Geoffrey Winthrop‐young
Biographic Data
| ID | 257656 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Geoffrey Winthrop‐young |
| GIVEN NAMES | Geoffrey |
| FAMILY NAME | Winthrop‐young |
| SIGNATURE | YOUNG G W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 120 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
“We are Germans. We are perfect, and we are dead”: Aspects of Nazi Chronopolitics in Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night
Katharine Burdekin’s classic dystopia Swastika Night (1937) depicts a twenty-eighth-century world in which Nazi Germany reigns supreme. Most of the scholarship deals with the novel’s extreme gender politics – above all, the enslavement and defacement of women – that foreshadow later dystopias like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). The paper addresses the other significant feature of Burdekin’s Nazi empire: the complete destruction of …
War and Literary Studies
Wotan’s Biopunk: The Grim(m) German God and His English Bloodsport in Sarban’s The Sound of His Horn
The essay analyzes Sarban’s 1952 novel The Sound of His Horn , one of the first alternate histories to depict a victorious Third Reich. The depiction of the latter is a strange mixture. On the one hand, the novel is a product of its day by presenting a regressive, resolutely anti-modern Nazi Germany headed back into a barbarian past. On the other hand, it anticipates later depictions (both in the alternate history genre as well as in historiograp…
Deutsche Rindergrammatik; or, The Once and Future Aurochs
The essay compares the back-breeding of the extinct aurochs by the German zoologists Lutz and Heinz Heck with the reconstruction of past Germanic languages and mythologies by Jacob Grimm. It then points to similarities between current rewilding projects and the absorption of the Hecks' back-breeding venture into the broader National Socialist vision of racial rewilding in the conquered eastern territories. Finally, it argues that the aurochs resu…
Furious Feedback and the Revolutionary Ode to Noise
The following remarks are designed to accompany Friedrich Kittler's essay “Wagner's Furious Host” (”Wagners Wildes Heer”) that is part of this issue of Cultural Politics. The goal is not to offer an overview or address all the aspects of Kittler's analysis. Rather, I want to focus on an obsession that runs through the essay much like the Furious Host invoked by Kittler's title storms through German woods at night. This obsession is the revolution…
A Green Hell Makes Better Germans: Carl Stephenson’s “Leiningen” and the Almost Aryan Countertextual Army Ants
Carl Stephenson’s short story “Leiningen versus the Ants” (1937) is one of the most widely read and remediated German literary texts of the last century. It is also widely ignored by academics, especially by German scholars. My analysis compares Stephenson’s story to H. G. Wells’ more respected “Empire of the Ants.” The basic thesis is that “Leiningen” is a countertext; it changes key elements of Wells’ story in order to deliver a different messa…
The Kittler Effect
This article traces the North American reception of "German media theory," especially the work of Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011). The construction of Kittler's work abroad is marked by truncations and targeted appropriations related as much to the breaks and discontinuities in his own writings as to particular dynamics in North American academe and beyond. It passes through several stages, extends into the domain of social media, and influences th…
Unpublished Preface to Discourse Networks
May 01 2016 Unpublished Preface to Discourse Networks Friedrich A. Kittler, Friedrich A. Kittler Friedrich A. Kittler (1943–2011) was Professor of Aesthetics and History of Media at Humboldt University of Berlin. His books in English include Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford University Press, 1990); Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays (G+B Arts International, 1997); Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford University Press, 1999); O…
Parlêtres
Viewed from the perspective of cultural techniques the anthropological of the philosophers is an effect of the problematic distinction between different species of talking animals (parlêtres). If, as Aristotle decreed, man is an animal endowed with the gift of speech, then throughout the histories of philosophy, pedagogy, and literature this particular animal will be trailed by a host of other speaking animals (such as woodpeckers and parrots) th…
AnArcheology for AnArchives: Why Do We Need—Especially for the Arts—A Complementary Concept to the Archive
The archive serves to organize mental and enforced orders in the shape of appropriate structures and to preserve the memory of past orders through their material-discursive traces. From the perspective of a logic of the manifold, however, the fruitless search for the one origin is as meaningless as the definition of a future. Yet, to work on the conceptualization and further development of utopian spaces of possibility does not necessarily involv…
Discourse, Media, Cultural Techniques: The Complexity of Kittler
Discourse, Media, Cultural Techniques:The Complexity of Kittler Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (bio) The following remarks are an attempt to apply selected features associated with complex phenomena to a recent development in German Kulturwissenschaften. The enterprise is fraught with difficulties, not the least of which is the absence of a commonly accepted and sufficiently ecumenical definition of complexity that would ease the transfer from the natur…
Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real
De Bellis Germanicis
Hemerochronia, or, Take a Walk on the Wild Side of Time: Sideline Snippets on Media Archaeology
This essay offers a few brief remarks on certain affects underlying the three main inflections of so-called media archaeology, the most important of which is the affect against hemerochronia, the - alleged - taming of time brought about by historiography. The anti-historiographical orientation is complemented by a view of archaeology as s possible entry point to very different - wilder - realms of time
On Friedrich Kittler's 'Authorship and Love
This article provides a short introduction to Friedrich Kittler's 1980 essay 'Authorship and Love' by showing how it fits into the development of Kittler's thought. The stark contrast between superficially similar scenes in Goethe's Werther and Dante's Divine Comedy, each of which is said to represent fundamentally different conceptualizations of authorship and love, is a revealing instance of Kittler's distinctive and polemical appropriation of …
TheKulturof Cultural Techniques
This article offers an introduction to the German concept of Kulturtechniken (cultural techniques), with a special focus on the term's multilayered semantic career, as well as on the way old notions of Kultur are at play in the concept
Cultural Techniques: Preliminary Remarks
These introductory remarks outline the German concept of Kulturtechniken (cultural techniques) by tracing its various overlapping meanings from the late 19th century to today and linking it to developments in recent German theory. Originally related to the agricultural domain, the notion of cultural techniques was later employed to describe the interactions between humans and media, and, most recently, to account for basic operations and differen…
Hunting a Whale of a State: Kittler and His Terrorists
This essay is a companion piece to Friedrich Kittler's lecture “Of States and Their Terrorists.” It provides additional background, especially for Kittler's discussion of the German Red Army Faction (RAF ), and discusses the various sources (from Friedrich Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt) that inform Kittler's broader historical survey of technology and enmity
Well, What Socks Is Pynchon Wearing Today?” A Freiburg Scrapbook in Memory of Friedrich Kittler
This essay, a sequence of short memories and reflections, describes several encounters with Friedrich Kittler in Freiburg between 1980 and 1985
Krautrock, Heidegger, Bogeyman: Kittler in the anglosphere
The paper discusses some of the key factors that shaped Friedrich Kittler's anglophone reception. Four points are of special importance: the truncated appropriation of Kittler's 'middle period' by American academics; the structural and ideological reasons for the failure of North American German Studies to capitalize on the growing interest in Kittler; the charges of technodeterminism; and Kittler's difficult role in the debate over posthumanism
P(r)ose of Pain
Anybody can despise bourgeois society for a decade or two, but it takes considerable stamina to do so for almost a century. Either the middle-class universe catches up with its detractors, in which case they are likely to end up on a pedestal, or history passes them by and they will be dismissed as tedious cranks. By the time he died just seven weeks short of his 103rd birthday, Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) had covered all the bases: he was a scandal…
Mensch, Medien, Körper, Kehre: Zum posthumanistischen Immerschon
»Vielmehr bietet [der Kommentar] auf höchstem Niveau eine substantielle Auseinandersetzung mit den Hintergründen, den Zusammenhängen, der Theorie und der Praxis des Grundgesetzes. Besseres lässt sich von einem Verfassungskommentar nicht sagen.“ Herbert Günther Staaatsanzeiger für das Land Hessen 2018 (50), 1494–1495
Memories of the Nile: Egyptian Traumas and Communication Technologies in Jan Assmann's Theory of Cultural Memory
In the 1990s, the Egyptologist Jan Assmann emerged as the most important contributor to German discussions of collective memory. This paper investigates, first, to what extent Assmann's theory of communicative and cultural memory is a generalization of his work on the “bi-materiality” of Egyptian culture, and second, how his controversial notion of the “Mosaic distinction” is linked to his work on the traumatic impact of Akhenaten's religious ref…
Cultural Studies and German Media Theory
The Third Reich in Alternate History: Aspects of a Genre‐Specific Depiction of Nazi Culture
Cultural Techniques: Preliminary Remarks
These introductory remarks outline the German concept of Kulturtechniken (cultural techniques) by tracing its various overlapping meanings from the late 19th century to today and linking it to developments in recent German theory. Originally related to the agricultural domain, the notion of cultural techniques was later employed to describe the interactions between humans and media, and, most recently, to account for basic operations and differen…
Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real
TheKulturof Cultural Techniques
This article offers an introduction to the German concept of Kulturtechniken (cultural techniques), with a special focus on the term's multilayered semantic career, as well as on the way old notions of Kultur are at play in the concept
Drill and Distraction in the Yellow Submarine: On the Dominance of War in Friedrich Kittler's Media Theory
Friedrich Kittler: An Introduction
The introduction provides a short outline of Kittler's biographical background and briefly discusses the stages of his work: The initial discourse-analytical stage of the late 1970s that centered primarily on literary text; the media-theoretical stage of the 1980s and early 1990s that focused in particular on electric and electronic media; and a current stage dedicated to rewriting the origin of one the most basic cultural technologies: the alpha…
On Friedrich Kittler's 'Authorship and Love
This article provides a short introduction to Friedrich Kittler's 1980 essay 'Authorship and Love' by showing how it fits into the development of Kittler's thought. The stark contrast between superficially similar scenes in Goethe's Werther and Dante's Divine Comedy, each of which is said to represent fundamentally different conceptualizations of authorship and love, is a revealing instance of Kittler's distinctive and polemical appropriation of …
Hunting a Whale of a State: Kittler and His Terrorists
This essay is a companion piece to Friedrich Kittler's lecture “Of States and Their Terrorists.” It provides additional background, especially for Kittler's discussion of the German Red Army Faction (RAF ), and discusses the various sources (from Friedrich Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt) that inform Kittler's broader historical survey of technology and enmity
The Kittler Effect
This article traces the North American reception of "German media theory," especially the work of Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011). The construction of Kittler's work abroad is marked by truncations and targeted appropriations related as much to the breaks and discontinuities in his own writings as to particular dynamics in North American academe and beyond. It passes through several stages, extends into the domain of social media, and influences th…
De Bellis Germanicis
Well, What Socks Is Pynchon Wearing Today?” A Freiburg Scrapbook in Memory of Friedrich Kittler
This essay, a sequence of short memories and reflections, describes several encounters with Friedrich Kittler in Freiburg between 1980 and 1985
Krautrock, Heidegger, Bogeyman: Kittler in the anglosphere
The paper discusses some of the key factors that shaped Friedrich Kittler's anglophone reception. Four points are of special importance: the truncated appropriation of Kittler's 'middle period' by American academics; the structural and ideological reasons for the failure of North American German Studies to capitalize on the growing interest in Kittler; the charges of technodeterminism; and Kittler's difficult role in the debate over posthumanism
A Green Hell Makes Better Germans: Carl Stephenson’s “Leiningen” and the Almost Aryan Countertextual Army Ants
Carl Stephenson’s short story “Leiningen versus the Ants” (1937) is one of the most widely read and remediated German literary texts of the last century. It is also widely ignored by academics, especially by German scholars. My analysis compares Stephenson’s story to H. G. Wells’ more respected “Empire of the Ants.” The basic thesis is that “Leiningen” is a countertext; it changes key elements of Wells’ story in order to deliver a different messa…
Discourse, Media, Cultural Techniques: The Complexity of Kittler
Discourse, Media, Cultural Techniques:The Complexity of Kittler Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (bio) The following remarks are an attempt to apply selected features associated with complex phenomena to a recent development in German Kulturwissenschaften. The enterprise is fraught with difficulties, not the least of which is the absence of a commonly accepted and sufficiently ecumenical definition of complexity that would ease the transfer from the natur…
Hemerochronia, or, Take a Walk on the Wild Side of Time: Sideline Snippets on Media Archaeology
This essay offers a few brief remarks on certain affects underlying the three main inflections of so-called media archaeology, the most important of which is the affect against hemerochronia, the - alleged - taming of time brought about by historiography. The anti-historiographical orientation is complemented by a view of archaeology as s possible entry point to very different - wilder - realms of time
Implosion and Intoxication: Kittler, a German Classic, and Pink Floyd
Focusing on Kittler's reading of Goethe's 'Wanderer's Nightsong' and Pink Floyd's 'Brain Damage', the article traces Kittler's development from discourse analysis to media theory. Where more traditional approaches would stress notions of self-reflexivity (both the poem and the song elaborate on their effects and foreground their own construction), Kittler performs, in his own words, a kind of 'implosion': The words of Goethe's poem collapse back …
Going Postal to Deliver Subjects: Remarks on a German Postal a Priori1
2002). GOING POSTAL TO DELIVER SUBJECTS: remarks on a german postal a priori1. Angelaki: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 143-158
The Perspective of Print
Ever since film, television, computer graphics, and virtual reality have made pictures move at ever faster rates, media theories have exhibited puzzling outbursts of delight. Writing in general and books in particular are said to be obsolete, while the image, more powerful and unifying than ever, is poised to reclaim its old rights. I would like to challenge this enthusiasm and the diagnosis it is based on with the counterargument that the book i…
Silicon Sociology, or, Two Kings on Hegel's Throne? Kittler, Luhmann, and the Posthuman Merger of German Media Theory
Observationes: Die lateinischen Schriften. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg , Dag Nikolaus Hasse
Die Titanic im Dritten Reich: Zur kulturellen Evolution einer Katastrophe
Luhmann und Kannitverstan im Druck: Zur Bildung typographischer Subjekte und alemannischer Sprachmaschinen
Going Postal to Deliver Subjects: Remarks on a German Postal a Priori1
2002). GOING POSTAL TO DELIVER SUBJECTS: remarks on a german postal a priori1. Angelaki: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 143-158
Introduction: Media--Models, Memories, and Metaphors
More on media? Another collection? Why? The simple answer is that some matters become clearer by heightened exposure, but media do not. While it is now impossible to hide from a term that only a few decades ago hardly made it into respectable encyclopedias, its inflated use has escalated into growing obscurity. Try to answer the question: What are media? Artificial storage and communication tools, technological systems, metaphors with knobs and d…
The Perspective of Print
Ever since film, television, computer graphics, and virtual reality have made pictures move at ever faster rates, media theories have exhibited puzzling outbursts of delight. Writing in general and books in particular are said to be obsolete, while the image, more powerful and unifying than ever, is poised to reclaim its old rights. I would like to challenge this enthusiasm and the diagnosis it is based on with the counterargument that the book i…
Literature as Product and Medium of Ecological Communication
If we grant the premise that urban-industrial culture is currently undergoing profound changes and that the term "information society" brings to a point current developments in our culture—including a vision for the future—then we need to introduce new frameworks to describe not only the economy, but also science, literature, and practically all other cultural phenomena. For one, the phrase demands that we conceive of ourselves, our culture, and …
Discourses, Schemata, Technology, Monuments: Outline for a Theory of Cultural Continuity
Discourses, Schemata, Technology, Monuments:Outline for a Theory of Cultural Continuity Hartmut Winkler (bio) Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (bio) and Michael Wutz (bio) Hartmut Winkler University of Paderborn Hartmut Winkler Hartmut Winkler is Professor of Media Theory and Media Culture at the University of Paderborn. He is the author of books on TV-reception, Switching/Zapping (1991); film theory, Der filmische Raum und der Zuschauer (19…
Drill and Distraction in the Yellow Submarine: On the Dominance of War in Friedrich Kittler's Media Theory
On a Species of Origin: Luhmann's Darwin
On a Species of Origin:Luhmann's Darwin Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (bio) Introduction: Of Beginnings, Boundaries, and Bogeymen In his obituary of Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998)—a remarkable necrological vignette that reads like a cross between Marc Anthony's funerary farewell to Caesar and W. H. Auden's poem on the death of William Yeats—Friedrich Kittler described Luhmann as a Herr (in the double sense of master and gentleman) who "spoke from further a…
Cultural Studies and German Media Theory
The Third Reich in Alternate History: Aspects of a Genre‐Specific Depiction of Nazi Culture
Implosion and Intoxication: Kittler, a German Classic, and Pink Floyd
Focusing on Kittler's reading of Goethe's 'Wanderer's Nightsong' and Pink Floyd's 'Brain Damage', the article traces Kittler's development from discourse analysis to media theory. Where more traditional approaches would stress notions of self-reflexivity (both the poem and the song elaborate on their effects and foreground their own construction), Kittler performs, in his own words, a kind of 'implosion': The words of Goethe's poem collapse back …
Friedrich Kittler: An Introduction
The introduction provides a short outline of Kittler's biographical background and briefly discusses the stages of his work: The initial discourse-analytical stage of the late 1970s that centered primarily on literary text; the media-theoretical stage of the 1980s and early 1990s that focused in particular on electric and electronic media; and a current stage dedicated to rewriting the origin of one the most basic cultural technologies: the alpha…
Memories of the Nile: Egyptian Traumas and Communication Technologies in Jan Assmann's Theory of Cultural Memory
In the 1990s, the Egyptologist Jan Assmann emerged as the most important contributor to German discussions of collective memory. This paper investigates, first, to what extent Assmann's theory of communicative and cultural memory is a generalization of his work on the “bi-materiality” of Egyptian culture, and second, how his controversial notion of the “Mosaic distinction” is linked to his work on the traumatic impact of Akhenaten's religious ref…
Mensch, Medien, Körper, Kehre: Zum posthumanistischen Immerschon
»Vielmehr bietet [der Kommentar] auf höchstem Niveau eine substantielle Auseinandersetzung mit den Hintergründen, den Zusammenhängen, der Theorie und der Praxis des Grundgesetzes. Besseres lässt sich von einem Verfassungskommentar nicht sagen.“ Herbert Günther Staaatsanzeiger für das Land Hessen 2018 (50), 1494–1495
P(r)ose of Pain
Anybody can despise bourgeois society for a decade or two, but it takes considerable stamina to do so for almost a century. Either the middle-class universe catches up with its detractors, in which case they are likely to end up on a pedestal, or history passes them by and they will be dismissed as tedious cranks. By the time he died just seven weeks short of his 103rd birthday, Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) had covered all the bases: he was a scandal…
Krautrock, Heidegger, Bogeyman: Kittler in the anglosphere
The paper discusses some of the key factors that shaped Friedrich Kittler's anglophone reception. Four points are of special importance: the truncated appropriation of Kittler's 'middle period' by American academics; the structural and ideological reasons for the failure of North American German Studies to capitalize on the growing interest in Kittler; the charges of technodeterminism; and Kittler's difficult role in the debate over posthumanism
Hunting a Whale of a State: Kittler and His Terrorists
This essay is a companion piece to Friedrich Kittler's lecture “Of States and Their Terrorists.” It provides additional background, especially for Kittler's discussion of the German Red Army Faction (RAF ), and discusses the various sources (from Friedrich Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt) that inform Kittler's broader historical survey of technology and enmity
Well, What Socks Is Pynchon Wearing Today?” A Freiburg Scrapbook in Memory of Friedrich Kittler
This essay, a sequence of short memories and reflections, describes several encounters with Friedrich Kittler in Freiburg between 1980 and 1985
Cultural Techniques: Preliminary Remarks
These introductory remarks outline the German concept of Kulturtechniken (cultural techniques) by tracing its various overlapping meanings from the late 19th century to today and linking it to developments in recent German theory. Originally related to the agricultural domain, the notion of cultural techniques was later employed to describe the interactions between humans and media, and, most recently, to account for basic operations and differen…
TheKulturof Cultural Techniques
This article offers an introduction to the German concept of Kulturtechniken (cultural techniques), with a special focus on the term's multilayered semantic career, as well as on the way old notions of Kultur are at play in the concept
Parlêtres
Viewed from the perspective of cultural techniques the anthropological of the philosophers is an effect of the problematic distinction between different species of talking animals (parlêtres). If, as Aristotle decreed, man is an animal endowed with the gift of speech, then throughout the histories of philosophy, pedagogy, and literature this particular animal will be trailed by a host of other speaking animals (such as woodpeckers and parrots) th…
AnArcheology for AnArchives: Why Do We Need—Especially for the Arts—A Complementary Concept to the Archive
The archive serves to organize mental and enforced orders in the shape of appropriate structures and to preserve the memory of past orders through their material-discursive traces. From the perspective of a logic of the manifold, however, the fruitless search for the one origin is as meaningless as the definition of a future. Yet, to work on the conceptualization and further development of utopian spaces of possibility does not necessarily involv…
Philosophy (24 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Cybernetics and Technology in Society (15 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Art (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · History (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · German (12 works) · Linguistics (12 works)