Friedrich Kittler zur Einführung (review)

Friedrich Kittler is, even in English, one of the best-known figures in the flourishing field of media studies, thanks to the excellent translations of Discourse Networks (Stanford 1990), Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford 1999) and Literature, Media, Information Systems (Routledge 1997). Distinctive to Kittler’s approach is his theoretical ambition, standing directly in the tradition not only of Foucault and Lacan, but also, in his later work, of Heidegger. Kittler’s work not only combines the unearthing of forgotten historical and archival materials with interdisciplinary linkages from literature to music and the hard sciences, but also makes powerful and sweeping theoretical claims in highly polemical fashion. This has gained him no lack of critics and outright enemies, especially since Kittler’s name has been synonymous with German reception of “French theory” from the late 1970s on. In contrast to the more skeptical and cautious commentary of Manfred Frank (What is Neostructuralism?), Kittler’s zeal for anti-humanism led him to a direct attack on the Frankfurt School, [End Page 161] which has opposed French influence, most famously in the work of Habermas. (Interestingly enough, Kittler has been less hostile to hermeneutics. This may not be so surprising given Derrida’s debt to Heidegger, for example.) In Germany, Kittler’s work has given rise to an entire school of followers and an idiosyncratic writing style known as Kittlerdeutsch. Only the French themselves can be said to have had the same kind of influence in the US.