...Friedrich Kittler; Geoffrey Winthrop-Young The essay presents a reading of three war-related texts: Friedrich Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell , Heinrich von Kleist’s The Battle of Hermann , and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow . Written against the background of the Revolutionary Wars and the Prussian...

..., there will inevitably be a shifting of the center of gravity toward immaterial flows, because “growth” in the material sphere will be prohibited on eco-systemic grounds. We shall presumably see a dramatic reduction of material flows – and with it a revitalization of regional economies. In these conditions, what is as yet...

... is its soul. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow This special section of Cultural Politics contains four hitherto untranslated essays by Friedrich Kittler: “ Auto Bahnen ,” “A Short History of the Searchlight,” “Animals of War,” and “ De Nostalgia .” They are of differing lengths, written...

... on this scorched earth.” 1 At the end of Gravity’s Rainbow , a final news flash from PNS Los Angeles reaches you, the reader of the novel. Seconds before the first or last V2 explodes over LA, a “Managerial Volkswagen” takes you on a trip along the Santa Monica Freeway, “the freeway of freaks...

... the planetary surface to some extra-atmospheric or subcutaneous redoubt has been periodically revisited as among the most likely long-term solutions to the question of how to preserve life in the face of disaster. While the emancipatory implications of release from gravity have lent spaceflight something...

... by far were LSD and Thomas Pynchon, though to this day I do not know where Kittler drew the line between the two, if indeed he drew any. He liked to compare our meetings to the question and answer sessions in Gravity ' s Rainbow when German doper Säure Bummer quizzes Seaman Bodine on esoteric American...

....” The twilight of place is also that of the gods and the plurality of worlds. No wonder, Virilio muses, string theory in physics, which denies the very concept of the infinite, is so popular. Cybernetic space is but an ersatz , a substitution of reality for a reality without gravity. Virilio leaves his readers...

... by trucks and buses as they drove back and forth between bunkers might be read aesthetically, like a drawing, while at the same time they seemed to provide a diagnostic tool for interpreting the gravity of the world's political situations. opposite: Lake Vostok with Two Olympias , 2007, acrylic...

..., waiting to be collaged on painted and printed sheets of handmade paper. On the border between these two worlds, Spero’s and Golub’s, a makeshift pole had been newly erected reaching to the ceiling. From the top of the pole hung red and black ribbons looping down to form a scallop of gravity before...

... allow for any gods, emission and transmission, message and noise coincide; Wagner's Ring ends in the very noise with which it began. And what starts now is the history or posthistory of our media wars. Gravity's Rainbow , the quintessential novel of World War II, begins with a noise...

... and reception of texts is now, in the realm of war and politics, the unflinching acceptance of dynamics and exigencies related to resources and technologies. The way in which Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow describes the Second World War applies to all wars: This War was never political at all...

...—and break free of the gravity of the human—has been played out across modern history. We might risk reading this need for speed back even further. Consider Plato’s (2002) Apology , where the founder of European philosophy, Socrates, embraces death to escape from his body and become an idea. In Jacques...

..., not among firms—it was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite” (1973: 521; quoted in Winthrop-Young 2012 : 407). Geoff Winthrop-Young turns to this passage from Pynchon’s Gravity’s...

... a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. ” Social Text , 46 – 47 , Spring/Summer: 217 – 52 . Sokal A. Bricmont J. 1998 [1997]. Intellectual Impostures . London : Profile . Stanton G. 1996 . “ Ethnography, Anthropology and Cultural Studies: Links and Connections...

... stories of such gravity (or apparent gravity) that they pull space towards themselves. In extreme instances one might expect a black hole phenomenon, in which the original story disappears entirely leaving only a set of frozen spectral traces of itself – the detritus of popular journalism...

... not respond. Defying the director's command to labor, he sprawls immobile on the cross, with his relaxed neck giving way to the weight of his head and his stretched-out arms falling by the force of gravity. After the assistant director checks on his pulse, they confirm that he has passed away, to which...

... to this era of suspicion and his attention to the radicalism of spatiodynamics as an early template for the dromospheric condition, including the theory of the function of the oblique, particularly in the way it redirected architectural focus to the body and to “the awareness of gravity” as a constant...

... that it did not relate to the law or its transgression, since, against the seriousness of the order and the law, it pitted the gravity of the game and the rule. Seduction haunted the old order as its absolute, irremediable antithesis, irresolvable into any ultimate synthesis. Seduction was femininity, every...

... criticism begins with the critique of religion; I would say instead that all criticism begins with the critique of gravity. 25 In short, the power of critique will depend on whether one conceives of mobilization as driven by an economy of guilt and lack, based on the conditions of the old...

... location. Walking is not just a matter of physiology, gravity, and kinetics; it involves chains of operations that link ambulatory abilities to cultural protocols. It is not just a species marker or biological given; it is always already the interaction between the fact that you can walk...