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Forum: The Legacies of Friedrich Kittler

Introduction
Friedrich Kittler (*June 12, 1943, RochlitzOctober 18, 2011, Berlin) was among the
best known and most discussed German culture scholars and public intellectuals of
his generation. His work had, and still has, a major impact on scholarship in literary
and cultural studies throughout German-speaking Europe, the United States, and
elsewhere. In content and style, Kittler sought to redefine German studies.
To create a playful alternative to the single-authored review essay that readers of
the German Studies Review have come to expect here, we asked a handful of scholars
to reflect on the impact of Friedrich Kittler on their own work, and to speculate on
his works future relevance.
Carl Niekerk

The Ecstasy of the Object: Friedrich Kittler

and Rudolf Heinz Pathognostik
Friedrich Kittler started out as one of the first German readers, translators, and
interpreters of Jacques Lacan. The visceral allure and the pathos of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the mid- to late 1970s are difficult to comprehend nowadays, since we
have YouTube videos that show Lacans humorous persona, and, in Slavoj iek, a
veritable jester of Lacanianism. But set against the background of (West) Germanys
utter political and social desolation in the late 1970s, and against the collapse by
exhaustion of hermeneutic theories of interpretation, Lacans near impenetrable,
allusive writings, and the stunning anecdotes surrounding his life and practice,
exerted an extraordinary fascination.
Already in its Freudian variant, psychoanalysis was a resolutely ontological
discourse: it claimed to guarantee references for its signifiersbodily or psychic
symptoms for the genealogies and narratives it invented. Inversely, it proposed to
intervene in being through the curative power of language. Lacan narrowed the
path of analysis further by restricting subjective expression to the machinic play of a
symbolic order that was delimited by the intrusion of the imaginary, and by the abyss
of the real. For West German intellectuals who had just been subjected to the first successful deployment of surveillance systems that, like Lacan, treated human language
as symbolic and differential (the famous Rasterfahndung that Kittler later admired

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so much), and who in the early 1980s were overwhelmed by images of nuclear and
environmental destruction, the Lacanian sharpening provided both an explanation
for their misery and the desperate hope that beyond the realm of the symbolic and the
imaginaryin the interaction (not relation!) of bodies formerly known as sexthere
might be a realm of unspeakable freedom.
Friedrich Kittler had published, in 1977, the first fully Lacanian analysis of a literary oeuvre, and in the process touched upon the famously disturbed life of its author,
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Here, as in other early works, mental illness is understood
as a consequence of, and as a silent protest against, symbolic processes that escape
the grasp of the speaking subject. Mental illness indicates that formationBildungis
always also irreparable deformation in the service of a bourgeois society that demands
of its citizens anticipatory obedience to the symbolic fixity of sexual and social roles.
The success of the modern state consists in its ability to make its biological and its
ideological reproduction coincide by pairing the civil servant with the nurturing
mother, each supplementing the others lack. This interpretive paradigm dominates
Kittlers analyses of the romantic paradigm shift around 1800, culminating in the
first part of the Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900.
In hindsight it is clear how much this position owed not only to Lacan but also to
Michel Foucault, and Kittler later reflected at length on Foucaults influence, and on
what he perceived as his shortcomings. It is less clear what influence the Lacanian
Left had on Kittler. Flix Guattari, most prominently, had anticipated and radicalized
the diagnosis that the nuclear family is irredeemably pathogenic and a conduit of
state control; his strangely worded analyses had made LAnti-Oedipe (German 1974)
such an exotic and irresistible book. But how did Guattari make it into the discourse
of German Literaturwissenschaft to which Kittler still belonged?
A seminal figure in this transmission was Rudolf Heinz, a professor of philosophy
at the University of Dsseldorf and a practicing psychiatrist and analyst in nearby
Wuppertal. He lecturedin the evening, when the university was emptyon SchizoAnalysis and Pathognostik, and had, beyond his circle of students, a discernable
influence on the burgeoning punk scene in the Ratinger Hof, and on such fabled
advertising agencies like GGK. Jochen Hrisch, who belonged to the stellar group of
assistants that Herbert Anton had brought to Dsseldorfaside from Hrisch: HansGeorg Pott, Gerhard Kurz, and Manfred Frankwas a member of Heinzs circle in
Wuppertal and will have brought Pathognostik to Kittlers attention. A material trace
of this attention are Kittlers remarks on and in a novel, Echo (1990), by Heinzs wife
Heide and their daughter Melanie.
The importance of Rudolf Heinzs thought and practice for Kittlers own path
cannot be measured by quotations or any other standard metric of influence. To a
large extent this is due to the fact that Heinzs writings are infuriatingly convoluted,
self-obsessed, and so full of neologisms and puns that no one would dare to quote

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them. Open any of the Texte on Heinzs CultD page http://www.cultd.eu/heinz/,

and youll see what I mean. Nonetheless Heinzan exceedingly nice and accessible
manwas eager to proselytize for his Pathognostik circle, and had built a close relationship to Hrisch, who also had a group of promising students around him. Heinz
has shown Kittler a way out of the retrospective and academic analysis of classical
German literature and into the world of technology and myth.
What is Pathognostik? Heinzs fundamental claim is that not only and not primarily
linguistic and artistic products are accessible to psychoanalytical interpretation, but
all objects, in particular those that are man-made and seem to serve purely instrumental purposes. The full meaning of these technical objects is revealed only through
mental and psychosomatic illnesses, such as neuroses, psychoses, and phobias. The
gephyrophobic, for example, who is unable to cross a bridge, reveals that bridges are
violent contraptions to overcome spatial finitude; they force together what does not
belong together and thus create the abyss that the gephyrophobic refuses to cross.
The violence of the psychic inhibition is a direct indicator of the violence embodied in
the technological object. Technology for Heinz includes everything from the practice
of writing to the built environment. Objects in general, and technological objects in
particular, then, are not, as traditional psychoanalysis seems to suggest, projections
of the mind or the body, but introjections that impose themselves upon us with often
overwhelming alterity and violence. Heinz speaks of the Objektextase that the illness,
in a way, celebrates.
It is not difficult to name the various influences that coalesce in the pathognostic
project: phenomenology, antipsychiatry, surrealism, radical feminism, the critique of
ego-psychology, a critique of Critical Theory, the Spinozism of Macherey and Deleuze,
Heideggerianism, etc. Remarkable in hindsight is how much attention Heinz pays to
the pathogenic violence of the built environmentin response to the architectural
devastation of German cities in the late 1960s and 1970sand how little attention as
yet to the violence of media. But it must have been obvious to someone with Kittlers
background and impulses that the pathognostic analysis could be extended to technical media as well. Above all in Kittlers media and technology essays from around the
time of Grammophon Film Typewriter (Berlin, 1986) the pathognostic overtones are
discernible for those who know the underlying score.
There is a second strand in Heinzs thought and practice that also exerted influence on Kittlers thought, even though it came (back) to the fore only in his Alterswerk.
Heinz regarded Greek myth and its personnel as real. Athene, a frequent reference
in his work, was not a symbol or a fantasy, but the Greek way to name relations and
propertiesthe father-daughter relation, virginity, pitilessnessthat retain their
psychic and social relevance today. In contrast to Freud, Heinz insists on the perennial
power of mythical figures. They may be hidden behind technological structures, but
their powertheir cruelty, their beauty, their shamelessnessremains undiminished.

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The innocence of the Greek gods casts its light also on the meaning, or rather on the
meaninglessness, of sexual relations. Lacan had famously declared, and Heinz had
extensively argued, that sexual relations do not exist, and this has been one of Kittlers
most enduring and, in a way, most endearing themes. It runs through such early essays
as Autorschaft und Liebe (Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften.
Paderborn 1980, 142173) or Writing into the Wind, Bettina (GLYPH. Textual
Studies 7 [1980], 3269) and then became a central concern in the latest tomes.
Pathognostik, by the way, is still alive and, so to speak, kicking. After some
Lacan-style troubles with revisionists and heretics, Pathognostik.org reconstituted
itself this November 2014. I was gratified to notice that its charter, Rudolf Heinzs
text Pathognostische Prospektiven http://pathognostik.org/images/content/upload
/files/pathognostische_prospektiven.pdf is as fascinating and as unintelligible as his
lectures 35 years ago.
Helmut Muller-Sievers, University of Colorado, Boulder

Rewriting Romanticism, Again and Again

My first encounter with Friedrich Kittler took place in a second semester course
Introduction to Comparative Literature at the Freie Universitt Berlin. I have
returned, again and again, to the chapter of his Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 that
I gave a Referat on during this seminar. Kittlers reading of E.T.A. Hoffmanns The
Golden Pot subsequently lured me into his classes when he arrived at Humboldt
Universitt the next year, completely in line with his own assessment of the impact
of his work in a 2009 interview: Es hat die Leute geschockt, aber die meisten sind
bergelaufen, komischerweise (Interview with C. Weinberger, Zeitschrift fr Medienwissenschaft 1, 96). In that same interview he declared his reading of Hoffmann
one of his Musterinterpretationen: Ich bilde mir ein, den Goldnen Topf besser als
viele andere interpretiert zu haben (94). But he was also done with it. He claimed
to have no need to go back to any of his interpretations (96)of course also in his
defiance to the concept of a hermeneutic circle, his opposition to contemporary
hermeneutics. Nevertheless, the next generation of readers who have gone through
Kittlers training still have much to gain by revisiting the readings he identified, for
one reason or another, as representative for their times.
Reexamining romanticism led me deep into the field of romantic science, one
that Kittler somehow had largely avoided. But considered more closely, it offers new
perspectives on his central topics. The new science emerging around 1800 was intimately related to the force of electricity that shows up in Hoffmanns tale early on.
When the student Anselmus first meets his future love Serpentina she embodies the
correlation of snake/Eve as ur-scientist and affects the poor lad immediately with her
sparkling performance, reminiscent of common experiments conducted in lectures
on experimental physics (to touch the two poles of a battery in order to receive an

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electric jolt): Through all his limbs there went a shock like electricity; he quivered
in his inmost heart (Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus. Tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann.
Ed. and trans. Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight. Chicago, 1969, 18). This
electrifying shock was conducted not only through romantic blue-flower-like eyes,
it also came out of a scientific field new and en vogue at the timegalvanism. In
galvanisms close circuiting of electricity and physiology romantic physicist Johann
Wilhelm Ritter had detected something new. Experimenting with the brand-new
Voltaic pile and its continuous current Ritter sensed this shock ... to be much
more penetrating and inward than the previously known electrical shocks of the
same strength (Versuche und Bemerkungen ber den Galvanismus, Annalen der
Physik. Vol. 7.4 [1801]: 448). So the new flowing electricity was a true romantic force
and produced Innerlichkeit.
But romanticisms scientific foundations also reveal themselves in particular ways
through writing. According to Kittler, Anselmus, on his way to become a romantic
poet, only needed to learn how the voice that was originally Nature can be made
into a book (Discourse Networks. Stanford, 1992, 80), a transformation quite
practically in action in the sciences at the time. In Serpentinas fathers library the
student encounters different versions of books of nature and meets his decisive test,
when father Lindhorst leads him to the room where Bhagavad-Gitas masters await
us (Hoffmann 59): he is to duplicate certain works which are written in strange
characters. Pulling a leaf from a palm tree that turns out to be a roll of parchment
Lindhorst spreads it before Anselmus who was more than a little struck by these
singular intertwined characters (60).
This originary script, the mythic beginning of all writing (Discourse Networks
85) is a text coming directly from nature. Lindhorsts claim that the plant- and
animal-hieroglyphics ... constitute a text in Sanskrit gives the parchment in Kittlers
reading the same status as the handwritten text of Nostradamus in Faust, which is a
foreign-language text and a revelation of Nature (85). What Kittler neglects in this
comparison is the fact that Nostradamus wrote in Latin letters. So while the content
may have seemed foreign to some, every (European) copyist could have transcribed
the texts without much trouble. Anselmuss test piece, on the other hand, contained
twisted strokes of ... foreign characters that remained ciphers to all but the most
advanced readers. The oscillation between a foreign culture and a foreign Nature
(85) connects Hoffmanns Sanskrit characters much more to Egyptian hieroglyphs
(not deciphered until 1822) and simultaneously to hieroglyphs of nature that captivated Hoffmanns contemporaries.
Poet and mining engineer Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis,
described these incomprehensible but infinitely alluring signs, this Great Cipher
code of nature in the opening passage of his Die Lehrlinge zu Sais as these wunderliche Figuren ..., die zu jener groen Chiffernschrift zu gehren scheinen, die

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man berall, auf Flgeln, Eierschalen ... auf berhrten und gestrichenen Scheiben
von Pech und Glas ... erblickt (Schriften. Vol. 1. Stuttgart, 1960, 79). These ciphers
created by nature precede the educational structures of the Aufschreibesystem 1800
that Kittler had identified. Nature did not (only) make another write, sheas The
Woman (Discourse Networks 25)wrote herself.
This self-writing of nature was first encountered and described in a preromantic
laboratory in Gttingen. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg found in 1777 dust formations
on the surface of his electrophore, a state-of-the-art electrical device, that were soon
called after him Lichtenberg figures. They brought a new visual dimension to the
field of electrical research that was crucial for the scientific community as it aided
electricitys transformation from a curiosity into a technology. But beyond that,
Novalis, Ritter, and their fellow romantics found a different meaning in this magic
inscription. Especially since another scientist, Ernst F.F. Chladni, had produced
sound figures that were directly inspired by Lichtenbergs but shared with them
primarily the concept of a self-inscription of nonhuman nature, the understanding
of the hieroglyphic figures as a secret language of nature began to disseminate. The
perception of the figures as THE language of nature that humans just dont have the
senses to comprehendanymore, or not yetcan be found in many of the romantic
texts. These hieroglyphs allegedly imprinted through nature itself resemble pure
writing in a Derridean sense, where there doesnt exist any [known] linguistic sign
before writing (Of Grammatology. Baltimore, 1976, 14). Ritter though wanted to find,
or at least search for die Ur-oder Naturschrift auf elektrischem Wege (Fragmente
aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Physikers. Hanau, 1984, 269), and his attempts at
deciphering figures for that purpose resemble Anselmuss training quite closely. With
that in mind Kittlers analysis of the construct of the originary text, which has no
basis in the real (Discourse Networks 86) may need some revision as this originary
romantic text comes directly from nature and seems to have been constituted exactly
by the real.
Antje Pfannkuchen, Dickinson College

Digital Humanities and Aesthetic Autonomy:

The Afterlife of Friedrich Kittlers Discourse Networks
The cresting wave of digital humanities and the perceived threat that distant reading
holds for the autonomy of literature reminds us that media-driven interpretation
has been a question in German Studies for decades and the threat that works of art
would be lumped together with all other documents in the universe to be sorted,
filed, scanned, and searched loomed on the horizon in the early 1980s back when
everyone thought Foucaults discourse analysis was the final word. The death of
Friedrich Kittler reminded me of just how radical his Aufschreibesysteme seemed
when it first appeared. Discourse Networks, the American translation, continues to
reverberate through English departments. Published in 1990, it marks a unique and

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temporary convergence of theoretical approaches to literature, a moment when the

detached, macro approach of media studies overlapped happily with the micro level
tradition of close reading.
The radical potential of Kittlers Habilitationsschrift was that it seemed to erase
literatures claim to uniqueness. By setting novels equal to pedagogical manuals,
Kittler was extending Foucaults discourse analysis into art. Not only did Discourse
Networks seem to mediate between institutional power external to the literary text
and the textual interior, thereby allowing critics to engage in a Foucaultian form
of immanent analysis, Kittlers book also brought antagonist French theories into
a workable compromise. By foregrounding media, Kittler seemed also to mediate
between the work of arts internal organization and the pull of its historical environment, as well as between the epistemologies of Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida. One
of the key aspects of this convergence was the word, or concept discourse. Kittler,
as Wellbery explained (in his introduction to Discourse Networks. Stanford, 1990,
viixxxiii), accepted the Lacanian principle that the unconscious was the discourse
of the Other; however he understood discourse in Foucaults terms as modes
of language that were shaped by a network of pressures and resistance applied by
disciplinary techniques, technology, mediaall external forces that constituted the
subject and the literary text. If these overlapping connotations of the word discourse
allowed divergent theories to fuse, the eventual divergence of Kittlers and Wellberys
positions also entailed the separation of the term into two distinct meanings. Later
in his career, Kittler abandoned his investigation of interiority by concentrating
on media hardware as the determinant factor in modern consciousness, whereas
Wellbery continued inward to produce his remarkable Lacanian account of Goethes
lyric poetry. The later Kittler was often criticized for having a reductionist account
of culture, but few have questioned the Resuscitation of the Author in contemporary
close-bore interpretations of Goethe poetry.
The early works of Kittler presented a wonderful interpenetration between close
literary analysis and cultural history relying on Foucault. The subtle back and forth
in his reading of Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in Dichtung als Sozialisationspiel (Gttingen, 1978) and Discourse Networks masterful leaps from a few lines in
Faustto the entire Enlightenment held many of us in awe. But eventually this tension
tore apart, and Kittler wrote increasingly about social forces as largely determinate
of subjective processes such as literature. His essay There is no software (Stanford
Literature Review, 9.1, 1992, 8190) had the same paranoid reductionism of bad
old nineteenth-century Marxism, whereby individual expression is really already
determined behind the scene by the forces of industrialization, or in Kittlers more
updated form, machine language. The theoretical alliance Kittler had forged with
his first books fell apart with the technologically determinist work, and critics who
had once participated in the project of discourse analysis turned increasingly to close
readings that neglected disciplinary regimes.

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Already in his introduction to the English translation of Discourse Networks,

Wellbery distances himself from Kittlers insistence that literary meaning is an effect
of inscription techniques. A criticism oriented by the presuppositions of exteriority
and mediality has no place for creative human subjects, allows no room to psychology
and its internalizations, refuses to anchor itself in a notion of universal human being
(Wellbery, xiv). For Wellbery, the poet and the poem resist the disciplinary regimes
that structure subjects, whereas Kittler insists that there is no prospect of evading the
guidance of pedagogues. Describing the pedagogical techniques that underlie Wilhelm
Meisters Lehrjahre, Kittler provides the kind of axiomatic statement usually heard in a
Cold War film about space invaders: resistance is futile. Wellbery, by contrast, echoes
Adornos insistence on form as resistance when he claims that the singularity of the
lyric poem holds social control at bay. Kittlers early work promised, or threatened,
to undo the most sacred tenet of German aestheticsthe autonomy of art and the
cult of genius, while still allowing for detailed interpretation of the text. Foucaultian
discourse analysis was supposed to shift the divisions that organized literary history
to replace them with more fluid relations in which literary texts would be aligned
with external discourses. The proposition that literature at the end of the eighteenth
century stood apart from earlier writing was in large part predicated upon the assertion of literatures new autonomy from other social institutions.
One of the most important and perhaps unexpected effects of Friedrich Kittlers
medialization of literature has been the opening it provided to early modern literature.
With the devaluation of aesthetic categories in discourse analysis, early modern literature found an opportunity to assert itself. Kittlers posthermeneutic claim that fiction
operates as a means for the processing, storage and transmission of data (Wellbery
xiv) has inspired new scholarship on Baroque literature. The classical complaint
that seventeenth-century novels were nothing more than encyclopedic accumulations of well-worn tropes and narratives seemed less of an insult within Kittlers
model. Baroque scholars writing in Kittlers wake eagerly point out the irrelevance of
Kunstautonomie for an approach to literature which emphasizes its interpenetration
with early modern rhetoric, mathematics, and mnemonics, hoping thereby to have
moved seventeenth century texts a little to the forefront of the academic stage. They
see Kittlers interest in codes as an opportunity to revive interest in early modern
novels as a form of data processing. Baroque scholars lament Germanistiks medial
fixation on the Goethezeit: the fascination with the author, his work, its aesthetic and
the biographical rationalization of its greatness were complements to a hermeneutic
engagement with the work of art. If all fictional texts were understood in terms of
their media environment, then the hierarchy created by the aesthetics of autonomy
would be replaced by a periodization based on shifting epistemologies.
In describing the rise of romanticism, Kittler explained the demise of the Baroque
in the terms that are obviously the model for new readings of Baroque texts: Kittler

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writes: The Republic of Scholars is endless circulation, a discourse network without

producers or consumers, which simply heaves words around [...] German poetry thus
begins with the Faustian experiment of trying to insert Man in to the empty slots of
an obsolete discourse network (Discourse Networks 4).
Of course much of Kittlers later media theory deliberately flattens the hermeneutic
subjectivity he describes in Discourse Networks. Twentieth-century media operations
have many of the qualities Kittler initially ascribed to Baroque writing: an endless
recirculation of forms along channels driven by new technologies and the audiences
they create. Capitalist media, like literature, do not hold the claims of authentic
authorship in high regard. German classicism, on the other hand, argued against
baroque literature that its novels and compilations were polyhistorical accumulations
of material that was never sorted into an articulate composition. Novels by Lohenstein
or Ziegler ran on for hundreds of pages, piling incidents upon accidents, so that critics like Immanuel Kant could compare such writing to tape worms that simply grow
longer the more they digest. Data mining shares this Baroque preference for amassing
information without organizing it systematically. Furthermore, it replaces the arch of
classical plot development with the episodic sequencing of Baroque literature. The
arbitrary manner in which archives come into existence and the unclear circumstances under which collections are amassed all indicate that historical knowledge
generated by data mining does not produce an organic entity in the classical mode.
Searches through large-scale data corpuses generate information series that pile one
piece of information next to the other much like the Baroque polyhistorical novel.
While the radical promise of Kittlers discourse analysis to dissolve traditional
aesthetic terms has supported early modern scholarship, critics writing on Goethe
and Romanticism have slowly reasserted canonical aesthetic terms so that the specific
disciplinary operations described in Discourse Networks now all too often appear as
ordinary historical context outside the text, and not the omnipresent forces Kittler
and Foucault described. The institutional instinct to defend literature now treats
digital humanities as the newest version of the radical potential embodied in Kittlers
early work.
Daniel Purdy, Pennsylvania State University

Kittlers German Media Histories

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young seems quite right in noting that Friedrich Kittlers media
theory is specifically German; this Germanness is one important reason why Kittler should remain of continued interest to interdisciplinary German studies. This is
the case not only because Germany is where some of the best media theory is being
currently produced, nor simply because Kittler wrote on figures familiar to most
members of the GSA, but because Kittlers work arose against the background of
debates about technology, humanism, and individual as well as collective identity

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formation emergent in Germany over the past two hundred years (Winthrop-Young,
Kittler and the Media. Cambridge, UK, 2011, 23). In reacting to the arguments and
institutions with which he grew up, Kittler recast basic patterns of thought and gave
rise to new ones. Greece and Germany, the universities of Bildung and modern science, oral speech and the printed word, technocrats and poets, cinema and psychoanalysis, war and lovethese are just a few of Kittlers most basic concerns, and is this
not part of our home turf as Germanists? As Kittler often pointed out, the reworking
of habits of body and mind evidences recursive structuresrecursive procedures refer
back to themselves as part of their operation. At their best, Kittlers media histories
encourage reflection on how our material and mental habitsincluding those we
activate as scholarsare inextricably linked to the media we use. Kittler thereby also
prompts us to reconsider the German lineages of our theoretical and institutional
formations and their suitability for addressing issues that call out for understanding.
The style of media-discourse analysis pioneered by Kittler identifies cultural technologies that epitomize the media systems of given historical periods. Recent studies
in this vein that speak broadly to Germanists include Bernard Siegert on the postal
system (Relays. Stanford, 1999), Cornelia Vismann on files (Files. Stanford, 2008),
Markus Krajewski on the servant/server (Der Diener. Frankfurt, 2010), and Helmut
Mller-Sievers on kinematics (The Cylinder. Berkeley, 2010). As with Kittler, these
studies attend to material, medial operations and they de-emphasize the subject as any
sort of prime historical mover. These works are often animated by a tension between
a Foucault-inspired emphasis on media-technological breaks (1800/1900/2000) and
narratives of recursive continuity between historical media systems. In the case of
the latter, it has become increasingly common to show how related medial functions
operate across different epochs. Krajewskis comparison of the early modern servant
and the twenty-first-century server is a good example of this, and Kittlers late work
likewise links computing and rock music to ancient Greek mathematics and religious
ritual. But even with an idea of recursive continuity, these media histories nonetheless
tend to foreground moments of game-changing transformation rather than noninnovative repetition, despite the fact that most historical uses of media are utterly
precedented. After a while, stories about the emergence of the new get repetitive
(though this is clearly not a problem affecting media studies alone). It is not difficult
to imagine alternative narratives that foreground untimely or anachronistic medial
practices: reading Latin sermons in the nineteenth century rather than German
poetry; sending handwritten letters rather than emails; listening to the radio while
having access to the digital cloud. At their best, though, Kittler and his students have
cleared ground for a variety of medial historiographies (the title of an influential
recent Graduiertenkolleg based in Weimar, Erfurt, and Jena), for they have made
the question of how cultural technologies influence meaning-making indispensible
for any present or future Kulturwissenschaft.
I personally have learned a great deal from Kittlers attention to educational

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institutions. Conceiving of the university as a media system is a constant in his work,

from Aufschreibesysteme to his late Berlin Lectures. Kittlers account of the rise of the
ethos of Bildung around 1800 continues to inspire scholars to rethink this epoch in
terms of medial practices, even if they frequently disagree with him (Andrew Pipers
2009 Dreaming in Books [Chicago] and Chad Wellmons forthcoming Organizing
Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research
University [Baltimore] are good examples of this). Kittlers more recent essays on the
university also remain worthwhile, not least because he situates the current and future
symbiosis of traditional disciplines with computing (i.e. the digital humanities)
within a larger media-historical vista. Kittler often worked by provocatively redescribing familiar narratives essential to the self-understanding of academic elites, and the
rise of the (German) research university is one such story. And especially in his later
career, Kittler himself did not shy away from the role of the masterful lecturer, a clear
relic of the nineteenth century. This role included the performance of his tobacco
addictionagain, more a nineteenth- than a twenty-first-century passion, if Hegels
snuff habits at the lectern are any guide. The book version of his 2002 Philosophien
der Literatur lectures (Berlin, 2012) retain Kittlers aside to his listeners that each
presentation will include a smoke break. Kittlers late lectures survey vast expanses
of cultural history, redescribing the rise of Western thought and technology on his
terms and thereby performing a kind of Hegelian Wiederholung oder Rekursion des
gesamten systematischen Weges (Philosophien der Literatur. Berlin, 2012, 185)
that leads to Kittlers own current position. His academic positionality is thereby both
pro- and anti-institutionalat times Kittler reinhabits traditional institutional spaces
and affirms the inherent value of Wissenschaft, but he also often plays the role of the
anarchic provocateur able to see through the pretentions of outmoded disciplinary
constructs. This tension inheres in his late work on Ancient Greece, which consists
of equal bits mandarin Philhellenism and a sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll take on
ancient art and religion.
Kittlers work on media temporalities will also likely remain relevant in coming
decades. His idea of time-axis manipulation (the notion that media alter the temporal
frames in which information is transmitted by spatially storing that information) has
become a basic concept of media studies, and it lays the groundwork for a vision of
history as a plurality of temporal frameworks engendered by cultural technologies.
The idea that media manifest their own unique temporalities, or Eigenzeiten, has
been taken up recently across a range of research programs (the current DFGSchwerpunktprogramm on sthetische Eigenzeiten is one example). Medial
macro- and micro-temporalities are also a primary concern of Kittlers successor
in Berlin, Wolfgang Ernst. Despite disagreeing on the possibility of media history,
the later Kittler and Ernst both deliberately ground their own theories of time and
technology in Heideggers thought, including both pre- and post-Kehre versions.
Kittler and Ernst overlap here to a certain extent with Paul Ricoeur and Reinhart

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Koselleck, who both return to Heidegger to develop a philosophy of historical time

in opposition to idealist philosophies of history. Though Kosellecks anthropological
orientation is anathema to Kittlers and Ernsts posthumanism, all three articulate
visions of layered, nonlinear historical temporalities, reserving a prominent place for
repetition and/or recursion. A comparative genealogy of these theories of historical
time(s) in post-1945, conservative-leaning German academic culture would be a
fascinating undertaking. One major question would be how to parse each figures
engagement with Heidegger, not least due to continued revelations about the role of
anti-Semitism in his world-historical vision. Whether the prominence of Heideggers
terminology in Kittlers work and in German media theory more generally will prove
a limitation or an advantage for its continued reception is an open question.
Sean Franzel, University of Missouri, Columbia

Superior Intelligence: On Friedrich Kittlers Hardware

Friedrich Kittlers uncompromising antihumanist stance was as mesmerizing as his
terse oracular pronouncements that drew as much on his vast Old European erudition as on his always up-to-date knowledge of the latest developments in computer
technology. His fundamental claim was that the technical media and the concomitant
discourse networks determine how one speaks and thinks and what can be spoken
and thought at a particular historical moment. For this reason, the hardware at the
heart of our apparatuses and dispositifs needed to be brought into focus, for it had
been systematically obscured by ever more layers of software. At the level of writing the
same phenomenon could be observed in a reading practice that had been prevalent
since around 1800, and which was aimed at meaning at the cost of forgetting the
letter. Kittlers remedy against hermeneutics was attentiveness to the materialities
of communication including its enabling discursive conditions.
The handbook in which this program was outlined in detail and with great historical
depth, was Discourse Networks 1800/1900, which many of us instinctively recognized
as one of those rare books that can change entire academic disciplines and open new
fields of inquiry. The work was paradigmatic not only because it was at the forefront
of what was to become German media theory, but also because Kittler was capable of
combining minute analysescall it a materialism from the ground upwith sweeping
vistas of distinctive discursive regimes and their techno-historical underpinnings.
To us, he was a German Foucault of sorts, who unflinchingly took the pioneering
genealogies of his French predecessor to their logical conclusion.
In 1994, Kittler participated in a Stanford conference about the two cultures. He
took the hard line, which is to say that he rejected the difference between the humanities and the sciences in principle. With barely concealed excitement he described the
evolving capabilities of chess-playing machines that were rapidly approaching those of
the best players. He predicted that before long computers would outplay any human

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opponents. In fact, less than two years later Deep Blue became the first machine to
win a game against the reigning world champion. Gary Kasparov went on to win the
match. Yet his victory, widely seen as a victory for humanity, was short-lived. A heavily
upgraded Deep Blue beat him in the rematch the following year.
Unlike Kittler, his respondent at the Stanford conference, Terry Winograd, an
eminent computer scientist, was not prepared to level the difference between man
and machine and, by extension, between the two cultures as unceremoniously as Kittler. After all, he insisted, the game may look the same, but the inside of the players
is different: the grandmaster relies on his intuition, whereas the machine evaluates
an enormous number of possible constellations before making its move. Predictably,
Kittler was not impressed with this argument and countered with a Turing question
of sorts: was it not the case that this difference was irrelevant to the task at hand
namely, winning the game?
Perhaps the disagreement between Kittler and Winograd was just a misunderstanding. When Winograd compared the grandmasters intuition to the computational
raw power of the machine, he most likely resorted to this manner of speaking in
order to avoid connectionist language. Connectionism, with its notions of parallel
distributed processing and neural networks had become a formidable opponent of his
own brand of Artificial Intelligence, which, by contrast, refused to consider thought
as an inexplicable emergent property of complex and therefore fuzzy occurrences.
Winograd insisted on the necessity to specify the processa demand that was at
least not incompatible with Kittlers views. Yet for Kittler, talk of the grandmasters
intuition recalled such fraught terms as genius and creativity, including the
corresponding constructs of interiority that were irrelevant for playing the game.
Another victory for the machines, then? Or better yet, for apparatuses and
dispositifs, the actual objects of Kittlers inquiries? Foucault had presented history
as a sequence of specific intertwinements of knowledge and power under changing
discursive conditions, which he analyzed with a historians eye for the telling detail
and a philosophers knack for conceptual generalization. Kittlers book became an
indispensible manual, precisely because it managed to stick more closely with the
phenomena of writing and literature, and analyze them by means of a reading practice
that, in the wake of Derrida and Lacan, was attentive to the materiality of the letter.
Most often, Kittler zeroed in on the intricacies of particular passages and eventually
combined these meticulous readings into panoramas that laid bare the operations
of the corresponding discourse networks and their representational regimes. In
simultaneously bypassing the hermeneutic unit of the work at the micro- and the
macro-level of the text and reading across a wide range of literary and nonliterary
genres, Kittler outflanked and infuriated not only traditional literary scholars, but also
intellectual historians and the occasional cultural anthropologist. Moreover, many of
his readings, fragmentary as they were, left an indelible impression. Could one ever

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read of Fausts translation troubles again without immediately thinking of Kittlers

stunning reading? And what about the toast Goethe sent to Hegel? Or Morgensterns
poetry? It is this exuberance, the love of the letter and the wordphilologiathat
makes Kittler unique among media theorists. His insistence on the necessity of reading and of practicing a mode of reading that does not succumb to the hermeneutic
desire for the sensus plenior is informed by his insight that the semantic dimension of
any signifying process is ultimately but an effect of medial conditions and hardware.
If nothing else, Kittler taught us to read technology in a way that integrated and
superseded the beginnings of media theory in Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan. For him, unlike his predecessors, technologies could not be reduced to extensions of man. On the contrary, it seemed rather obvious that complex technologies
could not be kept under control and instead began to follow their own trajectories.
They could not be captured in anthropomorphic terms as reconditionings or retrofittings of our senses; rather, they capture their subjects.
The fact that many of Kittlers claims seem dated today and that he embarked
on new projects by the end of the 1990s, seemingly leaving media theory behind, is
largely a function of his success. That media determine our situation has become a
widely accepted presupposition in the contemporary humanities, especially in the
field of literary theory.
But only Kittler could have fully appreciated the irony of the belated revelation in
2012 that a programming bug had most likely helped Deep Blue win the match against
Kasparov. The bug, which supposedly had been fixed by a crew of IBM computer
engineers, acted up on the forty-fourth move of the first game; unable to select a
move, writes Nate Silver, [Deep Blue] had defaulted to the last-resort fail-safe in
which it picked a play completely at random (The Signal and the Noise. New York,
2012, 288). This did not matter much, or so it seemed, since it was a late move in
a game that was as good as lost. Kasparov, however, was rattled by the unexpected
move, which he attributed to superior intelligence.
Peter Gilgen, Cornell University

Writing after Kittler

In 1992 Friedrich Kittler, in There is no Software (Stanford Literature Review, 9.1,
1992, 8190), argued that by then executable code had been written so deeply into
the hardware of contemporary computing and thereby absorbed into the workings of
silicon chips that the concept of software no longer appeared viable. We may continue
to use our computers to write words and sentences, but we no longer know what
writing really does. As most of our writing, he concluded, now resides in microscopic
circuitry and no longer in perceivable spaces and times, we in fact do not write at all
anymore even when we populate our screens with a myriad of letters.
Written during what from todays perspectives represents the infancy of our ever-

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expanding culture of computing, Kittlers obituary on writing was and remainsas

most of his workprovocative and outrageous. Though many love to hate what digital
devices have done to written communication, it is undeniable that the development
of microprocessors has led to an unprecedented explosion of textual culture over
the last two decades, with e-mail defining new standards for the speed of mediated
exchange and with text messaging serving as a virtual lifeline for an entire generation. And even though the proliferation of smart phone apps over the last five years
indeed has effectively embedded software operations into the materiality of hardware
configurations, electronic writing today is so much part of our culture of 24/7 availability that mobile typers frequently risk their lives as they navigate urban spaces
while thumbing words into their virtual keyboards. Is writing really as dead as Kittler
suggested? Have executable code and hardware really taken over to such a degree
that human writing is nothing other than a holographic illusion produced by largely
invisible media systemsan effect, rather than the content, of advanced engineering?
A philosopher rather than a mere theorist of media, Kittlers modus operandi
was to drill through historical surfaces so as to expose the material frameworkthe
hardwareof cultural expressions and practices. Whereas the kind of literary scholarship Kittler himself produced as a student and young scholar believed in the relative
autonomy of meaning from matter and software from hardware, his mature work since
the mid-1980sKittlers branch of media philosophyidentified shifting materialities
of communication as the true engines of cultural transformation. Media, for him,
did not simply mediate messages oras McLuhan wanted to have toextend the
human senses into the world. Media instead allowed humans to understand, read,
and conceptualize their senses in the first place; media provided the very condition
for the possibility of defining what it meant to be human. Media philosophys task
was no less than to expose the categorical blind spots of cultural criticism: to cut
through humanisms delusion of expressive freedom and to insist on technological
mediation as the only portal to what earlier generations had called the essence of
the human. The future of cultural studies, in Kittlers perspective, was in the hand
of engineers rather than hermeneuticians, hardware developers rather than software
coding experts. Which, from the viewpoint of media philosophy, was perhaps just
another way of saying that it had no future at all. That it was as outmoded and dead
as writing itself.
Kittlers media philosophy abounded with bold reversals of perspective and apodictic interventions. Each sentence was passed on to the reader like a cylinder of
dynamite, meant to blast asunder cherished interpretative habits, analytical commonplaces, and theoretical routines. His prose was at once transparent and of challenging
complexity, accessible and of mind-blowing density. No serious reader of Kittlers
work could leave his texts behind without being astonished about the originality of
Kittlers thought. Expect the Unexpected could have served as the motto for each

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and every of his essays and books. And yet, while Kittleralways en enfant terrible
at heartwas never shy to confront given tropes and conventions of scholarly work,
his mode of media philosophy often left little room and reason for other scholars to
carry out further work. As Kittlers work uncovered hidden causalities, foundations,
grounds, and frameworks, his sparkling intellect and ingenuity tended to consume
entire fields of study at once. The lasting strength of Kittlers media philosophy was
in offering unsettling answers to self-imposed and often counterintuitive queries. It
was not in asking open questions others could pick up and convert into productive
research agendas.
What in the wake of Kittlers media philosophy has come to be known as German
media theory describes a style of theorizing that, however perceptive and thoughtful
in its findings, often shows little tolerance for the idiosyncrasies of symbolic material
and the ambivalences of historical practices. It prefers to think through the technological structure of hardware configuration, to think of technology itself as a mode of
or analogy to thought, rather than to engage and map the messiness of the archives.
I cannot entirely resist to attribute todays somewhat dire state of German media
studies in North America to this particular effort of philosophizing modern media.
While the study of film and film history has invigorated German Studies in North
America since the 1980s and has moved the entire field into new directions, littleif
any work at allis done today that bears any resemblance to the scholarship of American scholars such as Alexander Galloway, Lisa Gitelman, Matthew Kirschenbaum,
Katherine Hayles, and Jonathan Sterne, that is, scholars whose theoretically inflected
work on the history of animated images, textual documents, digital storage devices,
electronic writing, and sound compression combines intricate textual analyses with
profound insights about the material frameworks of cultural production, dissemination, reception, and storage. It is as if German Studies in North America, stunned by
the gravity of German media philosophy, largely lacks what it might take to explore
media history and archeology without wanting to reduce each phenomenon to the
operations of technology itself. Kittler himself can and should not be faulted for the
remarkable failure of North American German Studies to be in productive conversations with some of the best scholarship produced by media historians and theorists
today. But any continued effort to emulate Kittlers media philosophy today tends to
isolate scholarship on German media culture rather than to connect it to innovative
trends in other quarters of the academyand this at a time, as Kittler would not
dispute, when little matters more than research on the interface of culture, media,
and technology. There is plenty of space to keep writing after Kittlereven if much
of that writing might be done for us by the invisible work of algorithms, circuitry, and
silicon behind the windows of our screens.
Lutz Koepnick, Vanderbilt University