Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

Kittler — the German McLuhan, darker and more technically precise — argued that the media technologies of the late nineteenth century broke the monopoly of print over the storage and transmission of human experience. The gramophone captured sound, film captured motion, the typewriter standardized the production of text, and together they disaggregated what the book had unified. His method is to read literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis as effects of their underlying media infrastructure, reversing the usual humanistic assumption that ideas drive technology. The English translation appeared in 1999 and brought Kittler's work to an Anglophone audience that was just beginning to take "media archaeology" seriously. The prose is dense and allusive, drawing on Lacan, Shannon, and Turing in the same paragraph. It is not easy reading, but it is the most rigorous account of how nineteenth-century media technologies made the twentieth-century subject possible.