Unpublished Preface to Discourse Networks

The text of the previously unpublished-in-English preface to Kittler's "Discourse Networks" is translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and published here. Kittler says that the following book starts out from the premise that more is at work in literary history than mind and labor processes. If literary texts are, and have, a history, then it involves information technologies--in a programmatic rather than a merely mimetic sense. If, for example, poetry is information, then it can be read 'as' a technology rather than as an occasional reflection on other technologies. It is no doubt of importance to literary historians to study how writers experienced the onset of trains as devices that saved muscular exertion, but how literature itself functions as an extension or replacement of the central nervous sytem is a great deal more important, can be understood as a technology employed to do something, and is, of course, the main topic of consideration in "Discourse Networks." OA