“Media Wars:” The Possibilities of Digital Media, The Limitations of War

A response to Friedrich Kittler's "Media Wars: Trenches, Lightning, Stars"


Kittler defines information in the context of technology—he sees the contours of the information age as emergent¬ from the architectures of its instruments. In terms of the computer technologies developed as tools of war, which are his focus in “Media Wars: Trenches, Lightning, Stars,” Kittler zeroes in on the binary nature of switches, tubes, and transistors as a manifestation of total control. “The binary architecture of our computers and missiles may well have perfected what’s at stake in every command,” he writes (2). Kittler sees war in the information age—“the war of coal and cables” (5)—as an information game, historically complicated by the noise inherent to crisis. “Command in war,” he asserts, “has to be digital because war itself is noisy” (3). Digital communications oppose noise because the symbols and logic of computers are “strictly strategic,” leading him to the conclusion that “silent digital signal processing… covers the noise of war” (4). His overarching idea is that digital processing is not merely useful in speeding up communications in wartime, but that a communications system based on binary is fundamentally and conceptually in line with the logic of war and command—that “binary economics [are] marvelously suited to war as the paradigm of zero-sum games” (3).

Entropy also figures into Kittler’s conception of information as a variant on noise. “Nature and brain have remained close to ancient chaos,” he writes (3). Meanwhile, God’s efforts tend toward the more discrete “binarization of day and night, heaven and earth… as well as of good and evil.” It is “digitalization” which “separated God’s ordered order from ancient chaos” (2). Kittler sees no room for chaos in true information, explaining that the Bible is constituted in the binary of “Yes’s and No’s,” which escape the “ever-present noise sources of physical channels” (3). Information is pure; it doesn’t tangle with the natural world.
Which is not to say that information cannot have a physicality—just that it manifests itself in the “trinity of memory-stored data, bus-transmitted addresses, and central processing instructions” with physical dimensions “of only some three to five square-millimeters”—in a computer chip, rather than in a human mind. Kittler even goes so far as to assert that, through these digital architectures, “information has been transformed into matter and matter into information” (10). Kittler specifically cites Alan Turing’s Universal Discrete Machine, which, if given infinite space in memory, defines the theoretical limit of computability on a deceptively simple architecture, reducing “the typewriter’s discrete but not yet binary systems to its very principle.” Such a computer, to Kittler, represents “a machine identical with information” (9). He quotes Turing’s assertion that “the system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe… the subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete machinery, physics not so easily” (11). The two theorists agree that the connection between information and the machine bypasses the realities of the natural world. Computers transcend their environment; they live in the world of information, of signifier, “God’s ordered order.”

And since war is the ultimate information game, the stakes of computability are very high. It’s no coincidence that Turing’s work was instrumental in cracking the German Enigma code during World War II, which put the Allied forces at a decisive advantage. Kittler frames this as a triumph of “computing media” over “storage media and transmission media.” “Allied victory,” he writes, “was guaranteed the day Britain’s secret service installed the first operational computer in history” (9). Again, this more than just Kittler’s vote of confidence in the reliability or efficiency of computer processing, it’s an affirmation of his assertion that modern war lives and breathes information, and the right machine is identical with that information. Allied victory, to Kittler, is proof of the “not too well known fact that computers follow… the very logic of decision-making, strategy, and information war” (11).

Kittler clearly asserts that war is determined by technology—at the same time, he hints that technology is determined by war. “Technical media,” he writes, “don’t arise out of human needs, as their current interpretation in terms of bodily prostheses has it, they follow each other in a rhythm of escalating strategic answers” (5). War and technology, from this perspective, amplify and necessitate one another in a feedback loop that drives each further toward a purer relationship with information—war becomes the noise-less information game, the computer becomes the most effective war tool. This certainly seems to be a limited conclusion to be drawn regarding war or technology in the information age—and the basis of Kittler’s theory doesn’t imply these limits in and of itself.

In fact, Kittler appears to begin to explore some very broad implications of computer science and technology. Although his exploration of Turing’s work naturally leads into a discussion of the implications of technology to war, his discussion of George Boole at least briefly lingers in the abstract. Kittler suggests that, in his construction of what we now know as Boolean logic, Boole did not merely describe a system of thought—he “opened the very possibility of thought with switches, tubes, transistors, and finally, chips.” Boole’s work “overcame enumeration by decision” (4). Kittler ends up bringing Boole’s work to bear on the mechanics of war, but a scientific development so profound as to open up a whole range of conceptual possibilities should not be limited to the discussion of conflict between nation-states.

It also seems odd that Kittler would bring in an extensive quote from radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi which emphasizes the non-military impact of the medium in downplaying its susceptibility to signal interception: “this ‘defect’ was utilized after about thirty years and has become radio, that means of reception which daily reaches more than 40,000 listeners” (5). Kittler moves immediately from this quotation to a discussion of this “defect” in terms of the military-industrial complex, but the real import of Marconi’s final sentiment lingers on and haunts the rest of the text—why does Kittler refuse to deal with radio’s value as a medium for cultural messages, beyond a brief reference to “entertaining rock music and mass reception” (7)? This text certainly has a historical focus, but that doesn’t fully explain Kittler’s assertion that “technical media have to do neither with intellectuals nor with mass culture,” when a fascinating example of a technology’s impact on culture lurks right within the text (13). This is to say nothing of the cultural consequences of computers—for, although Kittler concedes that “computers [are] nowadays a worldwide intelligence service offered to corporations, universities, writers, and post-modernity in general,” he does not discuss the impact that the computer (as information) would have on society in the information age (9).

In this light, it doesn’t seem quite fitting that Kittler’s Media Wars was published at a conference titled “Wars of Persuasion: Gramsci, Intellectuals, and Mass Culture.” Although Kittler certainly explores the role of war in the context of control technologies, he explicitly shies away from Gramsci’s theory of information in the public sphere. Unlike Gramsci, who “saw ‘the masses as [his] richest and most reliable source of information,’” Kittler chooses instead to theorize along the lines of Walter Benjamin’s “ever growing distrust in masses, democracy, freedom etc,” rationalizing that the existence of the self-guided missile affirms the latter perspective (2). The irony is that the foundation of Kittler’s theory—the idea that the nature of the hardware determines and defines the contours of the social context it was designed to serve—represents the grounds for an extremely compelling perspective on the relationship between computer media and post-modern mass culture. Only a few years after Media Wars was published, the advent of the Internet would make Gramsci’s perspective drastically more interesting to a theorist in the game of defining the implications of technology.

Kittler touches tantalizingly on this very issue when he writes that “the modern trinity of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic” can be boiled down into technical terms as “the trinity of sound recording, film dubbing, and dictated written orders” (6). These technological innovations have obvious impacts on mass culture and media, and Kittler grants them serious relevance to the abstract foundations of society—its’ too bad he couldn’t find a place for computers and digital media in this formulation, and speak to the ways in which binary architectures and digitalization might restructure art, law, and friendship in the public sphere (as we now know they have). That said, Kittler’s writings on the subject are not limited to “Media Wars,” and, a decade later, he would write that “it can be expected of hardware, and only of hardware, that it will one day drive out the apparition of the copyright,” which implies a space for the primacy of computer technology in determining the structure and reformation of culture beyond war (“On the Implementation of Knowledge: Toward a Theory of Hardware”).

“Media Wars” presents a fascinating perspective on digital technology as deterministic and formative of grand social realities, but Kittler conflates the origin of computer technology with its relevance. Although he is correct that computers “originated from an intelligence service in the strict military sense,” he is remiss in concluding that this is their ultimate field of relevance (9). The binary system fundamental to computer technologies pervades our lives in the digital age to the point that a social networking website which asks us to group people strictly into the group of “friends” and “not-friends” appears as a natural construction. Kittler’s theory of information as emergent from the machine is deeply relevant to mass culture, and the logic of mass culture increasingly dictates the structure of the machine. Had Kittler written “Media Wars” in the cultural context of smart phones, rather than self-guided missiles, perhaps this angle would have emerged within his text.