Discourse Networks: 192x  

Norm Friesen, PhD; October 2004

In his landmark literary study, Discourse Networks, 1800 / 1900 , Friedrich Kittler distinguishes between two epochs and their respective discursive paradigms: 1800, marked by the simultaneous development of enlightenment and romanticism, has as its discursive paradigm one that is above all hermeneutic, privileging meaning, interpretation, sense and depth.   1900, with the advent of the typewriter, phonograph and other mechanisms of inscription and transmission, marks the beginning of a discursive era of code, algorithm and pattern.

As the original German title of the book suggests, it is the development of these Aufschreibsysteme or "systems of inscription" that marks the separation of the epochs of the 1800's and the 1900's.   Exemplified above all by the typewriter --but illustrated also in photography, cinema, the telegraph and phonograph-- these inscriptive systems produce a "detachment of writing from subjectivity" that foregrounds writing's systematic, differential, and ultimately aleatory nature. As David Wellbery explains in his forward to the English translation of Discourse Networks ,  

The emergence of technological media around 1900 represents a decisive historical and discursive caesura that alters the structure, placement and function of cultural production. The typewriter frees writing from the control of the eye and the consciousness; it institutes spacing as the precondition of differentiation; it stores a reservoir of signifiers that strike the page

It is no longer the emergence of words from the depths of the body, either through the sonority of speech or the flow of handwriting that characterizes the moment of verbal creativity.   Instead, it is the combination, substitution and differentiation of discrete signifiers that is of importance.   Correspondingly, meaning is no longer opposed to nonsense.   Instead, through technologies of encoding and transmission, it is pattern and signal that are opposed to noise .   

It is with this understanding of modernist literary "media" that the hypertext project "Discourse Networks: 192x" has been created.   (A beta version is available at: http://learningspaces.org/192x.)   This hyptertext allows the user to engage with two canonical modernist works, Joyce's Ulysses and Digzita Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera.   It juxtaposes the text of the former with the stills from the latter, allowing the user to explore the systemic structures of either, or to engage in their kalidescopic combination.   Following Lev Manovich's notion of the "database imagination" (see: Manovich 2001) the project's database-driven hypertext inverts the traditional roles of paradigm and syntagm, and allows users to explore Joyce's and Vertov's works along both their syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes.   In the case of Joyce's prose, the project utilizes Princeton's WordNet Thesaurus as a means of establishing syntagmatic connections between terms; in the case of Vertov's film, it utilizes organizational schemata developed by Vlada Petric and others.

The random juxtaposition of both works is invited and enriched by the wide variety of levels on in which they can be fruitfully compared:   Both Vertov's and Joyce's works focus on activities of metropoli on the periphery of early-twentieth century Europe.   Dublin in 1904, and (primarily) Moscow in 1929.   Both feature births and deaths, work and leisure in their respective settings. Where Joyce looks to Homer for his narrative archetype, Vertov builds on Marx's understandings of labor, production and society.   Both engage in radical experimentation with narrative genres, and both participate in the use of systems of inscription described by Kittler: Joyce's work is implicated in these systems through the long and complicated history of its composition, proofing and correction; Vertov's work thematizes its own cinematic and mechanical nature both overtly and at great length.   Finally, the release of both works to the public --in 1929 for Vertov and 1922 for Joyce share the same decade.   It is this shared time-frame, together with the title of Kittler's study, has inspired the title of the present hypertext piece.