Videography and Testimony

Modern technological media and psychoanalysis are historically coextensive, so argues Friedrich Kittler. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, a profound transformation had taken place in the material conditions of communication—what Kittler terms Aufschreibesystem (literally “writing-down system,” translated as “discourse network”). Prior to that transformation, writing, in its various manifestations, was the dominant medium of information storage and transmission. When writing was the prevailing writing-down system, all forms of data had to pass through the “bottleneck of the signifier.” With the technological transformation that followed, the symbolic mediation of writing was supplemented by the non-symbolic writing-down system of sight and sound: the audio channel of the phonograph and the visual channel of the cinematograph. As opposed to writing, these media are unselective inscription devices, capturing the intentional together with the unintentional, data and noise, indiscriminately as they come. It is against this background that psychoanalysis appears as a contemporaneous method of recording both intentional and unintentional expressions: the meanings conveyed by speech together with the halts, parapraxes, and stutters—which are rendered at least as meaningful as the intended meanings. Psychoanalysis has a technological counterpart in the form of late nineteenth-century media: the psychic and the technical constitute two parallel mechanisms for the inscription of traces, with the logic of the latter partially informing the former. Sigmund Freud has an unlikely partner in Thomas Edison: the talking cure and the discovery of the unconscious are concomitant with phonography and the mechanization of nonsense. Yet media and psychoanalysis, argues Kittler, do not only supplement the medium of writing; they also take on various tasks of cultural mediation previously under the monopoly of script. One such task is the writing of the past, historiography understood most literally, which, following Kittler’s reasoning, is also transformed by modern media to include the aural and the visual. That the past is experienced through its media traces was obvious enough to any citizen of the twentieth century.