"Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and the Interminable Half-Life of "So-Called Man

Bibliographic Data

ID3774376
AuthorsThomas Sutherland (0000-0003-1538-7044, University of Lincoln, Brayford Pool, Lincoln, Lincolnshire LN6 7TS, UK.), Elliot Patsoura (School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 2010, Australia.)
Year2017
Volume22
Issue4
Pages49-68
Publication date2017-10-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAngelaki (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0969-725X • E-ISSN: 1469-2899
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0969725x.2017.1406047
OpenAlexW2773541587
LanguageEN
References cited19

This 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 (viz. 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

Appropriation · Causality (physics · Epistemology · Michel foucault · Politics · Positivism · Sociology · Transcendental number · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Cybernetics and Technology in Society · Law · Philosophy

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