Zeitkritische Medien (review)

Since media technologies cross time and space with increasing alacrity, the specific titular promise of this volume needs to be unpacked. In English, one calls time-critical an operation that copes with a great amount of data in short order, for instance by compression or encoding, and generally with the aid of computing. Computers provide tools for real-time control of the configuration and quantity of information displayed to a user, and designing flexible human-computer interfaces for monitoring applications. It is no coincidence that the phrase time-critical remains associated with military technology, with targeting and missiles, reconnaissance and surveillance, satellites and computers, and by extension with decision theory, planning, and management. This legacy—which clearly dominates the history of digital technology—has often been taken as proof of the adage that war is the father of all things in media technology. It can certainly be seen in the history of digital computing, arising between ballistics calculation, radar screens, and control devices. Whether or not this surmise holds for digital culture in general, it has led some critics to allege that the work of Friedrich Kittler and his students is marked by techno-determinism.

For this edited collection on time-critical media, Friedrich Kittler and Wolfgang Ernst act as series editors, and as a series title, their “Berlin Program” in media studies announces a rigorous methodology for the study of digital culture. Indeed, many of the 22 contributors to this voluminous book of almost 400 pages were trained in Kittler’s seminars, and share as their pivotal reference points a certain constellation of Foucault, Lacan, Shannon, Turing, Virilio, etc., that Kittler and others of his generation (one ought to mention Zielinski, Tholen, Theweleit, and others) forged into an alloy now being exported as “German Media Studies”—with programmatic claims that draw on cybernetics as well as on post-structuralist theory, on historiography as well as on literature.

However, it should be noted that this volume, Zeitkritische Medien, the fifth in this series, allows another reading of the titular claim. For the phrase time-critical in German has connotations of a critique, it marks a thoughtful distance from the Zeitgeist, an awareness that is informed both by a wider horizon than that of some contemporaries, and by a conceptual grasp that implies and gives rise to critical commentary. Although this is not the privileged meaning of the phrase for this book, it does indeed pervade it implicitly and even explicitly, as Wolfgang Ernst’s citations of computing pioneer Konrad Zuse for instance document. One way Kittler has distanced himself from what he sees as sociologisms and presentisms is by (re-)turning to ancient Greek thought on music and mathematics. Kittler is represented in this volume with a lecture on lightning and thunder, event and series, that turns from Foucault to Heidegger.

The collection is arranged into four sections: a prefatory section with texts by Axel Volmar and Wolfgang Ernst is followed by a section on intervals and reality, one on communication in and through time, and a final section on media culture as critique of ideology between the arts and the sciences. The cinematic work of Chris Marker, electronic music, and the visual art of Carsten Höller are discussed alongside the theories of Lacan, Bergson, and Wiener and technologies from bitmapping to RFID chips. If the book has a common denominator besides the emphasis on digital computing, it is that its chapters each take their cue from a facet of Kittler’s work, much of which has yet to be translated into English. Not all essays found in this edited collection succeed equally in their shared aim of explicating and executing a time-critical program in media studies, but taken together they are valuable and instructive.