The Moment of Wired

Thomas Streeter

Friedrich Kittler is on the right track when, in Discourse Networks, he suggests that one should understand romanticism, not as a collection of texts or a historical period, but as a way of organizing discourse through practices of writing, reading, and relating.³⁸ For the last two centuries or so, people who have never read Wordsworth, Byron, or Emerson have produced and consumed stories of heroic outcast wanderers on desperate quests, tales of revelation based on inner experience, celebrations of art as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," the use of the colloquial to generate an effect of authenticity, and so forth. The Kittlerian approach correctly makes the persistence of romanticism a problem of history, social organization, and systems of communication. And Kittler's Foucaultian use of the term technology to describe pedagogical manuals, child-rearing practices, and the like has a useful othering effect, displacing the romantic expressive tautologies of originary nature and genius onto a materialist analysis of their conditions of possibility. Romanticism is indeed well-described as "a certain technology of the letter."³⁹

But the shift from expression to technology has its own risks. The problem with McCluhanism is not that it's wrong to attribute causal power to technologies; it is that technology is imagined singularly, as the secret key that unlocks complexity, as the cause of cultural change. The move in Kittler from Discourse Networks to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter—one title suggesting an inquiry into concrete practices, the other a list of gadgets—risks too neatly reducing behaviors and differences into generalizable epistemes that can be tidily separated into distinct, technologically caused epochs. This can be particularly troubling when, by a millennial logic of succession (from 1800/1900 to 2000), the suggestion becomes that, as computers replace previous technologies of communication, consciousness is once again being transformed in one fell swoop.⁴⁰

In the case of the 1990s internet enthusiasms, it could be said that computers did not so much shape culture as the other way around. Computer networks did not create the rhetorical constructions of originary genius, of spontaneous creation-from-nowhere that functioned to promote both individuals like Andreessen and the internet itself as Promethean sources of wealth and knowledge, outside of history and social determination. The images made available by Mosaic and Netscape were clearly inspirational to many, not so much because they departed from conventional forms of representation, but to a large degree because they created a sense of anticipatory projection. The role of the web browser at first was more like that of a Rorschach-like object with which to explore fantasy. And for that fantasy to take wing, conventional, written romantic tropes were required, like the studied use of informal everyday language to construct authenticity, the dissemination of narratives that constructed the internet as a place for thrilling exploration, and the crafting of rebel-artist personas like Barlow and Andreessen. These tropes were often as not disseminated in conventional print, like Wired and Neuromancer. And that which was disseminated online was still largely made of traditional letters and words; what was important about the technology at first may not have been that it was digital but that it was narrowly accessible to the particular communities of those who did a lot of their own word processing. It was this historical accident of a shared sense of secret access, of being in the know by virtue of being fluent with a computer modem, that allowed the early online users to experience in the internet a sense of something radically new, of a break with the past. And that experience, in turn, helped distract from the sober economic and global realities that American culture spent the 1990s so energetically avoiding.

38See Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Mettler (Stanford, Calif. 1990).
39 David Wellbery, foreword to ibid., p. xvii.
40 This slide from a Foucaultian sense of causal complexity towards a reductive, singular sense of technological causation is clear enough in some of Kittler's followers, if not in Kittler himself. Consider Kittler's description of the "1800" discourse network: "Technologies like that of book printing and the institutions coupled to it, such as literature and the university, thus constituted a historically very powerful formation, which in the Europe of the age of Goethe became the condition of possibility for literary criticism" (Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, p. 369). Here, specific technologies like printing are seen in conjunction with institutions like the university. But then consider the translators' introduction to Kittler's sequel, which appreciatively cites McCluhan and pronounces, "Media are the alpha and omega of theory. . . . Literature is programming." The interesting use of an attention to technology as a way to undercut an idealization of "literature" starts to become an argument that media technology trumps all else, and cybernetic metaphors start to stand in for concrete analysis (Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, "Translators' Introduction: Friedrich Kittler and Media Discourse Analysis," in Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Winthrop-Young and Wutz (Stanford, Calif., 1999), pp. xx-xxi.