Postscript

Of Disappearances and the Ontology

of Media (Studies)

Jussi Parikka

Media studies, however, only make sense when media make senses.
F. A. Kittler

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MEDIA

Just when you thought (new) media studies got started it seemed al-
ready over. A brief moment of the discipline that promised to signal a
new technically enhanced philosophical and yet historically situated set
of knowledge practices, discursive provocations and material ontolo-
gies was after some years faced with talk of postmedia, the postdigi-
tal and even post-Internet. It felt like the object of its study slipped
from the analytical fingers that tried to methodologically follow the
media cultural trail. A multiplication of discourses in and around media
produced not only inflation in the very meaning of the concept, but also
arguments as to the possible uselessness of the concept. 1
To speak of after the media, or the superfluous nature of the con-
cept of media (Zielinski, 2013), in the wake of its inflated mobilization,
necessitates an evaluation of the possible closure of the mass media
eraand the new media era. The Snowden-leaks might qualify as one
such symbolic closure of the enthusiastic years of new media, as Geert
177
178 Jussi Parikka

Lovink notes (2014), forcing us into positions that speak of post but
they also speak of anti. Indeed, in Florian Cramers words Anti-
media is what remains if one debunks the notion of media but cant get
rid of it (quoted in Lovink, 2014). In the German context, one already
started to speak of the media and media studies in the past tense: what
were media, as Claus Pias (2011) asked reflecting on the different
generations of media theory and its institutionalisation. 2
Outside the intellectual circles, various political attacks especially
in the UK had for years branded the late-comer as a Mickey Mouse-
discipline that produced endless (re)readings of representations of Brad
Pitt and the cultural significance of The Beatles. Paradoxically, the
clichs produced in the media were happily targeting media studies in
ways that testified of the on-going bankruptcy of this type of journal-
ism, unable to write about deep, intellectual topics such as cultural
theory in the age of advanced media technologies.
And then on the side of technological designjust when we were
supposed to reach the peak excitement about media technological inno-
vationthe biggest innovation revealed to be about its disappearance.
The silent fading away of the technological device despite the libidinal
tickle of Apples design teams PR success is announced in terms of
ubiquitous environments, smart buildings and cities and the remote
sensorial taking the place of the tangible media material. The object of
our fantasy during that modern period has so much been about the
gadget is itself in risk of becoming a victim of its own success by way
of disappearing into the architectural environment. It is this penetrating
milieu that takes the role of sensorial-computational and is more than
merely an object of media analysis. Obtaining information will be
trivial, argues Mark Weiser, a pioneer of ubicomp, voicing what
sounds like the utter nightmare for anyone in the footsteps of Berlin
material media theory hackers:

Sociologically, ubiquitous computing may mean the decline of the com-

puter addict. In the 1910s and 1920s many people hacked on crystal
sets to take advantage of the new high-tech world of radio. Now crystal-
and-cats-whisker receivers are rare because high-quality radios are
ubiquitous. In addition, embodied virtuality will bring computers to the
presidents of industries and countries for nearly the first time. Computer
access will penetrate all groups in society. (Weiser, 1991: 1034)

Access will penetrate society and yet the object of media itself
disappears. Discursively, theorists and the art crowd are moving to the
 Postscript 179

postmedia age whether by this is meant an acknowledgement of the de

facto digitality of our social life or a movement to something that
follows the earlier phase of mass media society (see Apprich et al.,
2013). Politically and academically perhaps media was already a bit of
pass and out of its time, at least when looked at from the point of view
of institutions and discourses that are keen to invent another new to
ensure the peak-theory consumption stays at the top of its game in
producing waves of fabs. Technologically, the infrastructural started
taking the place of what we used to handily (when the objects were still
graspable, zuhanden) call media. Surely even theorists wont be soon
needed. Cue in Kittlers own joke from early 1990s concerning his
interest in information theory and random generative texts: One day I
wont have to write any more articles but will be able to generate new
Kittler texts statistically out of old Kittler texts and no reader will ever
notice. This is my mean spirited intention (Kittler and Rickels, 1992:
67).
However, to return to the disappearance of media as an object of
analysis, what many of the simplifications or hyperbolic variations can
shadow, is the rigorous methodologies that have gone into establishing
even a situation where media studiesand media theoryenjoys a
particular way of producing statements that, to put it bluntly, are rele-
vant. This banal sounding phrase hides inside itself an appreciation of
the multitude of material and social determinations that make up what
we often call mediawhether in the form of the internet, the
radio, the television, the cinema or the mobile. It is rather signifi-
cant in this sense that this is not a book only about F. A. Kittler.
Instead, the chapters focus on the variations and forces that the specific
theoretical desire produced. One can connect some of the ideas in the
book to the earlier historical context of German media studies (Siegert,
2013), but one can also link to a current drive for a radical revisiting of
media as a transversal field of investigation of relations between aes-
thetics, technology and politics. One way or the other, there is some-
thing alive in this mix of material media theory without of course
wanting to idealise German media theory as something of an intellectu-
al orientation that stands on a pedestal without its own problems.
180 Jussi Parikka

THE KITTLER DRIVE

Kittlers focus and methodology produces an insight to the physical as

much as the physiological without any illusion of a reduction to the
centrality of the human being. Kittler and German media theorists of
many kinds offer alternatives to McLuhanshistorically a bit too
straightforwardideas with a more meticulous touch and post-structu-
ral materialism. Underlining the nineteenth-century scientific research
into human beings as empirical, temporal and physiological matter, is
one way to address the post-Kantian era as a specific cultural historical
situation: psychophysics, Fechner and the emerging laboratories of
measurability take the place of apperceptive Man, even if such late-
comers as Edmund Husserl in the early twentieth century try to rescue
the world of humans (the life-world) from the real of psychophysio-
logical sensation. Kittlers (2006b) interest in media is both a reference
to the centrality of the technological in mediating the real and offering
an epistemological framework crucial to Modernityand an apprecia-
tion of the world as radically mediated on the physiological layer,
which psychophysical tests revealed through staring at the sun and
listening to noise.
When such a stance is carried over into analysis of technical media
it produces a situation that appeals to thinkers of nonhuman agency.
The conditions of human are to be discovered in such techniques in
which sensation is teased out, modified, manipulated and offered as a
technological reality of which the human is one extensionnot the
other way round. It is media which make sense when they make sense:
they are to be seen as material procedures in which sense, knowledge
and sensation are produced in a grounding of aesthetics in media. This
aspect forces a consideration of the predigital modulations of human
beings, a theme that should be of interest to contemporary versions of
affect-theory. Both material media theory and several theories of the
affect are interested in the evaluation of all there is that cannot be
reduced to the signifier and its play of meaning (see also Lazzarato,
2014: 29). Text-focused post-structuralism is transformed into media
theory.
Such an emphasis on the material is one of sort of a methodological
echo of what was established in the nineteenth century and during the
twentieth century, as a result of research into animal bodies as nerves:
sensory, motor, acoustic and optic regimes of the body are connected
but do not necessarily make up a conscious human being. Language is
 Postscript 181

only one regime of cognition and also meaning can become just one
variable among others, as demonstrated by experiments of, for exam-
ple, Gertrude Stein (Johnston, 2012: 16). Time and its graphic repre-
sentation became one key epistemological feature of this embodied
understanding of the nerve-being called man (see Schmidgen, 2014).
Kittler was interested in a historical scientific context of our theo-
ries of cultural reality. He was adamant that even if we hallucinate
meaning across cultural reality, the real is not merely a reflection of our
consciousness, singular or collective. Theres more to this material,
nerve-oriented and embodied situation that connects the scientific his-
tory of psychophysiological research into a media studies agenda full
of relevance to the cultural history of philosophy. To quote Kittler
(1990: 216): Because not every local center has direct nerve connec-
tions to every other, there is no unity of the transcendental signified
capable of organically developing speaking and hearing, writing and
reading out of one another. . . . Children circa 1900 learned to read
without understanding and to write without thinking.
This focus on the automated, nonconscious reality of cultural tech-
niques should already give an idea of whats to come when Kittlers
theoretical and historical case studies turn to the computer. It involves
an appreciation of the computer not merely as a tool but as a medium.
This refers to an evaluation of technological apparatuses as systematic
rearranging of relations of senses, sensibilities and other cultural tech-
niques that are not merely anymore expressed in what is directly per-
ceivable by the senses. Hence, the focus on counting and mathematics
steps to the forefront with a specific way of understanding the system-
atic nature of contemporary media. This was included in Kittlers own
reflection of his skillset too when he, in an early interview with Laur-
ence Rickels, reflected on learning mathematics in the 1980s as a way
to find his way around the system instead of being merely a hardware
tinkering hobbyist (Kittler and Rickels, 1992: 67). Funnily enough, all
the talk of Kittlers hardware-determinism neglects his fascination with
software and mathematics, which I would claim is not merely an intel-
lectual analytical theme that runs through his media theory, but some-
thing of an important pedagogical trait that needs to be emphasized
when considering media studies after Kittler.
The recent inventions of political manifestos that are (again) trying
to bring computing and software skills to schools in the UK and abroad
as well as the academic focus on digital humanities, were preceded by
media studies analyses and pedagogies such as Kittlers. Software, Li-
182 Jussi Parikka

nux operating system and the cultural history of Western philosophy

were brought into an intimate proximity as part of the humanities and
aesthetics curriculum. Since 1994, he convened his coding class
which was really an integral part of his teaching and institutional pres-
ence.
In this context it is clear Kittlers claim about the disappearance of
software (1995) was not a nave dismissal of what was evident: that
software is as important a trait in the power/knowledge-configurations
of our culture as alphabetization was to the nineteenth-century emer-
gence of modern nation-states coupled with pedagogical systems and
universities. Kittlers argument that there is no software still stands as
an insightful provocationan art that he mastered better than most
academicsthat both reflects an acute sense of an understanding of the
contemporary moment and also reveals Kittlers own predisposition
and background. It was meant to underlinein the midst of talk of the
immateriality of digital culturethat all that discursive vanishing of
materiality is grounded in massive computational, material, energetic
operations. Its not a dismissal of the code in any way, but looking at
the specific computational features of the digital code that is not merely
a text in the human-readable sense. The compiler stood there in be-
tween the machine and the supposed subject of writing which, could
not anymore always read what it wrote (see Berz and Feigelfeld, 2014).
From a burgeoning literature scholar Kittler ended up with the Li-
nux operating system and as a professor who demanded that in his
class, one had to know ones way around the Linux free c compiler
gcc (see Krajewski, 2011). He wrote books and texts but also code
over 100,000 lines of software code: pedagogical programs that unfold
media historically important problems of mathematics, graphics and
geometry (Berz and Feigelfeld, 2014). Teaching about optical media
went hand in hand with the skills in programming, measured by his
own code as well as the programming manuals and such now found in
the Kittler archives. But it was also a living pedagogical practice for
him. Besides his own private programming, he opened up an institu-
tional space for collective engagement with programming under hood
of academic humanities: the open source mandate became a driving
force for classrooms of media theory executed through mathematics of
computer programming (see Berz and Feigelfeld, 2014).
Kittlers take focuses on questions of what is writing as much as
where is writing in the age of new institutions of writingfrom univer-
sities to the computer hardware corporations. The twentieth-century
 Postscript 183

linguistics offered ideas about structure of language from Saussure to

the post World War II cybernetics-influenced views of language such
as Roman Jacobsons (see Geoghegan, 2011). Of course the decon-
structionist re-reading of text and reality by the likes of Derrida and
others offered another wave of theory that shifted the position of the
subject in relation to writing. And at the same time the engineers of
media technological realities offered their own version of a poststructu-
ralist credo: We are determined by our language, but our language is
determined by the writing machines and mediawhich however in the
age of Intel microcircuitry is increasingly determined by corporations
and their hardware secrets. Conditions of writing lie in the worlds
defined by .com and .exe ending files and in software suites such as
Wordperfect and Word (Fuller 2003). This is why Kittler was adamant
about the necessity of teaching programming. It is a logical continua-
tion of the programme of critical relating to the tradition of metaphys-
ics in the age of technical media. It is not merely enough to learn
natural languages as we in humanities had done for centuries. On top of
that we have to learn programming languages. This was reflected in his
own teaching: imagine going to a cultural theory class and learn essen-
tials about code and hardware! Kittlers 1990s Berlin seminars became
a classic over the years exactly for this mix of theory and computing. In
Krajewskis words:

After writing whole books about the subtle effects and inner-political
aspects of alphabetization (Kittler, 1990), Kittler demanded an equal
level of knowledge in writing computer sources among students, schol-
ars, and intellectuals. Given the strong influence of technical constraints
and challenges, it is also necessary to learn at least one or two formal
languages in order to overcome the dominance of and hence dependen-
cy on large computer companies like Microsoft if you want to command
your PC rather than be commanded by the machine. In short, Kittler
wanted to establish a real computer literacy. (2011: 35)

In other words, in order to learn about the changes in writing and how
we are being written, we have to learn such codes that are not merely
those of human alphabetics: Codesby name and by matterare
what determine us today, and what we must articulate if only to avoid
disappearing under them completely (Kittler, 2010: 40).
Such ideas, classroom situations and theoretical insights are also
part and parcel of the wider project of German media studies as articu-
lated by Bernhard Siegert (2013: 50): The philosophies of language and
184 Jussi Parikka

orality such as Derridas are to be shifted from their ahistorical read-

ings on to an analytical framework of historico-empirical cultural tech-
niques through which to understand the functions of pedagogy, not
metaphorics; operations of technical media, not just the play of diffr-
ance. Hence the particular attention to the grey areas of media as tech-
niques, or operations, which produce differences, process the cultural
reality and engage in the ontological real while also acting as an episte-
mological framework. It is interesting to read through the, at times
slightly hasty, critique of such approaches that demand a new material
take as nonpolitical even if they are constantly engaged with such
formational processes of power/knowledge, to use Foucaults vocabu-
lary. It is just that in the hands of writers such as Kittler the project of
Modernity turns into a question of the projectile (Kittlers fascination
of Thomas Pynchons novel Gravitys Rainbow, the V2 and the mathe-
matics of ballistics, rockets and targeting). Project of Modernity, in
other words, is one of development of advanced (military) technologies
and of communication media, which do not bend into the idealistic
discourses of democracy and communicative rationality as Kittler
(2002: 76) ironically puts it referring to Habermass alternative way of
pitching modernity. You dont speak of lust when speaking of commu-
nicative rationality, but with Kittler, the psychoanalytic vocabulary gets
attached to a political understanding of pedagogy and audiovisual and
calculational media: Every culture has its zones of preparation that
fuse lust and power, optically, acoustically, and so on (Kittler, 1990:
140).
This sort of an understanding of power resonates perhaps a sort of a
media theoretical understanding of Realpolitik which on the German
ground might refer back to writings by Carl Schmidt and Ernst Jnger,
but which on the recent theoretical agenda find allies also in the idea of
Evil Media by Fuller and Goffey (2009: 142): to get a grip on contem-
porary media practices of trickery, deception, and manipulation in-
stead of the idealisations of rational communication or representational
meaning.

POST-KITTLER: AN ONTOLOGY OF MEDIA

In the spirit of this book and the way in which already Eleni Ikonia-
dous primer affirms, Kittler is just one entry point to the issues at
hand. The agenda includes the theoretical impulse that theorises asigni-
 Postscript 185

fiying semiotics, material infrastructures of power and nonhuman agen-

cies, which are structuring the mediaand media studies reality. Kit-
tlers take might be rather different than Deleuze and Guattaris, or for
example Italian Post-Fordist theory, but even with the likes of Maurizio
Lazzarato, there are interesting resonances when it comes to the divid-
ual (as unit of control societies) defined by how the component parts
of subjectivity (intelligence, affects, sensations, cognition, memory,
physical force) are no longer unified in an I (Lazzarato, 2014: 27).
Such cognitive and affective capacities are produced and synthetized in
different assemblages from media to corporations, even if for Kittler
this shift is more historically focused on the post-Kantian physiological
grounding of media cultural image of the human. Still some of the
contemporary political theory speaks to the same points emerging in
German media theory too. Italian political theory of a Marxist bent can
oddly enough find some common ground with what is often seen as the
apolitical strand of material media theory (see Parikka, 2013). In other
words, across even the varying emphases of theorists, we should be
able to articulate differences as much as find synthetic new paths for a
media studies agenda of the new materialist/abstract materialist kind.
This includes also pedagogical insights and practices, as mentioned
above.
In this context, the disappearance of media objects is not merely a
problem for media studies but also a condition for its renewed mean-
ingfulness. Instead, media theory is able to productively expand the
objects of analysis to surprising directions as well as destabilise the
accustomed methodological choices with some new, exciting ideas, to
paraphrase Pias (2011: 28). Perhaps media studies, in the first place,
was less a unified field than a discursive, institutional and theoretical
strategy to carve out a specific angle within existing disciplines and
ideas. And perhaps the concreteness of the media as objects or systems
was always a slightly narrow way of understanding the materiality of
the technological reality. Instead, we are more interested in the creative
processuality and ontology of this existence that comes out in slightly
differing ways that are able to reflect on its own conditions of material
existence. This emerges in terms of ontologies for the twenty-first cen-
tury ubiquitous computing (see Hansen, 2014) as well as even a con-
ceptual proposition that Kittler, the mathematically oriented media
theorist par excellence, reminds us of. Even if an explicated ontology
of media might have escaped the Greek thinkers agenda, we have
fragments based on which we can articulate that it is not only what you
186 Jussi Parikka

see but how it is being conditioned: For ever since Thomass great idol
Aristotle, that particular matter which all but evades our senses yet
facilitates sensual perception in the first place is called to metaxi (the
middle, Latin medium) (Kittler, 2006a: 54). This is where theoretical
and institutional practices of analysis of technical media fold into the-
orisation of the ontology of media.
Hence, postmedia was always, already, postmedia object and sort of
a prequel to the digital as well. It is in this paradoxical sense that a lot
of the recent analytical post-theoretisation of postmedia and postdigi-
tal too is less a temporal after than a shifting of the coordinates of the
debate, from a linear understanding of media historical time to one of
more complex determinationsand hence the relevance of media ar-
chaeology in this context. (On temporal multiplicities of media archae-
ology, see Parikka, 2012.) The postmedia as an assemblage is more to
the point an understanding of the conditions under which material as-
semblages and technologies function as ways to facilitating sensual
perception. The seeming disappearance of media is also a testimony
to its own importance, hence efficient media theoriesafter media,
after Kittlerare ones that facilitate thinking about this threshold be-
tween the perceptible and the imperceptible.
In the more interesting uses of the prefix post, including in Cram-
ers (2014) definition of the post-digital, this threshold becomes artic-
ulated as the key matter of concern. It becomes a marker for the pos-
sibilities of historicization as well as disenchantment with digital in-
formation systems and media gadgets. After all, this disenchantment
can become articulated on a political agenda too. Cramer refers to the
post-Snowden situation that does not merely articulate a new con-
sciousness (the idea that now we know what the NSA and other geopo-
litical powers are up to) but one can also add a possible space and time
of practice. This hopefully keeps an active articulation alive: what me-
dia are as historical and material hinges where power and knowledge
operate. We dont need to claim that Kittler determines our situation
but his work is one impulse that helps us to filter through the more
interesting and productive of analyses that become useful in trying to
map out the situation of the present as one that is increasingly claimed
to be already ahead of itselfpost.
 Postscript 187

NOTES

1. In other words, I dont want to dismiss the critical voices relating to the evalua-
tion of German media theory itself. Stefan Heidenreich points out how the 1980s entry
of media studies into the mix of Humanities in Germany produced a fruitful break from
business as usual but was quickly adopted into a domesticated disciplinary system. In
Heidenreichs (2011: 15) evaluation, demonstrating the institutional difficulties in sus-
taining radical material thinking in contemporary corporate-universities: Regrettably,
what had the potential to lead us out of the trap of a backwards-looking orientation and
the split between theory and production soon fell prey to the usual course of academic
trends. Less than ten years after Friedrich Kittler introduced the new approach to Ger-
man literature studies, he was forced to acknowledge the ubiquitous presence of the term
media. Subsequently, the initial impulse was lost in the operational procedures of
academic administration. The term media turned into a discretionary keyword without
theoretical specificity, but with the powerful promise of generating money for research.
And most of the books considering media theory fell back onto an intellectual terrain
from which Kittler had initially tried to depart. The philological method of interpretation
and the self-restriction to history prevailed. That is the main reason why media theory
rarely had much to say about media after 1950, let alone the internet. Indeed, as
Heidenreich and others have pointed out, Kittler failed to address the Internet in a
sustained, proper way. For some contextual evaluation of German media theory, see also
Geert Lovinks (2007) chapter on the topic of Whereabouts of German Media Theory
in his book Zero Comments.
2. Suffice to say, my postscript is less focused on the question of German Media
Studies itself. The focus of this book is to expand into the double horizon of post-Kittler
and emerging media theories. Of course, the question of post-Kittler could be tackled
from such a cultural history of the media thinking in German-speaking academic, along-
side its internationalization. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young stands as the key figure and
commentator in this respect and his brief note is worthwhile quoting (while he also
acknowledges that it would need a lot of complexifying): To offer one of those irre-
sponsible generalizations that come easily to outside observers, it appears that, like
Hegel, to whom he is occasionally compared, Kittler has inspired a bifurcation into right
and left Kittlerians. Nothing, we suggest, reveals this division more than applying the
concept of cultural techniques to his work. Scholars like Siegert, Vismann and Krajew-
ski would qualify as left Kittlerians: his anti-hermeneutic stance is transformed by them
into a less intransigent post-hermeneutic approach involving certain notions of praxis
and limited human agency that Kittler was prone to eschew. Ernst, on the other hand,
would be a right Kittlerian by subordinating whatever human element may be involved
in cultural techniques to the closed times and circuits of technological recursions (Win-
throp-Young, 2013: 15).

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