"The text mirrors a theory of cultural technology, which takes culture at its word and the technology of (cultural?) cultivation reclaims the word 'colore'. Cultural technology always asserts a predilection to symbolic order, but it not only institutes symbolic order, but contradicts it as well. After all, the conductors and media of cultural technology dare to put into question the presumption of a sovereign subject which is the master of the constituative processes for culture. Rectitude is challenged to respond to (...) this break-down of the classic sovereign teachings of symbolic order and allow the conductors and media a position other than that of only a means to a legitimately sanctioned end.". (shrink)

Cultural technologies are practices which are commited to the framing of cultures and collectives and conveyed by means of the media and educational institutes. This concept is not limited to the so-called elementary cultural technologies (Reading, writing, arithmetic) but also technology of the body, representational processes and other creative technologies. In contrast to a pedagogic understanding of cultural technology, media-scientific cultural technology research is not concerned with the mediation of high culture, education or art, but fundamentally with the analyses of (...) cultural communication, in so far as it can be described as a technical process. (shrink)

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.