Cinema Beyond Cinematics

The Problematic of the Digital Image

It is only at the very end of his two-volume study of the cinema,in a kind of prospective addendum, that the late French philosopherGilles Deleuze raises the problematic of the digital image. In pre-senting the digital image as a challenge to cinemaa challenge thatcan either render it obsolete or occasion its wholesale functionalmetamorphosisDeleuze reasserts, one final time, the privilege ofaesthetics over technology that literally pervades the cinema study.And despite his own recognition that a full treatment of the digitalimage is beyond the purposes of his study, his very willingness toenumerate its principal effects suggests a hope that cinema can infact be reborn through the digital. These effects themselves havethe effect of specifying the digital image in relation to the time-image, and thus indicate a path for rethinking cinema after the dig-ital. For this reason alone, Deleuzes analysis of the digital image de-serves to be quoted at length:

new automata did not invade content without a new automatism bringing

about a mutation of form. The modern configuration of the automaton is the

correlate of an electronic automatism. The electronic image, that is, the tele

and video image, the numerical image coming into being, either had to trans-

form cinema or to replace it, to mark its death. . . . The new images no longer

have any outside (out-of-field), any more than they are internalized in a

whole; rather, they have a right side and a reverse, reversible and non-super-

imposable, like a power to turn back on themselves. They are the object of a

51

Cinema Beyond Cybernetics, or

How to Frame the Digital Image

Mark B. N. Hansen, Princeton University

Configurations, 2002, 10:5190 2003 by The Johns Hopkins University

Press and the Society for Literature and Science.

public.press.jhu.edu

perpetual reorganization, in which a new image can arise from any point

whatever of the preceding image. The organization of space here loses its

privileged directions, and first of all the privilege of the vertical which the po-

sition of the screen still displays, in favor of an omni-directional space which

constantly varies its angles and co-ordinates, to exchange the vertical and the

horizontal. And the screen itself, even if it keeps a vertical position by con-

vention, no longer seems to refer to the human posture, like a window or a

painting, but rather constitutes a table of information, an opaque surface on

which are inscribed data, information replacing nature, and the brain-city,

the third eye, replacing the eyes of nature. Finally, sound achieving an auton-

omy which increasingly lends it the status of image, the two images, sound

and visual, enter into complex relations with neither subordination nor com-

mensurability, and reach a common limit insofar as each reaches its own

limit. In all these senses, the new spiritual automatism in turn refers to new

psychological automata.1

What Deleuzes analysis shows is that, despite their apparent closecorrelation with the digital image, none of these effects (includingperpetual reorganization of the image or, more technically, the con-stant refreshing of scanned video and digitized images) is specific toit. Rather, these effects cumulatively represent the achievements ofthe more radical products of time-image cinema.

Thus the model of Bressons cinema is a modern psychologicalautomaton but one that has no need of computing or cyberneticmachines; Bressons characters are defined in relation to thespeech-act, and no longer, as before, by motor action.2 Similarly, Ya-sujiro Ozus 180 continuity shots assemble an image end to endwith its obverse, thus turn[ing] . . . the shot around (citing NelBurch), while Michael Snows The Central Region, with its electroni-cally controlled rotary machine, muddles [the] directions, [the] ori-entations of space in a way that destroys the primacy of the verti-cal axis that could determine them and leaves only an opaquesurface which receives, in order to disorder, and on which charac-ters, objects and words are inscribed as data.3 Developed further byJean Luc Godard, this dissolution of the vertical screen calls forth anentirely new function of the screen or frame, and a correlative trans-formation of the shot itself: the frame or the screen functions as aninstrument panel, printing or computing table, the image is con-stantly being cut into another image, being printed through a visible

52 Configurations

1. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 265266.

2. Ibid., p. 266.

3. Ibid.

mesh, sliding over other images in an incessant stream of messages[citing Leo Steinberg], and the shot itself is less like an eye than anoverloaded brain endlessly absorbing information.4

Because these achievements result from an aesthetic impulse, awill to art, and not from a mere technical possibility, they estab-lish a certain priority of aesthetics over technology, or more ex-actlysince it is the digital image that is at stake herethe priorityof an aesthetic impulse over informatics itself. The new spiritual au-tomatism and the new psychological automata depend on an aes-thetic before depending on technology.5 It is for this reason thatDeleuze takes pains to stress that the cinematographic image wasalready achieving effects which were not like those of electronics,but which had autonomous anticipatory functions in the time-image as will to art.6 We might rather say that these effects were in-deed like those of the digital image, but that they were producedthrough entirely different means. At any rate, what Deleuzes analysisestablishes are the prerequisites for a cinema of the digital image:since the effects proper to the digital image have been anticipated bycertain developments of the cinema of the time-image, a cinema ofthe digital image cannot amount to a mechanical unfolding of theseeffects, but must involve a new will to art. The new automatism,emphasizes Deleuze,

is worthless in itself if it is not put to the service of a powerful, obscure, con-

densed will to art, aspiring to deploy itself through involuntary movements

which nonetheless do not restrict it. An original will to art has already been

defined by us in the change affecting the intelligible content of cinema itself:

the substitution of the time-image for the movement-image. So that electronic

images will have to be based on still another will to art, or on as yet unknown

aspects of the time-image.7

Here we confront the two valences of a possible Deleuzeancinema of the digital image: a new will to art that emerges out of theproblematic of information and takes its bearings precisely from thelimitations of informatics; and an internal transformation of the time-image that resituates the source of the virtual from the interstices be-tween (series of) images to interstices within the limitless and con-tinually temporalizing digital image. According to this latter valence,the cinema of the digital image must be understood as a continua-

Hansen / Cinema Beyond Cybernetics 53

4. Ibid., p. 267.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., p. 266.

7. Ibid.

tion of the transformation that constituted the time-image: the ac-tual image . . . enter[ing] into relation with its own virtual image assuch.8 The cinema of the digital image functions like that of thetime-image insofar as it situates the virtual image within itself, cre-ating an image which is double-sided, mutual, both actual and vir-tual; in both cases, [w]e are no longer in the situation of a rela-tionship between the actual image and other virtual images . . . ,which thus become actual in turn. . . . We are in the situation of anactual image and its own virtual image, to the extent that there is nolonger any linkage of the real with the imaginary, but indiscernibilityof the two, a perpetual exchange.9 The only difference in this respectbetween the time-image and the digital imageand it is an impor-tant oneis the form of this indiscernibility: while the time-imageopens up the virtual in the irrational cut, which no longer links twocommensurate images but rather two incommensurate series of im-ages, the digital image incorporates the virtual within the actual,as the limitless potential for the generation of other images from anypart of itself. If the time-image resituates the out-of-field in a funda-mental way (such that the actual image no longer connects causallyand linearly with other actual images, but enters into serial relationwith its own virtual image), the digital image resituates this contactbetween the actual image and the virtual, transforming it from aconstitutive perpetual exchange into a true indiscernibilitynolonger a double-sidedness, but a constitutive doubleness within the(actual) image itself.

Might we not then be tempted to conclude that the digital imagesimply transforms the time-image in a way that mirrors and extrapo-lates from its technical properties? Deleuzes repeated emphasis onthe priority of the aesthetic should be enough to caution us againstsuch a hasty move, and his hints concerning the limitations of in-formatics help to indicate why. Beyond the question of the technicalspecificity of the digital image is the problematic of information. Itis this problematic that is (or would be) constitutive of a Deleuzeancinema of the digital image. To survive the digital, to be reborn as a

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8. Ibid., p. 273. In his study of the cinema, Deleuze makes a fundamental theoretical(as well as historical) distinction between the movement-image and the time-image.The central distinction involves the relation of the image to time: the movement-image obeys a sensorimotor logic of linkage and indirectly registers time (e.g., as afunction of movement through space, etc.); the time-image breaks with the sensori-motor logic and directly registers time (by giving us an image of time unsubordinatedto movement through space, the rational connections of frames, etc.).

9. Ibid.

cinema of the digital image, cinema must undertake an internalstruggle with informatics: a struggle against the very ineffective-ness from which information draws its efficacy.10 Put in thebluntest terms: the rejeuvenation of the cinema after the digitalitsdigital afterliferequires a struggle with cybernetics or the theory ofinformation, a struggle that Deleuze emphatically situates within cin-ema itself. This struggle is internal to cinema because of cinemasstatus as an automaton: a spiritual automatism, which only subse-quently refers to new psychological automata.11 It is thus a strugglebetween two cinemas: between a cinema that would provide a me-chanical surrogate for thought, and a cinema that would be a truespiritual automatona new mode for creating information and for chan-neling it between the poles that go beyond it (source and addressee).

Cinema in this latter sense, a true spiritual automaton, would bea machinism reducible neither to the human (as a preconstituted,empirical and psychological entity) nor to the machine (as a surro-gate for this entity): This is the psychological automaton, in thesense of a profoundly divided essence of the psyche, even though itis not at all psychological in the sense that this division would be in-terpreted as a state of the non-machine individual.12 The new spiri-tual automaton of a possible cinema of the digital image would be amachinism that confounds the distinction on which cybernetics isbased: a machinism identifiable neither with the human nor withthe machine, a machinism that is without an original. Accordingly, thefact that this cinema goes beyond the psychological individual is initself proof that it cannot be modeled cybernetically. And the factthat it thus involves something before or beyond cyberneticsmeans that cinema goes beyond the empirical psychological in-dividual without going beyond the human, or equivalently, thatthe will to create must be found beyond the empirical and thepsychological.

Putting together the two valences of the Deleuzean cinema of thedigital image, we can now identify the challenge specific to the dig-ital image, the challenge that sets it apart from even the most radi-cal work of time-image cinema. It is the problematic of framing afterthe image has, as it were, exploded the (cinematic) frame. On theone hand, this problematic can be said to be motivated by the tech-nical properties of the digital image; while the time-image preservesthe stabilizing function of the cinematic frame (which produces the


10. Ibid., p. 270.

11. Ibid., p. 266.

12. Ibid., p. 268.

images double-sidedness), the digital image explodes the frame, ex-tending the image without limit not only in every spatial dimensionbut into a time freed from its presentation as variant series of (vir-tual) images: into time itself as the constitutive force and source ofthe future, the new. On the other hand, because it necessarily raisesthe question of what or who steps in to take over the task of framing(framing being necessary to institute a difference between the actualand the virtual, and thus to catalyze the actualization of the virtual),this technical motivation points beyond itself, to something thattakes place beyond informatics, in the source and the receiver of in-formation. And with this, we come upon what is (or would be) gen-uinely novel about the cinema of the digital image: it is a cinemathat requires us to specify the process of framing that is constitutiveof it, and beyond that (and indeed to accomplish that), to produce aframing in and through our own bodies.

We might say, then, that this new cinema of the digital image un-does the correlation of the cinema with the image, insofar as the im-age can no longer be appealed to as an objective frame and, be-yond that, following Deleuzes trajectory, as a frame autonomousfrom the human body as a center of indetermination. Although thisraises crucial and complex issues that are largely beyond my scopehere,13 suffice it to say that the cinema of the digital image must, forthis reason and to this extent, be conceptualized beyond the re-sources of Deleuzes understanding of cinema. Put somewhat differ-ently, the actualization of a (virtual) Deleuzean cinema of the digital

56 Configurations

13. See John Johnstons provocative and far-ranging discussion of the limits of theBergsonian (and Deleuzean) image in relation to the digital image and the distributedsystem of contemporary telecommunications technology: With the arrival of the elec-tronic or digitalized image, at once a decoding and recoding of the cinematic move-ment-image, limits in Deleuzes theory begin to appear. The digital image is a decodingbecause it frees the cinematic image from its material support, mobilizing it within acommunicational network wherein it can be transmitted anywhere instantaneously;but it is also a recoding because, instead of being inscribed directly on a chemicallytreated surface, light is converted into information, mathematical data whose infini-tesimal discreteness allows the real to be synthesized or recomposed. . . . Deleuze notesin passing that these new images no longer have any outside (out-of-field), any morethan they are internalized in a whole. But if digital images can no longer be concep-tualized in Bergsonian terms (as movement- or time-images), to what extent do theyremain definable in Deleuzian, or machinic, terms? . . . for the digital image there is nooutside, only the vast telecommunications networks that support it and in which it isinstantiated as data. Instead of an outside, the digital image seems only to have an elec-tronic underside, so to speak, which cannot be rendered visible (John Johnston, Ma-chinic Vision, Critical Inquiry 26 [Autumn 1999]: 39). The limitation of the Bergson-ian (and Deleuzean) conception of the cinema is thus its rootedness in the category ofthe image and its correlation with perception.

image requires us to circumscribe the boundaries constitutive ofDeleuzes (actual) cinema: its origin in the transformation of mate-rial into informational transportation (physical movement into themovement-image) and its culmination on the cusp of the transcen-dence of the image as frame (the time-image as anticipation of thebeyond of information). Not coincidentally, these are the veryboundaries circumscribing the trajectory of cybernetics, and this co-incidence helps us understand both why the cinema of the digitalimage must emerge from an internal struggle with informatics,and why this cinema must be, in some significant sense, post-Deleuzean. It is or must be a cinema that emerges from the affirma-tion of cybernetics, not as a reduction of the human to the machine(or vice versa), but as the vehicle toward thinking the new machin-ism without original that Deleuze envisions.

Information Theory and Digital Convergence

We can find a contemporary antitype to Deleuze in the figure ofanother theorist of the digital, German media scientist FriedrichKittler. Whereas Deleuze insists on the priority of the aesthetic overthe technological, Kittler boldly announces, with a similar economyof expression, that media determine our situation.14 Media de-fine what really is [citing Norbert Bolz]; they are always already be-yond aesthetics.15 And though he has not as yet directly addressedthe issue of digital film, Kittlers thesis concerning the digital con-vergence of the media implies something like a theory of the digitalimage, or rather, of the obsolescence of the image in the age of the dig-


14. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. G. Winthrop-Young and M.Wutz (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. xxxix.

15. Ibid., p. 3. This priority of technology (or rather media) over aesthetics serves to de-marcate Kittlers work from that of McLuhan: Understanding mediadespiteMcLuhans titleremains an impossibility precisely because the dominant informationtechnologies of the day control all understanding and its illusions (ibid., p. xl). Media,that is, ground the hermeneutic circle and are for that reason, by definition, beyondthe grasp of interpretation. For this reason, Kittler suggests a posthermeneutics of whatwe might call symptomatic inscriptions which, in a media-technical appropriationof Foucaults Archaeologythat is, in the form of blueprints and diagrams, regardlessof whether they control printing presses or mainframe computersyield historicaltraces of an unknown called the body (ibid.). Such a posthermeneutics simply radi-calizes the emphasis that McLuhan places on medium, bringing this latter into linewith todays computer technology: What remains of people, Kittler argues, is whatmedia can store and communicate. What counts are not the messages or the contentwith which they equip so-called souls for the duration of the technological era, butrather (and in strict accordance with McLuhan) their circuits, the very schematism ofperceptibility (ibid., pp. xlxli).

ital.16 Because of both its theoretical boldness and its widespread in-fluence among students of contemporary media,17 Kittlers positiondeserves to be cited at length:

Optical fiber networks. People will be hooked to an information channel that

can be used for any mediumfor the first time in history, or for its end. Once

movies and music, phone calls and texts reach households via optical fiber ca-

bles, the formerly distinct media of television, radio, telephone, and mail con-

verge, standardized by transmission frequencies and bit format. The optoelec-

tronic channel in particular will be immune to disturbances that might

randomize the pretty bit patterns behind the images and sounds. . . . The gen-

eral digitization of channels and information erases the differences among in-

dividual media. Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface ef-

fects, known to consumers as interface. Sense and the senses turn into

eyewash. Their media-produced glamour will survive for an interim as a by-

product of strategic programs. Inside the computers themselves everything be-

comes a number; quantity without image, sound, or voice. And once optical

fiber networks turn formerly distinct data flows into a standardized series of

digitized numbers, any medium can be translated into any other. With num-

bers, everything goes. Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay,

storage, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mappinga total media link on

a digital base will erase the very concept of medium. Instead of wiring people

and technologies, absolute knowledge will run as an endless loop.18

Kittlers vision is an unabashedly posthumanist one, for in the futurescenario he depictsone where optical fiber networks will have be-come ubiquitous and the digitalization of information will have en-

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16. Kittler has, however, addressed himself to the topic of computer graphics, inFriedrich Kittler, Computer Graphics: A Semi-Technical Introduction, Grey Room, no.2 (Winter 2001): 3045. I discuss Kittlers argument in Mark Hansen, The AffectiveTopology of New Media Art, Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal ofFilm and Television Criticism (Winter 2002): 4070.

17. This influence has largely been limited to German readers of Kittler, although thereare positive signs that this is beginning to change: namely, the publication of transla-tions of many of Kittlers recent theoretical papers, which treat contemporary tech-nology and computer language, even if they do not (yet) amount to a new discoursenetwork, as well as the publication of his Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, which addressesthe epoch of media and its incipient contemporary overcoming. To this, one must addthe publication of two helpful English-language accounts of Kittlers project: JohnJohnstons Introduction to Friedrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed.J. Johnston (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997); and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutzs Introduction to their translation of Gramophone, Film,Typewriter (above, n. 14).

18. Kittler, Gramophone (above, n. 14), pp. 12.

compassed the previously separated and incommensurate mediathere will, quite simply, be no need for the human. Reality, to put itbluntly, will become an issue of number, and the quantitative regis-tration of the noise of the real will achieve an autonomy from thehuman.

Whether or not they furnish sufficient conditions to define a newdiscourse network,19 Kittlers musings on our contemporary situationdo perform the crucial function of demarcating the era of media (ormedia differentiation) and laying bare the necessary correlation be-tween media and the human.20 Put another way, optical fiber net-works and digital convergence configure the humanthat is, senseperceptionas a dependent variable, a supplement determinednot by the logic of technology but by economic interests of capital-ist institutions.21 It is in this sense that Kittler demarcates enter-tainment from what must be considered the true use and functionof digital technology, which, for him, cannot be separated from mili-tary planning and history. A mere by-product of pleasure, enter-tainment is a hangover from the media epoch: a function that catersto our (soon to become obsolescent) need for imaginary materializa-tion through technology, but that, as Kittler argues most forcefullyin his consideration of computer software, serves as a diversion tokeep us ignorant of the operative level at which information, andhence reality, is programmed. In Kittlers account, in other words,only the continued existence of certain technological obstacles pre-vents us from moving into a posthumanist age of complete digitalconvergence; despite appearances, the exploitation of the current


19. On the question of whether Kittler can legitimately speak of a new discourse net-work, and also whether he should, see John Johnston, Friedrich Kittler: Media TheoryAfter Poststructuralism, in Kittler, Literature (above, n. 17), p. 6. It seems to me that thenotion of a discourse network requires some correlation of technical registration withsome minimal form of reception; to the extent that Kittlers vision of the perfectedoptoelectronic future eliminates any such correlation, it would constitute an infor-mation network beyond all discourse networks.

20. Here, one would have to follow the suggestion of Siegfried Schmidt and restrict thedefinition of medium (and media) in a way that is specific to the historical epochof media differentiation. Otherwise put, one must respect the force of Kittlers argu-ment that, prior to the media separation (i.e., during the reign of alphabetic monop-oly), there was no concept of the mediumjust as, following the overcoming of mediaseparation in digital convergence, there will no longer be a (meaningful) concept of themedium. In this sense, medium always implies not only other media, but a mediaecology. See Siegfried Schmidt, TechnikMedienPolitik: Die Erwartbarkeit des Er-wartbaren, in Kommunikation Medien Macht, ed. R. Maresch and N. Werber (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 1999), pp. 108132.

21. Kittler, Gramophone (above, n. 14), p. 2.

situation by capitalist institutions does not so much explain the de-lay in convergence as take advantage of it:

At this point, the only thing being computed is the transmission quality of

storage media, which appear in the media links as the content of the media. A

compromise between engineers and salespeople regulates how poor the sound

from a TV set can be, how fuzzy movie images can be, or how much a beloved

voice on the telephone can be filtered. Our sense perceptions are the depend-

ent variable of this compromise.22

Though Kittlers repeated reference to the perfected optoelec-tronic future suggests that this compromise must itself ultimatelyfall victim to the inexorable logic of technological development,what is crucial in the context of the current discussion is less the his-torical plausibility of such a claim than its theoretical basis. Thequestion in which I am interested concerns the status of Kittlerspurism: can his conception of data flow freed from the restrictions ofmaterial inscription systems furnish a viable account of the digitalimage (or whatever will take its place, given the obsolescence of theimage in the digital)?

To address this question, we must first distinguish two systems ofrelations within Kittlers project: on the one hand, the differentia-tion of the technological media proper (gramophone, film, type-writer) from writing; and on the other, the differentiation of the dig-ital from all prior media systems (where writing is included as asystem, alongside gramophone, film, and typewriter). These two sys-tems of relations define very different modes in which technology,as Kittler puts it, determines our situation. In the first case, mediaoperate in correlation with the body (or the real of bodies), in thesense that (for Kittler) the limits of the dominant storage technolo-gies determine the possibilities for the construction of the body; inthe latter case, by contrast, media will have achieved (to adopt thefuture anteriority that necessarily becomes the operative mode ofKittlers optoelectronic future) a total autonomy from the body, inthe sense that they will no longer be oriented to the bodily senses inany way whatsoever. The question I want to ask can thus be refinedfurther: within Kittlers optoelectronic future, what will play therole, previously performed by the body, of lending form to infor-mation?

Given that his current project seems to revolve around the viabil-ity of direct inscription of the real by nonprogrammable computers,such a question would, no doubt, have no meaning for Kittler: as he

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22. Ibid.

defines it, his project hinges on defining information in itself,without any reference to a form-giving being or principle that wouldexist at a level distinct from the digital materiality of information(electronic pulses, 0s and 1s). Still, before examining the theoreticalframework that allows him to come to such a position, we might dowell to examine the function, within his work, of the category of theimage and its correlation with the body. For Kittler needs the imagemore than he would like to admit: needs it, that is, as the covertframe that gives form to information.

With respect to the digital image, Kittlers media history might besaid to revolve around the problematic of what he calls data flow,and the task he sets for himself is that of specifying what, in anygiven technical epoch, constitutes data flowwhat transforms(mere, raw) data into data flow. The trajectory of this history thusruns from a rigid standard (writing), to a more flexible standard (me-dia), and finally to a totally flexible standard (the digital); in the firsttwo cases, data flow is (necessarily, if only negatively) determined incorrelation with the senses or the body, which furnishes somethinglike an external source for organization; in the latter, by contrast,data flow has become a direct function of technology itself.

The correlation between data flow and sense perception that ori-ents the first two phases of this trajectory establishes the image asthe central category for Kittlers conception of media. For beyond itsmedia-specific ties with the storage technology of film, the imageseems to arise as a more general suture between media and thebody. For Kittler, it is the incommensurabilities of the separate me-diathe fissures that open between themthat carve out a space forthe body; because the media, in this phase of their development,cannot yet totally determine or inscribe the real, the body must begiven a role. In a word, media seem somehow geared toward theimaginary production of the body image. Thus, in spite of Kittlerscelebration of gramophone, film, typewriter as an actualization ofthe famous Lacanian triad (real, imaginary, symbolic),23 at a morebasic level all three of these storage systems would appear to dependon the category of the image, as Kittler himself seems to admit:

In contrast to the arts, media do not have to make do with the grid of the

symbolic. That is to say, they reconstruct bodies not only in a system of words,

colors, or sound intervals. Media and media only fulfill the high standards


23. For a discussion of Kittlers ill-fated, in my opinion, effort to graft the three storagemedia onto Lacans tripartite distinction, see the criticism of Thomas Sebastian, Tech-nology Romanticized: Friedrich Kittlers Discourse Networks 1800/1900, MLN 105(1990): 583595.

that (according to Rudolf Arnheim) we expect from reproductions since the

invention of photography: They are not only supposed to resemble the ob-

ject, but rather guarantee this resemblance by being, as it were, a product of

the object in question, that is, by being mechanically produced by itjust as

the illuminated objects of reality imprint their image on the phonographic

layer, or the frequency curves of noises inscribe their wavelike shapes onto

the phonographic plate. A reproduction authenticated by the object itself is

one of physical precision. It refers to the bodily real.24

Whether it is the celluloid inscriptions of film, or the plastic inscrip-tions of phonography, or the discrete impressions of typewriting,media function as databases from which bodies are constructed, andthe thresholds governing their capacities for registration continue tobe set, however indirectly, by the limits of (human) sense perception.

That this privilege of the imaginary is a generalized one, and notsimply limited to a single storage technology, is made clear in Kit-tlers discussion of the capacity of the media to store time. Movingbeyond the symbolic determination of time as the time of writing,modern media cause time to pass through the defile of the image:time is thereby identified with the portion of the quotidian dataflow (or real) that can be arrested in the autonomous inscrip-tional processes of phonography and cinema. The resulting auton-omy of eye and ear notwithstanding, the fact that what is inscribedremains relative to the respective ranges of the relevant human per-ceptual organsand indeed, the very necessity for any stable de-marcation of sound from noise and image from lightensures thecontinued centrality of the human body, even if it comes increas-ingly to function in absentia. For this reason, we cannot help but ad-mit the covert centrality of the image within Kittlers media ecology.

Kittler would, of course, vehemently deny all of this: for him, thebodily dimension of media differentiation, as one phase in the au-tonomous development of technology, can only be accidental, apurely contingent effect of secondary factors. One could, accord-ingly, understand his conception of digital convergence as a kind oftechnological eschatology in which the recognition of digital auton-omy has the important effect of eliminating the bodily reference ofmedia: in a kind of retroactive revaluation, not entirely unlike themechanism enabling the dialectical march of the Hegelian Spirit, thecorrelation of media with the body falls away as mere appearance, asecondary by-product of what can only be seen as the unfolding ofan autonomous logic. As I see it, the problem here is less the escha-tological dimension per se than the fact that, with the mere appear-

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24. Kittler, Gramophone (above, n. 14), pp. 1112.

ance of a bodily dimension, Kittler would seem to eliminate the roleof form, leaving us with what I shall describe as a sterile conceptionof information-in-itself. Put another way, Kittlers conception of dig-ital convergence leaves us with the specter of a fully realized absolutesystem of information storage,25 one that has ostensibly eliminatedthe role of potentialitywhich nevertheless continues (covertly) toinform his media ecology (through the fissures between the separatemedia), and which, more generally, I shall identify with embodiedhuman life. To fathom why this is the case, we will need to grasp justhow much his position is, in effect, rigidly entailed by his theoreti-cal allegiance to the dominant strand of cybernetics, and more pre-cisely, to Claude Shannons mathematical theory of information.

Kittler himself draws attention to the importance of Shannon forhis own efforts to conceptualize media and digital convergence in anessay aptly entitled The History of Communication Media. There,he maps the evolution of media in a manner consistent with NiklasLuhmanns premise that communication technologies provide afirst-rate demarcation of epochs magnetizing all else.26 As he un-derstands it, this requires historicizing Shannons elegant, five-stageformal model of information by introducing two decisive breaks:first, the decoupling of interaction and communication; and sec-ond, the decoupling of communication and information.27 Thefirst decoupling, as Geoffrey Winthrop-Young points out, is stand-ard fare: it demarcates the spatiotemporal extension of communi-cation as it shifted from oral, face-to-face communication to writing,and subsequently to the mechanized dissemination of writing.28 Thesecond decoupling, more difficult to grasp, begins with the un-linking of the transmission of dematerialized information from the


25. Recall that Kittler chooses to model the perfected optoelectronic future on the para-digmatic figure of totalization in Western philosophy: absolute knowledge running asan endless loop.

26. Friedrich Kittler, Geschichte der Kommunikationsmedien, in Raum und Verfahren,ed. J. Huber and A.-M. Mller (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1993); cited follow-ing the English version, The History of Communication Media, Ctheory:http://beta.theory.com/global/ga114.html, p. 1. Kittler is here citing Niklas Luhmann.

27. Ibid., p. 1. Here is the whole passage: This elegant model, however, cannot be ap-plied to the factual history of communication technology, not least because it lays noclaim whatever to historicity. Instead of simply accepting Shannons five black boxes,as has become customary in linguistics and the humanities too, it seems more impor-tant and more rewarding to trace back through history how their evolution must haveproceeded in the first place.

28. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Silicon Sociology, or, Two Kings on Hegels Throne?Kittler, Luhmann, and the Posthuman Merger of German Media Theory, Yale Journalof Criticism 13:2 (2000): 407.

transportation of material goods and people that began, historically,with telegraphy.29 The reason this decoupling is difficult to graspconcerns the technological dedifferentiation that supersedes it andleads directly to Kittlers claim regarding digital convergence. Unlikethe decoupling itself, this dedifferentiation involves a theoretical ab-straction of history: despite his insistence on historicizing Shannonsmodel, Kittler seems more than willing to disregard the historicalfact that communication systems . . . also include the traffic ofgoods and peoples, in favor of a reformulation of the communica-tion of information, people, and goods . . . in terms of informationtheory.30 This theoretical imperative surfaces unequivocally in Kit-tlers sketch of the shift from communication to information:

Firstly, messages [Nachrichten] are essentially commands that people are ex-

pected to follow [nach denen Personen sich zu richten haben]. Secondly, as sys-

tems theory teaches, persons are not objects but addresses which make pos-

sible the assessment of further communications [citing Niklas Luhmann].

Thirdly, as ethnology since Mauss and Levi-Strauss has taught, goods represent

data in an order of exchange between said persons. However if data make pos-

sible the operation of storage, addresses that of transmissions, and commands

that of data processing, then every communication system, as the alliance of

these three operations, is an information system. It depends solely on whether

the three operations are implemented in physical reality to what extent such

a system becomes an independent communication technology. In other

words, the history of these technologies comes to an end when machines not

only handle the transmission of addresses and data storage, but are also able,

via mathematical algorithms, to control the processing of commands. It is

thus no coincidence that not until the start of the computer age, that is, when

all operations of communications systems had been mechanized, was Shan-

non able to describe a formal model of information.31

As Winthrop-Young suggests, this passage marks a departure of sortsfor Kittler, a turning point in his work that takes him from the ear-lier media archival research of Discourse Networks to the recent essayson computers.

Perhaps the best way to conceptualize the significance of this de-parture is to return to the bread and butter of Kittlers theoryFou-caults discontinuous model of history (historical epoch as episteme

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29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., p. 408.

31. Kittler, History (above, n. 26), p. 1 (first sentence of translation modified in ac-cordance with Winthrop-Youngs translation, Silicon Sociology [above, n. 28], p. 408).

or archive). Kittlers history of the media constitutes nothing lessthan a break with this fundamental source material: a wholesale shiftfrom an empirically oriented or positivist conception of media his-tory as fragmentary and essentially discontinuous, to a continuous,evolutionist unfolding of a teleological progress that will culminatein the accomplished deployment of the optoelectronic digital con-vergence he envisions as nothing short of a future inevitability. Inthis respect, Winthrop-Young is right to correlate the swerve in Kit-tlers trajectory with the technical dedifferentiation that followsfrom the second historical decoupling, for this dedifferentiation hasthe crucial effect of retroactively transforming what appear to be em-pirically rooted historical ruptures into moments in the progressiveperfection of a fully deployed informational system.

Another, perhaps more direct, way of putting this is to say thatKittlers historical approach gives way to a theoretical imperativethat finds its source in Shannons information theory. The slippagefrom the second historical decoupling or differentiation to a tech-nological dedifferentiation is made possible by the structural separa-tion of information from meaning that Shannons theory postulates.Because Shannons mathematical theory of information has recentlybeen given excellent exegesis elsewhere,32 I can dispense with the de-tails of his theory and confine my account to what explicitly con-cerns me here: the formal nature of Shannons definition of infor-mationor in other words, his bracketing of all semantic issues asirrelevant to the technical level of communication. For Shannon, in-formation represents a choice of one message from a range of pos-sible messages and must therefore be defined probabilistically: itconcerns not what a particular message says, so much as what it doesnot say. As a result, information must be rigorously separated frommeaning. Warren Weaver explains why in his commentary on Shan-nons paper: The concept of information applies not to the indi-vidual messages (as the concept of meaning would), but rather to thesituation as a whole, the unit information indicating that in thissituation one has an amount of freedom of choice, in selecting amessage, which it is convenient to regard as a standard or unit


32. See, especially, N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cy-bernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 18,5254, and more generally, all of chap. 3. For a fuller treatment, see N. KatherineHayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1990), chap. 2. See also Winthrop-Young, Silicon Sociology(above, n. 26), p. 409. Hayles herself credits Norbert Wiener as the source of her ac-count (see Hayles, Posthuman, p. 300n2).

amount.33 Accordingly, information can be defined as a statisticalmeasure of uncertainty equal to the logarithm taken to base 2 of thenumber of available choices. Thus, if a message can be specified fol-lowing five binary steps or choices (as is the case with KatherineHayless example of a coding system for taking bets on a horse racewith thirty-two entrants), the statistical measure of uncertainty (orinformation) can be specified as:

C = log2 32 = 5

This logarithm allows the message to be specified probabilistically,without any recourse being made to its meaning.

In what amounts to an effort to save the historical basis of Kit-tlers history of media, Winthrop-Young reads his appropriation ofinformation theory as a functional equivalence rather than anidentification.34 According to Winthrop-Young, it is neither the casethat information theory is formalized discourse analysis, nor thatdiscourse analysis is demathematized information theory; rather,both enterprises must be understood as applications, within their re-spective domains, of a functionally similar apparatus: the probabilis-tic theory of information or, equivalently, the priority of the infor-mational situation as a whole over the individual message. Thoughit makes perfect sense in relation to Kittlers Discourse Networks andeven perhaps to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, this reading simplydoes not fit his most recent work on computers and digital conver-gence. Put bluntly, it is incompatible with the technical dedifferen-tiation thesis.

In order to understand why this is the case, let us turn to the so-called effectiveness problems that emerge from Shannons formalmodel. In his commentary, Warren Weaver distinguishes three levelsof (potential) communications problems: the technical Level A,concerned with the accurate transmission of symbols of communi-cation; the semantic Level B, concerned with how the transmittedsymbols convey the desired meaning; and what we might call the

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33. Warren Weaver, Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communi-cation, in C. Shannon and W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Ur-bana: University of Illinois Press, 1949), p. 9.

34. Given that discourse analysis is instrumental to Kittlers attack on [m]eaning asthe fundamental concept of hermeneutics and labor as the fundamental concept of thesociology of literature [citing Discourse Networks], and given that information theory,in turn, is used to dismiss media sociology or media-blind analysis, it appears that Fou-caults discourse analysis is to traditional literary scholarship what Shannons informa-tion theory is to traditional communication theory (Winthrop-Young, Silicon Soci-ology [above, n. 28], p. 409).

performative Level C, concerned with the effectiveness of the re-ceived meaning in affecting the conduct of the receiverthat is,whether it does so in the desired way.35 Admitting that Shannonsmathematical theory applies properly only to Level A, Weaver goeson to point out that Levels B and C can make use only of those sig-nal accuracies which turn out to be possible when analyzed at LevelA.36 For this reason, not only do any limitations discovered in thetheory at Level A necessarily apply to levels B and C, but more con-sequentially, the theory of Level A is, at least to a significant degree,also a theory of levels B and C.37 What is being asserted here is, ofcourse, the autonomy of the technical levelan autonomy that, asWinthrop-Young points out, resonates with Kittlers own privilegingof media over aesthetics.38 Thus, when Kittler dramaticallyrephras[es] the effectiveness problem in the passage detailing thedecoupling of communication and information, what he is doing isin effect drawing on the Shannon-Weaver reduction in order to legitimatehis own subordination of media to information.39

Contrary to his stated insistence on the importance of historiciz-ing Shannon, what remains decisive for Kittler is precisely the formalproperties of Shannons model: as the basis for the technical dedif-ferentiation that constitutes the logical culmination of the historicaldecoupling of information from communication, the model allowsKittler to postulate an informational posthistory. Effectively, then, itpermits him to decide, as it were, what still remains fundamentallyambivalent in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter and the papers sur-rounding it. For if the media separation that constitutes the focus ofthis research is ultimately significant because of its part in a larger his-


35. Weaver, Recent Contributions (above, n. 33), p. 4.

36. Ibid., p. 6 (emphasis added).

37. Ibid., (emphasis added). Later in his paper, Weaver goes on to wonder if in fact theseparation into the three levels is really [in the end] artificial and undesirable (p. 27).

38. That said, I would differ somewhat from Winthrop-Young by insisting on the im-plicit philosophical content of Weavers subordination of Levels B and C to Level A. Ac-cordingly, Shannons theory does not witness so much the subordination of philo-sophical content to engineering details (Winthrop-Young, Silicon Sociology [above,n. 28], p. 408), as the subordination of historical contingency to a theoretical telos.

39. Ibid., p. 408. Winthrop-Young astutely observes how Kittlers languagespecificallyhis play on Nachrichten (the German word for message)itself carries out thisrephrasing: messages (Nachrichten), he says, are commands [Befehle] that people areexpected to follow [nach denen Personen sich zu richten haben]. Calling this a quasi-Heideggerian etymological invocation of Nachrichten, Winthrop-Young implies thatKittlers wordplay equates messages with orders in a way that asserts the priority of thetechnical level of communication.

tory of communications media, then its constitutive alliance with theimaginary and, by extension, with the (absent) bodythat is to say,the entire range of so-called media effects said to constitute a mediaecologycan be accorded no more importance than that of being amere preparatory stage on the way to the perfected optoelectronicfuture. In this respect, the emergence of Shannons theory of infor-mation as the theoretical basis for Kittlers (new) media history op-erates a chilling retrospective revaluation that simply leavespeople out of the loop. From the standpoint of the optoelectronicfuture, the humanwhat Kittler tellingly names so-called Manmust be revalued as the purely contingent by-product of a prepara-tory phase of the autonomous evolution of information, a point al-ready legible in the margins of Kittlers Introduction to Gramophone,Film, Typewriter:

But these links are separated by incompatible data channels and differing data

formats. Electrics does not equal electronics. Within the spectrum of the gen-

eral data flow, television, radio, cinema, and the postal service constitute in-

dividual and limited windows for peoples sense perceptions. Infrared radia-

tions or the radio echoes of approaching missiles are still transmitted through

other channels, unlike the optical fiber networks of the future. Our media sys-

tems merely distribute the words, noises, and images people can transmit and

receive. But they do not compute these data. They do not produce an output

that, under computer control, transforms any algorithm into any interface ef-

fect, to the point where people take leave of their senses.40

With this theoretical argument for the structural irrelevance of the hu-man in the evolution of information, Kittler gives new meaning andforce to Foucaults famous pronouncement of the death of man.While Foucault allows Man to play an active role as the form thatshaped the episteme of the nineteenth century, even this is strippedaway by Kittler.41 Bluntly stated, if information really is independentof people, it shows Man to have been nothing more than an illusion,a purely passive construction of the autonomous force of information.

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40. Kittler, Gramophone (above, n. 14), p. 2.

41. On this reading, Foucault remains, in some important sense, a historian, while Kit-tler subsumes history into theory, or rather, into an epiphenomenon of the technicalproperties of information. Incidentally, Deleuze would also remain a historian in thesame sense; see his effort to articulate, on the basis of Foucaults work, a new super-human form that emerges from the conjunction of the human with the new forces ofthe outside comprised by silicon and molecular biology: Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans.S. Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), appendix.

We can now grasp the implications of Kittlers recent work for un-derstanding the digital image. For Kittler, the very term digital im-age involves a contradiction, since it couples the (covertly) opera-tive category for the epoch of media differentiation (the image) withthe (explicitly) operative category of optoelectronic posthistory (thedigital). As the preeminent form for the production of media effectsas projections of the (absent) body, the image simply cannot be ar-ticulated with the digitalunderstood, as it is by Kittler, as the veryprinciple behind the convergence that perfects the informationalsystem and thereby renders Man, at best, a dependent variable and,at worst, a cast-off relic of a now illusory media epoch. What Kittlerswork announces, then, is not (simply) the obsolescence of the cine-matic image in the age of the digital, but the digital obsolescence ofthe image as such. In the process, moreover, he radicalizes (the occul-tation of) the problematic of framing introduced above, on two sep-arate but closely correlated counts: on the one hand, followingShannons formal definition of information, convergence empha-sizes the frameless equivalence or seamless translatability amongwhat will formerly have been called media; on the other hand, thestructural epoche of Man removes the only potential source for aframing of information once the image has undergone its digitalimplosion.

MacKays Whole Theory of Information and Embodied Reception

Before embracing the seemingly inexorable logic of Kittlerstheory of media evolution, we might do well to take note of its de-pendence on what are, in the end, highly contentious interpretationsof technical questions raised by first-generation cyberneticists. InHow We Became Posthuman, Kate Hayles has brilliantly demonstratedhow contingent decisions on the part of a small group of scientists(most prominently, Norbert Wiener and Warren McCulloch) led tothe disembodiment of information that has become our legacy and,as Hayles so perceptively shows, our problem. In fact, she draws at-tention to a text of Shannons in which he himself insists on thenarrow parameters of his theory of information and warns againstapplications of the theory to the domain of natural language (appli-cations, that is, of just the sort Kittler appears to execute in his in-formational reformulation of Foucaults Archaeology).42

Hayles also mentions the existence of alternative models of infor-mation, developed around the same time as Shannons theory, that


42. See Hayles, Posthuman (above, n. 32), p. 54.

contest his bracketing of semantics. The most significant of these isthe model put forth by British scientist Donald MacKay. As Haylesstresses, MacKays model serves to indicate the possibility for a dif-ferent articulation of information, semantics, and change, and thusforcefully underscores the contingency of the disembodiment of in-formation that most of us now take to be a black-boxed fact. Yet themodel does far more than just that; specifically, MacKay advanceswhat is undeniably a theoretical argument against the separation ofinformation and semanticsagainst the very hinge of Shannonsmodel and, by extension, of Kittlers theoretical turn. DespiteHayless (dominant) insistence on historical relativism here,43 theShannon-MacKay conflict simply must be understood as requiring achoice: either Shannon or MacKay. For as we shall see, even if thetwo theories, restricted to the domains they respectively concern, re-main complementary in principle, their function as variant bases fortheories of communication, in the technical, biological, and socialdevelopments they themselves catalyzed, sets them fundamentallyat odds.

In order to contest Kittlers interpretive appropriation of first-generation cybernetics and to rehabilitate the problematic of thedigital image and that of framing against his technicist dissolution,I propose to reconstruct MacKays theory as a viable, if not in factnecessary, theoretical counter to Shannons formal or quantitativemodel. As I see it, MacKays model does not simply make meaningcompatible with the theory of information in a kind of happy syn-thesis of the two, as Hayless account seems to imply, but rather pre-sents meaning as a necessary aspect of any theory of information thatwould attempt to do more than simply provide a quantitative measure ofinformation.

MacKay is interested in developing a whole theory of informa-tion that would encompass, as one of its specific parts (followingShannons wisdom in restricting its scope), Shannons statistical

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43. I say dominant, because Hayles also seems to feel that MacKay is rightor per-haps more accurately, that the disembodiment of information ensuing from the gen-eralization of Shannons model is deeply problematic and misguided. Still, insofar asHayles tends to fault the reception of Shannons theory, rather than the theory itself,her position is less than unequivocal, at least regarding the question of the role ofmeaning in the theory of information. See her discussion of how Shannons theorygets modified and revalued by Hans Moravec (Hayles, Posthuman, pp. 5354), and alsoher discussion of the advantages of Shannons approach (pp. 1819).

44. Not incidentally, given what we have said above concerning the dangers of gener-alizing Shannons theory, MacKay contextualizes his contribution as a response to twounfortunate consequences inadvertently produced by Shannons innocent state-

theory of communication.44 His aim is to outline the place ofmeaning in the theory of information: By the theory of informa-tion, he notes, we shall mean broadly the theory of processes bywhich representations come into being, together with the theory ofthose abstract features which are common to a representation andthat which it represents.45 The whole theory of information, there-fore, is concerned with two processes, or rather two sides of theprocess of communication: on the one hand, the production of rep-resentations; and on the other, the effect or function of representa-tions, which is equivalent, as we shall see, to their reception (thoughnot to their observable behavioral consequences). MacKay distin-guishes these two sides of the process of communication as selectionand construction, respectively. Both concern information-content orthe quantitative measure of amount-of-information. The formerselectioncorresponds to Shannons definition of information asthe minimum equivalent number of binary steps by which the rep-resentation concerned may be selected from an ensemble of possiblerepresentations.46 Accordingly, MacKay proposes the term selec-tive-information-content to designate Shannons quantitative mea-sure. Construction, by contrast, concerns two alternative quantitativemeasures of amount-of-information: structural-informational-contentindicates the minimum equivalent number of independent featureswhich must be specifiedthe number of degrees of freedom or logi-cal dimensionality of the representation; and metrical-informa-tion-content names the equivalent number of units of evidencewhich the information provides for the construction of the rep-resentation.47 Together, and as distinct from selective information,these two measures comprise what MacKay calls descriptive-information-content.

Now it is important to understand that structural and metrical in-formational-content are not second-order modifications of selective-informational-content, as Hayles (and, following her lead,


ment regarding the exclusion of meaning from the mathematical theory of informa-tion. These are (1) the claim that the whole theory of information . . . has nothing todo with meaning; and (2) that the whole subject of meaning is not satisfactory forthe information theorist since it is bound up with the subjective (Donald M. MacKay,The Place of Meaning in the Theory of Information, in Information Theory: PapersRead at a Symposium on Information Theory Held at the Royal Institution, London, Sep-tember 12th to 16th, 1955 [New York: Academic Press, 1956], p. 215).

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., p. 216.

47. Ibid.

Winthrop-Young) claim.48 They are not metacommunications ormessage[s] about how to interpret a message, but factors that spec-ify the context for the selective-informational-content as part of alarger whole theory of information.49 Hayles is right to infer thatselective-informational-content and descriptive-informational-content always work together, but she is mistaken in how she ac-counts for this cofunctioning: structural and metrical informational-content do not impact selective-informational-content from theoutside or through an act of observation; rather, they combine with itto form what MacKay calls the selective function of the message onan ensemble of possible states of the C. P. M., or conditional-probability-matrix.50

MacKay illustrates the distinction between selective-informational-content (his gloss on Shannons mathematical definition of informa-tion) and selective function with an example that brings us right backto our discussion of the so-called effectiveness problem. He presentsa communication process in which A sends to B the following mes-sage (M): Someone is waiting for you outside. He assumes (1) thatA intends to produce some effect on B (otherwise, A might have senta message in gibberish or in a language unknown to B), and (2) thatA intends B to understand the message and appreciate its meaning.He suggests that A, in intending to produce an effect on B, is con-cerned with Bs total state of readiness or, in objective terms,

72 Configurations

48. Oddly, Hayles collapses MacKays distinction of metrical and structural informa-tional-content into the single category of structural information. In so doing she sim-ply eliminates the important distinction between two different components of de-scriptive information or the process of construction (issues of precision or reliability[metrical] and the number of distinguishable features [structural]). Insofar as MacKaysdistinction emphasizes internal factors of how information is constructed, rather thanany question of how it is observed, its conflation in Hayles makes room for the shift toan observational perspective and the idea that it is a metacommunication. I shall re-turn to this issue shortly. More importantly, however, Hayless understanding of struc-tural information as a different kind of information from selective information ignoresMacKays caution (following Shannon) against conflating information per se with mea-sures of information. On this point, see the revisionary note that MacKay appends tothe reprinting of his 1950 paper (actually a BBC radio talk): It . . . became clear that toavoid conceptual confusion it was not sufficient to preface the word information withdistinguishing adjectives such as selective, structural and metrical. Our chief termi-nological need was for a way of keeping the notion of information per se distinct fromall measures of amount-of-information (Donald M. MacKay, Information, Mechanism,and Meaning [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969], p. 18). See also ibid., chap. 6.

49. Hayles, Posthuman (above, n. 32), p. 55; Winthrop-Young, Silicon Sociology(above, n. 28), p. 410.

50. MacKay, Place of Meaning (above, n. 44), p. 219.

with the set or matrix of conditional probabilities of different pos-sible patterns of behaviour in relevant circumstances (C.P.M. forshort).51 Now this situation allows MacKay to underscore the short-comings of a theory of information that would both identify se-mantics with behavioral effect (Weavers Levels B and C) and subor-dinate both to the technical level (Weavers Level A). Such a theoryfails on at least two counts. First, the identification of meaning witheffect leads to incoherence, MacKay suggests, since it would compelus to contend that a message has no meaning if the receiver alreadyknows what it is saying; but [a] message, he counters, does notlose its meaning through being repeated.52 Second, the identifica-tion of meaning with change in the C.P.M. wont suffice, and for thesame reasonnamely, because a repeated message may produce nosignificant change at all.53

These objections inform MacKays postulation that the C.P.M.,rather than behavioral effect, constitutes the basis for a theory ofmeaning. The proximate advantage of this postulation, already ap-parent from the objections themselves, is that the C.P.M. allowsmeaning to be preserved in cases of repetition. If the C.P.M. is al-ready in the desired stateif for example I know already that some-one is waiting for methen your object has already been achieved.


51. Ibid., p. 218.

52. Ibid. McKay furthermore asserts the incoherence of this position purely on lin-guistic grounds, since many sentences in which meaning is used would becomegrammatical nonsense under this substitute definition (meaning = behavioral effect).

53. This objection would complicate Hayless distinction of Shannon and MacKay asrepresentatives, respectively, of a conservative and of a change-oriented theory of in-formation: Shannons distinction between signal and noise had a conservative biasthat privileges stasis over change. Noise interferes with the messages exact replication,which is presumed to be the desired result. The structure of the theory implied thatchange was deviation and that deviation should be corrected. By contrast, MacKaystheory had as its generative distinction the difference in the state of the receivers mindbefore and after the message arrived. In his model information was not opposed tochange; it was change (Hayles, Posthuman [above, n. 32], p. 63). Despite the care shetakes to distinguish MacKays claims regarding the state of the receivers mind (orrather, the receivers C.P.M) from less subtle claims regarding behavioral effect, heranalysis here overstates the role of change in his theory, and as a consequence, mis-construes the nature of the difference(s) between MacKay and Shannon. While we areon the topic of information and change, it may be helpful to note as well that MacKayraises a further linguistic objection against the move to identify the meaning with thestate of the C.P.M. (instead of with the change): The meaning of the message, hespecifies, is not identical with the state it produces. It is identified by the state it pro-duces. . . . A message read for a second time producesor should producesubstan-tially the same state of the relevant C.P.M. Its meaning is the same (MacKay, Place ofMeaning [above, n. 44], p. 219).

Your object, then, is not necessarily to bring about a change in theC.P.M., but to establish a certain state of (part of) the C.P.M. for ac-tivity, internal (e.g., perceptual) or external (e.g., motor activity).54

The more far-reaching advantage of MacKays postulation is that it es-tablishes meaningif, that is, one wishes to include meaning in awhole theory of information (as, MacKay argues, one must)55assomething which cannot be reduced to or situated on the same level asthe message or technical unit of information. Thus, for MacKay, thetechnicist performativity that allows Weaver to subsume Levels Band C within Level A (and that, incidentally, allows Kittler to sub-sume media differentiation under a broader eschatology of technicaldedifferentiation) is simply wrong:56 if, on the one hand, meaning isnot identical to, but identified by the state of the C.P.M. it produces,and if, on the other hand, the ensemble of states of the C.P.M. de-fines the selective function of the message, then the technical operationof a message (as something necessarily correlated with meaning in a

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54. MacKay, Place of Meaning, p. 218.

55. That is to say that meaning, on MacKays account, is a necessary element of what hecalls a whole theory of meaning. Incidentally, Weavers efforts to build meaning intoShannons mathematical theory of communication support MacKays position, even ifthey differ markedly on how meaning relates to the technical level of communication.

56. It is wrong because it collapses all distinction between the technical and the se-mantic, as can be seen clearly in Weavers proposed minor additions to Shannonsschematic diagram (Weaver, Recent Contributions [above, n. 33], p. 26). These addi-tions are meant to address semantic and performative considerations without steppingoutside the framework of the formal process of communication. They are: (1) the in-terposition of a box labeled Semantic Receiver between the engineering receiver andthe destination, whose function would be to subject the message to a second decod-ing, the demand on this one being that it must match the statistical semantic charac-teristics of the message to the statistical semantic capacities of the totality of receivers(p. 26); (2) the interposition of a box labeled semantic noise between the informa-tion source and the transmitter, whose function would be to impose into the signalthe perturbations or distortions of meaning which are not intended by the source butwhich inescapably affect the destination (p. 26); (3) consideration of the capacity ofthe channel (given the rule that fidelity of transmission decreases in proportion as thequantity of information transmitted over a channel increases) and the capacity of theaudience (for whom, by analogy with this rule, potential for error and confusionmount in proportion with quantity of information transmitted). These three additions,all of which treat semantic issues via analogy with technical ones, follow from themore general analogy between information and (thermodynamic) entropy so centralto first-wave cybernetics. Here, it is important to underscore that Weavers statisticalsemantic capacities of the totality of receivers (p. 26, emphasis added) is not the samething as MacKays C.P.M.: Weavers formalism renders the receiver a component of theformal communication circuit, whereas MacKays formalism opens communicationonto a probabilistic matrix (the ensemble of possible states of the C.P.M) that cannot beaccounted for by the technical communication circuit.

whole theory) is conditioned by the nontechnical context out ofwhich it is selectedwhich is to say, by what MacKay in a later pa-per calls the range of possible states of orientation of this or thatparticular receiver.57 Because it is identical neither with the technicallevel of information, nor with the behavioral states of the receiver,meaning has a specified objective role within a whole theory of com-munication: a role that we can now define to be that of connectingthe probabilistic basis of Shannons conceptualization of informa-tion with the concrete concerns and constraints constitutive of hu-man communication.

By way of summarizing MacKays contribution, both within thegeneral evolution of information theory and to the specific topic ofthe digital image, we would do well to return to the problematic offraming. Let me be perfectly blunt here: to my mind, MacKays en-gagement with meaning forms nothing less than the kernel of a re-demptive countertradition in which this crucial problematic doesnot suffer the occultation we observed in Kittler and in cyberneticsmore generally. Already in MacKays effort to differentiate a wholetheory of information from Shannons far more narrow mathe-matical theory, and in his (re)definition of meaning in terms of se-lective function, we confront an effort to build the function of fram-ing into the very process through which information is created.More than just a theorist who underscores the irreducibility of fram-ing in cybernetics, MacKay is a theorist of framing itself. With hisdefinition of (received) meaning as the selective function of themessage on an ensemble of possible states of the C.P.M., he fur-nishes the basis for (re)thinking the relation between informationand image beyond cybernetics.

Perhaps the best way to grasp this seminal role of MacKays work


57. Donald M. MacKay, The Informational Analysis of Questions and Commands, inInformation Theory (above, n. 44), p. 471. In this paper, MacKay extends his analysis ofmeaning and its correlation with the states of the C.P.M. to the organism and its rela-tion with its environment: In order that its behavior should be adaptive to its envi-ronment, the selective process by which basic acts are concatenated requires to beorganized according to the current state of the environment in relation to the organ-ism. . . . Information can . . . be defined as that which does logical work on the organ-isms orientation. . . . The amount of information received by an organism can then bemeasured (in various ways) by measuring if we can (in various ways) the logical (orga-nizing) work that it does for the organism. . . . [these] are necessarily relative measures,since they measure the impact of information on the given receiver. Amount of infor-mation measures not a stuff but a relation. The meaning of an indicative item of in-formation to the organism can now be defined as its selective function on the range ofthe organisms possible states of orientation, or for short, its organizing function forthe organism. It will be noted that this too is a relation (pp. 470471).

is to return to the paper he presented at the Macy conferences. InSearch of Basic Symbols (1951) lays out a distinction between whatMacKay calls communication and what he calls scientific infor-mation.58 More significant than this distinction, however, is thefact that, in both cases, the receivers internal structure plays an activeand determinate role: whether the message emerges out of a prefab-ricated ensemble or requires specification of an ensemble, the re-ceivers internal structure performs the crucial function of convert-ing incoming stimuli into internal symbols. In this process ofconversion, the receivers elementary acts of internal response to re-ceived stimuli are put to use as symbolic components for the in-ternal representation of what is perceived.59 Put another way, ac-tivity in the receivers internal structure generates symbolicstructures that serve to frame stimuli and thus to in-form informa-tion: this activity converts regularities in the flux of stimuli into pat-terns of information.60

Though MacKay goes on to develop this theory of framing inpapers that generalize the selective function of information (i.e.,meaning) in the context of the human as organism,61 what we havealready said suffices to pinpoint his principal contribution to theproblematic of framing: not only does he show that meaning is nec-essary to any whole theory of information, but he ties this neces-sity to operational demands of the system, not simply nor primarily tothe problem of reflexivity, the alleged Achilles heel of first-generationcybernetics.62 Framing (or the specification of selective function on

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58. Donald McKay, In Search of Basic Symbols, reprinted in MacKay, Information,Mechanism, Meaning (above, n. 48), p. 42.

59. Ibid., p. 50.

60. Here we see that for MacKay, pattern does not adhere in information, but comesfrom the receiver. For this reason, one can usefully contrast MacKay not simply withShannon and the dominant voice of first-generation cybernetics, but with the moregeneral privilege of pattern over materiality that, as Hayles has convincingly argued,represents one of its most significant legacies to us (if not the most significant).

61. See especially MacKay, Informational Analysis (above, n. 57). By generalizing theselective function on the range of the organisms possible states of orientation, MacKayforegrounds the role of the operational perspective of the organism as the crucialframe within which to evaluate information. Incidentally, he distinguishes this func-tion (which he calls the organizing function for the organism) from the organizingwork done on the organism (that is, the change in its behavioral state from an ob-servers perspective).

62. In this respect, Hayless account of MacKay, and also of the transition from the firstto the second wave of cybernetics, is insufficient. To supplement her historicizingmove, one would have to develop a minor tradition in cyberneticsone that origi-nates in MacKays correlation of the whole theory of information with the opera-

an ensemble of states of the C.P.M.) is not an operation that is per-formed on preconstituted information from the outside. Rather, it isan activity that quite literally constitutes or creates information. Forthis reason (as my brief discussion of metacommunication alreadysuggested), framing must be distinguished categorically from obser-vation, and MacKays theory must be rehabilitated against NiklasLuhmanns much modified appropriation of it in his own theory ofmeaning.63 Specifically, we must reaffirm precisely that dimension ofMcKays selective conception of meaning that Luhmann proposes toeliminate: its anchoring in the biological context of informationtransmission and reception.64 The bottom line for MacKay is that in-formation remains meaningless in the absence of a (human) framer,and that framing cannot be reduced to a generic observational func-tion, but encompasses everything that goes to make up the biologi-cal and cultural specificity of this or that singular receiver:

The meaning [of a message] . . . can be fully represented only in terms of the

full basic-symbol complex defined by all the elementary responses evoked.

These may include visceral responses and hormonal secretions and what have

you . . . an organism probably includes in its elementary conceptual alphabet


tional perspective of the system, passes through Maturana and Varelas foregroundingof the operational perspective, and culminates in the current work of Varela as ex-tended by the philosophical perspectives of Raymond Ruyer and Cornelius Castoriadisand contemporary neuroscience. Such a development, needless to say, is a task for an-other day.

63. Luhmann adopts MacKays argument in his own refunctionalization of meaninginto a functional definition: Meaning functions as the premise for experienceprocessing in a way that makes possible a choice from among different possible statesor contents of consciousness, and in this it does not totally eliminate what has notbeen chosen, but preserves it in the form of the world and so keeps it accessible. Thefunction of meaning then does not lie in information, i.e., not in the elimination ofsystem-relative states of uncertainty about the world, and it cannot, therefore, bemeasured with the techniques of information theory. If it is repeated, a message orpiece of news loses its information value, but not its meaning, Meaning is not a se-lective event, but a selective relationship between system and worldalthough this isstill not an adequate characterization. Rather, what is special about the meaningful ormeaning-based processing of experience is that it makes possible both the reductionand the preservation of complexity, i.e., it provides a form of selection that preventsthe world from shrinking down to just one particular content of consciousness witheach act of determining experience (Niklas Luhmann, Meaning as Sociologys BasicConcept, in Essays on Self-Reference [New York: Columbia Univeristy Press, 1990],p. 27).

64. MacKay, too, emphasizes the selective function of meaning but relates it not onlyto conscious states (experiences) but also to the totality of the conditionally built-intendencies of an organism (!) to react to the environment. But in this way the, for us,decisive aspect of world preservation remains unclear or assumed as a system-perfor-

(its catalogue of basic symbols) all the elementary internal acts of response to

the environment which have acquired a sufficiently high probabilistic status,

and not merely those for which verbal projections have been found.65

Machinism without Original: Raymond Ruyers TransspatialFraming Function

One way to describe the priority MacKay places on the opera-tional perspective of the framing (human) system is to say that fram-ing produces a change in the framer (and in the framers correlationwith information) that the framer is unable to frame. It must bestressed, furthermore, that this is a wholly different framing paradoxfrom the constitutive blind spot of any observation, as theorizedby Luhmann (following the early Maturana): rather than generatinga proliferation of observational levels within the same empirical space,framing in MacKays sense involves what we can only understand asan infraempirical operation on the part of the (human) framer, orwhat we might alternatively describe as the creation of information.

Precisely this issue of the infraempirical dimension of informa-tional framing orients French biophenomenologist RaymondRuyers effort to develop a positive reinterpretation of cyberneticsstripped of its mechanist postulates.66 With its insistence on therole of the transspatial dimension in biological beings, Ruyerswork is oriented precisely against the observational regress that isthe basis for Luhmanns epistemology; as Ruyer sees it, only a verti-cal jump in levels, from the empirical domain to the transspatial do-main, can stop the regress. Not only does he posit the priority of theoperational domain of the living over any subsequent observationaldomains, but he contends that this priority stems directly from thebiological basis of living beings. As Ruyer puts it, living beings can besaid to experience self-enjoyment, a kind of absolute self-knowledgethat is not rooted in observation.

Insofar as it differentiates the finalism of subjective processes

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mance in the form of memory, etc. (ibid., p. 70n6). Against this claim, I would simplyemphasize MacKays effort to embed the world-preserving dimension of virtualitywithin the operational system (thus anticipating Maturana and Varela). This becomesmost apparent in those moments when MacKay subordinates the measure of informa-tion to the perspective (or context) of a particular perceiver: with a given metric wecan have a precise representation of the meaning of a statement for a given individual, re-membering that each individual receiver will have his basic vectors defined by his owninternal apparatus (MacKay, Information, Mechanism, Meaning [above, n. 48], p. 49).

65. MacKay, Information, Mechanism, Meaning, p. 54.

66. Raymond Ruyer, La cyberntique et lorigine de linformation (Paris: Flammarion,1954), p. 81.

from the static physicalism of groupings of matter, the transspatialdimension serves to demarcate Ruyers critique and transformationof cybernetics from otherwise deceptively similar, dogmatic anthro-pomorphic criticisms. For Ruyer, that is, it is not a matter of simplyaffirming the priority of the vital over the mechanical. Nor is it amatter of rejecting this priority tout court in favor of some purportedindifference between the living and the nonliving. Rather, he seeksto retain the priority of the livingthough, we must note, in thevery specific sense that he attaches to the notion of consciousness (laconscience)67precisely by exposing the profound intertwining of the or-ganic and the technical in human being (and, ultimately, in all finalist,subjective processes). In this respect, he introduces a threefold hier-archy in place of the twofold cybernetic opposition: (in ascendingorder) mechanical machines, organic machines, and consciousness(or ontogenesis). And perhaps more significantly still, he moves be-yond the impasse imposed by the cybernetic opposition: rather thansimply endorsing the convergence of human and machine, Ruyermakes it his goal to explore their coevolution; accordingly, their con-stitutive differences remain as important as their simulated overlap.

For this reason, Ruyers position on cybernetics defines a trajec-tory antithetical to that followed by Kittler. Concisely put, he rejectsthe very basis of Kittlers media science: namely, the Turing test, andthe observational problematic (of machine-human [in]discernibility)that it foregrounds. As Ruyer sees it, this problematic is responsiblefor all the failures of cybernetics:

all the internal difficulties of cybernetics stem from the same error of principle

and from the ill-fated postulate according to which informational machines

are the integral equivalent of living and conscious nervous systems. This

mechanistic postulate commands all the failures of cybernetics: the failure to

understand the origin of information, and the implicit admission of a veritable

perpetual movement of the third order; the failure to understand meaning [le

sens]; the failure to understand the perception of universals or learning.68


67. One must bear in mind that the French term conscience has a broader semanticrange than the English consciousness. Ruyer uses the term to designate a function ofhuman being (and indeed, of all biological or subjective being as such) that goes wellbeyond the empirical notion of consciousness as awareness or representational think-ing. Indeed, he goes to great lengths to distinguish between primary and secondaryconsciousnessthe former being identified with the basic equipotentiality and inter-nal resonance of the living, the latter specifically with the nervous system of higher-order animals and the cortex of human beings. Ruyer insists that primary conscious-ness is fundamental and that secondary consciousness, if it is indeed significantlydifferent, remains a derivative of primary consciousness. See Raymond Ruyer, No-finalisme (Paris: PUF, 1952), pp. 40 ff, 79.

68. Ruyer, La cyberntique (above, n. 65), p. 81.

When he subsequently calls for a renunciation of this impulse to-ward substitution and argues that machines are framed by livingnervous systems, Ruyer in effect brings the resources of his complexbiophilosophy (developed in two earlier texts, lments de psycho-biologie [1946] and No-finalisme [1952]) to bear on the topic of cy-bernetics. His position is thus informed, not by a blind dogmatism,but by a systematic version of finalism that is predicated upon the ir-reducible specificity of the livingor, more precisely, on the neces-sary participation of living, conscious beings in a transspatial do-main of values and themes.

At the core of Ruyers neofinalism is the fundamental notion thatliving beings enjoy a kind of absolute self-knowledge, an experienceof themselves as absolute forms. This is what Ruyer calls the capac-ity for absolute survey.69 This notion, which he associates with thephenomenon of primary consciousness and the subjectivity of ab-solute forms (subjectivity without subject), finds a paradigmatic il-lustration in the example of vision. In chapter 9 of No-finalisme, hedistinguishes between the physical and the transspatial dimensionsof vision in order to show how the former is secondary to and thusdependent on the latter. When we look at a physical surface (definedpartes extra partes) such as a checkered tabletop, we must be posi-tioned in space such that our retina is at some distance from andalong a dimension perpendicular to the tabletop. Ruyer comparesthis visual experience with that of a camera, which likewise must oc-cupy a position in space at a distance from and perpendicular to thesurface. On the basis of this comparison, he introduces a certainregress of physical vision (or observation), since in order to see (orphotograph) the visual field n, an observer (or camera) would haveto be located in an n + 1 dimension. In simpler terms, in order to seethe image (or photograph) of the tabletop, an observer (or camera)would have to be at some distance and perpendicular to it, and so onfor each higher level or dimensionality. However, Ruyer notes, thisgeometrical law which governs the technique of perceptionthat is, perception as a physico-physiological eventis not valid forvisual sensation as a state of consciousness; when we consider visualsensation in itself, we no longer observe our sensation from the out-

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69. For further discussion of the absolute survey and its potential contribution to con-temporary theoretical problematics, see Paul Bainss discussion of the influence ofRuyer on Deleuze and Guattari: (Paul Bains, Subjectless Subjectivities, Canadian Re-view of Comparative Literature, September 1997, pp. 511528. See also the essays col-lected in Louis Vax and Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, Raymond Ruyer, de la science lathologie (Paris: ditions Kim, 1995), especially the contributions by Bernard Ruyer,Meslet, Pichlin, and Valdinoci.

side, from a dimension perpendicular to it, but stand, as it were, atall places at once in the visual field.70 This is what he means by ab-solute survey: a kind of absolute grasp of (in this case) the visualfield, a self-enjoyment that dispenses with the mediation of obser-vation and the infinite regress bound up with it. It is, says Ruyer, asurface grasped in all its details, without third dimension, . . . an ab-sol

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