The death this week of Friedrich Kittler reminded me of just how radical his Aufschreibesysteme seemed when it first appeared. Discourse Networks, the English translation, continues to reverberate through English departments. I remember vividly that it was the first book I photocopied in its entirety back in graduate school. Standing in a copy store in Ithaca, I wondered what mysteries were in the pages that came spewing out the machine, which the intense, high-minded older students, who had driven me to xerox Kittler, already claimed to understand.
The radical potential of Kittler’s Habilitationsschrift was that it seemed to erase literature’s claim to uniqueness. By setting novels equal to pedagogical manuals, Kittler was extending Foucault’s discourse analysis into art. Foucault had really written little about literature after all, but Kittler was first and fore mostly, a Germanist—at least back then.
Kittler’s work promised to undo the most sacred tenet of German aesthetics—the autonomy of art. People had claimed that Derrida and deconstruction would lead in that direction, but Kittler seemed to be one of the very first to thoroughly intermingle literature with other discourses, so that Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre was comparable to a book on language acquisition or medicine. The one thing that Kittler left to literature was the claim that its best works contained more insights about the operation of discourse and power than non-literary texts. Thus, a great novel might contain more social history than historical texts.
Looking back on the arc of Kittler’s influence, it seems clear that at some point this radical potential to knock literature off its pedestal has succeeded. Literary studies today are hardly as important to students and colleges as they were in the 1980s. Though, Kittler surely does not get the credit for the demise of literature. Infact he probably gets the credit for driving literary scholars to reclaim the autonomy of art, for there developed in the mid 1990s a backlash within literature departments against the pomo tendency to levelize all forms of writing.
The early works of Kittler presented a wonderful interpenetration between close literary analysis and cultural history relying on Foucault. The subtle back and forth in his reading of Wilhelm Meister in Dichtung als Sozialisationspiel and Aufschreibeysteme's masterful leaps from a few lines in Faust to the entire Enlightenment held many of us in awe. But eventually this tension tore apart, and Kittler wrote increasingly about social forces as largely determinate of subjective processes such as literature. His essay "There is no software" had the same paranoid reductionism of bad old nineteenth-century Marxism, whereby individual expression is really already determined behind the scene by the forces of industrialization, or in Kittler's more updated form, machine language.
The alliance of theory interests which Kittler had forged with his first books fell apart with the technologically determinist work, and critics who had once participated int he project of discourse analysis turned increasingly into a close readings which neglected the social context.
One place we can detect this swing away from Kittler’s approach is in David Wellbery’s The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism. Wellbery had always been seen as an ally of Kittler; their essays often appeared side-by-side. Each had students that worked with the other. Yet in Wellbery’s book on the young Goethe’s poetry, you can sense a decisive move away from the claim that literature is comparable to other discourses. Wellbery says he's engaged in discourse analysis, but really he performs very little of the broad historical sweep that Kittler displayed. Instead, Wellbery digs deeply into Goethe’s poems with Lacan-inspired close readings. Powerful, compelling interpretations of individual poems that run on for dozens of pages—this is what Wellbery produces, so that in the end, he re-establishes once again Goethe’s pivotal place at the origins of modern German literature. By the end of Wellbery’s book you are presented with overwhelming evidence of Goethe’s singular genius. The old cult is back—and this is conclusion that Kittler might have held in private, but he would never have written a book establishing this point.
The early works of Kittler presented a wonderful interpenetration between close literary analysis and cultural history relying on Foucault. The subtle back and forth in his reading of Wilhelm Meister in Dichtung als Sozialisationspiel and Aufschreibeysteme's masterful leaps from a few lines in Faust to the entire Enlightenment held many of us in awe. But eventually this tension tore apart, and Kittler wrote increasingly about social forces as largely determinate of subjective processes such as literature. His essay "There is no software" had the same paranoid reductionism of bad old nineteenth-century Marxism, whereby individual expression is really already determined behind the scene by the forces of industrialization, or in Kittler's more updated form, machine language.
The alliance of theory interests which Kittler had forged with his first books fell apart with the technologically determinist work, and critics who had once participated int he project of discourse analysis turned increasingly into a close readings which neglected the social context.
One place we can detect this swing away from Kittler’s approach is in David Wellbery’s The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism. Wellbery had always been seen as an ally of Kittler; their essays often appeared side-by-side. Each had students that worked with the other. Yet in Wellbery’s book on the young Goethe’s poetry, you can sense a decisive move away from the claim that literature is comparable to other discourses. Wellbery says he's engaged in discourse analysis, but really he performs very little of the broad historical sweep that Kittler displayed. Instead, Wellbery digs deeply into Goethe’s poems with Lacan-inspired close readings. Powerful, compelling interpretations of individual poems that run on for dozens of pages—this is what Wellbery produces, so that in the end, he re-establishes once again Goethe’s pivotal place at the origins of modern German literature. By the end of Wellbery’s book you are presented with overwhelming evidence of Goethe’s singular genius. The old cult is back—and this is conclusion that Kittler might have held in private, but he would never have written a book establishing this point.
As Kittler’s career moved off into media studies, computer programing languages and the history of technology, Germanistik found new theoretical means to re-establish the primacy of literature, at least for those who understood narratology and Lacan.
In other words, Kittler’s radical potential was broken down into highly specialized disciplines. If literature lost its claim to autonomy, it was not because of Aufschreibesysteme so much as because of the conservative turn among students, administrators and voters, who increasingly found the esoteric conversations of literary studies impossible to follow.
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