I. Introduction

Although Friedrich Kittler is sometimes cited by proponents of sound studies, it is unlikely he would have approved of much of their work. First: although his work may in some ways seem cognate to that of sound studies, in his “provocation” of traditional disciplinary boundaries, and his shared reference to Foucault, he himself was a sharp critic of Anglo-American cultural studies, which have arguably been the matrix for sound studies. Second, his own concept of sound—a term he largely contributed to popularizing in German—is quite distinct from, and even opposed to, that of sound studies, in its ontological dimension. This distinction has been continued by several of Kittler's German inheritors, whether in media studies or in musicology. Yet for all the seemingly conservative overtones of his later writing (with its central reference to Heidegger and Greece), his project remains difficult to frame or place within traditional disciplinary or philosophical contexts. Nonetheless, we can use the term sound itself as an Ariadnefaden or leitmotif to work out the peculiar theoretical status of Kittler's writings.

Relating Kittler to sound studies is rendered more difficult by the latter's lack of airtight definition, which some would see as a deliberate foil to traditional notions of scholarship. One could, perhaps, borrow Lawrence Grossberg's now-familiar, standard definition of cultural studies as “an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and sometimes counter-disciplinary field that operates in the tension between its tendencies to embrace both a broad, anthropological conception of culture and one that is more narrowly humanistic.” Right away one sees where Kittler differs: his own notions of culture were neither anthropological nor (certainly) “humanistic.” In Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaften (A Cultural History of Cultural Studies), written at around the time of his own Kehre or turn from media hardware to music and mathematics, he looks the concept of culture squarely in the eye. For Clifford Geertz, the patron saint of so much American culturalist (and new historicist) work, he has little time, calling him overrated; one suspects Geertz's debt to hermeneutics (one of Kittler's lifelong enemies) and his reduction of culture to text could hardly have interested him. Instead, Kittler is interested in the Schnittstelle (interface) of culture and technology, something “humanistic conceptions” have not always been interested in. In his attention to marginal phenomena around the production of intellectual history, Kittler may look like a practitioner of cultural studies or New Historicism.