You mention the role of literature in processing and transmitting new technologies. Goethe's Elective Affinities could be said to be an interdisciplinary model of discursive force-fields. Goethe picks up on the new theory of electricity and tries to use it to explain the new social code arising around 1800 with the modern state, bureaucratization and the nuclear family. Pynchon, one of your favorite sources to quote, also transports elements of technology in his writing. Gravity's Rainbow describes a discourse network in the twentieth century which has its optimal expression in the cinema. The V-2 rocket, at the end of the novel, on a trajectory from Peenemünde towards the Orpheum Theater in L.A. describes the transfer of Nazi military technology to the Hollywood culture industry. What are the contradictions between the media novel and film in the twentieth century, if, for example, you consider the novel, as is typically done, a nineteenth century art form. Can the novel do anything besides describe its own obsolescence? Would you say a few words on the novel and film as media?

The human sciences of the nineteenth century such as statistics, administration, cameralistics, and so forth are carried over by Goethe, as we've said, into the literature. The novel takes part in the development and rise of the new sciences of the eighteenth century, for example, population administration, in contrast to the old sciences like medicine and other medieval faculties. The whole experimental research of the nineteenth century attempts to find out how one can measure and record movement. I am still interested today in the development of the gramophone and the early telegraph's stylus, as a means in the first place of recording natural phenomena which are too fast to be observed. Film dealt in the beginning with recording the movement of bodies. A science which no longer dealt with individuals or subjects, as the administrative sciences of the nineteenth century had done, but rather with naked bodies, joined up with the new medium film. The sciences that deal in turn with the organization and control of the individual, require the bourgeois subject. Media theory can dispense with the notion of 'man' left over from the human sciences.