Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the German Settlement of Lake Llanquihue
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Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the Ge ...

Chapter 1:  Writing the Colony
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Friedrich Kittler offers a concise discussion of the status of writing in nineteenth-century Germany. Before the mass use of electricity gave rise to new media, Kittler elaborates in Grammophone that mechanisms of credibility and legitimization rested primarily on the handwritten or typeset word, while nonalphabetized prehistory and structures of oral history were readily relegated to the realm of legend or myth. Kittler casts the time between Goethe’s Faust and the advent of electricity-based audio and video recording in terms of an Aufschreibesystem or “discourse network” in which mass alphabetization was systematically institutionalized and standardized by state-regulated education. The purpose of such education, he argues, was the creation of loyal (male) subjects of the state.31 The process of writing and reading in this discourse network was normalized and came to erase orality altogether:

Writing therefore merely stores the fact of its authorization. It celebrates the storage monopoly of the God who invented it…Suffice it to say that one day—in Germany, this may have already been the case during the age of Goethe—the homogeneous medium of writing also became homogeneous in the social sphere. Compulsory education engulfed people in paper…They learned to read “silently to one’s self,” a “sorry substitute for speech” that consumed letters without effort by bypassing oral organs. Whatever they emitted and received was writing. And because only that exists which can be posted, bodies themselves fell under the regime of the symbolic.32 (Kittler, Grammophone 8)

At the same time, the nineteenth century saw the status of writing transition from the absolute—the notion hailing from the Middle Ages, and developed at the beginning of Faust, that the Bible embodied truth itself—to the relative, to a plurality of arguments and counterarguments foreboding the animated white noise of the Web 2.0. Improvements in German printing technology at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, such as the perfection of Friedrich Gottlob König’s steamdriven, high-speed cylinder press, facilitated the high-volume distribution of texts in the form of books and daily papers.