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Media as Technology and Culture

Decades after its provocative beginnings with Friedrich Kittler’s Aufschreibesysteme in 1985—which was nearly not accepted as the author’s Habilitationsschrift—German media theory has now solidly established itself at academic departments in Germany and the United States, and is already well into its second generation. As with Hegel’s followers, those of Kittler can be divided into distinctive wings or directions. One branch of media theory, represented by Oliver Jahraus, has tried to reforge a connection to hermeneutics in order to view literature itself as a medium.1 Others have sought to link media theory back to cultural studies, dubbing their product with the neologism Medienkulturwissenschaft. Wolfgang Ernst, however, continues Kittler’s deliberately cold, posthumanist, machine-driven perspective, bringing media theory from literary studies into history and, more specifically, the history of science and technology. Ernst’s name for his approach is Medienarchäologie, first programmatically set out in his Antrittsvorlesung at the Humboldt University in 2003, titled “Medienwissen(schaft) zeitkritisch,”2 and then developed in several subsequent books. Like Kittler, in Chronopoetik. Zeitweisen und Zeitgaben technischer Medien Ernst follows the discontinuous model of Foucault’s archeology, and Heidegger’s approach to technology; this has specific consequences for his writing. A longer quote from the opening of the book may be parsed to give a sense of Ernst’s project: