Abstract
The chapter explores two complementary perspectives: the lack of an explicit focus within semiotics on media technology and a converse lack of semiotic awareness in the classic media theory.
The slow genesis of the medium concept clearly affected the formation of modern semiotics with Peirce and Saussure. It is shown that within this process, the technological aspect constituted the “place of strongest resistance” and to what extent the subsequent developments in semiotics have been marked by this initial condition.
Technological media science, best represented by Kittler, is then shown to develop out of a blindness to the semiotic implications of its own premises. Even if it allows us to see how new ways of signification come to exist as a result of technical inventions, this insight is preconditioned by a gesture of erasure of semiotic difference. It appears truly ironic that Kittler’s writing is still so semiotically rich.
In the field of intermediality, we can observe an initial reversal in weighing the importance of the cognitive vs the technical dimension of the medium. The consequence of this is that intermedial research has tended to lose sight of the internal logic of media evolution. What has not yet been resolved is how the technical condition should be conceptualized if it contributes to the “qualification” of the medium. It is argued that both semiotics and technics should be seen as converging on a common theoretical terrain, in a complicated, chiasmatic relationship. Technics and semiotics need to be studied together.
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Notes
- 1.
Even the data-transformative branches of art, called mapping (Simanowski 2006: 69–76), clearly use signifying sets of data, and so qualify by all means as signs in the precise semiotic sense, e.g., human dance steps translated into music, the distribution of Jewish dwellings before WWII on museum grounds, the stock price of a corporation, and pixel-representation of bits on the CNN website – all of which work only by focusing on their semantic context. From the semiotic standpoint, even the postmodern mapping that aestheticizes trivial data appears symptomatic both of the growing tendency toward datafication and data analytics and theiconic turn.
- 2.
Jakobson’s and Mukařovský’s crucial modification was to add the “fourth” function: the aesthetic function, which pertained to the sign itself (Mukařovský 1976/1936).
- 3.
The diagram displaces writing (again, see below on Saussure) by assuming that the sign paradigmatically acquires the sound form.
- 4.
As expressed emphatically by Kittler: “Once the technological differentiation of optics, acoustics, and writing exploded Gutenberg’s writing monopoly around 1880, the fabrication of so-called Man became possible. His essence escapes into apparatuses. Machines take over functions of the central nervous system, and no longer, as in times past, merely those of muscles. And with this differentiation – and not with steam engines and railroads – a clear division occurs between matter and information, the real and the symbolic. […] The physiology of eyes, ears, and brains have to become objects of scientific research. For mechanized writing to be optimized, one can no longer dream of writing as the expression of individuals or the trace of bodies. The very forms, differences, and frequencies of its letters have to be reduced to formulas. So-called Man is split up into physiology and information technology” (Kittler 1999: 16).
- 5.
On the question of predecessors and influences, see, for instance, de Mauro 1972: 380–389 et passim.
- 6.
See Peirce 1960–1966 [CP4:447]; Peirce 1998: 274; here (as elsewhere), Peirce makes an interesting distinction between genuine and degenerate indices; in the case of the latter, the index conveys not only information but also an iconic representation (“Firstness”) associated with the object that has given rise to the indexical relation (a “weather-cock calls up an image of a quarter of a horizon” is an example given in MS [R] 491:3–4; a similar idea can be found in Peirce 1998: 306–7). “A photograph, for example, not only excites an image, has an appearance, but, owing to its optical connexion with the object, is evidence that that appearance corresponds to a reality” (Peirce 1960–1966 [CP 4:447]); MS [R] 491:2–3; MS [R] 939:45–6; MS [R] L67:37–38. See also Peirce 1986: 66–8; Peirce 1986: 76; Peirce 1960–1966 [CP 7: 355–6].
- 7.
In accord with the omnipresent triad of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.
- 8.
Eco himself corrected this quantitative approach by qualitative semiotic reinterpretation already in the 1965 edition of his Open Work (Eco 1989/1965).
- 9.
Just think of the Russian propaganda and its attempts to blur any difference between truth and lie in the face of the photographies of the Russian war crimes: The fact that a vast majority of these photographs are firmly embedded in the digital culture is revealing. The satellite and the drone perspective might represent the new provisional horizon of factuality – the symbolic anchoring of the imaginary – in this context.
- 10.
The same idea appears later in Kittler (1999) but in semiotically less developed terms.
- 11.
Cf. International Journal of Cultural Studies 2015, volume 18, and the Special Issue No. 1: The Uses of Yuri Lotman (and the articles there by Indrek Ibrus, Peeter Torop, Maarja Ojamaa, and Nicola M. Dusi).
- 12.
Cf. also Bühler 2011: 40 ff who etymologizes the words for “sign.”
- 13.
“Searle explains his argument by means of his famous parable of the Chinese room in which messages are processed by people who do not even understand the meaning of the individual words. The servants in this room are monolingual Americans who receive the messages in Chinese, but are nevertheless able to process them on the basis of numerical instructions that tell them how to combine and correlate the elements of the incoming messages. Consequently, these Americans (alias the computer) do not understand (and hence are not affected by semiosis), ‘because the formal symbol manipulations by themselves don’t have any intentionality; they are quite meaningless; they aren’t even symbol manipulations, since the symbols don’t symbolize anything’” (Nöth 2003: 86–87).
- 14.
Another main work where disability is prominent is, of course Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Kittler 1999).
- 15.
Let us signal here that Bellamy’s 1887 setting precedes the environment of most of the stories cited by Kittler which suggests that Kittler’s examples are very much already under the influence of the real technological achievements. That arguably contributes to Kittler’s forgetting the semiotic gesture, being already fascinated by the machinist functioning.
- 16.
Here we refer to his famous preoccupation with ‘soldering the circuits.’
- 17.
And to be noted, another example of acoustic sign (not signal) in the story “Death and the Shell” by Maurice Menard is the ominous melody which cannot be captured by musical score, but its only effect is the death to its listener – yet another case of failed communication (Kittler 1999: 51–55).
- 18.
Nothing changes with the accidental mention of “indexical media” in the context of Kittlerian studies (Salisbury and Sale 2015: xx). Put into context of a very peculiar theoretical framework, its true meaning is referring again to Jacques Lacan, which then leaves them to mean “media that register the imprint of the real.”
- 19.
Not only is audiovisual/iconic indexical semiotic expression not affected by the “spell” of the symbolic; the symbolic readjusts to the new environment: the media theoretical importance of experiments like lettrism (visual poetry) reveals that nonsignifying elements themselves can be brought to signify within the realm of literature – or by pushing its boundaries.
- 20.
The true function of communicated signs themselves lies no doubt in their context. Media are never free of the social environment and their content, though they fall into the different function categories of social systems (art, economy, law) and are pulled into the intricate network of society as a whole. A telling example is the arrest of people holding up blank “protest” signs by the Russian authorities (Van Brugen 2022). This blank space is never free of meaning, and this is all the more true in a situation where the aim of the authorities, as is well-known, is to counterbalance, camouflage, or cover up things that are not called by their proper names (“special military operation” in the place of “war”). In this environment, where one might otherwise consider a blank sign to convey no meaning, we see that signification does in fact take place (this, of course, is precisely the intention), and it is because of this that those holding the signs are punished. The authorities cannot help but notice. Thus, what is at stake is not just the overload of context imposed by public institutions but also the contrary: the almost involuntary subduing of public authority to the mechanism of contextual determination of blank space. In this way, they resemble Kittler’s unwanted testimony to semiosis that is never avowed.
- 21.
In a different essay, the reductive meaning of the concept of the medium includes “institutionelle Übertragungskanäle” (Wolf 2017: 154) and is in need of being complemented by semiotic systems; it is the typical “nicht nur … sondern auch” (not only … but also) phrase against which there is no objection except that in the subsequent train of thought, the work of pure semiotic difference (from a cognitive perspective) typically prevails over a more inclusive approach
- 22.
The genealogy of intermedial thinking is traced by Jedličková and Fedrová, 2020.
- 23.
The singling out of “technical media of display” in Elleström’s expanded model for understanding media relations (2021) seems unhappily to set the problem of technics/technology in larger sense aside.
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This text was proofread within the project Development of Research and Popularisation Resources of the Institute of Czech Literature of the CAS, CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/18_054/0014701, co-funded by the EU’s European Structural and Investment Funds within the operational programme Research, Development and Education.
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Chudý, T., Müller, R. (2023). Intermediality, Semiotics and Media Theory. In: Bruhn, J., López-Varela, A., de Paiva Vieira, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91263-5_18-1
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