Bernhard J. Dotzler is a prominent German media theorist who has written extensively about the philosophical, scientific, and literary historical backgrounds to the beginnings of the apparatus of the computer and first-order cybernetics. In his major three-volume work Diskurs und Medium, Dotzler considers discourse and medium as embodied knowledge or thinking, examining “archaeologically” the interconnections between technology and the history of ideas. It is a project to rethink the past now that it has become clear that digital media technologies are decisive imprints on culture and society in the present and future. In the first volume, subtitled Zur Archäologie der Computerkultur (2006), Dotzler surveys “machine thinking” from Kant to cybernetics. He writes about the Gestalt psychologist Fritz Heider (author of the influential essay “Thing and Medium” on the psychology of perception). He emphasizes the importance of philosophers Nietzsche and Foucault for the media theory of the digital. Dotzler analyzes Charles Babbage’s difference and analytical engines in reference to Marx and Hegel, and the constellation of ideas which led to the mathematical model of the Turing machine.
Dotzler explores what he calls the “simulacra of simulation” in early film history. He writes about simulation superseding representation or mimesis or fiction:
Fiction and simulation emerge in a dichotomy that results from the fact that simulation
reverses the opposition between fiction and reality. Simulation ceases to be equivalent
to fiction and instead establishes itself in its own reality… This inherent reality, this
decoupling of simulation and fiction, becomes the main thing – despite or because
fictional realities continue to be generated via simulation.
In the second volume, subtitled Das Argument der Literatur (2010), Dotzler investigates the relationship between literary history and computer technology, ranging in his studies from Goethe as a precursor to systems theory to considerations of poet Gottfried Benn and philosopher Max Bense. Dotzler writes about “the world on a wire” from Heinrich von Kleist to Paul Virilio. He comments on Edgar Allen Poe’s relation to Charles Babbage. It is a self-questioning of the traditional concerns of literature studies, going beyond the emphasis on discourse to recognizing the co-determining status for contemporary culture of hardware-oriented media devices. What happens when electronic and cybernetic technologies supersede language?
The third volume of Diskurs und Medium (published in 2011) is subtitled Philologische Untersuchungen: Medien und Wissen in literaturgeschichtlichen Beispielen. Dotzler presents additional examples from literary history, tracing how and which knowledge came to be embedded in media leading up to the digital. Digital media technologies are the cause and effect of the cybernetic society. What is the link between writing and the phenomena of media?
The relationship between cybernetics and German media theory is a captivating research question. Following Kittler’s death in 2011, Dotzler wrote the essay “Idiocy, Forgetting and Outdatedness: Friedrich Kittler’s Avant-Gardism and the ‘Time for Other Stories’” to honor the work of the man widely considered to be the prime mover of the media theory turn in German universities. Dotzler read a version of his essay out loud at the Kittler colloquium convened at the Deutsche Haus of New York University. Dotzler emphasizes the crucial role of “forgetting” in Kittler’s system of thinking. When all information, words, and discourses are saved in massive databases, then human memory is either no longer, or perhaps never was, what the human sciences believed it to be. Institutionalized data storage allows us to continuously forget.
Kittler was fascinated by programming, especially at the lower level of assembler languages, “close to the machine.” He went beyond discourse analysis to Aufschreibesysteme (systems of notation) and the “diagnosis of the present state of data storage, transmission, and calculation in technical media.” “It’s time for other stories,” Kittler proclaimed.
It’s time to go beyond books to electronic data processing, and to go beyond language-based communication to direct “touching with the other” as in reciprocally fulfilled sexual desire or poetic sound like Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage” on “the dark side of the moon.” The challenge for literature studies in the cybernetic era became how to describe, in the medium of writing, that which is henceforth beyond writing. Kittler wanted a “literary criticism of technical media.” Reaching outside conservative German academia, he owed the opportunity for his epistemological break to the openness of American universities, the insights of French theory, and cybernetics.
What one senses in the work of Bernhard J. Dotzler is the idea that second-order cybernetics preceded or takes precedence over first-order cybernetics. The decisive influence on Kittler and Dotzler was not Claude Shannon or Norbert Wiener but rather Heinz von Foerster. Von Foerster was an Austrian-American thinker working in physics, philosophy, informatics, and cognitive science. He developed the reflexivity idea of “the cybernetics of cybernetics,” applying cybernetics recursively to itself. He insisted on the undeniable role of the observer in all systems, which were now understood as observing rather than observed. As contrasted with the first order, second-order cybernetics emphasized epistemology and the self-organizing and self-maintaining (autopoietic) capabilities of complex systems.
In his essay “Demons – Magic – Cybernetics: On the Introduction to Natural Magic as Told by Heinz von Foerster,” Bernhard Dotzler writes about von Foerster’s engrossment in the study of magic practices in earlier times of human history. He was an avid reader of Johan Christian Wiegleb’s multi-volume Lehrbücher über natürliche Magie. What especially attracts Dotzler’s attention is von Foerster’s interest in the famous thought experiment in the history of science known as “Maxwell’s demon.” In 1867, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell postulated the existence of the demon trying to disprove the second law of thermodynamics (heat always migrates from hotter to colder spaces). The demon hypothetically controls a passageway between two chambers and overrides the second law. The demon filters which molecules go into which chamber according to the independent variable of their velocity, thus reversing the physical law expectation of which chamber heats up and which cools down. For von Foerster, according to Dotzler, another name for the demon is regulation or “the observer.” The cybernetic information theory principle of separating information from noise or entropy, would be the operation of a certain demonic action. Von Foerster turns Maxwell’s demon on its head into something positive.
Von Foerster divides Maxwell’s demon into two parts: an internal demon and an external demon. The internal demon takes care of the order within the system. It prevents new inputs from the outside from potentially sending the system into an unmanageable state of too high a level of entropy. The external demon strives to push the system into disorder with continuous inputs. This doubly demonic pressure is what, according to von Foerster, can incite the emergence of self-organizing systems.
Diego Gomez-Venegas zeroes in on the coupling of von Foerster’s work on memory and Kittler’s early essay “Forgetting” as a trenchant way of understanding the relationship between cybernetics and German media theory. Von Foerster developed a phenomenological theory of memory supported in an interdisciplinary way by psychology, physiology, and quantum physics. For Gomez-Venegas, the cybernetic nucleus of Kittler’s media theory is the epistemic reshaping of memory and forgetting in the post-human condition brought about by technological information systems. Language exchanges of speaking, reading, and writing are now archived, at least temporarily, into the omnipresent physical storage devices and databases. Memory is mediated by the media and the result is forgetting. “Information is erasable, rewritable, and forgettable,” writes Gomez-Venegas. “Humans become the embodiment of a technological forgetting.” It is no longer necessary for the human to remember (or perhaps even to think) since the archive remembers (or simulates thinking) for him. Post-humans have delegated much of their mind activities to machines.