I want to take up the question Joe Torok ended with in his blog post: “how might we understand Kittler in terms of computational hardware?” I particularly want to explore this in Kittler’s response to Jean-Marie Guyau’s “Memory and Phonograph.” Kittler suggests that Guyau “observed the brain simply as a technical apparatus” (34), in other words, Guyau saw the brain as hardware. Indeed, shortly before this, he calls the brain a phonograph with consciousness.

I know Kittler takes issue with this, but I’m not sure if the theoretical battle between Kittler and Guyau (as Noah pointed out on Slack) is as intense as we might initially think it to be. The tension seems to lie in the pairing of the concepts “consciousness” and “hardware” (both brain as “hardware” and phonograph as “hardware”). Kittler contends that the phonograph – as hardware - does not have consciousness, and that this is a good thing:

“Guyau’s conscious phonograph would attempt to understand and thus corrupt them. Once again, alleged identities or meaning or even functions of consciousness would come into play. Phonographs do not think, and therefore they are possible.” (33)

There’s an idea of thinking and memory and consciousness as somehow, for Kittler at least, getting in the way here. Memory, like poetry and the phonetic alphabet, is messy; all of these things represent the material stuff of the world rather imperfectly. Time axis manipulation, on the other hand, “affects the raw material of poetry, where manipulation had hitherto been impossible” (36). And if TAM is able to store or program sound, than memory is no longer necessary. The phonograph is actually a better piece of hardware than the brain because it does not rely on the mediation of consciousness, “as if the music were originating in the brain itself, rather than emanating from stereo speakers or headphones” (37). The process of “programming” no longer relies on sense extension or memory, but on purely quantitative data, in a manner that is “perspicuous and free from contradiction” (38).