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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Polity Theory Now
- Sprache: Englisch
Friedrich Kittler was one of the world’s most influential, provocative and misunderstood media theorists. His work spans analyses of historical ‘discourse networks’ inspired by French poststructuralism, influential theorizations of new media, through to musings on music and mathematics. Always controversial and relentlessly unpredictable, Kittler’s work is a major reference point for contemporary media theory, literary criticism and cultural studies.
This is the only book of essays currently available in English on an important thinker whose influence across disciplines is growing. The volume situates Kittler’s ideas, explaining and critiquing his sometimes difficult writing, and using his theories to undertake innovative readings of old and new media. It also includes previously untranslated work by Kittler himself. Contributors include Caroline Bassett, Steven Connor, Alexander R. Galloway, Mark B. Hansen, John Durham Peters and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Editors’ Introduction
Discursive Regimes
Science and the Humanities
War and Politics
Command and Control
Cultural Techniques and Ancient Greece
Kittler’s Influence
Notes
Works Cited
Part I Grecian 2000
1 The God of Ears Friedrich A. Kittler
Translator’s Note
Notes
Works Cited
2 Assessing Kittler’s Musik und Mathematik John Durham Peters
The Puzzle of Late Work
The Books
Questions
Notes
Works Cited
3 Thinking By Numbers: The Role of Mathematics in Kittler and Heidegger Stephen Sale
Heidegger and the Grundlagenkrise
Heidegger’s Critique of ‘the Mathematical’
Hölderlin and the ‘Other Beginning’
Kittler and Turing’s Machinization of Number
Epistemological Break
The Recuperation of Number and Another ‘Other Beginning’
Kittler’s Politics of Calculation
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
4 Siren Recursions Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
Recursive Hardcore Arcadian Porn
Serving Time
Tempus Ex Machina
Gulf Excursion: Storing the Sirens
Conclusion: Recursive Reasons
Notes
Works Cited
5 Preparing the Arrival of the Gods Friedrich A. Kittler
Notes
Works Cited
Part II ‘Our Writing Tools are also Working on our Thoughts’
6 Scilicet: Kittler, Media and Madness Steven Connor
Speaking Your Mind
1800/1900
Scilicet
Works Cited
7 The Typewriter’s Truth Katherine Biers
The Madness of the Female Typist
The Media Technological Order and the Persistence of Interpretation
Notes
Works Cited
8 Films in Books/Books in Film: Fahrenheit 451 and the Media Wars Gill Partington
Notes
Works Cited
Part III Turingzeit
9 If the Cinema Is an Ontology, the Computer Is an Ethic Alexander R. Galloway
Notes
Works Cited
10 Staring into the Sun Caroline Bassett
‘Quaint’
In or At the Movies: Film
An Arm’s-Length Observation
Wish You Were Here?
Notes
Works Cited
11 Symbolizing Time: Kittler and Twenty-First-Century Media Mark B. N. Hansen
From Discourse Networks to Real Numbers
From the ‘Symbolic of the Symbolic’ to the ‘Symbolic of the Real’
Time Axis Manipulation and the Convergence of Data and Experience
Notes
Works Cited
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
Begin Reading
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Theory Now
Series Editor: Ryan Bishop
Virilio Now, John ArmitageBaudrillard Now, Ryan BishopNancy Now, Verena ConleyRancière Now, Oliver DavisSloterdijk Now, Stuart EldenFoucault Now, James FaubionŽižek Now, Jamil Khader and Molly Anne RothenbergKittler Now, Stephen Sale and Laura Salisbury
Kittler Now
Current Perspectives in Kittler Studies
Edited byStephen Sale and Laura Salisbury
polity
Copyright © this collection, Editors’ Introduction, Chapters 2–4 and 6–11 Polity Press 2015
Copyright © Chapter 1 Friedrich A. Kittler 1984Copyright © Chapter 5 Friedrich A. Kittler 2011Copyright © Chapter 1, this English translation Polity Press 2015
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6396-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
This volume was conceived following the conference ‘Media Matters: Friedrich Kittler and Technoculture’ held at Tate Modern, London, in 2008. That event was supported both financially and intellectually by Birkbeck, University of London, and the London Consortium, and the editors are profoundly grateful to all those who helped to bring some of the most radical aspects of German Medienwissenschaft to London. We would also like to thank the contributors to this volume for their belief in the project, their good humour and their patience. The support and dedication of the editors of Polity Press have similarly been invaluable.
We are grateful for permission to reproduce the lyrics from Pink Floyd’s ‘Brain Damage’ to Warner Chappell Music Ltd (‘Brain Damage’ Words and Music by Roger Waters © Roger Waters Music Overseas Ltd (NS). All rights administered by Warner Chappell Music. Australia Pty Ltd.) and to Hampshire House Publishing Corp. (‘Brain Damage’. Words and Music by Roger Waters. TRO–©–Copyright 1973 (Renewed). Hampshire House Publishing Corp., New York, New York. International Copyright Secured. Made in U.S.A. All Rights Reserved Including Public Performance for Profit. Used by permission. ‘Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind’, ‘Here to me from Krete to this holy temple’ from If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, by Anne Carson, copyright © 2002 by Anne Carson, are used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., and Little, Brown Book Group Limited. An extract from ‘Oh England My Lionheart’ is reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing. A version of the chapter ‘If the Cinema Is an Ontology, the Computer Is an Ethic’ by Alexander R. Galloway was first published in his book The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).
The editors would like to thank Paul Feigelfeld, in particular, for his assistance in bringing the volume to completion. Not only did he undertake meticulous translations for the volume, he also liaised carefully and sensitively with the late Friedrich Kittler, who was committed to the dissemination of his ideas and to the success of this volume to the last. Without Friedrich Kittler’s generosity and dedication to his intellectual project beyond any reasonable expectations, Kittler Now simply would not have happened. We would also like to extend our thanks to Susanne Holl, Kittler’s widow, whose cooperation with this project has been sincerely appreciated.
Finally, we would like to thank Roger Luckhurst for his intellectual and practical guidance, and Fiona Robertson for her unstinting support throughout the gestation of the project.
Contributors
Caroline Bassett is Professor of Media and Communications and Director of the Centre for Material Digital Culture at the University of Sussex. She is author of The Arc and the Machine (Manchester University Press, 2007). She has recently been writing on expertise and digital media, and on silence as a response to digital media in First Monday. She is currently completing a monograph on anti-computing for Manchester University Press.
Katherine Biers is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Virtual Modernism: Writing and Technology in the Progressive Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Her articles and reviews have appeared in Representations, Textual Practice and several edited collections.
Steven Connor is Grace 2 Professor of English in the University of Cambridge and fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He has published books on Dickens, Beckett, Joyce and postmodernism, as well as on topics such as ventriloquism, skin, flies, air and sport. His most recent books are Beyond Words: Sobbing, Humming and Other Vocalizations (Reaktion, 2014) and Beckett, Modernism andthe Material Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2014). His website at www.stevenconnor.com includes lectures, broadcasts, unpublished work and work in progress.
Paul Feigelfeld worked for Friedrich Kittler from 2004 to 2011 and is the editor of Kittler’s source code and software for the upcoming Collected Works. Feigelfeld worked as a teacher and researcher at Humboldt University’s Institute for Media Theories from 2010 to 2013, and since 2013 has coordinated the Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University Lüneburg.
Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer working on issues in philosophy, technology and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is the author of several books on digital media and critical theory, most recently The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012).
Mark B. N. Hansen is Professor of Literature and Arts of the Moving Image at Duke University. His books include Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (University of Michigan Press, 2000), New Philosophy for New Media (MIT Press, 2004), Bodies in Code: Interfaces with New Media (Routledge, 2006) and the forthcoming Feed-Forward (University of Chicago Press).
Friedrich A. Kittler (1943–2011) was a literary scholar and media historian. In the course of a long and distinguished career, Kittler pioneered a new technologically inflected approach to the humanities. He was Professor of Aesthetics and History of Media at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and held visiting professorships at Columbia University, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley and other institutions. His works include Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford University Press, 1990), Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford University Press, 1999) and Musik und Mathematik (Wilhelm Fink, 2006; 2009).
Anthony Moore is Professor of Art and Media Sciences at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM), where he works on the theory and history of sound. Initially Professor for Musik, Klang, Geräusch and founder of the Music Department, from 2000 to 2004 he was the elected Rector of the Academy in Cologne. He is the founder of the symposia ‘per->SON’ and festival series ‘Nocturnes’.
Gill Partington is Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. She works on media, fictionality, histories of reading and the material text. Her recent work includes articles on textual erasure and a chapter on the work of Tom McCarthy. She has also co-edited two volumes with Adam Smyth: Missing Texts, a 2013 special edition of Critical Quarterly, and Book Destruction in the West (Palgrave, 2014).
John Durham Peters is A. Craig Baird Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Speaking into the Air (University of Chicago Press, 1999), Courting the Abyss (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and a forthcoming book, The Marvelous Clouds.
Stephen Sale is a PhD candidate at the London Consortium. His research focuses on the relationship between technology and culture, with a particular interest in German media theory. He has published articles in several journals including Theory, Culture & Society and Journal of War and Culture Studies.
Laura Salisbury is a Senior Lecturer in Medicine and English Literature at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and the co-editor of Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800–1950 (Palgrave, 2010). She is currently writing a study of the relationship between modernism, modernity and neurological theories of language, entitled Aphasic Modernism: A Revolution of the Word.
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young completed an MA at the University of Freiburg and a PhD at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he is now Professor of German in the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies. He is the author of Kittler and the Media (Polity, 2010). His main areas of research are theories of media and cultural techniques and issues related to the emergence of the posthumanities in Germany and North America.
Editors’ Introduction
Stephen Sale and Laura Salisbury
Aristotle, T. S. Eliot, Hermann von Helmholtz, Friedrich Hölderlin, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Pink Floyd, Sappho: only Friedrich Kittler could pull off such an insouciantly provocative, learned yet eye-popping, run of bibliographic entries in a piece of academic writing. To read Kittler in any sustained way is, however, to come to expect to find such strange attractions; it is to begin to understand the ways in which Goethe brushes up against literacy manuals, Alan Turing is calculating alongside Mallarmé and Lacan, and Syd Barrett makes music with the Greek gods. Kittler the literary critic, Kittler the historian, Kittler the Heideggerian, Kittler the computer programmer, Kittler the Hellenophile: this was a writer for whom the ‘Two Cultures’ divide between the arts and sciences, or the split between high and popular cultures, never even seemed like barriers to overcome. From this description, it is possible to imagine Kittler as a poster-boy for the extraordinary creative possibilities of interdisciplinary research and writing beloved of the contemporary neo-liberal university system, but he was and remains a paradoxically resistant figure, a provocatively conservative outsider, who defies the usual interdisciplinary frames and whom even devotees find hard to digest in any wholesale way.
Kittler’s academic career began at Freiburg in the 1960s and, following stints at Basel and Bochum in the 1980s, he established an institutional home at the Humboldt University for what came to be known as the ‘Berlin School’ of media studies or, in its international variant, ‘German media theory’. Kittler always claimed to be more concerned with history than theory, though, and it is his radical programme to bring questions concerning the history of media technologies to the centre of intellectual endeavour that has attracted interest from literary studies, media studies, film studies and the digital humanities. For at the most basic, most disruptive level, what Kittler’s concentration on mediality offers is an alternative frame of reference for the humanities – one that rejects the standard governing concepts of understanding, subjectivity and representation in favour of the ‘materiality of communication’.1 It is this profound challenge to our research models that has ensured that, despite his death in 2011, Kittler’s influence shows no sign of diminishing.
Although Kittler’s work may be becoming increasingly accessible and influential, it remains relatively uncolonized by introductory guides and primers. This is at least partly because his texts are characterized by mastery of a truly dizzying range of material that sits alongside complex and unorthodox political positions. Kittler is also capable of throwing out breezily devastating apercus, such as the now notorious opening pronouncement from his best-known work, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, that ‘[m]edia determine our situation’ (xxxix), that seem simple, but that nevertheless suggest fundamental alterations to our disciplinary frameworks. For Kittler was a technological determinist who argued that although technical media are decisive in shaping cultural production, they have been largely ignored by the humanities, which continues in its solipsistic interpretation of the content of communications. Kittler, however, celebrates those concrete technologies that, unbeknownst to us ‘end-users’, provide the very conditions of possibility for our thoughts. Following the material, technical forms of media rather than the texts they produce, Kittler’s work ranges across traditional disciplinary boundaries, deftly melding French poststructuralism (particularly Foucault and Lacan) with McLuhan and the Toronto School, while always following a path set down by his beloved Germans: Heidegger, Hegel and Nietzsche. There are also some British influences, but they are not the usual suspects: we hear about Alan Turing and Pink Floyd rather than Raymond Williams. The result is assertively eccentric work that is determinedly lively, sometimes baffling, but always distinctive.
Kittler’s singular approach makes itself felt across an oeuvre that includes several major monographs and some influential collections.2Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter have been translated into multiple languages; several essays on diverse topics are collected in Draculas Vermächtnis: Technische Schriften and the English volume Literature, Media, Information Systems; a lecture course from 1999 was published in translation in 2010 as Optical Media; and his multi-volume project Musik und Mathematik, though truncated by his death, has seen two of its volumes published in German. Several of Kittler’s essays have appeared in special editions of journals, including Cultural Politics, Grey Room and Theory, Culture & Society, alongside valuable exegeses, interviews and critical engagements with his work. Journals such as Thesis Eleven have also devoted editions to expanding the readership for Kittler’s work and German media theory in general. In terms of secondary literature, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young deserves special mention for his role in bringing Kittler to a wider audience and acting as respected commentator for both Anglo- and Germano-phone audiences. His Kittler and the Media is an excellent, wide-ranging introduction to the work. The introduction to this volume, though by no means exhaustive, works to complement these existing resources by outlining the contours of Kittler’s thought to an Anglophone audience. It takes a broadly chronological approach in order to contextualize the chapters that follow, covering the discourse analytical work from the 1980s and the radical interdisciplinarity that gradually emerged from it, Kittler’s later investigations into the martial origins of media technologies and the politics of ‘command and control’, and his final turn to cultural technique in ancient Greece.
Discursive Regimes
Kittler was a literary scholar in Freiburg’s German department when he produced his Habilitation thesis, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900, published in 1985 and translated into English in 1990 as Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Composed in two parts, each with an introit and three chapters, Discourse Networks structurally mirrors Foucault’s The Order of Things and, following its diachronic model of historical rupture, offers an account of the discursive construction of the German Romantic subject and its dissolution with the advent of modernism. Then a leading figure in the German reception of poststructuralism, Kittler argues that traditional disciplinary approaches are unwittingly implicated in their objects of study and are therefore unable to address their own conditions of possibility. Even Foucault, whose discourse analysis had attempted to reconstruct the rules through which an epoch’s discourses are organized, fell victim to this methodological blind-spot through an under-analysed reliance upon the written word. Kittler ascribes Foucault’s supposed inability to grapple with historical developments post-1850 to this limitation; for it is in the latter half of the nineteenth century that the monopoly of the written word as a means of data storage came to an end with the invention of photography, cinematography and phonography. Kittler’s solution is to extend Foucault’s archaeological toolkit through a historical analysis of the discourse network. In this broadened conception, written archives stored in libraries are merely a single instance of ‘the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data’ (Kittler, Discourse Networks 369).
In Kittler’s analysis, the historically contingent figure of ‘so-called Man’ that Foucault famously likens to a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea is predicated upon a particular set of discursive practices that characterize the discourse network of ‘1800’. The autonomous, self-determining subject is first glimpsed in Goethe with Faust’s free translation of the Gospel according to Saint John, which Kittler reads as the epistemological break that inaugurated the discipline of hermeneutics – a form of reading determined by the primacy of subjective interpretation and understanding. The significance of Faust is that he stepped outside the discursive controls that regulated the transcription and circulation of texts in the ‘Republic of Scholars’ and instituted the production of signs as an act of individual authorship. Referring to a number of pedagogical reforms that occurred in Prussia at that time, Kittler argues that the precondition for this epistemological break was the transformation of language from an arbitrary material force into a channel for the newly discovered ‘inner voice’. During this period, compulsory state education replaced the rote learning of language with maternal instruction through which pupils were encouraged to understand the putatively intrinsic ‘meaning’ of language. The inner voice came to stand in for a transcendental signified that preceded, underwrote and bound language to the realm of truth.
Accompanying these changes were the burgeoning literary, military and bureaucratic institutions of the modern nation state and the consolidation of the nuclear family. For the first time, the author was granted copyright protection, universities were brought under direct state control, and the voice of the ‘individualized universal’ was heard in Romantic poetry. At the same time, German Idealism served to legitimate the discursive regime through the theorization of an originary subjectivity that took the place of the divine as the guarantor of meaning. At the centre of Kittler’s Discourse Network 1800 may be the generative source of Nature, the soul and the maternal, but its machinery was that of the Prussian state. Paradoxically, then, it turns out that Romanticism’s poets and philosophers were the products of a civil servant factory, with their artistic freedom always state-sanctioned. Their inspired audience, intoxicated by gaining access to the inner voice sounding from the realm of truth, was equally the product of state intervention in the family home that implemented universal alphabetization.
But if subjects are formed by a technology of the letter they are also tied to its fate. And just as Faust’s penmanship serves to introduce the discourse network of ‘1800’, Kittler uses Nietzsche’s experiences with the typewriter to usher in the discourse network of ‘1900’. Late in his life, the exiled and half-blind Nietzsche, sitting in front of his new writing machine, had an epiphany concerning the raw materiality of language. In the typewriter’s forced separation of hand and word he was able to recognize the ‘irreducible facticity’ of words for the first time and see that words are not simply ciphers for ideas – ‘language is no longer the translation of prelinguistic meanings’ (Kittler, Discourse Networks 186). The inner voice had fallen silent and Nietzsche was left instead with the hum and the roar of white noise, crafting contingently meaningful accidents with words. With Nietzsche, then, the primacy of the transcendental signified of 1800 was replaced with the ‘logic of the signifier’; the Romantic subject dissolved into a sea of alphabet soup, and the human subject was no longer the agent of writing.
For Kittler, the precondition for this new epistemological break was the development of alternative storage media – the phonograph and photo-/cinemato-graph – able to capture both acoustical and optical data respectively, and thus reveal writing as just one medium within a broader paradigm of information. Once again disciplinary practices played their part: maternal instruction was replaced with the idea of a language that had to be directed, controlled and formed by schooling until it became, in this case, High German. With the disappearance of the ‘Mother’s Mouth’ as the source of discursive production, language unravelled into a tangle of nervous, sensory-motor threads and material, differential marks. As Kittler sees it, Foucault’s prediction for the ‘end of man’ had already come to pass, in or around 1900.
Kittler has described Discourse Networks as ‘written in black in every sense of the word’ (Griffin and Hermann 286), referring both to its radical conservative agenda, influenced by Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger, and to its private attacks on the German academic establishment. In this period, the world of German letters was dominated by hermeneutics, a practice which, as we have seen, Kittler sought to demote to a side-effect of eighteenth-century bureaucratic history. The critical theoretical Left in the form of the Frankfurt School fared little better, attracting scorn for its technological naivety in attempting to develop a theory of communication almost without reference to technology,3 while Kittler’s championing of poststructuralism came at a time when Habermas was defending the emancipatory potential of the Enlightenment project from the incursions of the French, and Derrida in particular. Courting enmity from both Left and Right, then, Discourse Networks met with hostility and the thesis was passed only reluctantly. Kittler was reportedly told, ‘[o]ne Foucault is enough. That is why we are against you.’4
Science and the Humanities
Alongside Foucauldian discourse analysis, the methodological machinery of Discourse Networks draws heavily upon a discipline less familiar to the humanities: information theory. Kittler suggests that hermeneutics deals in continuity and context, but as we move to Discourse Network 1900, the logic of the signifier requires a different approach: ‘the relative value of signifiers […] is given mathematically’, Kittler writes; ‘its articulation is called counting’ (Discourse Networks 190). Here, the tools appropriate for analysing discourse networks are seen to be not those of the interpretative reader, but those of the engineer. Kittler found inspiration in the work of Claude Shannon, an engineer at Bell Labs in the United States who, in the course of optimizing the national telephone network in the 1940s, had offered a new definition of information. In Shannon’s view, information can be defined mathematically as the statistical measure of uncertainty given in the selection of data from a range of options. This definition gave Kittler licence to ignore the questions of meaning that exercised practitioners of hermeneutics and instead look at the system-wide discursive regularities that determine which statements are selected as meaningful – those that become information – and those that are designated as noise. In analysing the systems themselves, he adopted Shannon’s functional model of communication systems as comprising five elements: information source, transmitter, channel, receiver and destination (Shannon and Weaver). Kittler tells us that while Foucault is able to describe ‘the production of discourses’, he fails to account for ‘the source of these discourses, of the channels or the receivers of discourse in the form of […] readers or consumers’ (Armitage 19), and this is what Discourse Networks sets out to rectify. Early readers can certainly be forgiven for not recognizing that the project is as much about generators, oscillators, amplifiers and receivers as it is about the canonical texts of German Romanticism. These themes were, however, made more explicit in the ‘Afterword’ published in later editions, where Kittler urged his colleagues to ‘learn from an information theory that has formalised the current state of technical knowledge’ (Discourse Networks 369).
One branch of the humanities that had embarked on a relatively early engagement with the new technological paradigm, Kittler tells us, is Lacanian psychoanalysis, which he accordingly elevates to the status of a privileged discourse. When, in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, the ‘technological addendum’ to Discourse Networks, Kittler details the media differentiation that he argues is characteristic of ‘1900’, he suggests that Lacan’s famous triumvirate of registers – the symbolic, imaginary and real – are themselves a theorization, or ‘historical effect’, of media-technological developments. The typewriter stripped writing of its surrogate sensuality to lay bare its symbolic function – that is, encoding the sound sequences of language into discrete units – and new storage technologies were able to capture what were previously unwritable data flows. The noise of the bodily real could now be captured by sound recording, and the development of film technologies, which allowed ‘memories and dreams, the dead and ghosts’ (Kittler, Gramophone 10) to become technically represented, replaced the hallucinations that accompanied reading in ‘1800’.
By Kittler’s account, indexical media – media that register the imprint of the real – brought the monopoly of the alphabet to an end and with it the medial configuration that supported the conception of the human as autonomous and self-determined. For as soon as optical, acoustical and textual data flows are separated, Kittler tells us, machines can begin to take over functions of the central nervous system in registering and processing the world. The result: ‘man’s’ ‘essence escapes into apparatuses’ (Kittler, Gramophone 16). As with Marshall McLuhan, another important influence on Kittler, human capabilities start to appear as imperfect implementations of media technology. However, Kittler is emphatic in avoiding what he views as a residual anthropocentrism in McLuhan. He claims that ‘McLuhan, who was originally a literary critic, understood more about perception than about electronics, and therefore he attempted to think about technology in terms of bodies instead of the other way around’ (Kittler, Optical Media 29). Kittler, also a literary theorist but one who soldered circuit boards in his spare time, suggests that we ‘forget humans, language, and sense’ and ‘move on to the particulars of Shannon’s five elements and functions instead’ (Optical Media 44). For Kittler, the advent of mechanical storage ‘designates the turning point at which communications technologies can no longer be related back to humans. Instead, the former have formed the latter’ (Gramophone 211). In his essay ‘Global Algorithm: The History of Communication Media’ Kittler describes this shift as the implementation in physical reality of Shannon’s five functions: (human) communication networks gradually give way to (machinic) information systems and thus reveal the contingency of the human–technological relationship. Humanity’s functional role is dwindling as the machineries become actualized and autonomous. What were mistakenly identified as uniquely human attributes are instead revealed to be the poor cousins of optimized computing processes. As Geoffrey Winthrop-Young puts it, ‘[w]here subjects were, there programs shall be – because programs were there in the first place’ (‘Silicon Sociology’ 397).
War and Politics
From the mid-1980s, Kittler’s technical histories became increasingly concerned with warfare as the crucible of technological change. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter and a constellation of associated essays5 detail the military origins of contemporary media technologies. We are told that Thomas Edison, who was a telegrapher during the American Civil War, invented the phonograph ‘in an attempt to improve the processing speed of the Morse telegraph beyond human limitations’ (Kittler, Gramophone 190), and that it was the gun manufacturer Remington & Son that began commercial production of the typewriter in 1874 in order to make use of surplus capacity following the ‘boom’ of the war. Following Virilio’s War and Cinema, Kittler also draws attention to the military’s role in the development of film technology, with Étienne-Jules Marey’s indirect adoption of the revolving chambers of the machine gun for his ‘chronophotographic rifle’ one of the precursors of cinema. Kittler is then able to tell us that ‘the history of the movie camera thus coincides with the history of automatic weapons’ (Gramophone 124).
If the American Civil War provided the impetus for the development of the new storage media, it was the First World War that led to the production of the new transmission technologies that could connect them. To overcome the stalemate in the trenches, troops needed to be mobilized, and that required communications systems such as radio to coordinate dispersed units in the field. These transmission technologies had been perfected by the time of the Second World War, which enabled a distributed and all-consuming form of warfare: for Kittler, ‘VHF tank communications and radar images, those military developments parallel to television, meant total mobilisation, motorisation and blitzkrieg from the Vistula in 1939 to Corregido in 1945’ (Gramophone 243).
But the star of Kittler’s narrative of the Second World War is the British mathematician and pioneer of computer science Alan Turing. Turing was one of the cryptographers working at Bletchley Park whose efforts in cracking the Enigma code proved decisive in determining the outcome of the war. Enigma was a modified typewriter used by the German military to encrypt messages that were then broadcast freely via radio. Turing had earlier theorized a machine that could simulate the workings of other machines and, together with his team, built Colossus – a reverse-engineered Enigma – which was capable of probabilistically determining what had been encoded by the other machine. It incorporated a simple feedback loop whereby it was able to adapt its processes according to the results of calculations. For Kittler, again drawing on Lacan, this gave computers the ‘operational reflexivity’ previously believed to be an exclusively human attribute. As well as storage and transmission, machines were now also capable of processing information. With subsequent developments in cybernetics, these conditional jumps were implemented in machines and ‘[c]omputers themselves became subjects’ (Kittler, Gramophone 258) with the ability to out-perform humans. Binary coding also meant that all media can be stored and processed by a modern computer: ‘the medium to end all media’ (Winthrop-Young and Wutz xxx). What is occasionally referred to as Discourse Network 2000 is characterized by the digitization and consequent de-differentiation of acoustical, optical and textual data streams. The time of media as traditionally understood is over. In Kittler’s Hegelian vision of ubiquitous computing, all knowledge will one day circulate in an endless loop.
As has become clear, war performs an important and controversial methodological role for Kittler. In his call for us to understand ‘technological a prioris in a technological sense’ (Kittler, Gramophone 117), Kittler states that the starting point for any general theory of media should be the independent histories of individual technological media, with the ‘subject’ (and, therefore, social relations) bracketed off from the analysis. But by arguing for the relative autonomy of the technical realm, Kittler requires a mechanism for historical change, an alternative to the standard societal dynamics of politics or economics. The one that he supplies can be described as ‘strategic escalation’, as rather broadly summarized here:
[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. (Kittler, ‘Technologies’ 738)
But in using this model of ‘strategic escalation’, Kittler reactivates in a German context a number of inter-war conservative discourses concerning the role of technology and war that had long been tarnished by their proximity to fascism. Of course, many of the conservative revolutionary thinkers who influenced Kittler – Jünger, Schmitt and, of course, Heidegger – had already found an audience in France in the post-war period, when disillusioned Marxists adopted the anti-Enlightenment rhetoric of the German Right to articulate anxieties about the more oppressive qualities of modernity. This, in turn, serves to explain why Kittler’s early identification with a French poststructuralism, which was, in its way, a cryptic alignment with German thinkers still felt to be implicated with the catastrophe of the Second World War, found such a frosty reception in Germany in the 1980s.
By pressing on the question of war and Jünger’s concept of mobilization explicitly, however, we can perhaps begin to see how Kittler places some distance between himself and both French and German Marxist thinkers, as he attempts to displace the industrial-technological paradigm with a military-technological one. Like the conservative revolutionaries of the Weimar Republic, Kittler adopts a martial rather than an economic model of social relations (what Foucault calls the ‘Nietzsche hypothesis’ (90)), but Kittler, infused with Lacanian cybernetics and posthumanism, rejects the existential underpinnings of Schmitt and Jünger and, in so doing, manages to elide, though he never quite evades, their questionable political affiliations. Kittler posits, instead, a timeless model of command and control, with technical infrastructures supporting an economy of instructions developing autonomously, with little relation to human needs. Instead of the base units of people, the exchange of goods and communication, Kittler substitutes addresses, data and commands (‘Global Algorithm’).
Command and Control
As Kittler turned his attention to the post-war period and the development of computing technologies, he began to ask urgent questions about the changing nature of command structures and their effects on humans, most notably in two influential essays, ‘Protected Mode’ and ‘There Is No Software’.6 With humans increasingly taken out of the loop, previously accessible data flows disappear ‘into black holes and boxes’ (Kittler, Gramophone xxxix); as such, the old antechambers of governmental power are gradually replaced by access privileges hardwired into silicon. By partitioning their hardware in this way, Kittler argues that companies such as Intel and IBM are implementing a military-industrial logic that effectively restricts access to higher-level computing functions. In cahoots with the state, these companies withhold technical capabilities that may bring national strategic advantage, and what they release to the public acts to circumscribe the experience of the ‘end-user’. We are thrown the bone of entertainment, fobbed off with software applications that serve to obfuscate the core hardware functions of our machines, while reinforcing our delusions of agency. An example Kittler often gave was Microsoft Windows, which, far from opening up the contents of our computers to us, merely implements the one-way mirrors of a surveillance state. With layers of user interfaces, programs and operating systems, our interactions with computers are mediated to an ever greater extent until ‘[w]e simply do not know what our writing does’ (Kittler, ‘There Is No Software’ 148). For Kittler, then, any attempt to grasp how our current situation is determined by media must look to the technical specifications of both hardware and software, for power structures are now implemented at the level of system design. In essays such as ‘Protected Mode’, Kittler asks us to take a political stance against the technological domination of the USA, and the surrendering of the state to an expression of the military-industrial complex that effectively makes us all subjects of Microsoft Corporation. For pockets of resistance can be found, and, characteristically, they reside within the communities engaging with the workings of technical media themselves, notably those in the Open Source/Free Software movements.
As with the 1800 and 1900 discourse networks, Kittler demonstrates how these technical developments have structural implications for the production of knowledge. He argues that the model of intellectual property inherent in the contemporary separation of an algorithmic instruction (software) from what it can do (hardware) merely serves to perpetuate the myth of humans as creators. Kittler proposes, instead, that knowledge should be seen as a collective endeavour and promotes the free circulation of ideas underpinned by the institution of the university. After all, universities have been based on an open source model since the Athenians, he tells us, and, despite their infiltration by ‘monkish’ (Kittler, ‘Universities’ 251) elements in the Middle Ages, have operated as a successful model of cultural production ever since. But moves to marketize the university, with faculties as clusters of profit centres, effectively privatize knowledge. For Kittler, however, intellectual goals should not be subordinated to short-term or commercial ends, and he viewed the leeching of Silicon Valley on educational establishments as particularly scandalous, with students encouraged to develop ideas in the university and then cash in as entrepreneurs. Even the printing press, which broke the monopoly on storage and transmission of data, left the processing of data to the academics. For Kittler, then, the most contemporary forms of digital media, far from simply being handmaidens to an upstart late capitalism, need to be thought alongside forms of knowledge circulation that emerged when Western civilization was in its infancy.
Cultural Techniques and Ancient Greece
By the turn of the millennium, Medienwissenschaft was a successfully established field in German academia with a small army of students working on topics such as the history of the tape recorder or researching the archive of Claude Shannon. But rather than following other media professors in analysing the evils of social networking or the proliferation of mobile devices, Kittler chose to emphasize the historicity of mediality. And his research into the origins of symbolic systems took him back to antiquity, like his intellectual heroes Foucault, Heidegger and Nietzsche before him. He became compelled by the invention in ancient Greece circa 800 BCE of the first vowel alphabet. With the addition of vowel characters, an alphabet was able, for the first time, to record language as it was spoken and to guarantee its faithful future reproduction. Furthermore, in a simple move, the same characters could be used for numbers as well as letters, and even to identify musical notes. Kittler saw in the Greek alphabet a near-universal notation system that points to the underlying unity of all cultural data.
Kittler championed the work of classicist Barry B. Powell, who had controversially argued that the Greek alphabet had been developed for the transmission of sung Homeric poetry and not, as was widely assumed, for economic, legal or political reasons. To understand this media-historical foundation for Western culture, Kittler delved into a newly discovered entanglement of gods, sex, music and mathematics. No longer interested in charting the history of modern warfare, he began to celebrate the story of ‘love in Europe’, with The Odyssey as the ur-text for European cultural history. To this end, Kittler embarked on a magnum opus – a proposed tetralogy entitled Musik und Mathematik – but was able to publish only two parts of the first volume (Aphrodite and Eros) before he died. The series was an ambitious cultural-historical project to chart European notation systems from ancient Greece and Rome, through the Middle Ages, and up to the present day. For Kittler, the encoding of the Sirens’ song, and the desire for knowledge that it enacts, inaugurates Western culture. He sought its traces around the shores of the Mediterranean and its echoes in European literature. In so doing, he identified a historical short circuit connecting ancient Greece to the modern Turing age (Turingzeit); for binary code once more grants culture a universal notation system via a universal medium: the computer. In this era of advanced technological conditions, Kittler discerned the possibility of a reclamation of the gifts of ancient Greek culture – a liberation of desire and knowledge. But, in Kittler’s account, there are considerable obstacles to attaining the supposed plenitude of the Greeks in a world that is corrupted by the monotheism of Christianity, Islam and Judaism, and blighted by the technical hegemony of the United States.
Kittler’s change of direction caused more than a few academic eyebrows to be raised, with many taking the view that the turn to the Greeks and the cult of Aphrodite was the ever-crazier outpourings of the ever-crazy Kittler. More sympathetic commentators, such as Claudia Breger, engaged directly with his ideas but raised concerns about his Hellenophilia. Others, such as John Durham Peters in this volume, question some of the ethical and political implications of Kittler’s late turn. This work is certainly far removed from the set texts of literary or media studies courses, as it jumps eccentrically, and sometimes alarmingly, from close readings of Greek poetry to travelogue, and then to lascivious descriptions of 1960s rock concerts. Kittler’s turn to the Greeks is sometimes seen as a dramatic departure from his interests; but there is much continuity, notably the linking of bodies with notation systems and their media. The question of alphabetization, so central to his later work, is of course also a key theme of Discourse Networks – a book that uses equations as epigraphs for each of its two main sections. Indeed, his later work could be described as unearthing the remains of Discourse Network 350 BCE.
Kittler’s Influence
In his essays on the status of the university, Kittler calls for an overcoming of the contemporary science/humanities divide through a revised implementation of Wissenschaft as a technically inflected higher learning. For Kittler, the future of the university itself depends upon the recognition of the ‘essential unity’ of letters and numbers and a radical engagement with the possibilities opened up by the computer, now the common hardware of knowledge across the disciplines. In Turingzeit it becomes clear that the sciences are historical and the humanities are technical; science departments thus need historians, and cultural studies departments require computing and mathematical expertise – something recognized in the emerging field of digital humanities. Kittler himself embodied (t)his connection between the disciplines, being equally at ease with Philolaus and low-level assembly code. Just as he thought that literary scholars should have (at least) composed poetry, so he believed that scholars commenting on technological changes should also have hands-on experience of their objects of study. Programming was a regular feature in his seminars, as he sought to ensure that scholars wishing to analyse the ‘daily data flow’ that constitutes cultural production were able to understand the dominant contemporary cultural codes.
When university literature departments first began to examine the relationship between technology and texts, their resources were limited. There was Derrida and hypertext, Foucault and the archive, and then Kittler, who, in the wake of French poststructuralism, issued a disciplinary challenge to analyse the economy of the letter as our means of access to culture. For Kittler there is no ‘universal grammatology’, but rather an untold history of notation systems and their accompanying technologies that must be unearthed. In literary studies, his ideas have been most influential among scholars interested in the materiality of media in transition, particularly in the modernist period described in the second half of Discourse Networks when literature’s monopoly came to an end with media differentiation. His influence is less marked in Anglo-American studies of Romanticism, at least in part because the first half of Discourse Networks is primarily concerned with German literary texts. For modernists, though, as gramophones, film and typewriters have become major objects of study, Kittler’s work has become a key reference point. Literary scholars who have addressed the typewriter’s role in modernity through Kittler include Tim Armstrong and Pamela Thurschwell, while Sam Halliday has used the work to theorize an understanding of the relationship between sound technologies and modernism. Kittler’s analysis of the gramophone and digital signal processing has helped form the emerging field of sound studies through the work of Douglas Kahn and (contra Kittler) Jonathan Sterne, while film scholars such as Mary Ann Doane, Thomas Elsaesser and Vivian Sobchack have all drawn on Kittler’s approach.
Kittler never dropped his identification as a literary critic, but it is worth noting that his refusal of hermeneutics and determined deprioritization of the content of media in one sense sets his approach profoundly at odds with the interpretative thrust of much work in literary studies – work that maintains (at least) a residual interest in the investments, engagements and ideas of ‘so-called Man’. That said, in Discourse Networks and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kittler did offer literary criticism an influential method that allowed the content and form of texts, and technologies of writing and transmission, to be understood as necessarily and structurally implicated within one another. Indeed, Kittler’s repeated use of Nietzsche’s condensed and cryptic aphorism that ‘our writing tools are also working on our thoughts’ (Gramophone 200) has been the most influential aspect of his work for literary-critical readings of culture, precisely because it enables interpretations of the content and form of ‘texts’ to be linked back to the possibilities for thought itself that are structured and enabled by particular media channels. Even though Kittler himself resisted the broadly hermeneutic aims of many critics working in the literary critical tradition, the fact that even the most conservative readers now struggle to engage with modernist texts without acknowledging their frequently self-conscious positioning within a broader discourse network of gramophones, film cameras and typewriters is testament to Kittler’s often implicit but nevertheless vital influence.
While Kittler certainly argues for the subordination of literary studies to a more broadly understood media studies, he offers a radically different vision of media studies to that conventionally practised in Anglo-American universities. Eschewing the traditional concerns of communication, ideology and representation, Kittler’s arguments are marshalled against those who argue that it is the social that shapes media rather than the other way round. Kittler is not interested, for example, in the ideological effect of mass media; instead, he urges media studies to study media and not the content that fills their channels. He argues that by their nature media conceal themselves, and that by relying on concepts such as understanding and subjectivity we are victims of a systematic deception. He deploys the same criticism against cultural studies (both Raymond Williams and the Birmingham School get short shrift) and also against sociology. His redefinition of society as a data processing machine has indeed prompted Nicholas Gane to call for a posthuman sociology to replace traditional subject-centred approaches. Kittler can be aligned here with other neo-cybernetic discourses emanating from Germany, particularly that of Niklas Luhmann, another broadly conservative thinker who focused on the differentiation of self-referential social systems.
So, a Kittlerian media studies must lay its foundations on a material base, for information always has a material substrate, whether it is marks on paper, voltage variations on a copper wire, or the frequency of light in an optical cable. But Kittler also raises questions about the possible links between computers and ‘non-programmable systems’ such as humans, and this work resonates with other materialist approaches to technology such as those pursued by Rosi Braidotti, Sean Cubitt, Manuel DeLanda and Jussi Parikka. In its early theorization of digital media, Kittler’s radical hardware approach is often contrasted with Lev Manovich’s focus on software, a pernicious fallacy in Kittler’s opinion, and interface, which he dismisses as mere ‘eyewash’. His ideas also form one of the main poles in current work on media aesthetics. For Kittler’s proposal that aesthetics can be reduced to perception and that sense perception is the ‘dependent variable’ of a ‘compromise between engineers and sales people’ (Gramophone 2) determinedly opposes the primacy of aesthetics over technology. Mark Hansen, a contributor to this volume, is a leading figure in this field.
A persistent criticism of Kittler’s radical materialism is that it lacks the vocabulary to discuss media as constituted and constituting forms of power. But, in Germany, the hardcore technophilia that characterized Kittlerian media theory in the 1980s and 1990s has subsequently softened. The school of media archaeology, led by figures such as Wolfgang Ernst and Siegfried Zielinski, is pursuing a more strongly Foucault-inflected route and is gaining influence far beyond Germany.7 More contemporary work on cultural techniques (Kulturtechnik) also offers a broader view of the imbrication of human cultural practices with technologies.8 If Kittler’s preference for physics over biology had expelled questions of life and practice, the concept of Kulturtechnik has allowed them back in.
One of the most striking aspects of Kittler’s reception, however, is his strong influence outside the university. His work on the changes wrought by computing technologies found an ardent fan base outside the usual channels for media theory. Indeed, part of Kittler’s early appeal was his rebellious outsider status and enthusiastic adoption of tools that were alien to fusty professors. As we have seen, Kittler was a supporter of the Open Source and Free Software movements and their challenges to the technical hegemony of Microsoft et al. ‘Protected Mode’ and ‘There Is No Software’ gave theoretical succour to the exploits of many in the hacker community, and Kittler was a frequent guest at the Chaos Computer Club, probably the largest association of hackers in Europe. Similarly, glitch and net artists, in their bids to resist the networks of control that he describes, have found inspiration in Kittler’s work, while he himself found delight in the effects of phasing and the moiré patterns of the interplay of technical standards, as described in ‘Computer Graphics: A Semi-Technical Introduction’.
The chapters in this volume offer new analyses of and engagements with Kittler’s work from across the disciplines we have described. The first section of the volume begins by assessing and contextualizing Kittler’s turn to the gods, to ancient Greece, to music and to mathematics in his later work, and is bookended by two translations of essays by Kittler. The first, ‘The God of Ears’, is a relatively early piece that originally appeared in German in 1982 and was later included in Draculas Vermächtnis: Technische Schriften. It is typically eccentric and also methodologically exemplary in its treatment of Pink Floyd’s ‘Brain Damage’ as a ‘[discourse] on discourse channel conditions’, with Roger Waters’ song read as a performance of its own technological conditions of possibility – in this case advances in sound technology following the Second World War. It also foreshadows many of the themes developed in the late essay ‘Preparing the Arrival of the Gods’ (the second translation featured in the collection), in which Kittler argues that the rock stars of the 1960s were the first to be able to do with music what Homer and Sappho had been able to do with language, that is, to reinvoke the gods with media technology. These arguments are contextualized, glossed and critiqued by John Durham Peters’ vital assessment of Kittler’s later, unfinished project, Musik und Mathematik. Peters reveals to an Anglophone readership the extraordinary scope of this work in a way that both appreciates and keeps judicious distance from Kittler’s polymathic but eccentric scholarship; Peters also asks searching and acute questions of the politics implicated within Kittler’s Hellenism.
Stephen Sale further contextualizes the late turn by understanding Kittler’s mathematical engagements to have been in operation throughout his oeuvre and part of his extended engagement with Heidegger. Understanding Kittler through his place in German philosophy rather than French poststructuralism or Anglophone media theory, Sale’s chapter reads Kittler as reconceiving Heidegger’s work for a digital age, while opening up mathematics and the technical qualities of technology to the humanities. Sale shows how Kittler precisely and productively teases out an ambiguity in Heidegger’s engagement with the question concerning technology – one which opens up the possibilities for rendering visible and understanding ‘calculative Being’, but which needs Kittler’s thought to work through the implications. The chapters in this section are brought to a critical conclusion with Geoffrey Winthrop-Young’s reading of the figure of recursion, or ‘repetitive instances of self-processing that nonetheless result in something different’, through Kittler’s later work. The concept, used in mathematics and computer science, is frequently invoked by Kittler to account for the historical short circuit that he sees connecting the ancient Greeks to the present day. Winthrop-Young demonstrates the methodological importance of recursive historiography as Kittler moves away from his earlier ‘artifactual bias’ towards his work on cultural techniques in Musik und Mathematik. In contrast to younger media theorists such as Wolfgang Ernst and Markus Krajewski, however, Kittler uses the concept to structure his ‘grand occidental narrative’ and thereby presses it into the service of updating Heidegger’s Seinsgeschichte, or history of Being.
