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Friedrich Kittler

literary scholar and media theorist (1943–2011)

Friedrich A. Kittler (June 12, 1943 – October 18, 2011) was a literary scholar and a media theorist. His works relate to media, technology, and the military.

Friedrich Kittler (2009)

Quotes

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Dracula's Legacy (1982)

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  • Nur was schaltbar ist, ist überhaupt. [Only that which is switchable, exists.]

Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1985)

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  • [Discourse network is ] The network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data.
  • the madman [Daniel Schreber] sought to imply that everything he did and said within the asylum was written down or recorded immediately and that there was nothing anyone could do to avoid it being written down, sometimes by good angels and occasionally by bad angels.
  • Printed laments over the death of Man or the subject always arrive too late.

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986)

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  • Media determine our situation.
  • Technologies that not only subvert writing, but engulf it and carry it off along with so-called Man, render their own description im­possible. Increasingly, data flows once confined to books and later to records and films are disappearing into black holes and boxes that, as ar­tificial intelligences, are bidding us farewell on their way to nameless high commands. In this situation we are left only with reminiscences, that is to say, with stories.
  • What remains of people is what media can store and communicate. What counts are not the messages or the content with which they equip so-called souls for the duration of the technological era, but rather (and in strict accordance to McLuhan) their circuits, the very schematism of their perceptibility.
  • It has become clear that real wars are fought not for people or fatherlands, but take place between different media, information technologies, data flows.
  • The general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media. Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface. Sense and the senses turn into eyewash. Their media-produced glamor will survive for an interim as a by-product of strategic programs. Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound or voice ... With numbers, everything goes ... a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of media. Instead of wiring people and technologies, absolute knowledge will run as an endless loop.
  • Nietzsche, as proud of the publication of his mechanization as any philosopher, changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.  That is precisely what is meant by the sentence "our writing tools are also working on our thoughts". Malling Hansen's writing ball, with its operating difficulties, made Nietzsche into a laconic.

Optical media (2010)

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Kittler, Friedrich A.; Enns, Anthony (2010). Optical media: Berlin lectures 1999 (English ed ed.). Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-4090-7. 

  • Take the concept of media from there – in a step also beyond McLuhan – to where it is most at home: the field of physics in general and telecommunications in particular
  • And when Liesegang edited his Contributions to the Problem of Electrical Television in 1899, thus naming the medium, the principle had already been converted into a basic circuit. Television was and is not a desire of so-called humans, but rather it is largely a civilian byproduct of military electronics. That much should be clear.

Others

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Kittler, Friedrich. "The history of communication media." ctheory (1996): 7-30.

  • The day is not far off when signal processing will reach the physical limits of feasibility. This absolute limit is where the history of communication technologies will literally come to an end.. the history of communication technologies as a series of strategic escalations. Without reference to the individual or to mankind, communication technologies will have overhauled each other until finally an artificial intelligence proceeds to the interception of possible intelligences in space.

"We are programmable", an interview with Die Welt (in de). DIE WELT (2000-08-09).

  • Culture is not the accumulation of concert reviews, a bit of science and a literary journal. But that is very difficult to change... Our parents were so ashamed after the war that they didn't want to touch technology anymore. Then Adorno flew in and his student Habermas announced the separation of communicative and instrumental reason.

Griffin, Matthew (1996). "Technologies of Writing: Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler". New Literary History 27 (4): 731–742. ISSN 0028-6087.

  • [Students today] should at least know some arithmetic, the integral function, the sine function - everything about signs and functions. They should also know at least two software languages. Then they'll be able to say something about what culture is at the moment... Cultural studies refers to and examines the most important sign systems.
  • I don't believe in the old thesis that the media are protheses of the body, which amounts to saying, in the beginning was the body, then came the glasses, then suddenly television, and from the television, the computer... it would be better to work, like Luhmann, systematically from the independent histories of the technological media... A history like this doesn't need individual bodies or a subject that expands in and through the media... the media, including books and the written word, develop independently from the body.

Conversation in 1995 with Paul Vililio. Virilio, Paul (1999-08). "The information bomb a conversation". Angelaki 4 (2): 81–90. ISSN 0969-725X. DOI:10.1080/09697259908572036.

  • how are culture and politics going to react to the slow demotion of their power? For both are predicated upon everyday speech and the normal human nervous system, which are both slow. However, neither speech nor the nervous system can be handled any more without machines preparing, assisting, and, in the end, even assuming some of their decision-making processes.
  • At best, the Internet will remain a space of freedom for a year or two, but, within a few years, it will most probably have fallen into the hands of big capital, and then the controls will be put in place. The other danger is that, along with the control mechanisms, the informational bureaucracies — precisely in order to avoid an information Chernobyl — will also expand. Thus, together, big capital and the informational bureaucracies may well simply scuttle the liberalisation of information.
  • These programs are called "daemons"... You never see them, and yet they're constantly doing something for you, like the angel in the medieval Angelo Loci... we should slowly let go of that old dream of sociologists, the one that says that society is by nature made up only of human beings. Today — and tomorrow — the term "society" should include people and programs.
  • But why people - and I include myself here — would rather sit in front of a computer than do other things such as have a conversation is difficult to explain. Perhaps it is a fascination with power. For example, in earlier times, some people directed their love away from their wives and families and directed it instead towards an image of Jesus or Mary.
  • a few far-seeing scientists say ... nature is not a computer ... the only rational hope I have that we have not arrived at the end of history. Because if the digital calculators did not have a kind of internal limitation, they would truly bring world history to an end, in all the aspects that you have mentioned: time would no longer be human time, space would no longer be human space, but merely a corridor within the circuits of these wonderful little machines.

"We only have ourselves to draw upon" – An interview by Andreas Rosenfelder

  • Men today are able to father a child at the age of 13. In my generation most of us didn't sleep with a woman until the age of 20 or 21, only then exposing ourselves to the risk of having children. In the meantime we would come up with incredible ideas. The programmer Linus Thorvalds writes in his autobiography: "I never drank beer, I never had a girlfriend, I wrote Linux." When secondary school kids are already having sex at 14, then this period of latency shrinks.
  • It's always difficult to find the first sentence. And with "Discourse Networks" where everything was at stake, namely my profession, it was more difficult than ever. So I rolled a joint and wrote the first chapter, about Goethe's "Faust", mildly stoned.

Technology is far too good to knock around forever with us humans.

Kittler, Friedrich (2012). "The Cold Model of Structure". Cultural Politics 8 (3): 375–384. ISSN 1751-7435.

  • What is at stake is that we finally—and in the interest of Europe—go back to the Greeks in order to provide Europe with a viable foundation of thought.
  • Take the ongoing attempts to use the human brain as a point of departure for constructing the world. To me that’s nonsense. I believe that human brains only exist within language. Neurophysiologists are aware of this, yet they deny it with every single statement they utter.
  • In the case of Marshall McLuhan, you can prove that every fifth sentence is wrong and every tenth is funny and very ingenious. And Harold Innis never managed to get into technical details.

Last words: Alle Apparate ausschalten [Switch off all apparatuses.]

Media are not pseudopods for extending the human body. They follow the logic of escalation that leaves us and written history behind it.

Machines... are not so much for us humans, for we are so-to-speak built much too big, but that in these machines, nature, this luminous and recognizing part of nature, interconnects with and feeds back onto itself… For the Internet exists so that computers are wiring up with computers, onto which keyboards and users can be plugged in, but don’t have to be.

  • From a 2002 interview. Quoted in Winkler, Robert A. ""Alle Apparate abschalten." Conceiving Love and Technology with Heidegger And Kittler." (2020).

Armitage, John (2006-12). "From Discourse Networks to Cultural Mathematics: An Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler". Theory, Culture & Society 23 (7-8): 17–38. ISSN 0263-2764. DOI:10.1177/0263276406069880.

  • there are no such things as thoughts. There are only words.
  • we are literally taught the alphabet through a sort of structural violence... How else would I have learned the alphabet? I certainly would not have learned it on my own accord. In fact, without being subject to this structural violence, I would still be a 5-year-old boy.
  • I cannot stand on American soil with much pleasure. In fact, my antipathy to America is one of the main reasons why I often avoid talking about the military-industrial complex since for me to talk about the devil is to talk with the devil. As a good friend of mine said to me lately, we in Germany should not say a word about America’s war on Iraq ... we should talk about love in Europe.
  • whether or not we personally ever use the typewriter is not important. What is important is that all of us are thrown into the age of typewriting, whether we like it or not. Of course, Heidegger himself preferred to continue his work in his own handwriting.
  • the real connection is not between people but between machines... the most remarkable thing about Linux for me is how other people just keep coming along to embellish Torvalds’ source code, making it more and more powerful every day. And so as far as I am concerned the Internet is at its best when it is operating as a self-reflection of computer systems, when it furthers the evolution of technology.
  • I do not believe that human beings are becoming cyborgs. Indeed, for me, the development of the Internet has much more to do with human beings becoming a reflection of their technologies, of reacting or responding to the demands of the machine. After all, it is we who adapt to the machine. The machine does not adapt to us... pursuing the cyborgian vision would have also meant that the incredible speed of Moore’s Law, that computing power doubles every 18 months or so, would have been impossible to accomplish. So, in my view, the computing industry is less interested in the development of cyborgs than it is in the development of software.

Martin Heidegger, Media, and the Gods of Greece

  • Computer technology is an alliance of hardware and software, of physics and logic, which has taken the place of the gods who have fled far away. Zeus, as you know, was at once the mighty brightness of the Greek sky and ‘the lightning that guides everything’. Only gods and computers are in the position of predicting today whether blue skies or rainstorms will be the weather tomorrow.

The Artificial Intelligence of World War: Alan Turing

  • Ever since IF-THEN commands ceased to be a privilege of the human being, all philosophical debates about the death of the subject have been settled, simply because weapons have become subjects themselves.
  • 0.1% of all telecommunications on this planet are absorbed by the NSA’s artificial intelligence. What then happens with them, no one knows. As a rule, orders for secrecy are lifted only after 30 years. Perhaps they will no longer be necessary at all three decades from now. The Word that was in the Beginning is vanishing into computer data banks anyway. When all that is said by the inhabitants of the earth has disintegrated into bits, Alan Turing's Universal Discrete Machine will be perfected.

Khayyat, E. "The Humility of Thought: An Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler." boundary 2 39.3 (2012): 7-27.

  • The only kind of politics I am interested in is military politics, to begin with. In fact, this is the only thing I can think of when one says politics.
  • I have some problems with Christianity, but in favor of the fact that every living being, be it plant or animal, has been begotten by the lovely union of female and male. ... like many Germans before me, including Friedrich II, Nietzsche, and to a certain extent Heidegger, I am after love that is fundamentally anti-Christian.

Rock Music: A Misuse of Military Equipment

  • Storing information and transmitting information without having to employ such obscure instances as the human ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’: such is the very definition of media.

There is no software

  • When meanings come down to sentences, sentences to words, and words to letters, there is no software at all... the so-called philosophy of the computer community tends to systematically obscure hardware by software, electronic signifiers by interfaces between formal and everyday languages... This ongoing triumph of software is a strange reversal of Turing's proof that there can be no mathematically computable problem a simple machine would not solve. ... software successfully occupied the empty place and profited from its obscurity. The ever-growing hierarchy of high-level programming languages works exactly the same way as one-way functions in recent mathematical cryptography.

Quotes about him

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  • Riding together in a taxi from some airport Kittler tried to explain to Luhmann that in contrast to social systems, switching circuits cannot exist without input and output. "Herr Kittler, it was like that already in Babylonia. A messenger rides through the city gate. Some [like me] ask, what kind of message he brings. Others [like you] ask what kind of horse he rides."
    • Niklas Luhmann, quoted in Unsterbliche: Nachrufe, Erinnerungen, Geistergespräche, p. 97.
  • Kittler's project was to trace "not the triumphal emergence of humanity into freedom, but our exit from the fulsome enjoyment of our taste for ourselves that assigns humanity a place to which it has no right".
  • Unlike Foucault, or indeed other leading media theorists such as Jean Baudrillard or Paul Virilio, Kittler steeped himself in physics, engineering, optics, the science of fibre-optic cables, and even wrote computer code – arguably gaining a more profound insight into media than his contemporaries.
  • ‘Derrida of the digital age’ whose vision combined the circuitry of Lacan’s models for the psyche, and Foucault’s archaeological conception of all knowledge and its systems, with the material hardware of technological transcription and recording: typewriters, tape recorders, film projectors and their non-analogue offspring.
  • Here was someone who – at last! – had charted the genealogy, or transmission lines, of writing’s interface with bodies, from Sade to Kafka, Marinetti to Pynchon. Most exciting of all, he lucidly and irrefutably articulated something I’d been trying ineptly to persuade people of for years: that Dracula is a book about the Dictaphone.
  • For Kittler, [Geisteswissenschaften, "humanities", but more literally "spirit sciences"] to be taken to its hard core: sciences stand at the centre of arts and humanities in the age of technical media... media are not only the mass media of television, newspapers and such, but a technical constellation that at its core is based on scientific principles of coding, channeling and decoding of signals... Man is a temporary solution, a crossroad in the complex practices and epistemologies of knowledge that might (has?) proved to be not so useful anymore when media can communicated to each other without human intervention. Ask your plugged-in Ethernet cable, it knows the amount of data that goes through it without you pushing even a single key.
  • Kittler wanted to establish a real computer literacy. And our group was both the justifying nucleus of this demand and his evidence of possibility.
  • The end of media is a situation in which the computer subsumes all other media. The machine subject appears as a sort of minimalist inhuman subjectivity wrought by recursion. It operates beyond or below the phenomenological capacities of humans, does not employ natural language, and does not think in terms of meaning. Myriad machine subjects are networked to form a loop of absolute knowledge. This loop excludes humanity which is functionally unable to participate therein. Within the loop, the machines cognize somehow in an asemantic logic and antagonistically evolve away from any semblance of humanity.
    • Steinhoff, James. "The Horror Of Kittler’s End Of Media." Glimpse 22.1 (2021): 100-104.
  • Brilliant, controversial and cantankerous. In his penetrating examination of our increasingly militarised and 'mediatised' existence that, he argued, replaced human agency, Kittler outlined with great energy the post-human historical condition. Perhaps his greatest academic transgression was to have such an emphatic sense of technology's triumph over the delusions of human agency, articulated in his writings on war and speed, mathematics and cryptography, in addition to the style of his claims, sculpted like a series of steps of military escalation, in imitative performance of the computerised world of total militarisation and technologisation that he portrayed.

Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey (2012-11-01). "“Well, What Socks Is Pynchon Wearing Today?” A Freiburg Scrapbook in Memory of Friedrich Kittler". Cultural Politics 8 (3): 361–373. ISSN 1743-2197. DOI:10.1215/17432197-1722100.

  • Kittler's speciality is the creatively enhanced misquotation... all the ameliorative sloppiness that Kittler the analyst attributes to authors of the “Discourse Network 1800” such as Goethe and Hegel, who kept bungling their quotations in highly creative self-serving ways.
  • Many controversial aspects of his work—including war, women, and a strange continental provincialism that increased with age—were already apparent back then. Kittler was ahead of his time, but he invested considerable energy into informing others that they were behind. He was an inspiring teacher, yet he was prone to seek out the danger zone where instruction turns into seduction, education becomes a form of contamination, and the pedagogue takes on the trappings of the demagogue.
  • ... collapse of traditional edifices of meaning accompanied by the corresponding emergence of hitherto obscured materialities of communication and inscription. I certainly did not grasp the finer points, but I came to understand that taking apart my Saba VS2160 amplifier or intently listening to scratches on old Yes or Tubes LPs constituted a genuine act of theory.
  • How will he be judged in the long run? I do not know, but it will not be fair. In the Weinberger interview Kittler claims that every fifth sentence in McLuhan can be proved wrong. Speaking as a Kittler translator who has spent many an afternoon hunting down factual errors, faulty page references, and bungled quotations, I doubt whether his stats are much better. ... clairvoyance seems to be composed of shameless simplifications (Kittler), the statistically inevitable result of scattershot predictions (McLuhan), and provocations churned out on an industrial scale (both).
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