Friedrich Kittler

Nesse artigo, discuto a não-definição clara de mídia (e sua indistinção em relação às materialidade) em Kittler e Gumbrecht como uma opção para manter aberta as possibilidades de definirem ad hoc o que é "mídia" em seus trabalhos, o que permitiu aos Estudos de Mídia saltar as fronteiras acadêmicas. A definição mais próxima de mídia como toda materialidade que armazena, processa e transmite dados/informação é mais operacional (metodológica) do que epistemológica (teórica). Minha "hint" é que esse entendimento de mídia não é particularmente uma construção, mas um entendimento tácito entre alguns autores a partir de sua experiência vivida (ou seja, a "rede discursiva" que possibilitou a emergência dos Estudos de Mídia em primeiro lugar). Nessa conceituação recursiva, mídia e os Estudos de Mídia são tanto sintoma quanto produto de uma situação específica - as reformas universitárias nos países de língua alemã desde a década de 1980.

Este ensayo presenta una discusión y análisis sobre el caso Cybersyn, desde una perspectiva de arqueología de medios, poniendo particular atención en los desarrollos teóricos y metodológicos planteados por los académicos Friedrich Kittler y Wolfgang Ernst. En consecuencia, la discusión se centrará en aspectos no-visuales del proyecto en cuestión, dejando de lado las miradas «iconográficas» que hasta ahora han abordado este caso, primeramente, desde las fotografías que documentan su sala de operaciones. De modo alternativo, propongo mover nuestra atención hacia la red de télex y el sistema de procesamiento que sostuvieron a Cybersyn, para buscar en ellos, en los sistemas de símbolos que por allí circularon, la materialización del saber técnico que caracterizaría al caso, esbozando así, potencialmente, su alcance cultural.

Téma:Analýza rozdílnosti divácké recepce filmového díla a umění
Abstract:
Nejen v diskurzech z oblastí: filmových věd a teorií pohyblivých obrazů, ale rovněž prakticky v každé otázce spjaté s el. médii, se až příliš často setkáváme s tendencí porovnávat média současná s těmi, jež jim předcházela.
Tato komparativní metoda a analýza médií dává vzniknout genealogiím a příběhům, které pro nás nadále utváří relativně pevný svazek zásadních vědeckých či uměleckých objevů a dějinných událostí ze světa médií.

Studying fanfiction in a field called “fan studies” conveys the assumption that we study it primarily to learn about fans. But what of fanfiction from a textual perspective—its distinctive recombinatory, iterative, and unstable textual effects and pleasures? How can it be defined and understood from literary historical and theoretical perspectives, or as a distinctive literary mode in its own right? Though it does seem refer to a recognizable kind of text, “fanfiction” resists a single definition but rather indicates an often playful relation nonetheless ordered by power dynamics—between source and text, writer and text, law, profit, platform or code and text, etc. Arguing through cephalopods and theorists influential in assemblage and network theory (Deleuze, Kittler), this chapter claims that “fanfiction” challenges models of unitary authorship and artistic hierarchies derived from Kant even as it relies on these models both conceptually and historically for the conditions of its existence

Saggio introduttivo alla traduzione (edita nello stesso numero di Kaiak) di un brano di Kittler, tratto da GFT. Il contributo vuole contestualizzare l'estratto kittleriano, chiarificando il quadro teorico dal quale proviene, commentandolo e suggerendone gli sviluppi.

This article was originally presented as a paper at the Technovisuality Conference at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2008. I assume it was among the first sustained discussions of archival art forms as part of an expanded practice I named "performative archives". It is viewed as a strategic gesture in relation to collections or archives proper. It may create an "archive" or it may critizise the "archival", and in a sense denaturalize archives as a political expression of power and knowledge. Michel Foucault's, Friedrich Kittler's and Hal Foster's notions of the archival was crucial from the first draft of the paper. After 2008 this field exploded into a variety of archival approaches; lots of scholars and curators talk about "performative archiving" or "performing the archive" etc. Today I would have written this article differently, but it bears witness to my early engagements with the archive in a more general way after my dissertation on Ken Jacobs' archival cinema (my dissertation was submitted in 2007 and published in 2010 as "The Still/Moving Image").

In Transmitted Wounds, Amit Pinchevski explores the ways media technology and logic shape the social life of trauma both clinically and culturally. Bringing media theory to bear on trauma theory, Pinchevski reveals the technical operations that inform the conception and experience of traumatic impact and memory. He offers a bold thesis about the deep association of media and trauma: media bear witness to the human failure to bear witness, making the traumatic technologically transmissible and reproducible.

Taking up a number of case studies--the radio broadcasts of the Eichmann trial; the videotaping of Holocaust testimonies; recent psychiatric debates about trauma through media following the 9/11 attacks; current controversy surrounding drone operators' post-trauma; and digital platforms of algorithmic-holographic witnessing and virtual reality exposure therapy for PTSD--Pinchevski demonstrates how the technological mediation of trauma feeds into the traumatic condition itself. The result is a novel understanding of media as constituting the material conditions for trauma to appear as something that cannot be fully approached and yet somehow must be.

While drawing on contemporary materialist media theory, especially the work of Friedrich Kittler and his followers, Pinchevski goes beyond the anti-humanistic tendency characterizing the materialist approach, discovering media as bearing out the human vulnerability epitomized in trauma, and finding therein a basis for moral concern in the face of violence and atrocity. Transmitted Wounds unfolds the ethical and political stakes involved in the technological transmission of mental wounds across clinical, literary, and cultural contexts.

The purpose is to clarify the concept of the new media in the media theory context, presented by the selected authors (Marshall McLuhan, Régis Debray, Vilém Flusser, Friedrich Kittler and Lev Manovich). The article provides an overview of the main positions concerning the understanding of the concept of media in its connection with technology, culture and communication processes in a broad (as a mediator) and a specialized (as communicational media) meaning. Article studies out the reasons to consider the new media as a particular mediasphere and to explore it as a specific subject of scientific interest. The article analyzes the key characteristics of the new media and its fundamental differences from previous types of media.
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Мета статті – прояснити зміст поняття "нові медіа" у контексті теорії медіа, що представлена обраними авторами (Маршалл Маклюен, Режі Дебре, Вілем Флюсер, Фрідріх Кітлер та Лев Манович). Запропоновано огляд основних позицій у розумінні поняття медіа в його зв'язку з технікою, культурою, комунікаційними процесами в широкому (як посередник) та спеціалізованому (як комунікативні медіа) сенсах. З'ясовано підстави розглядати нові медіа як окрему медіасферу і досліджувати їх як специфічний предмет наукового інтересу. Розглянуто основні характеристики нових медіа та їх принципові відмінності від попередніх видів медіа.
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Цель – прояснить содержание понятия "новые медиа" в контексте теории медиа, представленной выбранными авторами (Маршалл Маклюэн, Режи Дебрэ, Вилем Флюссер, Фридрих Киттлер и Лев Манович). В статье рассмотрены концепции, где медиа анализируются в их связи с техникой, культурой, коммуникационными процессами как в широком (посредник), так и специализированном (коммуникационные медиа) смыслах. Выяснены основания рассматривать новые медиа как отдельную медиасферу и исследовать как специфический предмет научного интереса. Рассмотрены основные характеристики новых медиа и их принципиальные отличия от предшествующих видов медиа.

Durch die Ausbreitung von Schreibmaschine und Computer verliert das handschriftliche Schreiben seine Bedeutung nicht. Mit dem Verlust seiner Selbstverständlichkeit treten besondere Qualitäten erst hervor.
Wie genau ändert sich die Rolle des Schreibens mit der Hand, seitdem technische Schreibmedien zur Verfügung stehen? Warum wird Handschrift nach wie vor so stark mit der Präsenz des Autors assoziiert? Wie beeinflusst die Entscheidung für oder gegen das Schreiben von Hand die Produktion von Literatur? Diese Fragen untersucht der Band aus medien- und literaturwissenschaftlicher sowie wissensgeschichtlicher Perspektive. Orientierten sich Untersuchungen bisher an der Abfolge der dominierenden Medien, nimmt dieser Band den Medienwandel unter Beachtung von Interferenzen in den Blick, die sich aus der Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen ergeben.

This essay is dated--computer graphics has come a long way since 1994. However the basic argument remains pertinent: it is that art history can contribute to the understanding of computer graphics, because the software that makes computer graphics possible is influenced by the history of art. Palettes, blurring routines, perspective choices, sharpness settings, and many other components of image software come from the history of art, either explicitly (as in "mosaic filters") or at several removes (as in the perspectival decisions made in video game design). Even now, art historians are only just beginning to take the history of computer graphics on board as an integral part of the discipline.

This collection of essays explores the current proliferation of the concept of the archive. The concept of the archive has expanded into areas beyond the classical archive to art, philosophy, and new textual and media practices. Simultaneously, these new practices both resist and transform the archival impulse, perhaps creating what one could call a new “anarchival” condition.

The contributions approach the topic from three different but related angles: 1. New Conceptions, 2. New Archival Practices, and 3. New Challenges. In the first section Knut Ove Eliassen (one of the best on MF ever written) and Wolfgang Ernst lays the ground for some of the new conceptions of the archive at stake in this collection.
The next section, “New Archival Practices” is devoted to practices outside the archive proper which relate to or reflect upon the contemporary archival condition. Susanne Østby Sæther explores emerging forms of Archival Art practices, and Terje Rasmussen analyses how the interplay between digital media and memory construction affects the smallest units in society, the family and the individual. Here, the mobile phone as an archive and a recorder is crucial.
In the last section, “New Challenges” Kjetil Jacobsen and Alexander Galloway pose a series of critical reflections as well as speculative conclusions regarding the future of the archive. In the article “Anarchival Society” Jacobsen argues that we have moved from a historical society to an archival society, or as he calls it (after Wolfgang Ernst), “anarchival society”, and Alexander Galloway from New York University addresses the Internet as a new kind of archive which determines every aspect of social life.
In the epilogue, Trond Lundemo sums it all up in an reflection upon the organizational principles and algorithms structuring what is accessible and stored in the archives and on the Internet, tends to hide themselves.

Il testo analizza la figura della Gertrude manzoniana, nel transito dal Fermo
e Lucia alle due edizioni de I promessi sposi, alla luce della sintomatologia
isterica elaborata in ambito medico — specialmente francese — a partire dal
Settecento. Attraverso un serrato confronto fra il romanzo e alcune delle sue
più celebri trascrizioni iconografiche, come i due ritratti di Gertrude realizzati da
Giuseppe Molteni nel 1847 e da Mosè Bianchi nel 1867, esso rivisita una figura
complessa come quella della monaca di Monza con un duplice obbiettivo.
Da un lato viene individuato un corpus di fonti, sinora complessivamente
trascurato dalla critica, che illumina da una prospettiva inedita la costruzione
manzoniana della psicologia della monaca. Dall’altro, il testo analizza l'isteria
di Gertrude alla luce della teoria lacaniana dei quattro discorsi, rileggendo I
promessi sposi come un caso di ‘liquidazione del discorso del Padrone’ per via
di romanzo (Friedrich Kittler).

What should we do about defunct or ‘aging new media’ artworks by a now deceased artist when there is no specific manual or artist’s statement to consult? Taking Nam June Paik’s dysfunctional multi-media artwork <The More, the Better>(1988) as an ‘exemplary symptom,’ this paper seeks to offer an answer.

Focusing on the relationship between ‘Time’, ‘Nature’ and ‘Technology’ in Paik’s oeuvre in terms of ‘entropy,’ we will see how they serve to illuminate contemporary discussions of preservation and conservation of so-called ‘time-based media’ as ‘performance.’ To that end, we will critically engage with the humanist take on Paik’s artworks as well as confusion about seemingly interchangeable concepts such as ‘entropy,’ ‘indeterminacy,’ and ‘chance.’

By re-reading Paik’s crucial statements, writings, artworks including performances such as “Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan,” <Confused Rain>, and his 1997 performance in a wheelchair at the Walker Art Center, we will see how <The More, the Better> as an ‘obsolete new media’ showcases what I call ‘parallax contemporaneity.’

In so doing, we will provide a necessary, if not exhaustive corrective to the extant scholarship on Nam June Paik’s art, and by extension, suggestive stimulants to contemporary reflections on new media, post-medium/media, and media archeology.

The information age has been marked by complex advancements in the technologies of social management.  Many of these advancements have been discussed in recent political theory.  However, a thorough engagement with their mechanism and historical resonance remains necessary in order to substantiate such discussion.  In this dissertation, I situate and analyze the increasingly informatic, molecular, and distributed technologies of power characteristic of "control societies" on a thoroughly substantive level.  My research substantiates a number of claims made in recent political theory regarding control societies, and indicates that only a politics of positive feedback is adequate to the mechanisms of such societies.

ion are also simultaneous and comparable with many cutting edge scientific quests that took place around the turn of the century. Physics, chemistry, experimental psychology, and other sciences were all similarly engaged in the deconstruction of the inanimate, biological and psychological realms into simple, further indivisible elements. Thus, it can be easily established that the gradual move toward abstraction in art echoes the same zeitgeist, argued Lev Manovich convincingly. Just as physicists, chemists, biologists and psychologists strived to break down reality to its basic constituents, so did the artists of the time. They too attempted to articulate the basic elements that constituted their field of inquiry Using motion as his means of investigation, Hans Richter challenged the cinematic experience by applying musical principles to it. Arguably it is the ‘music’ created by the transition of its elements that lends Rhythmus 21 its geometrical abstract quality. (Of course simil...

This paper investigates the relationship between sex and knowledge and its manifestation in the development of Artificial Intelligence. With the concept of the extimate uncanny I analyse the status of the robotic companion as emblematic of the Lacanian non-existent sexual relation. Through a commentary on the 2014 film Ex–Machina, I discuss the staging of symbolic castration, sexuation and the uncanny and suggest that this conceptual reading of the sex-bot is an essential starting point to a more complex understanding of the contemporary significance of Artificial Intelligence and sexualised automatons in the social bond. Via my reading, the figure of the sex-bot is understood to be the vanishing mediator which articulates the onto-epistemological nexus between psychoanalysis and philosophy.

Technē/Technology is the up-to-date critical volume on the theories, philosophies, and debates on technology and their productivity for the fields of film and media studies. Comprehensive as well as innovative, it is not organised around a single thesis - except the assertion that technique is a major concern for film and media scholars, whether this is approached in terms of philosophy, techno-aesthetics, semiotics, apparatus theory, (new) film history, media archaeology, the industry or the sensory / cognitive experiences. Technē/Technology deliberately includes contributions by film and media experts working in very different ways on a wide range of technology-related issues. A major questions to be addressed in this book is how the new philosophies (of technology) created in relation to major technological transformations - such as the new philosophies of (media) technology formulated by Benjamin, Heidegger, McLuhan, Kittler, or Stiegler - could or did contribute in turn to the modification of film theory and some of its key concepts.

Hier handelt es sich um die Entwurfsfassung für einen Beitrag in: "Soziologische Denkschulen. Zur Archäologie der bundesrepublikanischen Soziologie", herausgegeben von Joachim Fischer und Stephan Moebius. Es ist die Darstellung der Rezeption der französischen Kulturtheorie bzw. des französischen Poststrukturalismus in der bundesdeutschen Soziologie in den 70er und 80er Jahren. Dazu werden nicht nur entsprechende Denkfiguren identifiziert, sondern auch spezifische Milieus und die sich dort abspielenden Szenen untersucht.

Abstract: The theoretical paradigms of media theories, which discuss the relationship among human, technology and medium has been shifting during the past 50 years. They changed their focus from the decisive and essential role of techniques to the perspective of media ontology. This article is a review on the media theories of three representative scholars-McLuhan, Kittler and Krämer-from the ontological perspective of narrative theory. McLuhan’s media theory emphasizes the importance of technology in communication. In this mechanized process, the subjectivity of human thus disappear and media becomes the extension of human. While with the notion of “materialities of communication” and the autonomy in technology, Kittler believes that communication channel is only materialistic techniques. He analyzed medium from the perspective of historical context, power and discourse, as well as the structure of communication. Krämer used the "messenger model" metaphor to explain the mediating function of medium as mediality. Machine is the result of the mediating function of symbols or the process of “formalization”. As such, she constructs a theoretical paradigm on a macro level, which neither distinguishes technology and human, nor highlights the power of techniques. These theoretical explorations have important inspiring significance for the current issue "techniques-society", such as ethics, values and the relationship among human, technology and machines in the era of artificial intelligence. (This paper is originally published in Chinese)

The purpose of this article is to interrogate Marx’s analysis of the circulation of capital through the ‘new materialist’ communications and media theory of Friedrich Kittler. It explores the connections between Marx’s commodity fetish and how Kittler posits human beings as components of an information system alongside technologies and institutions. The article ask whether a ‘non-human’ Marxist theory is possible, i.e. if it is possible to remove the human being from its privileged position in Marx’s political economy. Specifically the paper argues that human beings are programmable human matter that serves to aid the communication of value through capital’s circuit. This stance necessitates adopting the point of view of capital and the fetish, bracketing the social and moving away from categories such as labour, production and class consciousness in favour of the value form, circulation and programmability.

Meine Magisterarbeit, geschrieben 2001 am Peter Szondi-Institut für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berlin. Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Gert Mattenklott.

Die Arbeit suchte in "Ulysses" von James Joyce nach Spuren der (um 1900) neuen Medien: Film (Bild), Phonograph (Stimme), Schreibmaschine (Schrift) (ja, das ist die Kittler-Trias). Inspiriert von einem Zitat von Marshall McLuhan.

After Friedrich Kittler, I consider the distribution of romantic love's codification via various forms of media, or 'discourse machine'. Since the seventeenth century, literature and statistical calculation have been engaged in mitigating and mobilising love's prelude as chance encounter that is rather a technique of probability. I trace this tendency into the present, where probability, typical to games of chance, is replaced by the accelerating possibilities of gamified digital calculation.

In his lectures on Optical Media, Friedrich Kittler sought to trace the history of image production, storage, and transmission through the lens of media technologies, from linear perspective to computer graphics. One of his opening observations is that 'we knew nothing about our own senses until media provided models and metaphors'.¹ To illustrate, he points to Plato's deployment of a wax tablet as a metaphor for 'the immortal and self-storing soul', alluding to the model of memory that Socrates presents in the Theaetetus, whereby sense perceptions are impressed into an ekmageion, or 'imprint receiving device' in the mind (191c-d). The Greek concept of mind (psychê) as a storage device for indexically recorded impressions becomes conceivable, Kittler implies, only through the medium of written philosophy itself. Platonic ontology is made possible by means of the very technology about which he expresses so much ambivalence; in Kittler's words: 'Under the guise of a metaphor that was not just a metaphor [. .. ] the new media technology that gave rise to the soul was eventually seen as the vanishing point of this newly invented soul.' But what was this 'new media technology'? Kittler refers to writing as 'the new medium of Attic democracy', and to 'the new Ionic vowel alphabet', 'the wax slate', and the tabula rasa as the media that brought...

Die Frage nach der Originalität der Technik verbindet Georges Canguilhem mit Friedrich Kittler, die beide die Notwendigkeit sehen, diese Originalität auf den Organismus bzw. den Körper und seine Sinne zu beziehen. In ihren Antworten auf diese Frage gewinnen beide Denker eine Relevanz für die Gegenwart. Für Canguilhem bleibt der vorrangige Maschinentypus seiner Zeit auf den Organismus bezogen, weil die Maschine ohne den Organismus auskommt, ihn aber in ihrer Konstruktion zum Vorbild hat. Laut Kittler wissen wir nichts über unseren Körper, ohne über Medien verfügen, die als Modelle fungieren und dieses Wissen formieren. Den Horizont beider Ansätze jedoch bildet die Ahnung, dass zu ihrer Zeit etwas an dieser begrifflich-konzeptuellen Konstellation an ein Ende zu kommen beginnt: bei Canguilhem der Gedanke, dass Maschinen Maschinen hervorbringen könnten und bei Kittler der Ansatz, die Maschine ohne den Menschen zu denken.

The question of the originality of technology ties Georges Canguilhem to Friedrich Kittler, and both see the necessity to relate this originality to the organism and the body. The answers found by both thinkers gain relevance for the present. For Canguilhem, the predominant contemporary type of machine is still based on the organism, though the machine doesn’t need the organism, but is based on its model. Referring to Kittler, we don’t know our bodies without knowing media which act as models and constitute this knowledge. Nonetheless, the horizon of both approaches is the anticipation that something of this conceptual constellation comes to an end: for Canguilhem, the thought that machines may create machines, for Kittler the desire to think machines without the human.

The question of what constitutes media has received little attention in Marxism and where it does, the concept is an empty abstraction. While Marxists have extensively theorized the concentration of mass media ownership, and analyzed mass media content as ideology or propaganda, critical discussions of what a medium is in the capitalist mode of production have been mostly lacking. That is to say, Marxism does not have a media ontology. Media is therefore a critical gap in Marx’s political economy. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap by asking what is a medium in the capitalist mode of production?, answering it with a value-form theory of media and a concept of “capital’s media” that takes the circulation of capital as its starting point. The dissertation goes beyond Marxism’s mass media myopia and moves the concept of media towards logistics and infrastructure.

The contributions this dissertation makes are to (1) develop a theory and category of capital’s media as a phenomenon of the circulation process of capital; (2) stake out an approach to investigate media phenomenon outside of pure political economy and cultural studies approaches; and in the process (3) contribute towards a rehabilitation of Marx’s analysis of circulation. To make these contributions this dissertation relies on a theoretical framework that is primarily based on Marx’s value theory, but enriched with concepts from Canadian-German media theory (Harold A. Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Wolfgang Ernst, and Hartmut Winkler) and Paul Virilio’s dromology. This dissertation has two components to its methodology: an original “circulationist” reading of Marx’s political economy that is developed from the heterodox Neue Marx-Lektüre (New Marx Reading), and a set of empirical case studies that includes the shipping container and intermodal transportation, distribution centers, and point-of-sale and payment systems. Positing a category of capital’s media, this dissertation concludes that nothing by its very nature is a medium but instead that things function as media when they appear in that category. More specifically, a thing, such as a container ship or distribution center, appears in the category of capital’s media when they function within and for the circulation process.

This chapter integrates Michel Foucault’s historiographic approach with media history. After describing how Foucault’s work has traditionally been used and understood by media historians, four areas of work are used as examples for establishing a more holistic account of the value of Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical methods of historical enquiry. They are (1) the work of German media theorist Friedrich Kittler, (2) the Stanford School of the philoso- phy of science, (3) cultural studies work in governmentality studies, and (4) Giorgio Agamben’s application of the Foucauldian concept apparatus. After providing eight questions for orienting Foucauldian historical investigation, the chapter explains how this leads to understanding the interrelated dimensions of power, knowledge, and subjectification as they intersect with the historical establishment of media forms, institutions, and technologies.