On Friedrich Kittler's Signal-Rausch-Abstand

7/30/2019 On Friedrich Kittler's Signal-Rausch-Abstand

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University of Amsterdam, Tuesday 11 December 2012 “Discourse Network: 2000 – Reading (Around) Friedrich Kittler,”

Melle Jan Kromhout On Friedrich Kittler’s “Signal ‐Rausch‐ Abstand”

The article under discussion – “Signal‐Rausch‐Abstand” (Signal to Noise Ratio) was

published in a book called Materialität Der Kommunikation, edited by Hans Gumbrecht

& K. Ludwig Pfeiffer in 1988. In 1994 a similar volume by the same editors appeared in

English under the title Materialities Of Communication. Although the English version is

not the same as the German, its introduction by Pfeiffer gives a pretty concise account of

what both volumes set out to do: “The main culprit […]” of the books “was, and to some

extent is, the “privileging of the semantic dimension”. Cosmologies, philosophies of history,

of ethnic, period, or natural spirits, and finally of communication, hermeneutic and

otherwise, have been allies and successors in that privilege.” A few sentences later he

specifies: “communication here is not supposed to connote understanding, coming to

terms, mutuality, exchange. It unfolds an open dynamic of means and effects.” Those

familiar with the work of Kittler will immediately understand why his work is included

in a book launching such an attack on semantics, such a shift away from interpretation

and hermeneutics and such a focus on materiality.

The German and the English version of Materialität der Kommunikation/

Materialities of Communication contain two entirely different essays by Kittler. In

German, there is the present article, “Signal‐Rausch‐Abstand,” in English, there is an

article called “Unconditional Surrender” (on the unconditional surrender of Germany at

the end of WWII). Significantly, the only overlap between the two pieces is a focus on

self‐guided weapons towards the end. In “Signal‐Rausch‐Abstand”, this comes rather



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unexpected (since the rest of the essay does not explicitly deals with war or weaponry),

in the case of “Unconditional Surrender”, it is (or at least seems to be, as I haven’t read

the article thoroughly) a more logical continuation from the main topic of the article. I

quote from the concluding remarks of “Unconditional Surrender”: “The self ‐ guided

weapons of World War II eliminated the two modern concepts of causality and subjectivity

and introduced the present as the age of technical systems. Only Shannon and Turing […]

calculated these systems through digitally to take the decisive step from radio waves and

differential equations to the pulse technology of radar or to the algebra of computers. […]

Whether digital

or

analog,

technical

systems

are

always

self

‐ guided.” What becomes very

clear from this quote is that, ultimately, the topic of both these essays is the removal of

the central position of human subjectivity and the development of a new, machine‐

subject: self‐guiding and operating independent from human agency.

Although, both the scope of Kittler’s article, and its theoretical complexity are

way to vast to cover in a short presentation – not to mention some of its mathematical

complexity, which occasionally is sadly somewhat beyond my grasp – I will attempt to

outline the most important elements of Kittler’s argument. Apologies beforehand if I’m

too long. I’ve tried my best to narrow it down.

“Signal‐Rausch‐Abstand” sets out with an explicit reference to the general theme

of the book Materialität Der

Kommunikation: on the one hand, there is no meaning

without physical support, but, on the other hand, no materialities that are information

or establish communication by themselves. A few pages later, Kittler therefor explains

that ‘information without matter, and matter without information are inseparably

connected.’ The phenomenon of noise and its fundamental position in information

theory, specifically in mathematician Claude Shannon’s 1948 Mathematical

Theory

of

Communication (to which Kittler wrongly (but significantly) refers to as Mathematical



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Theory of Information) is crucial in Kittler’s understanding of the connection between

materiality and communication.

Taking this interconnection as its focal point, the ‘Signal to Noise Ratio’ – a

mathematical tool calculating the ratio between noise and information in a given signal

– is introduced as the key to assess the importance of this connection in a wide array of

subjects. Since Kittler doesn’t bother to lay out what these are at the start of the essay,

the turns he takes in the text can be rather confusing and baffling: first, he sets out by

extensively explaining the importance of Shannon’s theory and some of the practical

and theoretical consequences of its separation of message and meaning, as well as

signal and noise. Subsequently, he turns to the topic of German poetry, Goethe and its

exclusion of ‘noise’ (rather familiar grounds for readers of Discourse Networks

1800/1900). Next, he extends this analysis to technological media and the

entertainment industry, only to return to physics once more by explaining the

importance of chaos and irregularity of the ‘Brownian Movement’ in modern physics. By

taking up Norbert Wiener’s use of the Brownian movement in developing a ‘Linear

Prediction Code’ (as Kittler calls it: the mathematization of chaos), he ends up at the use

of this code for air defence systems against Germany’s self‐guided weapons of World

War II. Only at the very end becomes clear what Kittler set out to do all the while:

showing how human subjectivity disappeared through the advances of technical media

– after which one can start reading the essay once more.

Hence, to start with the beginning: the telecommunication technology of the 19th

and 20th century made Claude Shannon’s mathematical formalisation of

communication possible. As Kittler often emphasises, for him, modern times started

with differentiation. In this case differentiating between (types of) messages, between

interpretative meaning and statistical information, and lastly between messages on the



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one hand and their material carriers on the other hand. By doing this, one could, as

Kittler calls it, separate the “pure control flow” (Befehlsflüss ‐ the control over messages)

from their content or meaning. This to be able to, once it became immaterial, accelerate

the speed of the ‘control flow’ up to the speed of electricity or light.

What Shannon did in his famous paper was to reduce the problem of the

transference of messages to a statistical one, namely calculating the probability of a

message arriving in good order at its destination, thereby separating the meaning from

said message from its formal being as nothing but the presence or absence of

‘information,’ no matter of what kind. This separation of statistical information and

interpretative meaning is most significant for Kittler’s understanding of the importance

of Shannon’s paper, as it reduces messages to mere statistics and gets rid of the

necessity of dealing with meaning as such. For the matters at hand, the most significant

consequence of Shannon’s reduction of the problem of communication to one of

probability is that the highest rate of improbability – or, in other words, the possibility

least likely to occur – contains the maximum amount of information.

If, however, and here Kittler’s own theoretical interest becomes apparent, the

maximum of information is nothing but the highest statistical improbability, it becomes

very hard to separate it from any random disturbance (or, indeed: noise). Kittler

extends on this ‘similarity’ between signals and noise by explaining how the highest

information‐rate occupies all the frequency‐bands available (“full bandwidth”), just like

random noise is distributed more or less equally over the entire frequency spectrum.

This prompts Kittler to conclude that “signals practice mimicry to disturbances,” or:

statistically, signals imitate noise.



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Furthermore, the best example of such random noise is so‐called “thermal noise,”

which, as Kittler calls it, is the “noise that all matter (or materiality) emits, when heated.”

It is exactly this inseparable crosslinking of signal and noise on the one hand and noise

and matter on the other hand from which Kittler concludes that ‘information without

matter, and matter without information are inseparably connected.’ One could say it is

noise which ties information to its materiality.

Now, by means of a process called idealisation, engineers treat signals as if they

derive from not one, but two separate sources: a signal‐source and a noise‐source,

thereby, again statistically, separating information from the noise that necessarily

occupies its material channels. The Signal‐to‐Noise‐Ratio calculates the amount of each

of these two, inseparable, interconnected parts of a signal (noise and signal), making it

possible to manipulate noise‐levels, and, as such, manipulate communication itself.

After a short detour on encryption, explaining why Alan Turing, the

mathematician who stood at the birth of the computer, concluded (according to Kittler)

that natural sciences can be replaced by crypto‐analysis, Kittler starts making his move

toward language and poetry (and therefor toward the territory he covers in Discourse

Network 1800/1900). With a reference to an unfinished text by Paul Valéry on – not very

surprisingly – Faust and the devil (“who’s very elementary science was of course

speech”) Kittler poses the central assumption (both central in this essay, and central in

his entire oeuvre) that ‘the experimental linking of information and noise’ made

traditional discourse of secondary importance.

Kittler illustrates this point by a writing experiment conducted by Shannon, in

which the latter tried to statistically recreate something resembling the English

language. First, by just randomly generating letters, the experiment produced rather



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unreadable chains of letters, or indeed: noise. But it became increasingly successful

when the basic elements were already organised according to the probable occurrence

of some letters, or small groups of letters. Eventually, Shannon’s experiment produced

English‐like words and sentences, the result of which, Kittler observes, already

resembles something like Finnigan’s Wake.

For Kittler, this experiment, which he calls an “attack on writers by noise,”

proved that letters can be treated in much the same way as numbers. That is to say:

statistically. Or, as Kittler puts it: “Signals and noise can be defined numerically.” Hence,

he concludes with Shannon, communication is always “communication in the presence

of noise.” Firstly, because channels themselves always emit noise, and secondly, since

messages itself can be generated statistically as a selection (or filtering) out of noise.

In contrast, nineteenth century poetry won’t allow for any noise. With the

medium of writing, Kittler explains, it is not possible to separate the channel from the

content, the system from its meaning, or the operation from its elements. In short: one

can’t separate signal from noise, or meaning from words. The “poetic function”

exclusively aims at transferring signals and just signals. It thereby puts the signal to

noise ratio at its very maximum, denying its own materiality. “Poetry,” writes Kittler,

“excommunicates inhuman sound in name of the articulate communication.” But media,

suspending poetry and music, constituted the mathematical return of this ‘old chaos.’

At approximately the same time that Goethe was called the Klängefänger (“sound

catcher”), Jean‐Baptiste Fourier developed a method (the so‐called Fourier‐analysis)

that made all physical signals – whether complex or not – quantifiable. Human ears hear

‘sounds’ (and not individual frequencies) because our ears can’t differentiate above

60hz. The Fourier analysis, however, is able to calculate the entire spectrum of any



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signal. Given it’s many, many application in future technological developments, the

Fourier analysis, argues Kittler, constitutes just an important and fundamental change

in treatment of signals, as was the invention of the alphabet.

So, whereas poetry, unable to separate signals from meanings, excluded all noise,

modern mathematics and physics made it possible to analyse and quantify every

complex signal in its entirety. For Kittler this is why “media replaced art”: the methods

of art where surpassed by the scientific developments of media, dealing with signals in a

fundamentally different ways. As he stretches in many articles, for Kittler, Wagner’s

Ring des Nibelungen was the first example of this practice: the first chords of the

tetralogy approximate a Fourier‐analysis and the end ‘liquidates’ the Signal to Noise

Ratio entirely (as the music “collapses” back into noise). When, at the end of

Götterdammerung, the Gods and Walhalla are succumbed by flames, it is European art

itself that perishes.

With a metaphor based on this ending of The Ring of the Nibelungs, Kittler

returns to what he set out at the beginning: materialities of communication. Wotan’s

two ravens, he writes, “dark messengers or angels of media‐technologies, do not speak

and do not sing. With their flight, the transmission and emission of their tidings, yes the

“message” and noise coincide. Götterdämmerung means materiality of communication

and communication of matter.”

So, after this detour along poetry and music, Goethe and Wagner, we return to

physics and materiality, with Robert Brown’s eighteenth century discovery of the

phenomenon that came to carry his name: the Brownian movement – a spontaneous,

stochastic, irregularity in all kinds of natural phenomena. First, the mathematical prove

of Brown’s observation, in the second half of the 19th century, made it possible to



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statistically represent this random noise of all matter. Secondly, in the 20th century,

mathematicians began to formulise this irregularity and chaos itself, to be able to work

with it. Most importantly, Norbert Wiener mathematized the Brownian movement in a

way that could statistically predict its course: his Linear Prediction Code, made it actually

possible to predict unpredictable, random, irregular movements.

Here, finally, Kittler starts to reveal what it actually is that concerns him.

Tellingly, this comes with a reference to Lacanian psycho‐analysis: for Kittler, both

Shannon’s mathematics of signals and Wiener’s mathematics of noise return in Lacan’s

structural psychoanalysis. Lacan’s Real, writes Kittler, is white noise, and his Symbolic is

built on top of (or rather filtered out of) this noise, calculable through statistical

probability (in a way not dissimilar to Shannon’s writing experiment). “Thirdly, this tele‐

communicational approach to the unconscious liquidizes the Imaginary, which, as a

function of “in advance” ‐optical pattern recognition stipulated the philosophical concept

of knowledge

as

a misjudgement.

Consequently,” Kittler concludes

“only

by

means

of

psycho‐analysis all the strategic opportunities of a subject can be game‐theoretically

calculated, that is to say: exhausted.” The computer, the symbolic medium par excellence,

that enables the prediction of the future by the statistical exhaustion of possibilities,

surpasses the Imaginary – that most mysterious and most human of Lacan’s triptych –

altogether.

Whatever to make of this exactly, the shift toward the subject and subjectivity

enables Kittler to make his final argumentative move: what can be calculated by

computed mathematics is a different, but no less strategic subject: self‐guided weaponry.

Wiener developed the ‘Linear Prediction Code’ not for human communication, but was

driven by the necessity to predict where a bomb was most likely to hit. Through the use

of the ‘Linear Prediction Code’ the allied were able to predict the future position of



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bombs. Indeed, they could ‘minimize the effect of incomplete information’ (after all, one

does not know beforehand where a bomb is going to drop) or, as Kittler calls it more

poetically, to minimize ‘the noise of the future.’

In the very last paragraph of the article, Kittler sums up what he set out to do all

along: to use the theme of the Signal to Noise Ratio to assess the inseparable

relationship between materiality and communication. The physical and mathematical

formalisation of this relationship – and the consequential development of technical

media, most importantly the computer – made human subjectivity an historical anomaly,

and, instead, introduced a new kind of subjectivity: that of self‐guided technology. To

quote Kittler at the end of his article: “In less than two hundred years, mathematical

telecommunication made the Signal to Noise Ratio into a throughout manipulable

variable. Together with the operational limits of the systems of everyday speech, the limits

of poetry and hermeneutics have been crossed and media have been established.

Notwithstanding all

consumer

marketing,

one

can

no

longer

be

sure

the

addressee

of

these

media is still called Human. Ever since its Greek origin, poetry served to reduce a sonic

chaos into writable and therefor articulable tones. Ever since its Romantic origin,

Hermeneutics served to scientifically secure this reduction of complexity once more: by

attributing to the addressee a poetic subject called Author. This interpretation cleansed

the interior of all noise, which nevertheless never ceased not to cease in deliriums and

wars.Ever since noise in the interception of enemy signals is no longer confronted by

means of the interpretation of articulated speech or tones, the burden of subjectivity has

been lifted from our shoulders. After all, automatic Weapons are subjects themselves.”

In the end, exactly the transition described in this article is nicely summed up by

Geoffrey Winthrop‐Young In Kittler and the Media: “This is

maybe

the

shortest,

most

economic way to summarize the switch from the Discourse Network 1800 to 1900, and



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then on to Discourse Network 2000 (a term Kittler hardly ever uses): from Geist to

Rauschen, from philosophically promoted poetry and naturalized hermeneutics to

stochastics and information theory, from the guarantee of an always already meaningful

world to an environment of meaningless noise that can at best be momentarily arranged

into allegedly significant patterns.”

And with this, I’d like to finish.

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On Friedrich Kittler's Signal-Rausch-Abstand