Friedrich Kittler Quotes
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. The quotes below are attributed to Friedrich Kittler, organized by topic.
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Friedrich Kittler on Death
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“Printed laments over the death of Man or the subject always arrive too late.”
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“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.”
Others
Friedrich Kittler on God
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“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.”
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Friedrich Kittler on Happiness
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“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.”
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Friedrich Kittler on Justice
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“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.”
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Friedrich Kittler on Knowledge
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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.”
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“Nur was schaltbar ist, ist überhaupt. [Only that which is switchable, exists.]”
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“[Discourse network is ] The network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data.”
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“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.”
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“It has become clear that real wars are fought not for people or fatherlands, but take place between different media, information technologies, data flows.”
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“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.”
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“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”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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Friedrich Kittler on Mind
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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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“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.”
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“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.”
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“there are no such things as thoughts. There are only words.”
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Friedrich Kittler on Truth
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“Media determine our situation.”
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
Friedrich Kittler on Virtue
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“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.”
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