Read­ing Friedrich Kittler’s Musik und Mathematik

The name Friedrich Kit­tler is inex­tri­ca­bly linked to Media The­ory, but in fact the rich diver­sity of his work exceeds this dis­ci­pli­nary label. Through­out his career, Kit­tler has attempted to achieve “the expul­sion of Spirit from the human­i­ties,” as the title of one of his early essays—“Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geis­teswis­senschaften” (1980)—announces. For a con­tem­po­rary English-speaking audi­ence, a bet­ter trans­la­tion of the same phrase might be “over­com­ing human­ism.” This has been Kittler’s goal ever since, as becomes par­tic­u­larly evi­dent in sem­i­nal works such as Dis­course Net­works (1983) and Gramo­phone, Film, Type­writer (1985), though it is also appar­ent in more recent texts such as “Uni­ver­si­ties: Wet, Hard, Soft, and Harder” (2000). One of the most impor­tant but under­val­ued accom­plish­ments of Kittler’s work is that he rede­fines the rela­tion between human­i­ties and sci­ence. Kittler’s empha­sis on the media-technological a pri­ori of knowl­edge not only allows him to crit­i­cize and reject many of the age-old dog­mas in the human­i­ties, but, con­versely, post­struc­tural­ism and psy­cho­analy­sis enable him to reflect crit­i­cally on tech­nol­ogy. Kit­tler thereby envi­sions a new kind of humanities—one that can no longer bear that name, of course! This new sem­i­nar focuses on Kittler’s lat­est and per­haps most ambi­tious project, Musik und Math­e­matik . This work aims to present a cul­tural his­tory of the West­ern world in four vol­umes, start­ing in ancient Greece, then pass­ing through Rome, the mid­dle ages and up to the present com­put­er­ized age. In 2006 the first vol­ume appeared (Wil­helm Fink Ver­lag), bear­ing the sub­ti­tle Hel­las 1: Aphrodite. Writ­ten by Kit­tler with the help of dozens of assis­tants, the book explores the early entan­gle­ment of eros, music, math­e­mat­ics, and the alpha­bet. On the basis of an orig­i­nal and arguably con­tro­ver­sial rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of the Sirens pas­sage from the Odyssey, Kit­tler aims to show how West­ern cul­ture was born from the nota­tion of the vow­els of the Sirens’ song. Kit­tler takes math­e­mat­ics to refer to the moment of, and the desire for, learn­ing impli­cated in this sin­gu­lar event. The book’s nar­ra­tive com­prises a patch­work of con­trast­ing sec­tions, con­tain­ing in-depth stud­ies of Greek texts, ref­er­ences to con­tem­po­rary (pop­u­lar) cul­ture, trav­els to the Tyrrhe­nean Sea, and dis­cus­sions with Theodor W. Adorno, Sig­mund Freud, Friedrich Niet­zsche, Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger, and count­less oth­ers. Bal­anc­ing as it does between grand syn­the­sis and local, rather free asso­ci­a­tion, the book invites a patient and crit­i­cal read­ing. The orga­niz­ers pro­pose to afford this strange but inspir­ing book the time required for such a read­ing. In the Fall of 2009, alter­nat­ing between loca­tions at Utrecht Uni­ver­sity and the Uni­ver­sity of Ams­ter­dam, they invite schol­ars from all dis­ci­pli­nary back­grounds to join in the read­ing. In view of the Home­ric con­text of the book, spe­cial­ists in ancient Greek, arche­ol­ogy, and other rel­e­vant fields will be asked to present their views on the books’ the­ses. For more details, please con­tact the orga­niz­ers: