Turning Back Time: Friedrich Kittler, Reversibility, and Media of Time Axis Manipulation

What can media studies contribute to a forum on reversibility? One starting point might be the observation that for nearly every technology of recording, there is a corresponding technique of reversal. From alphabetic palindromes to musical retrogrades, from reverse tape effects or "backmasking" in audio recording to reverse motion in the cinema, up to and including the endless loops, reversals, and inversions of contemporary digital media, it would seem to be a soft law of media history that any medium that can be read or played back can (and will) be read or played backward. My contention in this essay is that this reveals something fundamental about the nature of media temporalities. In what follows, I draw upon German media theorist Friedrich Kittler's notion of "time axis manipulation" to argue that reversals of chronological sequence rely upon recording media's underlying ability to spatialize stretches of time. This fundamental capacity to convert time to space (and back) serves as the precondition of all medial operations of recording, storage, and playback, from simple repetition to complex splices or reversals. I begin with what is perhaps the most familiar instance of reversibility in recording media: that of cinematic reverse motion.

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The origins of cinematic reverse motion are sufficiently dramatic that many media historians (not to mention film buffs) know the story by heart. The scene is a dimly lit basement in Paris, sometime in 1896—or perhaps early 1897; reports differ. The projection has just concluded of one of the Lumière brothers' latest short films, Démolition d'un mur, in which a team of workmen (led by Auguste Lumière) topples a segment of exterior wall, sending up plumes of glimmering dust and debris. Distracted by the visually arresting recording, the projectionist forgets to shut off the Cinématographe's projection lamp before rewinding the film. As a result, the apparatus continues to project as its operator rewinds, and the increasingly astonished crowd watches as the demolished wall reconstitutes itself before their very eyes, emerging miraculously out of the dust clouds into which it had dissolved moments before.¹ Through the happy accident of operator error, the Lumières discovered that anything that could be played back on their apparatus could also be played backward, and cinematic reverse motion was born. The innovation spread quickly, while retaining its ability to astonish. One early observer, after witnessing an imitation of the effect in Russia, emoted: "Thus, before the eyes of the audience, the wonder of the cinematograph compels the irreversible river of Time to flow backward" (quoted in Tsivian 2008, 59).

Like many origin stories, this one proves upon closer scrutiny to be something of a myth. As Andrew M. Tohline (2015) has shown at length, the earliest traces of reverse motion in cinema were speculative discussions, informed by late-nineteenth-century physicists' interest in entropy and order as well as by similar experiments in reversal that had been performed with the phonograph and the alphabet. Such findings suggest that apparent novelties like reverse motion should be placed within a longer history of reversibility, in which recording media function as privileged sites for reflection on the nature of time and temporal experience. In this regard, it is worth noting that reverse motion was only one of the technical miracles of which the Lumières' Cinématographe was capable—and perhaps not even the only miracle of reversal. For there are many ways in which media of recording, storage, and playback enable their operators to sluice or channel the "irreversible river of Time," and many senses of reversal. Like the Latin revertor, which can mean both "to turn about" and "to return" or "to recur," reversing the passage of time can also mean to make the same stretch of river—or, in a more media-theoretical jargon, the same "data stream"—pass by an observer once more.

Indeed, it may be of greater significance to a media history of reversibility that the Lumières' apparatus was able to play back past sights than that it was able to...