Conditions of Inscription, Conditions of Discourse: Friedrich Kittler's Media Theory

Friedrich Kittler directed the study of media from the meanings that humans produce to the technical conditions that enable their emergence in the first place. In the introduction to the Hebrew translation of the Introduction to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Yoel Botvinik situates Kittler’s thought within a tradition of thought on mediation and the conditions of possibility of perception and knowledge. This tradition evolved between different definitions of the medium and its connecting properties, and only in the second half of the twentieth century did it crystallize into a distinct field of media theory. Within this field, Kittler emerges as one of the thinkers who most radically formulated the medium not only as a means of transmitting messages, but as a technical condition that establishes the very possibility of communication and knowledge. Botvinik demonstrates how Kittler expands and exaggerates moves already found in Michel Foucault and Marshall McLuhan’s theories. He pushes Foucault’s archaeology beyond writing, into a world in which sound, image, and text are recorded in distinct technical channels, and detaches the medium that McLuhan thought of as an extension of the senses from the human body, presenting it as a technical system of documenting and processing. Thus, documenting infrastructures cease to serve as a means of describing reality and become partners in shaping it. From here, the introduction traces the connection between war and psychiatry in the development of documentation technologies, and demonstrates how the distinctions through which we perceive reality depend on the technical infrastructures that enable their emergence. In its conclusion, the text returns to the bleeding Israeli present, where the military origin of documentation infrastructures and discourse is more exposed than ever before, and in this way their decisive influence on culture and society is revealed.