Coming off of a very productive class conversation about McLuhan’s Understanding Media last week, my first moment of connection with Kittler had to do with the idea of media as facilitating interplay between the senses and media theory as potentially altering the way that we think about that interplay. For example, in the early pages of the “Gramophone” chapter, Kittler covers Edouard Leon Scott’s invention of the phonautograph. What is significant about the phonautograph, according to Kittler, is that it “made visible what, up to this point, had only been audible and had been much too fast for ill-equipped human eyes: hundreds of vibrations per second” (27). Before reading McLuhan’s explanation of how the typewriter can make poetry both visibly and auditorily stimulating, I would have been stopped in my tracks by Kittler’s assertion of the visible made audible.

Kittler goes on to explain how these mechanical inventions, especially the one that gives the chapter its title, not only create connections or transformations amid the our senses but also come to serve as mechanical (and eventually, digital) sensory organs themselves. The gramophone, per Kittler, is born of “a telegraph as an artifical mouth, a telephone as an artificial ear” (28). Media, because it is mechanized (as Joe says in his Kittler response), differs importantly from humans for lacking self-consciousness and from art for relying on neurophysiology to be successful (34, 37).

When people grasped the implications of mechanized media and the basics of how the latest inventions worked their sensory sorcery, ways of thinking were totally impacted. In the literary world, Kittler asserts that “ever since the invention of the phonogrpah, there has been writing without a subject” (44). In that most practical of spheres, military research, Turing discovered the ability to manipulate the target and direction of inter-sensory movement and produced the vocoder to systematically encrypt and then decipher coded audio (49). I’m reminded of a question Dr. Pruchnic raised as one for the ages a few times in last term’s Critical Theory course (which Aden and David were part of). It is, in my own words: is there a limit to what people can think based on when they’re living? I found the narrative within Kittler’s piece where mankind’s thoughts lead to media innovation/inventions, which lead to new thoughts, and so on, really exciting and inspiring.