Friedrich Kittler Quotes (1943-2011)

“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.”

“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."”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”