Operation Valhalla

“The preeminent thinker of media in the past half century, Friedrich Kittler speaks to deep concerns of the digital age in a voice that is philosophical, wry, learned, obscure, indirect, profound, and always stimulating. To read him is to have your neurons rearranged. Kittler’s work is essential.” -- John Durham Peters, coauthor of * Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History *
“As demonstrated by his famous mapping of the three media operations—recording, transmitting, processing—onto ‘trenches,’ ‘blitz,’ and Ronald Reagan's Star Wars, war for Friedrich Kittler was the principle that drove media history. Although a provocation for whiggish as well as for critical thinking that found the telos of media history in humanity's progress toward democracy or capitalism's perversion of democracy, Kittler's highly original approach to media analysis opened up a road to a posthumanistic theory of media which has never been more timely than today.” -- Bernhard Siegert, author of * Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real *

“Operation Valhalla is the best resource available for understanding the central role of warfare in Kittler’s thought and an all too relevant book for our troubled times.”

-- Anders Engberg-Pedersen * Critical Inquiry *