A study of Psychoanalysis in Kittler's Media Theory : Centering on the Relationship with Lacan's Concepts

Choi, So-Young

This thesis aims to investigate the role and the meaning of psychoanalytic discourses in Friedrich Kittler's media theory. Kittler connects the Lacan's concepts that explain the attributes of human subject's mind, the real, the imagine, and the symbolic, to the analog media, gramophone, film, typewriter. It is a point to show Kittler's media theoretic perspective that the meaningful discourses should be involved media technological conditions. And this point emphasizes the representative instance of Aufschreibesystem 1900 typified by the three analog media is the psychoanalysis also. So this article tries to organize how Kittler applies the Lacan's concepts to the anaysis of Media and then confirm whether his connection has any kind of validity. Kittler pays attention that psychoanalysis was born with the cinema and the gramophone write the image and the sound and Psychoanalysis shows the way to reorganize of the mechanism of human's mind as like the technological media. Unlike the era, ‘Aufschreibesystem 1800’, when accepts the human mind as an integrated and holistic thing, people of ‘Aufschreibesystem 1900’ is regarded as being has brain structure is devided into various functions and a kind of machine might talk and think. And the new approach to the human needs a new methodology, so the technological media and psychoanalysis can show the new mechanism of human mind that is postulated newly. The body of this writing traces to the reason that the gramophone might be connected the real, the cinema can be seen of the embodiment of the imagine, namely the mirror stage, and the typewriter is regarded as the equipment to visualize the operation of the symbol. Kittler connects the gramophone to the real so that the groove of gramophone is the device to write the vibration, and it doesn't distinguish the noise and the human voice, in other words, the sound of sense and nonsense. And he connects the imagine to the cinema, because Lacan explains the concept as the mirror stage that a child misunderstands his mirror image as his ideal image. Because Kittler regards the attribute of subject is the misunderstanding that the subject doesn't think his fragmented real body but his mirror image as his real image is similar to the attribute of cinema that shows the fragmented images as a successive image flow by technical reproducive way. Lastly, the typewriter might be regarded to realize the operation of the symbolic by the spatialization and the standardization of the keyboard. The symbolic is the concept is related to the language system and is the basic structure to allow of the exchange order in the way that the typewriter might be seen as a device to realize the character of the symbolic by the arrangement all the elements of the signifier equally. Through the analystic study of analog media with psychoanalytic concepts, we can figure out the close relationship between the three technological media of ‘Aufschreibesystem 1900’ and the psychoanalytic discourses. These media can be thought to realize human mind's mechanism that be known with Lacan's concepts technically.

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