Innis and kittler: The case of the Greek alphabet

Abstract

Harold Innis and Friedrich Kittler are exemplary thinkers in, if not founders of, two quite distinct fields in communication and media studies. These have been called the "Toronto School of Communication" and "German discourse analysis of media" (Diskursanalyse technischer Medien). Despite their many differences, for both Innis and Kittler, the Greek alphabet holds a unique place in human history; it is also paradigmatic for their divergent histories of media technology, which both paint on the grandest of scales. For Innis, the Greek alphabet’s effi- ciency as a means of recording speech provides the perfect conjunction for the spoken and the written word. Speech and writing are each transparently represented in or through the other, and with that, the space and time biases of both as communication media are ideally interfaced. For Kittler, on the other hand, the greatness of pre-Socratic Greece and its writing system are due not so much to its transparency as to its multifunctionality. Because these two dozen symbols can be used to denote sounds of speech, numerical values and musical notes, Kittler sees the Greek alphabet as powerfully prefiguring the multimedia capacity of today’s digital computers. In an eminently Heideggerian gesture, Kittler characterizes the Greek alphabet and the computer as each marking a moment in history where "being" as a whole is articulated through a single code. This chapter explores Innis’ and Kittler’s ambitious accounts of the Greek alphabet and its cultural significance, and highlights the similarities in their arguments as well as underlying differences.