Description:
The Technological Introject explores the futures opened up across the humanities and social sciences by the influential media theorist Friedrich Kittler. Joining the German tradition of media studies and systems theory to the Franco-American theoretical tradition marked by poststructuralism, Kittler's work has redrawn the boundaries of disciplines and of scholarly traditions.
The contributors position Kittler in relation to Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Derrida, discourse analysis, film theory, and psychoanalysis. Ultimately, the book shows the continuing relevance of the often uncomfortable questions Kittler opened up about the cultural production and its technological entanglements.Brief description: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor Emeritus in Literature in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French and Italian at Stanford University. As a public intellectual and highly prolific writer, he contributes to fields as diverse as the histories of national literatures in Romance languages, Western philosophical traditions, and forms of aesthetic experience in twenty first-century everyday culture. He has published more than two thousand texts, translated into more than twenty languages. His latest books are Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature (2012), Explosionen der Aufklärung: Diderot, Goya, Lichtenberg, Mozart (2013), After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present (2013), and Brüchige Gegenwart: Reflexionen und Reaktionen (2019).
Review Quotes: "The Technological Introject marks a major contribution to the work of the late Friedrich Kittler, whose defining impact on the fields of discourse analysis, media studies, and the archaeology of technology is increasingly recognized. Featuring essays by well-established and emergent scholars and engaging all the major phases of Kittler's rich academic life--from his early studies of German literature to his late volumes on music and mathematics, including his recent work on the history of sound--the contributors position Kittler's work in relation to French poststructuralism, the German literary and philosophical tradition he reacted against, and the theories and practices of media discourse analysis which he significantly redefined and enlarged. Erudite and avant-garde, The Technological Introject is among the first volumes to offer a posthumous assessment of Kittler's reach and to map the considerable legacy of a major theorist on the way we think (all things) 'media.'"-----Michael Wutz, Weber State University