Kittler, Friedrich A.

Anyone who wishes to study aesthetics today has to study media theory, period. A pronouncement by Prof. Dr. Friedrich A. Kittler (born in 1943) might run thus. Prof. Kittler began his academic career as a philologist and specialist in German area studies and has served as a tenured professor at the Institute of Aesthetics and Cultural Sciences in Berlin since the 1990's. He has both inspired and unsettled the humanistically oriented campus in decisive ways.

Strictly speaking, one would have to state that studying aesthetics requires one to orient oneself in a wide spectrum of theories that has developed through time and history, and if one wishes to expand into media theory one will come upon the field's mutually inimical scholarly and scientific approaches of constructivism, systems theory and post-structuralism soon enough. Well-prepared in this sense, someone who studies Friedrich Kittler's own development and his approach to science and scholarship will also come upon the progressions in scientific and scholarly jargon. Kittler himself owes them an interesting journalistic career, but his on-campus fame is more the result of his self-exclusion from the mainstream. With Kittler, one can read Nietzsche if Marx is not to one's taste, instead of Freud one is served Lacan, and one can confront the basic humanistic principles of the Geisteswissenschaften (translator's note: literally, "sciences of mind," i.e. humanities) with Heidegger.

Discourse Theory instead of Hermeneutics

In 1977, when Friedrich Kittler published the collection of papers Urszenen (i.e. primal scenes) together with Horst Turk, classical hermeneutics, with its predilection for ultimate truths, found itself facing competition. Analyses of discourse dispensed with interpretations and opened up a new way of approaching literature. They rejected the rigid focus on the text and began to investigate all the conditions of its development, transmission and significance in a wider context of knowledge. But one first has to master the jargon of discourse analysis: "It confronts history, this kingdom of opulent figures and meanings, these temples to works, authors and truths, with empty demarcation lines and the motionless figures of the tragic. For this reason, discourse analysis abjures the déjà-vu experiences of dialectic and the homelands of hermeneutics." There was much talk about a metaphysically homeless subject, psychoanalysis according to Lacan was required reading, subjectivity and its cabinets of mirrors, their onion-like layerings and transmutations, became the objects of literary research.

Aesthetics as Applied Physiology

Kittler's habilitation dissertation Aufschreibsysteme (i.e. discourse networks) followed in 1985, and from that time on the student public was confronted with a highly specialized scientific language that has come to be known as Kittler-Deutsch (i.e. Kittler-German). What sounded like the tiresome insider language of an overblown techno cult was in fact a calculated provocation of humanistic values. The "mind" was reduced to a result of "subroutines" that Kittler derived from the intersectioning of new techniques of data processing and experimental research on sensory perception current at the time. The discourse network of 1900 begins with Nietsche, whom Kittler – with sovereign humor - utilizes as a "word-maker," and at the same time as a portal figure for his new church, the theory of media. A primal scene is guaranteed to anyone who, after a strenuous session reading Nietzsche, suddenly imagines the Superman sitting at a ball-head electric typewriter.

In the Beginning Were the Media

The opening sentence of Kittler's book, Grammophon. Film. Typewriter., published in 1986, makes clear how media-theoretical and discourse-analytical approaches are to open up new perspectives in aesthetics: "Media determine our situation, which (whether in spite of this or because of it) deserves a description." But theoretical a prioris underlie this supposedly pure describing; corresponding media-theoretical dogmas follow the positing of a fundamentally antihumanistic standpoint. One core element of Kittler's media theory runs thus: "Technical communicative structures are prior to societal, cultural and epistemological structures." Human beings are not the masters of a humane world, one created by human beings: "We are the subjects of gadgets and instruments of mechanical data processing." But still subjects, and definitely not in the sense of servants.

Expansion and Demarcation

In Kittler's case, this final narcissistic wounding of the modern subject has resulted in a technically well-founded history of Being following in Heidegger's footsteps that promises interesting reading in the areas of media theory and discourse analysis, music history and the history of mathematics. But adherents of other faiths will understand nothing and at times the charm of novelty fades, too. Kittler's biographer, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, has formulated a Zip-file version of a nonetheless persistent strategy: "And exactly this is Kittler's project. Not "Aufklärung" in the sense of expansion of the limits of reason, but rather "Abklärung" in the sense of demarcating limits to reason, not the triumphal emergence of humanity into freedom, but our exit from the fullsome enjoyment of our taste for ourselves that assigns humanity a place to which it has no right."

Friedrich A. Kittler is a co-founder of Berlin's Helmholtz Center for Cultural Technology (Helmholtz-Zentrums für Kulturtechnik) where interdisciplinary research on the material and medial preconditions of culture is now being carried out. We may well expect productive results from this dialogue among various disciplines. But there is one particular phenomenon that calls for Aufklärung – clarification in the sense of resolution by means of reason - that Kittler merely demarcates – abklärt - as being the universal laboratory of technology, the media-technological precondition of the grammophone, film and typewriter; war - so that we human beings won't be assigned that place.

Literature Friedrich Kittler and Horst Turk: Urszenen. Literaturwissenschaft als Diskursanalyse und Diskurskritik. (i.e. primal scenes: literary studies as discourse analysis and critique) Suhrkamp 1977. Friedrich Kittler: Grammophon. Film. Typewriter. Brinkmann & Bose 1986. ISBN-13: 978-3922660170. English language translation: Grammophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford Univ. Press 1999. Friedrich Kittler: Aufschreibesysteme. 1800.1900. Wilhelm Fink Verlag 1995. ISBN-13: 978-3770528813. English-language translation: Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Stanford Univ. Press 1990. Friedrich Kittler, Thomas Macho, Sigrid Weigel: Zwischen Rauschen und Offenbarung. Zur Kultur und Mediengeschichte der Stimme (i.e. between noise and revelation. on the culture of the human voice and its history as a medium) Akademie Verlag 2002, ISBN-13: 978-3050035710 Geoffrey Winthrop-Young: Friedrich Kittler zur Einführung (i.e. an introduction to Friedrich Kittler), Junius Verlag 2005, ISBN-13: 978-3885066071 An English-language translation is in preparation (2009).