Innovation is Dead

“ A medium is a medium is a medium. Therefore it cannot be translated. To transfer message from one medium to another always involves reshaping them to conform to new standards and materials. In a discourse network that requires an “awarness of the abysses which divide the one order of sense experience from the other,” transposition necessarily takes the place of translation. ”

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Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 by Friedrich A. Kittler, Stanford University Press, [1985]1992, p. 265 [Amazon]

“Friedrich A. Kittler (born 1943 in Rochlitz, Saxony) is a literary scholar and a media theorist. His works relate to media, technology, and the military.” (wikipedia)

Derrida offers a similar analysis in his essay “Freud and the scene of writing” (1966)

(via skandalon)