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Theory, Culture & Society
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The Cultural Techniques of Time Axis Manipulation

On Friedrich Kittler’s Conception of Media

Sybille Krämer

Free University of Berlin, Center for Advanced Studies, Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg)

The originality of Kittler is not his preference for technical media, but his insight in the linking of media with the technique of time axis manipulation. The most elementary experience in human existence is the irreversibility of the flow of time. Technology provides a means for channeling this irreversibility. Media are practices that use strategies of spatialization to enable one to manipulate the order of things that progress in time by transforming singular events in reproducible data. Human bodies cannot be seen as media because they are subject to the linearity of time. Are media a priori functioning universals for Friedrich Kittler? The answer is: no. Media history has a beginning (writing) and an end (computer).

Key Words: cultural techniques • data processing • digitalized existentialism • history of media time axis manipulation • theory of media

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 23, No. 7-8, 93-109 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0263276406069885
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