Resumen El presente trabajo analiza críticamente la propuesta de Kittler de renovar las ciencias sociales y humanas mediante una reflexión orientada hacia los medios de comunicación. Para ello, se sitúa tal propuesta en el debate, impulsado por el giro medial en Filosofía de los Medios, acerca de la pertinencia del enfoque trascendentalista sobre los medios. En un primer momento, se presenta en términos generales el planteo kittleriano en cuanto enfoque trascendentalista. En un segundo momento, se reconstruye y analiza la estrategia (...) kittleriana consistente en eliminar la noción de sentido para concentrarse, en cambio, en la noción de información.This work critically analyzes Kittler's proposal to renew the social and human aspects through a media-oriented reflection. For this, such proposal is placed in the debate, driven by the medial turn in Media Philosophy, about the relevance of the transcendentalist approach to the media. At first, the Kittlerian approach is presented in general terms as a transcendentalist approach. In a second moment, the Kittlerian strategy consisting of eliminating the notion of meaning is reconstructed and analyzed to concentrate, instead, on the notion of information. (shrink)

El presente trabajo analiza críticamente la propuesta de Kittler de renovar las ciencias sociales y humanas mediante una reflexión orientada hacia los medios de comunicación. Para ello, se sitúa tal propuesta en el debate, impulsado por el giro medial en Filosofía de los Medios, acerca de la pertinencia (o no) del enfoque trascendentalista sobre los medios. En un primer momento, se presenta en términos generales el planteo kittleriano en cuanto enfoque trascendentalista. En un segundo momento, se reconstruye y analiza la (...) estrategia kittleriana consistente en eliminar la noción de sentido para concentrarse, en cambio, en la noción de información. (shrink)

This e-Special Issue of Theory, Culture & Society focuses on the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s impact across the field of humanities. By including Kittler’s own texts and other scholars’ articles that continue or comment on Kittler’s work, the editors have sought to address the core aspects of Kittler’s provocative insights into how media technologies underpin our cultural formations. The editorial introduction sets out key sections on technology, aesthetics, ontology and epistemology, identified as the significant axes where Kittler opens up (...) traditional notions of art and humanities. The sections also develop a common theme having to do with a media material understanding of aesthetics and philosophical determinations of the concept of media from Ancient Greeks to computational culture. (shrink)

This article analyzes the philosophical concept of dwelling from the perspective of a media pragmatics. Media pragmatics is presented here as a method that discloses the circular relation between rule-bound practices and the material and technological substrates that support them. This method is put into practice through a comparative philosophical interpretation of two “canonical” models of dwelling: the Greek oikos and the bourgeois home. Because dwelling, as Heidegger argued, is an interface mediating between the “lifeworld” and the “world” while also (...) organizing relations within the lifeworld, it serves here as a privileged object for articulating this method. (shrink)

This article considers the use of flag telegraphy by the US Signal Corps during the Civil War as it functioned as a proto-technical medium that preceded wire telegraphy as a military communications technology. Not only was flag telegraphy a historical step towards contemporary technical media, it was also an early iteration of the digitization of communication. Our treatment ties together three main theoretical threads as a way of seeing ‘the digital’ in material communication practices: (1) Friedrich Kittler’s concept of technical (...) media as a remediation between the 19th and 20th centuries, (2) Foucault’s docile bodies as means of reproducing culture, and (3) James Carey’s argument that the telegraph reconfigured communication. The Signal Corps is a rich historical moment in terms of media history and history of technology because it illustrates the convergence of historical exigencies at work in the war machine: mobility, secrecy, precision, and speed. Each contributes, we argue, to a digital telos that privileges digital ways of knowing and being. (shrink)

The article investigates the function and signification of doors in two silent films, Ernst Lubitsch's 1916 When I Was Dead and Charlie Chaplin's 1917 The Adventurer. Taking a theoretical perspective provided by the field of intellectual inquiry known as cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken), the door in these films is studied with respect to its procedural and functional operations. Specifically, the article focuses on the ways in which the employment of doors in each of the films relates to these films' configurations of (...) inside and outside as conceptual realms. The analysis presented shows that Lubitsch and Chaplin engage doors in uniquely different ways. It further reveals that, while the operation of the door in When I Was Dead reinforces an exclusive binary of inside and outside, which itself can be traced back to the film's concern with sexual difference, the operation of the door in The Adventurer essentially deconstructs the inside/outside binary, an act that can be linked to a critique of contemporary notions of industrial management and the treatment of humans as machines. (shrink)