Operation Valhalla: Writings on War, Weapons, and Media
Operation Valhalla: Writings on War, Weapons, and Media
by Friedrich Kittler edited by Ilinca Iurascu, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz
Duke University Press, 2021 Paper: 978-1-4780-1184-2 | eISBN: 978-1-4780-1318-1 | Cloth: 978-1-4780-1071-5 Library of Congress Classification P96.T42K588 2021
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Operation Valhalla collects eighteen texts by German media theorist Friedrich Kittler on the close connections between war and media technology. In these essays, public lectures, interviews, literary analyses, and autobiographical musings, Kittler outlines how war has been a central driver of media's evolution, from Prussia's wars against Napoleon to the so-called War on Terror. Covering an eclectic array of topics, he charts the intertwined military and theatrical histories of the searchlight and the stage lamp, traces the microprocessor's genealogy back to the tank, shows how rapid-fire guns brought about new standards for optics and acoustics, and reads Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to upset established claims about the relationship between war, technology, and history in the twentieth century. Throughout, Operation Valhalla foregrounds the outsize role of war in media history as well as Kittler's importance as a daring and original thinker.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) was a Professor of Media Aesthetics and History at Humboldt University in Berlin and the author of numerous books, including Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.
Ilinca Iurascu is Associate Professor of German at the University of British Columbia.
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young is Professor of German at the University of British Columbia.
Michael Wutz is Rodney H. Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor of English at Weber State University.
REVIEWS
“The preeminent thinker of media in the past half century, Friedrich Kittler speaks to deep concerns of the digital age in a voice that is philosophical, wry, learned, obscure, indirect, profound, and always stimulating. To read him is to have your neurons rearranged. Kittler’s work is essential.”
-- John Durham Peters, coauthor of Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History
“As demonstrated by his famous mapping of the three media operations—recording, transmitting, processing—onto ‘trenches,’ ‘blitz,’ and Ronald Reagan's Star Wars, war for Friedrich Kittler was the principle that drove media history. Although a provocation for whiggish as well as for critical thinking that found the telos of media history in humanity's progress toward democracy or capitalism's perversion of democracy, Kittler's highly original approach to media analysis opened up a road to a posthumanistic theory of media which has never been more timely than today.”
-- Bernhard Siegert, author of Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real
“Operation Valhalla is the best resource available for understanding the central role of warfare in Kittler’s thought and an all too relevant book for our troubled times.”
-- Anders Engberg-Pedersen Critical Inquiry
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editor's Preface / Ilinca Iurascu, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, and Michael Wutz vii Introduction: The Wars of Friedrich Kittler / Geoffrey Winthrop-Young 1 Part I: Guns, Germans, and Steel: The Hardware(s) of War 1. Free Ways (Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young) 53 2. A Short History of the Searchlight (Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young) 62 3. Fragments of a History of Firearms (Translated by Michael Wutz) 69 4. Tanks (Translated by Michael Wutz) 73 Part II. Wires, Waves, and Wagner 5. Noises of War (Translated by Michael Wutz) 79 6. Playback: A World War History of Radio Drama (Translated by Michael Wutz) 91 7. Operation Valhalla (Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young) 110 8. When the Blitzkrieg Raged (Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young) 117 Part III. Vanishing Animals and Returning Nomads 9. Animals of War: A Historical Bestiary (Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young) 123 10. On Modern Warfare: A Conversation with Alexander Kluge (Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young) 127 11. Of States and Their Terrorists (Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young) 136 Part IV. Love and War 12. Manners of Death in War (Translated by Michael Wutz) 151 13. Ottilie Hauptmann (Translated by Ilinca Iurascu) 166 Part V. Pynchon's War 14. On a Novel That Would Not Only Be Fiction . . . (Translated by Michael Wutz) 193 15. De Nostalgia (Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young) 198 16. Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second World War (Translated by Michael Wutz) 211 Part VI. Kittler on Kittler 17. Biogeography (Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young) 227 18. Theology (Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young) 233 Notes 235 Bibliography 273 Index 287 Credits 295
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