Kittler's "Phonograph" and Confounded Media

In contrast with the scatttershot approach Marshall McLuhan uses in Understanding Media, Friedrich Kittler seems to have a pretty good idea of what he’s talking about, even when his ideas are pretty out there; as such, I found “Gramophone” to be kind of a joy to read, despite its length and semi-density. And it helps that what I see as his central claim is something that I fundamentally agree with, as well as one that I’ve been arguing for quite a while, albeit on a much smaller and less thoroughly researched scale (my continued defense of various kinds of electronic music and abstract art as being valid, even good, to various YouTube commenter types).

Which brings me to my go at summarizing Kittler: the recorded sound is something that is essentially distinct from both representation and the human; it is dealing, instead, with a localized real. This fact, furthermore, has had great impact on Western notions of the aleatory and the real, despite the fact that we as a society have yet to fully establish this fact as true.

Kind of a mouthful, huh? But he argues his points well; any less so, and this essay would have been a pretty profound failure.

Where Kittler draws my interest most is in his use of examples and counterexamples of his point of view; the most pointed of these inversions being found in his treatment of Guyau’s reduction of the phonograph to biological and mental terms. The important thing to note about Kittler’s Guyau is that he doesn’t exactly realize that the phonograph is a machine by necessity (“Rather than hearing the random acoustic events…Guyau’s conscious phonograph would attempt to understand and thus corrupt them” (33) ), and the human brain simultaneously as outside of the mechanical for similar reasons.

Kittler writes: >”When Guyau, who had observed the brain simply as a technical apparatus, turns his experimental gaze inward, he falls short of his own standards. It was, after all, an external gaze that had suggested the beautiful comparison between attention and playback speed. If the focusing of blurred mental images by way of attention amounts to nothing more or less than changing the time axis of acoustic evnts by increasing playback speed or indulging in time axis manipulation (TAM), then there is not reason to celebrate attention or memory as miraculous abilities” (34).

So, in other words, it is essential not to reduce the phonograph to the capability of a man, in the same way that it is essential not to reduce the human brain to the capability of a record or a machine: when one does either, one loses the nuance of the pair. When the artist or the thinker manages to avoid this comparative trap, they are instead able to “transcend” to a world of the mechanical and authorless; as in Kelly’s post, this transcendence (or as the case may be, societal transition) is by no means a bad thing, at least by Kittler’s metrics.

My question, then, is: what exactly is it about recorded sound (especially early phonography) that makes it so damn easy to get it confused with the human?