Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks, 1800/1900.
Kittler combines historicism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and McLuhanism in his examination of media through the historically situated technologies permitting discourse storage. For Kittler, literature is always “medially constituted.” Since literature itself is a means for processing, storing, and disseminating data, literature will be transformed by the material and technical conditions of its epoch. In Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Kittler explores these material and technical conditions, as well as these conditions’ literary and philosophical effects, in the “discourse networks” (aufschreibesysteme) of 1800 and 1900. Kittler traces Romanticism’s preoccupation with primary orality and the transcendent inner voice of silent reading to the Mother’s Mouth, the source of phonetic sounds in early education. The shift to the phonetic instruction of language substituted the Mother’s Mouth for the book of graphic letters: “only the mother’s pointing finger retained any relation to the optic form of the letter” (34). Later in life, these students of the mouth would not see letters, but longingly hear “a voice between the lines” (34). The discourse network of 1900, by contrast, detaches language from subjectivity as it is mechanized in technologies like the typewriter, the phonograph, and film. These technologies’ “ability to record sense data” (229) without the shadow of a thinking (writing) subject transforms language into differential marks.
One of the limits of Kittler’s work for a Victorianist (studying mostly literature between 1800 and 1900) is his binary structure. Where does an author like Dickens sit, for example, in the timeline of Kittler’s analysis? Since my dissertation will likely focus on reading aloud, Kittler’s analysis of the Mother’s Mouth and orality haunting Romantic texts seems most relevant. Kittler’s 1800 aufschriebesysteme seems especially telling in light of the many scholars (Griffiths, Elfenbein, Kreilkamp, Gitelman, Stewart, Nowell Smith, Prins) who write about the imaginary-voice-in writing so palpable in Victorian prose and poetry. Yet—what about occasions of literal voicing? Kittler prompts me to consider how the Mother’s early oral instruction could inform the experience of listening Victorians.
