Literary Studies +/- Literature: Friedrich A. Kittler's Media Histories

Friedrich A. Kittler is Professor for Aesthetics and Media History at the Institute for Kunstund Kulturwissenschaften (Art and Cultural Studies) at the Wilhelm von Humboldt University, Berlin. He is the author of numerous books and essays on literary criticism and media theory, including Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (1985), which has been translated as Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1990). Kittler, who studied literature in Freiburg, has been influential since the late seventies in bringing a blend of poststructuralist thought, summed up in the writings of Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan, to German universities and thereby displacing a Gadamer-informed hermeneutics with a discourse analytical approach in literary studies. His earliest books, such as Der Traum und die Rede (1977) or Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel (1979), in which literature is treated as a “site at which discourses intersect and converge upon each other, without entering into the unity of theory or meaning,” ¹ establish the pattern for his later work on computer technology. As the title of a volume edited by Kittler, Die Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften (1980), illustrates, his concern is to restore to the humanities, and especially to the philologies, a theoretical basis in a culture in which literature can be seen as one function among many of communication technologies. Thus Kittler applies the term “Aufschreibesystem,” a term coined by the Geisteskranker jurist Daniel Paul Schreber and which literally means “system of writing down” or “notation system,” to a “network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to transmit, record and process relevant data.” ² Technologies, such as the printing press, and institutions, such as literature and the university, give rise to and provide, as Kittler writes, the preconditions for literary studies in the age of Goethe. Yet despite being itself a product of print technologies, literary studies neglect the aspect of literature summed up as data processing, privileging instead a hermeneutical meaning or a sociological reflection on the conditions of production. The rise of the technological recording media around 1900 marks a caesura within literary studies. “As long as no film and no phonograph, no computer and no microprocessor had broken the immemorial monopoly of textual data processing, literary criticism could well ignore the very materiality of its objects. The thought of poets and the poetry of thinkers remain favorite topics of Geistesgeschichte, bourgeois ideology and industrial revolution favorite topics of literary sociology—but as for the technical status of books themselves, idealism and materialism are equally blind.” ³ As the sequel to Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Kittler’s Grammophon Film Typewriter examines three technologies arising at the turn of the century that precipitate networks whose function no longer corresponds to the nineteenth-century positivism of “man,” history, or Geist. Kittler thus situates literary studies in the context of the alphanumeric code within which technology today operates when he writes that “all literature stands since the turn of the century under the mandate of regulating its relationship to the technological recording media.” ⁴

Friedrich Kittler’s concept of media can be seen to address the need within the humanities to develop an adequate conceptual vocabulary for dealing with technology and the way it is embedded in human experience. ⁵ At a time when the concept of the “‘cultural’ has established itself as something like a master-trope in the humanities, preying on and displacing the notion of the ‘textual’ as used in literary criticism and the ‘social’ as in social history,” ⁶ Kittler’s concept of media seeks to account for the technological transformation of knowledge in an electronic culture. Whereas in North America, “culture” provides the critical differences necessary for the motor of theory, in Germany the technological “media” supply theory’s point of departure. A discipline which takes “culture” as its object of analysis could be prone, by virtue of its lack of foundation in either a philologic or sociologic tradition, to go in the direction of a turn-of-the-century Kulturkritik, which would leave the two hundred year-old “national” paradigm within literature departments intact in the form of the “cultural.” The concept of media as applied in German...