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.
From 1986 to 1990, he headed the DFG'sLiterature and Media Analysis project in Kassel and in 1987 he was appointed Professor of Modern German Studies at the Ruhr University. In 1993 he was appointed to the chair for Media Aesthetics and History at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
In 1993, Kittler was awarded the "Siemens Media Arts Prize" (Siemens-Medienkunstpreis) by ZKM Karlsruhe (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, or "Centre for Art and Media Technology") for his research in the field of media theory.[2]
He was recognized in 1996 as a distinguished scholar at Yale University and in 1997 as a distinguished visiting professor at Columbia University in New York. Kittler was a member of the Hermann von Helmholtz Centre for Culture and the research group Bild Schrift Zahl ("Picture Writing Number") (DFG).[3]
Among Kittler's theses was his tendency to argue, with a mixture of polemicism, apocalypticism, erudition, and humor, that technological conditions were closely bound up with epistemology and ontology itself. This claim and his style of argumention is aptly summed up in his dictum "Nur was schaltbar ist, ist überhaupt"—a phrase that could be translated as "Only that which is switchable, exists" or more freely, "Only that which can be switched, can be."[4]: 7 This phrase plays on the concept that in principle any representation can be presented according to the on/off binary logic of computing. Kittler goes one step further by suggesting that, conversely, anything that can't be "switched" can't really "be," at least under current technical conditions. He invoked this doctrine on his deathbed in 2011. Dying in a hospital in Berlin and sustained only by medical instruments, his final words were "Alle Apparate ausschalten", which translates as "switch off all apparatuses".[5]
Workedit
Friedrich Kittler is influential in the new approach to media theory that grew popular starting in the 1980s, new media (German: technische Medien, which translates roughly to "technical media"). Kittler's central project is to "prove to the human sciences [...] their technological-media a priori" (Hartmut Winkler), or in his own words: "Driving the human out of the humanities",[6] a title that he gave a work that he published in 1980.
Kittler sees an autonomy in technology and therefore disagrees with Marshall McLuhan's reading of the media as "extensions of man": "Media are not pseudopods for extending the human body. They follow the logic of escalation that leaves us and written history behind it." [citation needed]
Consequently, he sees in writing literature, in writing programmes and in burning structures into silicon chips a complete continuum: "As we know and simply do not say, no human being writes anymore. [...] Today, human writing runs through inscriptions burnt into silicon by electronic lithography [...]. The last historic act of writing may thus have been in the late seventies when a team of Intel engineers [plotted] the hardware architecture of their first integrated microprocessor." (Kittler, Es gibt keine Software. In: ders.: Draculas Vermächtnis. Technische Schriften.)
And Kittler is a good friend of mine – I sponsored a chair at the Humboldt University for two years. He is not mainstream. Historians of music come and say, “But he did not write his thesis on Palestrina.” And all the professors of philosophy say, “But did he write a thesis on Kant or Heidegger?” No, Kittler is a mixture: Kittler is in between philosophy, the history of music, computer science, and media theory. That’s why he is completely outstanding. We have some fundamental heroes in Germany, really outstanding people on the level of Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, Bataille … Among these are Bazon Brock, Friedrich Kittler, Sloterdijk, Bredekamp, or Hans Belting. These people will last longer than I will in this book. In 50 years, each of them will be known as people who had been very sensitive to changes of the media.—Hubert Burda, 2011[7]: 180–189
Publicationsedit
1977: Der Traum und die Rede. Eine Analyse der Kommunikationssituation Conrad Ferdinand Meyers. Bern-Munich
1979: Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel. Studien zu Goethe und Gottfried Keller (with Gerhard Kaiser). Göttingen
1985: Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900. Fink: Munich. ISBN 3-7705-2881-6 (English edition: Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900, with a foreword by David E. Wellbery. Stanford 1990)
1986: Grammophon Film Typewriter. Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose. ISBN 3-922660-17-7 (English edition: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford 1999)
1990: Die Nacht der Substanz. Bern
1991: Dichter – Mutter – Kind. Munich
1993: Draculas Vermächtnis: Technische Schriften. Leipzig: Reclam. ISBN 3-379-01476-1 Essays zu den "Effekten der Sprengung des Schriftmonopols", zu den Analogmedien Schallplatte, Film und Radio sowie "technische Schriften, die numerisch oder algebraisch verfasst sind".
1997: Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays (published by John Johnston). Amsterdam
1998: Hardware das unbekannte Wesen
1998: Zur Theoriegeschichte von Information Warfare
1999: Hebbels Einbildungskraft – die dunkle Natur. Frankfurt, New York, Vienna
2000: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaft. München
2000: Nietzsche – Politik des Eigennamens: wie man abschafft, wovon man spricht (with Jacques Derrida). Berlin.
2001: Vom Griechenland (with Cornelia Vismann; Internationaler Merve Diskurs Bd.240). Merve: Berlin. ISBN 3-88396-173-6
2002: Optische Medien. Merve: Berlin. ISBN 3-88396-183-3 (English edition: Optical Media, with an introduction by John Durham Peters. Polity Press 2010)
2002: Zwischen Rauschen und Offenbarung. Zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Stimme (as publisher). Akademie Verlag, Berlin
2004: Unsterbliche. Nachrufe, Erinnerungen, Geistergespräche. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Paderborn.
2006: Musik und Mathematik. Band 1: Hellas, Teil 1: Aphrodite. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Paderborn.
2009: Musik und Mathematik. Band 1: Hellas, Teil 2: Eros. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Paderborn.
2011: Das Nahen der Götter vorbereiten. Wilhelm Fink, Paderborn.
2013: Die Wahrheit der technischen Welt. Essays zur Genealogie der Gegenwart, Suhrkamp, Berlin. (English edition: The truth of the technological world: essays on the genealogy of presence, translated by Erik Butler, with an afterword by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Stanford 2013.)
2013: Philosophien der Literatur. Merve, Berlin.
2013: Die Flaschenpost an die Zukunft. With Till Nikolaus von Heiseler, Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin.
^https://egs.edu/biography/friedrich-kittler%e2%80%a0/ Friedrich Kittler
Former Professor of Media Philosophy at The European Graduate School.
^Siemens Medienkunstpreis 1993/ Friedrich Kittle Archived 2016-10-28 at the Wayback Machine ZKM. Museum für Neue Kunst.
^Kraft, J. M., & Tölölyan, K., "Approaches in Teaching Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Other Works", in Thomas H. Schaub, ed., Pynchon Notes—issues 54-55 (2008), p. 301.
^Cruz, M. T., ed., Media Theory and Cultural Technologies: In Memoriam Friedrich Kittler (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), p. 4.
Friedrich Kittler Bibliography complete Bibliography
Auf dem Weg in den Maschinenpark Archived 2004-08-06 at the Wayback Machine – Rezension Friedrich Kittler: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaft – von Frank Hartmann, 28 November 2000
Telepolis: Friedrich Kittler meets Stephan Schambach Archived 2004-06-23 at the Wayback Machine von Stefan Krempl, 26. Mai 2000
Telepolis: Vom Sündenfall der Software Archived 2004-10-12 at the Wayback Machine – Medientheorie mit Entlarvungsgestus: Friedrich Kittler – von Frank Hartmann, 22 December 1998
Telepolis: Nicht Cyborg, sondern Affe 17 April 2005
"Rock me, Aphrodite!" – Interview mit Kittler auf Telepolis, 24 May 2006.
"Hegel is dead. Miscellanea on Friedrich A. Kittler (1943-2011)" – Obituary on Kittler, Telepolis, 17 November 2011.