Geoffrey Winthrop-Young

Cultural Techniques: Preliminary Remarks

These introductory remarks outline the German concept of Kulturtechniken (cultural techniques) by tracing its various overlapping meanings from the late 19th century to today and linking it to developments in recent German theory. Originally related to the agricultural domain, the notion of cultural techniques was later employed to describe the interactions between humans and media, and, most recently, to account for basic operations and differentiations that give rise to an array of conceptual and ontological entities which are said to constitute culture. In the second part of the essay, cultural techniques are analyzed as a concept that allows theorists to overcome certain biases and impasses characteristic of that domain of German media theory associated with the work of the late Friedrich Kittler.

The Kultur of Cultural Techniques: Conceptual Inertia and the Parasitic Materialities of Ontologization

This article offers an introduction to the German concept of Kulturtechniken (cultural techniques), with a special focus on the term’s multilayered semantic career, as well as on the way old notions of Kultur are at play in the concept.

Friedrich Kittler An Introduction

The introduction provides a short outline of Kittler’s biographical background and briefly discusses the stages of his work: The initial discourse-analytical stage of the late 1970s that centered primarily on literary text; the media-theoretical stage of the 1980s and early 1990s that focused in particular on electric and electronic media; and a current stage dedicated to rewriting the origin of one the most basic cultural technologies: the alphanumeric notation system.

Krautrock, Heidegger, Bogeyman: Kittler in the anglosphere

The paper discusses some of the key factors that shaped Friedrich Kittler’s anglophone reception. Four points are of special importance: the truncated appropriation of Kittler’s ‘middle period’ by American academics; the structural and ideological reasons for the failure of North American German Studies to capitalize on the growing interest in Kittler; the charges of technodeterminism; and Kittler’s difficult role in the debate over posthumanism.

On Friedrich Kittler’s ‘Authorship and Love’

This article provides a short introduction to Friedrich Kittler’s 1980 essay ‘Authorship and Love’ by showing how it fits into the development of Kittler’s thought. The stark contrast between superficially similar scenes in Goethe’s Werther and Dante’s Divine Comedy, each of which is said to represent fundamentally different conceptualizations of authorship and love, is a revealing instance of Kittlers distinctive and polemical appropriation of French post-structuralism as well as of his subsequent switch from discourse analysis to media theory. Ultimately, ‘Authorship and Love’ even points ahead to Kittler’s final work on music and mimesis in ancient Greece.

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.

Implosion and Intoxication Kittler, a German Classic, and Pink Floyd

Focusing on Kittler’s reading of Goethe’s ‘Wanderer’s Nightsong’ and Pink Floyd’s ‘Brain Damage’, the article traces Kittler’s development from discourse analysis to media theory. Where more traditional approaches would stress notions of self-reflexivity (both the poem and the song elaborate on their effects and foreground their own construction), Kittler performs, in his own words, a kind of ‘implosion’: The words of Goethe’s poem collapse back into the discursive order they evoke, and Pink Floyd’s song performs its own technology. But it is precisely this implosion that has an intoxicating effect, which paves the way for a more political, or at least politicized, reading of Kittler’s work that highlights his indebtedness to the cultural transgressions of the 1960s.

“Well, What Socks is Pynchon Wearing Today?” A Freiburg Scrapbook in Memory of Friedrich Kittler

This essay, a sequence of short memories and reflections, describes several encounters with Friedrich Kittler in Freiburg between 1980 and 1985.

Hunting a Whale of a State: Kittler and His Terrorists

This essay is a companion piece to Friedrich Kittler’s lecture “Of States and Their Terrorists.” It provides additional background, especially for Kittler’s discussion of the German Red Army Faction (RAF), and discusses the various sources (from Friedrich Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt) that inform Kittler’s broader historical survey of technology and enmity.

Friedrich Kittler: Kultur als Datenverarbeitungsgestell

Friedrich Kittler wurde am 12. Juni 1943 in Rochlitz bei Dresden geboren. 1958 siedelte die Familie in den Westen uber, was Kittler zufolge neben politischer Unzufriedenheit auch mit dem Wunsch seiner Eltern zusammen hing, den Kindern eine gute Universitatsausbildung zu ermoglichen (vgl. Armitage 2006: 17). Nach Besuch des Gymnasiums in Lahr studierte er ab 1963 Germanistik, Romanistik und Philosophie in Freiburg, wo er 1976 mit einer Arbeit uber Conrad Ferdinand Meyer promovierte. 1984 erfolgte nach einigem Gerangel in den zustandigen Gremien die Annahme seiner Habilitationsschrift Aufschreibesysteme. Im Anschluss an eine kurze Lehrtatigkeit in Basel war er von 1987 bis 1993 Professor fur Neuere Deutsche Literatur in Bochum und von 1997 bis 2008 Inhaber eines Lehrstuhls fur Medienasthetik an der Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, wo er seit 2008 eine Stiftungs-Gastprofessur fur Medienphilosophie innehat.