Technologies of Writing: Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler

Perhaps we could begin with your book Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Why the new edition? What changes have you made to the book and how do they reflect on your general project for literary studies?

I didn’t change a lot in terms of the book’s basic approach to literature and literary studies as technologies of writing. I made a few more references to politics and extra-Germanic literatures. The third edition was more the desire of the publisher. Nonetheless, I am happy that the book, which virtually had me blacklisted, is suddenly finding readers after having caused such a scandal ten years ago in literature departments—the book almost cost me my position in Freiburg. It’s strange for me how a complete outsider-book can become such an insider-book, in the sense that the whole world—and I don’t just mean universities—is talking about the materiality of communication. I’m fascinated when I see exhibitions like the ones in Marbach or Paris, dealing with the writer’s tools-of-trade, his writing material. These exhibitions take Nietzsche’s comment on his typewriter as their point of departure: “Our writing materials help write our thoughts.” It wasn’t exactly the most common practice ten years ago to place that thought at the center of a Nietzsche interpretation. Apparently the computer has had such a widespread effect that everyone is aware now that so-called normal writing, although not quite over, has definitely ceased to represent the state of the art. That’s what is suddenly being reflected upon in the literary sciences. The book was, so to speak, ahead of its time, because at night after I had finished writing, I used to pick up the soldering iron and build circuits. I knew what was in store. I understood what an electric circuit was because I was making a lot of electronic music back then. And now that it’s become clear world-wide where the trend is heading, the book has gained its actuality.

The book’s popularity could be said to correspond to poststructuralism’s rise within the academy. You yourself came to the Humboldt in 1993. Like poststructuralism, cultural studies is on everyone’s lips these days. What do you understand by cultural studies?

The concept of “cultural studies” is not as new as it may seem. There are, in fact, five such institutes for Kulturwissenschaften in Germany; the one at the Humboldt has existed some thirty years. That was, of course, something else back then. I don’t know what it was like. It’s not our job to rehash and work through the past. We’re not interested in deconstructing ourselves ad infinitum like some of the human sciences have been forced to do in recent years. We understand ourselves here in the institute as an attempt to pose cultural-theoretical questions in the face of technology.

Does cultural studies still think of itself as a continuation of the sociophilologic based sciences, if one considers their division into disciplines such as English, French, and German literatures, and so forth, to be obsolete?

Yes and no. I think we all understand that the movement away from the philologic basis can create monstrous problems. For example, I did a recent seminar, “Aesthetic of the Colonies,” and it worked for the students as well as myself because we could automatically expect a certain philologic competency: everyone could speak the languages and had, for the most part, read the books. There has always been in the philologic disciplines a firm, that means mega-technologic, basis for work. In cultural studies every canon drifts away. There is no referential model, no standard, and no curriculum. You’re essentially free to do what you want, and you have to hope that the students also have the philologic basis which you yourself bring as a transition figure.

How does the study today of culture differentiate itself from, say, the critical theory practiced by the sociologists of the Frankfurt School in the sixties...