I am interested in Kittler’s position on the connectedness, or, rather, disconnectedness of people and technology. While McLuhan, I think, sees technology as an extension of people, it seems like Kittler is preoccupied with technology as utterly separate from but simultaneously able to replicate human experience. He practically constructs a person with technology. Early in Gramophone, he says, “A telegraph as an artificial mouth, a telephone as an artificial ear…Functions of the central nervous system had been technologically implemented” (28). Like Joe observes in his blog post for this week, “Kittler’s project seems to explicate how gramophone, film, and typewriter mechanize aspects of the human sensorium–respectively vision, hearing, and language. That mechanization, he seems to be saying, presents a qualitative shift in human experience, a shift he explores in detail in the introduction with his exploration of writing.” I can’t seem to work out where TAM fits in to Kittler’s autonomous technology, but I think Diana is gesturing toward this when she observes

Memory, like poetry and the phonetic alphabet, is messy; all of these things represent the material stuff of the world rather imperfectly. Time axis manipulation, on the other hand, “affects the raw material of poetry, where manipulation had hitherto been impossible” (36). And if TAM is able to store or program sound, than memory is no longer necessary. The phonograph is actually a better piece of hardware than the brain because it does not rely on the mediation of consciousness, “as if the music were originating in the brain itself, rather than emanating from stereo speakers or headphones.” (37)

In other words, the brain can manipulate time in the form of memory, just like the phonograph can manipulate time by being able to speed up and slow down. However, the phonograph, as Diana points out, isn’t mediated by consciousness. As Kittler observes, “Phonographs do not think, therefore they are possible.” (33)