Kittler and the Media E-Book

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: TM - Theory and Media
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 238

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

With books such as Discourse Networks and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter and the collection Literature, Media, Information Systems, Friedrich Kittler has established himself as one of the world's most influential media theorists. He is also one of the most controversial and misunderstood.

Kittler and the Media offers students of media theory an introduction to Kittler's basic ideas. Following an introduction that situates Kittler's work against the tumultuous background of German 20th-century history (from the Second World War and the cultural upheaval of the late 1960s to reunification), the book provides succinct summaries of Kittler's early discourse-analytical work inspired by French post-structuralism, his media-related theorising and his most recent writings on cultural techniques and the notation systems of Ancient Greece.

This clear and engaging overview of a fascinating theorist will be welcomed by students and scholars alike of media, communication and cultural studies.

Leseprobe

KITTLER AND THE MEDIA

Theory and Media

Paul A. Taylor Žižek and the Media

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young Kittler and the Media

KITTLER AND THE MEDIA

GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG

polity

Copyright © Geoffrey Winthrop-Young 2011

The right of Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2011 by Polity Press

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9780745636276

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Background – Biography and Beyond

1. After Stalingrad

2. Heidegger’s Lair

3. French Struggles at Abbey Road

2. Discourse Analysis

1. First Teaser: Hermeneutic Hush-a-Bye

2. Rewiring the French Connection

3. Kiss of the Snake Woman: The Birth of Poetry and Philosophy from the Spirit(s) of Bureaucracy

4. You Must Remember This: Heretic German Lessons

3. Media Theory

1. Second Teaser: Syd’s Song

2. Skulls without Spirit: Media Technologies of the Discourse Network 1900

3. Dracula’s Phonograph Meets Zarathustra’s Typewriter

4. Write Text to Power: Programmare Aude!

5. On the Silicon Beach: The Ends of Man and Media

4. Greek Cultural Techniques

1. Third Teaser: Siren Facts

2. Greek Writing Lessons

3. And the Gods Made Love: Pythagorean Groupies

4. Greek-German Affairs

5. Greek Stakes: The Meaning of Being

5. Controversial Achievements

1. “Media Determine Our Situation”

2. Writing (and) Women

3. Mick Jagger’s Blitzkrieg and the Machine Subjects

4. Why War? From Peenemünde to Pynchon

5. Final Checklist: The Kittler Effect

Further Reading

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The following overview is the first book-length introduction to Kittler’s work in English. In preparing the text I have drawn on material published elsewhere (especially Winthrop-Young 2002; 2005; 2006b; Winthrop-Young and Wutz 1999; and Winthrop-Young and Gane 2006) and profited from helpful input by John Armitage, Michael Berger, Claudia Breger, Frank Hartmann, Till Heilmann, Philipp von Hilgers, Sybille Krämer, Geert Lovink, Larson Powell, Cornelia Vismann, Hartmut Winkler, and Michael Wutz. I am especially indebted to John Durham Peters, who always comes up with a better way of putting things.

Acknowledgments for quoted material in the text:

From Gramophone, Film, Typewriter by Friedrich Kittler, translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz Copyright 1999 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University for the translation; (c)1986 Brinkmann and Bose

All rights reserved. Used with the permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org.

INTRODUCTION

Fame, in the words of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, is no more than the sum of all the misunderstandings that cling to a name. The recent fame of Friedrich Kittler is no exception. To his English-speaking audience he is known either as Germany’s leading media theorist or as one of the most influential German proponents of poststructuralism. Sometimes the tags are stitched together and Kittler emerges as the leading German poststructuralist media theorist. An impressive and slightly intimidating label, no doubt, but how accurate is it?

To begin with, Kittler did not start out as a media theorist. His early work from the 1970s dealt with literary texts rather than with media technologies. The very words “medium” and “media” hardly occurred, and he never referred to himself as a media theorist. To make matters worse, his most recent work on the evolution of alpha-numerical sign systems appears to place him outside of conventional media studies. But if the young Kittler was not yet a media theorist and the older Kittler is no longer one (at least, not in the usual sense of the term), how useful is the designation? Concerning the slippery label poststructuralism, while Kittler did employ it at the outset of his career (one of his early edited volumes was subtitled “Programs of Poststructuralism”), the term soon disappears. Even worse, it is ridiculed by Kittler, whose work in fact raises doubt whether it should have been used at all. And what about the most troubling tag, German? It is a bit of an insult. The overwhelming presence of the Anglo-American academic industry in media and communication studies is such that many anglophone practitioners no longer consider it necessary to situate their work by using national adjectives, yet contributions that originate elsewhere need to be labeled “French,” “German,” or “Japanese.” These appellations do not refer to anything specific to France, Germany, or Japan, but merely serve to indicate that the work in question is not English. Nonetheless, the label German can and should be applied to Kittler. It does not, however, stand for any essential national characteristic (as if such natural collective attributes existed) but for a discursive context that arose in Germany even before the state bearing that name came into existence. Kittler’s theory is not German because he was born in Germany or writes in German, or because he frequently draws on canonized German names such as Hegel, Nietzsche, or Heidegger. (By the same token, he could be labeled French in light of his indebtedness to Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, American because of his high regard for Claude Shannon and Thomas Pynchon, or even British given his veneration of Alan Turing and Pink Floyd.) He has produced a German theory because the deeper layers of his work, the bias of his arguments and the recurrence of a certain set of references and associations, not to mention the way in which he expresses them, have to be understood against the background of debates about technology, humanism, and individual as well as collective identity formation that over the course of the last two centuries emerged in the German-speaking countries.

To simplify matters, this introduction will treat Kittler’s work as a sequence made up of three stages. The first stage, which lasted from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, focused on texts, more precisely, on the discourse analysis or “archeology” of primarily literary texts. The second stage, which started in the early 1980s and lasted for roughly two decades, concentrated on media technologies, first on the new, primarily analog media of the late nineteenth century (phonography, cinematography, the typewriter-induced mechanization of writing) and then on digital technology. While Kittler himself may not be too happy about it, this second, mediabased stage is generally regarded to be his most important contribution; it is certainly the most widely translated portion of his work. The third stage, at the center of which is a large-scale, ontologically oriented genealogy of mathematical and musical notation systems, engages cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken), a complex term greatly in vogue in current German theory that combines an attention to media technologies with a focus on elementary physical and mental skills, including, most prominently, reading, writing, and computing. With this tripartite division in mind, we shall start with a biographical overview that will introduce readers to some of the important connections between Kittler’s work and the changing historical, political, and intellectual German environments (chapter 1). Chapters 2, 3, and 4 will deal with his analyses of texts, media technologies, and Greek alphanumerical cultural techniques, respectively. Each chapter begins with an opening teaser, that is, with an analysis by Kittler of a short “text” that contains in a nutshell the salient points of that particular stage. These texts have been chosen because each of them constitutes, to introduce the first item of vintage Kittlerese, a “discourse on discourse channel conditions.” They are messages about their own medium, they discuss and perform their own medial conditions, and are thus highly revealing instances of the media conditions of their day.

Of course, this neat subdivision of Kittler’s career into separate stages should not be taken too seriously. It is a heuristic device employed for didactic purposes. Intellectual growth processes do not resemble geological strata; theories rarely evolve in discontinuous leaps and bounds. Kittler did not simply stop writing about literary texts in the early 1980s; neither has he altogether abandoned media and media theory now. Focusing on the noticeable continuities, rather than on the ruptures, we can just as well describe Kittler’s work as a widening spiral in which similar questions recur, but each time on a more expansive level. The (very ambitious) spatio-temporal expansion is obvious: the “literature stage” focused almost exclusively on German literature from the so-called age of Goethe (1770–1830); the “media stage” expanded the scope to incorporate almost 200 years of mediatechnological development in Europe and North America; and the recent “cultural techniques” stage aims at nothing less than the whole of occidental history from ancient Greece to the Gutenberg galaxy and beyond into the Turing age. And while each level calls for different concepts and categories, key concerns remain the same – heteronomy, codes, programming, conflict, and the very characteristic Kittlerian tendency to move between intoxication and investigation, or rapture and rule analysis. It is important that students with an interest in media theory keep this in mind when they wade through chapter 2, wondering what on earth all the analyses of love and language, mothers and ministries, family codes and writing lessons have to do with media. Much of what Kittler will have to say later on about media is already present when he performs his particular discourse analysis of literary texts; and it will remain in place when he takes aim at the singular cultural accomplishments of ancient Greece.

But an important word of caution before we start. Kittler, arguably one of the most complex and baffling contemporary German theorists, is certainly one of the most controversial. He is difficult to read, even more difficult to translate, and almost impossible to discuss without getting mired in the standard objections that accuse him of obscurantism, anti-humanism, techno-determinism, and a faintly Teutonic military fetish. To be sure, he is anything but an innocent target. Kittler generously indulges in provocations and exaggerations, displaying all the gleeful rambunctiousness of a bull that specializes in the destruction of politically correct china shops. In the concluding chapter 5 we will therefore spend a lot of time discussing Kittler’s controversial aspects, especially the troublesome three Ws: war, women, and writing style. As we shall see, some of the usual objections raised against him are off-target, but nonetheless readers should be cautioned right from the start against certain basic expectations that Kittler most certainly will not meet.

Many students of media and communication approach the field with a certain idealism. After all, why study media, why meticulously dissect the ways in which cultures process data, why wrestle with increasingly complex mediatheoretical proposals, not to mention the politically fraught issues of media access and ownership, if not with some view toward improving matters? No doubt many readers expect that a focused engagement with a high-profile media theorist will result in some insight into media abuse and provide clues as to how we can curb media manipulation, clear the conduits of communication, fully realize the potential of our technologies, or empower the disenfranchised. The idea that someone would spend decades trying to understand media while neglecting, denying, at times even ridiculing such aspirations – that idea is difficult to grasp. Kittler is that someone. His work will strike many as profoundly asocial or even ahuman, especially when approached in a more idealistic spirit. In his texts you will rarely encounter the words Gesellschaft (society) or Aufklärung (enlightenment) without hearing a sneer. Mensch – “human” or “man” – is almost always (dis)qualified as der sogenannte Mensch (“so-called man”), Kittler prefers the unassuming and in an academic context slightly dismissive Leute (“people” or “folks”). This is not because he disapproves of emancipatory socio-political agendas, but because these approaches are in his eyes based on naive conceptualizations of media that do not take into account the degree to which, to quote his most (in)famous opening line, “[m]edia determine our situation” (Kittler 1999: 1) – especially when we believe that we can determine them while pursuing our worthy social goals.

The German poet Gottfried Benn, who occupies a prominent seat in Kittler’s personal pantheon, once remarked that “the opposite of art is not nature but well meant (gut gemeint)” (Benn II, 1984: 156). This can be read as a radicalization of T. S. Eliot’s famous axiom that “[t]he more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material” (Eliot 2005: 154). Art – real art that deserves its name – is cold. Or, as nineteenth-century French thinkers liked to point out, art (pronounced in French with a nasal a and no t) is the sound an eagle makes when it swoops down on its prey. A good poem is made of words, not of feelings; it is clinical, technical, distant, removed, almost arctic in its isolation and therefore exceedingly rare, as opposed to the well-intentioned verbiage emanating from salons, seminars, or barricades designed to soothe, instruct, or mobilize impressionable readers. A similar axiom could be applied to Kittler’s self-understanding as a theorist: the opposite of theory is not practice but well meant. Good theory does little to improve the human lot; it does not make the world a better place; it merely serves to make it a bit more inhospitable for bad – that is, naive, sentimental, uninformed, serenely clueless, and hopelessly deluded – theorizing. To use the biased and often unapologetically macho thermal metaphors that Kittler and those writing in his wake are so fond of, this particular type of media theory sees itself as a necessary coldwater current injected into notoriously warm waters. We will have to investigate what this current consists of, where it originates, and how it enriches the larger streams it enters.

1

BACKGROUND — BIOGRAPHY AND BEYOND

1. AFTER STALINGRAD

The philosopher Martin Heidegger (who will haunt this introduction just as he has haunted Kittler’s career) once summarized the life of Aristotle in a memorably economic way: “He was born, worked, and died.” In other (and more) words: Aristotle’s importance resides in what he thought; whatever else he may have done on the side – living, getting involved in Athenian politics, attempting to turn the young Alexander the Great into a responsible adult – is not worth talking about. Though still alive, Kittler seems ideally suited for Heidegger’s pithy summary.

Friedrich Adolf Kittler was born on June 12, 1943, in Rochlitz, a small town in Saxony close to Germany’s eastern border. In 1958 his family relocated to Lahr, a small town in the Black Forest near Germany’s western border. After finishing high school in 1963 he enrolled in German, Romance studies, and philosophy at the nearby Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg. In 1976 he completed a PhD on the Swiss nineteenth-century writer Conrad Ferdinand Mayer, after which he worked as a lecturer at the German department in Freiburg. Following the completion of his Habilitation (the second, more extensive dissertation that qualifies candidates to formally teach at a German university) in 1985, he was briefly employed in Basel before becoming Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Bochum in 1987. In 1993 he was appointed Chair of Media Aesthetics at the prestigious Humboldt University in the newly reunited Berlin. He retired in 2008 but now holds (still at the Humboldt University) an Endowed Guest Professorship in Media Philosophy. In over thirty years of academic labor he has written and edited more than two dozen books and well over twelve dozen papers. To paraphrase Heidegger, he was born, worked, and goes on working. Kittler’s career is at first glance a stereotypical academic existence, a life spent between libraries and lecture halls. But peel away the scholarly veneer of this biography and aspects will emerge that are of help when it comes to understanding some of the hidden historical and cultural undercurrents that influence his work.

Rochlitz is located in the vicinity of Dresden, a city some readers may associate with the controversial air raid of February 13–15, 1945. In a recent interview Kittler mentioned that he dimly recalls “the fires over Dresden at night” (Armitage 2006: 26), which is a remarkable feat of memory given that at the time he was a few months shy of his second birthday. Let us treat it as a symbolic reminiscence that sheds first light on one of the most controversial aspects of his work. Kittler is a so-called Stalingrad child; he was born during the Third Reich but after the catastrophic defeat that caused a growing number of Germans to lose faith in the military prowess of the regime. It became obvious to many that the war could no longer be won on Germany’s terms; and given the intransigence of the Nazi regime it would probably end in total defeat. Yet now something strange happened. Following Stalingrad, the total mobilization of Germany turned the war into an inescapable, all-pervasive presence that more than ever dominated every aspect of life. Following the German surrender in May 1945, however, the war was, as it were, robbed of its stature to such an extent that it appeared not to have taken place – or at least not in the way many had experienced it. Yet at the same time the war continued in ways that left an indelible impression on Kittler’s childhood.

Rochlitz was part of the Soviet-occupied zone which in 1949 mutated into the short-lived German Democratic Republic (GDR), better known as East Germany. Claiming to have broken with all the authoritarian and fascist traditions that allegedly were still at large in West Germany, the GDR presented itself as the true fulfillment of past dreams of progress and enlightenment. Real existierender Sozialismus (“really existing socialism”) had finally come to Germany, if only to one third of its territory. This flattering self-image of the GDR as the legitimate heir to the better angels of German history shaped its official view of the war. The defeat at the hands of the Red Army was celebrated as a liberation from tyranny achieved by the heroic efforts of the workers and soldiers of the Soviet Union. No doubt this account corresponded to the perceptions of those who had suffered under the Nazi regime and who were now engaged in building a better Germany, but in many other cases it opened a rift between the officially sanctioned view of the war and individual experiences. State-imposed history marginalized private memories – a conspicuous divide that also occurred in West Germany. While World War I became the war that could not find its name because its unexpected horrors outstripped the ability to experience them in a meaningful way, World War II, whose engineered horrors were better known, seemed to turn into the war that dare not speak its name.

But the partly suppressed war was bound to resurface in all sorts of places, including the Kittler household. In a book-length interview Kittler recounts how his elder half-brother, a former wireless operator, used his technical expertise to assemble illegal radios by using parts scavenged from abandoned military aircraft in order to impress the local girls (Kittler and Banz 1996: 47). At the same time, his father, a teacher who had lost most of his students to the war, took to lecturing his children instead, with the result that by age seven Kittler was able to recite long passages from Goethe’s Faust off by heart. Thus, at a very early stage, much of what later came to dominate Kittler’s work was already in place, from the pre-established discursive order that ensnares children in the humanist universe to the emergence of civilian recording and broadcasting technology as an “abuse of army equipment” (Kittler 1999: 97). The juxtaposition of Goethe and the radio, classicism and technology, high literature and modern media, already contains the contrast between the “Discourse Network 1800” and the “Discourse Network 1900” that Kittler would elaborate three decades later. And we also have the biographical background for Kittler’s controversial attempts to relate modern war (and World War II in particular) not to stories of politics and ideology, crime and guilt, or tyranny and liberation, but to the evolution of modern control, communications, and computing technology.

2. HEIDEGGER’S LAIR

Kittler has stated that one of the reasons for the family’s move to West Germany was his parents’ wish to secure for their children the kind of university education that could not be had in the East. It was this particular background, he adds, that made him “such a keen student” who “was really engaged with the university,” unlike many others “who simply went there on the understanding that it was their right to do so, or as a kind of hobby” (Armitage 2006: 17). Kittler, no doubt, was a good student, but this is a somewhat biased assessment of the general student body in the early 1960s, when German universities, intent on overcoming the traditional hierarchy of the German education system, were striving to include larger portions of low-income families that certainly did not view post-secondary education as a “hobby.” There is something else at work here: just as his family did not leave the East solely in search of superior institutions of higher learning, the distinction between Kittler the keen and his spoilt peers is covering a more fundamental divide. Like many others, the Kittlers left the GDR because they were politically at odds with the socialist regime; but now, upon entering the university in the early 1960s, Kittler found himself surrounded by an increasing number of fellow students flaunting leftish ideals. This is an important point that is not adequately captured if one simply labels Kittler a conservative. As already noted, Kittler is prone to dismiss individual and collective emancipatory ideals – be it the formation and subsequent sovereignty of the human subject or the ability to engage in meaningful communication for the common pursuit of lofty goals of humanity – as cultural programs that have been inscribed into people and that are so successful because they are mistaken as emanations of a so-called free will. This debunking is to a considerable degree rooted in the divide, as it must have appeared to the young Kittler, between his own childhood experiences of socialism and the abstract socialist rhetoric of his new surroundings.

Kittler spent almost a quarter of a century at the University of Freiburg. Given his claim that we are “produced by our schools, by our universities and by our lecturers” (Armitage 2006: 24), it is worth taking a look at this lengthy association. Kittler’s student years from freshman status to dissertation coincided with the rise and fall of the so-called Studentenbewegung or students’ movement, the cultural upheaval that in German is encapsulated in shorthand as “1968.” The politically inflected label for the generation that came of age in the 1960s is Achtundsechziger, the “68ers.” Kittler, however, was neither politically active nor particularly interested in expanding his political consciousness. Looking back, the most memorable event of his student days was neither a sit-in nor a demonstration, and not even a consciousness-raising revelation courtesy of Georg Lukács or the Frankfurt School, but a lecture by the modernist composer György Ligeti (Kittler 2006a: 339). While many others (though probably not as many as later claimed) marched in the streets, Kittler sat in his room listening to late Beatles and early Pink Floyd LPs – a preference he attributes to “50% laziness and 50% conservatism” (Kittler and Maresch 1994: 95). To label this the apolitical stance of a right-wing slacker, or the snobby withdrawal from street-level activism, is to apply a fairly narrow interpretation of 1968 that misses out on its hidden undercurrents. For what was Kittler doing in his room apart from listening to The White Album and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn? He was reading; and among his preferred authors were not only Heidegger and Nietzsche (certainly not the politically correct authors in 1968), but also a phalanx of new French theorists on the verge of crossing the Rhine into Germany: Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. And this is where Freiburg – which in comparison to Frankfurt or Berlin had only been a second-tier center of action in the upheavals of the 1960s – starts to get interesting.

Robert Holub, one of the first scholars to introduce Kittler to an anglophone audience, pointed out that Freiburg and Berlin feature prominently in the German reception of French poststructuralism (Holub 1992: 43). Berlin – to be historically more accurate, the old West Berlin – is an obvious venue: an isolated pressure-cooker metropolis perched on the needlepoint of global politics, a hotbed of 1960s student radicalism with a thriving art scene, swamped by high-school graduates making use of the city’s exemption from compulsory military service – how could it not be a receptive entry point for the nomadic, anarchic ideas heading eastward over the Rhine? But Freiburg? That scenic deposit of philistine comfort besieged not by Soviet tanks but the sleepy firs of the Black Forest? Various explanations have been offered to account for its high profile in the German reception of poststructuralism. Some emphasize the city’s closeness to France; others invoke the (especially in death) larger-than-life presence of Heidegger. Both explanations are flawed. Geographical proximity has little to do with intellectual contact, especially in densely populated European countries boasting excellent highways and railway systems. Likewise, while many Freiburg visits by the new French luminaries included pilgrimages up the Todtnauberg to gawk at Heidegger’s mythical Black Forest cabin, the cloned Heideggerians in the Freiburg philosophy department were no more inclined to engage with the new-fangled Parisian theories than their colleagues elsewhere. To be sure, Freiburg’s location allowed the young Kittler to undertake fortnightly excursions to nearby Strasburg in France to attend lectures on Lacan; and it was a factor in securing Lacan’s much-anticipated trip to Freiburg in January 1975. The visit, however, was no great success. As he was prone to do, Lacan came, spoke, and left everyone confused. According to Kittler, Lacan “wanted to be influential in Germany,” yet, when he realized how young and lacking in influence Kittler and his associates were, “he was most disappointed” (Armitage 2006: 22). For all his cryptic aloofness, Lacan was a no-nonsense empire builder with an eye for promising beachheads in virgin markets, and Freiburg did not qualify. A few years later Derrida made an appearance and gave a lecture that was translated and edited by Kittler, but while the two over the years enjoyed a cordial relationship, their intellectual differences were so great that they could only be covered by the catch-all label of poststructuralism. The most sought-after theorist was Foucault, whose books the young Kittler awaited as impatiently “as new Rock LPs or the approaching steps [of a lover]” (1985: 141). Eagerly, Kittler kept inviting him; politely, Foucault kept declining. Heidegger or not, Freiburg’s allure had its limits.

In fact, Kittler never did meet Foucault, though he did run into him once. In 1976, during the intermission of the last, legendary centenary performance of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, staged by Pierre Boulez and Patrice Chéreau in Bayreuth, he caught sight of a laughing Foucault surrounded by a throng of admirers. But much like Dante in the presence of his beloved Beatrice, Kittler remained frozen and dumbfounded: “I did not approach him” (Kittler 1985: 151). In retrospect, the meeting place is not without a certain ironic symbolism, for in Kittler’s eyes the operas of Wagner represent “a monomaniacal anticipation of modern media technologies” (1990: 23; for a detailed analysis, see Kittler 1994). That is to say, the media magician Wagner with his early Sensurround Gesamtkunstwerk – what has been described as “Pink Floyd in Bayreuth” (Bolz 1990: 49–65) – is bidding farewell to the world of books and libraries that nurtured and confined the work of Foucault.

A more plausible reason for Freiburg’s conspicuous role in the history of German poststructuralism is its spiritus loci