Journal Article

Operations of Culture: Ernst Kapp's Philosophy of Technology

Weatherby, Leif, Kirkwood, Jeffrey West

2018

Overview

Tracing the origins of what has come to be called \"new German media theory\" leads to an unlikely location far from Germany--Texas--and by way of an even less evident path: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. A German emigre, Ernst Kapp, reading Hegel in the rural expanses of central Texas in the middle of the nineteenth century, penned what is arguably the first philosophy of technology. Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolutionary History of Culture (1877) has shaped and predicted the course of much of contemporary media theory. The deeper one goes into the sedimented record of Kapp's role in the history of media theory, the broader and more decisive his impact appears to be. Elements, published a decade later, reads as a synthesis of political, practical, and intellectual experience at the edge of world history. Kapp's philosophy revolves around the key concept of \"organ projection,\" which has remained the primary fixture in the media-theoretical reception and misinterpretation of his work.

• Publisher: MIT Press Journals, The
• Subject: German culture / History / Kapp, Ernst / Philosophers / Philosophy / Political history