Friedrich Kittler 1943 – 2011

Friedrich Adolf Kittler was a German literary scholar and media theorist and one of the principal architects of the German tradition of media philosophy. After studies at Freiburg in the orbit of post-structuralist French thought, he held chairs at Bochum and the Humboldt University of Berlin and produced a long series of studies in which the technical conditions of media, from alphabetic writing through phonography, film, and the digital computer, are taken to determine the conditions of thought, literature, and subjectivity. His Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter shaped subsequent humanities scholarship around the technical-medial turn.

Friedrich Adolf Kittler was born at Rochlitz in Saxony in June 1943. He studied Romance languages, German literature, and philosophy at Freiburg, took his doctorate there in 1976 with a thesis on the Swiss novelist C. F. Meyer, and habilitated in 1984 with the celebrated study Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900, translated as Discourse Networks 1800/1900. He held chairs at Bochum and from 1993 at the Humboldt University of Berlin as professor of aesthetics and history of media.

His major works are Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1985), Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986), the lecture series Optical Media (delivered 1999), Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaft (2000), and the unfinished four-volume Musik und Mathematik (two volumes published 2006 and 2009). He combined philological scholarship with hands-on engineering and an early enthusiasm for digital programming.

Kittler argued that 'media determine our situation' and that the Romantic and modernist conceptions of the human subject are themselves the products of specific technical configurations of writing, sound, and image; in the same post-hermeneutic spirit he read Lacan, Foucault, and Heidegger as theorists of inscription and signal processing. He is the founder of German media theory in its most rigorous form. He died at Berlin in October 2011.