In his essay Thinking Colours and/or Machines Kittler hints at a key point in the emergence of modern European culture: the point at which ‘letters and numbers no longer coincide’. In this essay - first published in 2003 as Zahl und Ziffer - Kittler traces the split between numerals and numbers in sweeping historical detail. This is part of a much larger project, the aim of which is to think about technology, history and culture anew by considering the (...) ways in which ‘letters, numbers, images and tones’ have been differentiated and re-integrated by developing notation systems and media technologies. In this present essay, Kittler is concerned specifically with the question of number. His argument is that numbers and numerals have not always stood apart. In Old Hebrew and even nursery rhymes, for example, numbers are in fact words. This might seem like a banal observation, but for Kittler it is crucial as historically, mathematics proper only developed ‘in cultures in which numbers are present as numerals’, a development which entailed the transformation of numbers from signifiers into signifieds and which rested on the emergence of storage and transmission media that Kittler calls ‘the media of mathematics’. This connection between media and mathematics is explored through a wide range of philosophical sources: Plato, Philolaus, Aristotle and Aquinas, to name but a few. Kittler is fascinated by the inscription technologies that make mathematics possible, and which at the same time structure cultural forms as well as our bodily experience of them. As he puts it in a programmatic aside, ‘media studies only make sense’ if they focus on how ‘media make senses.’ Hence his focus on the Greek phonetic alphabet: for Kittler, its superiority has less to do with its ability to reproduce the spoken words of any language, than with the fact that at one point it was used to handle language, music, and mathematics - that is, one and the same set of signs was used to encode letters, tones and numbers. This, however, was not an abstract undertaking but developed in constant feedback with specific instruments or media, especially the lyre and the bow. It was here that fundamental concepts such as logoi were first developed that were subsequently distorted, misunderstood and deprived of their musico-technical origins by philosophers such as Aristotle. Kittler’s essay is thus also part of a larger cultural project, indebted in particular to Martin Heidegger, whose aim it is to ferret out the different, as yet unrevealed beginning of occidental culture. Moreover, while it was necessary for the evolution of modern mathematics that numbers receive a notation system of their own that will allow for ratios and decimals, among others, it is obvious that Kittler sees the computer as a return of universal alphabet that operates in constant feedback with a medium that shapes our senses: ‘In the Greek alphabet our senses were present - and thanks to Turing they are so once again.’. (shrink)

This paper addresses the exclusion of physical and technical media from questions of ontology. It is argued, first, that from Aristotle onwards ontology has dealt with the matter and form of things rather than the relations between things in time and space. Second, it is argued that because the Greeks did not distinguish between speech elements and alphabetic letters there has been a tendency for philosophy to neglect writing as its own technical medium. This paper traces these tendencies through a (...) range of philosophical sources: from Aquinas and Descartes to Fichte and Hegel. It is argued, by way of response, that it is only with Heidegger that a philosophical consciousness for technical media first arose, and that today the connections of mathematics and media, and of media and ontology are to be formulated in more precise terms. (shrink)

This early essay from German media theorist Friedrich Kittler examines a number of epistemic shifts occurring in late 18th-century Germany, anticipating in both methodology and content his groundbreaking 1985 work Aufschreibesysteme [ Discourse Networks]. Of primary concern to Kittler here is the invention of what he calls the ‘authorship-function’, product of a new constellation of medial, pedagogical and juridical forces. Alongside broader societal transformations, Kittler documents the emergence of the author in the late 18th century through (...) analyses of new pedagogical practices, changes in childhood alphabetization, and new erotic relationships between authors and their readers. (shrink)

Collection of essays from throughout the author's career.

The article is an attempt to subject a basic figure of historical analysis - the juxtaposition of event and series - to the changing alphanumerical writing systems of Ancient Greece, the Early Modern Age, and the contemporary digitial environment. It shows how the basic mathematical analysis of periodicity and frequency in the realm of sound is, first, a by-product of innovations in war technology and, second, radically changed by different ways in which numerical systems process data. With regard to the (...) development of Kittler’s thought the article is a somewhat idiosyncratic but nonetheless highly revealing and representative example of his recent switch from media-technological to more alphanumerically oriented analyses and the accompanying focus on the importance of Ancient Greece for the evolution of science. (shrink)

Friedrich Kittler combined the study of literature, cinema, technology, and philosophy in a manner sufficiently novel to be recognized as a new field of academic endeavor in his native Germany. "Media studies," as Kittler conceived it, meant reflecting on how books operate as films, poetry as computer science, and music as military equipment. This volume collects writings from all stages of the author's prolific career. Exemplary essays illustrate how matters of form and inscription make heterogeneous source material (...) interchangeable on the level of function—with far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the humanities and the "hard sciences." Rich in counterintuitive propositions, sly humor, and vast erudition, Kittler's work both challenges the assumptions of positivistic cultural history and exposes the over-abstraction and language games of philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida. The twenty-three pieces gathered here document the intellectual itinerary of one of the most original thinkers in recent times—sometimes baffling, often controversial, and always stimulating. (shrink)

The article attempts to locate the role of the computer in the long-standing conflict between the humanities on one side and the hard sciences and mathematics on the other. The state-sponsored promotion of philosophy and its subsequent demotion of scientific explanations provoked a scientific counter-attack, in the course of which psychophysical research subjected the human perception apparatus to rigorous investigations that all but mechanized the faculties of human understanding that were so central to the aspirations of philosophers. The latter retaliated (...) either by creating realms such as Husserl’s phenomenological ‘life-world’ that preceded, and hence were immune to, psychophysical explanations of sensation and perception, or by universalizing the faculty of understanding in such a way as to ensure the importance and competence of philosophy (e.g., in the work of the early Heidegger). This ongoing antagonism was also present in the ways in which the parties treated media technology: Philosophy tried to constrain media by conceptualizing them as obedient instruments tools at the beck and call of their users, whereas psychophysical research modeled the human mind on the very media that were indispensable for accessing this mind in the first place. The former saw media as ‘handy’ tools, the latter proceeded to make them the very measure of man. Alan Turing’s universal machine puts an end to this struggle: Not only does it blur the distinction between instructions and data, it converts the materials of the real world, the mechanisms of the mind, and the principal bastion of philosophy, natural languages, into numbers. (shrink)

Der Vortrag schlägt vor, nicht mehr den Menschen als letzte Referenz und vertrauten Maßstab der Architektur zu setzen, sondern Architekturen als Mediensysteme zu denken. Eine noch ungeschriebene Mediengeschichte der Architektur sollte daher auch und gerade in historischer Absicht nach formalen Entsprechungen zwischen Techniken des Entwerfens und solchen der Bauten suchen, in denen Praxis und Produkt zusammenfallen. The paper proposes the consideration of architecture(s) as a media system, instead of imposing man as its ultimate reference and known measure. A media history (...) of architecture – which remains to be written – should therefore search for formal correspondences between techniques of drafting and those of buildings, in which practice and product coincide. (shrink)

The paper proposes the consideration of architecture(s) as a media system, instead of imposing man as its ultimate reference and known measure. A media history of architecture – which remains to be written – should therefore search for formal correspondences between techniques of drafting and those of buildings, in which practice and product coincide.

By means of an initial examination of nineteenth century modern warfare, primarily in Italy and Germany, this article argues that, in the early twentieth century, a number of military models of attack were put in question, particularly during the First World War. Investigating the origins, development and deployment of elite troops throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by way of Heidegger, amongst others, the article attempts to reveal both the continuities and the changes relating to the military techniques and temporalities (...) of elite troop offensives. It reflects on the consequences of the use of elite troops from the early twentieth century onwards and the ensuing new military order for modern warfare and for the infantry in particular. The article concludes with a historically and philosophically informed discussion of the contemporary materialization and employment of United Nations ‘rapid deployment forces’ in Bosnia and elsewhere. (shrink)

This e-Special Issue of Theory, Culture & Society focuses on the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s impact across the field of humanities. By including Kittler’s own texts and other scholars’ articles that continue or comment on Kittler’s work, the editors have sought to address the core aspects of Kittler’s provocative insights into how media technologies underpin our cultural formations. The editorial introduction sets out key sections on technology, aesthetics, ontology and epistemology, identified as the significant (...) axes where Kittler opens up traditional notions of art and humanities. The sections also develop a common theme having to do with a media material understanding of aesthetics and philosophical determinations of the concept of media from Ancient Greeks to computational culture. (shrink)

The article situates Kittler’s view on the question of visual technology within his general media theory and critically examines Kittler’s optical paradigm with regard to questions of technology, discourse, strategy and style. Focus is given to the link between visual technology and the Renaissance period.

This article provides a short introduction to Friedrich Kittler’s 1980 essay ‘Authorship and Love’ by showing how it fits into the development of Kittler’s thought. The stark contrast between superficially similar scenes in Goethe’s Werther and Dante’s Divine Comedy, each of which is said to represent fundamentally different conceptualizations of authorship and love, is a revealing instance of Kittler's distinctive and polemical appropriation of French post-structuralism as well as of his subsequent switch from discourse analysis to (...) media theory. Ultimately, ‘Authorship and Love’ even points ahead to Kittler’s final work on music and mimesis in ancient Greece. (shrink)

The introduction provides a short outline of Kittler’s biographical background and briefly discusses the stages of his work: The initial discourse-analytical stage of the late 1970s that centered primarily on literary text; the media-theoretical stage of the 1980s and early 1990s that focused in particular on electric and electronic media; and a current stage dedicated to rewriting the origin of one the most basic cultural technologies: the alphanumeric notation system.

This article considers Friedrich Kittler’s deterministic media theory as both an appropriation and mutation of Michel Foucault’s archaeological method. Focusing on these two thinkers’ similar but divergent conceptions of the “death of man,” it will be argued that Kittler’s approach attempts to expunge archaeology of its last traces of Kantian transcendentalism by locating the causal agents of epistemic change within the domain of empirical experience, but in doing so, actually amplifies the anthropological vestiges that Foucault hoped to (...) eradicate. The result is an alluring but dogmatically positivist theory of mediatic causality that, in spite of its best efforts, can only reify, rather than dispel, the image of “so-called man.”. (shrink)

This article follows the recurrent theme in Friedrich Kittler’s 40 years of prolific academic writing, which is of course the media-related production of discourse. Five heuristic principles are identified in his work: enabling, reduction, historization, the abolishment of the ‘two cultures', and post-hermeneutics. The paper closes with criticism of the intrinsic limits of Kittler’s point of view.

With studies like Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich A. Kittler contributed significantly to transforming the history of media into a vital field of inquiry. This essay undertakes to more precisely characterize Kittler’s historiographical approach. When we look back on his early contributions to studies of the relationship between literature, madness and truth – among others, his doctoral dissertation on the Swiss poet and writer Conrad Ferdinand Meyer – what strikes us is the significance that (...) Jacques Lacan’s structuralist psychoanalysis had in shaping the orientation of Kittler’s later studies. His intensive engagement with Lacan galvanized Kittler’s concern with the question of sex and/or gender in the evolution of the humanities as well as his concern with the media history of the university. At the same time, Kittler’s reliance on Lacan led him to a kind of history that is interested above all in the internal logic of discourse. As we see, for instance, in Kittler’s anecdotic treatment of 19th-century physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, this historiography does not involve any original research in archives and/or museums. Rather, it builds upon existing historical accounts and focuses its analyses on the issue of symbolic structures. Instead of investigating the history of the material culture of science and technology, what is thereby ultimately reinforced is a philosophical idealism in which knowledge and paranoia become superimposed in and by means of an ‘original syntax’. (shrink)

The originality of Kittler is not his preference for technical media, but his insight in the linking of media with the technique of time axis manipulation. The most elementary experience in human existence is the irreversibility of the flow of time. Technology provides a means for channeling this irreversibility. Media are practices that use strategies of spatialization to enable one to manipulate the order of things that progress in time by transforming singular events in reproducible data. Human bodies cannot (...) be seen as media because they are subject to the linearity of time. Are media a priori functioning universals for Friedrich Kittler? The answer is: no. Media history has a beginning (writing) and an end (computer). (shrink)

El presente trabajo analiza críticamente la propuesta de Kittler de renovar las ciencias sociales y humanas mediante una reflexión orientada hacia los medios de comunicación. Para ello, se sitúa tal propuesta en el debate, impulsado por el giro medial en Filosofía de los Medios, acerca de la pertinencia (o no) del enfoque trascendentalista sobre los medios. En un primer momento, se presenta en términos generales el planteo kittleriano en cuanto enfoque trascendentalista. En un segundo momento, se reconstruye y analiza (...) la estrategia kittleriana consistente en eliminar la noción de sentido para concentrarse, en cambio, en la noción de información. (shrink)

Resumen El presente trabajo analiza críticamente la propuesta de Kittler de renovar las ciencias sociales y humanas mediante una reflexión orientada hacia los medios de comunicación. Para ello, se sitúa tal propuesta en el debate, impulsado por el giro medial en Filosofía de los Medios, acerca de la pertinencia del enfoque trascendentalista sobre los medios. En un primer momento, se presenta en términos generales el planteo kittleriano en cuanto enfoque trascendentalista. En un segundo momento, se reconstruye y analiza la (...) estrategia kittleriana consistente en eliminar la noción de sentido para concentrarse, en cambio, en la noción de información.This work critically analyzes Kittler's proposal to renew the social and human aspects through a media-oriented reflection. For this, such proposal is placed in the debate, driven by the medial turn in Media Philosophy, about the relevance of the transcendentalist approach to the media. At first, the Kittlerian approach is presented in general terms as a transcendentalist approach. In a second moment, the Kittlerian strategy consisting of eliminating the notion of meaning is reconstructed and analyzed to concentrate, instead, on the notion of information. (shrink)

This paper offers a brief introduction and interpretation of recent research on cultural techniques in German media studies. The analysis considers three sites of conceptual dislocations that have shaped the development and legacy of media research often associated with theorist Friedrich Kittler: first, the displacement of 1980s and 1990s Kittlerian media theory towards a more praxeological style of analysis in the early 2000s; second, the philological background that allowed the antiquated German appellation for agricultural engineering, Kulturtechniken, to migrate (...) into media and cultural studies; and third, the role of these conceptual dislocations in enriching media-genealogical inquiries into topics such as life, biopolitics, and practice. (shrink)

This is a major collection of essays examining the legacy of Friedrich Kittler in the turn towards Media Philosophy.

Kittler was among the first to invite Derrida to lectures in Germany, and to translate Derrida’s texts into German. Yet a cursory tally in his references does not always do justice to what Kittler’s media theory owes to deconstruction. Discourse Networks credits Derrida with a mere ‘rediscovery’ of grammatology, although Wellbery’s foreword labors mightily to identify the deconstructive traits in Kittler’s work. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter reduces The Post Card’s complex networks to an allegation that ‘voice remains the (...) other of typescripts' – as if Kittler had not in fact taken a much more subtle evaluation of hearing oneself speak from Derrida. What happens to the writability and citability of texts if they are sorted into such neat binary distinctions of logical or poetic orientation? What, to Kittler, is the quotability and readability of the body of work titled Derrida? (shrink)

This ‘technical memoir’ shares insider knowledge of a specific scholarly and scientific situation in the second half of the 1990s: how a group of students and researchers at Humboldt-University Berlin, together with their teacher, media historian Friedrich Kittler, combined historical questions with computer science. The discussions and projects developed in this circle constituted a scholarly practice which would be called today digital humanities.

For a long time, ‘culture’ appears only to be an effect of the power of discourses and media in Friedrich Kittler’s works. But in his Berlin lecture series on the cultural history of cultural studies, he discusses the historical formations in which a discrete science of culture could emerge. His perspective not only highlights the historical foundations but also the blind spots of cultural studies.

The paper discusses some of the key factors that shaped Friedrich Kittler’s anglophone reception. Four points are of special importance: the truncated appropriation of Kittler’s ‘middle period’ by American academics; the structural and ideological reasons for the failure of North American German Studies to capitalize on the growing interest in Kittler; the charges of technodeterminism; and Kittler’s difficult role in the debate over posthumanism.