Friedrich A. Kittler: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986–) [DE, EN]

“Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of the printed word was shattered by the arrival of new media technologies that offered novel ways of communicating and storing data. Previously, writing had operated by way of symbolic mediation—all data had to pass through the needle’s eye of the written signifier—but phonography, photography, and cinematography stored physical effects of the real in the shape of sound waves and light. The entire question of referentiality had to be recast in light of these new media technologies; in addition, the use of the typewriter changed the perception of writing from that of a unique expression of a literate individual to that of a sequence of naked material signifiers.

Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, part theoretical discussion of the responses to these media—including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators—Gramophone, Film, Typewriter analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan. Fusing discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory, the author adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which we are constituted by our technologies. The book ties the establishment of new discursive practices to the introduction of new media technologies, and it shows how both determine the ways in which psychoanalysis conceives of the psychic apparatus in terms of information machines.

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter is, among other things, a continuation as well as a detailed elaboration of the second part of the author’s Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford, 1990). As such, it bridges the gap between Kittler’s discourse analysis of the 1980’s and his increasingly computer-oriented work of the 1990’s.”

Publisher Brinkmann & Bose, Berlin, 1986
ISBN 3922660177
427 pages

English edition
Translated, with an Introduction by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz
Publisher Stanford University Press, 1999
ISBN 0804732337, 9780804732338
315 pages

Reviews: Bruce Clarke (Electronic Book Review, 1999), Alex Magoun (Technology and Culture, 2001).

Publisher (DE)
Publisher (EN)

Grammophon Film Typewriter (German, 1986, 7 MB, added on 2014-6-30, updated on 2019-5-2)
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (English, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, 1999, updated on 2012-10-13)

Sonja Neef, José van Dijck, Eric Ketelaar (eds.): Sign Here! Handwriting in the Age of New Media (2006)

“Sign Here! features a number of articles from different fields, reaching from cultural and media studies to reaching from cultural and media studies to literature, film and art, and from philosophy and information studies to law and archival studies. Questions addressed in this book are: Will handwriting disappear in the age of new (digital) media? What happens to important cultural and legal concepts, such as original, copy, authenticity, reproducibility, uniqueness, and iterability? Where is the writing hand to be located if handwriting is performed not immediately ‘by hand’ but when it is (re)mediated by electronic or artistic media?”

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, 2006
Transformations in Art and Culture series
Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 License
ISBN 9053568166, 9789053568163
247 pages

Keywords and phrases
weblogs, digital signature, Saul Bass, electronic signature, Martin Scorsese, Hurufi, Hitler diaries, Anne Frank House, tattoo, Arnold Dreyblatt, calligraphic, identity theft, Shirin Neshat, Eecke, handwriting, blogging, Jacques Derrida, Adolf Hitler, mise en abyme, digital media

Publisher
OAPEN

PDF (updated on 2013-3-5)

Vivian Carol Sobchack: Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004)

“In these essays, Vivian Sobchack considers the key role our bodies play in making sense of today’s image-saturated culture. Emphasizing our corporeal rather than our intellectual engagements with film and other media, Carnal Thoughts shows how our experience always emerges through our senses and how our bodies are not just visible objects but also sense-making, visual subjects. Sobchack draws on both phenomenological philosophy and a broad range of popular sources to explore bodily experience in contemporary, moving-image culture. She examines how, through the conflation of cinema and surgery, we’ve all ‘had our eyes done’; why we are ‘moved’ by the movies; and the different ways in which we inhabit photographic, cinematic, and electronic space. Carnal Thoughts provides a lively and engaging challenge to the mind/body split by demonstrating that the process of ‘making sense’ requires an irreducible collaboration between our thoughts and our senses.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2004
ISBN 0520241290, 9780520241299
328 pages

Keywords and phrases
phenomenological, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, metonymy, irreal, Elaine Scarry, rience, catachresis, Roland Barthes, Martin Heidegger, Decalogue, cyborg, Aimee Mullins, Walter Benjamin, synecdoche, Street of Crocodiles, Million Man March, prosthetic leg, transform fictional, semiotic, Medium Cool

Publisher
Google books

PDF (updated on 2014-12-7)