Kittler Introduction

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Kittler E-Special Introduction
Friedrich Kittler:
E-Special Introduction
Theory, Culture & Society

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DOI: 10.1177/0263276414567836
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Jussi Parikka
Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton)
Paul Feigelfeld
Leuphana University
Abstract
This e-Special Issue of Theory, Culture & Society focuses on the German media theorist
Friedrich Kittlers (19432011) impact across the field of humanities. By including
Kittlers own texts and other scholars articles that continue or comment on Kittlers
work, the editors have sought to address the core aspects of Kittlers provocative
insights into how media technologies underpin our cultural formations. The editorial
introduction sets out key sections on technology, aesthetics, ontology and epistemology, identified as the significant axes where Kittler opens up traditional notions of
art and humanities. The sections also develop a common theme having to do with a
media material understanding of aesthetics and philosophical determinations of the
concept of media from Ancient Greeks to computational culture.
Keywords
aesthetics, code, cultural techniques, German media theory, Humboldt University,
mathematics, media theory, post-human, software
Introduction: Kittlers Media Exorcism

The Kittler-eect: a certain kind of a watershed in terms of Friedrich
Kittlers impact on media studies as a provocateur, historian and a theorist
who denounced software (while writing over 100,000 lines of code himself), is seen as a techno-determinist (and yet constantly focused on institutions and politics) and, despite dismissals, remains one of the most
exciting and odd theorists, not only in media studies but more broadly
speaking a technologically contextualized humanities eld. The Kittlereect is a phrasing coined by Georey Winthrop-Young contextualizing
Kittlers inuence in terms of conceptualizations of media. It is not meant
to sound heroic though, but also something to trigger critical evaluations
of the themes he brought as part of the agenda: media, technology, materiality and historical methods that were not just media history. And it is
Corresponding author: Jussi Parikka. Email: j.parikka@soton.ac.uk

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
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also about feedback loops back into the many neighbouring disciplines,
where it established new possibilities of diagonal thinking. The fact that
philosophy, literature, etc., now naturally take media into account is in no
small part down to Kittler. Winthrop-Young also points out that the
imitative followers of Kittler are less interesting than his theoretical challenge, whether one agrees with him or not: the emergence of a radical
historical agenda for media studies, an upgrading of French poststructuralism for the media age and also a renewed interest in the so-called
Canadian media theory of the likes of McLuhan and Innis (WinthropYoung, 2011: 1456). Nietzsches typewriter took part in the forming of
his thought as he typed. McLuhans media prophecies became prosthetic.
For Kittler, ultimately, object-orientation (a programming paradigm he
abhorred) meant the necessary escalation towards our being subjects of
media technologies. In addition, it is worthwhile to talk about the Kittleraect. Not just the impact of Kittler on the agenda of what we speak about
but the intensity with which it made its way and is being talked about: the
commitment to delirious delight as a path to higher wisdom that John
Durham Peters (2010: 16) talks about, the outright rejection and despising
of Kittlers style by others, the close attachment of the close followers of
Kittler to the amount of mythos created around him. This mythos includes
various phrases, one-liners and summarizations. Avital Ronell, during her
eulogy for Kittler at the memorial in Treptower Park, Berlin (11 Nov.
2011), called his books molotov cocktails. The last words assigned to
him: Alle Apparate abschalten! (Roch, 2011). Shut o all the machines.
Whether true or not, it is too spot-on to be ignored.
In Kittlers wake it emerges that one of the main questions for the
human and the humanities is how it is being conditioned by the technological. The analytical question is to understand the epistemology of
culture through its media apparatuses. The ensuing onto-ethical question
is about the exorcising of the spirit of the human from the humanities
(a phrase which sounds better in German, referring to the title of his
early work on poststructuralism: Austreibung des Geistes aus den
Geisteswissenschaften; Kittler, 1980). If the more recent media theory
debates have been about exhumation (referring to media archaeology),
Kittlers work is closer to media exorcism: to exorcise the spirit from
idealistic illusions of cultural reality and try to understand the material
processes in which data gets reproduced, amounting, if the word play is
allowed, to XORcism (referring to XOR logic gates), since Kittlers
attempt at an ontology of media stated quite early on that only what is
switchable actually is (nur was schaltbar ist, ist uberhaupt; Kittler, 1993:
182). This attitude is present in a lot of texts and passages in this collection
too, including naming the power that books have over bodies (in the
article Authorship and Love). This emphasis on the guiding power relation that literature and writing enunciate as a material structuring is so
important in understanding Kittlers relation to literature and media.
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Parikka and Feigelfeld
It was clear that the path Kittler took was dierent from a majority of
other international directions, diverging from both Habermas and
Critical Theory as much as from the Cultural Studies of the
Birmingham style (Geoghegan, 2013: 68). All of these were either explicitly or implicitly accused of naivety when it comes to technology in the
contemporary world or even understanding historical media formations. This also probably led to some of the long-held suspicions towards
Kittlers alternative take on contemporary culture, even if it found a new
context some 1020 years later with the wider emergence of post-human
theory.
This e-collection outlines, through Kittlers own texts and other scholars articles, themes in and around his work. This means addressing
technology and aesthetics as much as ontology and epistemology a
variety of conceptual and historical takes on the question of media
broadly understood. The sections reect various aspects of Kittlers
thought but also develop a common theme having to do with a media
material understanding of aesthetics and a philosophical determination
of what media have grown to mean from Ancient Greek thought to
contemporary computational reality. We also added a section, After
Kittler, that shows that his thought is contextualized by a large body
of work that is at times called German media theory. Cultural techniques is one such key concept that does not merely replicate Kittlers
own conceptualizations but opens up new paths to historically situated
analysis of techniques of knowledge.1 In addition, we selected some interviews to add to the texts by Kittler, as well as the texts drawing on and
commenting on Kittler, in order to emphasize some dialogical openings
to his thoughts. Gane and Sales text is interesting as it puts Kittler into
dialogue with Mark Hansens more phenomenologically grounded media
theory. John Armitages interview is able to draw out important distinctions Kittler himself makes, including his continuous emphasis on the
importance of mathematics for humanities.
Such emphases come out in other sections, too, where Kittler opens up
traditional notions of art and humanities, such as aesthetics. Aesthetics is
not meant in the sense of the esteemed tradition of philosophy of aesthetic judgement but more in the sense of modulation of ways of perception and sensation. Aesthetics becomes an issue of technological
manipulation, art collapses as part of media. The text Thinking
Colours and/or Machines is one example of this line of thought.
While questioning how the image can continue to exist in the digital
age, Kittler continued to write graphics code. Kittlers scale is broad: it
ranges from profound studies in German literature, to a close reading of
the technological cultural history of colours and computer graphics, to
metaphysical dimensions of the ontology of media. That question was,
according to Kittler, arranged for us by the Greeks and only later sort of
closed by Alan Turings scheme for the age of computers. Numbers and
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mathematics are a continuous fascination for Kittler, as evidenced in

pieces such as Number and Numeral, as well as the military even if
we dont want to over-emphasize this aspect. Kittler for sure had an
enthusiasm for military history (see Flower of the Elite Troops in this
collection) and at times he even had his military-deterministic moments
(Winthrop-Young, 2002) but this does not mean he ignored other sorts of
institutional contexts, which function alongside as catalysers for (and
catalysed by) media.
Education and universities were among his interests too. For Kittler
they were perceived categorically as European institutions in a narrative
that arranged constant feedback loops to the 19th century with a gesture
that made him at times look irretrievably romantic and denitely
German-biased. This perspective does not dismiss the humanities so
much as it wants to rst insert media inside them and then, in some
of his writings, insist on the legacy of thinking about numbers, mathematics and reality in terms that continue the philosophical project set in the
European tradition (see Number and Numeral in this collection). This is
a sort of project for Kittler to rejuvenate philosophy by taking account
of its contingent history: a contingent but nevertheless recurrent history
of philosophy not dominated but heavily inuenced by media (Gane and
Sale, 2007: 328).
There is a tendency to divide Kittlers work into three broad phases:
the literature-discourse network-analysis of the 1980s, the software and
technical media studies of the 1990s and the return to the Greeks
and the history of European cultural sciences that marks his research
and writing since the beginning of the 2000s (see Breger, 2006). This
division gives only a general indication of the three broad themes
which need some complementary details acknowledging that a lot of
the later focuses were already discussed by Kittler in his early days in
the late 1970s and early 1980s (for a memoir-style of insight, see
Winthrop-Young, 2012), but it is worthwhile to note the troubling
Euro-Greek centrism that, as Breger (2006) points out in Gods,
German Scholars, and the Gift of Greece, included in this collection,
reinstalls a variation on the earlier mythologies of the special status of
Europe vis-a`-vis the Anglo-Americans. (On Kittler and the anglosphere,
see Winthrop-Young in this e-collection and Winthrop-Young, 2011.)
Kittler is primarily known to the international audience for his work
on technology, literature and the contemporary constitution of technical
media culture that comes out in an array of texts on software, hardware
and power. He is often aliated with post-human thought (see Ganes
Radical Post-humanism in this collection). People often stick with the
one-liners (such as the infamous media determine our situation [Kittler,
1999: xxxix]) without reading the rest of the sentence that demands a
proper historical analysis of why this is so.2 It is this Kittler who provokes us to update Foucaults methodology for the media age, and
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consider questions of media analysis as grounding humanities disciplines.

It is also this Kittler who is spot-on in terms of the impact of information
processing for issues of national and transnational organization of networks. National Security Agency scandals of the past year hark back to
the role of the intelligence agency in the pre-internet era as a specialist in
data management, as is analysed by Kittler in one of his shorter, more
forgotten texts dating back to 1986, included in this collection. The
digital humanities boom that shares the same ground as social media
corporations and the military rests on this methodological basis: to
come up with eective quantitative forms of data analysis that are less
interested in exposing power and ideology, but focus more on pattern
recognition and handling the massive datasets that dene both the information trac and its storage. Humanities were already technical before
the digital became a keyword promoted by media corporations to be
picked up by scholars needing a branding boost.
In other words, the major impact of Kittler and other related scholars
(e.g. from the rst generation of Kittlers students, Bernhard Siegert and
Wolfgang Ernst) has been to discover not digital humanities but the
humanities of technical media, exorcising not only the Geist of the human
but also a short-term infatuation with corporate popular culture. While
Kittler was an ardent fan of pop music (see Winthrop-Young in this
collection) and even travelled to Pink Floyds recording studio on a
houseboat on the Thames in 2008 to eat strawberries and listen to
Dark Side of the Moon, he was a erce opponent of pop culture and
corporate capitalism, from record companies to Microsoft. More
mythos: according to one of the stories that circulate about him,
during the 1990s and his later Berlin years Kittler adamantly reminded
students wanting to study with him that his Chair was against three
things: Microsoft, Hollywood and monotheistic religions. The pedagogical power of the teacher, as he recognized in a later interview with
John Armitage, was not only to tell stories of how things had been and
were now, but to restructure dierent sorts of knowledge agendas.
Kittler had discovered a magical way of debunking magic tricks, of
looking behind the curtain. He let one in on a secret: a hashish-smoking
Baudelaire once wrote that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was
convincing the world he didnt exist. With Kittler, we can say that the
greatest trick that media technologies ever pulled o was convincing us
that they do not do anything, that they are tools, passive machines,
gadgets, ultimately trash. Universities are programs, and we are produced by our schools, by our universities and by our lecturers
(Armitage and Kittler, 2006: 24). Indeed, for a theorist who became
aliated with post-human theory discourse due to his famous analyses
of the so-called Man determined by its media technological apparatuses, it was emblematic that he called the later refashioning of the unied European Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree inhuman (Roch, 2011).
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He was, adamantly, focused on the powers of institutions, as well as the

hegemonic standardization of the European university system over the
past ten years.
We wanted to organize this e-issue not according to the aforementioned three-part historical determination and to avoid a chronological
narrative of development. Even if one section is titled After Kittler, in
that section the chapters also outline a longer genealogy of media and
cultural theory in Germany that cannot be simply said to be marked
solely by Kittlers writings. Instead, the more recent cultural techniques
writings (Siegert, forthcoming; Winthrop-Young et al., 2013) and media
archaeology (Ernst, 2013) are partly projects that hark back to the 1980s,
and especially the 1990s, even if, in the wake of Kittler, they gather a new
sort of impact in the international arena. This is why it is important to see
texts such as Sybille Kramers in this collection not merely as reections
on Kittler, but as the expression of a signicant theorist in her own
right.3
Indeed, as a way to continue the discussions that the Kittler-eect
and aect has started, a range of publications coming out during
the next year or so will hopefully amount to more than a reproduction
of the message. Such forthcoming books include Media after Kittler
(Ikoniadou and Wilson), Kittler Diractions (Bunz and Burkhardt),
and Kittler Now (Sale and Salisbury), as well as new translations in
French which will present yet another exportimport operation: returning poststructuralist theory to France but denitely in a modied format,
with added information theory and media technology. Similarly, the new
book series Recursions (Amsterdam University Press)4 is easily perceived
by readers and scholars as a post-Kittler series, but it aims to produce
variations instead of imitations: to expand on the blind spots inherent in
some materialist media theory and to be more reective in terms of questions of geography of theory and other questions. In terms of media
theoretical debates, it will be one of the crucial tests as to how Kittlers
ideas and methods will aord a further expansion of his eld so that it
does not just become a possibility to be activated, but a potentiality to be
actualized (to use Deleuzian terminology; see Deleuze, 1994). Kittler
himself never took a closer look at the internet; however, it remains to
be worked out how these methods can be employed to deal with the
network cultural reality, from its hardware cabling to its software routing, from the new protocols for the internet of things to the data operations of globally carefully distributed server farms. The crucial
questions as to the political economic hegemony of corporate power,
the role of information in the extended Cold War, the environmental
questions as well as the technical grounding of aesthetics and the archive
are all areas where many of the debates are going, and hopefully with
some Kittler-eect added.
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Notes
1. See the Theory, Culture & Society special issue 30(6) on Cultural Techniques,
edited by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Anna Tuschling and Jussi Parikka, for
a key collection on this concept.
2. For an elaboration on Kittler and accusations of technological determinism,
with an interesting way out of the accusations via Marx, see Winthrop-Young
(2011: 1204).
3. The first English translation of a Sybille Kramer book is published in spring
2015 by Amsterdam University Press.
4. The series is edited by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Anna Tuschling and
Jussi Parikka.
References
Armitage J and Kittler FA (2006) From discourse networks to cultural mathematics: An interview with Friedrich A. Kittler. Theory, Culture & Society
23(78): 1738.
Breger C (2006) Gods, German scholars, and the gift of Greece: Friedrich
Kittlers philhellenic fantasies. Theory, Culture & Society 23(78): 111134.
Bunz M and Burkhardt M (forthcoming) Diffracting Kittler: German Media
Theory and Beyond. Luneburg: Meson Press.
Deleuze G (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Patton P. London: Athlone
Press.
Ernst W (2013) Digital Memory and the Archive, edited by Parikka J.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gane N and Sale S (2007) Interview with Friedrich Kittler and Mark Hansen.
Theory, Culture & Society 24(78): 323329.
Geoghegan BD (2013) After Kittler: On the cultural techniques of recent
German media theory. Theory, Culture & Society 30(6): 6682.
Ikoniadou E and Wilson S (eds) (forthcoming) Media After Kittler. London:
Rowman and Littlefield International.
Kittler FA (ed.) (1980) Austreibung des Geistes aus dem Geisteswissenschaften.
Programme des Poststrukturalismus. Paderborn: Schoningh.
Kittler FA (1993) Real time analysis, time axis manipulation. In: Draculas
Vermachtnis. Technische Schriften. Leipzig: Reclam.
Kittler FA (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Winthrop-Young G and
Wutz M. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Kramer S (forthcoming) Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to
Media Philosophy, trans. Enns A. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Peters JD (2010) Introduction: Friedrich Kittlers light shows. In: Kittler FA,
Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Enns A. Cambridge: Polity, 117.
Roch A (2011) Hegel is dead: Miscellanea on Friedrich A. Kittler (19432011).
Telepolis, 17 Nov. Available at: http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/35/35887/
1.html (accessed January 2015).
Sale S and Salisbury L (forthcoming) Kittler Now. Cambridge: Polity.
Siegert B (forthcoming) Cultural Techniques. Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other
Articulations of the Real, trans. Winthrop-Young G. New York: Fordham
University Press.
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Winthrop-Young G (2002) Drill and distraction in the yellow submarine: On the

dominance of war in Friedrich Kittlers media theory. Critical Enquiry 28(4):
825854.
Winthrop-Young G (2010) Krautrock, Heidegger, bogeyman: Kittler in the
anglosphere. Thesis Eleven 107(1): 620.
Winthrop-Young G (2011) Kittler and the Media. Cambridge: Polity.
Winthrop-Young G (2012) Well, what socks is Pynchon wearing today? A
Freiberg scrapbook in memory of Friedrich Kittler. Cultural Politics 8(3):
361373.
Winthrop-Young G, Parikka J and Iurascu I (eds) (2013) Cultural Techniques
Special Issue. Theory, Culture & Society 30(6).
Jussi Parikka is Professor in Technological Culture and Aesthetics at

Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). He is Docent
in Digital Culture Theory at University of Turku, Finland, and the
author or (co-)editor of several books. These include Digital
Contagions (2007), Insect Media (2010), What is Media Archaeology?
(2012) and Geology of Media (forthcoming in 2015). Edited books
include The Spam Book (2009, with Tony D. Sampson) and Media
Archaeology (2011, with Erkki Huhtamo). j.parikka@soton.ac.uk
Paul Feigelfeld is the academic coordinator of the Digital Cultures
Research Lab at Leuphana University Luneburg. He studied Cultural
Studies and Computer Science at Humboldt University in Berlin. From
2004 to 2011 he worked for Friedrich Kittler and is one of the editors of
his collected works, focusing on source code. From 2010 to 2013 he was a
researcher at Humboldts Institute for Media Theories and is now undertaking his PhD titled The Great Loop Forward: Incompleteness and Media
between China and the West. His writing appears in publications such as
032c, frieze, Texte zur Kunst, Novembre, PIN-UP and Modern Weekly
China. He is also an editor for the peer-reviewed web journal spheres,
focusing on post-media discourses, digital cultures and activism.
paul.feigelfeld@gmail.com
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E-Special Issue: Friedrich Kittler

Table of Contents
Editors: Jussi Parikka and Paul Feigelfeld
Technics, aesthetics and knowledge
Friedrich Kittler, Thinking Colours and/or Machines
Theory, Culture & Society, December 2006; vol. 23(78): 3950.
http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/23/7-8/39.abstract
Friedrich Kittler, The Flower of the Elite Troops
Body & Society, December 2003; vol. 9(4): 169189.
http://bod.sagepub.com/content/9/4/169.abstract
Friedrich Kittler, Authorship and Love
Theory, Culture & Society, May 2015; vol. 32 (3)
Friedrich Kittler, No Such Agency
Theory, Culture & Society website
Available at: http://theoryculturesociety.org/kittler-on-the-nsa/
Georey Winthrop-Young, Implosion and Intoxication: Kittler, a
German Classic, and Pink Floyd
Georey Winthrop-Young, On Friedrich Kittlers Authorship and
Love
Theory, Culture & Society, May 2015; vol. 32(3)
Sybille Kramer, The Cultural Techniques of Time Axis Manipulation:
On Friedrich Kittlers Conception of Media
Nick Gane Radical Post-humanism: Friedrich Kittler and the
Primacy of Technology
Theory, Culture & Society, June 2005; vol. 22(3): 2541.
http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/22/3/25.abstract
Ontology of media
Friedrich Kittler, Towards an Ontology of Media
Theory, Culture & Society, March/May 2009; vol. 26(23): 2331.
Friedrich Kittler, Lightning and Series Event and Thunder
Friedrich Kittler, Number and Numeral
Claudia Breger, Gods, German Scholars, and the Gift of Greece:
Friedrich Kittlers Philhellenic Fantasies
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After Kittler
Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual
Postwar Era in German Media Theory
Theory, Culture & Society, November 2013; vol. 30(6): 4865.
Bernard Dionysius, After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of
Recent German Media Theory
Theory, Culture & Society, November 2013; vol. 30(6): 6682.
Interviews and Conversations
Nicholas Gane and Stephen Sale, Interview with Friedrich Kittler and
Mark Hansen
http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/24/7-8/323.full.pdf+html
John Armitage, From Discourse Networks to Cultural Mathematics:
An Interview with Friedrich Kittler
Theory, Culture & Society, December 2006; vol. 23: 1738.

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Kittler E-Special Introduction

Theory, Culture & Society

Introduction: Kittlers Media Exorcism

Corresponding author: Jussi Parikka. Email: j.parikka@soton.ac.uk

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Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

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Parikka and Feigelfeld

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Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

mathematics are a continuous fascination for Kittler, as evidenced in

XML Template (2015)

Parikka and Feigelfeld

consider questions of media analysis as grounding humanities disciplines.

XML Template (2015)

Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

He was, adamantly, focused on the powers of institutions, as well as the

XML Template (2015)

Parikka and Feigelfeld

XML Template (2015)

Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

Winthrop-Young G (2002) Drill and distraction in the yellow submarine: On the

Jussi Parikka is Professor in Technological Culture and Aesthetics at

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Parikka and Feigelfeld

E-Special Issue: Friedrich Kittler

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Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

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