Jussi Parikka

Green Media Times: Friedrich Kittler and

Ecological Media History

Introduction
There are very different notions of materiality that have been circulating
in international media and cultural studies discussions during the past few
decades. In a cultural and media studies context, materiality is meant to
focus on something different than the same word within a German Medien
wissenschaft context. In Britain, on the axis of universities from Lancaster
to London with the centre at Birmingham in the Midlands, materiality
quite often calls to mind a lineage starting from Raymond Williams cultural studies emphasis, and its modern variations. University departments
still carry a strong legacy of cultural studies, and even in media studies,
the technical speciics of media culture are often left to colleagues in the
sciences and engineering on the other side of the Faculty lines. This emphasis often has to do with the birth of the Birmingham school of cultural studies in the 1960s, and its aftereffect on modern cultural and media studies departments across UK. In such a heritage, materiality is often related
to ( human ) experience. The critique of positivism in this tradition might
assume forms that emphasise the empirical above theoretical considerations. The construction of meaning is a central feature through which to
understand the living materiality of media practices, and media materialism reverts to concrete practices of cultural production in speciic spatiotemporal settings.1 Therefore, it is no wonder that the teachings of the likes
of Friedrich A. Kittler did not always ind fertile ground across the Channel,
despite his admiration for certain sites of British culture: the Cambridge of
Turing and Pink Floyd, Bletchley Park, and the London of rock engineering
culture and studio technologies.2 But as we know, he admired neither British cultural studies, nor the rising hegemony of English-language international universities. Indeed, as a theoretician, he was invested in writing an
alternative history of media and materiality, even if the latter s focus changed in his later work on the love life of the Greeks a mediatic affair. The
Kittler that is internationally known as a material media historian, especially
in the Anglo-American world, is both lauded and reviled for his emphasis on the primacy of technology. This Kittler is the scholar interested in
the triangles of war, science and engineering, as indexes for what humanities should be about in the Turing age. In this sense, there was always a
strong normative sense in Kittlers provocations that had an inluence on his
historical methodology too. For people trained in contextual thinking, some
of his demands always felt somewhat anachronistic. Kittler s methodology
was partly recognizable for those knowledgeable about Foucault, but also

(1)NickCouldry,InsideCulture.ReImaginingtheMethodofCulturalStudies,LosAngeles
LondonNewYork2000,p.1112.
(2)Onrelatedtopics,seeGeoffreyWinthropYoung,CulturalStudiesandGermanMedia
Theory,in:GaryHallandClareBirchall(eds.),NewCulturalStudies.AdventuresinTheory,
Edinburgh2006,p.88104.

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puzzling when it came to ideas such as those expressed in OpticalMedia:

to take Claude Shannon s mathematical theory of communication of 1948,
and to transpose it as a method through which to map media history before
the term media was even properly used in the way in which we understand
the term. This was the model of seeing history through the set diagram
of Source-Coding-Channel-Decoding-Reception. The engineered model is
detoured around the semiotic understanding it received in Anglo-American
hands, and returned to its mathematical roots and therefore also those
roots planted as the initial stages of an investigation of media history. It is
a sort of a backwards recursion, variations on a theme.3 As John Durham
Peters notes in his introduction to the English translation of OpticalMedia,
we ind a speciic understanding of a materialistic media methodology in
Kittlers relation to time. The difference to British cultural studies, for example, is not always evident, even on the level of topics: it is as if institutions,
people and political agency are pursuing Kittlers agenda! Indeed,
Optical media is clearly interested in the development of institutions such as Edisons Lab, the ways that marketing imposes compromises between consumers and engineers, the unique historical conditions that enabled the emergence of photography in
the 1830s, and the ways that war inancing affected the development of television. His celebration elsewhere of the technological bricoleur who, with soldering gun in hand and DOS screen in
view, reconigures the user-friendly interfaces of dumbed down
technologies, certainly suggests an activist role for at least those
with an engineering bent. Indeed, in his 1990s campaign against
Microsoft Windows, Kittler could sound a bit like a cultural studies type praising the agency of ordinary folks who rewrite the
dominant code for their own purposes.4
As Peters suggests, it is as if Kittler and the Brits share something of the
1970s: a punk culture or at least an attitude. And yet, we know that Kittler s punk attitude really had more to do with Pink Floyd and with knowing how to solder. Punk cultures celebration of the amateur, who does not
have to possess musical talent or even know how to play, was far removed
from Kittler s emphasis on insider knowledge of hardware and software.
While punk bands inluenced by the Sex Pistols learned to play basic chords
and to write anarchist lyrics, Kittler investigated what makes songs happen by building his own synthesiser, which is now being reconstructed by
artist Jan-Peter Sonntag and other supporters. Aside from any references to
punk culture, we should seriously consider the centrality of time in Kittler s
media history. As a media historian, Kittler articulated materiality as part of
the humanities agenda. In this way, he also posited new notions of media
ontology and temporality. In this paper, I will address this entanglement of
materiality and time, and ask if there are ways to expand Kittler s media
historical interests to something I will call non-mediatic media materiality which leads to a different approach to media temporality as well.
This approach is not interested in explaining Kittler s stance, but rather

(3)OnrecursionandKittler,seeGeoffreyWinthropYoung,Kittlerssirenrecursions ,in:
StephenSaleandLauraSalisbury(eds.),KittlerNow:CurrentPerspectivesinKittlerStudies,
Cambridge(Forthcoming)2013.
(4)JohnDurhamPeters,Introduction:FriedrichKittlersLightShows,in:FriedrichKittler,
OpticalMedia,trans.AnthonyEnns,Cambridge2010,p.7.

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Green Media Times: Friedrich Kittler and Ecological Media History

in variations: how to continue and develop Kittler s inspiring accounts of

media and time, and how, on an international level, his work is giving rise to
further variations on the theme of media ecology . Indeed, Kittler has thoroughly inluenced much of post-cultural studies media theory and media
ecology over the past several years in Britain, for instance.5 Beyond this link,
however, I want to open up the possibility of thinking about ecology more
literally with Kittler.

The Place of Media Matter

It goes without saying that Kittler was devoted to analysis that paid close
attention to the materiality of contemporary media technologies. The investigations carried out under the inluence of Foucault ( and Lacan early on )
are mappings of the contemporary. What separates Kittler from otherwise
appropriate references to established traditions of media theory in Canada
primarily McLuhan and Innis is his penchant for factual detail and technical speciicity. His approach never assured that the facts were necessarily
correct in the end, but it was still a systematic way of dealing with media
historical topics in the present that did not consider technology a mere
externality. For later commentators, this explains why his theory s relation
to the anthropotechnics tradition from Leroi-Gourhan to Simondon, and
even to Stiegler, continues to attract interest.
Naturally, for Kittler, the absence of media from media theory was
one of the worst possible starting points. It s dreadful when media scholars pontiicate about computers without ever having looked underneath the
lid. 6 A narrative of his early career might be told through the technologies
he used to write, from typewriters to electric typewriters, to computers that
expressed the internalized Nietzschean mantra, and complemented with his
1970s synthesizer building. In this context, one can already speak of the
two forms of Foucauldean inluences of the 1970s mobilizing into what was
later called media archaeology: 1 ) a descent in the historical sense, through
the archival, and as genealogical mapping of the contemporary moment,
2 ) and in the technological sense, an under-the-hood methodology of
media theoretical excavation that departs from what Nick Montfort later
called screen-essentialism , toward software, hardware, and further levels.
There is much more to visual culture than merely the screen and its images.
This double movement characterizes much of Kittler s inluence both in
terms of media studies and practice-based research. Especially the latter
is often undertaken outside of universities: much of the Kittlerian spirit ( to
use a counterintuitive term for someone who wanted to chase spirits out of
Geisteswissenschaften ) can still be seen in hacktivist practices. In any case,
the double movement between history and technology constantly focuses
on the materiality of the object in Kittler s media history. So what is the
place of materiality in his media historical account ? What are the suggestions offered and which characterize the idea of media materialism as it
pertains to the imagined brand of German media studies ? Put simply, the
analysis of technical media cultures is an epistemological border patrol

(5) See Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies. Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture,
Cambridge/M A2005.
(6)FriedrichKittler,TheColdModelofStructure.FriedrichKittlerinterviewedbyChristoph
Weinberger,in:CulturalPoliticsvol.8/issue3,2012,p.379.

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operation that at least implicitly produces lists of media: What are media ?
is a question answered through the various operations in which it is being
exercised. Methodological choices are always ways of producing stable
objects, and as such, an archive of what counts as media. In a similar way
to what McLuhan achieved, German-based media studies such as Kittler s
and many more recent ones ( e. g., in the Kulturtechniken debates ) have successfully expanded the deinition of media beyond mass media, to practices
of technology that condition formations of knowledge and serve as a historical ontology7 for current investigations too. For McLuhan in Understand
ingMedia nearly ifty years ago, it meant extending the deinition of media
to allow for analyses of roads and housing, clothes and clocks.8 The list is
expansionist, in the sense that media studies as a discipline has appropriated not only historiographical methods ( Foucault and new historicism led
to media archaeology ) but also those of anthropology and other humanities
ields.9 Pushing the boundaries of media studies has even created a discourse
of media studies in the past tense, as well as claims that the notion itself has
become redundant: What were the media ? becomes as pertinent a question as the claim that there is no media .10 Rather than expressing a nihilistic sentiment intended to close down media studies departments something that one might suspect in the UK, for instance, given the long-term
political attacks by conservative voices against such new disciplines the
idea that there is no media actually aims to capture the pragmatic aspects
of how to approach the materiality of the object. Indeed, instead of closing
the discipline down by deinition an ontological project Eva Horn posits
the lack of media in media studies as a radical opening:
Perhaps such an anti-ontological approach to media, a radical
opening of the analytical domain to any kind of medial process,
has been more productive and theoretically challenging than any
attempt, however convincing, at answering the question of what
media are.11
Siegfried Zielinski s most recent book [NachdenMedien] seems to develop
this thought in the same vein.12
Now the media exist in superabundance, there is certainly no
lack. For the thoroughly media-conditioned individuals they
cannot possibly be the stuff that obsessions are made of any
longer. What has now turned into a given that is at one s disposal, is utilized and defended as property but it is no longer a
coveted object of desire. In this speciic sense the media have

(7)BernardSiegert,TheMapistheTerritory,RadicalPhilosophy169,(September/October
169),p.15.
(8)MarshallMcLuhan,UnderstandingMedia.TheExtensionsofMan,LondonNewYork
1964/2001.
(9)BernhardSiegert,CacographyorCommunication?CulturalTechniquesinGermanMedia
Studies,trans.GeoffreyWinthropYoung,in:GreyRoom29,2008,p.2729.
(10)SeeClausPias(eds.),WaswarenMedien,Zrich2011;EvaHorn,ThereIsNoMedia,in:
GreyRoom29,2008,p.613.
(11)Horn,ThereisnoMedia,cf.note10,p.8.
(12)SiegfriedZielinski,[nachdenMedien].NachrichtenvomausgehendenzwanzigstenJahr
hundert,Berlin2011.

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Green Media Times: Friedrich Kittler and Ecological Media History

become superluous/redundant. Through the monumental exertions of the twentieth century, they have also become time
worn/shopworn/usedup/spent.13
Zielinski laments the disappearance of the critical moment from the promise
of media, and calls attention to the abundance of media-related discourse
that itself is emptied of any particular critical force. Indeed, his observation
targets a contemporary analysis of the globalization of digital economy as a
loating signiier through which media can assume any meaning. However,
what if one takes the last part of his critique literally and begins to examine
all the used up and spent media technological devices, infrastructure, and
materials ? Discourses of media obsolescence, dead media, and more recently, zombie media , take up this speculation, as do an increasing number of
accounts in media analysis, which acknowledge the environmental hazards
that technologies carry with them.14 At irst, the issue of environmental
dangers of chemicals and metals feels removed from discussions of media
materiality, but it actually provides positive feedback that helps expand
our thinking about media materiality. In short, media materiality and this
is a necessary simpliication for my purposes here has been successfully
expanded and intensiied by media theoretical accounts such as Kittler s,
and therefore, a new arena of media history has opened up that eschews
worn out statements about the primacy of mass media. However, media
history has also concentrated on speciic ways of understanding materiality. In Kittler s work, especially his writings from the 1980s and 1990s, this
approach implied a focus on the engineering and scientiic contexts of technical media, with his occasionally heavy emphasis on war. I will not recapitulate Kittler s main points in detail here. It will sufice to recall his early
notes on the need to update Foucault s archaeology to methodologically
suit the technical media age ( instead of focusing solely on books and archives ); his suggestion to update Lacan by incorporating the symbolic logic of
information technology; and his meticulous close readings of analog and
digital technical media. In the words of Markus Krajewski, who provided a
short memorial reminder on Kittler s behalf:
One of his most prominent demands was that nowadays people should not only be obliged to learn to read and write. It is
now also one of the required fundamental cultural techniques to
understand how computers can be directed. After writing whole
books about the subtle effects and inner-political aspects of

(13) Ibid., p.16. Translation from: Siegfried Zielinski, The Media Have Become Super
luous,in:Continentissue3:1,2013,http://w ww.continentcontinent.com/index.php/conti
nent/article/view/136[lastaccessedon29.09.2013].
(14)Onzombiemedia,seeGarnetHertzandJussiParikka,ZombieMedia.CircuitBending
MediaArchaeologyIntoAnArtMethod.Leonardovol.45/5,2012,p.424430.Forgeneral
referencestosomerecentliteratureonmedia,theenvironment,andwaste:JenniferGabrys,
DigitalRubbish.ANaturalHistoryofElectronics,AnnArbor2011;JussiParikka(ed.),Media
natures. The Materiality of Information Technology and Waste. 2011, online book under
http://w ww.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/M edianatures[lastaccessedon29.09.2013].
RichardMaxwellandTobyMiller,GreeningtheMedia,Oxford2012.SeanCubittsworkhas
alsobeenpioneeringinthisield,whereissuesofmediawasteandtheenvironmentalloadof
advancedtechnologiesmustbeconsideredinrelationtoglobalmediagovernance.See,e.g.,
SeanCubitt,CurrentScreens,in:OliverGrau,withThomasVeigl,Imageryinthe21stCen
tury,Cambridge/M A2011,p.2126.

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alphabetization [ ], Kittler demanded an equal level of knowledge in writing computer sources among students, scholars, and
intellectuals.15
The nucleus of this knowledge comprises the painstaking cultural techniques
of coding, understanding C and Assembler, algorithmic thinking, and the
wider computer infrastructure that governs knowledge. Similar to the way in
which writing in the age of word processing is subsumed under the logic of
executable commands, and the whole corporate logic in which technicity is
hidden, the historical method and the archival moment are to be subsumed
only to the logic of technical media.16 As suggested above, it is not only the
choice of hardware objects based on the primacy of the materiality of the
technological and hence the pejorative accounts that condemn Kittler as a
hardware fetishist masquerading as a media historian but also the methodology itself that is based on this primacy: the historical methodology that
begins with Shannon and Weaver s mathematical theory of communication.17 Kittler summarized this idea in the speculation that [ p ]erhaps telecommunications brings history itself, which was always a metaphor for the
possibility of written inscription, to a point beyond which it is no longer history in the traditional sense.18 In different ways, similar ideas have guided
post-Kittler developments in media archaeology, too, including how historical time has been transposed as technological time: the Eigenzeit of the
machine as a speciic instance of microtemporality, as Wolfgang Ernst suggests, leads from a media-theoretical intervention to media historical methods.19 However, there is another sort of media materiality attached to different temporalities that escapes most of these accounts. Indeed, what if there
is a way of tapping into media temporality other than that of the machinic
time, and what if there is another materiality of the media which, paradoxically, is not only related to media devices and infrastructures ? Should
we also attend to the broken and discarded machines, to obsolescence ? 20
Should we pay attention to material things that are not yet media in the traditional sense ? This might imply a focus on rocks, minerals and metals as a
metallurgical prelude to media before its time.

(15)MarkusKrajewski,OnKittlerApplied:ATechnicalMemoirofaSpeciicConigurationin
the1990s,in:ThesisEleven107/1,2011,p.35.
(16)SeeFriedrichKittler,ThereisNoMedia,inLiterature,Media,InformationSystems,
Amsterdam1997,p.149.
(17) Kittlers reception in the Anglosphere has often been characterized by pejorative
accounts.ThesearecriticallymappedanddiscussedbyGeoffreyWinthropYoung:Andsince
thereisalottofearinKittlerhehasacquiredanimpressivelitanyoflabels:technodeter
minist,antihumanist,reactionarymodernist,militaryfetishist,disgruntledliteraryscholar
sufferingfromastrongcaseofphysicsenvy,EurocentricHeideggerianclone,andsoon.
GeoffreyWinthropYoung,Krautrock,Heidegger,Bogeyman:Kittlerintheanglosphere,in:
ThesisEleven107/1,2011,p.8.
(18)Kittler,OpticalMedia,London2009,p.4345.
(19)WolfgangErnst,Gleichursprnglichkeit.ZeitwesenundZeitgegebenheitetechnischer
Medien,Berlin2012.
(20)Cf.Kittler,inaninterview:ThefactthatFoucaultandIhadsuchaninterestinfunctio
ningmachinesasopposedtobrokenones,likethosein[GillesDeleuzeandFelixGuattaris]
AntiOedipusmayhavebeenwhatunitedus.Kittler,TheColdModelofStructure.cf.note4,
p.380.

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Green Media Times: Friedrich Kittler and Ecological Media History

Ecology as Non-Mediatic Media Materialism

Kittler s media historical framework has paved the way for a reconsideration
of media materiality. However, it concentrates on speciic technological and
scientiic frameworks, whereas there are certain contexts that are increasingly important to considerations about which materialities and temporalities of media interest us analytically. Indeed, media studies as a discipline is
founded on objects that it, itself, has posited as media.21 This sense of materiality exists in a systems-theoretical loop, so to speak. But it remains clear,
as a matter of environmental importance as well, that we must consider an
expanding list of objects, including media events, as relevant to our analyses. These new objects also necessitate broadening media historical inquiry.
In short, this new perspective corresponds to the environmental urgency of
electronic waste as a global problem, as well as other environmental factors
that condition digital technologies: e. g., cloud computing s massive use of
CO2-releasing energy, such as coal and raw materials, which comprise one
set of material conditions that extend media materiality to media ecology.
Here, media ecology does not refer to ideas stemming from the Canadian
school of media studies from McLuhan to Neil Postman, but rather to the
concrete connections that media as technology has to resources ( as in the
Heideggerian concept of standing in reserve ) and nature. As noted above,
the media ecological context has been increasingly broached in recent media
theory, screen studies, and media history. Aside from an interest in the current ecological problems caused, for instance, by toxic screen technologies,
media ecology also implies rethinking the temporal regimes of media technologies themselves. Indeed, this is where the expansion of what counts as
media materiality feeds back into the question of what temporalities count
for our horizons of media history. In a similar way to Kittler, who paved the
way for an expansion of material questions and methodologies, as well as
a speciic understanding of the temporal nature of technical media,22 we
might use the theoretical seeds as an impetus to broaden this agenda further toward the non-mediatic basis of technical media: from minerals to the
scientiic development of synthetic materials, and to the afterlife of media
technological waste, we encounter not only an alternative materiality but
also an alternative temporality of media. Through a selection of what sort
of objects media studies deals with, one opens up a different sort of media
historical / temporal horizon, too. For instance, one could consider media
studies to include objects such as plastics, wood, plywood, copper, aluminum, silver, gold, palladium, lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, selenium,
hexavalent chromium, and lame retardants.23 A list like this one, which can
be found in electronic waste management manuals as well as in a document
distributed to health oficials enumerating the toxic materials inside information technology, contains materials that leak not only into nature but
also into media theoretical accounts. On the other end of the spectrum, one
could include rare earth minerals necessary for the speciic effects of audiovisuality. Coltan is the conlict mineral that appears in accounts by several
recent theorists, but there are dozens of others which are of importance for
geopolitical and material reasons: lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, yttrium,

(21)WolfgangHagen,WieiseineeigentlichsozunennendeMedienwissenschaftmglich?,
in:ClausPias(ed.),WasWarenMedien,Zrich2011,p.94.
(22)AxelVolmar(ed.),ZeitkritischeMedien,Berlin2009.
(23)V.N.Pinto,EwasteHazard:TheImpendingChallenge,in:IndianJournalofOccupatio
nalandEnvironmentalMedicine,August12,2008(2),p.6570.

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and praseodymium are examples of what makes our media truly media.
Aside from the oficial mines, many of which are concentrated in China,
there is also the widespread illegal business of rare earth mineral mining.
Along with new mines, one can reuse mines that already exist: an old copper mine might turn out to be rich in indium, which is part of visual culture,
too, in the form of LCD and LED displays. This is a different sort of remediation culture than some earlier uses of the term have indicated.24 This collection of media objects a kind of a media history of the materialities of
media from minerals to discarded and waste objects includes a change of
horizon. It does not focus on the use-time of media anymore, or even on
the time of inventions. Its epistemological shift is one of an episteme that
expands to the grounding scientiic cultures in which the wider set of materialities are to be discovered. In a way, instead of networking technologies,
perhaps we should examine copper and copper mines, too, since approximately the middle of the nineteenth century. Kittler does not neglect this
topic altogether; after all, he wanted to move from the body to the realm of
materials and physics. This tendency is evident, for example, in the Optical
Media lectures of the late 1990s:
The only thing that remains is to take the concept of media from
there in a step also beyond McLuhan to where it is most at
home: the ield of physics in general and telecommunications in
particular.25
However, when we enter into this ield of physics, we need to ask: why stop
here ? If we take a more courageous step forward, and combine a Kittlerian
media history of physics with Manuel Delanda s call for a thousand years
of non-linear history, we enter a new temporal horizon. In short, Delanda s
project mapped non-human agencies, including rocks, which played a role
in the world of human affairs through architecture and other formations. His
physics and complexity theory, which inluenced historical methodology,
is also driving historians such as Fernand Braudel toward new non-human
regimes, and even lirts with the idea of a social history of mineralisation.26
The point becomes even clearer if we relate it to media waste. Scholars such
as Jennifer Gabrys have argued that media waste pushes dead media and
obsolescence discourse into new and interesting areas. We should expand
the media history discourses and practices of framing time inside museums
and collections of objects to failures, breakdowns and the broken. This is
an argument that Jennifer Gabrys makes as well, and I have elaborated on
it in terms of the general accident of digital culture . Gabrys formulates it
as follows:
Any museum or archive in which electronics are held is a collection of repeated obsolescence and breakdown. But failure is only
one part of this story. Whether in a state of decay or preservation, obsolete devices begin to express tales that are about something other than technical evolution.27

(24)JayDavidBolterandRichardGrusin,Remediation:UnderstandingNewMedia,Cam
bridge/M A2000.
(25)Kittler,OpticalMedia,cf.note18,p.32.
(26)ManuelDelanda,AThousandYearsofNonlinearHistory,Cambridge/M A2000.
(27)Gabrys,DigitalRubbish,cf.note14,p.104.

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Green Media Times: Friedrich Kittler and Ecological Media History

Gabrys suggests including speculative questions such as: can we gain a new
perspective on media history from the point of view of dust ? What is the
temporality of dust and then, more signiicantly, what are the speciic
temporalities that media technology produce on the level of materials and
toxins ? This is one speciic attempt to tackle the issue of speed, and instead
of increasing speed, we might examine the slowness of material decomposition.Gabrys underscores another aspect of media temporality, in which the
surface of ephemerality, afiliated with software cultures and information
understood mathematically, is embedded in speciic materialities of modernity: such media materials include plastic, copper, mercury and lead, which
are substances thicker and more enduring than any transcription of ones
and zeros ,28 as well as beryllium, cadmium, and brominated lame retardants. This approach involves a mix of temporalities, which do not proceed
merely from the alternatives of acceleration vs. obsolescence, but arise out
of a more complex mix of materialities that time . As Gabrys puts it,
[ m ]aterials are caught in a tension between the quick and the
slow. Ephemerality can only hold at one level; it instead reveals
new spaces of permanence. Throw away plastic to discover it
lasts for an ice age. The balance of time shifts. The instant plastic package creates new geologies. We now have mountains of
congealed carbon polymers. Entirely new landscapes are built up
around the fallout from the momentary and the disposable. So
this is not just a story about the vaporization of all that is solid ;
rather, it suggests that new forms of solidity new types of hardware emerge with the program of disposability.29
In other words, in response to accusations about the hardware fetishism
of media historical methods, one might say that wehaveneverbeenhard
enough. This reply refers to the fact that aside from the hardware of media
technologies, there is the hardness of which the hardware is composed: the
aforementioned lists of materials, toxins and others that contribute to an
ecological and environmental awareness of technical media. Maxwell and
Miller elaborate on this point in detail in GreeningtheMedia, which offers
a researched perspective on the chemical and material basis of media, from
mass-manufactured paper to networks and technological screens.30 This
question is also about ontologies: what is the ontology of media historical
materiality, what is its focus, and on which metal does materiality focus ?
In short, perhaps we need concepts to account for the multiple materialities at play when considering media history a laminated ontology of multiple levels which allows us to speak with ease about the different aspects
of media across code, interfaces, hardware and, I would add, environmental concerns, and even labour.31 Green( er ) media technologies is a topic that
has moved from the policy and awareness agendas of NGOs to the academic work of media scholars as well. However, aside from concrete empirical work and a challenge to contemporary media policy, the topic of green
media technologies may be able to offer theoretical innovation. Discussing
media, ecology, and waste constitutes one pole of the discussions relating

(28)Ibid.,p.87.
(29)Gabrys,DigitalRubbish,cf.note14,p.88.
(30)MaxwellandMiller,GreeningtheMedia,cf.note14.
(31)DavidM.Berry,CriticalTheoryandtheDigital,NewYorkLondon2014,p.6063.See
alsoJussiParikka,WhatisMediaArchaeology?Cambridge2012,p.163164.

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to the anthropocene, one of the concepts which, itself, is a curious example of epistemological concepts / objects shifting across disciplinary boundaries in twenty-irst century academic debates.32 But perhaps Kittler s media
historical impetus toward materiality can provide a way to address the
emerging concept of the anthropocene. Similar to the way in which historians like Dipash Chakrabarty have called attention to the need to reconsider
the ield of history in relation to its Other that is, natural history media
history should also be able to reconvene around shared topics and concerns
that attach it to ecology. This does not imply the media ecology we inherited from McLuhan and Postman, but rather one that has been inluenced
by the more science-sensitive Kittler and that has been pushed toward an
environmental agenda. A green Kittler might not sound correct, in light
of Kittler s own legacy, but it might present new ways to think about media
history. Media ecology would imply an agenda wherein media materialism shifts from a perspective on devices, technological inventions, and the
agency attributed to the scientiic basis of technical media, to the materials
and material sciences on the outskirts of these interests. Instead of speaking
of networks, we could speak about the copper inside cables or the gutta
percha insulating them in the nineteenth century; instead of screens and
computer graphics, vectors and bit mapping, we could talk about the chemical basis of Cathode Ray Tubes ( CRT ), LCD and plasma-screens. Indeed,
knowledge of screen technologies here becomes a question of energy consumption, for example: the knowledge that LCD -technology reliance on
mercury-vapor luorescent backlights consumes less energy than electroluminescent phosphors, a detail pointed out by Sean Cubitt.33 LCD technologies make a difference to CRTs, a screen media technology that might have
accompanied much of our post-World War II lives as part of what theorists
then referred to as the simulation, spectacle and emergence of visual culture but which also are intensive risks in terms of their components ( lead,
toxic phosphors, barium ) and energy consumption.34 Cubitt implicitly raises
the media historical point we are after: should we try to radicalize Kittlers
media historical methodology and push media studies out from its sole
focus on media, to the world of chemicals and materials, and even energy
consumption ? This would mean that a Green Kittler would not imply a
Kittler that is any less hardware-oriented perhaps this ield would be even
harder, with its focus on the rocks, minerals and materials of which media is
constituted, and whose histories are those of minerals, the soil and geological formations.

JussiParikkateachesattheUniversityofSouthampton,WinchesterSchoolofArt.

(32)However,weneedtorememberthatinthe1870s,thegeologistAntonioStoppaniwas
alreadywritingabouttheanthropozoicerainasimilarmanner,emphasisingtheemergenceof
anewgeologicalerabecauseofhumanactions.
(33)SeeCubitt,CurrentScreens,cf.note14.
(34)Ibid.,S.2228.

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Green Media Times: Friedrich Kittler and Ecological Media History