Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan

From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus

In his 1962 masterpiece of structural analysis, The Savage Mind, Claude Lévi-Strauss set about overturning the centuries-old belief that European scientific and technical reasoning, by dint of its rational and wellordered procedures, was superior to “primitive thought.” Lévi-Strauss did not appeal for paternalistic tolerance towards subaltern cultures, however, nor did he tout the situated or local character of native knowledge. Instead, he celebrated the great genius of the savage mind to have long ago recognized and understood what Western scientists working in the field of information theory had only recently discovered: the world is organized into a discrete series of signals and messages that invite our recognition and interpretation.1 In treating animals, plants, and other aspects of the natural world as a system of obscure signs, the savage mind had discovered “prin-

After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of Recent German Media Theory

This paper offers a brief introduction and interpretation of recent research on cultural techniques (or Kulturtechnikforschung) in German media studies. The analysis considers three sites of conceptual dislocations that have shaped the development and legacy of media research often associated with theorist Friedrich Kittler: first, the displacement of 1980s and 1990s Kittlerian media theory towards a more praxeological style of analysis in the early 2000s; second, the philological background that allowed the antiquated German appellation for agricultural engineering, Kulturtechniken, to migrate into media and cultural studies; and third, the role of these conceptual dislocations in enriching media-genealogical inquiries into topics such as life, biopolitics, and practice.

The Smartness Mandate: Notes toward a Critique

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The Spirit of Media: An Introduction

“Religion,” William James once wrote, “is not a mere illumination of facts already elsewhere given . . . [but] something more, namely a postulator of new facts as well.” In The Varieties of Religious Experience he sought to win wider recognition for these kinds of facts. It was in his lifelong studies of paranormal phenomena, however, that he sought to take part in their production. There among the spiritualists he found believers unafraid to introduce protocols, planchettes, photography, records, surveys, and observation into the study of spiritual effects. Eminent colleagues, including Stanley Hall, Edward T. Pickering, C. S. Peirce, and Josiah Royce, joined him in these investigations. Mainstream philosophy and science did not, seeing neither illumination nor meaningful knowledge production in “esoteric” activities. Charles Taylor has summarized this latter perspective with his dismissal of the nineteenth-century interest in esotericism and the occult as a reactionary symptom of the spiritual malaise

Mind the Gap: Spiritualism and the Infrastructural Uncanny

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In Memoriam: Friedrich A. Kittler, 1943–2011

FriedrichA. Kittler, Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics andMedia Studies at the Humboldt University, died 18 October 2011, following a protracted illness (fig. 1). He was sixty-eight years old. In a career that spanned more than three decades and well over one hundred publications, Professor Kittler contributed to a profound reassessment of literary and media production. At the center of his work was the controversial claim that “media determine our situation.”1 The conventions of obituaries and elegies seem ill suited to praising an author who consistently exhorted his readers to eschew the mirage of the author in favor of an empirical analysis of the apparatuses, procedures, institutions, and techniques that regulate discourse. Even so, a brief summary of the life andwork attributed to the name “Friedrich A. Kittler” is in order. Friedrich Adolf Kittler was born in Rochlitz, Saxony, in 1943. During his childhood, his mother would sometimes take him to visit the site where engineers had devised the V2 rocket, and he carried memories of World War II and the subsequent occupation throughout the rest of his life. In his sweeping accounts of media and technological change in the twentieth century, both the war the rockets would return as protagonists. In 1958, his family fled to West Germany. From 1963 until 1972 he studied Romance languages, German, and philosophy at the University of Freiburg. He subsequently taught at his alma mater as a graduate assistant while completing his postgraduate studies.Friedrich A. Kittler, Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and Media Studies at the Humboldt University, died 18 October 2011, following a protracted illness (fig. 1). He was sixty-eight years old. In a career that spanned more than three decades and well over one hundred publications, Professor Kittler contributed to a profound reassessment of literary and media production. At the center of his work was the controversial claim that “media determine our situation.”1 The conventions of obituaries and elegies seem ill suited to praising an author who consistently exhorted his readers to eschew the mirage of the author in favor of an empirical analysis of the apparatuses, procedures, institutions, and techniques that regulate discourse. Even so, a brief summary of the life and work attributed to the name “Friedrich A. Kittler” is in order. Friedrich Adolf Kittler was born in Rochlitz, Saxony, in 1943. During his childhood, his mother would sometimes take him to visit the site where engineers had devised the V2 rocket, and he carried memories of World War II and the subsequent occupation throughout the rest of his life. In his sweeping accounts of media and technological change in the twentieth century, both the war the rockets would return as protagonists. In 1958, his family fled to West Germany. From 1963 until 1972 he studied Romance languages, German, and philosophy at the University of Freiburg. He subsequently taught at his alma mater as a graduate assistant while completing his postgraduate studies.

Editor's Introduction: What Bound the Double Bind?

ion in Communication,” ca. April 1954, p. 8, in R.g. 1.1 (Project Files), Rockefeller Foundation Archives. 9. See Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1962), xii; Ira Jacknis, “Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: Their Use of Photography and Film,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 2 (May 1988): 160–77; and Fatimah Tobing Rony, “The Photogenic Cannot Be Tamed: Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s ‘Trance and Dance in Bali,’” Discourse 28, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 5–27. 10. David Lipset, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 178. 11. See Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York: W.W. Norton, 1951). For more on the films, see my essay elsewhere in this issue of Grey Room. 12. See Deborah Weinstein, The Pathological Family: Postwar American and the Rise of Family Therapy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 13. Bruno Latour argues that natural science emerges from the production of immutable mobiles, semiotic systems that can travel across contexts while retaining

The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America

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Friedrich A. Kittler, Professor

On the afternoon of 15 July 2011, a sixty-eight-year-old Germanist delivered his final public address. The video posted to YouTube depicts a man of slight size crossing a sparse stage and taking a seat at a flimsy coffee table. His hands tap away at the surface of the table, his eyes dart about the room. When he leans forward, his suit and dress shirt seem to swallow up his meager frame. Amidst the background chatter and the indefinite clearing of throats, an assistant enters the frame from the left, exchanging the cup of water on the table for a glass of dark red wine. The man looks down at the wine and nods twice, affirmatively. That is enough. As if someone had flipped a switch, laughter and applause erupt from the audience, eliciting a bashful smile as well as gestures for calm from the sexagenarian. A simple and effective feedback circuit has transformed addresser and addressee. The frail Germanist becomes Professor Kittler. The disordered crowd of two hundred onlookers, young and old, becomes an audience of rapt students. The lecture may begin. This scene set the stage for the Kittler’s last academic lecture, “Farewell to Sophienstraße,” delivered on the occasion of his retirement from

Occult Communications: On Instrumentation, Esotericism, and Epistemology

Viewed from the perspective of the occult, formerly straight and narrow conduits of reason may even begin to resemble irregular relays composed of irregular twists and turns. This essay offers a brief overview of key literature on spiritualism and the occult, some larger reflections on the place of the occult within studies of science and communications, and brief summaries of the essays contained in this volume.