MICHEL FOUCAULT, FRIEDRICH KITTLER, AND THE INTERMINABLE HALF-LIFE OF “SO-CALLED MAN”

Abstract

This article considers Friedrich Kittler’s deterministic media theory as both an appropriation and mutation of Michel Foucault’s archaeological method. Focusing on these two thinkers’ similar but divergent conceptions of the “death of man,” it will be argued that Kittler’s approach attempts to expunge archaeology of its last traces of Kantian transcendentalism by locating the causal agents of epistemic change (namely media technologies) within the domain of empirical experience (thus tacitly deriving the transcendental from the empirical), but in doing so, actually amplifies the anthropological vestiges that Foucault hoped to eradicate. The result is an alluring but dogmatically positivist theory of mediatic causality that, in spite of its best efforts, can only reify, rather than dispel, the image of “so-called man.”

Keywords:

• Foucault; Kittler
• humanism
• transcendental
• archaeology
• media

ORCID

Thomas Sutherland http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1538-7044

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

Both authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments and feedback regarding this article. Thomas would also like to thank the Internationale Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar for furnishing the research fellowship during which his portions of the article were predominately written.

1 We witness this, perhaps most acutely, in Meillassoux’s positing of a “hyper-chaos” that absolutizes contingency, such that “nothing is or would seem to be impossible, not even the unthinkable” (64).

2 The presence of such Kantian gestures in OT, notes Étienne Balibar, is due to the “exquisite sensitivity of Kantianism to the tensions of an anthropological positivity” (59). Although for brevity’s sake we will not take this into consideration here, other noted “post-structuralist” philosophers, such as Gilles Deleuze (especially in Difference and Repetition) and Jean-François Lyotard also show strong sympathies to at least some form of Kantian transcendentalism, whatever their dissatisfactions with Kant’s project in the main.

3 After all, Kittler insists that “literature (whatever else it might mean to readers) processes, stores, and transmits data, and that such operations in the age-old medium of the alphabet have the same technical positivity as they do in computers,” thus legitimizing literature as an information system (in concordance with the Shannon–Weaver model of communication) at the same time as he dismisses the hermeneutic obsession with literary meaning (Discourse Networks 370).

4 For all the fondness that he shows toward Foucault and Lacan, Kittler seems to have little time for the work of Jacques Derrida, arguing in a quite pointed (albeit simplistic) rebuke to deconstruction that it is inevitable that one remains “within the space of philosophical discourse if one portrays and suppresses the Western metaphysics of presence in terms of another which, already by virtue of its name: arche-writing, is transcendental and categorial” (“Forgetting” 92; translation modified).

5 Although Hayles often draws upon Kittler as a precedent for her own work on the “posthuman,” she rejects the unilateral causality he posits between humans and the media that condition them, seeking instead a more fluid and open-ended relationship between bodies and machines.

6 As with many of his influences (e.g., Heidegger, Schmitt, Innis, McLuhan, etc.), Kittler’s politics are often deeply (and provocatively) conservative in orientation. Maybe the most troubling of such impulses is his “participation in a discourse of European, and also German, identity,” which seeks to “re-capture collective identities in the age generally known as the age of globalization,” premised upon a primacy and originarity of Greek culture (Breger 126).

7

One does not need to derive the individual philosophically from the concept, nor denounce it, in Marxist fashion, as an ideological semblance; the individual is the real correlate of the new techniques of power that save its data and produce its discourses. (Kittler, “Authorship and Love” 28)

8 A similar, but less cursory argument is put forward by Bernard Stiegler, who proposes that Kant’s model of schematism elides the fact that “schematics are originarily, in their very structure, industrializable: they are functions of tertiary retention; that is, of technics, technology, and, today, industry” (41).

9 Given that he posits the transcendental ego as not internal, but discursive, Kittler elsewhere argues that “[t]he I then has its positivity only in the literary: as the shifter of the author’s proper name, which since the time of Kant and Herder must be able to accompany speech acts,” directly connecting it to the function of literary authorship (“Authorship and Love” 31).

10 See O’Leary, who argues that whereas in the 1960s “literature was given a privileged status and role in Foucault’s work,” from 1970 onward (specifically, beginning with his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France) “it loses that role and becomes just one more possible object of analysis – and, in fact, an object of analysis which Foucault chose not to pursue” (104).

11 See Miller 148–59.

12 See Sutherland and Patsoura, wherein we interrogate Foucault’s “death of man” in light of François Laruelle’s “non-humanist” intervention. Laruelle is notable here in so far as the premises of his so-called “non-philosophy” lie in an attempt to overcome the empirico-transcendental doublet (as he argues explicitly in Le Principe de minorité) by identifying a real and transcendental subjectivity that is not in any way mixed with empiricity, even as it determines the latter in a unilateral manner.

13 On Foucault’s occasional, indulgent failure to distinguish between man as epistemic structure and man as empirical content – whereby he harnesses the popularity of OT and its defining trope for an explicitly and technically dissociated anti-humanist cause, ignoring the inconvenient fact that OT speaks not of humanism in this sense, and thus effacing much of the specificity of the concept of “man” (and, by extension, this figure’s death) in the process – see Han-Pile.

14 We invoke said “impossibility” in light of Foucault’s earlier study of the intertwinement of Kant’s critical project and his lectures on anthropology, which shows Kant himself struggling to avoid the confusion of the empirical and the transcendental within his own critical work. See Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, and Han 17–37.

15 As Djaballah notes, following Léon Brunschvicg, we must distinguish “between the doctrine of the Kantian system and the idea of criticism” (1), with Foucault‘s considerations in OT being clearly driven by the latter.

16 See Han 68.

17 Similarly, Lisa Gitelman remarks that

it is as if Kittler doesn’t need to persuade his readers of details about why or how phonographs were invented because he already knows what phonographs are, and therefore he knows what (and particularly how) they mean [ … ] that is to make a medium both evidence and cause of its own history. (10)

18 As During notes, directing us toward both Kant and Foucault’s sensitivity to the problem in the Critique of Pure Reason and OT, respectively, this is a “difficulty with the notion of ‘conditions of possibility’” that Foucault does not himself resolve (so much as respect): “They are recursive, moving into a mise en abîme. If, for instance, the archive is deemed to condition positivities, why stop there? How do we know that there is only one archive?” (100).

19

Kittler’s media histories systematically neglect what students of the diffusion of innovations call the “implementation” phase of new technologies – all the messy false-starts, slow creeping transitions, negotiations, and adjustments that occur in the long dull non-state-of-emergency between the births of new discourse-networks. (Peters 18)

20 This notion of a “happy positivism” is derived from a concept often ascribed to Foucault, based upon his declaration that

[i]f, by substituting the analysis of rarity for the search for totalities, the description of relations of exteriority for the theme of the transcendental foundation, the analysis of accumulations for the quest of the origin, one is a positivist, then I am quite happy to be one. (AK 125)

It is our contention, of course, that Kittler’s positivism, in contradistinction to that with which Foucault associates himself in AK, precisely involves a return to the search for transcendental foundations and origins, under the guise of mediatic determination.