Krautrock,Heidegger,Bogeyman: Kittler in the anglosphere

I. Germany’s most disturbing home theories

In The Genealogy of Morality Friedrich Nietzsche speaks of the ‘deep and icy mistrust that the German evokes as soon as he comes to power’, an echo, so he argues, ‘of that inextinguishable horror with which Europe viewed the raging of the blond Germanic beast’ (Nietzsche 2007: 23). Fortunately, the blond beast, if it ever did exist, has gone the way of those who in the 1930s tried to resurrect it, but the horror – or amusement – evoked by some of the more outlandish instances of Teutonic behaviour survives, albeit in satirically diluted fashion. One prominent example is ‘Sprockets', the Saturday Night Live skit from the early 1990s featuring Mike Myers as Dieter, the obnoxious host of a fictitious German television show. Dressed in tight black spandex and faux-existentialist turtleneck sweater underneath slicked-back hair, Dieter insulted his guests, expressed immediate boredom at anything that did not satisfy his sado-eccentric preferences, and abruptly ended each interview with a jerky techno dance that recalled the spasms of an electrocuted puppet. One of the show’s most memorable segments was ‘Germany’s Most Disturbing Home Videos', a collection of black and white clips featuring a fat man in diapers cavorting around a sprinkler, the face of a dead vagrant covered by ants, one man kicking another in the testicles, and other uplifting fare. Submitted by ‘ordinary Germans' like Dieter, the clips had the look of frat house pranks directed by Ingmar Bergman in his bleakest period. The blond beast is no longer what it used to be: rather than embodying a predatory will to power unsoiled by Judaeo-Christian resentment protocols, ‘German’ has come to stand for a weird mix of petty cruelty, sophomoric nihilism, and over-the-top artsy embarrassment.

Drawing on a rich legacy of clichés about Germany and the Germans, Sprockets spoofed two targets in particular: the German art world of the 1980s with its neo-minimalist, hyper-expressionist histrionics, and the robo-cool techno decor of the contemporaneous German music scene. Not coincidentally, Sprockets' signature theme was a sped-up excerpt from the title track of Kraftwerk’s 1986 album Electric Café. Kraftwerk, musically seasoned readers will recall, was the most important electronic band to emerge in Germany in the 1970s; more than any other it came to epitomize what is known as Krautrock. The term has its own history. First used by British DJs as a derogatory label for any popular music made in Germany (and therefore of inferior quality), it later acquired a more specific and positive meaning by referring to a distinctly German contribution to the musical explosions of the last four decades. Ranging from the psych-folk and space rock of Amon Düül or Ash Ra Temple to the minimalist groove of Kraftwerk and Can and the avant-garde soundscapes of Faust, Krautrock’s most striking feature was a juxtaposition of two elements: a tendency towards esoteric depth, be it the astro-pychedelic sound trips of Tangerine Dream, the consciousness-expanding mystic monotony of Ash Ra Temple, or Faust’s rigorous denial of anything that smacks of popular music; and a commitment, if not a surrender, to technology, as embodied by Kraftwerk’s synthesizer fetish and their attempt to musically recreate a thoroughly technologized environment.

You do not need a degree in German Cultural Studies to recognize this as another instance of the well-known ambiguity that informs the perception of Germany. Germany is das Land der Dichter und Denker, the land of poets and philosophers with their reputation for profundity and occasionally nebulous complexity – the intimidating realm of Hegel, Thomas Mann and Stockhausen (the latter, incidentally, of pivotal importance for Krautrock). But it is also the land of engineers and technicians with their no less established reputation for efficiency, reliability and near-fanatical dedication to machines – the land of Mercedes, Zeiss optics, and VHF-equipped blitzkrieg tacticians. And precisely this mix of high theory and high tech, Hegel and Mercedes, Goethe and Guderian, appears to be at work both in the theory and the anglophone reception of Friedrich Kittler.

To be sure, Kittler’s success in the English-speaking world cannot be reduced to such clichés, but you cannot ignore them either. Just as his anglophone reception is, in terms of sites and media, as much a matter of blogs and chatrooms as it is of seminars, lectures and journal specials, his anglophone construction is a mix of sober, detailed engagements on the one hand and self-interested truncations and hackneyed constructions on the other. The obvious temptation is to conjure up the former to explain the latter: Kittler’s reception is such a checkered affair because so much of it takes place beyond the control of academic gatekeepers. This is nonsense (and hence to be found in scholarly journals). If there is anything to learn from the next couple of pages it is that truncations and projections, facile rejections and partisan appropriations, are a core ingredient of Kittler’s academic reception. No doubt his provocations and Dieter-like dismissals of alternate approaches (‘Your story has become tiresome’) are in part to blame. Kittler is himself partly responsible for the fact that he has become what in Harry Potter’s world is known as a boggart: a protean creature that invariably assumes the shape of whatever observers fear most. And since there is a lot to fear in Kittler he has acquired an impressive litany of labels: techno-determinist, anti-humanist, reactionary modernist, military fetishist, disgruntled literary scholar suffering from a strong case of physics envy, Eurocentric Heideggerian clone, and so on. And in some cases there is, both at home and abroad, a mix of acknowledgement and exasperation reminiscent of the attitude many have toward Ernest Hemingway (or Marshall McLuhan): yes, something like this had to be said and done, somebody had to write like this, but did it have to be him?

Given these difficulties, the following remarks will offer neither a comprehensive nor an impartial account of Kittler’s anglophone reception. I will concentrate primarily on appropriations and apotropaic gestures that characterize(d) the treatment of Kittler in literary scholarship as well as in theory-inspired media and posthuman studies in the United States. ¹ While I believe that the ideas presented here can be applied to the reception of Kittler in other domains of the anglosphere, I do not claim to provide an objective account. Biases will show. Furthermore, I will argue that factual developments have to be seen in the light of aborted alternatives. In order to understand what happened to Kittler it is helpful to briefly discuss what could have happened but did not.

II. Sharks, whales, dolphins: An almost biological history of American German Studies

For well over a decade Kittler’s anglophone reception was an almost exclusively American affair. Of the first three books translated into English, two – Discourse Networks and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter – were issued by US publishers while the third, the collection Literature, Media, Information Systems, was edited and translated by American scholars. According to the bibliography in the Kittler Festschrift FAKtisch, prior to 2005 virtually all the papers translated into English appeared in North American journals or collections (Berz et al. 2003: 359–74). The last five years, however, have witnessed a marked trans-Atlantic extension. In 2006 the British journal Theory, Culture & Society published the world’s first Kittler special; the first conference dedicated to him took place in the Tate in 2008; and the latest book to be translated, Optical Media, was issued by Polity, a UK publisher also responsible for the first book-length introduction to Kittler in English (Winthrop-Young 2011).

Given the notoriously blocked communication channels between Britain and Germany in matters of cultural theory – as exemplified by the long-standing animosity between the two countries' most important theory exports, Birmingham’s Cultural Studies and Frankfurt’s Critical Theory – Kittler’s cross-channel incursion is no small feat. One noteworthy aspect of the recent British reception is the conspicuous presence of young – in academic terms, very young – scholars. Born in the 1970s and part of a new generation, they have never known a ‘time before theory’ (Hall and Birchall 2006: 2), but unlike many of their teachers they are less inclined to cling to established alliances and ideological fault lines. (The same, incidentally, can be said about the most recent engagement with Kittler by North American scholars, including young Germanists.) However, it is not always clear whether recent British engagements are dealing with a ‘German’ Kittler or one pre-processed by his American reception. Sometimes the circuitous routes of contemporary theory recall the triangular arrangements of the old slave trade. We must, therefore, focus on Kittler’s US reception, though in order to understand those who engaged with him it will be necessary to first deal with those who should have done so but did not.

Disciplines, like individuals, have stories they live by; and, like individuals, they prefer self-serving narratives over self-critical ones. My discipline – German Studies as it has evolved in North America – is no exception. For a long time we saw ourselves as an offshoot to German Germanistik. We were sidekicks – earnest, loyal, less impressively costumed – to the superheroes residing in Berlin, Munich, or Heidelberg. There is a lot of evidence to support this self-denigrating tale. Didn’t the pronounced humanism of immediate post-war North American scholarship and its conservative turn in the 1950s mimic contemporaneous developments in Germany? Wasn’t the move toward the political left in the late 1960s initiated in Germany and then imposed on us by incoming scholars? Indeed, hasn’t our work been determined by successive waves of emigrants who on at least three occasions – around 1933, after 1945 and then again in the late 1960s and early 1970s – realigned the disciplinary outposts with developments in the mother country? Germany had little luck with colonies after 1918, but its intellectual colonies continued to prosper.

But then, so the story goes, a great break occurred in the 1980s. It was preceded by internal muttering which pitted US-born and educated Germanists against those among their German-born and educated colleagues who may have physically crossed the Atlantic, but whose astral bodies remained in Germany and who failed to realize that more than mere language and location separates talking about Goethe in Cologne from talking about Goethe in Cleveland. The discipline slowly came to realize that it is a different ballpark rather than just a different ballgame, and that the rules had to change accordingly. Increasingly, US Germanists took their cues from neighbouring disciplines and departments rather than from across the Atlantic. Indeed, for the first time the trans-Atlantic flow reversed direction and an array of paradigms and approaches was communicated back through the umbilical cord: feminism, gender studies, gay studies, (post-)colonial studies, new historicism, and so on. This is more than independence, it borders on reverse colonization.

It is a good yarn, a tale of adolescence and rebellion that comes with a whiff of 1776 and culminates in a second Marshall Plan. In a thought-provoking analysis the US Germanist Peter Hohendahl has questioned its first part. While he does not doubt the influence of US theory production on German academia during the last two decades, he challenges the received wisdom that it was preceded by a German hegemony over US German Studies. Similarities, Hohendahl argues, can be deceiving. What was primarily attributed to theoretical influence and personnel influx is more likely to be the result of very different institutional and discursive practices producing deceptively similar results. To use biological terms, Hohendahl turns homologies into analogies. Even when they appeared to be behaving in near-identical fashion, German Germanisten and US Germanists were not like whales and dolphins (closely related, the former just a bit bigger), they were more like sharks and dolphins (similar appearance despite radically different background, and not to be mistaken for each other). The great break of the 1980s which replaced ‘harmonious cooperation’ with ‘pronounced distance’ (Hohendahl 2000: 357) was less an uprising against German disciplinary oppression than a new awareness of a pre-existing difference. In short, we Auslandsgermanisten were never that German to begin with. ²

To grasp the implications for Kittler’s reception we need to focus on Hohendahl’s analysis of the political and ideological infighting that occurred just before Kittler came to America (see Hohendahl 2000: 363ff.). Whether you attribute the leftward shift of US German Studies to the arrival of Frankfurt-inspired Germanists or to the influence of the native New Left, it did exacerbate the rift between progressive scholars and those less willing to soil the study of literature with social approaches, especially if rooted in (neo)Marxist paradigms. But then a third player entered who was so inimical to both combatants that they forgot their differences and entered into a tactical alliance, as it were, to ward off the common enemy: poststructuralism. Its rise to prominence in North America (and, more specifically, the ascendancy of deconstruction in literature departments) has been chronicled in great detail; and while the verdict is still out on how much that American product called ‘French theory’ had to do with what originally appeared in France, one thing is clear: German departments had little to contribute. Notwithstanding exceptions like Werner Hamacher or Samuel Weber, the majority of German scholars both in the US and in Canada remained either indifferent or hostile. And this once again appears to resemble the situation in Germany. Just as North American German scholars were less willing to admit Derrida, Foucault and Lacan than their colleagues in English and Comparative Literature, poststructuralism received a far more chilly welcome in Germany than in the United States.

How did this impact the reception of Kittler who, after all, started out as a literary scholar determined to import Foucault and Lacan across the Rhine? He had two strikes against him. First, his arrival coincided with the growing distance that separated US German Studies from Germany. His fate equals that of Niklas Luhmann: at exactly the moment when German theorists once again became interesting, Germanists abroad started to be less interested in German theories. Second, much of what came to dominate US German Studies in the 1990s – questions of identity, minority, gender, affect, trauma, memory; the Holocaust; the demise of the GDR; the globalization of the Germanies – was of little concern to Kittler, and much of what came to dominate his work – technology, media, war, symbolic machines, the nefarious spell of software – was of little concern to many North American Germanists. Technophobia is encoded in the DNA of virtually all literary studies, but probably more so in Germanistik than in many others.

As a result the first and formative phase of Kittler’s North American reception took place outside of German Studies. It was carried out by Americanists like John Johnston, Joseph Tabbi, Bruce Clarke, Mark Seltzer, and Michael Wutz, many of whom were 20th-century experts specializing in the cross-relationships between literature, media and culture. Kittler, in many ways a quintessentially German theorist, became an important resource for the study of non-German modernist and postmodernist literature. The result was a conspicuous truncation that persists until today: the Kittler that emerged in North America is the Kittler of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter and the second part of Discourse Networks. Much of the earlier work – the Lacanian dissertation on Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the study of Hebbel, the work on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, the important essays on Schiller’s Don Carlos and Hoffmann’s ‘Sand Man’ – remains unknown.

In hindsight, Kittler’s first large-scale deployment as a theorist in the anglosphere was part of the trend toward technologically informed and theoretically updated inter-medial case studies that gathered steam in the 1990s and which centered on texts published between 1850 and 1950. Over time these early engagements have been followed by book-length contributions that continue to use Kittler as a point of departure (e.g. Harris, Wutz). Indebtedness, however, should not be mistaken for imitation. There is a discernible tendency among American scholars to accept the premises and details of Kittler’s analyses while rejecting many of his strident evaluations, such as the pronouncement that in post-Edisonian times literature is reduced to either withdrawing into esoteric formalism or delivering film scripts. As Wutz – himself a seasoned Kittler translator – has recently demonstrated, literary texts in analog and digital media ecologies are a great deal more flexible, resourceful and enduring than the second part of Discourse Networks allows them to be (Wutz 2009). If you know Kittler well, you can work with him against him.

III. Sighs and challenges: Missed opportunities

But North American Germanists did not summarily ignore Kittler. Reviews were published – some positive, others lengthy. In fact, at the very beginning of Kittler’s anglophone reception stand two interventions by prominent US Germanists that deserve closer inspection. Robert Holub offered a concise account of Kittler as part of one of the first attempts to describe to an anglophone audience the German reception of poststructuralism (Holub 1992: 95–107). Holub is not – and never claimed to be – a disinterested observer of the French theory import. His approach resembles that of Manfred Frank: to combine ‘the philosophical sophistication of neostructuralism with an ethically and politically responsible hermeneutic position’ (Holub 1992: 96). Kittler appears to be lacking the latter:

Unlike Frank, whose political criticism emanates from the insistence on an individual non-determination that escapes structuration, Kittler is able to muster only a helpless and cynical political gesture. Thus we may admire his voluminous scholarship, his intuitive insights, and his stylistic bravado; and we may even want to affirm that his work has been a high point of the German appropriation of poststructuralism. But I suspect that while postmodern readers are emitting spirited sighs of exhilaration and admiration, the ‘ach’ uttered by those still adhering to political agendas will ultimately be one of exasperation and frustration. (Holub 1992: 107)

At first glance this us-versus-them diagnosis is itself cause for exasperation. Of course Kittler, too, has a political ‘agenda’, it’s just not Holub’s. And the strained praise (‘we may even want to affirm’) that Kittler presents a ‘high point’ loses some of its allure in light of the fact that Holub is not only providing an account of how poststructuralism fared in Germany but also how it could have fared had Peter Szondi still been around to act as mediator (Holub 1992: 74–83). The ‘high point’ turns out to be a rather modest elevation given that it could have been so much higher. But looking back it is Holub’s own attempt at mediation that deserves a subjunctive lament, for it demonstrates that despite all ideological and political differences stimulating engagements with Kittler could have taken place – if others in the profession had followed his lead. But they did not.

The second intervention is David Wellbery’s foreword to Discourse Networks, which remains the most important, if not the most elegant, text on Kittler in English (or any other language). But 20 years later two features stand out that most early readers tended to overlook. First, Wellbery knows that he is introducing a poststructuralist theorist to an audience steeped in poststructuralism. It sounds like a promising match, but Wellbery nips the romance in the bud by emphasizing that Kittler’s poststructuralism is decidedly not that of his audience:

[E]ven where the instruments and strategies of post-structuralist thought have been enthusiastically adopted, they have often served as modish disguise. Thus the reception and broad dissemination of Derrida in the United States has taken shape as a blending of New-Critical immanent interpretation, on the one hand, with a negative theology of the literary work in which texts figure as the hopefully hopeless allegory of their own failure, on the other. The difficult term deconstruction has become a laxly used synonym for negative critique. Information, according to Gregory Bateson’s definition, is a difference that makes a difference. By consigning post-structuralism to the realm of fashion, American literary criticism has systematically refused to be informed. … American criticism has avoided the experience of post-structuralism, in Hegel’s sense of experience as a transformative sufferance in which not only consciousness changes, but also its objects and criteria of truth. For this reason, the publication of Friedrich Kittler’s book Discourse Networks is particularly propitious. (Wellbery 1990: viii)

Translated into B-film discourse: ‘You want poststructuralism? You think you know what it is? Here, let me show you the real thing.’ Wellbery is not only castigating the once popular tactic of warding off poststructuralism by dismissing it as mere fashion, he is also targeting the influential early stage of the North American reception of poststructuralism, in the course of which a lot of what in France had originated in the domains of social theory, anthropology, philosophy and social theory, was squeezed through the bottleneck of literary studies. This constrained refunctionalization worked so well because regardless of all the obvious differences Derrida’s formidable toolbox turned out to be pretty compatible with many of the critical procedures of New Criticism. There is a perception, occasionally offered behind closed doors and between Kittler’s lines, that precisely because the German reception of so-called French theory was fraught with such hardship. it resulted in something more radical than what arose in the more welcoming circuits of American literature departments. As Jane Fonda and Arnold Toynbee put it: No pain, no gain – only if there is a real challenge will there be a hardy and vigorous response.

Second, Wellbery directs an implicit challenge back to the German reception of Kittler. In marked contrast to Holub he emphasizes that Kittler’s enterprise is not without bonds of solidarity and ethical reason:

The victims who people Kittler’s book – the Bettinas, Günderodes, the Nietzsches, the Schrebers – speak the truth of the culture they suffer. Whoever would look for the bonds of solidarity that orient Kittler’s investigation will find them here: in its unmistakable compassion for the pathos of the body in pain. Hermeneutics would appropriate this corporeal singularity in the construction of a meaning. Post-hermeneutic criticism, however, draws its responsibility precisely from the unassimilable otherness of the singular and mortal body. This is the ethical reason it stops making sense. (Wellbery 1990: xv)

Preposterous, surely. When did Kittler morph into Elaine Scarry? He has repeatedly trounced theory’s sentimental fetish of the body, and now we are to believe that he is ruled by compassion for ‘the sufferance of the body, its essential pathos' (1990: xv)? You might as well paint a blowhole on the back of shark, affix a paper mache snout and try to sell it off as a friendly dolphin. But this misses out on Wellbery’s underlying point that some of the more subtle and crucial aspects of Discourse Networks which remained unappreciated in Germany could receive a more informed welcome in North America. Wellbery, in short, was voicing a challenge and a hope. His diagnosis that the American appropriation of poststructuralism has not yet experienced a ‘transformative sufferance’ (1990: viii) challenges his readers to learn something from the more rigorous German reception, while his second point is fuelled by the aspiration that American academics will be better able to understand Kittler because they are familiar with a discourse the Germans have yet to fully discover – such as the discursive, historically contingent construction of gender (with all the performativity it entails) or the medial blurring of body/technology boundaries. The challenge has yet to be met and the hope has yet to be realized.

It is difficult, then, to avoid the conclusion that despite the promising opening moves the discipline failed to engage with Kittler, and that the failure was due primarily to ignorance and prejudice. This, however, is unfair, especially if based on an unacknowledged contradiction that permeates the discussion to this day. On the one hand many clamour that the various outlets of German Studies have to recenter themselves in accordance with the cultural and educational needs and profiles of the countries they happen to be located in; on the other hand many – and sometimes the very same – demand that the various centers of Auslandsgermanistik are missing out on the most recent German theory production. This, clearly, is a double bind. You cannot at one and the same time criticize Auslandsgermanisten for being out of touch with what is going on in Germany (or the US) and for not developing a study program that takes into account the particular needs of their home country. Maybe the neglect of Kittler was part of the price we had to pay to gain our independence. ³

IV. ‘German media theory’ and the challenges of posthumanism

Intermedial case studies were Kittler’s major entry point into Anglophone academia. His reception was part of an underlying shift within the humanities that found its institutional expression in the creation of electronic writing centers, media studies departments, and digital humanities initiatives, most of which coexist uneasily with established media and communications programs. However, the more Kittler is referenced in this process, the more he is de-literaricized into a media theorist (it would not be the first time that institutional changes rewrite scholarly biographies). This is an ongoing process that cannot be contained in a neat story, but several features are worth mentioning; and none is more interesting or revealing than Kittler’s somewhat iffy maverick status in the current posthumanist discussion.

Let us start with two preliminary observations. First, in his media-theoretical anglophone reception Kittler tends to be either a prefatorial theorist – he pops up in introductions, prologues and forewords, primarily in the context of larger theoretical clarifications, but then all but disappears from the text – or is confined to Area 51 chapters: that is, to well-demarcated textual compounds designed to isolate secret or harmful subject matter. In both cases Kittler ends up in solitary confinement; one of the few fellow inmates he is allowed to socialize with is, not surprisingly, the alleged master technodeterminist McLuhan. Much like McLuhan, Kittler is frequently featured in media-theoretical discussions and handbooks as an unrepentant technodeterminist, which, as we know, is something deeply suspect, if not morally depraved. Kittler’s most infamous one-liner, ‘[m]edia determine our situation’ (1999a: xxxix), seems to have determined his situation in the anglosphere.

Second, to the dismay of many German media theorists (some of whom have choice words for his contributions), Kittler’s work has come to stand for ‘German media theory’. The term’s career resembles that of Krautrock: it has risen from generic label to acclaimed brand name. In 1999 New German Critique, the most important anglophone Germany theory journal, published a special on ‘German media studies'. At that time the title referred – simply, innocently and ecumenically – to any kind of media theory produced in German-speaking countries. Kittler himself was not part of the collection, though the editor described him as a morose Gutenbergian whose ‘gloomy rantings' amount to a ‘lament over the displacement of the written word’ (Geisler 1999: 83). Eight years later Grey Room issued a special dedicated to ‘New German media theory’, in which Kittler appears as the founding figure of the type of media analysis that informs all six contributions. ‘German media theory’, then, uncannily resembles the ‘Canadian School’ of McLuhan and Innis. In both cases the production of a couple of outsiders is regarded primarily by outside observers as a nationally emblematic approach; and in both cases observers discern a strong dose of technodeterminism.

How did this shift come about? To my knowledge, the first outside observer to recommend ‘German media theory’ to non-German audiences – or at least, the first to do so with any success – was Geert Lovink. (If reception histories, which make for tedious narratives at best, had heroes, Lovink would be ours; his work, rooted in social activism and net critique, and a great deal closer to hacking than to Heidegger, shows how well someone from a very different part of town can engage Kittler.) Lovink claimed that in the 1980s a vibrant, globally unique media theory production had evolved in the German-speaking countries. Of course there was media theory in the Germanies before that, but what Lovink had in mind was a new stage of intellectual production in which media studies had come under the influence of new bodies of theory. The three main influences were poststructuralism, systems theory and cognitivism (frequently associated in short-hand manner with the names Kittler, Luhmann and Siegfried Schmidt, respectively). But while the former paradigm was firmly ensconced in North American literary and related media studies, the latter two were marginal players.

This explains the step-by-step truncation that shapes the observer construct ‘German media theory’. First, it is reduced from generic label to a more restricted designation referring to a certain theoretically informed intellectual output. Second, of the three principal influences the two with limited connectivity in the anglosphere are sidelined and we arrive at commodity with an undeniable trans-Atlantic export potential: poststructuralist media theory. Third, since Kittler is the only such theorist of note to have been widely translated, his name comes to stand for this particular theoretical orientation.

But then there was a fourth step, a truncation within poststructuralism. Wellbery’s divide between an authentic posthermeneutic approach that had truly ‘suffered’ through poststructuralism and the pseudo-posthermeneutic American variant can also be applied to theoretically informed media studies. It is worth recalling that Kittler’s name was far more present in the aforementioned intermedial scholarship than in one of the hottest topics of the early 1990s, the hypertext debate. Why this low profile? To answer in name-dropping shorthand, with regard to its French ancestry the US hypertext scholarship of the 1990s descended from Barthes and Derrida while Kittler came from Foucault and Lacan. From Kittler’s vantage point, that is, from the point of view of an a-human history of discursive regimes in which technological and/or symbolic machines inscribe orders of speech into a psychic apparatus that, ultimately, is nothing but an intracranial assembly of communication and storage devices, the work of scholars like George Landow and Greg Ulmer must appear somewhat naive, optimistic, liberal, and user-centered, if not humanist. Despite claims to the contrary, it retains many of the concepts that the harsher variants of poststructuralism aimed to eviscerate: authorship, oeuvre, creativity, artistic freedom, and even the very American redemption of theory through technology (see Winthrop-Young 2006: 96). To denounce Kittler as a technodeterminist, then, is not only the understandable reaction to his provocative rhetoric, it is also an attempt to cover up one one’s own bias by exposing that of another.

However, matters have become more complex with the subsequent deployment of Kittler in the debates surrounding posthumanism. This is a vast topic best approached via a quick detour through a back door: Kittler’s treatment of Foucault. Holub had already criticized German poststructuralism’s penchant for ‘focusing too obdurately on the early Foucault’ (1992: 68). Especially in Kittler’s writings the later, ethical, almost Kant-like Foucault – the one even Jürgen Habermas came to appreciate – is downgraded in favour of the earlier, implacably cool anti-humanist who reduced man to a fleeting concept arising from the epistemic interplay between les mots et les choses. Ever since Wellbery provided the first explanation, Kittler’s grounding and media-technological recasting of Foucauldian epistemes has become a staple in his anglophone reception. What is missing, however, is the ambiguous treatment of Foucault that is on display in Kittler’s more recent texts.

On the one hand, Kittler is pushing Foucault back into Heidegger. Ultimately, Kittler argues, Foucault was practising Heideggerian Seinsgeschichte by revealing the discursive rules involved in determining the historical character of the relationship between man and being. On the other hand, Kittler is pushing Foucault forward into Shannon. As Kittler would have it, Foucauldian discourse analysis was closing in on the mathematical theory of communication in as far as it located the validity and meaning of utterances in the formal rules governing the relationship between that which is said and that which could have been said. Foucault is Shannon avant le nombre. His shorter texts ‘set sail from the solid shores of his libraries out into the open sea of media technologies, until Wiener’s and Shannon’s mathematical concept of information appeared on the horizon’ (Kittler 1999b: 8). Like Moses, Foucault never reached the promised land – so it falls to Kittler to haul him ashore on the other side.

However, underlying Kittler’s most recent work, including the large-scale excursions into Greek and Roman antiquity, is the attempt to close the gap between Heidegger and mathematics, which directly affects the status of Foucault, if not of poststructuralism itself. The more Kittler insists that the late Heidegger had already worked his way towards thinking the computer (and with that, the end of philosophy), the more intermediaries like poststructuralism in general and Foucault in particular lose in stature (see Winthrop-Young 2011: 117). Wellbery’s challenge can be extended: it is not only that the poststructuralism that flourished on Western shores may not have been the real thing, the whole notion of poststructuralism needs to be questioned because maybe there never was such a thing to begin with.

This puts Kittler on a confrontation course with anglophone posthumanism which, to a considerable extent, is informed by both media theory and poststructuralist imports. What are the main difficulties? First, there is a tendency among some anglophone posthumanist theorists – Neal Badmington comes to mind – to locate their continental theory sources primarily, if not exclusively, in France. The prominence of Derrida in particular in posthumanist theory means that Kittler once again is on fairly inhospitable ground. If – under the influence of Derrida, and mediated by Cary Wolfe and others – the posthumanist debate has shifted from early euphoric or dystopian claims that humans have been turned into (or pushed aside by) something posthuman, to the more nuanced commitment to see posthumanism as a rigorous self-questioning and questioning of boundaries that defines the human while strictly avoiding gestures of trangression or exteriorization, then Kittler with his human obsolescence scenarios and ‘presupposition of exteriority’ (Wellbery) must – once again and on an even grander scale – appear as a techno-ontological determinist.

The second difficulty is related to the fact that Kittler shows little interest in two aspects of great importance to North American posthumanism: animals and evolution. In Derridian parlance, Kittler has yet to fully attend to the question of the animal. To be sure, the immediate response is to dismiss this objection as gratuitous and irrelevant. Not everybody can talk about everything; and to ask that Kittler deal with the animal is to demand that an apple talk like an orange. Let us postpone the objection for a moment and focus on the question of evolution. One of the most decisive moves in posthumanism has been to deconstruct the ideologically burdened man/technology divide and replace it with the ongoing co-evolution of humans and technology. There is no clear point of human origin, there never was a pristine early human subject that at one point in time adopted, devised or exteriorized tools, instead there is ‘a relation between bios and tekhne so complex and so historic that any presumption of the priority of one over the other can only be sustained by means of an appeal to a metaphysics of creation’ (Wills 2008: 5). Humans and their alleged tools from choppers to chips are always already caught in an ongoing feedback loop. Ironically, some of the key theorists behind the North American discussion (from André Leroi-Gourhan to Bernard Stiegler) hail from France; and once again North American Germanists are left to ponder why the corresponding German tradition (from Ernst Kapp to Peter Sloterdijk) has such a low profile abroad.

In any case, Kittler does not fit in well. This is less a result of his avowed preference for hardware and hard abstractions, i.e. physics and mathematics, over ‘soft’ biological theories than an effect of his Heideggerian inheritance. To be sure, judging by his recent Aphrodite-inspired Musik und Mathematik volumes, Kittler has become the Theorist Who Came in from the Cold; he appears to have mellowed and become more interested in love than in war, but his proclivity for ruptures – be it the clash of his own ‘discourse networks', the epistemic breaks of Foucault, or the epochs of Heideggerian Seinsgeschichte – remains at odds with the basic dynamics of evolution, Darwinian or otherwise. More importantly, in recent years Kittler has adopted an increasingly explicit Heideggerian stance by emphasizing that the proper focus of Denken or ‘thinking’ (as opposed to mere philosophy) has to be an updated revelation of the ways in which man relates to Being – more precisely, of how we can return to or reconnect with the musico-mathematical ways it was performed in antiquity before it was destroyed by Athenian philosophers and their hapless Roman translators. From this point of view even the most subtle posthumanist deconstruction of man ultimately remains an anthropocentric enterprise. Kittler’s position toward current posthumanism resembles that of Heidegger toward the German Philosophical Anthropology of the 1920s. Building in particular on the work of Jakob von Uexküll, Heidegger argued that the traditional criteria that served to demarcate humans from animals were mired in anthropocentric metaphysics, but he then proceeded to argue that what characterizes man, and man alone, is the potential for openness in the relationship to Being. From the point of view of theoretically supercharged posthumanist discourse, this attitude reveals a heavy dose of unacknowledged speciesism. The same would apply to Kittler.

Intermedial literary analyses, media theory proper, technologically informed posthumanism: throughout the most important deployments in anglophone academia Kittler remains a theorist who is acknowledged rather than approached. He resembles the dragons on the margins of medieval maps – you need to know where they are because you cannot go beyond them without falling off the edge of the sane world. With the exception of McLuhan no theorist has been credited more with advancing the claim ‘that media form the infrastructural basis, the quasi-transcendental condition, for experience and understanding’ (Hansen and Mitchell 2010: viii); but with the exception of McLuhan no theorist has been so frequently – and erroneously – charged with saying only that and nothing more. Sometimes the prophet receives the same honors abroad as in his home country. Despite all necessary truncations and amputations the Kittler of the anglosphere is not unlike the German Kittler: both have been turned into the grand bogeyman of technological determinism. Kittler, the boggart who embodies whatever theorists fear most, has played the role well and with dramatically increasing scope: first, materialities of communication determine literary texts; then, data-processing networks determine entire epochs a.k.a. ‘discourse networks'; and finally, the evolution of technology shapes, uses and discards man. To a considerable extent Kittler has himself to blame or thank for this awkward location at the extreme or extremist margin; but if running our head against the wall helps us find the exit we are looking for, then we do owe the wall a measure of gratitude.