Abstract Allow me to begin with two explanatory notes. The first concerns the title of this lecture: Europe in the Global History of Culture, or: Journeying to a Japanese Cape with Friedrich Kittler. The subsidiary title Journeying to a Japanese Cape with Friedrich
Kittler sounds as if I travelled from abroad across a vast sea to a cape in Japan, enjoying a voyage with the thinker and cultural historian, Friedrich Kittler. Unfortunately, this is not true. It was a much less romantic journey in a taxi we took from Tokyo. At all events, we both undertook
an excursion to the coast. I will be talking about this journey. Please also allow me, therefore, to share private experiences with you. I do this in order to place this thinker in an intercultural context and explore his relevance to comparative studies. So, who was Friedrich Kittler? He
was born in 1943 in Saxony, emigrated from East to West when Germany was divided, and studied in Freiburg – mainly German Studies. In his books from the 1980s, such as Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (Discourse Networks 1800/1900) and Grammophon Film Typewriter (Gramophone,
Film, Typewriter), he developed the method of analysing literary history as part of media studies, defining “media” as things like books, phonograph or computer hardware. In 1993, after the reunification of Germany, he took up a professorship in “Aesthetics and the History
of Media” at the Humboldt University, where he remained until his death in 2011 in Berlin. He always identified as a historian. His research focus was cultural history from antiquity onwards. For him, the core of cultural history was media history, and the history of literature was part
of media history. For approximately the last ten years of his life his focus was on a large project, a cultural history of Europe from antiquity to the present. In 2007 Friedrich Kittler, the expert on Europe, came to Japan, and this is what I will be talking about here. My focus is therefore
on Europe, Japan, and the sea that connects Europe and Japan and the European Friedrich Kittler in an intercultural context. So, that was my first explanatory note.
Plenary Session III. Media History. Media History Becomes Communication History – or Cultural History?
