Silicon Sociology, or, Two Kings on Hegel's Throne? Kittler, Luhmann, and the Posthuman Merger of German Media Theory

Introduction

In 1999 Rudolf Maresch and Niels Werber co-edited a Suhrkamp volume entitled Kommunikation Medien Macht ("Communication Media Power") that aspired to reclaim the abandoned peaks of German philosophy. In their letter of invitation, the editors solicited contributions that would respond to "a philosophical, intellectual, creative and political challenge of the first order" by helping to merge the poststructuralist media theory of Friedrich Kittler with the autopoietic systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. With its focus on communication, media, and power as "the building blocks of the emerging global society," this Übertheory would be able to occupy "the place of the king that has been vacant since Hegel's death." ¹ Maresch and Werber argued that the strength of this royal hybrid would result from the partners' ability to correct each other's blind spots: Kittler would supply the technologically informed focus on the materialities of communication excluded by Luhmann, while Luhmann would provide a compatible understanding of communication, that is, a complementary analysis of how understanding, the construction of meaning, and social evolution emerge from the processing of communicative events, all of which is of little importance to Kittler. In short, the imperial theory would be made up of a combination of Kittlerian hardware and Luhmannian software.

What is surprising--not to mention entertaining--is not only the retrieval of the lost belief in grand theory narratives, or the desire to introduce a double-headed alpha-male into an acephalous theory habitat, but also the evident gap between motion and act. Neither the contributors nor the editors really seem to believe in the feasibility of the project. The papers either stick to one of the theorists and disregard the other (and those that do discuss both tend to clearly favor one over the other), or both are abandoned and the authors happily present their own, homegrown, theories. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that given certain basic incompatibilities, some of which will be discussed below, the merger was doomed from the outset. But then why write about it, or why try to initiate it in the first place? Because in matters of theory--just as in matters of love and business--ambitious failure is a great deal more interesting and revealing than moderate success; and what makes this particular failure so intriguing is that it grows out of an exemplary move within the space of posthuman theorizing. Following N. Katherine Hayles, "posthuman" does not refer to the absence of humans but to a historically specific construction that recently emerged from the changing constellation of media, technology, and culture. As Hayles argues, the 'posthuman' is a point of view characterized by a set of (highly debatable) assumptions including the privileging of informational pattern over material instantiation, the debunking of consciousness "as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow," and, most importantly, the redesign of the "human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines." ²

No doubt Luhmann and Kittler, whose theories are related to the project of rethinking the evolving human/machine and communication/consciousness boundaries, would share many of Hayles's objections, above all her critique of persisting notions of possessive individualism in the instrumentalist treatment of increasingly gadget-endowed bodies. But it is also clear that Kittler and Luhmann are not only posthuman thinkers in Hayles's sense of the word, they are clearly and unapologetically posthumanist: Luhmann for removing humans from their traditional place at the center of the analysis of social systems and replacing them with the autopoietic reproduction of communication, and Kittler for his claim that "so-called Man [der sogenannte Mensch] is not determined by attributes which philosophers confer on or suggest to people in...