Jpeg withdraws from view. Just as one gets near to its working, it slips away. In my “digital imag(in)ing apparatus” jpeg is folded within the camera’s software, encoding light as data and leaving its traces indelibly in particular images and imaginings and enabling certain practices. It is enfolded in the structural relations of the imag(in)ing industries, in the archive and data mining practices of social networks and search engines and in the marketing and business strategies of camera and IT manufacturers and telcos. Jpeg exists. Its traces are clear – if enfolded. It is an actant in alliances across the networks (in the ANT rather than purely technical sense). But it withdraws from view. It defies observation and refuses a clear position. This is not a philosophical game. The difficulty of accounting for protocol leads to accounts of its workings that can fall back on textualist or foundationalist models that fail to deal with the complex enfoldings and power full relations within which it works.

Graham Harman’s Heideggerian reading of Latour allows us to position jpeg as an actant and to embrace this withdrawl from view. By turning to Alfred North Whitehead’s account of occasions, events, entities and societies, we can see why and how the jpeg actant withdraws from view and indeed develop an account of it around which we can build an account of its power full alliances and workings.

In Process and Reality Whitehead develops a processual account of  things. Here actants are always in movement. They are events, not just in the sense that an object is not physically the same from one minute to the next – as it ages or is weathered, but in a more fundamental sense. Whitehead says things in the world, human or not, are “events” single incidents of becoming. What we experience in the world is those events in a group, a “multiplicity of becomings” (Shaviro p18) or “nexus”. When that nexus is held together by a “defining characteristic” that they have “inherited”, Whitehead calls that a “society” (p34). Whitehead says that a society is “self-sustaining; in other words […] it is its own reason […] The real actual things that endure,” and that we encounter in everyday experience, “are all societies” (Adventures of Ideas 203-204).

Shaviro sums it up:

If we address the jpeg protocol from this processual perspective, seeing it as a quantum occasion, a moment of becoming, we can see why and how it withdraws from view. Each moment of becoming, each process of encoding/decoding, each working of light into data, each compression is a quantum occasion. That is jpeg. The process is not what jpeg does, it is what it is. Jpeg withdraws from view because each quantum moment of becoming perishes, only to be taken up again by another instantiation of jpeg, another occasion.

Jpeg has a form of continuity in the documents of jpeg group, in the specifications and strategies of the imag(in)ing industries, in the alliances within which it is enfolded. But its ontological continuity comes from its quantum moments of becoming, its position as a process that becomes and then perishes only to become and perish with the next instantiation. Jpeg is a society.

Kittler rises to Lev Manovich’s challenge: “if we are to focus on software itself […] it helps to practice what one writes about” (Manovich 2008: 8). Kittler not only knows about software, he has taught it and advocates programming as a practice (Kittler 1995, 2008). What is perhaps interesting is how he approaches software less perhaps as a material object but wither as an element in hardware apparatuses or as a component in a new discourse network or regime.

Kittler takes a materialist view, software is enfolded in hardware. “Not only no program, but also no underlying microprocessor system could ever start without the rather incredible autobooting faculty of some elementary functions that, for safety’s sake, are burnt into silicon and thus form part of hardware” (Kittler 1997: 150). This hardware has been “explicitly contrived to evade our perception” (p 148) and as such has power-full implications.

It is in this that he returns to his broader theme of discourse networks (the enfolded technological/semiotic regime). “Through the use of keyboard like user-interface, user-friendliness or even data projection, the industry has damned humanity to remain human” (Kittler 1997: 157). This is his wider critique of the human subject –  or as Winthrop-Young has it “homo faber, man the toolmaker” (Winthrop-Young 2010: 75). Kittler attacks user-friendly software as implicated in our narcissistic belief in our importance in the assemblage (the sort of critique Latour would warm too). It tricks us into seeing the human subject as in charge.  Software is the opium of the masses and those willing to engage with programming are Neo-like heroes battling the Matrix.

In 1986 he predicted: “The general digitization of channels and information erases the difference among individual media […] Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number, quantity without image, sound, or voice […] Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay, storage, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping –  a total media link on a digital basis will erase the very concept of medium. Instead of wiring people and technologies, absolute knowledge will run as an endless loop” (Kittler 1999: 1-2). He was of course right to see software-empowered shifts in the information economy and media ecology, but what is important is how, in Kittler’s work, the emphasis is on the epistemic shifts in which software-within-hardware is enfolded (and potentially the hardware apparatuses) rather rather than software as a material actant itself. This is an analysis of a new media assemblage where software is a material actant only insofar as it is burnt into hardware. The regime/discourse network is the prime mover and point of interest.

His latest work on sign systems continues this location of software as an element in a broader material/semiotic regime but not a distinct actant. Here software code is addressed as a sign system within a genealogy of other codices. “If every historical epoch is governed by a leading philosophy, then the philosophy of code is what governs our own,” he says (2008: 45). Once again there is the concern with the epistemic ruptures and regimes. This is not to say that his has become an idealist critique. Those codes/philsophies/discourses are enfolded within material assemblages and technologies. Software whether “burnt into silicon” or circulating as philosophy is part of the discourse network. Where perhaps we can extend Kittler’s account is by addressing software as material not only in terms of its location in hardware but also in its own ontological status – an object actant in the world.

• Manovich, L., 2008, Software Takes Command. unpublished ms., 2008, unpublished ed. .
• Kittler, F 1995, There is No Software, Ctheory. net. Retrieved February 14, 2011,  from http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=74
• Kittler, F., 1997, Literature Media Information Systems, Johnston, J. ed. OAP, Amsterdam.
• Kittler, F.A., 1999, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Translated by G. Winthrop-Young & M. Wutz. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif..
• Kittler, F. 2008, Code (or, How Can You Write Something Differently), in M Fuller (ed), Software Studies : A Lexicon, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.; London, pp. 40-7.

Geoffrey Winthrop Young characterises Kittler’s later work as a shift to dealing with “technological” as opposed to a  “communication” medium. “Writing operates by way of a symbolic grid which requires that all ‘data pass through the bottleneck of the signifier’ 9Kittler 1999: 4), whereas phono-, photo- and cinematographic analog media process physical effects of the real” (Winthrop-Young 2010: 59).

Winthrop Young’s distinction arguably narrows down our (and Kittler’s) conception of media. Of course writing works at the semiotic level. The sign does not equal the referent. The same truism applies to visual representational media. But more importantly, the symbolic system of writing is enfolded in the technological medium of writing apparatuses, the pen, the typewriter, the PC, the phone.The two cannot be separated and part of the power of Kittler’s approach is his willingness to deal with the technological, material as part of the medium enfolded with the representational. The ‘bottleneck of the signifier’ operates alongside the technological assemblage. It is only by being willing to entwine these processes and practices that Kittler can engage in his media archaeological account of ruptures. The rupture is not the move from a semiotic medium to a material one but rather a shift from one semiotic/material regime to another.

Kittler’s project is a material one and a media one. His early work on literature as much as his later work on typewriters is a study of he operations of media power, not wielded by a human subject or reducible to a more basic foundation or essence in class struggle, patriarchy or even discourse, but emergent within material/semiotic regimes. As Winthrop-Young has it: “an autonomous media-technological evolution driven by an internal dynamic” (Winthrop-Young 2010: 65).

In his work on texts (what Winthrop-Young would perhaps classify as analysis of a communications medium), Kittler says his objects of analysis (whether Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Goethe’s Wanderer’s Nightsong  or Pink Floyd’s Brain Damage) are “discourse[s] on discourse channel conditions” (Kittler 1982: 473). They are not objects to be interpreted but rather events, performances as much about the conditions of possibility for a particular discourse as about vampires, nature or mental illness. Those conditions of possibility are semiotic but also material. In the case of Pink Floyd’s song , Brain Damage is not just a song about mental illness or even about sound technologies for Kittler, it is “a highly seductive techno-acoustic event – one whose seductive qualities arise from a sophisticated and self-conscious performance of advances in sound technology […] a musically staged genealogy of rock music that manages to link its self-performance to the question of how technology relates to madness” (Winthrop-Young 2010: 54). The song/text is enfolded in the technologies, media and materiality of sound. Of course it would not have been possible without that technology but the semiotic-material/technological relation is more fundamental than that. The text, its writing and reading is the instantiation of the material/technological as well as discursive conditions of possibility.

This approach is all the more appropriate to read/write media such as software and the Web, a subject Kittler knows something about.

• Kittler, F. 1982, England 1975 – Pink Floyd, Brain Damage, in K Lindemann (ed), Europalrik 1775-heute. Gedichte und Interpretationen, Schöningh, Paderborn, pp. 467-77.
• Kittler, F.A., 1999, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Translated by G. Winthrop-Young & M. Wutz. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif..
• Winthrop-Young, G., 2010, Kittler And The Media, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK.

For Friedrich Kittler too, the “subject’ is a core concern. This is obviously apparent in Discourse Networks, 1800-1900 (1990) where he draws connections between pedagogical techniques and the mergence of the modern subject through a merger between Foucauldian archaeology and Lacanian psychoanalysis. For early Kittler biopower was at the heart of the discourse networks he defined as: “the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store and process relevant data” (1990: 369).

It would be a mistake to see the early Kittler as somehow less interested in media technologies. Even here in his account of German child rearing and language learning, technologies are enfolded in that pedagogic subject construction. The child’s development as subject works in and through her cursive handwriting – a practice but also a media technology of representation. The tools of handwriting with the basic strokes that Kittler sees as constitutive of historically located subjectivity are apparatuses for writing and articulating but also imag(in)ing.

Writing for Kittler is enfolded in and through technologies. Talking of his more recent interest in alpha-numerical sign systems  he says: “When you program a computer, something is constantly happening. It’s almost like magic. You write something, strike ‘enter,’ and then what you just wrote happens” (Griffin et al 1996: 740).

Of course Kittler is interested in programming and programmes as a language (cf Kittler 1995) but also as material technologies. This does not just mean the obvious material boxes of keyboard, screen, hard-drives and servers but also the software (and protocols). These are sites of subjectification. The striking of a keyboard in authoring, executing or live hacking a programme, like practicing one’s cursive Germanic handwriting, is enfolded with the magic of biopower – doing things, establishing subject (and object) relations whether that is an algorithm data-mining consumer behaviour or just printing ‘Hello World’. The practice of programming, like handwriting is implicated in subjectivity but also a material technology operating as an actant in the world – forming alliances, becoming an everyday black box, transparent but power-full.

The constitution of the subject is also at the heart of his more explicitly media archaeological work around technologies and apparatuses (1999, 2002). As with Foucault, Kittler is keen to unseat “man”. Just as Foucault sought to behead the king in terms of theories of power, so Kittler looks to unseat the actor from history. As he says: “A history like this doesn’t need individual bodies or a subject that expands in and through the media – such a history can do without the subjective agency of a historical actor” (Griffin et al 1996: 738). This is not just a post-structuralist anti-author(ity) gambit for the sake of philosophical or hermeneutic coherency. This is rather a rebalancing of the subject-media relation. For Kittler as for Crary and Friedberg, the best way of unpicking the operations of biopower is through material technologies as sites of the construction of subjectivity. The subject is an effect of power not its source. Technologies, whether pen and paper, typewriters, camera obscuras, iPhones or protocols are enfolded in those processes and operations. As he says in a critique of Foucault “Even writing itself, before it ends up in libraries, is a communication medium, the technology of which the archeologist simply forgot” (Kittler 1999:5)

What links the “early Kittler” interested in literary texts with the “middle period Kittler” of media archaeology and the “latest Kittler” approaching sign systems, is a consistent emphasis on the enfolding of subjectivity and media technologies or apparatuses as well as a willingness to take those technologies seriously as material sites of that subjectification – to perhaps engage with a flat ontology.

• Griffin, M., Herrmann, S. & Kittler, F.A., 1996, Technologies of Writing: Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler, New Literary History, 27(4), pp. 731-42.
• Kittler, F.A., 1990, Discourse Networks, 1800-1900, Translated by M. Metteer & C. Cullens. Standford University Press, Standford, Calif.
• Kittler, F 1995, There is No Software, Ctheory. net. Retrieved February 14, 2011,  from http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=74
• Kittler, F.A., 1999, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Translated by G. Winthrop-Young & M. Wutz. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif..
• Kittler, F.A., 2002, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, Translated by Enns. Polity, Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA.
• Kittler, F. & Banz, S., 1996, Platz der Luftbrücke: Ein Gespräch, Oktagon, Berlin.

For Anne Friedberg, the frame is more than a metaphor. Although she starts The Virtual Window: From Alberti To Microsoft with “Alberti’s window metaphor” (2006: 12), and then goes on to discuss Windows and “the window”, she is looking to do more than simply show how Microsoft’s engineers and marketing teams used the metaphor to position their Graphical User Interface (GUI). For Friedberg: “window, perspective, frame, screen architecture – operate in both metaphoric and literal registers, and their meanings frequently slip between the dual functions of philosophical paradigm and representational device” (p13).

Friedberg goes on to use Derrida (1987) to explore the position of metaphor in language but what is more important from our point of view is how Friedberg’s media archaeology of the frame/window/screen is premised on its materiality, its instantiation in architecture – whether physical or computer:

“Facing a screen, the spectator/viewer/user is caught in a phenomenological tangle – twin paradoxes – of mobility and immobility (the mobility of images; the immobility of the spectator) and of materiality and immateriality (the material spaces of the theater, domicile or office and the immateriality of the cinematic, televisual, or computer image). The screen functions as an architectonic element, opening the materiality of built space to virtual apertures in an ‘architecture of spectatorship’” (Friedberg 2006: 150).

It could be argued from a materialist software studies perspective that to characterise digital images as immaterial is to miss their object-positions as actants that are simultaneously immaterial and deeply material in terms of their location in code, on physical drives and servers and also their alliances within material structures and relations. Leaving that aside for a moment, however what is important about Friedberg’s contribution to the analysis of the scopic is her willingness to engage with and draw the archaeology of the apparatus.

Friedberg joins W. J. T. Mitchell (19920 in disagreeing with Crary’s account of the differences between the optical system of the camera obscura and that of the stereoscope and phenakistoscope in Techniques of the Observer (1990). But Friedberg does work from the same central insight that Crary emphasises – that the technologies of vision need to be addressed alongside and entwined with that of the “gaze” and subjectivity. She may argue over focus, emphasis and periodicity but her book is as full of illustrations and explorations of specific apparatuses as sites of the gaze as Crary’s. She may critique Crary for his failure to account for a “socially constituted or gendered body” (p285), but the ground of argument is the material apparatuses  across which those bodies are gendered. This is a different world of critique from the psychoanalytical account of film criticism (Mulvey 2009) or photography (Burgin 1996) or a focus on the image as in the work of Mitchell (2007). Friedberg’s account of power is rooted in how that is mobilised and instantiated across technologies of vision whether the material optical toy or the (im)material software interface.

Friedberg critiques Friedrich Kitler’s account of how “from the camera obscura have come the photographic camera and the computer screen” (Kittler 2001: 53) as a “forceful polemic” but one making an enormous leap that “elides details of technology and history” (p19). But again her critique is over the details of the reading of technological apparatuses and assemblages rather than the need for addressing the materiality not just the metaphor.

• Burgin, V., 1996, In/Different Spaces: Place and memonry in Visual Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley.
• Crary, J., 1990, Techniques Of The Observer: On Vision And Modernity In The Nineteenth Century, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• Derrida, J., 1987, The Truth In Painting, Translated by G. Bennington & I. McLeod. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
• Friedberg, A., 2006, The Virtual Window: From Alberti To Microsoft, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass..
• Kittler, F.A., 2001, Perspective and the Book, Grey Room(5), pp. 38-53.
• Mitchell, W.J.T., 1992, The Pictorial Turn, Artforum, 30(7), pp. 89-94.
• Mitchell, W.J.T., 2007, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives And Loves Of Images, University of Chicago Press, Chicago; London.
• Mulvey, L., 2009, Visual And Other Pleasures, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire [England] ; New York.