New Media in CTMS Mark Hansen

177-178
In Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kittler has articulated a history of media that moves from monopoly on storage long exercised by the alphabet to the media differentiation of the nineteenth century and finally to the contemporary convergence of media in the form of digital code and computer processing. At the core of his media history is an appreciation for technics as a material production (a production of the real) that is not preadapted to or constrained by the sensory and perceptual thresholds of human experience.
eg, sound analysis that developed out of the phonographic revolution
the capacity of technical sound recording to inscribe frequencies outside the range of human hearing allows for an inscription (or "symbolization") of the flux of the real that is not narrowly bound to human modes of symbolization.....
whereas the inscription of nature language operates on the discrete ordering of the alphabet, the inscription of sound operates on a far more fine-grained discretization of the sonic flux. One technique for such discretization, Fourier analysis, symbolizes the raw flux of sound by means of intervals that periodize nonperiodic, innumerable frequency series. According to Kittler, what is most important about these so-called Fourier intervals—and what makes them exemplary of digital signal processing per se — is the recourse to real number analysis (a mathematical technique encompassing the continua between whole numbers) they make necessary.