Abstract
‘In controversies about technology and society’, Langdon Winner’s (1980) famous article on the ‘Politics of Artifacts’ begins, ‘there is no idea more provocative than the notion that technical things have political qualities’ (p. 121). Indeed, in media and communication research, the idea that media should have any kind of demonstrable effect is usually treated with profound scepticism. The field has, at least in its Anglo-American tradition, largely concerned itself with media content, rather than media technologies, and relegated research that zeroed in on the structural qualities of the technologies themselves to its margins, under the label ‘medium theory’. The figure at the helm of this tradition, Marshall McLuhan, arguably posed the biggest provocation of all; his work lacked all the usual markers of academic rigour: linearity, structured argument, empirical evidence. His one-liner ‘the medium is the message’ is, in the words of Paddy Scannell (2007), ‘brilliant’ and ‘illuminating’ – a shame he rarely allowed himself to be ‘intimidated by facts’ (p. 132).
All the more reason, then, to carry on ignoring a thinker whose writing is at least as idiosyncratic as that of McLuhan, for whom Martin Heidegger is the greatest philosopher of all time, and whose thesis, in brief, is that ‘media determine our situation’ (Kittler, 1999: xxxix). Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011), the German literary scholar and media historian, has long been read in departments of German, English Literature and, at times, philosophy. He has been notably absent, however, from bookshelves and reading lists in departments of Media and Communication. There are plenty of reasons not to read Kittler. First, most of his work is only available in German. Second, it is difficult to read, even for speakers of German. As an undergraduate student of Medienwissenschaft at a University in Southern Germany, I spent 3 years reading mostly Kittler, to the extent that when I applied for doctoral study in the United Kingdom, I was told that I would have to simplify my writing – English had little tolerance for the heavily inflected style that has since become known as Kittlerdeutsch. Kittler writes in ellipses – and in a way that suggests he takes it as given that you have read the German Romantics, are familiar with European military history and are well versed in the philosophy of the Ancients. Some call it arrogance. Most culpably, though, Kittler is unapologetic about his technological determinism: he has no interest in hermeneutics and cultural studies. Machines, he was adamant throughout his career, determine our situation.
In light of the above, the recent surge of interest in Kittler seems rather odd. But the last 12 months have seen the translation into English and publication of a collection of Kittler’s essays, The Truth of the Technological World (Stanford University Press, 2014), the publication of an edited collection: Kittler Now: Current Perspectives in Kittler Studies (Polity, 2015), as well as a special issue of the journal Theory, Culture & Society dedicated entirely to Kittler (2015). The demise of a thinker (he passed away in October 2011) invariably leads to a surge of interest in their work: their death seems to imbue them with a mystical aura that lends an element of the tragic/mystic to their work also. This would be the simple answer, but with an optimism that Kittler himself would probably disapprove of, I would suggest that there is a better reason for this new-found interest, namely, in the realisation of something we should have realised much sooner. It would not have changed what was going to happen: big data and the gradual erosion of our privacy via the exploitation of our data by corporations and the surveillance of our communication by governments. We might, however, have been better prepared to meet these challenges, rather than casting about for explanatory concepts like the Ban-Opticon (Bigot, 2008), the Oligopticon (Latour, 2005) or the Surveillant Assemblage (Haggerty and Ericson, 2003).
The Truth of the Technological World begins with an essay called ‘Poet, Mother, Child: On the Romantic Invention of Sexuality’, where Kittler (2014c) explains how Romantic poetry prioritised sound over content. After 180 pages, however, we read of spy satellites [that] have intercepted telephony, telegraphy, and microwaves – mail from all corners of the globe …; its computers have deciphered messages that are potentially code, scrambled, and so on, stored the transmissions automatically, and trawled through them (just as automatically) for suspicious keywords. And so, 0.1 percent of all telecommunications on this planet are absorbed by the NSA’s artificial intelligence. (Kittler, 2014a: 193)
Kittler is referring to the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) use of computer technology to intercept global communications. This essay was originally published in a collection called ‘Arsenale der Seele: Literatur- und Medienanalyse seit 1870’ (Arsenals of the soul: literary and media analysis since 1870), a dusty copy of which I have just lifted from the shelves in a remote corner of Cambridge University Library. The label attached to its cover tells me it has only ever been borrowed once (tellingly, in 2015); the collection, however, was published in 1989, more than 20 years before the Snowden Revelations.
I will not summarise the essays of the recently published volume, as I don’t want to deny those with enough time and patience to spare the enjoyment of reading them. Instead, I will focus on two essays that I see as key to Kittler’s emergence (for it is an emergence, rather than a revival) on the scene of media and communication research in this country. They are ‘The Artificial Intelligence of World War: Alan Turing’ and ‘Protected Mode’. I believe they can make a late, but nevertheless absolutely vital, contribution to our understanding of our current information-technological landscape. What the Snowden revelations regarding the global surveillance programmes run by the NSA (facilitated by intelligence agencies in Britain and other countries) have highlighted is a critical lack of understanding of the technological capabilities of digital media. As a media historian, and more specifically a historian of information and communication technology, Kittler (2014c) is scathing of the ‘blindness’ historians habitually show to data banks (p. 179), but it is a blindness that has a distorted mirror image in our own institutionalised disinterest in history (Scannell, 1980 and Curran, 1991) and, more specifically, the technological history of media. Kittler’s (2014c) bafflement that ‘even though literature about computers grows daily … silence prevails about their military history’ (p. 180) rightfully ought to be our own.
One of the first blind spots Kittler sets out to correct is the link between the binary operating principle of digital communications technologies, which is a choice between two signals, 0 and 1, and the need for clear, unambiguous signals in military strategy. ‘The language of Supreme Command’, he writes, ‘has only operated with “yes” and “no”’ (Kittler, 2014c: 181). Because sound moreover could not be stored, the optical telegraph system that ran from Asia Minor to Mycene operated on the basis of a simple fire signal: a burning fire signalled the success of a military undertaking, its absence indicated failure. To get an idea of what this looked like, watch the scene of the lighting of the beacons in the third part of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy: a burning beacon on a mountain top is clearly visible from afar, which allows a chain of beacons to be lit and great distances to be covered. In this instance, the message was ‘danger’ and a call for aid. The point, however, is the same: there is a choice between two messages, success or failure, danger or safety, yes or no, 0 or 1. The ‘binary economy of signs’, Kittler (2014c) writes, is ‘made to order for war’ (p. 181).
More complicated commands had to take written form until dispatches could be represented with Morse dots and dashes – again, a choice between two signals. The real breakthrough, however, came with Charles Babbage’s mechanical calculating machine which could implement an ‘IF-THEN’ command, which – Kittler (2014c) would say ‘as we know’ – is what allows cruise missiles to ‘steer their own flight paths’ and decide when and where to detonate: ‘Fly this way, then that’ – say, to the Ukraine – ‘and when you see this and that’ – say, Kiev’ ‘make a turn and detonate’. (p. 180)
Today, we might replace the cruise missile with a drone, the Ukraine with Syria and Kiev with the Islamic State (IS) stronghold Raqqa, where the United States and its Arab allies began launching air strikes in 2014. The fact that such operations work the way they do today is in part also due to the British mathematician and philosopher George Boole who, by rendering Aristotle’s logic into mathematical symbols, provided the model for switching theory and the design of digital circuits.
Kittler moves on to what is, thanks to bestselling writer Robert Harris and Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet, more familiar territory: the ENIGMA encryption machine which, as Kittler demonstrates in his usual staccato mode of reasoning, first made possible the remote control of weapon systems like tanks and submarines. Kittler’s version of events makes do without the romantic liaisons of the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, but, or rather, precisely because of this, he is able to focus on the elements of the story that mattered: the combination of very high frequency (VHF) transmitters (which unlike previous transmission technology, were able to operate without interference from the landscape) with the encryption technology developed by German engineer Arthur Scherbius. Scherbius had his invention patented in 1918 and had first tried to get the Imperial German Navy interested but then had to market it commercially, until the navy realised their mistake and the machine was taken off the market. Kittler namedrops people and places with an air of arrogance that suggests he is showing off. These are not always necessary, but they enliven what would otherwise be a tale of technics. The crucial point that emerged from the combination of radio transmission and the automated encryption of messages is slipped in by Kittler (2014c) in his usual casual tone: that ‘by 1939 war itself coincided with its information network’ (p. 185). Like so many developments hailed as ‘revolutions’, informational and drone warfare have a long history we would do well to acknowledge.
It is a difficult and bleak exercise to try and gauge what would have been the consequences had the Allies not developed a way to read the messages encrypted by Enigma, but, as Kittler (2014c) points out, for all their technical capabilities, the Germans were ‘not in full possession of … [their] senses’ (p. 186). The manual decoding of the daily-changing Enigma codes was not possible or at least not practical – military strategy is only worth knowing if one can respond to it – which requires that the decoding be quick. The Germans had not, however, taken into account the possibility that the Enigma might be cracked by a machine, and in the end, Kittler (2014c) ventures, ‘WORLD WAR II occurred simply as a combat between two typewriters’. This sounds like an outrageous suggestion in light of the magnitude of the loss of life and emotional trauma suffered through this conflict, a lack of sensitivity bordering on the pathological. Sometimes, however, the most terrible thing is its inherent banality – as Hannah Arendt (1977) famously urged us to acknowledge writing about the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. The principle of the Enigma was decoded using Alan Turing’s ‘Universal Discrete Machine’ (and the aid of the work of a largely under-acknowledged Polish mathematician, Marian Rejewski), which forms the basic operating principle of computers to this day – a simple IF-THEN specification: All they consist of is a roll of paper that simultaneously contains commands, data, and addresses – input and output, a program, and results. Turing machines do not need the many redundant letters, figures, and signs of a typewriter keyboard. They make do, loosely following Boole, with one sign and its absence: one and zero. (Kittler, 2014c: 187)
What marks Kittler out, then, from the cacophony of commentary on media and communication is his complete lack of impressionability. The simplicity of the principle on which Turing’s machine and successive machines were built is a point he kept emphasising throughout his career, and it seems to me to be a hugely important one: All they consist of is a roll of paper that simultaneously contains commands, data, and addresses – input and output, a program, and results … The roll of paper moves either not at all or just a bit to the left or the right; that is, it moves just as discretely as typewriters do with their space bars and backspace keys. The difference is that the way they read … determines what is subsequently written. It depends on the sign (or as the case may be, its absence), whether Turing machines leave the mark standing or delete it – or conversely, whether they leave the empty space standing or replace it with the sign. After this simple operation, the program loop jumps back to reading, and so on, ad infinitum. (Kittler, 2014c: 187)
A lengthy paragraph, but at least it’s all there should we wish to cut it out and stick it up on our walls, which strikes me as a good idea. Someone might interject that today, if we were to open a computer, we would no longer find a roll of paper but silicon chips, wires and circuit boards. ‘To be sure’, Kittler (2014b) writes elsewhere, ‘the “flip-flops” that cover silicon chips with patterns repeated ad infinitum … [take] up a million times less space here than on paper’ (p. 210), but that’s where the differences end. The principle remains the same: read, write, repeat. ‘No computer that has ever been built – or will ever be built – can do more’ (Kittler, 2014c: 187).
Of course, the problem is that most of us are unlikely to ever look inside a computer. We use them, but we don’t take them apart to see how they work, the same way that we don’t take apart a vacuum cleaner or a toaster. The important thing to us is that such devices ‘function’. However, as Heidegger, whom Kittler greatly admired, said, that ‘everything functions’ is ‘precisely what is uncanny’ (Heidegger, 1976). It is part of the ontological make-up of technologies that they present themselves to us as things that function; they invite us to use them, rather than investigate how they work. This, in essence, is Heidegger’s ontology of media, which Kittler argued was the first real attempt to philosophise media technologies. This functional relationship, however, comes at a loss: we have no understanding whatsoever of what our technologies are capable of – something that has become very clear throughout the whole Snowden affair but something that the very design of our devices is intended to obscure.
This is the point made by Kittler in the essay ‘Protected Mode’, originally published in German in 1993. The version numbers of the word processing software and Microsoft operating system (Word 5.0 and MS DOS 3.3) in the essay recall the enormous boxes housed in grey plastic that once (dis-)graced our desks, a world away from the fluid, translucently gleaming Macbooks and Sony laptops that you have to squint at to make sure they are actually there. I would suggest, however, that recent software and device design only exacerbates the fundamental fact of which years of studying programming and hardware have left Kittler (2014b) convinced: that software ‘use[s] everything at its disposal to prevent … humans … from having access to hardware’ (p. 209). If it hasn’t so far, now it certainly gets technical: ‘Protected mode’ is one of two operational statuses of central processing units (CPUs) that allows the operating system to control software applications. It decides how much processing power to allocate to various tasks, giving the user not what he wants, but what he needs.
For Kittler, the various stages of development in Intel’s processors are not matters of technological progress, but of strategy. Once computers were no longer the prerogative of the military, the need for a myth arose to protect the core processing capacities of the computer from its user, all the while giving him the illusion that he is in control. Thus, the point of software is not to increase the ‘user-friendliness’ of the hardware – a term at which we can almost hear Kittler scoffing – but to spin a ‘fairytale’ of computers becoming ‘increasingly gentle, user-friendly, spiritual and intelligent’. Does this sound familiar? Of course, it is difficult not to hear the techno-evangelist rhetoric of Steve Jobs and his Californian disciples sound forth like a choir of angels. Apple’s products are so smooth and gleaming, their icons so round and cuddly, they almost radiate with user-friendliness. The simplicity of their design (Apple has always kept the number of buttons on an iPod to a minimum) mirrors precisely the logic Kittler criticises above: there are just enough options to do what we need to do, not what we want to do. In fact, we do not even know what we might want to do, we have become so used to operating with the affordances our devices grant us – we are technologically enframed, to use a Heideggerian concept.
The point is not the individual instance where Protected Mode allows our CPU to prioritise one task over another – those who assume Kittler to be making a mountain out of a molehill fundamentally misread him. The point is that Protected Mode has transferred the logic of the military-industrial sphere – the hierarchy of commands, the decision of who may talk and who may not, into our own information technologies. How can we speak of truly ‘social media’, when in the ‘self-same silicon in which the prophets of a microprocessed democracy-to-come have placed all their hopes, the elementary dichotomy of modern media technologies returns’ (Kittler, 2014b: 212)? Social media were meant to challenge the hierarchies embedded in traditional broadcast media; instead of one-to-many communication, we were meant to be entering the age where everyone can talk to everyone – or so the diagrams we show our students seem to explain the ‘revolution’ ushered in by new media. The Arab Spring and the other social uprisings that followed were all hailed as evidence of the inherently democratising powers of social media. Except that when Edward Snowden sent his stash of slides to the newspapers, it became clear who had been listening in to these conversations, and it has since become very clear that it depends on who you are, what you want to say and to whom whether you are given a voice or not – those deemed a risk to national or ‘public security’ have their profiles removed and their mouths gagged – both literally and figuratively. Think Pussy Riot, think Ai Wei Wei or even the student protest groups who had their profiles shut down by Facebook (Malik, 2011), and these are only some of the most well-known examples.
As long as traditional power structures are embedded in the very kernels of our information and communication technologies, there will always be a risk that the programmes and applications that sit on top of these structures will only replicate these inequalities. This is why Kittler (2014b) argues that the analysis of systems of power, that ‘vast task bequeathed to us by Foucault’, is really two tasks: For one, one should no longer seek to understand power, as conventionally happens, as a function of so-called society; instead, and conversely, one should seek to reconstruct sociology from chip design [Chiparchitekturen] up. (p. 214)
There is one essay that is missing in the collection, The Truth of the Technological World, an essay Kittler wrote in 1986, entitled ‘No Such Agency’. Fans of word games might have already spotted the aphorism. In it, he talks about an employee of the NSA who had handed over some of their code to the enemy (Soviet Russia, at the time) and was sentenced to 365 years in prison, and he talks about computers, about the Enigma, about Turing and about the Colossus (the computer used to decode the German Lorenz cipher) – because this is where it all began. And he predicts that on the back of the NSA’s experiments with optical computers, surface acoustic wave filters and CCDs or charged-coupled devices, one day, those 99.9% of the data flow that still run past the NSA might become graspable and evaluable. Derrida’s ‘post in general’ would become a closed system, writing and reading, calculating and enciphering itself. The NSA as the collapse of strategy and technology would be information itself – ‘No Such Agency’. With the chance of forgetting us in the process. (Kittler, 2014a)
But let us look on the bright side. It seems there is scope for another volume of Kittler essays to be translated into English.