Oh so inhuman

David Wellbery nail-on-the-heads-it when he claims that Kittler "presupposes post-structuralist thought," that he takes it seriously and uses it as "the operating equipment, the hardware" (viii). While this is subsumed under the heading of post-structuralism, it seems more to the point that it follows directly out of Derrida and deconstructionist thought. This quote itself follows directly from a condemnation of the American academy's own fashionable and fleeting engagement in the sport of deconstruction.

(This next section gets a little rambly and lack some citation, but I want to try to work out the relationship I see between Kittler and Derrida's projects. So I'm going to shoot from the hip a bit and see about the rigour after the dust settles.)

And indeed in Kittler's two introductory sections we see the working of Derrida's foundational speech v writing statements. Kittler is documenting precisely the written word's--in its technological form--move inward to become the transcendent spirit. While Derrida draws the connection back to Plato as the founding moment of Western culture, Kittler attends to the very material shift that he is linking to 1800, the internal voicing of written words in a private study. The focus on this era isn't unique to Kittler however. Derrida too seems to have focused on a dramatic shift that floated seemingly from Descartes until arguably now. Kittler's (intense) attention to media and technology is the marked difference.

In the place of Derrida's abstracted movements of humanism whose sites appear always to be the writing of philosophers, we have Kittler's picture of a solitary, fictional man reading to himself and shifting the words in his translation until they "feel" right. What matter here is the technological apparatus that allows the scene to be constructed and replicated. It doesn't have to be Faust or Goethe. It can be anyone that the new technologies have allowed to fit the scene and internalize the word.

The Nietzschean counterpart then is the end of one technological regime and the beginning of the line of thought Derrida is to inherent. Nietzsche--as he is presented here in is grammar books and then in the demise of his sanity and beyond--takes literally the system he can see. He see the technology that is the human living in the book and he ends up completely severed from it with nothing but inhuman noise he is without tools to decipher (183-4). Again this is a meditation on technology, its tricks and its ruses.

Ending my own perturbed run through of these positions, my own interest is in a better articulation of the distributed network relationship with technology as it finds its home in each person. In Faust and Nietzsche we have the picture of two forms of neurosis. First the failing to grasp the working of technology on the individual (literally misrecognizing its effects). And secondly, the excessive realization of technology that is self-alienating. Can we have a new 2000 discourse network in which we can resolve our relationship to the tech? Or at least have some means of cognizing that relationship (and the relationship to the distributed network in general). This is similar to what I was reacting to last week in Kirschenbaum. He seems close to accounting for the gap between mechanism itself and our screen ideology (though I feel like he never quite got there). Where does the tech end and we begin? And how do these things change?

Excuse me while I go and howl my inhuman wail.