4

Media Theory and New Materialism

We inished the previous chapter with a call for a more material

way of understanding imaginary media: how the various phantas-
matic expressions such as ghosts and other supernaturals are actually
super-phenomenological – supersensual, as Henry Adams described
them; they expand outside the normal ways of sensation of the human
body. This has been an important theme in media studies in general:
in addition to mapping the social, political and historical contexts of
emergence of new forms of human communication, whether we are
looking at remediations of blogs in relation to earlier modes of writing
technologies, techniques of communication over distance from the
telegraph to the Facebook era, or the visions of human communities
from the suburban television families of the 1950s to the online cul-
tures of peer-to-peer, there are important non-human elements which
are integral to what constitutes the modern scientiic world. This
chapter continues the theme of materiality by explicating, through
German media theory (a slightly unsuccessful term that suggests too
much national spirit), also often called materialist media theory, or
even hardware theory, how media-archaeological research has elabo-
rated the material ontologies of and challenges to the storage, dis-
tribution and processing of communication events. In this chapter, I
will look more carefully at such writers as Friedrich Kittler, Bernhard
Siegert, Claus Pias and Wolfgang Ernst, among others. But German
media theory is, of course, not the only one to address materiality, and
nearer the end we will connect some of the threads to recent devel-
opments in Anglo-American media studies. As such, the key themes
that stand out from this chapter are things and materiality, as well as
medium-speciicity. L

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 64 What is Media Archaeology?

Hard(ware) theory

Media archaeology has been always fascinated with objects, appara-

tuses, and remnants of past media cultures – monuments from past
media ages. Even to an excessive amount, it has shown a curiosity-
cabinet kind of awe of quirky devices and pre-cinematic toys as the
alternatives to a mainstream media history. Marshall McLuhan was
one of the early media theorists interested in expanding the notion
of ‘media’ in a variety of ways in which different spatial and tempo-
ral constellations, from architecture to clocks, could be seen and con-
ceived as ‘media’. One of the reasons for this was that he was very much
embedded in a similar situation to the one we are in now, concerning
a media cultural change: having to rethink many of the institutional
but also aesthetic contexts of seemingly familiar media technologies
such as cinema (expanded cinema discussions in the 1970s), as well
as books and writing (one of McLuhan’s favourite topics, due to his
background as a literature scholar) which meant moving away from
the book object in the manner understood since Gutenberg to much
more decentralized, distributed and mobile forms – what we now talk
about as ‘e-books’. Hence, the material basis of media technologies
– and books are only one example – is changing, for which historical
perspectives might give not only comforting back-up (‘nothing is as
permanent as change’) but also ideas to push the change forward:
how to rethink familiar media technologies in new material constel-
lations and in ways that lead to new modes of using, consuming and
institutionalizing media.
The emphasis in media archaeology has been on nineteenth-
century devices that seemed to gesture not only a way towards the
birth of cinema, but also to the possibilities for differing routes. As
outlined in chapter 2, such devices signalled relations more tactile,
more personal and otherwise different with regard to the body than
occurred with the later birth of the mass-audience full-length iction
ilm. In other words, ‘hardware matters’ (Christie 2007), and inves-
tigations into the material hardware characteristics of media tech-
nologies matter as much – in terms of how they can demonstrate the
different ways in which toys, instruments and tools were incorporated
into practices of use and the visual culture of the nineteenth century.
Emphasizing hardware matters in the midst of the increasing invis-
ibility of consumer objects in digital culture is an important political
task for media-archaeological research; this invisibility was already
part of the birth of the cinematic apparatus, but is increasingly part
L of the structuring of media technology in the age of easy-to-use

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 Media Theory and New Materialism 65
machines and digital rights management software and platforms. And
similarly, hardware, toys and automata from the past can be used in
different ways to illustrate, for example, how, through objects, we can
interpret the birth of the automated factory system, as with Jessica
Riskin’s (2003) reading of the Vaucanson Duck as the key igure in
Enlightenment thought and technology. Indeed, to an extent, one
could say that it’s not only the curiosity cabinets and such-like that
have been a focus of rethinking media and archives through models
of heterogeneous order and amazement (see, for example, Stafford
and Terpak 2001), but also that media history itself can become such
a curiosity cabinet – for better or for worse, as the danger lies in being
drawn into writing about ‘curiosities’ for their own sake, instead of
asking the simple and critical question ‘why’: why is this particular
technology important, and what is the argument behind this research
into this curiosity of media history?
Things matter in terms of their politics and how they participate in
the constitution of our world. Media hardware can be understood to
be important from a variety of perspectives, from design to aesthetics,

Image 4.1 Media archaeology has focused on a range of objects and appara-
tuses, often proto-cinematic ones but, increasingly, other forms of technical
media such as recording and sound reproduction. In addition to social con-
texts and, for instance, design, media-archaeological theories are interested
in going ‘under the hood’ to investigate the material diagrammatics and tech-
nologies of how culture is being mediatically stored and transmitted. L

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 66 What is Media Archaeology?
politics and critical cultural studies. The idea of ‘hardware media
theory’ has been most often connected to the writings of Friedrich
Kittler, and the circle of scholars inluenced by his post-Foucauldian
thoughts concerning media history. He is one of the leading igures
of the so-called ‘German media theory school’ – which is far from a
uniied school, and more often perceived as such a unity from Anglo-
American perspectives in a similar way to how a lot of French theory
after the 1960s was labelled under the vague category of ‘French
theory’, or ‘French poststructuralism’. Of course, in addition to Kittler,
there are various other writers – many of them still untranslated into
English – who have their own approach to thinking about art, mate-
riality, science and media history (see, for instance, Hagen 2005; Pias
2002; Siegert 2003; Zielinski 2006a; for a critique of Kittler and an
alternative cultural historical approach to media art and modernity,
see Daniels 2002). In other words, the label ‘German’ is a sort of mis-
interpretation, and even relating Kittler’s work to a ‘Berlin-school
of media theory’ would neglect a lot of institutional and academic
detail. Kittler deinitely is not, and never was, the only media theorist
in town. Yet, despite continuing inaccuracies in terms of such gen-
eralizations as ‘German media theory’, it is clear that Kittler’s writ-
ings, which stemmed from his background in literature studies had a
huge inluence in terms of how international – and especially Anglo-
American – media theory considers systems of writing, storage and
communication as material networks. As a historical constellation,
German media theory, especially in its mix of enthusiasm for close-
reading of technological systems and high theory, can be understood
as a critical reaction to the Marxist analyses of media by the Frankfurt
school, and, on an international scale, as a desire to differentiate from
British cultural studies – a point that Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
(2006: 88, 2011) articulates well.
Winthrop-Young identiies Kittler alongside, for example, Jochen
Hörisch as part of the poststructuralist generation of scholars inter-
ested in Foucault, Derrida and Lacan that initially emerged outside
any oficial schools in Germany (Winthrop-Young 2005: 34). Later
there was talk of the Kassel school of media theory in which Kittler
and others were inluential, as well as, since the 1990s, the Berlin
(Humboldt University) school of media theory, identiied as very
materially driven. The generation that turned poststructuralist phi-
losophy into media theory soon carved out an original and radical
niche in the disciplinary ield. In addition, this intervention in media
studies included a strong emphasis on the importance of the scientiic
and the technological. The German-language use of wissenschaften
L (‘sciences’), in their terminology for cultural and media sciences as

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 Media Theory and New Materialism 67
well is where some of the Kittler-inluenced media theory distances
itself from cultural studies that ‘know higher mathematics only from
hearsay’ (quoted in Winthrop-Young and Wutz 1999: xiv). Such prov-
ocations serve to frame the difference between the science- and tech-
nology- oriented sciences of culture and the studying of human actions
and structures of meaning, which offer a different way of seeing the
constructed nature of the cultural world. For Kittler and his like, it
is mathematics and engineering that concretely construct worlds
through modern technology. As provocations, such critiques of cul-
tural studies, the Frankfurt school and other alternative approaches
are often, however, crude generalizations (cf. Winthrop-Young 2011).
And yet the ideas are not only about provocations, of course: Kittler
can be described as the ‘irst renegade Germanist to teach computer
programming’ (Winthrop-Young 2011: 74), and the Berlin Humboldt
University Institute for Media Studies is one of the few places that
have offered such undergraduate courses as ‘Mathematics for Media
Studies’.
This division between the special case of Germany and ‘the old
Europe’ (as Kittler might want to have it) and the Anglo-American
cultural and media studies feeds into a speciic way of understanding
media archaeology. To be fair, and to point it out sooner rather than
later: Kittler himself has never said he is a media archaeologist, and,
more recently, he has announced his difference from the explicitly
media-archaeological theory of another Berlin Humboldt University-
situated professor, Wolfgang Ernst (Armitage 2006: 32–3). In a short
passage in an interview, Kittler discusses briely the importance of
such ‘non-linear media history’, with which he agrees, but underlines
that Ernst’s work does not stem from his own. In the interview Kittler
continues to talk about the need to think history outside narratives
and in terms of what he calls ‘the recursive’, which clearly has reso-
nances with media-archaeological methods – even that of Huhtamo’s
(1997, 2011) cyclical and recurring topoi. Kittler mentions the Sirens
as one such example of recursive history ‘where the same issue is
taken up again and again at regular intervals but with different con-
notations and results’ (Armitage 2006: 33): from seductive Greek
sea nymphs to monsters of early Christianity, from mermaids of the
Middle Ages to the nineteenth-century technical use of the term in
the form we understand it, i.e. as a signalling device with a loud sound,
subsequently playing a key part in the mapping of the thresholds of
hearing as well as the development of radio (2006: 33).
But let’s step back a bit, and introduce the key points of Kittler’s
theories about why he has, in the irst place, been named as one of
the most inluential media-archaeological writers, without himself L

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 68 What is Media Archaeology?
wanting to be labelled as such. After that, we shall return to how he
has afforded and been followed by a range of other thinkers whose
media-theoretical and historical writings are of the highest relevance
to media archaeology too, and give us insights into materialities of
media history. Such ideas resonate with a wider trend in cultural
theory called ‘new materialism’, as well as some other new ields in
Anglo-American media studies (software studies, platform studies,
media forensics).
Kittler’s concept ‘discourse networks’, from the book of the same
name (originally Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900), was itself an impor-
tant step towards applying Foucault’s methodological positions to
media. The two key things that Kittler was able to do and to offer
humanities and media studies were: (1) to look at ‘old media’ such
as literature as media systems for transmitting, linking and institu-
tionalizing information (with a nod towards Harold Innis); and (2)
to offer insights into how power works in the age of technical media.
Indeed, it is through his emphasis on the importance of the techni-
cal as a system of inscription, in the manner Foucault talked about,
which related to both his archaeological (conditions of knowledge)
and genealogical (history is inscribed in various bodies, or materials)
theories, that the link to media archaeology was born.
The notion of ‘discourse networks’ and the whole magnum opus
that was translated in 1990 into English introduced a way to read lit-
erature as media, and technical media as a new regime of posthuman
sensation and agency. Media, from books to cinema to computers,
were not reducible either to content or to sociological conditions, but
had to include considerations that took into account how media tech-
nologies afford speciic forms of perception and modes of memory
as well as social relations. By marking radical epistemic breaks circa
1800 and 1900, Kittler was not trying to make a historical claim that
a clear break in how our technologies and we, ‘so-called-humans’,
develop in intimate connection takes place in these speciic years,
but to map out the epistemic conditions for media. He wanted to
produce a mix of Foucauldean archaeology of conditions of knowl-
edge, McLuhan-inspired interest in how media form our sensory
and cognitive abilities, and a vision of media history that stems less
from social history than from communication physics (for a wonder-
ful elaboration of Kittler’s basic ideas, see Winthrop-Young 2011). In
other words, as Kittler explicates later in his Optical Media lectures
(from the late 1990s), it is the engineering communication theory of
Claude Shannon (1916–2001) from the 1940s that provides the tem-
plate for teaching how media work. In other words, not meaning, not
L representation, not any imaginary of media that is conditioned by the

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 Media Theory and New Materialism 69
social, but the act of communication in its physical distributing and
effective channelling of signals stands at the core of media, claims
Kittler. Communication can hence be methodologically understood
through the elements of the Shannon model of: data source, sender,
signal, receiver, addressee. In other words, the process of coding,
signal processing and decoding becomes of higher importance in
this model, in which Kittler (2010: 44, cf. 1990: 370) underlines that,
‘in contrast to traditional philosophy and literary studies, Shannon’s
model does not ask about the being for whom the message connotes
or denotes meaning, but rather it ignores connotation and denotation
altogether in order to clarify the internal mechanism of communi-
cation instead’. As a sidenote, this focus on science and engineering
does not prevent Kittler from using, for instance, iction literature –
for example Thomas Pynchon’s – to illuminate his ideas. That is one
of the peculiarities of his style of writing.
Discourse Networks 1800/1900 was itself an opening to a world
of understanding the ‘so-called human being’ – a world in which
the paranoid schizophrenic Judge Schreber (see chapter 3) acts as
a good symbol of technical media, and where pioneering use of the
typewriter by Friedrich Nietzche (1844–1900) is indexical of the
transformation into a new regime of language and the self. Despite
his technological enthusiasm, Kittler is not afraid to use iction lit-
erature and stories – quite often quirky, forgotten ones – to support
his analyses into the new regimes of articulation where subjectivity
is renegotiated in the complex network of new sciences of sensa-
tion and the brain, the new media technologies of moving images
(cinema), recording (gramophone and phonograph) and writing
(typewriter), and the new arts of such technical media. Hence, the
notion of ‘network’ in the translation, which does not follow directly
from the original title Aufschreibesystem (‘system of inscription’),
is apposite: despite often being accused of being a technological
determinist in the same way as McLuhan, Kittler’s work is more
nuanced in its methodological way of tieing arts, sciences and tech-
nology into a co-constitutive interaction. Technology does not just
determine arts, science does not just determine technology, and art
is not only creation and contemplation of beauty. They all work in
a co-determining network of historical relations where aesthetics is
also tightly interwoven with science and technology (cf. Siegert 2008)
– although, to be frank, it is mostly science and technology that are
emphasized in the last instance. Literature and iction are more like
ways of self-inscription of the media technologies of the age, and a
methodological tool for approaching the effects of the hard core of
science and technology. L

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 70 What is Media Archaeology?
At the end of Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Kittler (1990: 369)
offers a deinition of the concept: ‘The term discourse network, as God
revealed it to the paranoid cognition of Senate President Schreber, can
also designate the network of technologies and institutions that allow
a given culture to select, store and process relevant data.’ Hence, it is
in this link between institutions and technologies that various kinds
of agents, signals and processes appear and are posited in systematic
relations. Kittler’s materialism is thus more than just substance-based,
so to speak. He is adamant about a claim that stems from a poststruc-
turalist background (Winthrop-Young and Wutz 1999: xx): we do not
speak language, but language speaks us, and we have to participate
in such systems of language, which are not of our own making. But
language in the age of technical media is not just natural language: it
is the new technological and physical regimes introduced by media,
such as the typewriter, and later computer software languages, which
should methodologically be seen in a similar way – they impose new
regimes of sensation and use to which we have to accommodate our-
selves in order to be functioning subjects, and we are secondary to
such systems. Besides agency, this has to do with power. Power is no
longer circulated and reproduced solely through spatial places and
institutions – such as the clinic or the prison, as Foucault analysed –
or practices of language, but takes place in the switches and relays,
software and hardware, protocols and circuits of which our technical
media systems are made.

Archaeologies of the material body

Kittler is an important posthuman thinker in how he outlines through

careful media- archaeologically tuned analysis the way technical
media includes a new agency of the machine. This becomes evident
especially when he talks about computer media, and the program-
mability of media as well as of humans. His approach to poetry of
the Romantic period is in a way anachronistic in terms of its method,
when he claims that the structuration of the message by such writers
as Goethe is actually about programming the nation into certain kinds
of social and family structures (Winthrop-Young and Wutz 1999:
xxi). In the analysis of the discourse network of 1800, the family unit
becomes a way of transposing the body in its movement and sound
– the movement of the hand in the writing technology of handwrit-
ing as an organic low, and the Mother’s Voice as an integral part of
the pedagogical discourse which was, in a way, almost transposing the
L voice of Nature to the learner – as part of the nation- state system that

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