The technological media, in postmodernism's 'gay apocalypse,' are means of revelation, but the object of revelation can also be a thorn in the eye. 'Apocalypse' in ancient Hebrew denotes, as Derrida writes, the ritual unveiling or revelation of "a part of the body, the head or eyes, also a secret, the sexual organs." In Grammophon Film Typewriter you describe Edward Muybridge's photographic series, "Animal Locomotion," which was originally commissioned for painters as studies of bodies in (slow-)motion. Muybridge, however, couldn't completely give up the old medium 'paint.' He made a few touch ups to the stills....

Right. Those are the Stanford pictures. When his models are facing the camera they have on bathing trunks, but when their backs are turned to the camera they're naked. They spin the entire time — he had them turning pirouettes — so you can imagine the uncanny effect. The swim trunks are an early animation trick. For the same project in Pennsylvania he didn't bother. They weren't intended, like the Stanford pictures, for educational purposes.

The blind spot, since Conrad, has been the 'heart of darkness' in Western civilization. Blindness, however, for Nietzsche is a precondition of the medium: he bought a typewriter because his eyesight had become so bad. Flaubert tells of sitting the entire evening spellbound with book in hand, hitting a reading-high. Today people sit for hours in front of their computers playing Pac-Man, etc. How would you characterize this process of medium-induced blindness?

I've never played Pac-Man. But I have to answer very dogmatically. That the media influence bodies through emergence and immersion, on that point we both agree. However, I don't believe in the old thesis that the media thus are prostheses of the body, which amounts to saying, in the beginning was the body, then came the glasses, then suddenly television, and from the television the computer. The mythology is that everything frees itself from the body, dissolves and submerges in it again, in the sense of emergence and immersion, virtual reality, cinemascope and hallucination. Your theory may be true for some of the entertainment media, but I think to be able to describe a general media history, it would be better to work, like Luhmann, systematically from the independent histories of the technological media. The media don't emerge from the human body, rather you have, for example, the book, and the military generals in considering how they can subvert the book or the written word, come up with the telegraph, namely, the telegraph wire; and then to offset the military telegraph, they come up with the wireless radio, which Hitler builds into his tanks. In England, Alan Turing or Churchill ponder a way to beat Germany's radio war, and they arrive at the computer to crack the radio signals — and the German goose is cooked, that's the end of the war. 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. Rather, I think, it's a reasonable hypothesis to say that the media, including books and the written word, develop independently from the body. Even then, if you want to, you can describe how, through advertising or commercial means, the media influence and separate bodies.