No More Learning

2 2 . Manfred Frank, What Is Neostructuralism? trans. Richard Gray (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, I989 ) .
Sabine Wilke and
23. See H6risch, Die Wut des Verstehens: Zur Kritik der Hermeneutik (Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp, 1988), 50-66.
24. Urszenen: Literaturwissenschaft als Diskursanalyse und Diskurskritik, ed. Friedrich A. Kittler and Horst Turk (Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp, 1977). Con- taining essays by Kittler, Bolz, and'H6risch, this collection marks the beginning of French-inspired German literary s&olarship.
25. See Norbert Bolz, ed. , Goeth? s 'Wahlverwandtschaften': Kritische Mod- elle und Diskursanalysen zum Mythos,Literatur (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, I98 I); Jochen H6risch, Die andere Goethezeit: Poetische Mobilmachung des Subjekts um I800 (Munich: Fink, 1992); and Kittler, Dichter Mutter Kind (Munich: Fink,
I991). A well-known early example is the Lacanian reading of Kleist by Helga Gallas, Das Textbegehren des 'Michael Kohlhaas': Die Sprache des Unbewuf5ten und der Sinn der Literatur ( Reinbek: Rowohlt, 198 I ) .
26. Frank, WhatIsNeostructuralism? 313.
27. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar ofJacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Techniques ofPsychoanalysis I954-I955, ed. Jacques- Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988), 46.
28. Kittler, "The World of the Symbolic-A World of the Machine," in idem, Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays, ed. and intro. John Johnston, trans. Stefanie Harris (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, I997), 1H.
2 9 . Ibid. , 1 4 5 , referring to the following passage (Lacan, Seminar II , 89 ) : "This discourse of the other is not the discourse of the abstract other, of the other in the dyad, of my correspondent, nor even of my slave, it is the discourse of the circuit in which I am integrated. I am one of its links. "
30. George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Crit- ical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992), H. 31. GregoryUlmer,AppliedGrammatology:Post(e)-PedagogyfromJacques
Derrida to Joseph B euys (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 198 5 ) , 3 0 3 .
? 270 Notes to Pages xix-xxii
3 2 . See Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr. , "The Electronic Panopticon: Censorship, Control and Indoctrination in a Post-Typographic Culture," in Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers, ed. Myron C. Tuman (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 167-88; and Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context ( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), 69-98.
3 3 . Regis Debray, Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms, trans. Eric Rauth (New York: Verso, 1996), 54.
3 4 . Bolz, Philosophie nach ihrem Ende, 1 5 4 .
3 5 . Hans H. Hiebel, " Strukturale Psychoanalyse und Literatur, " i n Neue Literaturtheorien, ed. Klaus-Michael Bogdal (Darmstadt: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990), 69. See also Kittler, "'Das Phantom unseres Ichs' und die Literaturpsy- chologie: E. T. A. Hoffmann-Freud-Lacan," in Urszenen, 139-66.
36. See Kittler, Dichter Mutter Kind, 7-17, and Horisch's belated preface to Die andere Goethezeit, 7-9. See also Kittler's remarks in Griffin and Herrmann, "Technologies of Writing," 74 1 : " When I think of my oId literary criticism, the good essays are actually didactic pieces in programming. How did Duke Carl Eugen von Wurtemberg [sic] program Friedrich Schiller? I didn't write about Schiller's sentiments or religion, because all I had was a bare-bones model: educa- tors and princes program the novelist for a specific civil function in the state. What you need is a fundamental understanding of concepts such as hardware, programming, automatization, and regulation. "
37. Kittler, Discourse Networks, I8ooiI900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), 177.
38. All of these essays first appeared in the 1980s, but where possible we have provided an English translation: "Wie man abschafft, wovon man spricht: Der Autor von Ecce Homo," in Literaturmagazin 12: Nietzsche, ed. Nicolas Born, Jurgen Manthey, and Detlev Schmidt (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1980), 1 5 3-78; "Pink Floyd, 'Brain Damage,'" in europalyrik 1775 bis heute: Gedichte und Interpreta- tionen, ed. Klaus Lindemann (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1982), 467-77; "Das Alibi eines Schriftstellers-Peter Handkes Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter," in Das schnelle Altern der neuesten Literatur, ed. Jochen Horisch and Hubert Winkels (Dusseldorf: Claassen, 198 5 ), 60-72; "tiber die Kunst, mit Vogeln zu ja- gen: The Maltese Falcon von D. Hammett," in Phantasie und Deutung: Psychol- ogisches Verstehen von Film und Literatur, eds. Wolfram Mauser, Ursula Renner, and Walter Schonau (Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1986), 299-314; "Dracula's Legacy," Stanford Humanities Review 1. 1 (1989-90): 143-73; "The Mechanized Philosopher," in Looking After Nietzsche, ed. Lawrence A. Rickels (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1990), 195-207; "World-Breath: On Wagner's Media Technology," in Opera Through Other Eyes, ed. David J. Levin (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford Univ. Press, 1994), 215-35; and "Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second World War," trans. Michael Wutz and Geoffrey Winthrop- Young, in Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology, ed. Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell Univ. Press, 1997), 157-72.
39. Kittler, "Ein Erdbeben in Chili und PreuiSen," in Positionen der Liter- aturwissenschaft: Acht Modellanalysen am Beispiel von Kleists 'Das Erdbeben in Chili,' ed. David E. Wellbery (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1985), 24.
? Notes to Pages xxii-xxxii 271
40. As Michael Giesecke points out in his monumental study of the early print age, media theorists have themselves only recently started to pay full atten- tion to the "neglected difference" between scriptography and typography. Michael Giesecke, Der Buchdruck in der friihen Neuzeit: Eine historische Fallstudie iiber die Durchsetzung neuer Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (Frank- furt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 29.
4 I . See Kittler, "Autorschaft und Liebe," in Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften: Programme des Poststrukturalismus, ed. Friedrich A. Kitt- ler (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1980), 142-73 .
42. Griffin and Herrmann, "Technologies of Writing," 734.
43. See Wellbery, foreword to Kittler, Discourse Networks, xix.
44. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 3 69.
45. Kittler, "Benn's Poetry-'A Hit in the Charts': Song Under Conditions of
Media Technologies," SubStance 61 (1990): 6.
4 6 . Kittler, Discourse Networks, 3 4 7 .
47. Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language ofModernism
(Princeton, N. ]. : Princeton Univ. Press, 1993 ), 74.
48. Gottfried Benn, "Vortrag in Knokke," in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Dieter
Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1959), 4: 543. See also Kittler, Discourse Net- works, 177.
49. With this more nuanced account of the relationship of Lacan's registers to media technologies Kittler gpes a long way toward meeting the reviewers of Discourse Networks who charg? d him with setting up arbitrary links between the two. See, for example, Thomai Sebastian, "Technology Romanticized: Friedrich Kittler's Discourse Networks I S o o! I9 0 0 " : " Why the phonograph should have ac- cess to the real, while the film only has access to the imaginary is baffling . . . Notes emanating from a phonograph are neither more real nor less imaginary than filmed images on the screen" (MLN 105. 3 [1990]: 590).
50. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1 8 2.
5 I . Most of the computer-related essays have been translated and collected in Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems. Regarding military technology and history, and related issues, see Kittler, "Die kiinstliche Intelligenz des Welt- kriegs: Alan Turing," in Arsenale der SeeIe: Literatur- und Medienanalysen seit IS70, ed. Friedrich A. Kittler and Georg Christoph Tholen (Munich: Fink, 1989), 187-202; "Unconditional Surrender," in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, trans. William Whobrey (Stan- ford, Calif. : Stanford Univ. Press, 1994), 319-34; "Eine Kurzgeschichte des Scheinwerfers," in Der Entzug der Bilder: Visuelle Realitiiten, ed. Michael Wetzel and Herta Wolf (Munich: Fink, 1994), 1 83-89; and "II fiore delle truppe scelte," in Der Dichter als Kommandant: D'Annunzio erobert Fiume, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Friedrich Kittler, and Bernhard Siegert (Munich: Fink, 1996), 205- 25. This last advertises a forthcoming essay on Wotan and the Wagnerian pre- history of the German Storm Trooper ( 2 1 4n ) .
52. JOrg Lau, "Medien verstehen: Drei Abschweifungen," Merkur 534/535 (1993), 836.
5 3 . Holub, Crossing Borders, 103 . 54? Ibid. , 104.
? 272 Notes to Pages xxxii-xxxvi
55. Jacques Derrida, "The Question of Style," in The New Nietzsche, ed. David Allison (New York: Dell, 1977), 176.
5 6 . Witness, for instance, Kittler's take o n Habermas's theory of the origin of the enlightened public sphere: "This enlightenment ideology did not have its origin in the Enlightenment but is primarily the work of Jurgen Habermas, who, as is well known, wrote The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the book about the topic. First of all, something has to be said about this book. He claims that the private postal system, which was introduced at the time, set the whole process in motion. What Habermas completely forgets over all those lov- ing, intimate letter-writing people, who he thinks are so great because in them the bourgeois mentality is said to have constituted itself, is quite simply that states, as good mercantilist states, founded this postal system with a clear object in mind: they wanted to skim off the postal rates. For instance, 40 percent of Prussia's suc- cessful Seven Years War against Austria was financed by postal revenue. So much for the function of enlightenment or participation in the eighteenth century. " Kitt- ler, "Das Internet ist eine Emanation: Ein Gespriich mit Friedrich Kittler," in Stadt am Netz: Ansichten von Telep0lis, ed. Stefan Iglhaut, Armin Medosch, and Flo- rian Rotzer (Mannheim: Bollmann, 1996), 201.
5 7 . Griffin and Herrmann, "Technologies of Writing," 7 3 5 ?
58. Linda Dietrick, "Review of Discourse Networks r8ooir90o," Seminar 28. 1 (1992), 66. Virgina L. Lewis, among others, also observes that "Kittler's the- sis that a single unified discourse network fully characterizes each of the two epochs he discusses is hardly acceptable" ("A German Poststructuralist," PLL 28. 1 [1992], 106).
59. Timothy Lenoir, "Inscription Practices and Materialities of Communica- tion," in Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communica- tion, ed. Lenoir (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford Univ. Press, 1998), 15.
60. Kittler, "Laterna magica," 220.
61. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro- duction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 237.
62. Kittler, "Geschichte der Kommunikationsmedien," in Raum und Ver- fahren: Interventionen 2, ed. Jorg Huber and Alois Martin Muller (Basel and Frankfurt: Stroemfeld / Roter Stern, 1993 ) , 1 8 8 .
6 3 . "The robot historian of course would hardly b e bothered by the fact that it was a human who put the first motor together: for the roles of humans would be seen as little more than that of industrious insects pollinating an independent species of machine-flowers that simply did not possess its own reproductive organs during a segment of its evolution. Similarly, when this robot historian turned its attention to the evolution of armies in order to trace the history of its own weaponry, it would see humans as no more than pieces of a larger military- industrial machine: a war machine.
" Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intel- ligent Machines (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 3.
64. James Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), vii.
65. Jochen Schulte-Sasse, "Von der schriftlichen zur elektronischen Kultur:
Notes to Pages xxxvii-I 273
Uber neuere Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Mediengeschichte und Kultur- geschichte," in Materialitat der Kommunikation, eds. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), esp. 429-33.
66. For a detailed study o f the literary imagery surrounding and glorifying the German engineer, see Harro Segeberg, Literarische Technik-Bilder: Studien zum Verhaltnis von Technik- und Literaturgeschichte im 1 9 . und fruhen 2 0 . Jahrhundert (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1987).
6 7 . For related texts, see Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds. , The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of Cal- ifornia Press, 1994), 393-411.
6 8 . Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 3. 69 . For a critical assessment o f these influences see Richard Wolin, Laby- rinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas (Amherst: Univ. of Massa-
chusetts Press, 1995).
PREFACE
//.
1. Benn, April 10, 19411, in Benn 1941 / 1977-80, I: 267.
2. Concerning the precision of Benn's "Take stock of the situation! " see Schnur 1980, which makes clear that the poetic maxim immediately following- "Reckon with your defects, start with your holdings, not with your slogans" (Benn 1959-61, 2: 23 2)-simply rewrites Germany's logistical problems with dis- tributing raw materials during the war.
3 . See Schwendter 19 8 2 . 4? See Lorenz 1985, 19? 5. Heidegger 1950, 272.
6. Hitler, January 1945, in Schramm 1982, 4: 1652. See also Hitler, May 30, 1942, in Picker 1976, 491, where the fragment from Heraclitus appears as the eternally true and "profoundly serious statement of a military philosopher. " But asJunger (1926/r993, 128) observed, world wars, rather than continuing to fight in the "prevailing mode," depend on innovation as such.
7. See Pynchon 1973, 606.
INTRODUCTION
1. Under the title "Nostris ex ossibus: Thoughts of an Optimist," Karl Haushofer, "the main representative, . . . though not the originator, of the term 'geopolitics'" (November 2, 1945, in Haushofer 1979, 2: 639), wrote: "After the war, the Americans will appropriate a relatively wide strip of Europe's western and southern coast and, at the same time, in some shape or fashion annex En- gland, thus realizing the ideal of Cecil Rhodes from the opposite coast. In doing so, they will act in accordance with the age-old ambition of any sea power to gain control of the opposite coast(s) and rule the ocean in between. The opposite coast
? 274 Notes to Pages 3-I2
i s a t least the entire eastern rim o f the Atlantic and, i n order to achieve domina- tion over all 'seven seas,' possibly the entire western rim of the Pacific. Thus, America wants to connect the outer crescent to the 'axis'" (October 19, 1944, in Haushofer 1979, 2: 635)
2 . W. Hoffmann, 1944, in Hay I975b, 374. 3? Bolz 1986, 34?
4. Abraham and Hornbostel 1904, 229.
5. See Campe 1986, 70-71.
6. Foucault I963iI977, 66.
7. Goethe I829iI98I, 122.
8. Goethe, "Geschichte der Farbenlehre" (1810), in idem 1976, 14: 47. [The
oral nature of this "opposite" to written history is underscored by the use of Goethe's word Sage, "legend, " which derives from sagen, "to say. "-Trans. ]
9. See Ong 1982, 27 and (more reasonably) 3. 10. See Exodus 24:12-34:28.
II. Koran, sura 96, vv. 1-6.
12. Winter 1959, 6.
13. SeeAssmannandAssmann1983,68.
1 4 . Nietzsche, " Geschichte der griechischen Literatur" ( 1 8 7 4 ) , I n idem 1922-29, 5: 213.
15? Goethe I8II-I4 / 1969, 3: 59?
? ? 16. 17. 18. 19? 20. 2 1 .
Strauss I977iI979, 1 5-16.
Hegel I 807iI977, 190.
Hardenberg (Novalis), 1798-99 / 1960-75, 3: 377.
Schlegel I799iI958ff, 8: 42.
See Kittler I985iI990, 108-2 3 .
Goethe I 797iI987, 3 . For reasons why a fully alphabetized literature in
particular simulated orality, see Schlaffer 1986, 7-20.
22. Goethe, Werther ( 1 774), in Goethe 1990,
23. Benjamin 1924-25 / 1972-85, I: 1, 200.
24. Goethe, ElectiveAffinities (1809), in idem 1990, 342.
25. Brentano I835iI959-63, 2: 222.
26. Marker 1983, 23-24.
27. See Deleuze 19 6 5 , 3 2. "The alternative is between two purities; the false
and the true; that of responsibility and that of innocence; that of memory and that of forgetting. . . . Either one remembers words but their meaning remains ob- scure, or one apprehends the meaning, in which case the memory of the words disappears. "
28. Leroi-Gourhan, quoted in Derrida I967iI976, 333n.
29. E. T. A. Hoffmann I8I6iI969, 148 (translation modified).
30. Nadar I 899iI978, 9.
3 1 . Arnheim I933iI977, 27?
32. See Lacan I978iI988b, 278.
33. Edison, 1878, quoted in Gelatt 1977, 29. Phonographic recordings of
last words are based on the recognition that "physiological time is not re- versible," and that "in the province of rhythm, and of time in general, there is no symmetry" (Mach I886iI9I4, 256).
109.
Notes to Pages I2-2 I 275
34. SeeJoyce 1922ir969, II3? See also Brooks 1977, 213-14. ["AEG" refers to the Allgemeine Elektrizitats-Gesellschaft, one of the leading German electron- ics corporations. It was originally founded in 1 8 83 by Emil Rathenau as the Ger- man Edison Society for Applied Electricity. -Trans. ]
35? Rathenau19I8-29,4:347? Twoexamplesofdeformationprofessionelle among the dead of Necropolis: "A writer is dissatisfied with his epitaph. An em- ployee of the telephone company uses short and long intervals, a kind of Morse alphabet, to ring in a critique of his sucessor. " King Alexander, the hero of Bron- nen's Ostpolzug, says everything there is to say about telephonitis and Hades while, according to the stage directions, the "telephone is buzzing": "Oh, you black beast growing on fatty brown stems, you flower of untimeliness, you rabbit of dark rooms! Your voice is our hereafter, and it has crowded out heaven" (Bron- nen 1926ir977, 133).
38. Schafer 1983, 2.
40. See Gordon 198 1 , passim.
42. See Walze 1980, 133.
44. Heidegger 1942-4 3ir992, 8 6. 46. See Mallarme 1893ir945, 850. 48. Lacan 1978ir988b: 47?
36. The song "Example #22" actually combines the announcement and sound of "example no. 22" ("Hier spricht Edgar" / "Edgar speaking" [Schafer 1983, II]), which, strangely enough, must have migrated on a paranormal cas- sette-to-book from FreibuJ;g to the United States.
? 37. See Lacan 1966/? 977, 1 84. 39. Ibid? ,3? 1\
41. Watson 1978, 26, 410.
43. See Luhmann 1985, 20-22. 45? Keller 1865ir974: 41.
47? Lacan 1966, 720.
49? See Lacan 1966/1977, 1-7?
51. See Lacan 1978/1988b: 191-2? 5.
52. Nietzsche 1873-76ir990, IIO.
53? See Turing 1950, 441-42; Hodges 1983, 415-17.
54? Hodges 1983, 279?
55? Ibid. , 30.
56. Ibid. , 14?
57. ]. Good, September 16, 1948, quoted in ibid. , 387.
58. See Zuse, June 19, 1937, in idem 1984, 41: "Decisive thought, 19 June
1937 / Realization that there are elementary operations to which all computing and thinking operations may be reduced. / A primitive type of mechanical brain consists of storage unit, dialing system, and a simple device that can handle con- ditional chains of two or three links. / With such a form of brain it must be pos- sible to solve all operations of the mind that can be dealt with mechanically, re- gardless of the time involved. More complex brains are merely a matter of exe- cuting those operations faster. "
GRAMOPHONE
1. Chew 1967, 2. When Kafka's captured ape delivers his "Report to an Academy," the scene depicting his animal language acquisition quotes both Edi- son's "Hullo" and his storage technology: On board the ship "there was a cele-
50.