Winthrop-Young 2012

Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. "Kittler's Siren Recursions."

Krajewski, recursive historiography

" In order to understand the servers of today, then, the analyst must retrace the iterations of the protocols and procedures back in time to a predetermined reversal point (in Krajewski's case, the mid-18th century), and then, equipped with the knowledge gained from this movement backwards, turn around and retrace the iterations forward in time to the present. The trick is that tracing the iterations backwards (which in each and every case involves the observation of how servant protocols process themselves) will change the reversal point. In other words, if we step by step trace the history of servers and servants back to the 18th-century, we will arrive at a new description of the latter. This means that our iterations forward to the present will start in a past that is different from the one we had targeted when we set out. The iterative process—Winkler's expanded reproduction—changes the goal. As a result, the present we return to will will also change. And one of the main aspects of this change is a new insight into the structural correlation between past and present serving entities."

"performative recursive analysis"

"Reversing the venerable phrase by sometime Nazi art historian Wilhelm Pinder, Krajewski points out that recursion enables us to apprehend the Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigkeiten ("the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous"). As we shall see, this is where matters get serious, because it conjures up the possibility of history -defying juxtapositions and short-circuits that are outside the provenance of time —human time, that is."

"when it comes to media established historiographical narratives are unable to handle non-human temporalities. Historiographical emplotments cannot capture machine time."

media have and produce their own time

"If Foucault insisted on subjecting history to vertical cuts that sliced it into epistemic discontinuities, and if Kittler's update of Foucault consisted in relating these epistemes to techno -discursive networks grounded in epoch -specific materialities of data processing (if, to update Ranke, every epoch is immediate to its machines), then Ernst is adding horizontal cuts that transfer these materialities into their own temporal domain—a xenochronia fun damentally out of synch with human time."

"A whole infrastructure of links and short-circuits is emerging next to and beyond human history —it may indeed obsolesce history as we know it. And make no mistake, the medial recursions extend far beyo nd minor century -old short -circuits connecting turntables to i-pods, they go back millenia. "

"Recursive historiography, then, obeys the Foucauldian injunction on assumed continuity while avoiding the dilemmas of exaggerated rupturism."