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.
Key facts
- Nationality
- German
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Continental, Post-Structuralism
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Friedrich Kittler:
“Media determine our situation.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Kittler:
“What we are able to think depends on what our technology allows us to record.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Kittler:
“The history of philosophy is also the history of writing instruments.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Kittler:
“There is no information without a medium.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Kittler:
“Discourse networks are the conditions of every discipline.”