Unpublished Preface to

Discourse Networks
FRIEDRICH A. KITTLER
TRANSLATED BY GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG

A device cannot distinguish between a true random sequence and

a pseudo-random sequence if the periodic length exceeds its storage
capacity. In most cases this condition is easily met.1

The term discourse network [Aufschreibesysteme] occurs (as a quotation

from another language) in Daniel Paul Schrebers Memoirs, where it
represents the question in what place, in whose name, and addressed
to whom what is put to paper. It seems a good term to conduct literary
studies on an elementary levelas a history of practices whose interplay
constitutes a literate culture. Our theme, quite simply, is speaking and
hearing, reading and writing.
This choice of topic, however, already deviates from the fundamental
assumptions with which intellectual history [Geistesgeschichte] and
literary sociology approach the existence of texts. For a long time intel-
lectual history skipped over the information channel known as writing
and headed toward a meaning that may be supported by writing but
whose intelligibility is not affected by it. Worldviews and mental
constructs rather than letteralities became themes, because only the
former were considered to be both historical and of historical impact.2
Conventional literary sociology, by contrast, read texts as reflections of
the social conditions of production, whose paradigm, as is well known,
is labor rather than information. Steam engines and weaving looms
became topics (as in the case of Goethe); typewriters did not.
The following book starts out from the premise that more is at work in
literary history than mind and labor processes. If literary texts are, and
have, a history, then it involves information technologiesin a program-
matic rather than a merely mimetic sense. If poetry is information, then it
can be read as a technology rather than (as is now once again done in the
wake of Schivelbusch) as an occasional reflection on other technologies.
It is no doubt of importance to literary historians to study how writers
experienced trains as devices that saved muscular exertion.3 But how
literature itself functions as an extension or replacement of the central
nervous system is a great deal more important.

Grey Room 63, Spring 2016, pp. 90107. 2016 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 91
 An approach to literary studies that proceeds in proper accordance
with its own object instead of deriving its contents from philosophy,
sociology, or psychology is first and foremost confronted with the
seeming externality known as information. It is an elementary fact that
literature (whatever else it may be) processes, stores, and transmits data
and that these acquisition, storage, and transmission systems, when they
take on the appearance of texts, have the same technological positivity
as computers.
We are dealing with texts as they exist, not with what they contain or
represent, reflect or criticize. No doubt the latter takes precedence among
readers. But a scientific analysis of texts, precisely because it treats read-
ing as a topic of investigation rather than a natural given, must remain
aware of the material basis of information. Books, to put it bluntly, are
masses of printed words; and given that the present has developed pro-
cessing technologies other than books, we are forced to ask what words
are able to achieve (or not), and according to which rules they are written
and stored, read and interpreted. The goal, then, is to design a blueprint
for the data stream we call literature, to identify the particular agents and
positions that according to Shannons model act as source, sender, channel,
and receiver: Who acts as the source that is articulated by texts, and who
acts as the processor or interpreter that in turn articulates these texts?
Who may assume the position of writer and reader? No more and no less
is contained in the term discourse network.
Evidently, this is an approach informed by media theory and cyber-
netics. But unlike many other attempts to embed literary scholarship in
information theory, the following study will apply this approach to
specific historical situations. The goal is to neither formalize (Bense, Eco)
nor idealize (H.D. Zimmermann) literary texts by means of information-
theoretical concepts. While those literary theories use Shannons model
(deprived of the source) as a timeless invariant, we are by contrast con-
cerned with concrete instantiations in time and space. What conditions
does a given culture tie to the function of writers, and what does it
ascribe to readers and interpretersthose are questions that move beyond
the idealizations so common among the followers of Habermas. Such ide-
alizing theories are marked by their tendency to reduce highly complex
literary information systems to elementary models, which are then
in a second stepsubjected to normative demands.
Information, however, is a technological and not a philosophical
concept. It is better suited for the analysis of data streams than for the
design of communicative miracles. The question is not how complex
societies are persuaded to develop a reason-based identity but how it
came about that certain information networks are labeled reasonable.

92 Grey Room 63
This is what pragmatic linguists focus on after abandoning idealizing
models (Wunderlich, Ehlich), and it also the focus of the following his-
torical contextualizations.
Yet analyses of positivities come with their own idealization. It is the
assumption that empirical situations have their standards. Otherwise no
description could ever move beyond a simple protocol. But as ethno-
methodologists (Garfinkel, Hymes, and others) have shown, positions in
an information network never remain merely individual positions. Since
every culture imposes conditions on the access, administration, usage,
and transmission of data, the participating individuals can also be
treated as functions. (This is obvious in the case of technical media.) It is
therefore possible to address, for instance, the position of literary authors
as well as that of their male and female readers and their interpreters
within a given period. From the point of view of literary history, this has
the advantage of being able to operate on a level that includes more texts
than is possible when relying on constituent hermeneutic components
such as author, oeuvre, genres, yet without taking recourse to concepts
such as period style, zeitgeist, or cultural morphology. (Functions in a
circuit are more defined and above all more calculable than intentions or
types.) And from the point of view of literary sociology, it has the advan-
tage of replacing global designations such as society, critique, or
affirmation by defined instances and verifiable area of functions. Which
is why this book remains on an intermediate level of generalization. That
is, instead of invoking proper names or timeless essences it will refer to
social designations and types as well as to gender- and age-related roles.
It is helpful to make use of systematic comparisons when dealing with
standardized functions that commonly are approached by way of proper
names and biographies. The blueprint of a given system becomes appar-
ent only when its particular set of included and excluded functions are
compared to alternate possibilities. For the purposes of such a contrast
it is both necessary and sufficient to reconstruct the literary information
networks of two different points in time. It is necessary because the dif-
ference between the two allows us to isolate functions from their respec-
tive carriers or executions. On the other hand, it is no more than
sufficient because no historical information network is as devoid of pre-
conditions as the first analyzed system may initially appear. We will
address this problem by placing introductory chapters at the beginning
of each synchronous information network in order to remind readers of
the historical preconditions.
Historically oriented systematic comparisons between two or more
states are a common procedure in modern historiography, which unlike
the now defunct intellectual history [Geistesgeschichte] is interested in

Kittler | Unpublished Preface to Discourse Networks 93

 synchronous functional contexts. The latter is, so to speak, the red thread
that ties together Kuhns and Bachelards inquiries into the histories of
science as well as Canguilhems and Foucaults analyses of the history
of human sciences. No such attempt has yet been made in the field of
literature, but Foucault paved the way for such a project in The Order
of Things and other writings.
The following study will adopt some of the methodological distinc-
tions made by Foucault, who introduced the basic notion of discourse to
the study of written information systems. In order to reconstruct such
systems and their paradigm changes, however, it is by no means neces-
sary to confine them to a single temporal continuum. On the contrary, a
lot can be gained by restricting oneself to narrow snapshots without fill-
ing the interim gaps with lots of speculation. Heidegger already pointed
out that the nineteenth and most ambiguous century could never
be understood by describing the sequence of its periods. It must be
demarcated simultaneously from both ends, i.e., from the last third of the
eighteenth century and the first third of the twentieth.4 Hence the two
literary networks under investigation each have the breadth of one
generation (1800 +/15, 1900 +/15). Only under these conditions will
it be possible to arrive at effective functional contexts that despite all
standardization will facilitate viable interpretations.
The price one has to pay for these methodological caesuras and sec-
tions is, first, the inability to posit any causal explanations for long-term
historical changes. The second drawback is the inability to introduce
further modifications on a level smaller than the temporal unit under
investigation. Regarding the first point, it is the method introduced by
Foucault and worked out in The Archaeology of Knowledge that in fact
allows us to isolate the very paradigms and parameters whose changes
appear to be in need of causal explanation. This is not always the case in
literary history, especially when it refers the passage of time to already
established notions of enlightenment and reflectionwhich results in
terminological anachronisms. With regard to the second methodological
drawback: It may serve as a corrective for the widely spread tendency to
personalize innovations in literary historywhich results in the ongoing
conditions of a given time period vanishing underneath a narcissism of
minor differences. (Think of bygone studies of Weimar and Jena, classi-
cism, and early romanticism.)
Despite these two limitations, and regardless of all the objections that
have been raised against structuralism, nothing is of greater interest to
systemic comparisons than change. The two states of literature under
investigation in this study were chosen precisely in order to highlight
certain elementary and consequential innovative thrusts in the domain

94 Grey Room 63
of written data processing. This approach places changes at the very
center of the investigation. To be sure, every new age modifies literary
practices, but ruptures that touch upon the very concept of literature are
extremely rare. They and they alone enable us to see how historically
blind it would be to use terms such as author and oeuvre as unchanging
basic concepts. Systemic changes suspend the regularity of information
processing (and thereby also all presumptive basic concepts). They ques-
tion the literary object of analysis and demand a conceptual overhaul
capable of operating at this level. Beyond all particular findings, then,
the analyses may well take on an exemplary character.
Of course it first needs to be shown that there indeed were such
innovations in the literary domain (rather than only in the well-known
technological realm). Such a claim is at odds with the notion of a com-
prehensive European literary tradition (complete with established
genres, themes, and hermeneutic transmission horizons). Initial evidence
in favor of this claim are the many personal testimonials and self-
representations that indeed occur in both the epochs under investiga-
tionand that differ from the epigonal self-consciousness of around
1820 or 1865. But then again, such expressions of revolutionary change
could just as well be common figures of common modern rhetoric. The
only data and pieces of evidence that are conclusive are those that, irre-
spective of all matters of opinion, clearly point to a change in the cultural
techniques themselves.
With regard to the second rupture under investigation, there can be no
doubt that once the data-processing devices typewriter (Remington II of
1878), phonograph (1887), and film (1895) had reached their maturity
phase, the significance of literature changed. A historically unprece-
dented gap opens up between writing, acoustics, and opticson this, at
least, scholars of literature and media agree. (Leaving aside the type-
writer; only McLuhan, originally a literary scholar, paid sufficient atten-
tion to it.)
And because the innovations of 1900 occurred on a global scale, an
analysis of their literary effects and reactions cannot restrict itself to the
Germanophone domain. We will in passing also pay respect to Villiers,
Mallarm, Proust, Marinetti, Apollinaire, and Valry; to Stoker, Doyle,
Gertrude Stein, and William James.
The other innovative thrust under discussion is rarely described as
such. Personalizing literary histories attribute it to the one and only Goethe.
Only recently have there been attempts to describe the literary revolution
of the age of Goethe in systematic and anonymous terms. Heinrich Bosse,
for instance, tackled the origins of copyright; Peter Weimar, those of
literary studies. Continuing their questions and results, the focus here

Kittler | Unpublished Preface to Discourse Networks 95

 will be on the reform of writing and reading practices which in that
particular time period revolutionized the medium of the book (even
without the pressure of a technological competitor). The thesis is that
very simple and technical practicalities, because they ensured a general
alphabetization, emerged as the material basis for the success of German
classicism and romanticism. And because Germanywhich had lagged
behind in the first industrial revolutiontook the lead in this innovative
thrust, the evidence presented in the first part will be exclusively German.5
Ethnologies and histories of writing (e.g., Goody and Furet/Ozouf)
tend to cover fairly large periods of time, which are then referred to as
the age of writing or print culture. Keeping in mind the now once again
pressing problem of periodization, it seems appropriate to focus on his-
torical changes within these grand formations. Only then will the differ-
ences between the general alphabetization of around 1800 and earlier
forms of print literacy became pronounced enough to also explain strictly
synchronic changes of the concept of literature. Since established media
theories neglect this particular epoch of the book, we need to draw
together evidence from historically oriented sociologies of reading
(Schenda, Engelsing, Gessinger) and especially from the magnificent and
meticulous cultural histories of the positivist epoch (Bngers, Kehr,
Stephan, Paulsen, etc.). Thanks to its systematicthat is, experimental
analyses of reading and writing, positivism accumulated a vast knowl-
edge of information systems, though one that has been occluded by
intellectual history. It needs only to be correlated with known facts of
literary history in order to enable a history of discourse.
The two cuts imposed on the apparent continuity of German literature
can further be supported by correlating them with other forms of knowl-
edge. After all, elementary regulations concerning reading and writing
have effects that reach far beyond literature in the narrow sense. Both
caesuras confirm what Foucault discovered in the very different domain
of scientific discourse. Derrida, in turn, arrived at similar conclusions
when discussing Rousseaus new relationship between alphabet and
voice (De la grammatologie) and the irruption of technological means of
telecommunication into the processing of written data during Freuds
age (La carte postal). Nonetheless, quite apart from the fact that the
following book deals with very different evidentiary material, it will go
a methodological step beyond Foucaults discourse analysis and Derridas
grammatology.
First, Derrida. Grammatology, or the philosophical theory of writing,
is stifled by its speculative methodology whenever its exegetical proce-
dures are insufficient. Nobody can think or interpret the sequence of
letters of a typewriter keyboard. What needs to be added are empirical

96 Grey Room 63
data about the point of time and the intention of such a standardization
a task Derrida circumvents by restricting his material to grand specula-
tive texts. By contrast, this book follows Foucault; that is to say, it adopts
a positivism that replaces the grand claims of philosophy with an indif-
ference toward diverse and anonymous texts. There will be no prejudging
what roles are played by what texts within a given information network.
Nonetheless, Foucaults correlations between different disciplines, each
of which constitutes a synchronous system of knowledge and social
relations, remain rational constructions and are hence open to further
critique. The reason, quite simply, is that Foucault treated discursive reg-
ularities as intelligible rules while hardly ever referring to the flow of
information at their material base. As a result, technological thresholds
do not appear in his analyses.
In order to arrive at empirically more valid results, Foucaults findings
have to be applied to these thresholds (which need to be described rather
than interpreted). The advantage of such a transcription is, first, that the
concept of discourse returns to its home ground. Up until now Foucault
has had a stronger impact on the social and historical sciences (Donzelot,
Baudrillard, Said) than on literary studies, despite the latters obvious
responsibility for discourse. Second, a technological rereading of Foucault
or Derrida that uses substantially extended data may result in an archae-
ology of basic structuralist presumptions based on historical facts. Not
coincidentally, the Archaeology of Knowledge features the typewriter
keyboard of 1888 as an irreplaceable but deceptively timeless paramount
example. In this and many other cases, our aim is to delimit present figures
of thought (scarcity, nontranslatability, spatialization) by tracing them
back to historical decisions.
Technical vocabulary is well suited to transfer philosophical theories
into historical facts. The following study will strive to make use of infor-
mation- and guidance-technological terms with the greatest possible pre-
cision and without any metaphorical constraints. This vocabulary is the
only language that neither rationalizes nor idealizes. It adopts a neutral
stance toward types of texts and orders of knowledge. Neither philo-
sophical nor psychoanalytic, technical vocabulary hasfor very tangible
reasonsthe advantage of providing immediate and finite instructions
capable of exposing the blueprint of information systems.
Submitting the fine arts to such technicism may cause disconcert-
ment. And yet it is not without support. Heidegger has shown that the
things we believe we encounter freely have long been determined by the
essence of technology (which for Heidegger came to mean: by informatics).
A corresponding analysis can be applied to speeches we listen to and the
texts we read. To be sure, Heidegger has the tendency to hint at a preserve

Kittler | Unpublished Preface to Discourse Networks 97

 beyond all planification: poetry or art. But that, precisely, is the point.
Though literature may be more informal than the sciences and institu-
tions of its age, it is not completely decoupled from them. Maybe it is
able to secure operative possibilities. Methodologically, it seems more
fruitful to investigate functional connectionsthat is, to tentatively ana-
lyze literature as one sociocultural guidance technique among others
than to indulge in artistic metaphysics (as even the Left is prone to do)
and perceive literature to embody some autonomous realm or even have
access to the critical truth of society. Unlike those suggestions, our
hypothesis at least allows for verifications and falsifications.
What Christa Brger callsin a historically limited sensethe insti-
tution of art will be hypothetically generalized and correlated with other
institutions in order to go beyond Brgers inquiry and determine the
position of literature within a system at a given point in time. We are not
dealing with the frequently analyzed influence of certain sciences and
institutions on authors but with what makes these influences possible in
the first place. For instance, it is well known that the literature produced
in Goethes time established close connections with German idealism.
However, to determine how systems of poetry and philosophy had to be
organized in order to achieve such an intersystemic interface requires
that we move beyond the level of influence or impact. These problems
can only be solved by means of analyzing real institutions and verifiable
addressing procedures.
To begin with, the analysis of protocols of address enables us to name
pertinent forms of knowledge and institutions. As pragmalinguistics has
shown, texts have boundaries that embed them in information flows.
Titles, prefaces, dedications, open letters, and the like provide the clear-
est evidence for what sources fed the literary texts and what types of
reading, processing, interpretation, and so on they are addressed to. As
in the case of postal letters, the data regarding sender and receiver result
in a traceable information network (Pestalozzi/mothers/civil servants,
Goethe/Hegel, Schreber/Flechsig, etc.).
The empirical procedure is so necessary because the inquiry into the
connection between literature and other institutions of knowledge is
frequently and with gusto shaped by the institutions in question. Thus
Freud claimed poets for himself, just as Hegel had done earlier. These
partly transmitted and partly institutionally or academically sanctioned
connections serve to fix and enshrine what is historically variable and
therefore needs to be analyzed in all its variability. The fact that there
are sciences that literature refers to is more important than their chang-
ing names. Instead of producing yet another treatise on Poetry and
Philosophy, or Literature and Psychoanalysis, the following study will

98 Grey Room 63
attempt to describe a space in which such couplings are datable possibil-
ities. Which implies retracing how certain couplings became impossible
and were replaced by others. Only in this manner is it possible to specify
the achievements and limits of factually established discourse networks.
This study does not aim to propose alternative models (rather than
hinting at such models, it will set them aside as unthinkable). Instead it
merely moves one step beyond established couplings. Nobody will deny
that works of the German classical and Romantic era were optimally
tapped by the philosophy of their age, or that many modern texts cry out
for psychoanalytic readings. But rarely do we inquire into the historical
conditions that make such affinities and interpretations possible. Our
so-called methodological pluralism with all its arbitrariness may well
result from this omission.
If, however, it can be shown that and how literatures speak within the
context of their reference disciplines, this will put an end to the legends
of authors who can say what they want, and of readers who may think
whatever comes to mind. Like all the other concepts proposed here,
intertextuality (Kristeva) will also serve to limit matters. Rather than
referring back to experiences, literature becomes a positive figure within
a historical field. According to McLuhan the content of a medium is
always another medium. In line with this insight, the following study
will inquire into those powers that for a given time defined the matter of
literature and the playground of its language. This allows for two things:
first, to make literary contents more describable than when they are left
open (as in the case of referring to ideas and experiences); and second,
to establish clear priorities. By counting the respective positions in the
systems, we can distinguish between cases in which literary writing
practices subsequently turn into sciences and those in which literature
continues a technical or scientific data-processing technique. All too
often this question is decided beforehand by disregarding the material,
be it by talking about poetry moving ahead of either philosophers or
psychoanalysts, or by bracketing the question itself in favor of structural
parallels.6 But once we are able to provide positive evidence that, for
instance, expressionist verse and associative writing techniques emerged
from the experimental setup of physiological laboratories (rather than the
other way round), a lot will be gained in terms of situating an allegedly
detached poetry within sociocultural realities.
The same applies to reception processes. Once again, the analysis
of literary-institutional wiring [Vernetzung] has to show that and how
contemporaneous sciences channel what readers believe that they read.
Depending on historical circumstances, the latter may include letters or
meanings, specific parts or oeuvres, nature images or semiotechnically

Kittler | Unpublished Preface to Discourse Networks 99

 optimized codesin other words, thoroughly contrary conceptualiza-
tions of texts that could not exist without an overarching theoretical
practice. By emphasizing the importance of forces of knowledge that reg-
ulate reading acts that dissolve into countless variants, the following
study departs from any reception theory that describes the text as an offer
to the ideal reader. Such approaches appear to codify what interpreters
presuppose when they formulate how they deal with texts: that is, their
understanding that when they open a book they do so for the first time
and of their own free will. To unsettle these idealizations by showing the
ways in which reading is a dependent variable that presupposes more or
less professionalized institutions is not very difficult. And because the
school is that particular institution which in our culture is charged with
administering reading and writing, both parts of the following study
delve into educational structures, from elementary schools all the way
to universities.
Furthermore, in order to arrive at a satisfactory analysis of the institu-
tional ingredients of reading and writing, those sciences wired with a
contemporaneous literature will be observed primarily as institutions. It
is not necessary to describe all the peak performances and theoretical
details of the pedagogics and philosophy of Goethes age, or of turn-of-
the-century psychophysics and psychoanalysis, in order to determine
their intertextual location. Literary studies is not responsible for thoughts
and arguments but for texts and readings. It suffices to retrace how these
sciences came to construct specific situations within information
flowsbe it essay writing, the ways in which schools and universities
organize teaching, the psychoanalytic couch, or the physiological human
experiment. Situations, however, are not anecdotal components of human
or natural sciences but their sociocultural reality, no matter how strange
they may appear (Feyerabend). What is committed to paper, who has the
right to read, how knowledge is transmitted and examinedeverything
is determined on this level. Rather than once again probing the corre-
spondences of themes and motives, it is more fruitful to determine the
correspondences between the reading and writing technologies of con-
temporaneous literatures and sciences. It is well known that the Atlantis
fantasy in Hoffmanns Golden Pot recycles a literary and intellectual
motif of its day (aetas aurea ); what needs to be added is that the acquisi-
tion of this ability to record Atlantis is by no means the product of a
merely fictitious examination situation.
Time and again the focus will be on simple and all too familiar situa-
tions whose literary and scientific implications we hardly ever recog-
nize.7 Many a legend has prevented us from observing literature in these
empirical, all-too-empirical surroundings. (Immanent interpretations are

100 Grey Room 63

by definition incapable of doing this.) Several chapters of the following
book therefore will attempt to show that Hoffman is staging the entirety
of the reading and writing reforms of Goethes time, or that Rilkes metic-
ulous descriptions of reading and writing could not have come about
without the inscription techniques of psychophysics and arts education.
Primers, essays, test protocols, association tests, case studies, and so on
these are all equally supraindividual and underrated discourse techniques
that provide a nomenclature capable of defining the status of literary texts
in historical and media-technical rather than metaphysical terms.
Correlations that move beyond the traditional genre grid have their
methodological pitfalls. The demon of analogy, as Mallarm called it, is
prone to lead us into purely figural or structural constellations. Little
would change if Rilkes novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
were merely a simulation of agraphy (in the way it is, for instance, also a
Passion narrative). We are dealing with institutional correlations for
which we have to produce documentary evidence. This is not always
possible, especially in the case of the highly probable cross-connections
between Hoffmann and elementary-school reformers like Phlmann and
Stephani. Further research is necessary. In general, however, it will be
possible to prove the presumed links between literary and scientific dis-
course, including those located on the biographical level.
Unlike what you would expect in view of the condition of the respec-
tive sources, matters are simplest when dealing with the thoroughly
researched age of Goethe (Creuzer and Gnderrode, Niethammer and
Goethe, Schleiermacher and the Prussian Ministry of Culture). It is more
difficult, though also more important, to provide evidence regarding the
experimental sciences; that is, for turn-of-the-century psychophysics and
aphasia research. Due to the decoupling of the study of literature from
neighboring disciplines, it becomes necessary at the outset to document
that psychophysics was in fact related to literary studies and how these
connections were shaped. It most likely has to do with their preference
for the celebrities du jour, but not even media histories pay sufficient
attention to the basic work of Fourier, Helmholtz, Wundt, Erdmann,
Mnsterberg, and so on. Benn scholarship completely missed out on the
importance of the psychiatrist Ziehen, who was both Nietzsches doctor
and Benns superior. Kafkas connections to a parlograph manufacturing
company or to Ellen Key and other reform pedagogues are similarly
direct and underrated. Only by drawing on such source-based evidence
is it possible to ascertain that some of Benns early texts are association
tests or that Rilkes texts are freestyle essays.
Of course, in certain famous cases research has been undertaken
(Herrlitz on Niethammer and Goethe; Muschg and others on Freud and

Kittler | Unpublished Preface to Discourse Networks 101

 literary writers; Calasso on Flechsig, Schreber, Freud; Cournot and
relying on himDeleuze and Guattari on Kafka and media technologies;
and no less a figure than Skinner wrote on Gertrude Stein and
Mnsterbergs psychotechnics). This limits our task. It is now a matter
of integrating the results of these preparatory studies and highlighting
their institutional and information-technological aspects. Studies that
would appear to be pertinent but have overlooked or eliminated these
aspects were not used.8
The systemic comparison between literary and scientific discourses,
on the one hand, and the various wirings [Verschaltung] at different
historical stages, on the other, yields such a mass of documentary and
time-specific evidence as to facilitate the economic use of secondary
literature mentioned above. Concerned contemporaries tend to register
the institutional and technical aspects of literature with greater precision
than interpreters working at a historical remove. The same applies to
the impact of technological media on data processing: Only after 1920
do we find even-tempered, equanimitous primary and secondary texts
dealing with the technological reproduction of music (Thomas Mann,
Hermann Hesse).
For this reason the following study willfollowing the principle of
lock and keyrepeatedly draw upon parallels from strictly synchronous
though very different discourses. Facts for which no parallels can be
found have no place. Though this basically precludes any possible hapax
legomenon, it does result in the parallelized texts interpreting each
other.9 And precisely the fact that such (frequently verbatim) correspon-
dences originate in differing if not mutually hostile discourses, renders
them conclusive. Otherwise the parallelism could be explained away by
invoking the redundancy of everyday language systems. To explain Stefan
Georges typography by way of Christian Morgensterns proves little. But
to refer it to ideologically distant physiologies of reading is to alter our
understanding of George. Thus the combining of extremes has its method.
It is probably no coincidence that this general procedure yields espe-
cially clear results in the extreme case of Flechsig/Schreber; that is, in
the case of a psychiatrist and a patient. What this study takes from Lacan
(apart from the real/imaginary/symbolic triad) is one particular hypoth-
esis: signs and words, because they belong to nobody, form networks that
reach beyond the individual and, in good Freudian fashion, can be
reconstructed and addressed as indices and literalisms. Evidently, such
an approach depends on a rational and reliable limitation of the corpus
under investigation. This corpus may, for instance, include the informa-
tion triangles made up of Flechsig, Schreber, and Freud, or Hegel, Krug,
and a nameless female reader, but not their respective interpreters Calasso

102 Grey Room 63

or Henrich. No secondary literature, only Krug and Flechsig, can fulfill
the very economic double function of providing both parallel texts and
interpretations for Hegel and Schreber.
In addition, this innately psychoanalytic procedure is plausibly suit-
able for literary studies (as N. Hass, S.M. Weber, and others have already
demonstrated). All the literalisms and quotation clusters, the argumen-
tative figures and naming of names that wire literary to nonliterary texts
are, once again, taken literally. With that in mind, not a single sentence
in the following study lays claim to any timeless truth (for instance,
about literature as such). Each and every one merely serves to historically
situate a word, a sentence, a book, a mass of books, or a discursive prac-
tice. But, as opposed to the opinion of authors or the meaning of work,
these things are. To describe literature as information also means to fol-
low the standards of the latter. One needs to procure data in order to
support data. That is the reason why passages and quotationsthat is,
presentable and delimitable elementsare the basal units of the follow-
ing argument. And that is also why its style consists of an ongoing com-
mentary of texts, regardless of whether these texts are labeled; scientific
or poetic, automatic or psychotic.
To make matters more accessible, it probably would have been prefer-
able to make use of summaries and interpretations, especially those
based on established histories and studies of literature. But that would
serve to elide the very letteralities, the reading and writing scenes, on
which everything dependsbe it those in Hoffmann or Stephanie, George
or Ebbinghaus. Processual technologies are not covered by results reports
and general interpretations. Just read what Nietzsche has to say about
todays readers.10
But then again, the commentary form chosen here possesses its own
economy. It would be pretty cumbersome to reconstruct the elementary
school books and reading primers implied in Anton Reiser or Henry of
Ofterdingen, among other texts, by means of the methodical exegesis
of the protagonists or narrators of one or several novels. It is better to
tackle matters in reversethat is, to find, scrutinize, and comment on con-
temporaneous primers in order to deduce their effect on the novels pro-
tagonists and structure. This has the net advantage of speed, which is a
welcome benefit for any analysis obliged to handle a large number of texts.
There is a second advantage. When institutions such as elementary
school education become subject to the gaze of our own discipline, it is
usually done from the point of view of literary and, in particular, narra-
tive texts. In more concrete terms, the principal vantage points are the
reconstructed perceptions of protagonists or narrators. Think, for instance,
of the many studies of childhood and school literature. But like any other

Kittler | Unpublished Preface to Discourse Networks 103

 phenomenological undertaking, such a procedure runs into difficulties
once it has to deal with matters of programming and arrangement; that
is, with anything operating behind the scenes. Benjamin left no doubt
that, as a medium, film cannot be adequately analyzed from a consumer
standpoint. The primacy of the technical applies to all media, including
books. In order to determine how and to what end primers program those
on the verge of literacy, the accounts provided by the latter are insuffi-
cient. On the other hand, it would be foolish to claim that such program-
ming is of no interest to literary history and can be deduced simply by
looking at contemporaneous language theories. Practices are not mere
applications. Nonetheless, the following study appears to be the only one
that depicts the rules that determine what has to be taught during the
classical-Romantic period in order for writers to qualify as objects of sci-
entific interest. Even the recent psychoanalytic interest in the childhood
of writers does not guarantee (despite Melanie Kleins suggestions) that
simple matters like the acquisition of writing become a topic of study.
The final advantage of emphasizing programs and programmatics is
the ability to conduct institutional history selectively. It is not necessary
to describe the school-based teaching of German or the coordination of
exams in secondary institutions in all their historical and regional depth
in order to analyze their systemic changes and placements. That would
go beyond the scope of this study; besides, it has been done by H.J. Frank,
G. Jger, Jeismann, von Westphalen, and others. Programs and manifestos,
however, which not coincidentally abound in the two time periods under
investigation, bundle historical information and reveal in exemplary
clarity the new couplings and legitimization procedures between litera-
ture and reference sciences. Historical pedagogy, to which this study is
greatly indebted, may be obliged to calculate the temporal delays and
degrees of efficiency of such programs, but for a functional analysis it is
enough to show that the canon of school poets demanded by Nietzsche,
or the free essay of the arts education movement, did in fact exist. They
are discursive facts that enable us to determine institutional connections.
In addition, the emphasis on programs makes methodological rather than
factual sense. Temporal delays, nonsynchronicities, and long-term
effects are by no means denied. The fact, for instance, that as of 1908
Prussian universities accepted female students initially may have been
no more than a programmatic measure, but by now the broad impact is
undeniable. The same applies to Ebbinghaus and his little book.
Granted, this methodological juxtaposition of literary texts, on the one
hand, and programs with statistical effective and/or hoped-for impact, on
the other, may appear strange, but there are good reasons for it. One of the
drawbacks of literary sociology seems to be that it chooses its objects in

104 Grey Room 63

accordance with its method by focusing on widely read but third-rate
texts. Yet it is more likely that highly elaborate literary texts are better
able to keep pace with their times and programs. In turn, immanent
interpretations seem to be hampered by their proclivity to refer grand
texts to theories and philosophies that skip over elementary reading and
writing practices (which are described in those texts). Even the term cri-
ture, which has turned into an interpretative buzzword, does not refer to
cultural techniques as cultural techniques. You will in vain search liter-
ary sociologies on the important reading mania of around 1800 for a
Tasso reader called Leonore, despite the fact that she too displays char-
acteristic symptoms of that mania. In turn, you will in vain search Tasso
interpretations for any reference to the reading mania as sociostatistical
event. And that is only one of twenty possible examples of an unfortu-
nate division of labor. The task, therefore, is to close the gap between (1)
statistically ascertainable and (2) individually described occurrences of
literary history.
The notion of cultural techniques appears to be a feasible concept to
tackle this endeavor. Unlike the factually or ideologically occluded con-
ditions of production, cultural techniques are not inaccessible to people.
On the other hand, as guiding and programming techniques they can
never be strictly individual. Just read what Marcel Mauss (speaking of
body techniques) has to say about the historical origins of swimming in
Central Europe.11 Analyzed as cultural techniques, even the most quo-
tidian practices shed their apparent harmlessness and individuality,
because they are now rendered transparent to governmental or industrial
programs. And this should not apply to the considerably more official
practices of reading and writing?
In other words, doubts are warranted whenever we encounter bound-
aries constructed between a cultural and, more specifically, literary
public sphere on the one side and state or industry on the other. These
boundaries are part of the common self-understanding of the bourgeois
age. Media historians, however, analyze the public sphere differently: It
was the factor determined by the government itself, with which the
latter turned its administrative function into a public task.12 The fol-
lowing study, too, makes clear how and to what purpose the education
state that emerged after JenaAuerstedt functionalized literature in one
of its control loops. To make equally clear what large-scale industrial
strategies stand behind technological media, would involve going beyond
the literary-historical frame.
To be sure, control loops with functions like programming, guidance,
and administration offer a less enjoyable vista than a literature that
allegedly emerges from free competition and sets out to promote human

Kittler | Unpublished Preface to Discourse Networks 105

 dignity and social utopias. Control loops, however, are verifiable. Reading
the long and unwritten book known as the history of war is, to quote
Schlieffen, not always pleasant. It may not be very uplifting to design
the history of literature as part of a history of culture techniques and
data-processing machines. But it has one advantage: the object of our stud-
ies moves into the scientific and technical world that alone is our real
word (Foucault).

And if you ask me what became of love ? . . .13

To which the only answer can be that cultural techniques are always
also body techniques. That, for instance, writing cultures wire hands and
eyes, mouths and ears in specific ways. And that, subsequently, type-
writer, gramophone, and film wire these and other body parts in other
ways. Ultimately, to analyze literature as an information technology
means to recognize its sensualitiesthe many it has promised over the
course of time, as well as the few it really contains. (The detailed differ-
entiation between writing media and other media is designed to high-
light precisely this distinction.)
It therefore may not be inappropriate to adhere to gender differences.
The fact that Goethe dictated handwritten letters while William James
dictated typed ones is not the whole story. The former had male secre-
taries, the latter one a female secretary. Hence it needs to be clarified
what gender these texts, media, and institutions have and what gender
they address. This also applies to those cases in which texts, media, or
powers of knowledge appear to be neutral in the literal sense of the word,
although theyas feminist studies have shownexclude certain bodies.
At this one point, on which everybody seems to agree, it is up to the
historical systemic comparison to produce a certain nonpolemical clarity.
Interpreters, too, smile or remain mute, as if the literary distribution of
gender roles were a private matter (of authors and interpreters). Alewyn
alone recognized that the riddle of why Goethe wrote for girls is indeed
a riddle. The following study merely adds what roles were and still are
being played by female and male secretaries, manuscripts, and typewriters.
Love is one of the most venerable topics of our literature. To state that
loveor its oppositeis a constituent component already at work in the
pure existence of literature may not amount to a new sentence. But it is
good to repeat sentences.

106 Grey Room 63

Notes
Friedrich A. Kittlers postdoctoral thesis Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 was published
by Fink Verlag, Munich, in 1985 and translated into English by Michael Metteer with
Chris Cullens as Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1990). The previously unpublished preface to Aufschreibesysteme translated here
was composed in 1983 and revised in 1987. The typescript is held by the Deutsches
Literaturarchiv Marbach. The earlier 1983 version of the preface was published as
Friedrich A. Kittler, AUFSCHREIBESYSTEME 1800/1900: Vorwort, Zeitschrift fr
Medienwissenschaft 6 (2012): 11726.Eds.

1. Ulrich Tietze and Christoph Schenk, Halbleiter-Schaltungstechnik (Berlin: 1980),

510. Thanks to Moritz Hiller for providing the reference.Trans.
2. Kittler uses the term Buchstblichkeiten, a plural noun derived from the adjective
buchstblich (literal or by the letter). To convey the material rather than semantic
inflection of Kittlers argument, I have chosen the neologism letteralities.Trans.
3. A reference to Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization
of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Oakland, CA: University of California
Press, 1986). The German original appeared in 1977.Trans.
4. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volumes I and II, trans. David Farrell Krell (San
Francisco, CA: Harper, 1991), 85.
5. See Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 17001914
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
6. Karl Friedrich Gschel, Ueber Gthes Faust und dessen Fortsetzung: Nebst einem
Anhang von dem ewigen Juden (Leipzig, Germany, 1824), 151.
7. See Heidegger: But even the most abstract working out of problems and refining
what has been gained, uses, for example, writing materials [Schreibzeug]. As uninter-
esting and obvious as these components of scientific investigation may be, they are by
no means ontologically indifferent. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan
Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), 328.
8. Just one example: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Goethe and Philosophy, in Literature and
Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German Literary Theory, trans. Robert H. Paslick
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 119; originally published in
1947 as Goethe und die Philosophie.
9. Hapax legomenon (from Greek , what is said once): What occurs
only once does not lend itself to the parallelisms Kittler has in mind.Trans.
10. Among Kittlers preferred quotations in this context: He who knows the reader
does nothing more for the reader. Another century of readersand the spirit itself will
stink. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans.
Thomas Wayne (New York: Algora, 2003), 29.Trans.
11. Further, see Marcel Mauss, Techniques of the Body, Economy and Society 2, no. 1
(1973): 7088.Trans.
12. Winfried B. Lerg, Die Entstehung des Rundfunks in Deutschland: Herkunft und
Entwicklung eines publizistischen Mittels (Frankfurt, Germany: Knecht, 1970), 272.
13. Und fragst Du mich was mit der Liebe seia direct quotation from Bertolt
Brechts early poem Erinnerung an die Marie A. (Memory of Marie A.).Trans.

Kittler | Unpublished Preface to Discourse Networks 107