This Article Abstract Free Full Text (Free PDF) Free Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Web of Science (1) Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Kittler, F. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Lightning and Series - Event and Thunder

The article is an attempt to subject a basic figure of historical analysis - the juxtaposition of event and series - to the changing alphanumerical writing systems of Ancient Greece, the Early Modern Age, and the contemporary digitial environment. It shows how the basic mathematical analysis of periodicity and frequency in the realm of sound is, first, a by-product of innovations in war technology and, second, radically changed by different ways in which numerical systems process data. With regard to the development of Kittler’s thought the article is a somewhat idiosyncratic but nonetheless highly revealing and representative example of his recent switch from media-technological to more alphanumerically oriented analyses and the accompanying focus on the importance of Ancient Greece for the evolution of science.

Key Words: digitization • event • history of mathematics • periodicity

References

• Aristotle (1975) Posterior Analytics, trans. Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Clarendon Press .
• Aristotle (1994) Metaphysics. Books Z and H, trans. David Bostock. Oxford: Clarendon Press .
• Bergson, Henri (1923) L’Évolution créatrice. Paris: F. Alcan .
• Burkert, Walter (1992) The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, trans. Margaret E. Pinder and Walter Burkert. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
• Descartes, René (1953) uvres et lettres, ed. by André Bridoux. Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
• Eribon, Didier (1991) Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
• Foucault, Michel (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon .
• Foucault, Michel (1988) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage .
• Freeman, Kathleen (1957) Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
• Heidegger, Martin (1973) The End of Philosophy, trans. John Stambaugh. New York: Harper and Row .
• Heidegger, Martin and Eugen Fink (1979) Heraclitus Seminar 1966/67, trans. Charles H. Seibert. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press .
• Hesiod (1988) Theogony and Works and Days, trans. M.L. West. Oxford: Oxford University Press .
• Homer (2004) The Odyssey, trans. Edward McCrorie. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press .
• Lacan, Jacques (1988) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York and London: W.W. Norton .
• Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1985) Philosophische Schriften, ed. by Hans Heinz Holz. Wiesbaden: Europäische Verlagsanstalt .
• Mersenne, Marin (1975) Harmonie universelle contenant la théorie et la pratique de la musique, ed. by François Lesure. Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974) Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montiari. Berlin: de Gruyter .
• Oresme, Nicole (1971) Tractatus de commensurabilitate vel incommensurabilitate motuum celi, ed. and trans. Edward Grant. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
• Ovid (1986) Metamorphoses, trans. A.D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press .
• Pascal, Blaise (1954) uvres complètes, ed. by Jacques Chevalier. Paris: Gallimard .
• Pausanias (1965) Description of Greece, trans. J.G. Frazer. New York: Biblio and Tannen .
• Plutarch (1971) Moral Essays, trans. Rex Warner. Harmondsworth: Penguin .
• Rabelais, François (1990) Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Burton Raffel. New York: W.W. Norton .
• Rossi, Paolo (2001) The Birth of Modern Science, trans. Cynthia de Nardi Ipsen. Oxford: Blackwell .
• Schopenhauer, Arthur (1958) The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover .
• Sophocles (1953) Electra and Other Plays, trans. E.F. Waitling. Harmondsworth: Penguin .
• Xenophon (2002) Spartan Constitution, Intro. and trans. Michael Lipka. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter .

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 23, No. 7-8, 63-74 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0263276406069883


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?

This Article Abstract Free Full Text (Free PDF) Free Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Web of Science (1) Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Kittler, F. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?