“媒介决定我们的现状。” 1880年前后，分别代表声学、光学和文字储存技术的留声机、电影和打字机相继问世，打破了活字印刷术长达四个世纪的书写垄断。这不仅开启了用数据流记录人类记忆的新时代，更重要的是，人类的信息感知和思维模式从此发生了根本改变，这种改变影响至今。 留声机第一次成功复制下人类生活中的白噪音，电影特技变成了灵魂的模型，操作不便的书写球造就了尼采的简洁风格…… 在本书中，弗里德里希·基特勒带我们亲历了这三种技术从发明到接受，再到相互关联的历史，回顾了与之相关的轶事、文学文本和哲学断片，并在其中展开对记忆与书写、技术与意识、媒体与艺术等终极问题的思考。

This is a highly original book about the connections between historical moment, social structure, technology, communication systems, and what is said and thought using these systems - notably literature. The author focuses on the differences between 'discourse networks' in 1800 and in 1900, in the process developing a new analysis of the shift from romanticism to modernism. The work might be classified as a German equivalent to the New Historicism that is currently of great interest among American literary scholars, both in the intellectual influences to which Kittler responds and in his concern to ground literature in the most concrete details of historical reality. The artful structure of the book begins with Goethe's Faust and ends with Valery's Faust. In the 1800 section, the author discusses how language was learned, the emergence of the modern university, the associated beginning of the interpretation of contemporary literature, and the canonization of literature. Among the writers and works Kittler analyzes in addition to Goethe's Faust are Schlegel, Hegel, E. T. A. Hoffman's 'The Golden Pot', and Goethe's Tasso.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of the printed word was shattered by the arrival of new media technologies that offered novel ways of communicating and storing data. Previously, writing had operated by way of symbolic mediation--all data had to pass through the needle's eye of the written signifier--but phonography, photography, and cinematography stored physical effects of the real in the shape of sound waves and light. The entire question of referentiality had to be recast in light of these new media technologies; in addition, the use of the typewriter changed the perception of writing from that of a unique expression of a literate individual to that of a sequence of naked material signifiers. Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, part theoretical discussion of the responses to these media--including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators--"Gramophone, Film, Typewriter" analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan. Fusing discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory, the author adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which we are constituted by our technologies. The book ties the establishment of new discursive practices to the introduction of new media technologies, and it shows how both determine the ways in which psychoanalysis conceives of the psychic apparatus in terms of information machines. "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter" is, among other things, a continuation as well as a detailed elaboration of the second part of the author's "Discourse Networks, 1800/1900" (Stanford, 1990). As such, it bridges the gap between Kittler's discourse analysis of the 1980's and his increasingly computer-oriented work of the 1990's.