Romanticism as Media Technologies: Friedrich Kittler on “Discourse Networks 1800”

This paper attempts to discuss the analysis of“Discourse Networks 1800” in the first half of Kittler’s masterpiece Discourse Networks 1800/1900 by re-discovering the relationship between Romanticism and media technology, and to show how Kittler complements and corrects Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge from the perspective of media technology. Kittler creatively pointed out the metaphorical relationship between German romanticism’s knowledge structure and a production machine operating in a linear loop and explained further the paradigm shift of ideas of language around 1800, which is the shift from signifier to signified, from sign to significance, from matter to spirit. Kittler also reminded us that“poetry” accurately represented the ideas of language in this period: the language in romantic poetry is only regarded as a transparent, nonmaterial information channel.