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Discourse, Media, Cultural Techniques: The Complexity of Kittler

2015; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 130; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.2015.0035

1080-6598

Geoffrey Winthrop‐Young,

Art, Technology, and Culture

Discourse, Media, Cultural Techniques:The Complexity of Kittler Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (bio) The following remarks are an attempt to apply selected features associated with complex phenomena to a recent development in German Kulturwissenschaften. The enterprise is fraught with difficulties, not the least of which is the absence of a commonly accepted and sufficiently ecumenical definition of complexity that would ease the transfer from the natural sciences to intellectual history. In addition, there is the Goldilocks predicament of finding the right size. Cross-disciplinary analogies and correspondences that attempt to draw on complexity, chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics inevitably are faced with the task of navigating between the finicky and the facile. On the one hand, there is the constant danger of overly enthusiastic meticulousness. Entertaining as it may be to describe Jonathan Culler’s reading of Barbara Johnson’s reading of Jacques Derrida’s reading of Jacques Lacan’s reading of Poe’s “Purloined Letter” as a deconstructive variant of period-doubling bifurcation, it is probably not very helpful. On the other hand, the analogies frequently do not advance beyond truisms. ‘Complex,’ invoked with hushed reverence or missionary zeal, all too often turns out to be a fancy synonym for ‘complicated’ or ‘really difficult’; it indicates little more than a tacit agreement between authors unable to explain and readers unwilling to ask. If Theodor Fontane were still around to update Effi Briest, the trademark phrase of Effi’s overwhelmed father das ist ein zu weites Feld (literally, ‘that is too broad a field’), would be das ist alles zu komplex—this is all too complex. None of these concerns are new. Readers with sufficient length of tooth will recall the skepticism and ridicule that accompanied the mainstreaming of complexity theory—the Great Nonlinear Honeymoon—lasting, roughly, from the appearance of James Gleick’s [End Page 447] Chaos in 1987 to John Horgan’s takedown of complexity as a sham in the June 1995 issue of Scientific American, and passing through well-thumbed copies of Kate Hayles, Kevin Kelly, Roger Lewin, Mitchell Waldrop, John Briggs and others. Yet while the originality of deploying complexity and associated concepts within the humanities is by now diminished, the pitfalls are still there in full force. If you repeat something intelligent, it has lost its luster, but if you repeat something silly, it is just as silly as before. The thrills of the honeymoon can never be fully reenacted, while its embarrassments remain as vivid as ever. A certain restriction of scope and goal is advisable. The following is a heuristic exploration that I will apply to selected features of complexity to illuminate a key dynamic in the work of Friedrich Kittler (and slightly beyond). The operative word is feature. Rather than attempt an overall definition of complexity—or, worse still, imply one without any attempt at defining it—I will limit myself to a few well-known characteristics of complex phenomena. First, complexity involves the emergence of systemic properties that arise from, but cannot be reduced to, the interaction between individual components. Whether you are talking about ant colonies or brains, the world wide web or the immune system, they are all “complex systems in which relatively simple components with only limited communication among themselves collectively give rise to complicated and sophisticated system-wide (‘global’) behaviour” (Mitchell 6). In the following I will argue that key concepts in current cultural theory—including “media”—can be described as emergent conceptual phenomena. Second, in many instances the emergence of complex systemic properties is the result of a recursive mechanism. Recursion refers to an algorithmic procedure in the course of which the output of a particular stage in the operation of a system is fed back into the system as the input for the next iteration. One frequently cited example is population growth, as formalized in Verhulst’s equation Xn+1 = BXn (1-xn). There is no straightforward linear growth; instead, the population of every given year Xn is the input for calculating the population of year Xn+1. I will argue that this self-recursive turning back toward and reprocessing oneself is a key dynamic for understanding Kittler’s evolution as...