Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

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

MICHEL FOUCAULT, FRIEDRICH KITTLER, AND THE INTERMINABLE HALF-LIFE OF “SO-CALLED MAN” AbstractThis 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.” http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities Taylor & Francis

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

Download PDF

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

Abstract

AbstractThis 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...
Loading next page...
 
/lp/taylor-francis/michel-foucault-friedrich-kittler-and-the-interminable-half-life-of-so-8uzH5zEXQI
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
ISSN
1469-2899
eISSN
0969-725X
DOI
10.1080/0969725X.2017.1406047
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AbstractThis 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.”

Journal

Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities – Taylor & Francis

Published: Oct 2, 2017

Keywords: Foucault ; Kittler; humanism; transcendental; archaeology; media

References

  • Foucault’s Point of Heresy: ‘Quasi-Transcendentals’ and the Transdisciplinary Function of the Episteme
  • Gods, German Scholars, and the Gift of Greece: Friedrich Kittler’s Philhellenic Fantasies
  • Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside
  • The ‘Death of Man’: Foucault and Anti-Humanism
  • Cinema beyond Cybernetics, or How to Frame the Digital Image
  • Symbolizing Time: Kittler and Twenty-First-Century Media
  • Authorship and Love
  • A Discourse on Discourse
  • Forgetting
  • Thinking Colours and/or Machines
  • Towards an Ontology of Media
  • The Cultural Techniques of Time Axis Manipulation: On Friedrich Kittler’s Conception of Media
  • Foucault’s Turn from Literature
  • Epistemology Not Ideology OR Why We Need New Germans
  • Strange Sympathies: Horizons of German and American Media Theory
  • Baudrillard’s Woman: The Eve of Seduction
  • The Map is the Territory
  • Media after Media
  • Academic Networks 1982/2016: The Provocations of a Reading
  • Human-in-the-Last-Instance? The Concept of ‘Man’ between Foucault and Laruelle