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The Study of The Concepts of F. Kittler's Media and Human Body
The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art
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Kittler is an information materialist who argues “human beings are determined by technical standards”. His argument is based on a media materialism point of view which asserts that the analysis of materialistic structure of technology should come first; he thinks outside the common notion of technology being the production of human beings and overcomes MacLuhan who emphasized the interaction between technology and human society, by insisting that technology is the fundamental condition to determine human beings. In addition, he excludes the human body from the media, overcoming MacLuhan’s major proposition of calling the media “the extensions of man”. His radical technology-comes-first point of view emphasizes media technology as an optimization of technicality instead of media as “extensions of the human body”. The seemingly very radical argument of Kittler is concretized by the analysis of ‘Aufschreibesysteme(Discourse Networks)’ that enables the construction of cultural environment of human beings. Aufschreibesystem is the network of technology and a system that enables a society and a culture during a specific period in history to transmit, save and fabricate important information and data. As MacLuhan regarded the messages of media as all changes and transformation that media bring forth in human history, Kittler regarded that the level and characteristics of a society and culture are determined by the Aufschreibesystem they adopt. That is, Kittler considered the structural conditions of the power and thoughts of a society could be clarified if we know the characteristics and particulars of the Aufschreibesystem that decides the production, distribution and consumption of information. And all Aufschreibesysteme are decided by media technological conditions and such Aufschreibesystem and information technology can control the knowledge and information of a time and a society. Therefore, this thesis aims to examine Kittler’s media concept centering on his discussions on ‘Aufschreibesysteme’ and ‘human body’. Kittler defines media as the technology of recording, regeneration and fabrication. Especially his research on the Aufschreibesystem of the 1800s and 1900s shows clearly what great changes happened in our overall culture due to the introduction of ‘technological media’. Unlike the ‘Aufschreibesystem 1800’ that considered the exchange of the writer’s soul and symbolic world as an important driving force of the society, the ‘Aufschreibesystem 1900’ by analogue technological media shows the character of media that records reality itself beyond the relations. The reason why analogue technological media are important to Kittler was because the ‘Aufschreibesysteme’ that had been confined in the limitation of the ability of human body, in other words ‘symbols’, could record more than that by the introduction of such media technology. That is the reason why human beings or human body are excluded in his media theory. And in the same context Kittler introduced the TAM technology that controls freely the streams of linear data according to time flow, in order to better clarify his concept of media. He focuses only on “connections and the circuit diagrams”, not messages. However, it is not fair to say that he stands in the position of anti-humanism. It is only that he criticizes old regulations for human beings and culture that should be abolished under the condition of modern media technology. The post human beings he talks about should be seen as a problem posing of how to newly define ourselves under the technological condition we put ourselves in today's world.
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