Sacred Channels

Erich Hörl's Sacred Channels is an original take on the history of communication theory and the cultural imaginary of communication understood through the notions of the sacred and the primitive. Hörl offers insight into the shared ground of anthropology and media theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and presents an archeology of the philosophy of technology that underpins contemporary culture. This singular and unique project focuses on the ethnological disciplines and their phantasmatic imaginations of a prealphabetical realm of the sacred and the primitive but reads them in the context of media cultural questions as epistemic unconscious and as projections of the emerging postalphabetical condition. Drawing inspiration from work by the likes of Friedrich Kittler, Hörl's understanding of cybernetics in the post-World War II interdisciplinary field informs a rich analysis that is of interest to media scholars and to anyone seeking to understand the historical and theoretical underpinnings of the humanities in the age of technical media.

"Hörl’s project is ambitious and original, offering an intellectual history which readers are unlikely to have realised they were missing and which intervenes simultaneously into media theory, anthropology, philosophy and the history of computation."- Megan Wiessner, Radical Philosophy 2.06 (Winter 2019) "Erich Hörl’s Sacred Channels is as original and innovative as they come. The book articulates an archaeology of modern notions of the sacred and the primitive and draws upon a wide-ranging theoretical framework that includes philosophy (phenomenology, Heidegger, and deconstruction), anthropology, media theory, and breakthrough developments in modern science. The substantial preface by Jean-Luc Nancy, and the excellent translation by Nils. F. Schott, make Sacred Channels (by now a classic in the German-speaking world) a groundbreaking book finally available to an English-speaking audience."- Michael Wutz, Weber State University

Erich Hörl is Full Professor of Media Culture at Leuphana University of Lueneburg, Germany and director of the focus "Rethinking the technological condition" of Leuphanas Digital Culture Research Lab. Before he was Associate Professor of Media Philosophy and Technology at Ruhr-University Bochum. He is the founder of the Bochum Colloquium Mediastudies (bkm), an internationally renown series of diagnostical interventions concerning our contemporary techno-medial situation. He currently works on a General Ecology of Media and Technology.