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Configurations 10.1 (2002) 37-50



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The Perspective of Print

Friedrich Kittler
Humbolt University

Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz


Ever since film, television, computer graphics, and virtual reality have made pictures move at ever faster rates, media theories have exhibited puzzling outbursts of delight. Writing in general and books in particular are said to be obsolete, while the image, more powerful and unifying than ever, is poised to reclaim its old rights. I would like to challenge this enthusiasm and the diagnosis it is based on with the counterargument that the book is not simply at the end of its tether. Rather, it was a singular medium that had the power to facilitate its own technological supersession; and that particular power (and the source of much of Europe's political power) was not derived from its printed words alone, but from a technologically sophisticated media link that joined these words to printed images.

Media theorists—that is, Marshall McLuhan and, in his wake, Vilém Flusser—made an absolute distinction between writing and pictures which, ultimately, was expressed in geometric terms: the one-dimensionality of printed books stood in clear contrast to the irreducible two-dimensionality of pictures. In final, simplified analysis this may be true, especially given that today's computerized text can be modeled as strings. But it elides a simple fact that was emphasized, not coincidentally, by Michel Butor, a nouveau romancier: the most widely used books—from the Bible to the telephone directory—are not read in a linear fashion at all. And with good reason: ever since Gutenberg, printed lines are as linear as book pages, since the age of [End Page 37] twelfth-century scholastics, have been two-dimensional. 1 All paragraphs, sections, footnotes, and headings are placed on a surface whose two-dimensionality is in no way distinct from that of pictures. As well—as Michael Giesecke has emphasized time and again—the fact that Gutenberg's movable types were designed not with mass production in mind, but in order to compete with the calligraphic elegance of handcrafted manuscript pages, further testifies to the pictorial origin of the printing press (which was, after all, nothing but a sobered-up winepress). 2

While still residing in Strasbourg, and prior to his move to Mainz where he embarked on reproducing Bibles and calendars, Johann Gutenberg had been busy reproducing pictures of saints. Nonetheless, the geometry of the letters of Mainz was different from that of the icons of Strasbourg. As Sigmund Freud pointed out, "letters of the alphabet"—as opposed to faces—"do not occur in nature." 3 Since everything depended on putting individual letters in their place, Gutenberg's print technology required a spatial geometry. Each lead letter was located in relation to its neighbor to the right, left, top, and bottom; in other words, each letter filled an empty space that was already waiting for it. Thus the typographic standardization of writing merely continued the standardization of numerals brought about by the medieval import of the Indo-Arabic place-value system. Zero—a sign wholly unknown to the Greeks and Romans—had referred all other numerals to their spaces, just as did the space that Gutenberg turned into lead and Mallarmé into poetry. 4 It was not until the possibility existed to replace the empty space by any letter that the inner ability to write was transformed into the materiality of the letter case. Writing in the age of its technological reproducibility is a combinatorics of standardized elements or characters, just as the old Greek vowel alphabet had been a combinatorics of a finite number of elements or letters.

The Greek stocheia or letters did not give birth only to the four elements of antiquity or the one hundred and twenty chemical elements [End Page 38] of today: Elements was also the name of a book that for more than two millennia taught Greeks, Arabs, and Europeans the axioms of geometry. The current enthusiastic scholarly rediscovery of images, bodies, and natures tends to forget that elements exist only in sets&#8212...

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