Historical, technological and medial a priori: on the belatedness of media

ABSTRACT

This essay addresses German-language media theory through the lens of its central concept, the technological a priori. The technological a priori is a concept developed most prominently in the work of Friedrich Kittler out of the historical a priori of Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis. The focus of the technological a priori is historically significant materialities, that is, media technologies. This essay argues that the technological a priori precisely cannot be reduced to analysing specific materialities, such as individual media technologies, the computer, gramophone, telephone, etc. in terms of their fundamental significance for sense-making and history. The technological a priori entails not only a concept of materiality but also a concept of time. The media studies to come should expand the technological a priori towards a more general media a priori by incorporating more complex theories of time such as those offered by various approaches to belatedness. This task would prove especially compelling for the history of media and the disciplinary history of media studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Media history
• discourse analysis
• temporality
• German media theory
• belatedness
• media-technological a priori

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Anna Tuschling is a Professor in the Media Studies Department at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. After academic training in Marburg, Bremen and New York, she received her PhD from the University of Basel in 2006 with a work on gossip in the age of electronic communication. Her research focuses on nineteenth- to twentieth-century media and its impact on science, cultural theory and media anthropology. She is currently completing a book on the ‘Münchhausen-Machine’.

Notes

1. ‘All-pulverizer’ is what Moses Mendelssohn calls Immanuel Kant, who, in Mendelssohn’s eyes, revolutionizes the world of the mind in an overwhelming and thus oppressive/distressing way (see Mendelssohn 1785).

2. Hardly any introduction to media theory and media history fails to refer to the technological a priori, which again may demonstrate the persistent virulence of the issue for the development of the discipline. For a selection of more specific accounts in recent years, see Stiegler (2005, p. 82), Ebeling (2006) and Bergermann (2009, p. 307). For an earlier critique, see Sebastian and Geerke (1990); Hickethier’s modest critique (2003). For important further developments, see Engell and Vogl (2001) and Vogl (2007).

3. The use of ‘imperfect’ here plays, both in English and German, with the multiple meanings of the word, both with its colloquial sense of not perfect, and with its status as a grammatical tense.

4. In his later lectures, Foucault firmly positions himself in the philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment and subsequent critical projects in Hegel, the Frankfurt School, Nietzsche and Max Weber. See for instance Foucault (2008, p. 22).

5. For a discussion of Benjamin as the first thinker of these abilities, see Weber (2008). The shift from a formal to a historical a priori can unfortunately be only suggested here, as mentioned. Examining this shift comprehensively would seem worthwhile and is undertaken to some extent in Bürger’s work. Bürger demonstrates how French philosophy of the twentieth century struggles against restricted readings of Hegel and even of Kant, a struggle that is due to the reception history of these thinkers harking back to Kojève. For Bürger, French postmodernity presupposes a caricature of Hegel in particular as its own counterpart in order then to be able to set itself apart from this counterpart.

6. On the door as a basic cultural technique, see Siegert (2010).

7. It seems to have been forgotten that materialism has many variations. In many cases materialism does not assume a fixed physical form or material as the reduction of materialism to materiality in media studies would seem to suggest.

8. Without mentioning this technological implementation of a universal discreteness of time, an entire tradition of philosophical critiques of time developed simultaneously, which defended themselves against the objectification of time represented through the discretization of time; in particular these critiques are offered by Bergson and Heidegger (see Langlitz 2005, p. 57). Even Lacan divided the analytical movement through his reluctance to accept the clock as the quintessence of time’s objectification and as an external instrument of analytical speech, as Langlitz suggests. On the cultural and media history of timekeeping, see the works of Innis, Koyré, Peters, Macho, Mumford and Thomson.

9. To ask generally ‘what is discrete?’ is neither banal nor is it a settled matter. In fact, it presents a number of diverse tasks. The question itself contains precisely a problem of time. Furthermore, discreteness demands modularization and standardization, something that has been addressed in several media-historical and media-theoretical works.

10. For a technological–philosophical reading of Derrida, see Stiegler (2009).

11. For an example in the case of psychoanalysis, see Tuschling (2007).