyberspace,” in Bell, David & Kennedy, Barbara M. (ed.), The Cybercultures Reader. (London: Routledge, 2000), 489–503. Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacres et Simulation. (Paris: Galiliée, 1981). —. América. (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1987). —. A ilusão do fim ou a greve dos acontecimentos. (Lisbon: Teorema, 1995). Benjamin, Walter (1973), “La obra de arte en la época de su reproductibilidad técnica,” in Benjamin, Walter, Discursos Interrumpidos I. (Madrid: Taurus, 1973), 15–57. Blumenburg, Hans, “Imitation of Nature: Toward a Prehistory of The Idea of the Creative Being,” Qui Parle, 12,1, Spring/Summer, (2002): 17– 54. Burke, Edmund, Indagación filosófica sobre el origen de nuestras ideas acerca de lo sublime y de lo bello. (Madrid: Tecnos, 1991). Calinescu, Matei, As cinco faces da modernidade. (Lisbon: Veja, 1999). Canguilhem, Georges, La connaissance de la vie. (Paris: Vrin, 1971). Cèline, Louis-Ferdinand, Voyage au bout de la nuit. (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). De Kerckhove, Derrick, A pele da Cultura. Uma investigação sobre a nova realidade electróncia. (Lisbon: Relógio D’Água, 1995). De Miranda, José A. Bragança, Analítica da actualidade. (Lisbon: Vega, 1994).

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Debord, Guy, La société du spectacle. (Paris: Gallimard, 1992 [1967]). Deleuze, Gilles, Empirisme et subjectivité. Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988). Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix, O Anti-Édipo. Capitalismo e esquizofrenia. (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvin, 1995). Derrida, Jacques, Mal de archivo. Una impresión freudiana. (Madrid: Trotta, 1997). Derrida, Jacques & Stiegler, Bernard, Ecographies de la televisión. (Paris: Galilée, 1996). Freud, Sigmund, L’inquiétante étrangeté et autres textes /Das Unheimliche und andere Texte. (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). Gibson, William, Neuromancer. (London: Harper Collins, 1995). Gil, Fernando, Mediações. (Lisbon: I.N.C.M., 2001). Gitelman, Lisa, Always Already New. Media, History and the Data of Culture. (Cambridge/Mass.: The MIT Press, 2008). Groys, Boris, Under Suspicion. A Phenomenology of Media. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Hayles, N. Katherine, How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Heim, Michael, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Hugo, Victor, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. (New York: Modern Library, 2002). Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. Reprinted from the original edition in three volumes and edited with an analytical index by SELBY-BIGGE, L. A. Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1888 (repr., 1975). Jauss, Hans Robert, Las transformaciones de lo moderno. Estudio sobre las etapas de la modernidad estética. (Madrid: Visor, 1995). Kant, Immnanuel, Kritik der reinen Vernunft. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgeselshaft, 1998 [1781/1787]). Kittler, Friedrich, “The Mechanized Philosopher,” in Rickels, Laurence A., Looking after Nietzsche. (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990),195–207. Kittler, Friedrich, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). —. “Number and Numeral,” Theory, Culture & Society, 23, 7–8, (2006): 51–61. —. Optical Media. Berlin Lectures 1999. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).

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—. The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). Lanier, Jaron (1996), “Interviewed by Lynn Hershman Leeson,” in Leeson, Lynn Hershman (ed.), Clicking in. Hot Links to a Digital Culture. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996), 43–53. Maldonado, Tomás, Crítica de la razón informática. (Barcelona: Paidós, 1998). Manzini, Mancini, Artefactos. Hacia una nueva ecología del ambiente artificial. (Madrid: Celeste Ediciones, 1992). Mitcham, Carl, ¿Qué es la filosofía de la tecnología? (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1989). —. Thinking through Technology. The Path between Engineering and Philosophy. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Papaïs, Xavier, “Puisssances de l’artifice,” Revue de Philosophie, 47, (1995): 85–92. Perniola, Mario, A estética do século XX. (Lisbon: Estampa, 1998). Rajchman, John, The Deleuze Connection. (Cambridge/Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). Renaut, Alain, La era del individuo. Contribución a una historia de la subjetividad. (Barcelona: Destino, 1993). Ronell, Avital, The Telephone Book. Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). Rosset, Clement, La anti-naturaleza. Elementos para una filosofía trágica. (Madrid: Taurus, 1974). Sirius, R. U. (1996), “Interviewed by Lynn Hershman Leeson,” in Leeson, Lynn Hershman (ed.), Clicking in. Hot Links to a Digital Culture. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996), 54–60. Terranova, Tiziana (2000), “Post-Human Unbounded: Artificial Evolution and High-Tec Subcultures,” in Bell, David & Kennedy, Barbara M. (ed.), The Cybercultures Reader. (London: Routledge, 2000), 268–79. Virilio, Paul, Esthétique de la disparition. (Paris: Editions André Balland, 1980). Weibel, Peter (1997), “La era de la ausencia,” in Giannetti, Claudia (ed.), Arte en la era electrónica: perspectivas de una nueva estética. (Barcelona: L’Angelot), 101–21. Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey, Kittler and the Media. (Cambridge: Polity Press).

CHAPTER SIX ON THE MATERIALITY OF WRITING AND THE TEXT MARIA AUGUSTA BABO

“In my writings, /…/ there are no such things as thoughts. There are only words. Literature is not an island but stands in relation to the external field of technical media. And so my research has led me both beyond and back to literature.” F. Kittler (Armitage, 2006: 23)

There is something paradoxical when addressing writing. For what makes writing unique is precisely the fact that it is written, that it has already been written and that it sees itself as writing. However, what we set ourselves to do here is to tautologically write about writing, write about the act of writing and contemplate the mediation between the two. It is in this sense that we state the specificity of writing as a mediation. It is worthwhile mentioning, in memory of Friedrich Kittler, that materiality constitutes and defines writing as a medium. Perhaps the much disseminated era of the dematerialization of writing and the book has paradoxically allowed us to confirm its medial nature. Curiously, with the advent of the digital era, this arising possibility of dematerializing writing and especially the book revived the question of its everlasting obliteration. The obliteration of the humanist perspective conferred to writing as a technique on behalf of entities such as the author, meaning, theme, interpretation or intention, is historicizable and has its fullest form of expression in romantic idealism. In Bernhard Siegert’s view, the character of inauthenticity of the medial regimes appears as its mark of excellence, which perhaps explains the obliteration of its crucial function in the constitution of those humanistic figures that range from author to meaning.

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The maladjustment between the transcendence of meaning and its artificial nature, of the order of the artifact, its mechanical character, as also showed by Peter Weibel, highlighting the mechanical slope of the alphabet, for example, contributed to the obliteration of writing as techné so that it would become something transparent and, therefore, unquestionable. It is worth noting that it was the deconstruction of this historical obliteration of writing on behalf of orality that constituted the motor of J. Derrida’s work. In general terms, writing reveals some insurmountable marks that demarcate it from other domains of communication. They are the absolute exteriority of the line as a defined register, as a prosthetic extension of memory to which the process of grammatization has contributed (Stiegler, 2004: 111) – the establishment of the mark as a differential economy of the symbolic – and, on the other hand, its symbolic systematicity – the alphabetical system – that derives from a supra and transindividual device but which, for that very reason, permits the development of the processes of individuation. Thus, writing derives from very peculiar characteristics that confer it its own status in relation to the human. It is not just a bodily, material character that comes from that absolute exteriority of the register but also the mechanical dimension that reinforces its interactivity of writing procedures and confers it a level of autonomy capable of being an inevitable constraint in the expression of thought and, at the same time, for this very reason, to its own condition. From the point of view of its genealogy, we would say that writing is material: visible and inscribable but still imposing itself in human phylogenesis, through the training of the hand, offering itself as its extension, as an inorganic exudation of the organic as defined by Leroi-Gourhan. In the paleontological perspective, one can say that writing results in the concreteness of a process that occurs from the brain to the hand. The following assertion has been attributed to Leroi-Gourhan and it has become surprising given its impact: “The hand is a converter of ideas.” The hand holds the work in its concreteness and autonomy relative to the brain, the idea and the project. The hand therefore converts the project into an object. Or, going a little further, the hand objectifies the sub-jectum, projecting it outside of itself and thus constituting it as a subject. This formulation contains the entire paradoxical inversion of western metaphysical thought in which the subject in its intentionality prevails over the means that it utilizes for the manifestation of its finished, limpid and interior thought. From an anthropological point of view, the openness to graphic notation is based and happens with the sedentarization of peoples during the agricultural turn. It is done as an appropriation and domination of a

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space transformed into territory that is linearized to receive the sowing. It is also delimited, always having the margin as a frame, which implies that that same space was demarcated, and somehow separated itself from the compelling matter by its change of symbolic status. Boustrophedon writing, also used by the Greeks, shows the task of cultivating a space. By clearing, delimiting and furrowing it in order to sow harvests, what is determined is that of the scribe who prepares the support where, line by line, he will inscribe the text, transforming it into a page, associated to others, gaining volume, which, in turn, has already served to designate the book. The rejection of writing is known, that ars artificialis, especially by the preference given to the breath, to the pneuma, to the voice that, in its apparition/evanescence, will be the only medium capable of conveying meaning. For that reason the Port-Royal grammarians in the 17th century already considered that the voice as a perfect signifier “would be simultaneously visible and material in order to convey the signified and invisible and immaterial so as not to cause it any obstacle” (Marin, 1975: 75, my translation). The voice anchors in the presence of the subject that is said, and deletes itself in favor of the transparency of the spirit. It is the voice that is largely responsible for the ideology of environment transparency, of its failure or invisibility. As stressed by Derrida, this results in a kind of ambivalence of writing: its failure, its incapacity to say the total meaning due to the absence of its guarantees and, at the same time, its exorbitance, that excess which overlaps and resides in its force of resistance. Communication models, in turn, conferred a machine-like, medial element to communicational support, which is inserted in information engineering. Upon organizing the functions performed by language in the communication scheme, Roman Jakobson integrated a function in the 50s that aims at the channel of transmission. This was a specification of the model by Karl Bühler, a German functionalist from the first half of the 20th century and author of Organon Model, where he designed the triangulate character of communication with three functions: Ausdruck (the expression centered on the addresser – emotional function), Appell (the appeal directed to and founding the addressee – conative function), and Darstellung (representation as a linguistic object that mediates between the poles of communication – referential function). It is based on this triangle constituted by the addresser, the addressee and that which they exchange or speak of that Jakobson withdraws other functions he considers to be already implied in Bühler’s triangle (Jakobson, 1963: 216/220). The Russian linguist, subsequently also exiled in the USA and

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in contact with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the last days of his life, operates the shift of information engineering and cybernetics models to a discourse language by creating the famous model of six functions of language, which are determined by the action that language fulfills upon addressing one of the six purposes of communication, namely: the addresser, the addressee, the context, the code, the message itself and, finally, the channel it conveys. There is a linguistic function that corresponds to each of these components. Now, if the message reverts to itself, it becomes opaque in its literariness and results precisely in a poetic message, in a sort of reflexivity that the language would operate over itself, designating and making its own matter denser than what the message is made of – the linguisticity of language. As for the channel that functions as a vehicle or medium in which the message is transmitted, it was always considered as an operator that technical perfection would erase, not interposing in the ultimate goal of the message: the constitution of meaning. Thus, the classical example that would indicate the appearance of this function – the famous question on the telephone – can you hear me? – as if, only in the case of noise, that is, of a bad operation of the channel in the transmission of the message, would it be relevant to attack the support material of communication. That is, the channel would exhaust its participation in the communication complex due to its ductility. The phatic function that Jakobson borrows, this time from the Polish functionalist, Malinowski, is that which attributes the ultimate goal of maintaining contact to the channel (1963: 217); this markedly and residually marginal function in the general scheme of communication, exhausting itself in that contact which, paradoxically, upon carrying itself out, would erase the medium that makes it possible. Thus, the example evoked by the linguist accentuates the conversational and presential character of the interlocutors deleting, once again, the medial function of the channel. Therefore, what is configured here is a sort of transparency of the medium in relation to the message – content – that is conveyed and even against the resistance of the code that institutes the metalinguistic function, an expression of the opaqueness and structure of a level of mediation, the only one truly consented by Jakobson, which is that of language as object (1963: 218). This position, which came to consolidate communication analysis and determined a teleology of communication that is substantiated in the instance of meaning as the ultimate goal, is questioned by McLuhan’s perspective, which alerts to the fact that the media have an intransitive character that prevails over mediation, over its transitivity.

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We return to the mediation of communication and in particular to writing as that medium which is our concern here. The more transparent it is to communication, the less noise and interference there is, the better it fulfills the teleological function of language; that is, the better the language becomes ductile to meaning. In the ideology of communication, the medium tends toward its maximum transparency as a vehicle of meaning. And, in that measure, all of the registers and media are looked upon for their functionality and transparency. They have the voice as a paradigm, understood as the ideal vehicle for communication, as previously referred. Even the activity of reading slid into the obliteration of writing, especially from the universalization of character – the tupos – brought by the discovery of the press and that provides writing without noise, without opaqueness, closer to the ideal of the voice as its only model. We are dealing with a range of mediations that are hierarchically arranged according to ductility to meaning: from language as voice to its inscription in writing. This ideology, which consists of the assumption of a full meaning in addition to the materiality that maintains it, and thus ignores or disqualifies it, has gone through western thought, as we know, since Plato. It is worth recalling The Phaedrus. This is an exemplary dialog by Plato, where Socrates inveighs against sophist rhetoric with arguments that need further consideration. One of the oppositions that warrants attention in Phaedrus is precisely that which Socrates establishes between rhetoric and dialectics. This is not about the most renowned opposition in Phaedrus – that of writing in relation to orality – but of the most curious one, that of rhetoric as techné in opposition to dialectics as tukhé. In fact, writing will be remitted to the side of rhetoric since this addresses, first and foremost, a technique of devices used in argumentation that can be targeted at reaching ends. Its judicial use shows this as an art of influencing souls as opposed to revealing them the truth. The art of rhetoric as an artificial and exterior thing would therefore be in the antipodes of true discourse, a dialectic, because it is spontaneous, organic, intuitive; in other words, the fruit of inspiration. Dialectics, as understood by Plato, is used as a living organism. It is the logos as a living word. It is founded in eloquence as a gift and not in art as technique. It is obvious that dialectics is not opposed directly to writing but mainly to rhetoric; just like writing, it is a techné. For Socrates, dialectics is basically an effect of happy chance – tukhé – neither more nor less than inspiration itself, and in that it opposes the sophist’s technique, an art of borrowing. From this rupture Phaedrus then places the metaphysical status of inspiration as being inside, as spontaneity and as a truth of the subject, against technical artificiality and the arts of

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borrowing, be it rhetorical or writing. For Plato, eloquence is, through Socrates’ voice, a gift, not an art. But the Platonic texts itself, in this logic, becomes an aberration given that it is, at the same time, borrowed – the speech of Socrates lent to Plato – and written – artificial art that leads to the absence of its guarantees – from the side of the non-living or the dead: the voice of Socrates transposed by Plato for the record of writing. Dialogs that are ostensibly dialogic are paradoxically inhumane, second, repeated. Now, in this series of questions, it turns out that writing as a technique was invariably remitted to a position of notation of speech, of transcription of orality and, therefore, irreparably subordinated as a supplement. In that aspect, the traditional reading that is made of Phaedrus, concerned with depreciating writing as an imitation of the voice, of the dialogue, the only pure form of arriving at truth, of making sense, forgets its own diverse origin of writing – attributed to the big inventor Thoth which, it is said in the legend told by Socrates, is close to calculation, geometry and astronomy on the one hand, and the game of dice on the other. It should be noted that Kittler will designate an isochronism between the Greek alphabet and the numerical system, whose research is developed by S. Krämer. That is, writing as an artificial technique has a common origin with algebra, arithmetic, abstract reasoning and to conceptual spatialization of which geometry derives. If writing, namely Egyptian writing, creates an indissociable link between figurative drawing and the conventional and symbolic character of pictographic characters, the subsequent written alphabet, such as that of the Greeks, conceives a writing that is already entirely systematic and economic. It also reaches a considerable rank of simplicity and abstraction in the correspondence it establishes to the phonemic system. From that hybrid writing, which guards a close relationship with the icon, such as pictographic writing, there is an elaboration for alphabetical/phonetic writing that grammatizes the figure/figural, giving to the iconicity of writing a certain systematicity and iterability that constitute the bases of what the Greeks called gramma, and that redoubles in writing its graphic character – graphein: iterable, on the one hand, and differential on the other. In alphabetic writing, the distinctive mark is structural in its founding negativity. Writing happens, therefore, from the side of logic, of mathematics and is based on symbolic, artificial languages as defended by Sybille Krämer. Mathematics is, from the very beginning, a form of writing. The discriminatory character of mathematical notation approaches it to writing, which shares the same property. Now this projection of writing in mathematics converts it, from the onset, into a notation of mechanical

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nature, as the author highlights. It is a bearer of consequences for the theory of writing and especially for the hermeneutics resulting from it. It therefore puts writing at the level of a syntactic chain, preferably to its traditional remission for the order of meaning, for interpretation; that is why she states: “Operation and interpretation can be separated from one another.” Her notion of notational iconicity, close to the conception put forward by Jack Goody, requires a notation system that possesses two invariant characteristics: first, a disjointedness and, second, the “finite differentiation,” establishing that “Notations are discrete and disjunctively organized graphical systems by means of which language and/or nonlinguistic entities, movements and/or states can be noted” (Krämer, 2015). The number is therefore a type of graphic notation of this order, thus approaching alphabetic writing, both discrete and differential, in its structure. Notational iconicity is a materiality that concepts gain upon being transferred to this notation, and in that manner they distinguish themselves from pictorial iconicity that transposes conventional images. All of the conception developed by this author relates to the specificity of writing as a conceptual dimension. That being the case, it continues Goody’s line of thought, which provided, through the analysis of graphic notation systems, the opening to a cognitive world that he called graphic reason. This is where the economic and administrative functions of writing derive from organizing lists and elaborating classifications. But we must also emphasize the fact that the founding myth of writing remits to an activity that is close to it, and that is also invoked by Krämer, the astronomy that, we would say, has nothing to do, at first glance, with the writing we know and practice. It is the case of the celestial letter that participates in the discriminatory character of the elements, projecting them as well as the other regimes, into a surface according to a spatial orientation. We can approach the knowledge of firmament, the determination of the stars in their neighborly relation and in their syntagmatic articulations – the constellations – to the exercise of reading. Reading the firmament is the beginning of astronomy itself, which shows us how much reading precedes writing and can be founded as a system. This therefore highlights the visibility of the sky for pleasure and fantasizes the one who contemplates it, the one who looks at it without seeing anything in it. The starry sky also presented the particularity of proposing to look at a model of visual rationality, insofar as the figures united in space do not constitute only signs but also a system of assembly: not only visible, but equally legible. Its lesson would be essential for the soothsayers and would lead to writing. *

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Anne-Marie Christin not only attributed the origin of writing to that huge screen where signs can be read but also considers that that legibility happens from the necessary relation between the signs – the stars – and their spacings; this means that the elements are articulated because the space between them or the space between the assemblies and the remainder of the elements also becomes legible, a distinctive line. Writing is therefore that graphic matter where letters and the emptiness between them are organized. Hence, one may conclude that the image is necessary for the text. And the space between the letters, empty until then, gains significant materiality. As we have come to affirm, the text is then a graphematic and grammatological composition. While graphein sees inscription as the retention of gesture, register, gramma sees the systemacity of notation, that inherent organization in the system, which makes it iterative, economic and differential. Stiegler designates grammatization as the operation that makes the behavioral, sensitive, etc., continuum discrete. Grammatization will be, among other things, the operation of analyzing, discriminating, as a whole, its elements in order to organize them into a system; appealing to the development of tertiary retention systems (2004). In that aspect, writing will be the means, par excellence, of the grammatization of experience, of real life. Writing next to the letter: The letter is a discrete but complex unit from the point of view of its status in writing. It therefore falls within this systematicity and iterativity of the code, precisely because of the possibility that the code should simultaneously establish with the maximum economy of elements and an open combining capacity. On the other hand, in its inscribable materiality, the letter was also subject to the constant obliteration that hermeneutics promoted in the series or layers of meaning that are outlined, for example, in scholastics. The multiple binary oppositions that defined and orient western thought are revealing, given that they all conceal a dissymmetry in terms of: spirit/letter, pneuma/gramma; voluntas/scriptum; true meaning/figurative meaning, etc. The four meanings of Origen – the literal, the moral, the allegorical and the anagogic – are symptomatic of the infinite scale in the journey toward the ultimate meaning, marking a teleology where the literal is, by nature, superfluous or, as A. Compagnon designates, “has little effect in edification and salvation” (1979: 175). This opening to the series of meanings inaugurates, in the teleological dimension presented here, a theological regime of meaning that obliterates the letter and depreciates the figural.

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The letter, also called carnal meaning, always put itself out in favor of the spirit, of the true meaning, even in its material and mechanical dimensions – the so-called printed characters. What carries out the big mechanographic invention of typography is, in fact, the universalization of the letter, its type or tupos that, from then onwards, disappears (in legibility and therefore in reading) to let meaning pass. That transparency of the letter is obtained when the manuscript of writing, in its artisanal status, gives rise to the mechanization and industrialization of typographic writing in the form of the printed book. The regime of print makes the letter become transparent, invisible and imperceptible. The book erased the letters that are used to produce it, in favor of its maximum legibility. Curiously, however, the press came to dematerialize the letter in comparison with its manuscript obscurity, which makes certain premodern manuscripts today become practically illegible given the exorbitant presence of the letter opacifying the text, its reading, and meaning. And in this manner, the line as well. The printed book will occur as a text without image, operating the definite detachment between drawing and writing. The book, of which we are heirs, is iconoclast. In the regime of print, the letter subordinated itself gently to the phonè, operating only as its transcription or fixation. Has the digital come today to simulate that immateriality, evanescence and immediacy that created, once again, a sort of euphoria of the spirit? Has the digital conversion of the image, text and sound and its convergence homogenized the sonorous and visual regimes, or has it allowed, on the contrary, processes of contamination and hybridization? And, in this case, has the letter dematerialized or, in contrast, in its hybridization to the image, has it not gained greater visibility? Some authors (Ong, Hert) speak of an “almost oral” writing, a gradation that remits to a dematerialization of the letter and also to the simultaneity of the oral – presence. The letter projected onto the screen, as defined by Jacques Morizot, brings it closer to the image. Or, as he says more specifically, the writing of the screen (as Souchier also calls it in Salaün: 2004) operated a semiotic mutation in the language system since, on this path, the image is the first symbolic system and not the second. The image is the “generalized [form] of handling information” (2004: 104). The image comes from the viewing device itself and is beyond the plastic forms that it can take at the same time the text superimposes in successive layers of the operation of the logical, programmatic, electronic, textual machine – architextual – at the same time invisible and visible: text and text-image – image-text.

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That e-poetry is, from the point of view of perception, a hybrid only highlights what is played from the digital in writing as a technique.

References Armitage, John, “From Discourse Networks to Cultural Mathematics: An Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler,” Theory, Culture & Society. SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi, 23,7–8, (2006): 17– 38. Compagnon, A., La seconde main – ou le travail de la citation. (Paris, Seuil,1979). Hert, Ph., “Internet comme dispositif hétérotopique,” Hermès. (Paris, CNRS, nº25, 1999), 93–107. Jakobson, R., Essais de linguistique générale – 1. Les fondations du langage. (Paris, Minuit, 1963). Kittler, F., Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. (California-Standford, Standford University Press,1999). Krämer, Sybille, (2017), “Materiality of Script and the Operation of Thoughts: Some Reflections on ‘Notational Iconicity’ and ‘Flattening Out’ as a Cultural Technique” in Cruz, Maria Teresa (Ed.) Media Theory and Cultural Technologies. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 43-56. Marin, Louis, “La Critique du discours” in Logique de Port-Royal et les Pensées de Pascal. (Paris, Minuit, 1975). Morizot, J., Interfaces: texte et image – pour prendre du recul vis-à-vis de la sémiotique. (Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004). Ong, W.J., Orality and Literacy: The Techonologizing of the Word. (NY, Methuen, 1988). Platão, Phèdre, seguido de Derrida J., La pharmacie de Platon. (Paris, Flammarion, 1989). Salaün, J.-M. andVandendorpe, C. (coord.), Les défis de la publication sur le Web: hyperlectures, cybertextes et méta-éditions. (Villeurbanne, Presses de l’enssib, 2004) Stiegler, B., De la misère symbolique I. (Paris, Galilée, 2004).

CHAPTER SEVEN SIGNS IN THE MACHINE: THE POEM AS DATA FLOW MANUEL PORTELA

1. Introduction What is the specific materiality of the digital machine? Is writing finished? Are media finished? Is software all that remains? Have we become witnesses to the infinite and automatic iteration of symbols in the hardware? Does the intermediality of algorithmic literary practices instantiate the dissolution of media specificity as an effect of software? Is intermediality, in turn, merely a surface effect determined by the actual material processing that occurs in electronic circuits? What reflexive digital forms are there that allow us to think about the interface in its relation to the acts of writing in electronic circuits? What do these digital forms say about the possibility of remodeling forms and genres in the new technical conditions of literary communication? These issues will be briefly addressed in four sections: the first will discuss the notion of digital medium; in the second, the notion of intermediality is analyzed by looking at cinematic processes for animating letters; finally, in the third and fourth sections, the possibility of an intermedia writing, which assumes the algorithmic condition of semiotic and symbolic networked practices, will be described in digital creations by Jörg Piringer and Jason Nelson. Modeling the poem as an interface for data streams, the works of these authors show the processes of softwarization of media and hardwarization of writing. The programmability of digital objects, a consequence of their existence as mathematical representations, seems to be both a cause of their medial flexibility (and the ensuing formal and generic hybridization) and an effect of their machinic materiality.

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2. Code, Medium, Matter When describing the effects of media digitization, Kittler (1999) highlighted the dissolution of the very concept of medium. Universal numerical representation has enabled machine code to dissolve medial differences arising from analog material specifics, making possible not just an infinite recombination and integration of media but also a kind of universal transcoding and translation of their respective codes, which would enable digital machines to take over symbolic production independent of human agency. Within his general theory of inscription technologies as discourse systems for notation, Kittler hypostasizes the autonomy of technological processes, imagining them as subjects of history: The general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media. 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 glamor will survive for an interim as a by-product of strategic programs. Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound, or voice. And once optical fiber networks turn formerly distinct data flows into a standardized series of digitized numbers, any medium can be translated into any other. 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, 1999: 1–2)

The specificities of writing, sound and image – and therefore of the interactions that we establish with digital objects – would be but temporary effects of the interface, irrelevant from the point of view of the electronic processing of data streams, and of the war strategy that, ultimately, determines the entire megatechnological system. Once formalized through the microprinting of electronic components that control and determine electronic flows, these circuits would be the agents of writing and reading. Kittler radicalizes the automatic condition of the processing of writing considering that the integrated circuit in microprocessors represents the end of human agency in processes of writing and reading, an agency that would become irrelevant in the automated digital universe. The software itself, as the set of languages that are meant to be compiled and run in different platforms, would not be more than an epiphenomenon of a technical-scientific structure for action that is already embodied and encoded in the hardware architecture:

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As one knows without saying, we do not write anymore. The crazy kind of software engineering that was writing suffered from an incurable confusion between use and mention. Up to Holderlin’s time, a mere mention of lightning seems to have been sufficient evidence of its possible poetic use. Nowadays, after this lightning’s metamorphosis into electricity, manmade writing passes instead through microscopically written inscriptions, which, in contrast to all historical writing tools, are able to read and write by themselves. The last historical act of writing may well have been the moment when, in the early seventies, the Intel engineers laid out some dozen square meters of blueprint paper (64 square meters in the case of the later 8086) in order to design the hardware architecture of their first integrated microprocessor. (Kittler, 1995: n/p)

One of the persistent problems in theories of digital mediation relates precisely to the relationship between the manifestations of writing at the level of the interface and that which corresponds to its algorithmic and electronic processing. If, for Kittler, hardware is the determining factor of the robotic otherness of electronic writing – dislodging the “human” from the “human-computer interface” equation – for other researchers, it is the software that determines its medial and formal specificity, and it is at the interface level that human-machine intermediation can be truly situated. Janet Murray (2012), for example, refers to the development of applications, interfaces and interaction models as modes of inventing the digital medium, i.e., of inventing functionalities and conventions that are able to take advantage of its procedural, participatory, encyclopedic and spatial affordances. Lev Manovich (2013), for his part, when describing the computational specificity of the digital medium, draws a similar conclusion to Kittler’s in terms of the loss of operability of the concept of medium: all media have become an accumulation of software techniques, algorithms, data structures and interface conventions, thus losing the technical and formal specificity that defined their analog legacy, although this legacy still survives as a familiarization device in several techniques and conventions of current software. Certain techniques could therefore be considered specific or derived from a given medium, forming a kind of archaeological memory of that legacy. However, unlike Kittler, Manovich does not devalue the interface as a mere epiphenomenon of automated nanometric writing, stressing instead that media have become software, and consequently digital media analysis has come to mean software analysis: To summarize this discussion, let me make a bold statement. There is no such thing as “digital media.” There is only software—as applied to media (or “content”). Or, to put this differently: for users who only interact with

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Manovich’s basic assumptions are that the specificity of digital culture can be ascribed to the software layer, and that the materiality of digital processing, that is, the unification of multiple data streams via the same universal process of binary encoding, questions the very separation of media as distinct technologies. Their properties do not reside in file content but are mostly defined by the applications through which one interacts with the files. The preponderance of software as a common layer would entail the dissolution of their technical, generic, and formal identity – a fact that is observable in the hybridization and remixing processes that characterize digital media objects and digital art. Media analysis would therefore be replaced by software analysis, since their material, medial and formal specificity has come to depend entirely on the software that allows the instantiation and interaction with digital objects. A definition of digital medium thus oscillates between two perspectives: a concept of digital media as monomedium, i.e., a medium that dissolves earlier material, technical and formal differences, emerging as a single new medium; and a concept of digital media as a metamedium, i.e., as a medium that reencodes and remediates earlier media, generating separate outputs through a shared layer of algorithms and software techniques. Other authors have attempted to describe this hardware-software duality. Matthew Kirschenbaum (2008) distinguishes the level of forensic materiality, through which he refers to the inscriptions on the magnetic disk, from the level of formal materiality of codes as executed on the screen display. This dual computational materiality is described as a cascade of physical processes of storage and deletion, writing and overwriting. Digital information becomes abstract because it is susceptible to allographic manipulation of discrete units (substitution, deletion, insertion, transposition, relocation and repetition). In this grammatological vision of digital differentiality, digital writing functions in a constant tension between inscription and abstraction, between digitality and volatility. Kirschenbaum’s analysis allows us to relate and distinguish inscription at the hardware level, on the one hand, from software configurations and formal modeling on the other.

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Understanding the role of programs and programming languages in metatextual modeling, especially in the way they are manifest in certain formal properties, is crucial for understanding the ideological and cultural dimensions of structuring and representing data. Many of the features that we tend to essentialize as attributes of digitality are actually the result of specific formal operations in modeling and representing data in a given configuration. Graphical user interfaces and other software tools have been naturalized to the extent that we fail to notice the conventionality that produces certain structures and digital behaviors. With the concept of formal materiality, Kirschenbaum captures this level of modeling that produces specific instantiations of forensic digital materiality. N. Katherine Hayles assigned four properties to digital text: it consists of layers, tends to be multimodal, storage is separated from the execution, and its temporality is fractured (Hayles, 2008: 163–64). While the first and third properties arise from the ontology of the computer as a binary machine, the second and fourth describe specific aspects of its formal materiality as they are phenomenologically experienced by a human subject. By analyzing a series of works of electronic literature as critical reflections on digitality and intermediation, Hayles tries to demonstrate the existence of emergent cognitive processes in the interactions between humans and networked computing machines.1 Thus, intermediation implies, on the one hand, a cognitive distributed system formed by humancomputer interaction, and, on the other hand, it refers to the set media recombinations resulting from the general quantization of optical, acoustic and graphical objects in the form of discrete streams of data. When thinking about hybridity and intermediality in digital poetry, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth (2006) describes digital works as simulations of this medial complexity that show the medial instability and fluidity resulting from numerical integration. Streams of verbal, visual or aural data would be a posteriori effects generated through computational processes: Medial integration is a numerical integration; the same goes for medial differentiation. But this will not be shown. The digital tends to hide its own numerical materiality and manipulate a medial diversity in the projection of medially complex configurations. This means that hybrids like medially complex digital poetry can in the end be nothing but a simulation of medial complexity. However, this very simulation may well bring home to us that 1

Reflexive operations and rhetorical strategies of digital literature have been the subject of multiple analyses in recent years. See Shaffer, 2010; Memmott, 2011; Johnston, 2011; Funkhouser, 2012; and Eskelinen, 2012.

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Retrospectively, the digitization of multiple media streams would make it possible to grasp each medium as a temporary materialization in a fluid transmedia and intermedia arch-writing process. The integration of written signs into optical and acoustic media flows, hybridizing the codes of both literature and film, is a good example of that intermedial procedurality.

3. Cinematic Literature The cinematic remediation of literature generally means the transformation of a written text into a script of dialogs and scenes that can be filmed. It also means translating from the abstract code of graphic signs of writing into a code of concrete images and sounds that can be optically and acoustically captured and reproduced. There are, however, processes of remediation of the literary letter that consist of applying the photophonographic and kinetic properties of film to the written signs themselves. The animation of writing and abstract forms can be found both in the first silent cinematic experiences and in the early experimentation with the effects of synchronization between motion and sound. The presence of letters in motion became an element of the opening credits that was often symbolically integrated into the film, creating iconic relations between the graphic and cinematic form of the credits and the narrative and discursive content of the film. The graphical form of the opening credits often works as a graphic and verbal synthesis of semantic and symbolic meanings that plot and editing will enact dramatically and visually, suggesting a possibility of continuity between the perception of the letter as optical image and of the optical image as an inscriptional sign. Twentieth-century experimental literary practices also express this desire to animate written signs as a symbolic embodiment of the presence of life in writing. This kinetic desire led to an intense exploration of the visuality of writing, and to the development of many intermedia forms, a process that was also encouraged and facilitated by the expressive possibilities opened up by technological inventions in optical, acoustic and

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print media. This expressive kineticism of the letter took several forms, including the post-Mallarmean constellated poems; “liberated words” of the futurists; Dadaist collages of text clippings; typographic expressiveness of red and black in the Russian avant-garde; synaesthetic experiments of abstract filmmakers with visual music and painting in motion; automatic collages of surrealistic writers; phonetic and lettrist fragmentation of words; self-referential verbivocovisuality in concrete aesthetics; and, in recent decades, computer-programmed motions of letters on the pixels of digital screens. From the suggestion of motion on the paper page to the cinematic motion of written signs on cinema screens and electronic displays, animation has established itself as a major expressive and rhetorical feature of graphical and intermedia literary modernist and postmodernist forms. The modularity of digital media has made possible the integrated manipulation of alphabetic writing, motion picture and sound recording. The modular recombination of these elements as collections of digital objects originate hybrid forms in which we can recognize, for example, the simultaneous presence of film techniques and literary techniques, suggesting the convergence of processes of letter animation in both the history of cinema and in the history of literature. Considered as cinema, these works exhibit features of abstract animation of the early decades of the twentieth century. Considered as literature, they update processes of visual and combinatorial literature of the second half of the twentieth century. In digital kinetic works we can see a confluence of literary and filmic syntax, even if the techniques for producing a filmic sequence or a verbal utterance retain their relative autonomy. The legacy of analog techniques that determine the specificity of their respective media survives in certain operations formalized in software (e.g., the codification of virtual camera movements), but at the same time their medial specificity becomes subject to algorithms that rely only on programmability and the mathematical nature of the modules that constitute them as objects. By integrating the processing of abstract (letters) and concrete (images and sounds) forms, these works prefigure new forms of textuality and reading, in which the discontinuity between text and image seems to merge into a single materiality. In today’s digital art, we find kinetic forms that have turned letters into cinematic objects, and images and sounds into literary tropes, integrating operations of verbal montage with visual and phonovisual montages. By integrating the abstract representation of the letter into the optical and acoustic representation of a moving image, certain digital forms and genres redefine the materiality of literature and film, and reconfigure their

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relationships. In this reconfiguration of the process of producing and reading signs, writing can be perceived as image, and the image can be perceived as writing, changing the relationships between the symbolic and technological dimensions of each mode of inscription. The role of the computer as a modular combinatorial machine is determinant in the aggregation and integration of digital codes for written characters with the digital codes for optical and acoustic objects. This material and formal integration seems to challenge the fundamental discontinuity between the hallucinatory disposition based on the imaginary world created by the processing of the written code, on the one hand, and the hallucinatory disposition sustained by optical-acoustic immersion in the space of cinematic illusion on the other. In digital kineticism, graphicality and audiovisuality enter into new kinds of relationships with each other. What happens when letters become kinetic images? And what happens when images become readable? Is it possible to traverse the gap between letter and sound or the gap between letter and image? What happens when the graphical representation or suggestion of motion gives rise to actual cinematic motion? What happens when the optical and acoustic inscription of the real become morphologically contiguous to alphabetical inscriptions? Do film sequences integrated into a written text maintain their filmic autonomy in relation to the text or do they become part of a video-writing form, a form in which images in motion establish semiotic and symbolic relations of literary type, for example, becoming a visual metaphor or a metonymy explicitly associated with written verbal signs? Do the letters included in a film sequence retain their autonomy or do they become part of the sequence, establishing semiotic and symbolic relationships of cinematic type, for example, becoming optical and acoustic objects that are perceived according to the principles of framing, point of view, and editing of the filmic code?

4. The Letter as Code and Image In the film syntax of some digital literary works, we encounter relations between the act of seeing and hearing and the act of reading that modify the modes of attention and immersion characteristic of the pragmatics of reception of each of these modes of artistic mediation. Insofar as the individual electronic terminal has increasingly become the sensory and semiotic space for execution and presentation of these works, these forms of cinematic literature materials result from the technological convergence of writing and moving image inherent in programmable networked media. Additionally, interfaces and tools for interacting with

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digital objects often make it possible to see and read the motions of writing, image and sound in new ways – above all else, this follows from the possibility of manipulation and editing. Jörg Piringer’s animated film Unicode (2011) enacts this duality of digital characters as both image and code – a duality that enables the computer to process them as writing traces and also, in this filmic figuration, as cinematic objects (Figure 1). As a work of digital art, Unicode brings together the mediality of film and the mediality of writing.

Figure 1: Jörg Piringer, Unicode (2011).

Piringer sequenced images in png format to the rhythm of an image of a Unicode character per frame (49,571 frames / characters) at a rate of 25 frames per second.2 The selection of Unicode characters was done with the 2

A complete list of characters in Helvetica font used by Jörg Piringer can be found at http://joerg.piringer.net/unicode/alldisplayablechars.txt?PHPSESSID=a66cf9ca51d a737411d3db9931cbb62e. See also Jörg Piringer, Unicode (April 10, 2011) .

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help of editing a text file that contained all displayable characters while eliminating those that appeared as undefined rectangles. The sound, in turn, consists of a recording of the sound of the letters of the alphabet in German, with the sound of each letter matching the duration of two frames (or the duration of one frame in the section with the Chinese characters). The sequence of letter sounds was randomized, their duration was subject to stretching during the first half the film and to acceleration in the second half, while the frequency of sounds was also modified by the use of filters. Because there are 26 sounds to 25 frames per second, there is an increasing lag between sounds and frames as the film progresses. The acoustic effect of changes in sound frequency and the lag between sounds and frames, combined with the fast pace of images, allows us to access a hallucinatory simulation of the machinic process of writing, as if we were able to perceive sensorially those electronic processes that take place in the machine’s circuits and make it capable of semiotic processing. Jörg Piringer’s Unicode (2011) constitutes a suggestive evocation of the machinic and automatic nature of the processing of writing codes. It makes optically and acoustically perceptible the condition of electronic writing as a cascade of abstractions that passes from the infra-atomic scale of voltage differences to machine code, and from this to Unicode as a universal representation of multiple graphic sign systems for writing codes. In its accelerated animation of characters, this cinematization of the codes of writing suggests a possible human approach to the codes of the machine and their particular ways of processing and generating writing. The optical acceleration and acoustic distortion allow us to apprehend image and sound at the threshold of our sensory system and, at the same time, to have an insight into the unbridgeable distance between processing a human-scale system of inscriptions and the electronic system of circuits and computer inscriptions. Unicode offers the paradoxical experience of the equivalence and incommensurability between the two scales and the two systems. The possibility of representing all writing systems and signals by a universal code – i.e., the very essence of the digital computer as a universal machine – implies the re-representation of their specific analog differential systems via a digital metacode that enables arranging pixels on the screen according to the particular design of each logogram or pictogram. This animated simulation of Unicode processing shows us the automatic generation of writing as a principle that is simultaneously codified in hardware and software. If media differences are to be seen as a mere surface effect of the software, ultimately determined by the automation printed in circuits, the differences between the different codes of writing

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would, similarly, be determined by the meta-encoding that enables their universal automatic processing, derived from electronic inscription and its machinic principles. The computational meta-writing occurring in the circuits is translated into the meta-writing of its respective machine code, this is translated into the meta-writing of Unicode, and this, in turn, in the unique visual configuration of pixels that shows us the different writing systems on the screen. Through Unicode, Piringer engages the specific mode of writing of the computer, whose cascading codes enable signals to pass from circuits to compiler to screen, thereby evoking the invisible and automatic process of differential generation of signals from the nanometric scale of electromagnetic processing to the human scale of audiovisual perception.

5. Text as Game and Interface The machinic and kinetic pulsating of writing systems in the work of Piringer is also an exploration of the metamediality that allows computers to seamlessly process the channels of writing, audio, and image. This integrated processing, particularly when considered in the context of programmable and networked media objects – involving multiple links among them across different levels of granularity – came to define our current digital media space. The interaction with different materialities of digital media objects depends also on interfaces that model, at once, the objects themselves and our interactions with them, enabling various degrees of manipulation as well as multiple perspectives for visualizing these objects. The flexibility of these interfaces – a consequence of the modular nature of digital objects as numeric representations – and the fact that many of the properties of digital objects derive from techniques that are common across different programs used to create and manipulate them, led Lev Manovich to conclude that media have become software. The existence of specific techniques that are medially specific in certain applications (deriving from printing, drawing, painting, photography, film or phonography, for example) does not invalidate the general principle of dissolution of differences inherited from analog media. The concepts of multimediality and intermediality have been used in recent decades to describe the specificity of the medial constellations and interactions created by the digital computer.3 In effect, the conceptual and 3

Packer and Jordan, for example, defined multimedia based on the conjunction between art and computer, especially after the way this conjunction was technically implemented in the 1990s. They identified five characteristics of multimedia art: integration, which refers to the combination of art forms and

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material history of its construction by software engineers during the 1960s and 1970s testifies to this long-term project of creating a metamedial machine that would be able to process and simulate the different materialities of media technologies. Certain platforms, such as the Flash multimedia platform (developed by Macromedia, starting in 1996, and then by Adobe since 2005), were designed to integrate different types of media objects, and to generate outputs that combine animated image, audio and writing. Giving users the possibility of building a library of objects and behaviors, and scripts for interacting with these objects and behaviors through the ActionScript language, Flash has become one of the most successful applications in the development of both a stylistic and formal repertoire for digital works, and a visual rhetoric for interfaces, web pages and even games (Salter and Murray, 2014). Its presence came to be used as a descriptor of genre for certain works, as it happened, for example, with the “Flash poem,” a form in which animation features were poetically applied to letters and words. One of the artists whose poetry is strongly linked to this platform is Jason Nelson. His metacritical use of Flash develops at two simultaneous levels: the level of objects and actions that make up the work, on the one hand; and the level of the interface as a representation of those objects and actions on the other. Nelson is an author who works with Flash but also against Flash in the sense that he uses its tools to produce a dysfunctional and “dirty” design that draws attention to the different ways (either to Flash itself, or to interactivity, or to the remediation of other media fragments – drawing, photos, graphic and web design, or videogames, etc.). His creative use of Flash reveals the presence of the visual vocabulary and interaction rhetoric of the platform itself – whose tools for animation and interaction are formalized in the Graphical User Interface of the application through features such as “timeline,” “library” and “scripting” – but also how its specific constraints can become a source for purely playful aesthetical pleasure. Playability – one of the major affordances of the platform, which allowed the development of a specific technology in hybrid forms of expression; interactivity, which describes the ability of users to manipulate objects in ways that interfere with their own media experience, and also the ability of users to communicate with each other; hypermedia, i.e., the possibility of creating links between different media objects as well as the creation of personal associative paths; immersion, which means the experience of participating in a simulation or diving into a three-dimensional virtual environment; and, finally, narrativity, that is, formal and aesthetical strategies derived from the four preceding characteristics that result in forms of non-linear narrative and presentation (cf. Packer and Jordan, 2001: xxv).

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genre of games – has been turned into a literary and artistic trope for navigating the symbolic space of Nelson’s ambiguous, sarcastic and selfreflexive sentences and phrases. His appropriation and manipulation of software techniques, combined with his imaginative ability for paradoxical associations of disparate objects, allowed him to develop a unique poetic of the Flash platform. Jason Nelson applies algorithmic procedures to visual, kinetic and sound textualities in order to emulate the continuous flow of networked data. Random permutations and iterative processes, combined with hypermedia fragmentation, put readers in a maze of optical and acoustic signs, which they have to navigate according to the exploratory and iterative progression of a videogame. Readers are faced with both the chaotic and probabilistic nature of machinic processes, and with the conventions of interaction interfaces (Portela, 2013: 212–15). His cybertexts seem to emulate the electronic space itself and redefine the poem as a textual instrument of algorithmic culture and database aesthetics. If – as Kittler suggests – with digitization “all data streams flow into a state n of the universal Turing machine” (1999: 19), Nelson’s media poetry gives us a simulation of the feedback loops that allow digital machines to take over symbolic production. This is done, however, through a process of radical critique of automatisms in digital forms and practices, generally recontextualizing the playful elements of the textual and graphical game through explicit references to political and social realities. What distinguishes his work as that of a digital artist is precisely his simulation of a manual intervention in this universe of automated behaviors and actions programmed through algorithms. The production of an apparently confused and disorganized graphic game space, marked by the presence of hand-made scribbles – with crude handwritten letters and drawings, and collages that suggest heterogeneous surfaces – help to undermine the effect of functional transparency and invisibility of clean web design so characteristic of Flash conventions and current digital art. The author himself has emphasized those conflicting representations in a note on that work: “My notion was to deviate from the clean lines and computer-generated design of most new media artworks. To create a messy, paper-centered world inside a game engine” (Jason Nelson, July 2011). The way Flash conventions are used in Scraper Scraperteeth: Or the crushing punch/slap/stab of real estate madness (2011) shows a dysfunctionalizing of scripts that makes them active elements in the act of reading the game-text (Figure 2). The action of codes that determine the transition from screen to screen or from level to level of the game show

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Figure 2: Jason Nelson, Scraper Scraperteeth: Or the crushing punch/slap/stab of real estate madness (2011).

how interactive behaviors serve to literalize, in the progression of reading, the chaotic movement that led to the financial crisis in housing markets. Sentences and phrases that appear at each moment and the actions triggered by key strokes to traverse the graphical and verbal space of the different stages of the game create a feedback process that translates the meaning of the work into moment-to-moment interactions in the chaotic process of playing a fragmented reading. Through this reflexive interfacialization of randomness, Nelson shows how to write with but also

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against the software, i.e., against the merely functional transparency of the interface. 4

6. Conclusion The reflexivity of those two works interrogates their condition as digital electronic writing, directing our attention, in one case, to the multilayer nature of computational materiality and, in the other, to the conventions of interface and software configurations. These examples of “medially complex poetry” give us the opportunity of examining the allographic and autographic aspects of computational writing. Whether through the automatic processing and animation of letters and writing, or through the play with the intermedia interactions of a reflexive interface, processes of replication and automatic semiotic generation are explored in ways that address computational processing and interfaces for representing and manipulating media objects in their material and formal writing space. Jörg Piringer and Jason Nelson show that writing might not be finished yet, even if automatic processing machines made it possible for machines to iterate human symbolic production in infinite loops. They further suggest that it is still theoretically necessary to maintain the distinction between hardware and software – even if only for operative and contextual reasons – and that the interface will remain a writing and reading space whose rhetorical and expressive potential should not be underestimated. If in Unicode we can have a human-scale perceptible image of what is the machinic processing of the codes of writing, and, by analogy, of the electronic processing of the remaining codes that originate multiple medial instantiations derived from the numerical representations that define a digital object, in Scraper Scraperteeth, we witness what it means to write with the interface; that is, with the medial specificity algorithmically programmed in a given software and its formal conventions. In their metamedia reflexivity, these two works offer us a glimpse into the flow of signs in the machine – beyond the electronic differentiality of their technological condition and the structures and functions formalized in the software. 4

The exploration of Flash in the context of “art games” can be seen in other works by Jason Nelson, including game, game, game and again game (2006) and I made this. You play this. We are enemies (2011) . The use of handwritten words, drawings, and traces occurs in other works, e.g., in Sydney's Siberia (2010) .

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References Eskelinen, M., Cybertext Poetics: The Critical Landscape of New Media Literary Theory. (London: Continuum, 2012). Funkhouser, C.T., New Directions in Digital Poetry. (London: Continuum, 2012). Hayles, N. K., Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008). Johnston, D. (Jhave), Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry as Ontological Probe. (Montréal: Concordia University, 2011). http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/36284/. Kirschenbaum, M. G., Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008). Kittler, F. A. “There is No Software.” CTheory, 10/18/1995. www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=74. —. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Manovich, L., Software Takes Command: Extending the Language of New Media. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Memmott, T., Digital Rhetoric and Poetics: Signifying Strategies in Electronic Literature. (Malmö: Malmö University, 2011). http://dspace.mah.se/handle/2043/12547. Murray, J. H., Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012). Nelson, J., Scraper Scraperteeth: Or the crushing punch/slap/stab of real estate madness. (2011). http://www.secrettechnology.com/scrape/scrape1.html. Packer, R. e Jordan, K. (orgs.) Multimedia: from Wagner to Virtual Reality. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001). Piringer, J., Unicode. (2011). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_sl99D2a18. Portela, M., Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013). Salter, A. e Murray, J. Flash: Building the Interactive Web. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). Schäfer, J., “Reassembling the Literary: Toward a Theoretical Framework for Literary Communication in Computer-Based Media,” in Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla (orgs.), Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres. (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2010), 25–70.

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Wurth, K. B. “Multimediality, Intermediality, and Medially Complex Digital Poetry.” RiLUnE 5 (2006): 1–18.

CHAPTER EIGHT FROM THE FALLACY OF THE IMMATERIAL TO KITTLER’S SURFACE EFFECT MANUEL BOGALHEIRO

“Les matériels eux-mêmes ne cessent de se complexifier.” —Jean-François Lyotard

I The image of the technique and its objects is founded on a certain idea of solidity and palpability of materials. We recognize this image, from the beginning, by how the first paradigms for manufacturing tools and objects were associated with the domain of a type of hard material that evolved in their conditions of moldability and physical resistance. In short, we are referring to the division of pre-history into three ages – Stone, Bronze and Iron. Forcing the historic leap to modernity, it is still this image of the solidity of machines that subsists in the industrial revolution when, embedded in the new metal universe of factories, the workers realized that now, in relation to the vulnerability of meat and human rhythms, “everything that we look at, everything that the hand feels is hard.” 1 The advent of electricity, even in the second industrial revolution, was the main precursor of the inversion that took place with the generalization of the digital code and the corresponding computerization of technology during the second half of the 20th century. As the biggest symptom of this inversion, we find ourselves, today, with a growing difficulty in recognizing a physical consistency or a stable presence in technical

1

Céline, L-F. Viagem ao Fim da Noite. Frenesi, (1997), 238 apud Tavares, Gonçalo M. Atlas do Corpo e da Imaginação. Lisbon: Caminho, (2013), 102. All non-English quotations have been translated by the author.

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objects. The setback to the glory of the connection2 – after overcoming the geographic barriers and constraints for universal conversion through the computer code – is a disorder that arises when one realizes that a dimension of physical space collapses with the emergence of cybernetic networks, and that the rigidity of the objects gives way to the physical impalpability and evanescence of electricity, fiber optics, frequencies and bits. The axiom of remediation proposed by Marshall McLuhan that “the content of a medium is always another medium” 3 already anticipated, at least theoretically, this transformation, reframing the theory of media into an issue of materiality. McLuhan problematized, in the first place, the (im)materiality of any shapeless or unstable media, and in the second place, the latent materiality that any medium contains in itself, whether in relation to the media that precedes it – as when television integrates radio – or in relation to the dynamic in which form and content start to relate beyond the physical determination of the material that sustains them. 4 On the basis of this axiom were McLuhan’s observations on the electric light bulb – electricity as a paradigmatic example of an environment, apparently without content or form, which, even so, determines the social and all modern equipment. In parallel, some trends of contemporary art would play an anticipating role in this categorization of the immaterial. We found examples in kinetic art and in their claims for the movement, in the conceptual art of the 50s and 60s and in their search for the dematerialization of the object5 or, in an 2

“There is happiness and glory in the act of connecting.” Bruno, Giordano, Des Liens. (Paris: Allia, 2011). 3 McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1964), 8. 4 In the brief but incisive preface to his book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich Kittler, without escaping a certain post-humanist vision that is attributed to him, retrieves the meaning of these theses by McLuhan on the relationship between materiality and content: “What remains of people is what media can store and communicate. What counts are not the messages or the content with which they equip so-called souls for the duration of a technological era, but rather (and in strict accordance with McLuhan) their circuits, the very schematism of perceptibility.” Kittler, Friedrich, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), xl – xli. 5 This search for the dematerialization of the object, at the forefront of the 50s and 60s, under the conceptualism of art as idea and action, not only pointed to the obsolescence of the physical object but also refused the limitations of the support for artistic creation. Despite some radicalism, these trends would ultimately

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emblematic way, in the exhibition Les Immateriaux with the curators JeanFrançois Lyotard and Thierry Chaput in 1985 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition brought together a group of works under the premise of refounding an imagination for the new materials, turning the solid materiality of industrial society to the numerical processes of the information society. However, it would end up being the imaginary of virtual and cyberspace6 that gave us some of the most practical (or perhaps disturbing) illustrations of this trend for the immaterial when designing a whole reality based on large computational databases that exist inaccurately in circuits and persist through a nomadic omnipresence, removed from a specific support. It would not be long until scientific advances actually substantiated some of these applications put forward by fiction. We increasingly acknowledge them in the digital record of the symbolic – images, sound, writing – which, despite the potential creation of a universal archive, paradoxically seems to weaken their conservation and physical concreteness. The technique is then increasingly a way to access and conjure, freeing itself from the objects themselves. It is in this sense that, in spite of the multiplication of interfaces, the recent platforms for data storage in clouds7 propose themselves as the closest step to the annulment of the constraints of the physical stiffness toward the realization – which we can call gaseous – of total connection. constitute an important contribution to the cultural and theoretical questioning of the concept of dematerialization which, more than being only understood as a denial of matter, was launched as a new way of thinking about the multiplicity of (artistic) materiality in addition to its direct connection with the physical entity of the object. The main reference continues to be the text by Lucy Lippard in 1968, “The Dematerialization of Art Object” and, even if it is more focused on kinetic art, the book by Frank Popper Le Déclin de l'Objet (1975). 6 Among many others that could be chosen from the seminal Neuromancer by William Gibson, we highlight here one of these illustrations of cyberspace: “A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” Gibson, William, Neuromancer. (London: Grafton, 1984), 67. 7 These storage systems, also known as cloud computing, are proposed as the next paradigm for physical databases, tied to a single device. Relativizing the relationship between software and device, cloud computing frees the data of the storage medium and converts all devices into mere points of access. Among the growing number of these systems, we may include Dropbox, Apple’s iCloud or Cloud Power by Microsoft, whose slogan is “I am not constrained by barriers, borders or gravity.”

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As a culmination of these heterogeneous manifestations, there often emerges a discourse that says, under the weight of a certain radicalism that is both persuading and reckless, that objects are disappearing and that we are entering the phase of dematerialization.

II This easy receptivity of the concept of immaterial, however, seems to be reductive, from a cultural point of view, and inaccurate, from a technical point of view. It is reductive because it denies any materiality that does not depend on metaphors such as solidity, palpability, opacity or density, an acceptation inherited from the old ‫ބ‬ȜȘ 8 of the classics. It is inaccurate because, although evanescent, inaccurate or unstable, the numeric-digital materials do not cease to be states of matter. Therefore, the crisis of matter or supports does not lead, in a simple way, to a hypothetical state of pure absence of matter. Matter exists, even if “virtualized” or converted into a numeric state or energy, affecting our senses and persisting beyond that which we are able to touch. Therefore, instead of giving in to the abstract category of the immaterial or the disappearance of matter, it will be required to do precisely the opposite: admit that new explorations of matter have emerged, which are made possible by more sophisticated equipment. Walter Benjamin soon realized this step in relation to film or even to architecture and its arcades. For Benjamin it was through film, as a disruptive media-logic “that burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second,” that revealed “entirely new structural formations of the subject” 9 – the explosion understood as a process that, more than destructive, causes the release of energies and the shattering of 8

Greek word whose meaning can be translated as wood, substance, thing, matter or material. Despite this being the broadest meaning of material which would be primarily associated to the meaning of ‫ބ‬ȜȘ, the initial etymology associated to wood is not irrelevant. It is Aristotle who is assigned this passage, as the Greeks did not have a word for matter in general, coining the meaning of anything physical that would be constituted by the same basic substance of the stiffness of wood. This fact has contributed to the understanding that predominated in western culture in associating material to something rigid and to the hesitance in recognizing a material dimension to material instances associated with energy, flow, or certain dynamic processes of less tangible characteristics. 9 Benjamin, Walter, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations (Translated by Harry Zohn, Edited and with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt, Preface by Leon Wieseltier). (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 236.

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materialities that before were merged under the rigidity of a single one and that now become fragmented and made visible. The metaphor of the explosion that Benjamin uses is, actually, more accurate than any other that pointed to a sense of pure absence or a process of disappearance, given the instability of the moving images of film and its dependence on the optical unconsciousness of the spectator. Despite the fact that Benjamin’s time only allowed him to look at the techniques of reproduction, the evolution to digital techniques of appearance and circulation would prove that the technique was increasingly working not only on the conditions of the existence of objects but on the matter itself that constitutes them. As Paul Virilio observes about digital technology, “the technique is no longer that which only deals with the multiplication of objects produced, nor that of the reproduction of photographic images, but that of the sudden multiplication of dimensions of matter.” 10 In actuality, the ubiquity of informational matter and its ceaseless movement in a network confirm that, in fact, instead of being faced with a regime of absence and the immaterial, we find ourselves faced with a regime of explosion and multiplication. As Bernard Stiegler defends: “We are not witnessing at all a dematerialization, but on the contrary a hypermaterialization: everything is transformed into information, that is, into states of matter by means of equipment and devices” that are manipulated and controllable “in the infinitely small and the infinitely brief.” 11 Faced with this, “the problem is not therefore immateriality but the invisibility of matter” that is multiplied.12 Rejecting the notion of immaterial, Stiegler then proposes the concepts of hypermatter, which defines it as a “a complex of energy and information where it is no longer possible to distinguish matter from its form” and hypermaterial, which he defines as “the process where information – that presents itself as form – is in reality a gear of states of matter produced by devices, by technological apparatuses in which the separation between matter and form is completely devoid of sense.” 13 Stiegler’s concepts point toward both a technological state in which we only understand the media in their surface effects, as well as the impossibility of understanding the materiality of the numeric-digital under the notions given to form and matter. With numeric conversion, we are faced with transitional states, whose essence is to constantly be informed. 10

Virilio, Paul, L’Espace Critique: essai sur l’urbanisme et les nouvelles technologies. (Paris: éd. Christian Bourgois, 1984), 90. 11 Stiegler, Bernard. Économie de l’hypermatériel et psychopouvoir. (Paris: éd. Mille et Une Nuits, 2009), 111. 12 Stiegler, 112. 13 Stiegler, 111.

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This attempt – as well as McLuhan’s – to look for another link between form and matter that accounts for the conditions of digital materiality – in addition to the notion of immaterial – is a total refusal of a theoretical model that has marked much of the history of western thought: the system of Aristotelian hylomorphism that, within a philosophy of nature, considers natural bodies as the product of a constitution between matter and form. The refusal of this model has been extensively developed by Gilbert Simondon, who saw in the extreme dualism of matter and form a system incapable of explaining the individuation of beings and objects themselves.14 We briefly present here three problems of hylomorphism that give an account of the inability of this system to deal with states of shapeless matter, promoting, as a result, abstract categories such as the immaterial. The first problem of the hylomorphic model is that of understanding the two categories – form and matter – as two extreme starting points, without considering all the complexities of mediation, interaction and internal resonance between these two extremes – the between as a moment of tension where the individuation of any being or object is actually played. By conceiving two maximum abstractions of the active and passive, hylomorphism does not account for everything that exists in the between and in the relation – instances understood as allagmatic processes, i.e., as the transformation of differing energies. More indebted to the rigidity of an ontology than the phasing of an ontogenesis, the relationship considered by hylomorphism is nothing more than a relationship after the existence of the terms (matter and form), elaborated from the results of individuation themselves (already shaped matter). The second problem of the hylomorphic model resides in the fact that it is incapable of giving an account of processes that are continuous or updated – be it the electric valve of a cathode ray tube, or the graphical interface of a computer – because it presupposes that matter only takes form once in time – as in the case of a brick that results from a mold and

14

Gilbert Simondon’s criticism of hylomorphism, which had also already been made by medieval philosopher Scotus, is principally in the first chapter, “Forme et matière”, of the book L’Individu et sa Genèse Phsysico-biologique, which constitutes the first part of his doctoral thesis L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2005). It is from this criticism of hylomorphism, along with the substantialist and atomistic models, that Simondon founded the main notions of what can be assigned as a philosophy of process on the problem of individuation: metastability, resonance, information, energy and potency.

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clay. Therefore, the possibility of a dynamic dimension of matter and of form itself is excluded. The third problem, and returning to the issue of the materiality of the digital, arises from the fact that the theory of hylomorphism is insufficient to understand a materiality of pure informatic synthesis, i.e., a materiality “whose design is purely theoretical and quantitative and that finds an apparent confirmation practice in the appearance and disappearance of image-forms composed of points without dimension and briefly without duration, numerically controlled by algorithms of a coded language.”. 15 Not only does it become impossible to distinguish between form and matter, the very exercise of distinction becomes useless when, at the level of the formal character of numeric-digital operations, matter is already always a form (at a quantum level) and form is always already information (as a transitory state of matter produced by equipment). The era of the digital, and the way it reignited the issue of materiality, proves then what Simondon perceives in relation to any system of individuation: the invalidity of the theory of hylomorphism and the need to replace it with a theory of information.16 The concept of information is not understood here in the strict sense of the mathematical theory of communication, according to the model of the source, transmitter, channel, receiver and destination. For Simondon, the notion of information, as an alternative to hylomorphism, is understood in an energetic perspective as transduction that works in the mediation of the tension between disparate realities, giving rise to a new system or relationship. Information as an energy complex is evident each time an incompatibility to solve a system becomes an organized dimension in the resolution of this same incompatibility. Simondon enlightens us on this process with the paradigmatic example of the formation of a crystal. 17 The most important thing here is the emphasis of this thought, based on the process and in mediation, breaking with the accepted tradition that understands material objects as previously existing or already immutable in a final state. 15

Virilio, 133. Cf. Simondon, Gilbert, L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2005), 35. 17 “Such an individuation [of the crystal] is not the meeting of a form and a previously existing matter as previously constituted separate terms, but a resolution that has arisen within a metastable system rich with potential: form, matter and energy pre-exist in the system. Neither form nor matter are sufficient. The true principle of individuation is mediation, generally assuming an original duality of the orders of magnitude and initial absence of interactive communication between them, and then of communication between orders of magnitude and stabilization.” Simondon, 27. 16

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Information as energy that acts in the between and in the tension adjusts itself more to the current operations of the technique of multiplication and movement, increasingly based on processes that are continuous and updated, than to processes of a single shape or form. On the other hand, by exceeding the dualism that opposes solid material to shapeless and impalpable immaterial, recognizing that “form, matter and energy preexist in the system,” we can admit a new type of materialism, not only of the objects but of information itself: energy itself is viewed as material even if it is a materiality in progress, in transduction. Going back to the notions of hypermaterial and hypermatter listed by Stiegler, the tendency for the digitalization, through equipment that converts everything into number and information, is evidence, on the one hand, that the materiality inherent to the digital is not the end product of the relation between form and matter, but, on the other hand, that form and matter are indiscernible. Thus, matter can only be understood if placed in a relationship of equivalence with the notion of information.

III The approximation that Simondon and Stiegler develop, among the notions of matter and information, is integrated into a conceptual context that opens, within the philosophy of technique, an alternative to hylomorphism toward another understanding of the processes of individuation of material objects and living beings themselves. In the strictest domain of a theory of information systems, in addition to the previously mentioned McLuhan, some of the most assertive theses about this approximation reach us from Friedrich Kittler who, in a materialist analysis, focused on the analysis of the material structures of technology at the expense of meanings and messages. Regardless of the disturbance caused in the paradigm shift that each medium has meant (as in the passages of the gramophone to film, or, after, to the typewriter), Kittler focuses on the conditions and possibilities that have been expressed through that which is material – or, to put it better, hardware – lasting in each medium. At the basis of this way of looking at media is the principle of considering them as devices whose first nature is the ability to record or register. By placing emphasis on registration or on the condition of producing technological memory, information for Kittler is also not just treated as probabilistic function, as in the mathematical theory of communication, but as material property that is indistinguishable from those physical components of the device itself that sustains it. Just as Simondon’s and Stiegler’s approach – despite the natural differences between the philosophy of technique of the first and the

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theory of media – Kittler’s approach does not admit the possibility of the immaterial as well. Counteracting the surface effects, Kittler tries to sustain a materialism of information where apparatus and information are transformed into one or, as he states, in which information is “transformed into matter and matter into information.”18

IV Despite the efforts of this kind of thought to refuse the simple notion of the immaterial, its reference persists in contemporary discourse, as we exemplified at the start of this text. The post-media condition from which Kittler develops his theory of media is, in fact, one of the technical frameworks that give visibility to the problem of the immaterial. After the existence of media in its individual state – gramophone, film, radio, television, etc. – with “incompatible data channels and different data formats,” 19 the computer causes the fusion of all media into one, therefore extinguishing its condition of differentiated existence. In his well-known formulation of post-media, Kittler writes that “the general digitalization of the channels and information erases the differences among individual media. (...) Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound, or voice. And once optical fiber networks turn formerly distinct data flows into a standardized series of digitized numbers, any medium can be translated into any other.” 20 For the author, the consequence of this “total media link – [that] will erase the very concept of medium” is that “sound and image, voice and text are reduced to the surface effects [Oberflächeneffekt] – or, that which we consumers know as interfaces.” 21 After the individual media and, to some extent, their physical components being absorbed by the departicularization of their total connection, it is the interfaces, as areas of access sensitive to the formal programming of computer codes, which continue to ensure that, in addition to their post-condition, media still exist and entertainment will continue22 ; that is, it will continue to have mediation. The problem arises, however, when one realizes that this mediation between users and media is 18 Kittler, Friedrich, “Media Wars: Trenches, Lightning, Stars,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems – Essays. Edited and introduced by John Johnston. (Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997), 126. 19 Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 1 – 2. 20 Kittler, 2. 21 Kittler, 1 (my emphasis). 22 “But there still are media; there still is entertainment.” Kittler, 2.

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mainly given at the level of these surface effects, i.e., at the level of a sensitive use of the media that are increasingly further from the abstraction inherent to numbers and codes which, deep down, ensure the functioning of devices and are only dominated by programmers. Consumers, determined by the media23 and forced to produce meaning about them, end up creating metaphorical categories that may overcome this abstraction without, however, being able to produce a true technical meaning on the formal processes to which they relate. 24 Assuming the concept of immaterial is, thus, accentuating this type of surface effect on the current media. If one deepens the correspondence that Kittler establishes between his theory of media and the three psychic schemes proposed by Lacan, we recognize that, in part, this difficulty in producing meaning on the media can still be anchored in the absence of a scheme that matches the numeric. The sound of the gramophone corresponded to the real and its noise, the moving image of film to the imaginary and its optical illusion, and the typewriter, retrieving the regime already that of handwriting, corresponded to the symbolic and its formal operationalization. 25 The numeric or the digital seem, however, to lack their own regime to produce meaning, given the level of abstraction involved in its programming. This is worsened, according to Kittler’s determinism, by the fusion that all media on a computer produce, a stage where circuits seem to produce their own language and exclude the so-called man of technical processes: “Technologies that not only subvert writing, but engulf it and carry it off along with the so-called Man, render their own description impossible. Increasingly, data flows once confined to books and later to records and films are disappearing into black holes and boxes that, as artificial intelligences, are bidding us farewell on their way to nameless high commands.” 26

23

“Media determine our situation,” Kittler, XXXIX. “All code operations, despite their metaphoric faculties such as ‘call’ or ‘return’, come down to absolutely local string manipulations and that is, I am afraid, to signifiers of voltage differences. Formalization in Hilbert’s sense does away with theory itself, insofar as “the theory is no longer a system of meaningful propositions, but one of sentences as sequences of words, which are in turn sequences of letters. We can tell [say] by reference to the form alone which combinations of the words are sentences, which sentences are axioms, and which sentences follow as immediate consequences of others”.” Kittler, Friedrich, “There is No Software,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems – Essays. Edited and introduced by John Johnston. (Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997), 150. 25 Cf. Kittler, Friedrich, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 15 –16. 26 Kittler, XXXIX. 24

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V The absence of a regime of meaning for the numeric can then be seen as a symptom of a bigger crisis: that of classification or categorization. The category of the immaterial is simultaneously a metaphor and a product of an experience that persists in relating to the inconceivable of an existence that is increasingly synthetic; that is, an existence that is increasingly dependent on the technique and its formal abstraction, and is in constant reaction to the failure of the old analog referents of the world and its given nature: substance, form, matter, space and time. This crisis, based on what Paul Valéry had already recognized as a set of “things without similarity to our things,” has not yet exceeded the rupture with certain dualist metaphysics of the material and immaterial, of matter and form, which blocks an understanding of the processes of relation and dynamic as the multiplication of materiality. Faced with the irreversibility of the whole technique tending to operate under the illusion of the surface, in a “state of things without things, in which the dynamic overlaps the static, the fluid over solid, the energetic over substantiality,” 27 we will have to refocus on the specific characteristics of this technique in order to, within its new nature, be able to find the hypothesis for a way out of the crisis. Returning to Kittler and the fabrication of what he always referred to as the so-called Man [sogenannte Mensch], this fabrication may not pass through only one (post) human situation determined by media, with man as a temporary solution in the time in which the media is automatically tied without the need for his intervention. By moving further away from Kittler’s determinism and toward Simondon’s mechanology,28 this fabrication of the so-called man, who can no longer dwell outside the field 27 Renaud, Alain-Renaud, “A Interface Informacional ou o Sensível no Seio do Inteligível,” in Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens, nº 43/44, Org. Maria Teresa Cruz and Manuel José Damásio. (Lisbon: Relógio D’Água Editores, 2012), 141. 28 Although both Kittler and Simondon established themselves as two authors that militantly defended the importance of knowledge about technology and its operation, as a first step to avoid cultural misunderstandings. Simondon not only rejects the opposition and the determinism of machines over men (and vice versa) but he also defends the possibility of conciliation between man and machine. Such conciliation would be the objective of mechanology, which, as a science of machines, would help Man develop a harmony with the technique, by integrating it civilizationally and affirming its human nature as a subject that transforms the world through good technical exploitation. This is the basic idea behind the introduction of his book Du mode d'existence des objets techniques. (Paris: Aubier, 1989).

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of the media, may also involve discovering, within the synthetic nature of that same field, new creative and tectonic possibilities to remake the world. As Alain Renaud-Alain explains: Henceforth, the morphological intuition of a world already governed and analysed from a general form (the ‘natured nature’) must give way to the morphogenetic intuition of a world in formation or even forming ‘in all its parts’ (the ‘natured nature’). (...) The world should abandon the status of a global referential ‘Nature’ to become a universe of pure quantitative ‘data’ without size, nor colour, nor weight, fully anesthetic – i.e. without a body – that the appropriate games of architectural interface, under certain symbolic conditions, will convert into objects, or worldly empirical forms, accessible to a sensitive and perceptive body.29

More than becoming stuck to the Promethean erotics of the immaterial and the liberation of the constraint of matter, it is up to (the so-called) man to get rid of the fallacies that result from the weight of the old categories and invest in understanding that resulted from technical changes. It is not only about producing meaning over the machines and devices that he uses but also about producing meaning about himself and the world in which he dwells. Along these lines, and by taking advantage of the new potential of the technique, we will win an advantage and be able to produce new symbols and images that can fill the inconceivable.

References Benjamin, Walter, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations (Translated by Harry Zohn, Edited and With an Introduction by Hannah Arendt, Preface by Leon Wieseltier). (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 217–51. Kittler, Friedrich, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). —. “There is No Software,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems – Essays. Edited and introduced by John Johnston. (Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997), 147–55. —. “Media Wars: Trenches, Lightning, Stars,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems – Essays. Edited and introduced by John Johnston. (Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997), 117–29.

29

Renaud, Alain-Renaud, 144, 152.

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Lippard, Lucy and Chandler, John, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International. (February 1968): 31–36. Lyotard, Jean-François, Les Immatériaux - Catalogue d’exposition. (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985). McKenzie, Adrian, Bodies and Machines at Speed. (New York: Continuum, 2002). McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1964). Renaud, Alain-Renaud, “A Interface Informacional ou o Sensível no Seio do Inteligível,” in Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens, nº 43/44, Org. Maria Teresa Cruz and Manuel José Damásio. (Lisbon: Relógio D’Água Editores, 2012), 139–59. Simondon, Gilbert, L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2005). Stiegler, Bernard, Économie de l’hypermatériel et psychopouvoir. (Paris: éd. Mille et Une Nuits, 2009). Virilio, Paul, L’Espace Critique: essai sur l’urbanisme et les nouvelles technologies. (Paris: éd. Christian Bourgois, 1984).

CHAPTER NINE NOTES ON MEDIA ONTOLOGY JORGE RODRIGUES

I Ein medium ist ein Medium ist ein Medium —Friedrich Kittler (1985, 288)

The computer, that supreme simulator, has cleared all the mediation processes and it therefore requires an ontology that puts this aspect in its center. Having made possible the simulation of all machines, using nothing but a symbol and its absence (the number 1 and 0, which constitute binary language), the universal machine puts the question of mediation at the center of thought. The possibility of thinking this subject through the tools of European Ontology is as fundamental as it is complex (Kittler, 2009:23). The word and the thing, media, was systematically forgotten or regarded as a secondary question throughout western philosophical thought – Kittler identifies the beginning of this intentional suppression back to Aristotle (2009:24). In order to build systems of thought where form and matter become the core, and where considerations are reached, the erasing or suppression of the process of constitution itself, that is, the medial production of thought itself, was a fundamental step. Media, regarded as inbetween (inzwischen), are the element that stops and forbids reaching a defined ontology: “Inzwischen is a form, perhaps still too metaphorical, of the rapport between an out-side and what is already constituted, a sort of “ontological” horizon that cannot be suppressed by any philosophical Ontology” (Bragança de Miranda, 1994:91). By Media Ontology, a paradoxical expression, what is underlined is the constitution of a type of knowledge that places the concept of media in its center (and not form or matter). It does so in order to, surprisingly,

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present what is apparently constituted, whether these objects are systems of thought, technological devices or artistic expressions: all of them emerge in a set that has as its a priori their technological/technical constitution. It is therefore required, from this knowledge, to perform a reading of the world that, contrary to previous systems of thought, declares explicitly that its own tools are derived from a constellation of apparatuses that belong to a certain epoch – and, therefore, present themselves as contingent. Contemporary times witnessed the coexistence of the Universal Turing Machine hypothesis, which announced the end of mediation (or rather its beginning) while all simulations converge into the number in an apparatus which is able to perform as the physis itself. This view presupposes that nature, as a set of processes, is not only able to be simulated but also to be completely explained in formal terms. Establishing concepts from the concrete properties of technical/technological objects is the only possibility for such a theory of materiality, which implies a real knowledge of the mechanical procedures they perform. A Media Ontology does not distinguish between thought and machine, for the machine bears the materialization of thought. This conclusion led Kittler to explore domains such as the conception of pages, compilation and other techniques of literary culture, and, from 1980 onwards, he understood that, in order to say something about computers from an informed perspective, it is necessary to understand its electronicmathematical works. This approach goes beyond that of the majority of philosophers who tackle the question of media, who are satisfied to be in the position of the domesticated user for whom the machine is veiled by an endless amount of software ( Kittler, 1993b:225–42): “(…) one of the differences between Virilio and me is that I only write about things that I did put into practice. But, as you know, Virilio is not alone in this, because, for my desperation, many of the media researches nowadays write extensively books about computation or internet without any concrete experience of how these things work.” (Kittler, 2006:26)

The consequences of the invention of the computer on contemporary thought are still far from being assumed by theoretical thought. Taking Kittler’s case as one of these rare exceptions, we understand that questioning the impact of the computer in culture is clearly distanced from the many tasks media studies have imposed on themselves, namely, the use and abuse of a sort of ideology of interactivity, portrayed as a transmedial concept, and avoiding the evidence that it is nothing but a parasite of concrete hardware.

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What is at stake with Turing is not the possibility of simulating everything through a software that bends in front of our human perception but rather the removal of man from this original medium that congregates in itself stocking, processing and transmission: computers communicate between themselves.

II. The First Separation: Communication and Interaction The first evidences of writing are, as it is widely known, inscriptions without real surfaces of inscription. Two-dimensional stamps in the medium of clay have made it possible to give to objects the addresses of their possessors or their contents, the same way writing on stones featured the names of their dead. As signs of absence of the source of the message and, therefore, through the dissociation of communication and interaction, inscriptions opened the possibility of Literature – according to Jan Assman’s analysis. —Friedrich Kittler, 1993

The dissociation between communication and interaction occurred, according to Kittler, the moment men started to mark the stones that covered the dead as well as other objects, giving them a property mark. Communication is here understood as the oral interaction between two subjects in their presence – the condition of philosophical dialog, according to Plato. The interaction is therefore regarded as something that establishes its presence through the signs of its absence. This immemorial and founding gesture represents the separation of two functions that were previously together. By marking a surface, people have the power to illustrate something that is absent on the surface itself, whether it is their master or a dead body. Such is the founding aspect of all literature: marks without bodies, the emergence of signs, the possibility of iteration: A written sign, in the common sense of the word, is a mark that remains, that is not worn out in the present of its inscription and can therefore give room to an iteration in the absence of the beyond of the presence of the empirical determined subject that produced it in a certain context. This is the way in which, more or less traditionally, “written communication” is set apart from “spoken communication.” (Derrida, 1972: 377)

To evoke a presence through a mark (icon, symbol, word or trace) requires from the reader an ability that can be defined as hallucinatory – from the Latin word hallucinantis, to be deceived or delusional. This ability is what allows us to imagine sounds, images and worlds from concrete objects such as stamps, clay, paint or luminous projections. By

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separating the communicative origin from the body that has written it, the message from the source, it is possible to create the illusions so dear to literature, such as giving discourse ability to animals, elements, wind, immemorial times or dead bodies. The source of this magic trick, in order to fully work, should not be mentioned, otherwise consciousness could undermine the products of illusion: the essential blindness when it comes to the medium is the necessary condition to present the products of the inscription surfaces as something more than mere contingencies, that is, media effects. Artists were the only ones to be aware that from goodness or beauty there is nothing to prove – the access to them is made through the pigments portraying beautiful women or men: There is nothing like the “beautiful in itself” as an idea; there are only “beautiful girls” (Kittler, 2011:10). To believe in Beauty or Good, it is fundamental to inflict a voluntary selfblinding movement and forget (or at least submit) the ink and other materials that were assembled in a particular context. The abstraction aims to avoid the fragility of the physical tension in order to point that the experience is somewhere else, in that place which is not one: language itself, outside of which even the word meaning dissolves, as proved by computing mathematics. It is not only because writing was invented for the inscription of myths that Platonic philosophy has as its main goal to dismiss it. It is rather because writing has as its requirement a function that emerges from its supports, that is, a surface that is able to be evoked and read, whose message is eternal and universal (even the slaves possess it). The process of anamnesis can only come from an “inner dimension” because machines would have been placed in a more profound and rooted position than the inside of man itself. The task of the philosopher would be to set in motion these “wax machines,” to incessantly give birth to innate messages, to bring them into light by Erscheinung. The lack of knowledge of the philosopher is precisely his inability to stop the machine: any form of final knowledge would make the machine obsolete or masturbatory in Duchamp’s way. When Kittler affirms that “from people there is only what Media can store and send” (1985:5), he is pointing out that it is only in men that the mnenotechnical process occurs – even from Socrates we have nothing but his writings, which were the conditio sinen qua non for the integration of his philosophy in later systems of thought, discourse networks, Aufschreibesysteme. It is therefore only existent that which has been mediated. If the end of the 18th century and, especially, the beginning of the 20th century were testimonies to a process of division of perception, which led

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to the destruction of the monopoly of the book over the flesh, the second half of the 20th century presents itself as a period of final perceptive resolution, with the convergence of all mediations, including those that subjected the human being to the boat of Charon: epigraphy, literature, gramophonic technologies and photography. The archive starts to include the most common material on the face of the earth, silicon, which, even if it includes storage potential, is not consultable due to the simple fact that it does not express itself in a writing that could be read with previous technologies or media techniques. Even if the “task of the archive is to represent life outside of it” (Groys, 2000:7), the powers that are included in daily lives became not only too microscopic but also numerical and ciphered. The data concerning information that really matters (that is, political data) left libraries, painting collections, cinema screening rooms and sound archives long ago. When mediation technologies, which “define reality,” consisted of sounds without bodies, images without flesh or writing without hands, its products were still understandable, even though the archive was faced with a spreading of its functions to support the outside of the book or the painter’s canvas. The time of the dissociation of that once literary perception is simultaneously a time of expansion of the archive to the celluloid band, the luminous projection, the sound inscriptions or machine writing. The concept of archive itself as a “machine of producing memories – a machine that produces stories from the reality’s forgotten aspects” (Groys, 2009) – is only thinkable as a sort of hypermachine when this expansion forces it to include even the machines that produce any representation: gramophone, film, typewriter. The book was denounced as a non-electrical machine. The inverse could never happen, since those machines are the physical product of a perception work that started with words themselves: without making the grapheme an erotic force that creates worlds (literature as Novalis sees it), it would have been impossible to conceive machines that represented directly the visual or sound hallucinations that literature imposes on the reader. It is also the archive that allows the emergence of characters that marked the 20th century in the most profound way, such as the proletarian or the Führer. The 20th century witnessed the “era of media” as the monopoly of the book ceased, “breaks apart, and leads to the emergence of media, in plural, from its ruins.” The technologies of the end of the 19th century had already introduced the first blow to the handwritten letter, since they dissociated the hearing from the heard (gramophone), the written from the processor (typewriter), and the time of writing from the time of reading (cinema). The word was therefore ready to be desiccated: when the

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machine of writing that was the book meets its competition, there is something in it that ceases to be hegemonic: the sound is not only hearable through the hyper-erotic powers of the words – now there is the gramophone representing it more faithfully; the image does not exclusively emerge from the work of literature, the text production is no longer associated to a handwriting that announced the profound subjectivity of the hand that wrote it – we are then faced with the mechanical aspect of touch, with its brutality and neutrality, that seeks to produce new discourse.

Fig.1: Niki de Saint Phalle, Tirage, 1961, Tate Museum

With the appearance of purely mechanical production, new commitments are set between engineering and politics. The arts reflect new practices and devices: they follow a logic of appropriation of the war products, which seems to be set as the norm after the second part of the 20th century. The typewriter has its origin in an excess of resources that were no longer necessary after the American Civil War. Even today, the materials from which music instruments such as the percussion pedal were created were originally issued from war technologies; the same goes for the audiovisual equipment, such as the synthesizer, that came to be used for music, the GPS and, as much as the interfaces try to conceal, the internet itself. During the 20th century, the arts took on the military technologies in a

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systemic way. Daily language and artistic concepts did so too – O.K. stands for zero killed; blockbuster was a term used by the air force during the Second World War before it became a successful movie; shooting was done by the weapon before the camera; the film crew came after the war crew; and projectors triggered bombs before the light of moving pictures. The military aspect does not limit itself to a sort of influence of the arts and their concepts. Let us take as an example the German band Kraftwerk, a pioneer of electronic music. Its musicians not only made use of the synthesizer, voice software and beat machines but also explored the new problems that emerged from the leftovers of the world wars – from the production force to the all-new power plants (both named in German Kraftwerk), passing by the new world of computing (Computerwelt, 1981) to the high speed trains (Trans Europe Express, 1977), radioactivity (Radioaktivität, 1975) and the transformation of iconic places such as cafés (Electric Café – 1986). Even the revelation of men as machines and the digitalization of reality were approached by this music group, capturing in the air of times the impact of these military orphans. It is not a coincidence that the Volksempfänger VE301 is on the cover of one of Kraftwerk’s albums: the radio receiver that informed the German families of the rise and fall of their collective hallucination, and of the submission of all voices to a bigger one, was the product of an agreement between Joseph Goebbels and the engineer Otto Griessing. Both radio and radioactive activity emerged as techno-political agreements that marked the experience of the Second World War.

Fig.2, Fig. 3: Covers from the German and English versions of Radioaktivität (1975)

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The forms of knowledge themselves witnessed the era of media and its end. Psychoanalysis, for example, emerges as direct competition to one of the media of the end of the 19th century: the gramophone. Both present as their main goal the translation not of words but sounds, which were considered up to that time irrelevant, in order to point out that it is that unrepresentable babbling that might be the truth of speech itself. This babbling was, for the first time, able to be registered and reproduced. Psychoanalysis aims to transform what the gramophone registered into a new text. The future of these forms of knowledge is nowadays uncertain, for the era of the gramophone is gone: In a measure that is to be determined, the institution and theoretical project of psychoanalysis, with its topical and economical representations of the unconscious, belongs to a moment in the history of technology, and first of all to the devices and rhythms of what we called “communication”. What future for Psychoanalysis in the era of the internet email, of the multimedia and CD rom?” (Derrida, 1995:2)

Kittler goes even further, arguing that Freudian psychoanalysis became obsolete when Heidegger included it in the realm of philosophy (2001: 230). The “return to Freud” that Lacan follows is therefore nothing but a new reading of psychoanalysis in a different media era – Lacan is no longer in competition only with the hermeneutics of sound but also with the moving image and cinema: his sharp awareness that media matter manifests itself in the very titles of his works, which refer literally to what they are: his radio interventions are published under the title of Radiophonie, his writings are Écrits, his seminar Le Séminaire. In contrast to what stood as reality in the previous century, where war data and plans still allowed a diagnosis of the situation to be made, contemporary times are faced with historiographic impossibility. That today’s situation “is darker” (Kittler, 1986:3) is the only truth that can be stated with previous analysis tools, since the hands of those that analyze can no longer grasp the data of a machine that is not based on man’s perception: “It is true that, when human emotions are implied, scientists still leave a lot to wish for, but probably computers are not tools that were invented by humanity to make our lives easier but rather tools that nature invented to understand itself (Kittler, 2006). Bouveresse expressed the same uneasiness toward the machines: “In opposition to the living, which is an end in itself, the mechanism is that which tends to a certain goal. From here emerges the idea that in its last state of perfection,

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machines know always where they are going, in contrast to us” (1971:461).

Fig.4: Jean Tingueley – Dissecting Machine – 1965 – motor setting, mannequin parts with forged iron. Photography: Hickey-Robertson, Houston, The Menil Collection

By returning to the Greek coincidence between letter and number, after the convergence of the technologies that were fathered by the Second World War, today’s situation requires analysis that not only makes use of the computer and the silicon that powers it but also places it as its key concept. The computer is therefore the medium of the end of media, for it contains in itself the possibility of simulating all previous media. Working with a number and its absence (1 and 0), it reduces all representation to a truly universal language: the symbolic consummates itself. The written page had already ceased its domain by the late 60s, right before the first IBM chip was invented in a garage. The players in this dethroning of the book as the king of all media were precisely the gramophone, film and typewriter, and the names of their developers and inventors resound as fundamental characters of the reshaping of reality (Wirklichkeit), which leads to the conclusion that any new approach to the History of Being cannot forget those engineers and politicians and focus exclusively on

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philosophers. In the fractures of recent history, there are mathematicians, engineers, poets and philosophers whose names stand as key players. It is certain that the process of constituting a sensitivity capable of producing achronological temporalities, that is, images that are infused with colors, textures and voices that whispered or cried in despair, locomotives in fury or splendors in the grass, was already being put in practice by literature (in all its glory with Goethe), in an erotic writing that became hypersensitive to the point of being a sort of nervous prosthesis that merged with our own sensibility. Kittler does not state that the new medium surpasses its predecessors but rather that it forces the latter to take on other functions. The example of radio and television is obvious but, if we take a closer look, video killed the radio star and not the radio itself, or, as Derrida pointed out, “There is, there will be as it has always existed, a coexistence and survival of past structural moments, there where the creation leads to new possibilities” (2001:29). In the case of the book, the promise remains of a book to come that takes on the page and includes the media situation of our time: “We expect another book, a book to come that will transfigure or even save the book of the sinking which is taking its course” (Derrida, 20–21) – Kittler prefers to point out the fact that if today, even if “nobody writes” (1993:227), “Working in the limit area, the obsolete media will be sensitive enough to register the symbols and symptoms of a situation” (1986:4). The central point is to deduct the consequences of the invention of computer. The question is, similar to the last century concerning photography or cinema, what are the consequences of technology not only for the experience, but, first of all, for detecting the fractures and possible continuities that the digital representation introduced in contemporary thought systems. In the domain of the arts, we have seen symptoms that this understanding is far from evident: “The technician does not know precisely what the artist needs, the artist does know what he needs from the technician” (Hans Erdmann, Zwischen Technik und Ästhetik, 1929). The work of Kittler states a radical change that retakes the Greek particularity that was the base of western expression: the coincidence, in a phonetic alphabet, that features vowels/vocals (in German, both are described by the term vokal) with a numerical system. The fundamental premise of Media Sciences (Medienwissenschaft) as a total reading system, that is, a true Ontology of Media, assumes itself as brutally material, limited by what theory is capable of: more than a phenomenology of perception, it stands for a phenomenology of phenomenology for it establishes as its a priori not what things are but how things are constituted in the technical and technological aspects of

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their appearance – the dualism form/matter falls to leave in the center the concept of media. This approach should not be mistaken for the aesthetics approach, since media are always “beyond” or “outside” aesthetics: “they define what truly is” (Kittler, 1986:10). Contrary to what philosophy is used to, that is, submitting hardware to software (the material reality to the spirit), this new approach inverts the pyramid in a reminder that it was the spirit who was the slave of supports and not the other way around. In order to give an example of this approach, let us focus on the Roman Empire. There is no way to examine the political, economic and historical problems of this period without considering the via romana, the Roman network of roads. Kittler refers to the Roman Empire as the network of roads itself since it is imbricated in the culture, experience and practice of the power of the empire to the point of not being distinguishable – the network is a manifestation of the Empire itself, that is, the keystone of reading that historical moment. Kittler’s last effort is precisely to look at western history through a totalizing evolution of music and mathematics, using as a reference the conceptions of western sensibility – a monumental conception of the great systems of recording as the testimonies of western poetry and thought – starting with the Greek (Aphrodite und Eros), passing by the Roman Empire (Sexus und Virginitas), progressing toward medieval times with Minne, Liebe and Sex, and ending its tour in the present times, Turingzeit (Kittler, 2006, 2009). His latter works put in place a new set of concepts that promise a new understanding of culture (2009: 26–28): stocking, processing and transmission. Only when a medium successfully assembles them (the computer) is it possible to trigger a system of thought which, retroactively, understands the way these functions were assembled and set apart throughout history and its material culture. The method is clear: by analyzing a culture’s objects, we are able to understand its world view and power structure. If Kittler starts his Gramophon, Film, Typewriter by stating that “Media define our situation, which (despite of or because of it) deserves a description,” he clarifies the meaning of this despite of or because of it: if we are indeed determined by media, there is no “outsider” point of view from which we could engage in a neutral analysis. The fact that media configure us engages us from the beginning in their functioning – we are always set between technical mediations in a much more profound sense than a certain discourse of the social sciences leads us to believe. This sort of deceiving discourse, which aims to cover the priority of technology and technique in the constitution of reality, tries to put the spirit where it did not exist as something other than a media effect – in the bodies of readers. The spirit (Geist) is in itself an effect whose constitution can be detected in

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a historical period: those centuries that led to the invention of Gutenberg prepared that totalizing moment where all knowledge had been submitted to the structure of the book, with its pages, index and other paratextual elements, that crowned it as the medium of all media. The compiled pages were the discourse network where power left marks of its functioning: in the letters that were written, the destiny of nations and people were decided, reputations and subjectivity were built and destroyed in mailed paper: there was gunpowder in writing, making all liaisons dangerous. The human sciences were, from the time of Vico, dominated by a philosophical thought whose players performed the role of text processors, that is, reducing an amount of text into another, the so-desired philosophical encyclopedia that was meant to synthesize the world, and that reached its glory (and subsequent fall) during the 19th century. Modern culture sprouted from the support of paper – the discourse networks that evolve in it manifest themselves in a manual writing, followed by typewriting, shaping the well-known Gutenberg Galaxy. The thinkers of such times could effectively describe the situation through text processing and literature. Kittler uses the expression despite of or because of it to assume that his analysis is subject to the technical and technological conditions of the epoch in which his book is being read. The gesture of starting a book by reminding readers that they are faced with dark ink on paper is not typical of philosophers who, blinded by its bibliographic methodology, would have its death announced the moment books no longer condense the spirit of an epoch. Everything happens in a process of mediation, from the vision to the touch, from hearing to tasting: the metaphors for what was not traditionally considered physical always stated what they were – concept (in German Begriff, “that which is held by the hand”) and imagination (Vorstellung, “that which is presented in front”). These gestures, based on and turned into metaphors from the purely physical realm gave to the machine of language the ability to talk of things such as the beautiful, the good or the mother, which, by not being material, allude to tensions in the work of the machine. The universal and the infinite cannot be found as something other than products of inscriptions. They emerge from inscriptions on paper or luminous projections, which does not mean that they do not exist – virtual does not mean the absence of existence. The essentialist thought is therefore forced to consider language, which it mistakes for the languages, not as a mere machine of production of essences but as a first machine, above all others – isn’t that the platonic curse to which the sophists did not succumb? In the literary culture, in the beginning there was the word (Schiller’s translation of the biblical

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sentence that mentions the ȜȩȖȠȢ). In order for language to function effectively, it has to forget its support. The problem is that this machine has failed for many, and the poets and artists are on the front line of those who deal with this failure and play around it. To promise readers that they are facing “an infinite gaze in an endless hugging,” as Goethe did, means that this gesture is permanently revocable, brought into presence. Eternity is something of books or, as the Portuguese poet Antero de Quental described it – “In the middle of the systems of philosophers and religions of the theologians, immortality appears as an endless aura in a small drop of water, in a tear of a woman” (1864); that is, the female readers to whom literature is aimed.

References Benjamin, Walter, Gesammelte Schriften, volume I-2. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974). Brangança de Miranda, J.A., Analítica da Actualidade. (Lisbon: Editora Vega, 1994). Bouveresse, Jacques, La Parole Malheureuse – De l’Alchimie Linguistique à la Grammaire Philosophique. (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1971). Delillo, Don, Cosmopolis. (New York: Scribner, 2003). Derrida, Jacques, Mal d’Archive – Une impression freudienne. (Paris: Editora Galilée, 1995). —. Marges de la Philosophie. (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972). —. Papier Machine. (Paris: Galilée, 2001). Groys, Boris, Über das Neue. Versuch einer Kulturökonomie. (Munich: Hansen, 2004). Heidegger, Martin, Sein und Zeit (or.1927), 17th edition. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993). Kittler, Friedrich, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1985). —, (Ed.), Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften. (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1980). —. Gramophon, Film, Typewriter. (Berlin: Editora Brinkmann & Bose, 1986). —. “Geschichte der Kommunikationsmedien,” in Raum und Verfahren edited by Jörg Huber und Alois Müller. (Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1993a), 169–88. Kittler, Friedrich, “Es gibt keine Software” in Kittler, Friedrich, Draculas Vermächtnis – Technische Schriften. (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1993b), 225–42

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—. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaft. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001). —. “Von Staaten und ihren Terroristen.” Lecture presented in 2002 in the “Mosse-Lectures,” Hilde Mosse Foundation, New York. —. Musik und Mathematik I. Hellas 1: Aphrodite. (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2006). —. Musik und Mathematik I. Hellas 2: Eros. (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2009). —. Optische Medien. Berlin Lecture, 1999. (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2011). Lacan, Jacques, Écrits. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1966). —. Le Séminaire. (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1978). Löffer, Petra and Kümmel, Albert (Eds.), Medientheorie 1888-1933. (Frankfurt am Main: Editora Suhrkamp, 2002). Quental, Antero, Cartas. Intro. by Ana Maria Martins. (Ponta Delgada: Universidade dos Açores, 1989).

CHAPTER TEN GENEALOGY OF PERCEPTION AND THE FABRICATION OF SOGENNANTE MENSCH CATARINA PATRÍCIO

1. On Perception Metaphysics has always sought to adjust to human perception. War has also always coincided with this management of perceptions, either in an expansion of the scopes or in its control. All that is called correlationism sought this control since it apprehends the world-registering events, phenomena and objects in a table of concepts, either for the establishment of a recognized repertoire or for the creation of a universe of meaning. Metaphysics in its entirety and all of the wars worked in correlation for the perception of what is taken as totality. By preconizing an ambitious project that goes through a refoundation of post-Kantian metaphysics, Meillassoux seeks to eliminate the “gene” of control from metaphysics, of which it is symptomatic, through a philosophy of contingency. Quentin Meillassoux builds speculation around the impossibility of verifying the totality of the phenomena that constitute the universe by either natural human perception or through the aid of mechanisms. For the French philosopher, the concepts are fixed and static categories. They are unable to contain reality, which is fluid and imponderable. As for correlationism, the main critique in After Finitude (Après la Finitude, 2008), it was established as a circular program that dominated post-Kantian philosophy, and built an incarcerating metaphysical ring around man. At the heart of this delimitation, thought exists in such completeness that it prevents any contamination of that which is unknown (to it). Meillassoux wants to establish the absence of thought because, he asserts, thought is not coextensive with being.

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Therefore, correlationism is expressed by its inseparability from thought in relation to the content that was thought, i.e., everything that can be compiled must be given to thought. Hence, there is no space for the unthinkable. In the constitution of speculative materialism, for which absolute reality is a reality without thought, you have to affirm that thought is not absolutely dilatable to existence and, therefore, that there is always an event that escapes it; or, better still, for the materialism that chooses the speculative path, it is necessary to reassure that a given reality is possible, excluding it from the fact that we are thinking it, which shocks, in an obvious way, the “strong model” of correlationism, which ensures that it is unthinkable that the unthinkable is possible (Meillassoux, 2008: 69). Essentially, the totality of knowledge, whether we like it or not, will always be incapable of taking into account the planet and the ways in which nature is revealed. You only have limited access to a world that, in its total indifference to the human being,1 is “supra”-metaphysical. There it is: metaphysics has always sought to regulate human perception. And war will also always coincide with the management and dilation of perception about the totality – apparent in the history of its multiple technical objects, which are always objects of perception. There is no war without perception, says Virilio (1984) – for whom weapons, in addition to their destructive potential, are also instruments of perception: they are stimulants that cause chemical and neurological allocation within the central nervous system, providing the necessary perceptual identification to differentiate between objects. But before you map the logistics of perception,2 you must understand the scope of this complex operation. It involves both the entity that perceives and the world that surrounds you. It is a perception that encompasses, as affirmed by Gilbert Simondon in his perceptive history Cours sur la Perception (1964–65). Perception is not contemplation but action: it is form building itself, it is a foundation unfolding itself, it is pure thought. And it is also this in so far as it affects 1

We are attacking logic when designing a world without thought, essentially disassociated if we think it or not, a blow that offends science and metaphysics: “The sense of desolation and abandonment which modern science instills in humanity’s conception of itself and of the cosmos has no more fundamental cause than this: it consists in the thought of thought’s contingency for the world, and the recognition that thought has become able to think a world that can dispense with thought, a world that is essentially unaffected by whether or not anyone thinks it” (Meillassoux, 2008: 187). 2 Logistics of Perception is the enlightening subtitle of War and Cinema (Virilio, 1984).

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the way each epoch accounts for the real, affecting the way in which it makes it come forward.3 In this regard, perception reveals a truth that philosophy collects and sends to subjects. And there is truly a philosophy of perception – but isn’t all philosophy a philosophy of perception? This is the question that we can take away from reading the notebooks from Gilbert Simondon’s courses on perception. In the first part of the course from 1964, Simondon devotes himself to the study of perception as an operation that generates western thought. He reflects on how, for the logic and ethics of classical antiquity, perception is taken as the sole instrument of knowledge. Thus, before the development of physical and natural sciences, this operation was always the foundation for the entire reflection and mode by which an understanding of the world was sought. In an attempt to establish a principle that might serve to encompass or universally connect to the subjects, Simondon describes the “transcultural” movement of the first port cities of the Mediterranean. There you find foundations that demonstrate how knowledge through the means of myth is not absolutely dilatable and therefore incapable of giving an account of reality. He discards the myth, but not completely. He replaces it with the idea of perception. This is how western philosophy began – in Greece, and with the unconditional choice of perception as a source of knowledge (Simondon, 1965: 6). With declared perception, it reached an operative universality. It is irrevocable that Greek philosophy is a philosophy of perception despite a clear separation between two distinct attitudes: on the one hand, there are the Ionian physiologists and the privilege given to sensuality. In other words, there is a path toward knowledge in which reality and objectivity to sensitive qualities is granted. On the other hand, there is the trajectory covered by Eleatic, Pythagorean and Platonic structures that concentrate on the form and in which their structure deviates from material meanings. Eleatic thought only admits the existence of two sources of knowledge: that which comes from the senses, and is pure illusion, and the knowledge that comes from rationality and, for this reason, is true. But, in the end, what Gilbert Simondon searches for is to demonstrate that any of the doctrines already show a real analysis of the problem of perception. Therefore, either in the priority given to form or in the priority given to sensation, we are dealing with different perceptions. If for Pythagoreans and Platonians the real is a fact a priori because it pre-exists the apprehension of any perceptual information, for the Ionian physiologists 3

Perception is a vital operation for aletheia, which is this bringing to the front of the ways to make the world through truth.

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the real takes shape during both the process of perception and operation. Simondon synthesizes that if in the first case the future is negative, because it already exists, and it multiplies or transforms itself from here on, then in the second case, the future is positive because the real is formation and growth since its genesis, and hence the objects are also a construction in progress (Simondon, 1965: 21). Therefore, the two postures complement each other in a debate that, instead of opposing form and knowledge, gathers perceptions. The classic period is different. With rationalism and empiricism, perception is conceived not as a source of knowledge but as an operation. A general expulsion of perceptual experience is observed – since after the discovery of mechanics, the classic period found a source of deductive and constructive knowledge regardless of perception. The progress in biology, particularly with Georges Canguilhem, who greatly influenced Simondon, refocuses on the study of perception. It thus becomes, for the modern era, a principle of intelligibility of the world, “no more than as a source of logical paradigms and criteria of true knowledge, but as a starting point for a theory of the relationship between the body and the environment” (Simondon, 1965: 3). Perceiving is not only comprehending a particular form; it is much more. It is resolving a conflict by discovering a compatibility and, therefore, an inventive action in itself. It modifies not only the relationship that the individual maintains with the object but also the structure of the object itself. The being understands, conceives, and while modifying its relationship with the environment, modifies itself, “inventing new internal structures” (Simondon, 1964: 28). Here we find several points of agreement with his theory of individuation because Simondon is much more interested in the nature of the process than in the epistemological finality or in the effect of the operation.

2. On the Genealogy of the Logistics Perception In its singular and collective existence we know how mankind was highly affected by the technique – and war demonstrates it because it was always there. This condition was synthesized by Walter Benjamin: During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. (Benjamin, 1939: 222)

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Thus, each period is marked by the technical paradigm that is contemporaneous to it because each civilization organizes a perception of the world in accordance with its technical substrate.4 This experience expands perception, which very symptomatically determines epistemology, the legal propositions produced, and the geopolitical scouring between nations to produce, in the end, that which we take as history. All in all, the mutation of technical objects and the medium that determines perception decisively affect the ways of conceiving and making the world. But let us remember that it is war that serves as the technical environment for all this mutation. Perception is essential in military culture, and information technologies gave it a new consistency. Human perceptive functions are reflected in machines, replicating spontaneous behaviors and physiological aspects that are specific to living beings.5 We also know how machines are sensitive to light and vibration, and have an auditory, thermal and even chemical sensitivity. Human essence, crystallized over the entire apparatus, questions the limits of differentiation; it is now the machines and assemblies that complain about the functions of the central nervous system, and not only those that amplify human muscles as they once did. We know how Kittler matches the origin of Man to the creation of writing and the alphabet. With the recent arrival of the era of technical networks, precipitated by the computational turn, there is an essential differentiation between matter and information: it is there that the so-called human was irreversibly divided between physiology and information.6 But it should be

4 For Simondon, however, culture is delayed in relation to technical reality. Let’s emphasize the note: “Il faudrait faire une histoire du développement des objets techniques, qui serait une histoire par étapes, et voir qu’il y a une espèce de retard de la culture sur la réalité” (Simondon, 1968: 108–09). 5 It is known how Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings anticipated many inventions, and mimic either the appearance or functions in the natural world: the war tank mimics the strength and robustness of the elephants, and the idea for a proto-helicopter is born from the spiral of a shell, among other examples (Mazlish, 1993: 15). 6 See the full passage: “And with this differentiation – and not with steam engines and railroads – a clear division occurs between matter and information, the real and the symbolic. When it comes to inventing phonography and cinema, the age-old dreams of humankind are no longer sufficient. The physiologies of eyes, ears, and brains have to become objects of scientific research. For mechanized writing to be optimized, one can no longer dream of writing as the expression of individuals or the trace of bodies. The very forms, differences, and frequencies of its letters have to be reduced to formulas. So-called Man >sogenannte Mensch@ is split up into physiology and information technology” (Kittler, 1986: 16).

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noted that there are possibilities that reveal a genealogy of perception and its logistics. It was on a trip by steamboat, and by taking into consideration the incessant repetition of the movement of the boat paddles, that Colonel Richard J. Gatling created the machine gun with a cylindrical drum activated by a crank. We were in 1861, the year in which the American Civil War started. Similarly, and inspired by the revolver with a Colt drum, astronomer Jules Janssen conceived his astronomical revolver in 1874, a device capable of photographing in a continuous mode so as to record the movement of planets. The essential link between automatic weapons and the camera is Étienne-Jules Marey.7 The chronophotographic rifle,8 a descendant of weapons with a mobile drum and barrel, was able to capture the motion of a body moving in space in a single plate (Virilio, 1984: 15). If, as Virilio reminds us, we take into account that it was the professor of optics Henry Chrétien who outlined the groundwork for a new process of filming while he refined telemetry in artillery, and that would be called “CinemaScope” – an optical trick that led to the formation of an image two times higher – we can better achieve the harmonious relationship between the functions of the eye and those of armaments (Virilio, 1984: 86). In 1794, General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan emerged victorious from the Battle of Fleurus because he was able to visit the battlefield of the enemy through the first observation balloon, the Entreprenant. About sixty years later, Nadar would take the first photos from a balloon, elevating photography to the height of art.9 And shortly after, during the American Civil War, the first balloons equipped with telegraphs and many other ways of reaching the distanced world were used. In fact, direct perception had become a thing of the past. There is a tendency toward an agglutination between elements – the paradigmatic example of such a coalescence is the cruise missile. But for a genealogy of perception, see the “missile-video” in its ancestral form: in 1912, Alfred Maul launched a gunpowder-fueled rocket with a coupled 7

According to Kittler: “It was then only a matter of combining the procedures of shooting and filming to take Marey’s brand name literally. The chronophotographic gun became reality in the cinema of artificial, that is, lethal, bird flights” (Kittler, 1986: 125). 8 Georges Demeny, Marey’s assistant, publishes L'Education du Marcheur in 1904, where he demonstrates the usefulness of chronophotography in the distribution of the effort of the combatant in forced marches or in the handling of weapons; Demeny would later come to play an important role in the physical preparation of the armed forces (Virilio, 1984: 86). 9 “Élevant la Photographie à la hauteur de l'Art” – invokes here the lettering in Honoré Daumier’s known lithography from 1863.

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camera that, when it achieved the maximum point of its distance in relation to the ground, would shoot a single image while descending slowly and bringing to the terrain a vision of heights in synthesis; what we would call a map. It was a military experience that aimed to prolong Nadar’s aerostatic photos.10 The vehicle-weapon operated as a machinist paradigm of contemporary war through the figure of miniaturization; not only when the equipment illustrates a perceptive disarrangement when shrinking the Earth to a single image, that which is viewed from space, but also in the technical achievement that led to the reduction of equipment. With the launch of satellites, unmanned drones, radar and other equipment that work on real-time perception from a distance, it has become possible to have a global and live vision of the Earth that is no longer deferred. However, we were able to reach a distance without going there for a long time; and military sighting has long counted on artificial perception. Let’s look at the example: technical progression from the watch tower up to the reconnaissance plane and the subsequent achievement of electro-optical assembly, with the innovation of the satellite network, enlightens us as to the constant entry of “viewing machines”11 in the combat field. The individuation of the ocular element in individuals and optical arrays attest to a phylogenetic line, or a family of technical objects, which are rooted in a single act of synthetic invention,12 i.e., vision. From an early age, military sighting devices ceased to be disarmed.

3. The Fabrication of Sogennante Mensch For the logistics of perception, any machine is close enough to the world to become a means of decoding it. It is like this in Simondon, who considers it a privilege for the bipedal creature to be able to see the world from a plane or satellite.13 10

See War and Cinema. In 1988, Paul Virilio writes La machine de vision, which was obviously an extension to the inevitable War and Cinema from 1984. He then continues with his analysis on the role of perception in the field of battle, noting that the logistics of the image is completely rooted in contemporary culture. 12 Gilbert Simondon stresses that the technical object generates a family and this transformation involves the idea of a natural technical evolution, and that the beginning of a strain of objects is marked by an act of synthetic invention defined as pre-individual essence (Simondon, 1958). 13 Simondon says “Voir le monde d’avion, le voir d’un satellite, c’est le voir comme jamais homme ne l’a vu aussi concrètement, mais à une plus grande 11

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It was the technique, from the outset, that makes all correlationist pretensions fall. It only takes, from time to time, surprising inventions to reveal wonderful inaccessible landscapes that would continue to be beautiful even if there wasn’t anybody there to see them. Each technical object denotes an intention and a new aesthetic attitude because, in addition to coming from or fixing any human intentionality, that intention and attitude are collected from the natural world. The television antenna is one of the examples used by Simondon. The antenna lies between geography and transmission; that is, it is between nature and its transduction into waves that disseminate information. There is a “conaturalness” between the human network and natural geography but, contrary to assuming the correlation14 between nature and human, it presupposes the emanation of the technique of the natural world. Technical objects are more than symbols that appear on the horizon since they reveal a kind of magical gesture, a contemporary magic, adds Simondon (1968: 111), precisely because they unveil landscapes that natural human perception could never access. This is how, and stressing the non-anthropocentric anthropology of Friedrich Kittler, we come up against the principle that sees war as the engine of so-called humans (sogenannte Mensch). Understanding, then, that after two millennia of conflict, it was in war and for war that the telephone as an artificial ear was invented, or that the telegraph was imagined as an artificial mouth, just as the recorders, radars and drones distance et avec une plus grande vitesse. On ne saurait accorder de privilège à la bipédie pour voir le monde, ou au fait de passer en voiture. Tout est bon, pourvu que l’on reconnaisse qu’il s’agit de vitesses et d’altitudes différentes” (1968: 111). 14 In an attempt to drop correlationism and anthropocentrism, we should recall that Meillassoux accuses Kantianism of bringing a Ptolemaic counter-revolution to philosophy. Let us briefly look at the idea: as a result of the application of the Copernican model to the sciences, Immanuel Kant established a reconfiguration of thought in philosophy, thus pointing to a retreat in the geocentric cosmological system. The decentring supported by modern science has engendered the disqualification of heliocentrism in reason, and we have witnessed a return to man as the centre of thought, and of the universe itself. Thus, a vision of the world has been regenerated, one that is absolutely dependent on conditions, occurrences and events that are observable by humans. And the deeper meaning of this counterrevolution is the correlation that is abated between being and thought, interpreting everything, even the elements that “seem to be indifferent to our relationship with the world” (Meillassoux, 2008: 191–92). We should reiterate that the decentring operated in science by the Copernican revelation has revitalised a centralization in man and in his thought and, therefore, within the Kantian framework that Meillassoux rejects, everything that exists, exists in the correlation.

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were implemented. William S. Burroughs states in The Electronic Revolution (1970) that basically there is only one game and this game is war.15 It is for this reason that all objects and subjects can be recruited, or rather, can be fully mobilized16 to the war fronts that are now everywhere – from the traditional stages of air, land and sea combat to smaller stages such as spreadsheets, videos or jpegs: “World war weapons like the Magnetophone have been put to commercial use in the shape of tape recorders >…@.” (Kittler, 1986: 110) Behold the magnetophone, which after its commercial sale, would return to wear the clothes of the past and make war with the Watergate case, something that would repeat decades later with the servers of Cablegate. For Friedrich Kittler, the idea that humans have created language was imponderable. The philosopher’s thesis involves identifying how the media are, a priori, anthropological and how they manufactured the socalled humans. To give substance to his argument, he goes to William Burroughs’ Garden of Eden. In Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden (1970), Burroughs presents an admirable theory. He suggests that, in the ancestral origin of the human species, the “virus of biological mutation B-23” altered the structure of the throat of primates that were not programmed to speak. As a symptom of the presence of the virus, the first hominids that were especially intended to receive it would have suffered incipient biological alterations. These alterations were progressively transmitted at a genetic level until the point at which the symbiotic relationship is established. From that moment on, and for the host, the parasite began to be perceived as “a useful part of itself,” showing how natural the future can be achieved in a process of individuation.17 The whole theory denotes that the virus made the spoken word possible. As the word is the first technical gesture, and by rebuilding the throat, which was not configured to speak, of monkeys, the virus created humans. It is this virus, the transmissible word, which made of Adam, Eve

15

“The weapons that transform consciousness could question the war game. All games are hostile. Basically there is only one game and this game is war” (Burroughs, 1970: 92) [My translation from the Portuguese version]. 16 See Ernst Jünger and Die Totale Mobilmachung, 1930. 17 For Simondon, a technical object, the maximally concrete, is something that merges with the natural domain.

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and God recorders in the Garden of Eden as true as the recorders in the Watergate case.18 Friedrich Kittler tries to prove to the social sciences his technological being, a priori, and if this has not been recognized it is because it exists in a stable state of symbiosis with the host. The human being was therefore manufactured in a process of individuation that founded the written word as the first technical gesture of humans – as a synthetic act of invention. And it is truly there that history begins. From that moment onwards, it was possible to manufacture an amplified perception, discovering, finally, how perception was already a medium, a priori, analogous to the functioning of artillery. In fact, the technique is this first step where the human begins. But the correspondence of anthropogenesis to technogenesis is owed to André Leroi-Gourhan. It was in a chain of successive releases, or individuations, that the hand freed the word, and the bipedal march which freed the hand, freed the prehension (Leroi-Gourhan, 1964: 122) by releasing mediation and perception, and consubstantiating the first technical impulse. For the freed hand calls itself a tool. And the human being invented himself at the technical moment he invented the first tool. There, by externalizing himself technically onto the tool, in writing, man manufactured himself so as to be able to exercise his thoughts. Let’s recall Simondon who stated that before the era of the machine there already existed embryonic machines in the world. Through scientific anticipation, mechanology has long existed under a poetic form, which foresees the relationship between the most perfect industry, the best well-equipped science and nature in its most natural state.

References Benjamin, W., “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. (New York: Schocken Books, >1939@ 1992), 217–51. Burroughs, W., A Revolução Electrónica. Trans. M. Teles e J. Mourão. (Lisbon: Vega, >1970@ 2010). Harman, G., “Grant, Bruno, and Radical Philosophy,” in Speculative Turn: Controversial Materialism and Realism. Trans. J. Golb and R. Wolin. (Melbourne: Re. Press, 2010), 21–40. 18

“Perhaps we have in these three recorders a biologically mutated virus which once gave us the word and has hidden behind the word since then” (Burroughs, 1970: 27) [My translation from the Portuguese version].

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Kittler, F., Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, >1986@ 1999). Leroi-Gourhan, A., O Gesto e a Palavra. Vol.1. Técnica e Linguagem. Trans. V. Gonçalves. (Lisbon: Edições, >1964@ 1990), 70. Mazlish, B., The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-evolution of Humans and Machines. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993). Meillassoux, Q., After Finitude: An Esssay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans. R. Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008). Simondon, G., On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Trans. N. Mellamphy. (Ontario: University of Western Ontario, >1958@ 1980). —. Cours sur la Perception. (Chatou: Les Éditions de La Transparence, >1965@ 2006). —. “Entretien sur la Mecanologie,” Revue de synthèse, 130 (>1968@ 2009): 103–32. Virilio, P., War and Cinema – The Logistics of Perception. Trans. Patrick Camiller. (London-New York: Verso, [1984] 1989).

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE KITTLERIAN INTERFERENCE IN FILM AS A “CONSTRUCTIVE EXTENSION” OF MAN CARLOS NATÁLIO

In a recent interview I had the opportunity to have with Catalan director Albert Serra in Lisbon, for the presentation of his most recent film Història de la meva mort (in English, The Story of My Death), a crossroad of memoirs between Giacomo Casanova and the figure of Count Dracula, he told me how easy it was to become one of the best filmmakers in the world with a couple of friends, borrowed digital cameras and very little money. With the provocative tone of affirmation, there is an intention attached to this: to circumvent the scheme of production and bourgeoisindustrial representation and to make of the genetic reproducibility of film (the “produce through reproduction”1 to which Walter Benjamin drew attention) something of a performative nature. In his case there is no construction of shots – there are filmed scenes with non-actors and in the editing, Serra glues questions to answers that were not given, showing in the final result conversations that never really happened. In addition, the film was shot in a four-by-three format (4:3) and in the editing, the image was cut to sixteen-by-nine (16:9), the widescreen format. In this regard, the film that we can see repeatedly on the big screen never actually happened. This attempt to “tear the retina,”2 which seems to extend to a 1

“The technological reproducibility of films is based directly on the technology of their production,” in Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936), in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eland, et al. (London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 44. 2 The reference is to the famous sequence from Un Chien Andalou (1928) by Luis Buñuel in that one eye is cut by a blade. This moment is today an icon of the surrealist intention to introduce constant disruptions of the senses and meaning into the centre of artistic activity.

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certain extent the oldest Bretonian or Buñuelian surrealist tradition of attacking the construction of meaning, is a good starting point to realize the ontological nature of cinema [which always puts a projected exterior (material or immaterial) into contact with an interior (introjected, by perception)] and understand the relationship between the Macluhian extension of man through the medium of film and its non-symbolizing, inherent potential in the image. An incorrect and simplistic reading would put Marshall McLuhan and the German theoretician Friedrich Kittler in opposition regarding the generic relationship between man/technique and the specific connection between imaginary/image. On the one hand, the Canadian seems to embrace an anthropocentric notion of the technical relationship by portraying media as a “prosthesis” that puts to sleep the part that helps supplement, something that is highlighted in his idea “that our human senses, of which all media are extensions” (McLuhan, 1994: 21). This is an idea that moves toward the notion of a “technological simulation of conscience” that inaugurates the post-medial condition of ubiquity and the convergence of digital encoding – the world of Turing as media that ends all media. On the other hand, as Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz refer, the English translators of Grammophone, Film, Typewriter (1986), Kittler assumes his technological determinism, doing away with the humanistic concept of der sogenannte Mensch as a self-determined cognitive agent, subsumed by the technological march of self-sophistication (Kittler, 1999: XXXIV) initiated by engineers such as Edison, Muybridge, Marey and Lumière, laborers in a world where technology reigns and defies ontological notions of existence and authenticity. However, such an opposition is more apparent than real. It seems clear that both are well aware of the techno-logic dynamic inherent in the object in its dimensions of supplementarity and formatting of the human. Is it not this same dynamic that is already implicit in the call to attention that the “medium is the message”? Or, for example, in 1964 when McLuhan refers to the formula that must be taken into account in future cultural strategies: “Why the TV Child Cannot See Ahead” (McLuhan, 1994: 332). And Kittler, in turn, seems to believe in a dialectic of exchange between the discursive superstructure and the techno-based media in the history of technomaterialism. In the case of film, this dynamic can be seen in relation to the imaginary/moving image. Henri Bergson, in L'évolution Créatrice (1907), equates our process of knowledge to a cinematographic interior: Nous prenons des vues quasi instantanées sur la réalité qui passe, et, comme elles sont caractéristiques de cette réalité, il nous suffit de les

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This is the idea that allows Gilles Deleuze to conceptually map the seventh-art in L’Image Temps, stretching the Bazanian question “what is cinema?” toward this other question “what is philosophy?” This originating ontological permeability between cinema and the human is also implicit, to a certain extent, when Kittler relates the invention of cinema to the ability of exteriorizing the Lacanian “imaginary.” This is part of the explanation of the idea that the technological differentiation of optics, acoustics and writing produces an escape from the so-called human essence in relation to media apparatuses by which the machine takes over the functions of the central nervous system. In the case of cinema, the imaginary is then a matter of optical illusion by which the cutting of separate images from the real give way to the fusion and false fluidity in the imaginary. Perhaps this is why McLuhan speaks of the seventh art as a “magic carpet” in which we wrap the world, and as representing a “spectacular wedding of the old mechanical technology and the new electric world” (McLuhan, 1994: 284). In a famous passage from Orality and Literacy (1982), Walter Ong tells us that the transition from orality to writing involves the introduction of a greater division and alienation, and that this process is constitutive of our conscience. This division is a progressive process that cinema intensifies as “speeding up the mechanical,” lived as a fragmentary or sequential experience that “carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure” (McLuhan, 1994: 12). Although this idea refers to cinema as a symbol of modern experience in the specific mode of preparing perception technically, as a contemporary and residual product of military technology, we are interested in thinking that the supposed materialization of the imaginary produced by the seventh art, by which all dreams are possible and real, is its own technological constituent of what we can imagine. As a result, the imaginary is as much a producer of images as the reverse is true. This relationship is also another way of posing the question of ontological dynamics between stop and advance, between fragmentation and fluidity, and explains cinema as a passage of our energy to the spectacle, to the structure of aggregation, association and passage of elements as a relational form of knowledge. For Walter Benjamin, the experience of the optical and tactile, given its technical capacity to penetrate the sensitive experience, gave an appearance of naturalness to the artificiality of the aesthetic device. For him the auratic distance was

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broken by the ideals of a gradual immersion, which continues today in a rapid expansion process in the agency and indistinctness between the body and media apparatuses. And if Benjamin stressed the tactile element of montage, it was because the introduction of cinema had already started the technical equipping of perception into a model that would be constituted as a multisensory one, as a step in the constitution of the subject as an observer of modern vision that, Jonathan Crary3 examined, would ignore the centrality of vision, insisting on a flow logic. In this sense, cinema has already indicated in a way the “decadence” of the regime of visuality that began with the written language and alphabet systems. As stated by McLuhan, the 20th century is that change from the visual space of a linear perspective to an acoustic space of the digital (an “audio-tactile” world introduced by TV (McLuhan, 1994: 45)), with a “dynamic, always in flux” dimension and where we carry out today an indistinction between the real and the virtual, between the potential and the actual, where there is nothing more real than the images and sounds in movement and constant hyperindividuation. Still related to the cold medium of television, McLuhan placed on the problem of flow the distinction between “visual structure” and “mosaic” precisely to have an understanding of how it could not allow the capacity of distancing because of its involvement in depth. In it, its “TV image reverses this literate process of analytic fragmentation of sensory life” (McLuhan, 1994: 332). You could say this distancing is the question of desire; it is distance as a space between me and the thing, that which ensures the non-satisfaction of that same desire and the perpetuation of its mechanics. It is an emotional investment, a kind of “glue of coherence” that allows us to think about the construction of meaning, of the operationalization of the temporary closure of the flow (or at least the mere cognitive mapping of possibilities) in the context of the infinite movement of sounds and images that constantly grasp and produce, in a digital context, the environment of formatting and the industrialization of the sensitive4 in which we are immersed. The absence of a rigid structure in circulation, the lack of structure in the audio-tactile mosaic, convenes the question of attention as the presupposition of desire. On this, we could say that from Benjamin’s

3

Cf. Jonathan Cracy, Techniques of the Observer. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). On the industrialization process of the sensitive cf. Bernard Stiegler, De la misère symbolique: Tome 1 L’époque hyperindustrielle. (Editions Galilée, 2004); and Bernard Stiegler, De la misère symbolique: Tome 2, La catastrophe du sensible. (Editions Galilée, 2005).

4

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notion of “reception in distraction” 5 to the pathologies of contemporary “attention deficit disorder,” there is an entire path that became denser and which connects the notion of spectacle as a mobilizer of perception stimulated by a total and constant mediation (Debord’s section 18) to a civilizational process (Norbert Elias) that normalizes (Foucault), and generates discontent (Freud) by the repression of impulses until a postmodern libidinal economy (Lyotard) based on the manipulation and destruction of mechanisms of desire within a system of pulsating capitalism. If this path seems to demonstrate (although with the inspiring disagreement of a counterculture based on the famous work by Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 1955) a “victory” of thanatos over eros, it claims that connection between the issue of attention and the formation of desire. It is at this point that some authors today seek support from neuroscience to explain, for example, the incompatibility between the dual fragmentation of the digital, of the zeros and ones, of the “good and evil” and the formation of attention and the ability to think in depth, producing a culture of “superficial thinkers” (Carr, 2010: 141,194) or a society of mere hunters and gatherers of information, in a movement of disintegration of the “reading brain” in the digital context of the end of the book civilization (Wolff, 2008: 226). But back to the film Història de la meva mort, it does not cease to be curious that Albert Serra has put in it precisely two models of desire – one that expands outwardly through sociability and female conquering, attributes of Cansanova’s charm; the other, the desire of Dracula, of possession and submission that does not run to things but makes things come to him. This space of desire, which may involve conquest (advancing from the interior to the exterior) or submission (the retreat of the interior with the advance of the exterior) allows the creation of a clear image of how the cinematic technique can work even when cinema is only an archaeological dash. Cinema or the “cinema-form” (that would involve the production of provisional meanings through the transductive6 and aggregative operation of sounds, images and other elements of the real in a montage of everyday life) establishes itself as a flow of images over the flow of consciousness of the spectator (Stiegler, 2001:34), which may 5

Cf. Sections XVII and XVIII in Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936), in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eland, et al. (London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 38ff. 6 On the transductive operation cf. SIMONDON, Gilbert, L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme e d’information. (Éditions Jérôme Millon, 2005), 32.

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promote the maintenance of this submission. This submission, which implies, in the short term, the passage from desire to instinctual behavior, is carried out by the decline of individuation, by strengthening the paths already taken of the stereotypes, influencing movement as a formal path, the flow without a constitution of meaning that is produced by the encounter of the psychic individuation with the collective one. The occupation of media spaces as instruments of power that propose a control of the sensitive experience, and of the mechanisms of symbolization and representation for economic purposes, promotes a space of desingularization, in that the art, the art of images, enters the field of information, as Kittler refers indirectly by talking about the example of the insertion of CocaCola images in films as a weapon for suggestion and manipulation of the optic nerve (Kittler, 1999: 115). However, if as Ezra Pound stated, poets are “the antennas of race,” there is this effort in art to introduce invention as a competing strategy of resistance. This implies less of a construction of a new ethics of images for the masses (if only because it is doubtful that they still exist, that single ethics and these masses) and more of an establishment of a “trauma,” a short circuit in cognitive systems, which allows for conquest by a constructive extension of the exterior in relation to the interior, a new territory, the introduction of the unique human experience in the hygienic metaphysics of digital circulation. In the case of cinema, it is a sort of recovery of the “disaster of the gesture” (Agamben, 1993: 136), and it is the forms in space (in its unrepresentability and escape from the coded meaning) that allow a genuine encounter, a desire to encounter something that is in temporary cessation, a residual schwebendes bild that requires human fulfillment for it to meta-stabilize. That fulfillment is more like a provisional occupation of uninhabited spaces, hence perhaps the need to rethink Lyotard’s post-modern condition, put in its place early in the game, as an appearance or echo without ownership of the modernist voice. To think about it not as a project but as a point of departure to access the way of conceiving values of serenity and coherence over infinite variation and repetition. These are characteristics of that landscape, in which we are “in the middle,” between the crisis or the idea of present apocalypse and a future, that seems to us already gloomy because it is calculable and calculated.

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References Agamben, Giorgio, “Notes on Gesture” in Infancy and History – The Destruction of Experience. Trans. Liz Heron. (London/New York: Verso, 1993). Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (1936). Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eland, et al. (London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008). Bergson, Henri, L’évolution Créatrice (1907). (Presses Universitaires de France, 2007) (édition électronique). Carr, Nicholas, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. (New York: Norton & Company, 2010). Debord, Guy, A Sociedade do Espetáculo (1967), Trans. Estela dos Santos Abreu. (Brasil: Contraponto Editora, 1997). Kittler, Friedrich, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986), Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop Young and Michael Wutz. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999). McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media - The Extensions of Man (1946). (London: MIT Press,1994). Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy (1982). Trans. (New York: Routledge, 2005). Stiegler, Bernard, La Technique et le Temps 1. La Faute d’Epimethée. (Paris: Galilée, 1994). —. La Technique et le Temps 3. Le Temps du Cinéma et la Question du Mal-Être. (Paris: Galilée, 2001). Wolff, Mayanne, Proust and the Squid. (London: Icon Books, 2013).

ABSTRACTS / CONTRIBUTORS

Chapter One Bernhard Siegert is Gerd-Bucerius Professor for the Theory and History of Cultural Techniques at the Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar. He studied German literature, comparative linguistics, philosophy, Judaic studies, and history at Freiburg University. He received his PhD from Ruhr-Universität, Bochum in 1991. After a position as assistant professor of Aesthetics and History of Media (Institut für Kultur-und Kunstwissenschaft) at Berlin’s Humboldt University, Siegert came to Weimar in 2001. In 2004 he was a co-founder of the graduate school “Mediale Historiographien.” Together with colleagues from the faculties of Architecture and Media he also initiated the MA program “MediaArchitecture” at Weimar. In 2004/05 Siegert was Senior Fellow at the IFK (Internationales Forschungszentrum für Kulturwissenschaft) in Vienna, and in 2008 and 2011 he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is, with Lorenz Engell, one of the founders of the IKKM and has co-directed the institution since 2008. Mediality After Media: The Textility of Cultural Techniques Not only methodologically but also ontologically, media – according to Friedrich Kittler – have been characterized primarily by their inauthenticity since the triumph of the digital computer. Methodologically, their authentic meaning never was to be found within their own history but rather in their "destructive character." Ontologically, media existed after the implementation of Turing's Universal Machine and Shannon's scanning theorem only as ghosts of their own selves. But, strangely enough, this deprivation of an ontological significance led to a mediatheoretical revision of ontology itself, which is labeled now as cultural techniques. It pits practices and processes against the various categories of being. The theory of cultural techniques demands that medium and message, ground and figure, passivity and activity, object and meaning are no longer conceptualized as separate but as woven into each other. Therefore, textile art and textile media may form a new paradigm of postkittlerian media theory.

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Chapter Two Born in 1944 in Odessa, Peter Weibel studied literature, philosophy, medicine, logic and film in Paris (F) and Vienna (A); and since 1966 conceptual photo-literature as well as audio pieces, texts, objects and actions. At the end of the 1960s, he worked in the field of Expanded Cinema, action art, performances and film together with his partner Valie Export. His interdisciplinary activities comprise scientific and artistic as well as literary, photographic, graphic, plastic and digital works. As theoretician and curator, he was a.o. curator of the Neue Galerie, Graz (A), and professor at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna (A), as well as the commissioner for the Austrian pavilion of the Venice Biennale; from 1989 to 1994 director of the Institut für Neue Medien, Frankfurt/M. (D) and since 1999, chairman of the ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe (D). He lives and works in Karlsruhe. Beginning with work in the tradition of visual poetry, Weibel produced “media-based literature” in the form of paper, photographic and object poems, body texts and material poetry, text objects and video texts. Conceptual works and actions followed, together with media analyses employing the media under scrutiny, initial TV experiments on Austria's ORF, and later numerous installations deploying film and video. The publication of candid sexual representations in a black book on Viennese Actionism led to a lawsuit against its publishers Valie Export and Peter Weibel in 1970. Both artists continued to support each other's projects into the late 1970s, with Weibel writing the screenplays for Export's films Unsichtbare Gegner (Invisible Opponents), 1977, and Menschenfrauen (Humanwomen), 1979. His subjects are less body-oriented, however, and deliver from a media-specific and semiological viewpoint socially critical analyses of systems and machines like film, television and the visual arts. Weibel was an early and eloquent champion of a theory of media and communication, which he repeatedly applied in investigating the inherent laws and mechanisms of the various media. Media and Amechania Odysseus has many surnames, epitheton ornans, that indicate to which character traits he owes his survival of his ten-year odyssey. Among them there was polymetis, the wise one, and polymechanos, the resourceful one. Polymechanos comes from amechania, the goddess of helplessness. “A” is in the Greek language a negation. The word mechanics is the opposite of

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amechania, of helplessness. Up until the 19th century, there were polytechnic institutes, which went back to the term polytechnos (Greek: skilled in many arts). Starting with this etymology, a new media theory is conceptualized.

Chapter Three Sybille Krämer (born in 1951) is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Freie Universität, Berlin. Having studied philosophy, history and social sciences in Hamburg and Marburg, she received a PhD in philosophy at Philipps-Universität, Marburg, where she worked as assistant professor between 1982 and 1989. In 1988, she completed her habilitation, titled Berechenbare Vernunft. Kalkül und Rationalismus im 17. Jahrhundert. Krämer has been visiting professor at the Vienna University of Technology (1993), the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna (2005/ 2006/2007), and the universities of Zurich (2006), Luzern (2008/2010) and Graz (2011). Krämer also held several fellow- and memberships; most notably, she was a founding member of the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin in 2000. From 2000 to 2006, she was a member of the Wissenschaftsrat. Since 2006, she has been a permanent fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, since 2007 a member of the Scientific Panel of the European Research Council, and since 2008, she has held the chair of the graduate school “Notational Iconicity” at Freie Universität, Berlin. Materiality of Script and the Operation of Thoughts: Some Reflections on “Notational Iconicity” and “Flattening Out” as a Cultural Technique For a long time the phonographic dogma dominated the theory of writing: writing is considered to be a fixed version of spoken language. Consequently, musical notation, dance notation, numerical and logical notation, scientific formulas and programming languages, etc. do not count as writing. To look at writing as a cultural technique means to overcome this language-centered phonographic dogma. The decisive argument is the non-linearity and operativity of writing: Notational signs open up a twodimensional space of aisthetic presentation and tactile manipulations. Writing is a paper-tool, a laboratory for cognitive and aesthetic activities. This creative potential comes into view only when it is recognized that writing is not language, but rather synthesizes image and language, combines the iconic and the discursive. The concept of “notational iconicity”

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refers to the perceptibility, the materiality and the operativity of writing. What this means will be systematically developed and demonstrated by different examples.

Chapter Four Maria Teresa Cruz teaches Media Theory and Aesthetics at NOVA University of Lisbon (UNL, Portugal) and she is a member of the Research Center of Communication and Language (CECL / UNL), which she directed between 2012–2015. She has published mostly in the fields of contemporary art and culture, and she is also the editor of New Media, New Practices (2011), Art, Before and After Art (2010) and the founder of the journal Interact – Art, Culture and Technique. Medium, Dispositif, Apparatus This paper reflects on some of the recent contributions for the definition of dispositif and also on the use of this concept in media theory. We give particular attention to the near equivalence between the notions of dispositif or “apparatus” and “medium” currently established in cultural and communication studies. Some of the most significant reasons for this equivalence lie in the onto-theological “economy” that determined one of the earliest and most significant determinations of “apparatus.” This highlights the fact that the control of appearance is a central operation of all “apparatus,” thus showing the relevance of the rationalization of the sensible underlying mediation processes continuously present throughout media history. Keywords: medium, dispositif, apparatus, economy, senses

Chapter Five José Gomes Pinto. Associate Professor in the School for Communication, Architecture and Art at the Lusófona University of Humanities and Technologies; Undergraduate in Philosophy at the New University of Lisbon; PhD in Aesthetics and Art Theory at US, under a grant given by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). Attended a postdoctoral program at Berlin’s Humboldt University. Part of several research projects in Portugal and Spain. Headed and created the degrees in Communication and Art and the Master’s program in

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Production and Creation in the Technological Arts. He is currently subdirector of ECATI, and runs the Post-Graduate and Research Department. Artifice as an Aesthetic Force. A Tribute to Friedrich Kittler The battlefield of the crisis that Western thought is experiencing today is found in the determination of the concepts of artificial, artifice and artificiality. This is the novum of modernity, our specific circumstance. In other words, the “new” in present times is a matter of human construction. The artificial is not the negative correlative of the real; it must be rethought as an image determined and configured in and by the history of its confrontation with nature and the natural. Thus, Friedrich Kittler’s mapping of the structure of media gives us an opportunity to determine, with precision, the “artificial” real that media themselves produce.

Chapter Six Maria Augusta Babo. Associate Professor at the Communication Sciences Department at the Human and Social Sciences College of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal; PhD in Literary Semiotics. Having worked closely with Julia Kristeva, develops research in theory of writing, semiotics and theory of the self. Recent publications: La traversée de la langue – le Livre de l'Intranquillité de Fernando Pessoa, Covilhã, LabCom Books; Arte & Melancolia, Lisbon, IHA/CECL, 2011 (co-edited with Margarida Acciaiuoli). On the Materiality of Writing and of Books We intend to point out the specificity of writing as a medium. The formalization of this proposition, in memory of Friedrich Kittler, states that materiality is constitutive of writing and defines it as medium. Perhaps the overtly exalted era of dematerialization of writing and books has allowed the confirmation, paradoxically, of their medial nature. With the advent of digitality, the possibility of dematerialization of writing and especially of the book, which hovered in the horizon, has reignited the question of their everlasting obliteration.

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Chapter Seven Manuel Portela is Assistant Professor with Habilitation in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Coimbra. He holds a PhD in English Culture (2001) and Habilitation in English Literature (2010). He was an FCT post-doctoral scholar at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), University of Virginia (2008). He has taught in several undergraduate (Modern Languages, Art Studies, Information Sciences) and graduate programs (MA in English and American Studies; MA in Poetry and Poetics; MA in Curatorial Studies; PhD in Contemporary Art, and PhD in Materialities of Literature). He was Director of the University Theatre (TAGV) between 2005 and 2008. He is a researcher at the Centre for Portuguese Literature at the University of Coimbra. He is also a team member of the research project “PO-EX ’70’80: A Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature” (CECLICO, University Fernando Pessoa, 2010–2013), and principal researcher of the project “No Problem Has a Solution: A Digital Archive of the Book of Disquiet” (CLP, University of Coimbra, 2012–2015). Signs in the Machine: The Poem as Dataflow Digital computer networks are now the main tool and space for writing. The metamedia nature of the computer as a writing device results from its technical ability to represent all data streams as numerical strings. Whether as hardware or software, digitization dissolves media specificity through common operations for coding, decoding and transcoding objects. This article discusses the electronic nature of writing, taking as its starting point Friedrich Kittler’s ideas about the relationship between circuits and interface. The automatic and human dimension of computational semiotic processing is analyzed in digital works by Jörg Piringer and Jason Nelson.

Chapter Eight Manuel Bogalheiro. Undergraduate and Masters Degree in Communication Sciences from Universidade da Beira Interior with a dissertation titled “The Role of Technique in the Control of Experience: Preventive Societies as a Product of a Technological-Political Mutation.” He is currently a grantee of FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology) and is working on his PhD thesis in Communication Sciences (Contemporary Culture and New Technologies) at FCSH-UNL, with a project based on a theory of objects and their relationship to technique and aesthetics, under the

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orientation of José Bragnaça de Miranda. From the Fallacy of the Immaterial to Kittler’s Surface Effect Recent developments in informational and digital technologies evince a hindrance in recognizing a physical consistency or stable presence in technical objects. Virtual imaginary conceives a reality where everything exists in circuits inaccurately and subsists through a nomadic ubiquity and detached from a particular support. Announcing the media crisis and the crisis of the object, the problem becomes a concrete one when it is assumed that physical space collapses with the emergence of cybernetic networks, and object hardness gives rise to the evanescence of electricity, optical fiber, frequencies and bits. Among artistic tendencies of dematerialization and theories on the virtual, a certain type of contemporary discourse emancipates the immaterial as a category that represents a new technological phase. However, this tendency to the immaterial seems to be narrow from the cultural angle, and inaccurate from the technical angle. It is narrow because it denies any materiality unrelated to metaphors of solidity, palpability, opacity or density, meanings that succeed from the Greek ਫ਼ȜȘ. It is inaccurate because, although evanescent, indeterminate or unstable, numerical-digital matter is still a material state. These material states compel, moreover, new exploitations of materiality and more sophisticated devices. The ubiquity of informational material and its unceasing circulation on network demonstrate that instead of being before a regime of immaterial, we are before a regime of multiplication where everything turns into information through intermediate states of matter and devices. After all, the modern epoch is not one of the immaterial but of the hypermaterial (Bernard Stiegler). Among the several involvements of this assumption, one begins to recognize a need to overcome the Aristotelian scheme of hylemorphism, which states that all bodies are constituted by shape and matter, and to realize that there is an ongoing state of things without things – when it is no longer possible to distinguish matter and form, everything will be only a surface. At this point, the suspension of the rigid materiality as a constraint to the universal converging of media in a total connection, what Friedrich Kittler called “surface effect” becomes relevant (Oberflächeneffekt), pointing to a generalization of the interface as a cultural and technological configuration that gathers the media crossing, the screen logic as experience and a formal regime of digital numeralization, whose referent is not in the natural world but in the

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universe of pure quantitative data, enabling a new morphogenetic of the world constantly taking shape. Keywords: materiality, surface effect, interface, hylemorphism, objects.

Chapter Nine Jorge Rodrigues. Undergraduate and Master’s degree in Communication Sciences – Contemporary Culture and New Technologies. Master’s program titled “Friedrich Kittler – Philosopher of Technology” (2013) under the orientation of Professor Maria Teresa Cruz. Rodrigues develops his research in the areas of Philosophy of Technique and Contemporary Art. Art Critic for artecapital.net. He attends the post-graduate program Philosophie et Critiques Contemporaines de la Culture at the Paris 8 University. Member of the jury at the 63rd Berlinale; translator of German, English and French. Several activities developed in the art market, especially with Galerie Polad-Hardouin (Paris), and others related to cinema, especially as a communication assistant for the association NISI MASA – Réseau du Jeune Cinéma (Paris). Assistant in Portuguese language classes in Paris (2014–2015). Notes on Media Ontology One of the crucial aspects of Kittler’s approach consists of proposing a methodology to create concepts and tools for questioning reality derived from the concrete properties of technical objects themselves. It therefore opens a dissolution of the defining features of what the roles of the intellectual, philosopher, engineer or poet consist of. New conceptual characters are proposed, and the analysis of the production of truth becomes key to changing technological society itself. Keywords: Kittler, ontology, technology, media

Chapter Ten Catarina Patricio [December, 1980]. Visual artist, researcher in Contemporary Culture and New Technologies, Teacher at UHLT –Lusófona University of Humanities and Technologies. Undergraduate degree in Painting at the Fine Arts Faculty of Lisbon’s University [FBA-UL: 1998–2003], having in the meantime studied photography and etching at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld under the ERASMUS program. In 2008, she concluded her

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Masters degree in Anthropology of Social Movements at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Lisbon’s New University [FCSH-UNL], and is currently working on her PhD in Communication Sciences. Genealogy of Perception and the Invention of the “Sogenannte Mensch” Metaphysics has always sought to enhance human perception. And war was always linked to the management of perceptions, either in expanding or controlling scopes. Involving both the entity that perceives – man or machine – and the world around it, perception embraces. It is not contemplation but pure activity. Indeed, it affects the way each epoch understands the real and how it brings it forward. In this sense, it reveals a truth that philosophy collects and sends to the subject: but isn’t all philosophy a philosophy of perception? Here stands the thesis taken from the Course of Perception by Gilbert Simondon. Perception is the original mode of connection between the individual and the world since it comprehends a theory of relation, essential to deliberating on the connection of equipment to the individual but also between equipment and nature because technical objects should be considered a problem of perception and not reason. We comprehend, at last, after millennia of conflict – and emphasizing the non-anthropocentric anthropology of Friedrich Kittler – the engine of the sogenannte Mensch was war. If the history of humanity is, first of all, the history of the mutation of the mechanisms of perception, let’s trace its genealogy.

Chapter Eleven Carlos Natálio (Lisbon, 1980). Undergraduate degrees in Law (Law Faculty of Lisbon) and Cinema (Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema), and Master’s degree in Communication Science (Branch of Contemporary Culture and New Technologies) from FCSH-UNL. Over the last few years, Carlos Natálio has worked in the Programming Department of the Cinema Museum – Cinemateca Portuguesa. Under an international internship program and as a grantee of the Portuguese State, he worked in distribution and production at a cinema production company based in Amsterdam (Visionat Media). At the moment he has a grant from FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology) and is preparing his dissertation on “Cinema and Identity” at Lisbon’s New University, under the orientation of Professor Maria Teresa Cruz and French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. He has been writing regularly on cinema and contemporary culture on cinema and contemporary culture on his website Ordet since 2009. He’s also one of

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Abstracts / Contributors

the founders of the cinema website À Pala de Walsh. The Kittlerian Interference in Film as a “Constructive Extension” of Man The aim of my reflection is to confront Friedrich Kittler’s and Marshall McLuhan’s vision regarding the emergence of cinema. This intersection is key to understanding how it is that the seventh art is the medium that juxtaposes in the same gesture the famous idea of the American theorist who sees the medium as an extension of man, and implicates in its work the gestuality itself and the exterior reality, a technical vision as condition and creator of man itself. It is precisely between cinema, on the one hand, as an anticipating space of representation (both literal and symbolic) and, on the other hand, as a space of “servitude” that is shaping man that we can understand the interior/exterior dynamics of cinematographic technics. This is a “no man’s land” that is sometimes appropriated by the discursive structures of power, and other times can belong to the dynamics of creative invention that constantly challenges the roles of man and “tool.”