Kittler

As I was reading Friedrich A. Kittler’s Gramophone, Film Typewriter, Marshall McLuhan’s notion of technology becoming an extension of man kept coming to mind. Early in “Gramophone” while recounting the development of the phonograph, Kittler writes, “A telegraph as an artificial mouth, a telephone as an artificial ear- the stage was set for the phonograph. Functions of the central nervous system had been technologically implemented” (28). Just as McLuhan wrote of the clock becoming an extension of man through its ubiquity in the literate world and man’s dependence on it and use of eyes and sight for telling time; the telegraph, the telephone, and phonograph were also influenced by sense organs and then became extensions of these organs and senses. In her blog post this week, Kelly also caught the common ground between McLuhan and Kittler on machines affecting our senses and sensory organs and also becoming those very organs.

McLuhan believed that technology became such a profoundly ingrained part of us that its influence could be considered wired into and extending our central nervous system. As I wrote in my blog last week, McLuhan emphasizes the significance of this idea through the very subtitle of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. There are even a few instances in Kittler which seem to allude to McLuhan’s specific thinking on technology and the central nervous system including, “Artificial mouths and ears… as technological implementations of the central nervous system” (28) and “In order to implement technologically (and thus render superfluous) the functions of the central nervous system, it first had to be reconstructed” (74). Kittler also mentions Otto Wiener’s inaugural lecture on “‘the extension of our senses’ by instruments” (77). Repeatedly in his text, Kittler returns to McLuhan’s concepts that technology becomes extensions of man and profoundly connected to him, but he doesn’t repeatedly mention McLuhan despite how much his thinking and research seems to defer to McLuhan.