키틀러와 데리다: 기록시스템 1850, 거지독자, 그리고 『드라큘라』

Abstract

Friedrich Kittler, German media philosopher, argues in his Inscription Systems 1800/1900 (1985), that the long-held prestige of writing as a medium for communication was irrevocably lost during the nineteenth century; modern technical media, gramophone, film, and typewriter, were invented and spread. His argument is noteworthy for the studies of English literature as he takes Bram Stoker’s fiction Dracula (1896) as an example to reveal that historical transformation of the media environment. What I attempt in my article is to challenge Kittler from another media theoretical perspective, which I will derive from Jacques Derrida. I will focus on Derrida’s Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money (1991) as a text to reveal his hitherto unclarified media theoretical view of literary production. I will show Derrida is a Kittlerian in that he suggests a certain historical specificity of the media conditions of Charles Baudelaire’s literature, which I name the “Inscription System 1850.” Here Derrida is concerned about the future the technical media will bring. I argue Derrida, however, unlike Kittler, is not deterministic because his idea of “arche-writing,” or différance, can be applied to any media beyond writing as a principle to effectuate their time—thus, space and world—creating role. With the theoretically clarified view of literature as media, I will reread Dracula not as a work to show the downfall of the writing’s prestige but as a work to reveal the pertinence of the arche-writing principle over different media systems. I will especially focus on the fact that Dracula was published according to the new production system of fiction established after 1895. Dracula incorporates heretofore prevalent narrative types which represent different narrative times, and thereby newly creates a ‘real-time’ narrative employing the technology of typewriter as a motif in the story and at the same time a catalyst for a new form of narrative.