Sybille Krämer

The Cultural Techniques of Time Axis Manipulation: On Friedrich Kittler’s Conception of Media

The originality of Kittler is not his preference for technical media, but his insight in the linking of media with the technique of time axis manipulation. The most elementary experience in human existence is the irreversibility of the flow of time. Technology provides a means for channeling this irreversibility. Media are practices that use strategies of spatialization to enable one to manipulate the order of things that progress in time by transforming singular events in reproducible data. Human bodies cannot be seen as media because they are subject to the linearity of time. Are media a priori functioning universals for Friedrich Kittler? The answer is: no. Media history has a beginning (writing) and an end (computer).

Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques - Moving Beyond Text1

Originally published in 2003, this article presents one of the first attempts to provide a systematic summary of the new concept of cultural technique. It is, in essence, an extended checklist aimed at overcoming the textualist bias of traditional cultural theory by highlighting what is elided by this bias. On the one hand, to speak of cultural techniques redirects our attention to material and physical practices that all too often assume the shape of inconspicuous quotidian practices resistant to accustomed investigations of meaning. On the other hand, cultural techniques also comprise sign systems such as musical notation or arithmetical formulas located outside the domain of the hegemony of alphabetical literacy. The rise of the latter in particular is indebted to the impact of the digital – both as a domain of technology and a source of theoretical reorientation. Together, these aspects require a paradigmatic change that challenges and supersedes the traditional ‘discursivism’ of cultural theory.

The ‘eye of the mind’ and the ‘eye of the body’: Descartes and Leibniz on truth, mathematics, and visuality

In the conflict between rationalism and empiricism, the rationalist is regarded as a philosopher whose source of knowledge is reason rather than sense perception. And yet the terminology of “sight” plays a striking role in rationalist philosophy. This paradox of the simultaneous “devaluation” and “valuation” of seeing is normally explained in terms of the difference between the “eye of the mind” and the “eye of the body”. The rationalist, according to this view, transforms sight into the activity of reasoning, whereby the “intellectual eye” sees all the more clearly the more the body’s eyes remain blind. This essay is aimed at correcting this understanding by means of looking at the epistemologies of Descartes and Leibniz. An investigation into the epistemological meaning of the mathematical innovations of both philosophers will help rehabilitate the role of bodily sight in rationalist forms of knowing. It is proposed (i) that the calculization in mathematics, to which Descartes’ Analytical Geometry and Leibniz’s Infinitesimal Calculus contributed significantly, promotes a specific type of visuality which is called “tactile seeing” or “seeing with the hand”. And it is demonstrated (ii) that traces of calculization, in form of the core rationalist move of reducing truth to correctness, can be found in epistemology. The rationalists devalue “ocular seeing”, since it is closely tied with the illusionary, but they value “tactile seeing”, which is not a “seeing with the mind”, but a “seeing with the hand.”

Thinking with diagrams: the semiotic basis of human cognition

Diagrams and diagrammatic representations in the form of notes, tables, schemata, graphs, drawing and maps pervade scientific and knowledge production. This book explores the role of diagrams in cognitive processes such as experimenting, problem solving, making a choice or orienting oneself in mental of geographical space, demonstrating the extent to which the diagram serves as the semiotic basis of human cognition.

Connecting Performance and Performativity: Does It Work?

Among the many approaches to the study of the performative, we can identify two main areas of performative theory: analyses of, on the one hand, linguistic ‘performativity’ and, on the other, artistic ‘performances.’ It is at this intersection of linguistic and artistic performance that emerges an idea of the performative as rooted in a ‘ making-perceptible’. In the following I will sketch out this aisthetic emphasis in the concept of the performative.

Mind, symbolism, formalism : Is Leibniz a precursor of artificial intelligence ?

The assumption that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is a precursor of the idea of Artificial Intelligence is misleading. The argument is to distinguish between episteme and mind, recognition and cognition. Leibniz interpreted formal symbolic operations as a mere epistemological instrument, but not as a description of what actually happens within the mind: Leibniz denied that a machine can be used as an explanative model of cognition.

Symbolische Maschinen, Computer und der Verlust des Ethischen im Geistigen Tun

Der Entwicklungsstand einer Zivilisation zeigt sich an den ihr zur Verfugung stehenden Strategien der Entlastung. Die Technisierung ist eine der erfolgreichsten und folgenreichsten Entlastungsstrategien. Wir konnen diese mit Gehlen thematisieren als »Organentlastung, Organausschaltung und schlieslich ... (als) Arbeitsersparnis« [Gehlen 1967, S.8] Oder wir konnen sie mit Luhmann definieren als »Entlastung (von) sinnverarbeitenden Prozessen des Erlebens und Handelns« [Luhmann 1975, S.71]. Doch nicht nur die Minderung von korperlicher Arbeit und des bestandigen Zwangs zur Konstitution von Sinn leistet die Technik. Sie vermittelt auch eine Entlastung der »dritten Art«: Das ist die Entlastung von der Verantwortung.

The Messenger as a Model in Media Theory. Reflections on the Philosophical Dimensions of Theorizing Media

The concept of communication leads a double life in German discourse. On the one hand, there is the theory of communicative action, coupled with universal pragmatics, and associated with Jurgen Habermas. On the other, there are technical-material theories of communication, derived from the Shannon-Weaver model, and often associated with the name of Friedrich Kittler. Both types of theory converge on a single point: language and media are autonomous and function like an Archimedian point and an a priori. Is it possible to develop a philosophy of the media without following such stances on language and media determinism? This question can be answered in the affirmative only if we reject the thesis that media are autonomous and look at them as heteronomous. The constitutive heteronomy of media is explained from the perspective of a “messenger-model.” Its heuristic value consists in the fact that it rehabilitates and explains the productivity of “transmission” and “transgression” in very different cultural and natural fields. Three messenger-figures are analysed: the religious idea of an angel, the physiological concept of a virus, the juridical and epistemic institution of the witness.

Zur Grammatik der Diagrammatik

What about the connection between >narrative diagrammatics< and real >graphical diagrams<? To find the link between diagrammatics and diagrams, we have to interpret both as phenomena of surfaces. To be able to reflect on diagrams and their operative potential, what matters is not only their visibility, but the two-dimensional spatiality. Texts and diagrams use artificial flatness as a medium of depiction and inscription. The essay conceptualizes a >grammar of the diagrammatics< by outlining different attributes like materiality, flatness, directionality, graphism, relationality, reference, normativity, operativity, mediality. No single feature is sufficient for specifying what it is to be a diagram, but their interdependence delineates the conceptual field of diagrams. One of the most relevant effects of diagrams is the possibility to present time by spatial relations. Is this >spatialization of time< the crucial point to connect narrative diagrammatics to graphical diagrams?

Karten erzeugen doch Welten, oder?

Zusammenfassung Dass Karten ihr Territorium abbilden oder diesem gar ähnlich sind, ist ein theoretisches Tabu geworden für kulturkritische und konstruktivistisch orientierte Positionen; die Leitidee ist dabei: Karten erzeugen, was sie zeigen. Der Aufsatz setzt sich mit dieser Diskreditierung von Abbildung und Ähnlichkeit kritisch auseinander, indem er ein grundlegendes Wechselverhältnis zwischen Erzeugung und Abbildung diagnostiziert. Der Zweck des Kartengebrauchs besteht darin, ein fremdes Terrain für einen Kartennutzer in einen zugänglichen Bewegungsraum zu verwandeln und zwar mithilfe der indexikalischen Verortung der Nutzerin in der Karte. Solche kartographische Operation gelingt nur, wenn eine strukturbewahrende Abbildung mit Hilfe einer Projektionsmethode sowie die freie Erfindung von Hilfslinien wie Längen- und Breitengrade miteinander interagieren. Abbildung und Erzeugung schließen sich bei Karten also nicht aus, sondern schließen sich ein. Dieser kartographische Impuls, der darin besteht, mithilfe der Karte ein unbekanntes Terrain für einen Akteur in einen Handlungsraum zu verwandeln, kann auch auf den Umgang mit Wissen übertragen werden: Was die Karte für das alltägliche räumliche Orientierungsverhalten, das ist dann das Diagramm für das Orientieren auf Wissensfeldern. Was das bedeutet wird an historischen Beispielen erläutert: den Weltkarten von Klaudius Ptolemaios und Gerhard Mercator, aber auch anhand der graphischen Aufzeichnung des philosophischen Weltenaufbaus in Platons Liniengleichnis.