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Friedrich Kittler

40 quotes

“Nur was schaltbar ist, ist überhaupt. [Only that which is switchable, exists.]”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Discourse network is ] The network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Printed laments over the death of Man or the subject always arrive too late.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Media determine our situation.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It has become clear that real wars are fought not for people or fatherlands, but take place between different media, information technologies, data flows.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From a 2002 interview. Quoted in Winkler, Robert A. ""Alle Apparate abschalten." Conceiving Love and Technology with Heidegger And Kittler." (2020).”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“there are no such things as thoughts. There are only words.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source