Submerging Kittler

The XL Catlin Seaview Survey, a major scientific project, has a purpose: ‘To scientifically record the world’s coral reefs and reveal them to all in high-resolution, 360-degree panoramic vision.’ Funded by the insurance company XL Catlin, the project began by surveying 32 reefs along the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and has now expanded globally to document a broad range of coral reefs. The documentation of reefs – and translation of the ocean into a navigable, three-dimensional digital space – aims to provide a baseline record of coral reef health in anticipation of future climate changes (such as coral bleaching events triggered by rising ocean temperatures). Catlin has partnered with Google Street View in order to make a variety of these surveys public, such as the site pictured in Figure 1 of the Liberty Wreck in Bali, Indonesia – a former cargo ship now sunken and encrusted with marine life forms, and clouds of colourful reef fish.

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Figure 1.

Google Street View screenshot of Liberty Wreck (Bali, Indonesia), in partnership with Catlin Seaview Survey.

Such translations of reefs and oceanic wrecks in digital space seem to be commensurate with Friedrich Kittler’s prediction that digital media herald the erasure of the concept of ‘a medium.’ Indeed, underwater spaces appear converted into the currency of the digital, reterritorialized by the same mapping practices (Google Street View) used to represent and navigate urban environments. By framing ocean environments through the mediating surface of a screen, digital media commence a kind of Foucauldian ‘Birth of the Aquarium’, with the computer as a site for aquatic voyeurism and control (see Pálsson, 1998). Yet encounters in the ocean offer unique opportunities to revisit Kittler’s theorizations of recording media in relation to the environment. In what follows, I offer some ways in which the ocean changes how we theorize computational media.

One of the more notable scenes in Kittler’s seminal work Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999) involves a passage from Reiner Maria Rilke called ‘Primal Sound’ (1919) in which Rilke recounts attending an anatomy lecture and staring at the grooves of a skull, which suddenly remind him of the grooves on a gramophone record. What if a needle were to be placed on the grooves? Kittler notes that before Rilke, ‘nobody had ever suggested to decode a trace that nobody had encoded and that encoded nothing’, thus ushering in the possibility of ‘writing without a subject’ (Kittler, 1999: 44). Therefore, Rilke celebrates ‘the very opposite of his own medium’, the ‘duped needle’ producing a ‘white noise no writing can store’ (Kittler, 1999: 45). However, the Rilke story not only introduces the possibility of writing without an author or subject; it also introduces a profound ontological question about the difference between what we might call natural recording media (the skull) and man-made recording media (the gramophone), in terms of the role of intentionality in each.

This question of natural vs. man-made recording media resurfaces time and again throughout the gramophone chapter, as well as Kittler’s writings about language learning. As Geoffrey Winthrop-Young notes, Kittler frequently shows a progression from noise to sound to speech, such that for humans ‘inscribed’ by the cultural techniques of language, ‘everything is always already on the threshold of meaning’, be it natural objects or sirenic women (Winthrop-Young, 2011: 44). In one example, Kittler excerpts several pages from a story by Maurice Renard called ‘Death and the Shell’ (1907), concerning the frustrations of a composer unable to translate the siren-like noises heard in a seashell into musical notation, a song called ‘Amphitrite’. One character asks, ‘What if this ear-shaped snail stored the sounds it heard at some critical moment – the agony of mollusks, maybe? And what if the rosy lips of its shell were to pass it on like a graphophone [sic]? All in all, you may be listening to the surf of oceans centuries old …’ (Kittler, 1999: 54). The shell figures as a natural recording medium, an analogue of the man-made gramophone – though we could alternately venture that the newer gramophone imitates the centuries-old shell. Much could be said about the parallels between the mollusc and siren-women (the noisy voices of goddesses heard in the shell) or, for that matter, the relationship between women and noise. ¹ Yet what is novel about the story’s implications for media theory is the retrospective recognition of natural objects as recording media, a recognition derived only after the development of technologies performing similar functions. ²

While natural media participate as agential media in Kittler’s work, they remain peripheral to his anthropocentric focus on man- (and I emphasize man-) made media. Take, for example, a short essay called ‘In the Wake of the Odyssey’, where Kittler traces the origins of written notation back to Hellenic antiquity: ‘The very medium that made such [Homeric] fictions and media possible is commonly overlooked: the alphabet in the unique form that the Greeks gave to it – a form, that is, which records vowels and by this means can transcribe any language at all’ (Kittler, 2014: 275). In this chapter, Kittler discusses how he conducted the surprising experiment of placing two women on the shore of a beach and, himself, rowing out beyond the waves to see what he could hear. He discovered that only vowels, not consonants, could be heard beyond the noise of the waves, concluding that Odysseus was lying when he said that he could hear the sirens from the beach. It is not difficult to draw parallels between Kittler’s interest in the alphabet as a universal recording medium of antiquity and the digital as a universal recording medium today. Yet – given that Kittler is talking about the Odyssey – it is not too far to venture that the other neglected medium that made Homeric fictions possible was the ocean itself: the generator of wave noise frustrating the transmission of voice, a carrier of Greek ships, and storage vault of all those crew members Odysseus lost overboard on his journey, dotting the seafloor. ³

Although Geoffrey Winthrop-Young rightly notes that many scholars mis-read Kittler as being anti-environment – since objects made without human agency appear frequently in his texts, like the shell and the skull I mentioned earlier – I doubt that anyone would read him as environmental-ist. Although natural materials figure in his discussions of media, there tends to be a teleology in Kittler’s work that moves in one direction: towards the production of anthropogenic media. I suggest that a possible distinction between natural and man-made media is about intentionality (rather than ontology): did a human being with an explicit will or purpose go about making the object under consideration, or was it formed without human agency (like the musical record of Renaud’s shell) before being taken up as an analogue for technical media (like the gramophone)?

There has been a recent push to consider the role of the environment in the media, largely due to the desire to respond to the lived material and historical context of global climate change. Scholars like John Durham Peters, Richard Maxwell, Toby Miller, and Jussi Parikka have recently called for an expanded environmental sense of the media concept, to include not only man-made technical objects but also the materials that enable technical media to function today: for example, rare earth metals, water that cools data centres, petroleum that provides energy (see ; Maxwell and Miller, 2012; Parikka, 2015; Peters, 2015). Maxwell and Miller’s (2012) Greening the Media in particular pushes us to think about the environmental costs (and waste production) of media technology, no longer able to be seen in a bubble. This form of enviro-material consciousness is arguably not present in Kittler’s work. Much like his depiction of women (nurturing mothers and sirens), natural media – and nautical media – lurk at the periphery of intelligibility, translated by male subjects. ⁴ Mother nature, mother tongue. ⁵

One of the implications of this growing body of environmental media theory is to challenge the stability of Kittler’s periodizations of technology: the pre-1800 moment when recording only happened through writing; the fragmentation of recording media into the senses (gramophone, film, typewriter) in the 19th century; and electronic or digital media in the present, where ‘any medium can be translated into any other’ such that ‘a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium’ (Kittler, 1999: 1–2). Once we consider natural media (ice cores, geologic strata, tree rings) and the advent of climate change, it becomes harder to see the present moment as an exclusively (or even teleologically) digital epoch – but rather something with a very mixed temporality. Natural media are always already co-present with digital media; and we have only recently and retrospectively been able to see natural media as media through the lens of analogous technical media for storage, transmission, and recording. What remains to be worked out, then, is a more comprehensive account of the heterochronicity of the present moment that attends to both the networked power of computational media and their contemporaneity with natural media.

Catlin Seaview Survey’s underwater ‘street views’ demonstrate the heterochronicity constituted by the co-existence of computational media and natural media. The ship (Figure 1), on the one hand, figures as a kind of historical archive of mixed human and natural history. Not only is there a record of its voyages in a ship’s former log, and the photographs of underwater tourists; the corals growing on the ship can be read and measured like tree rings (dendrochronology), perhaps as ‘cnidaria-chronology’. Scientists measure the age of corals through the radioactive decay of uranium in their skeletons, made of calcium residues accreted over time. One photo caption on Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute’s website reads, ‘A slice through the center of a long-dead brain coral is a slice through human and ocean history’(Woods Hole, n.d.). To see the entire material picture of Google Street View, then, means gathering all these senses of information-bearing media together: digital archive, ship as archive, living organisms as archives, and – furthermore – the nourishing medium of seawater.

Yet as we saw with the shell, the ocean possesses certain untranslatable elements that cannot be captured by signifieds (or in this case, pixels). Consider, for example, the experience of exploring the archive through floating in water as compared to ‘hopping’ from one 360° image of the wreck to the next on screen; or the experience of refracted light for the human eye compared to the camera’s lens (which is the view we see in Street View). As so many aquatic environments – once remote and difficult for most humans to access – migrate into digital environments, we would be wise to remember what is lost or gained in each context. In Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Kittler offers something very important to say about the role of translation between media, an idea similar to Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation (Bolter and Grusin, 2000). ‘To transfer messages from one medium to another always involves reshaping them to conform to new standards and materials’ (Bolter and Grusin, 2000: 265). What if these new standards and materials were not simply object-based, but environment-based, involving light, gravity, orientational sensation? Could we extend Kittler’s thesis to more environmental contexts, and think about the reshaping that happens with changes in the milieux of storage media, diversely interpreted – when waters acidify, or a coral becomes captured in Street View?

Attention to the role of environment in this way suggests a mischievous inversion of Kittler’s claim that ‘media determine our situation.’ Perhaps the possibilities of our media are determined by the materiality of distinct environmental situations. ‘Submerging Kittler’ then, suggests a shocking and direct confrontation with the hardware of perception, by asking about its operative milieu. Not only do digital media depend on the substrate of petroleum (or better wind, or solar) to produce the electricity necessary for their functioning; they are also designed, mainly, for use in air rather than salt-water. What might we learn from the marine organisms that have been signalling, transmitting, and genetically storing information in an oceanic environment?

Perhaps the ocean opens the door for a new kind of comparative studies between concepts in terrestrial contexts and concepts in the thalassic wild. In previous work I have called for ‘milieu-specific analysis,’ or the idea that concepts respond to the environmental conditions of their emergence (Jue, 2014, 2015). Thinking about the vocabulary of media theory in an aqueous environment, then, would entail a drastic shift in how we think about the ubiquity of terrestrial media terminology like inscription, as the process of recording information. What about the residues left by coral in the form of calcium skeletons, as information-bearing structures? Or take the term Anthropocene: coined within the context of the science of Stratigraphy – or study of geologic layers – it names a possible new epoch or break from the Holocene, marked by human perturbations (although which measurable perturbations are under debate). ⁶ If -cene is about what is left and measurable in sediment layers, what about life forms dying in the Anthropocene? In another context, Christina Sharpe offers the generative term ‘wake-work’ for responding to the Middle Passage and its afterlives: ‘What does it mean to memorialize an event that is still ongoing?’ (Sharpe, 2016: 20). Following Sharpe, perhaps oceanic measures of time might be thought of as wakes – a watery alternative to ‘Anthropocene’ that connotes mourning as a funereal ‘wake,’ but also perhaps a period of a particular consciousness (to be a-wake). Google Street View certainly facilitates a new submarine consciousness, bringing distant viewers into 360-degree seas, one pivot at a time. And yet I wonder what might it mean to be in the ‘wake’ of corals, rather than in the -cene of the anthropos. Would seeing the contemporary period as a cnidarian ‘wake’ denote their bleaching and soft-bodied dissolution, or the ripples of their agential world-making?