“Alle Apparate abschalten.” Conceiving Love and Technology with Heidegger And Kittler

• Main Author: Robert A. Winkler
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture 2020-09-01
• Series: On_Culture
• Subjects: friedrich a. kittler; love; technology; martin heidegger; popular culture studies
• Online Access: https://www.on-culture.org/journal/issue-9/alle-apparate-abschalten/

This article explores Friedrich Kittler’s conception of the intersection of love with modern technology and illustrates the theoretical insights gained by considering Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013). The German media theorist Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) was among the first to study the discursive and material implications of modern technologies. Recent scholarship has stressed Kittler’s indebtedness to Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. Accordingly, Kittler thinks through the latter’s contention that it is in and through modern technology that human beings are possibly confronted with ‘truth events,’ in which the particular time-specific ‘self-unconcealment of being’ takes place — and this unconcealment would not least materialize in the realm of ‘love’ (Gumbrecht 2013; Kittler 2014; Weber 2018). In this article, I focus on the theoretical examination of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology in general and the concomitant notion of ‘enframing’ in particular to shed further light on Kittler’s reflection on love that pervades the latter’s entire oeuvre. The article then interrogates whether, and under what circumstances, modern technology might foster said ‘truth events’ by focusing on: first, love among human beings, second, love among technological beings, and, third, love between human beings and technological beings. Thereby, Spike Jonze’s critically acclaimed science-fiction drama Her, depicting a romantic relationship between a human being and a computer operating system, serves as a reference point in illustrating Kittler’s multifaceted conception of the nexus of love and modern technology.