Friedrich A. Kittler

Towards an Ontology of Media

This paper addresses the exclusion of physical and technical media from questions of ontology. It is argued, first, that from Aristotle onwards ontology has dealt with the matter and form of things rather than the relations between things in time and space. Second, it is argued that because the Greeks did not distinguish between speech elements and alphabetic letters there has been a tendency for philosophy to neglect writing as its own technical medium. This paper traces these tendencies through a range of philosophical sources: from Aquinas and Descartes to Fichte and Hegel. It is argued, by way of response, that it is only with Heidegger that a philosophical consciousness for technical media first arose, and that today the connections of mathematics and media, and of media and ontology are to be formulated in more precise terms.

Universities: Wet, Hard, Soft, and Harder

244 1. Ernst Robert Curtius, Europaische Literatur und lateinischesMittelalter (Bern, 1948), p. 62. 2. See Plato, Republic, 10.600a. 3. See for example Plato, Phaedrus, 60a, 116 a–b. 4. Compare FriedrichNietzsche, “Gotzen-DammerungoderWie manmit demHammer philosophirt,”Gotzen-Dammerung, inWerke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and MazzinoMontinari, 9 vols. in 30 (Berlin, 1967), 6.3.120, §23: Universities: Wet, Hard, Soft, and Harder

Number and Numeral

In his essay Thinking Colours and/or Machines Kittler hints at a key point in the emergence of modern European culture: the point at which ‘letters and numbers no longer coincide’. In this essay - first published in 2003 as Zahl und Ziffer - Kittler traces the split between numerals and numbers in sweeping historical detail. This is part of a much larger project, the aim of which is to think about technology, history and culture anew by considering the ways in which ‘letters, numbers, images and tones’ have been differentiated and re-integrated by developing notation systems and media technologies. In this present essay, Kittler is concerned specifically with the question of number. His argument is that numbers and numerals have not always stood apart. In Old Hebrew and even nursery rhymes, for example, numbers are in fact words. This might seem like a banal observation, but for Kittler it is crucial as historically, mathematics proper only developed ‘in cultures in which numbers are present as numerals’, a development which entailed the transformation of numbers from signifiers (‘a matter of hearing’) into signifieds (‘a matter of reading and writing’) and which rested on the emergence of storage and transmission media that Kittler calls ‘the media of mathematics’. This connection between media and mathematics is explored through a wide range of philosophical sources: Plato, Philolaus, Aristotle and Aquinas, to name but a few. Kittler is fascinated by the inscription technologies that make mathematics possible, and which at the same time structure cultural forms as well as our bodily experience of them. As he puts it in a programmatic aside, ‘media studies only make sense’ if they focus on how ‘media make senses.’ Hence his focus on the Greek phonetic alphabet: for Kittler, its superiority has less to do with its ability to reproduce the spoken words of any language, than with the fact that at one point it was used to handle language, music, and mathematics - that is, one and the same set of signs was used to encode letters, tones and numbers. This, however, was not an abstract undertaking but developed in constant feedback with specific instruments or media, especially the lyre and the bow. It was here that fundamental concepts such as logoi were first developed that were subsequently distorted, misunderstood and deprived of their musico-technical origins by philosophers such as Aristotle. Kittler’s essay is thus also part of a larger cultural project, indebted in particular to Martin Heidegger, whose aim it is to ferret out the different, as yet unrevealed beginning of occidental culture. Moreover, while it was necessary for the evolution of modern mathematics that numbers receive a notation system of their own that will allow for ratios and decimals, among others, it is obvious that Kittler sees the computer (as first envisaged in Alan Turing’s mathematical modelling) as a return of universal alphabet that operates in constant feedback with a medium that shapes our senses: ‘In the Greek alphabet our senses were present - and thanks to Turing they are so once again.’

Thinking Colours and/or Machines

The article attempts to locate the role of the computer in the long-standing conflict between the humanities on one side and the hard sciences and mathematics on the other. The state-sponsored promotion of philosophy and its subsequent demotion of scientific explanations provoked a scientific counter-attack, in the course of which psychophysical research subjected the human perception apparatus to rigorous investigations that all but mechanized the faculties of human understanding that were so central to the aspirations of philosophers. The latter retaliated either by creating realms such as Husserl’s phenomenological ‘life-world’ that preceded, and hence were immune to, psychophysical explanations of sensation and perception, or by universalizing the faculty of understanding in such a way as to ensure the importance and competence of philosophy (e.g., in the work of the early Heidegger). This ongoing antagonism was also present in the ways in which the parties treated media technology: Philosophy tried to constrain media by conceptualizing them as obedient instruments tools at the beck and call of their users, whereas psychophysical research modeled the human mind on the very media that were indispensable for accessing this mind in the first place. The former saw media as ‘handy’ tools, the latter proceeded to make them the very measure of man. Alan Turing’s universal machine puts an end to this struggle: Not only does it blur the distinction between instructions and data, it converts the materials of the real world, the mechanisms of the mind, and the principal bastion of philosophy, natural languages, into numbers.

Lightning and Series - Event and Thunder

The article is an attempt to subject a basic figure of historical analysis - the juxtaposition of event and series - to the changing alphanumerical writing systems of Ancient Greece, the Early Modern Age, and the contemporary digitial environment. It shows how the basic mathematical analysis of periodicity and frequency in the realm of sound is, first, a by-product of innovations in war technology and, second, radically changed by different ways in which numerical systems process data. With regard to the development of Kittler’s thought the article is a somewhat idiosyncratic but nonetheless highly revealing and representative example of his recent switch from media-technological to more alphanumerically oriented analyses and the accompanying focus on the importance of Ancient Greece for the evolution of science.

Man as a Drunken Town-Musician

The sciences are on stage again.1 This self-referential assertion is less trivial and less timeless than it sounds. Not knowledge, but science could certainly only have existed since the Greek vowel-alphabet connected an alternating interface between the elements of letters and the elements of nature. As Jesper Svenbro has shown, what for the ionian philosophers of nature arose out of itself in fact only arose from writing. Therefore, everything which can be called science must be able to appear as text. The elements, whether Heraclitus’ or Mendeljew’s, are first given only in the sign of their names, and thus in Latin they have become ‘data.’ Yet this basic relation between knowledge and writing has been so deep-seated that it has scarcely reappeared. Almost in the same historical moment when Galileo directed all modern physics to the reading of that book which Nature was supposed to have written herself in geometric or, subsequently, algebraic signs, the modern novel and modern theater stepped in as evidence that modern readers and spectators enjoy the effects of those fictions most of all when they are altogether free of science. Not only the age of Goethe, but first and foremost the one to whom this age owes its name bears eloquent witness to that effect, despite his love for mother nature and her open secrets. Goethe claimed that the intuition of nature could only take place however as far or as much as fortunate eyes were able to intuit and to see. Still, that elementary technique of culture

Authorship and Love

This early essay from German media theorist Friedrich Kittler examines a number of epistemic shifts occurring in late 18th-century Germany, anticipating in both methodology and content his groundbreaking 1985 work Aufschreibesysteme [Discourse Networks]. Of primary concern to Kittler here is the invention of what he calls (drawing upon Foucault) the ‘authorship-function’, product of a new constellation of medial, pedagogical and juridical forces. Alongside broader societal transformations (the transition from societies of the law to societies of the norm, the appearance of new sexualities), Kittler documents the emergence of the author in the late 18th century through analyses of new pedagogical practices (including the invention of hermeneutics), changes in childhood alphabetization, and new erotic relationships between authors and their readers.

Real Time Analysis, Time Axis Manipulation

This essay traces the advances in time axis manipulation brought about by the media switches from symbolic mediation (alphabet) to analogue recording (phonography and cinematography) and digital processing (computers). Special emphasis is on the mathematical dimension of the final stage. The Fourier transform enables the conversion of sound events into periodicities with numerical values that can then be manipulated and converted back into sound events, even if there was no original source involved. The media access frequencies and operate at speeds beyond all human thresholds. Kittler argues that the resulting ability to subvert and simulate human perception is the very definition of technical media.

Of States and Their Terrorists

This lecture, presented by Friedrich Kittler in 2002 as part of the Mosse Lecture Series at Humboldt University (Berlin), explores in a sequence of short historical vignettes the thesis that power systems such as the old British and the new American empires produce their own, system-specific enemies. In each case the technological environment provides the basis for the struggle between “states” and their “terrorists,” and the success of either party will depend on the degree to which they are able to adapt to and/or mobilize that environment. In addition, Kittler offers a philosophically informed genealogy of the “nomadic” state enemy, arguing that a basic dynamic of the escalating showdown is the increasingly invasive securing of natural resources.

Blitz und Serie – Ereignis und Donner

Meine Damen und Herren, es sei Sache des Denkens, einer Kultur, die es verloren habe, das Tragische wieder zu bringen. Das stand vor vielen Jahren in einer seither unterdrückten Vorrede zur »Geschichte des 1 Wahnsinns im Zeitalter der Vernunft«. Nach meinen Erfahrungen trifft beides, nämlich jener Verlust und diese Notwendigkeit, Graduiertenkollegien sogenannter Erlebnisgesellschaften ganz besonders.