LITERATURE, MEDIA, INFORMATION SYSTEMS

GRAMOPHONE, FILM, TYPEWRITER

What reached the page of the surprised author between 1880 and 1920 by
means of the gramophone, film and typewriter- the very first mechanical mediaamounts to a spectral photograph of our present as future. That is to say, with
those early and seemingly harmless devices that could store and thereby
separate as such, sounds, faces and documents, a mechanization of information
began, which -in the hindsight of stories- already made todays self-recursive
number stream possible.

Conversely, rows of numbers, blueprints and circuit diagrams never again turn
into the printed word, always and only into appliances and devices. Heideggers
beautiful maxim that technology itself prevents any experience of its own
essence, signifies no more and no less.

What counts, therefore, are not the messages or contents with which
communication technologies literally equip so-called souls for the duration of a
technological era, but (strictly after Mcluhan) only their circuit arrangements,
those diagrams of observability in general.
What was new about the storage capability of the phonograph and
cinematograph- and both names refer, not accidentally, to writing- was their
ability to store time: as a mixture of audio frequencies in the acoustic realm, as a
movement of single picture sequences in the optic realm. Time, however, is what
determines the limits of all art. The quotidian data flow must be arrested before
it can become image or sign. What is so called style in art is only the switchboard
of these scannings and selections
Texts and scores were Europes only means to store time. Both are based on
writing; the time of this writing is symbolic (in Lacans terms). This time
memorizes itself in terms of projections and retrievals- like a chain of chains.
Nevertheless, whatever runs as time on a physical of (again in Lacans terms)
teal level, blindly and unpredictably, could by no means be encoded. Therefore
all data flows, if they were real streams of data, had to pass through the defile of
the signifier. Alphabetic monopoly, grammatology.
If the film called history is wound back, it will become an endless loop. What
soon will end in the monopoly of bits and fiber optics began with the monopoly of
writing. History was that homogenous field which, as a subject in school
curricula, included only cultures with written language. Mouths and graphisms
dropped out into pre-history. Otherwise events and their stories could not have
been connected. The commands and judgements; the announcements and
prescriptions that gave rise to mountains of corpses military and juridical,
religious and medical all went through the same channel that held the

monopoly on the descriptions of those mountains of corpses. This is why

anything that ever happened ended up in libraries.
And Foucault, the last historian or the first archaeologist, had only to look it up.
The suspicion that all power comes from archives to which it returns could be
brilliantly illustrated, at least within the legal, medical, and theological fields.
This is the tautology of history or merely its cavalry and tomb. For libraries, the
archaeologists rich places of discovery, gathered and catalogued papers which
differed greatly according to address, degree of secrecy, and writing technique:
Foucaults archive as entropy of a post office. Before it falls into libraries, even
writing is a communication medium of which the archaeologist only forgot the
technology. That is why his analyses end immediately before that point in time
when other media penetrated the librarys stacks. For sound archives or towers
of film rolls, discourse analysis becomes inappropriate. Nevertheless, as long as
there was history, it was indeed Foucaults endless bleating of words. More
simply, but not less technically than the fiber optics of the future, writing
functioned as the general medium. For that reason the term medium did not
exist. For whatever else was going on dropped through the filter of letters and
ideograms.
Literature, Goethe wrote, is the fragment of fragments; the least of what had
happened and of what had been spoken was written down; of what had been
written down, only the smallest fraction was preserved.
Thus, writing stores only the fact of its authorization. It celebrates the storing
monopoly of the god who has invented it.
General compulsory school attendance pulled a hide of paper over everyone
They learned a silent and private way of reading which, as a sad surrogate of
speech, could easy consume letters, bypassing the oral organs. Whatever they
were emitting or receiving was writing. And since whatever exists depends on
what can be posted, the bodies themselves were submitted to the regime of the
symbolic. This is unthinkable today, but it was once a reality; no movie stored
the movements that they produced or perceived, no phonography the noises
they uttered or heard. For whatever existed failed before time.
Perfect alphabetism was supposed to supplement precisely those optical and
acoustical data flows which refused to stop not writing themselves under the
monopoly of writing. In order to neutralize writing, writing had to be made
painless, and reading had to become silent. Educated people who could skim
letters were provided with sights and sounds.
Around 1800 the book become both film and record simultaneously not,
however, as a media technological reality, but only in the imaginary of the
readers souls. General compulsory school attendance and new technologies of
alphabetization helped to bring about this new reality. As a surrogate of
unstorable data flows the book came to power and glory.

Draculas Legacy

Only tape heads are capable of inscribing into the real a speech that passes over
understanding heads, and all of Lacan's seminars were spoken via microphone
onto tape. Lowlier hands need then only play it back and listen, in order to be
able to create a media link between tape recorder, headphones, and typewriter,
reporting to the master what he has already said. His words, barely spoken, lay
before him in typescript, punctually before the beginning of the next seminar.
(p.50)

Speech has become, as it were, immortal.

One hundred years before the discoveries of Lacan, Scientific American
announced Edison's phonograph under the headline: "Speech Capable of
Indefinite Repetition from Automatic Records."5 Endless repetition thanks to
automatic recording-just one more reason to keep on speaking. To speak in
particular about what writing is, and what it means psychoanalytically to be able
to read one's own speech,6 even what is merely spoken off-the-cuff. All friends of
wisdom and deep thinking in Germany, who have pondered signifier and
signified, could (if they only wanted to) hear how simple this distinction is. It
exists only technically, "in the dimension of writing as such": "The signified has
nothing to do with the ears, but only with reading, the reading of what one hears
in the signifier. It is not the signified, rather the signifier which one hears. (p.5051)

Even if Freud's basic rule commands that one speak at random, and even if the
"most direct" path "to the pleasure principle" (not including all of those chin-ups
"to higher spheres, which form the basis of Aristotelian ethics")14 leads through
this gibberish (Blab/a), 15 there really is no other option. After all, tape recorders,
television cameras, and radio microphones were invented for the very purpose of
recording gibberish (Blab/a). Precisely because they "understand nothing,"
technical media take the place that, on other occasions, was reserved for Lacan's
seminar participants. (p.53)
Psychoanalysis in the age of technical reproduction is an open provocation.
Because there is no such thing as pre-discursive reality, 18 discourses can, by
means of the tie called discourse, themselves create precisely this social tie. It is
not a coincidence that the master liked to demonstrate the tying of knots that
apparently cannot be untied. The social tie of the Lacan seminar consists of
provocations that describe it as a social tie and nothing else. "I have," says
someone to his listeners, "been saying for a long time, that feelings are always
mutual. And I have said this that it might return to me again: 'Yes and then, and
then, love, love, is it always mutual?'-'But-of-course, butof-course.' "19 So the
Chapel of Saint Anne serves as a giant echo chamber (and it is quite likely that
chapels have always had this architectural significance). The word of love is sent
forth, is received, is sent out again by the receiver, picked up again by the
sender, etc., until the amplifier reaches the point that, in studies of alternating
current, is called oscillation amplitude, and, in the contemporary discourse is
called love. Because no one in the seminar attempts to protest, or, in other
words, to produce inverse feedback, these provocations fulfill their intention-love
has become a resonant (oscillating) circuit. (p.53-54)

In order to replace the Id with an Ego, to replace violence with technology, it is

necessary that one first fall into the clutches of this violence (p.56)
Half spy, half prisoner, Harker creeps through the dusty hallways of a castle in
which there are no mirrors and no coins that could still be legally circulated.
(p.60)

The old Count will neither allow himself to be bought, nor to be made into an
image. He remains the Other, whom no mirror can reflect, a paranoic
hallucination with desires that Harker does not even dare mention in his secret
diary.(p.61)
"The signifier commands above all else. "38 Men want nothing to do with the
Lord Discourse and his lordly definition. Harker saves the only thing he has, his
diary, which has been spared from the Count as if by a miracle, and flees. (p.62)