Friedrich Kittler Quotes on Knowledge
Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1985) and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) gave late twentieth-century German media philosophy its founding works. The central thesis is that the apparently autonomous content of literature, philosophy, and the human sciences is in fact the surface effect of the underlying technical media that organize the storage, transmission, and processing of information at any given historical moment — the romantic-philosophical authorship of the 1800 discourse network is replaced in the 1900 network by the differentiated technical media of phonograph, film, and typewriter that have decoupled the previously unified function of the writing-reading subject. The framework, drawing on Foucault, Lacan, McLuhan, and a deep engagement with the technical history of communication and computation, shaped contemporary media theory through the Berlin school of media studies and the broader engagement with the technological conditions of knowledge.
Quotes
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“Media determine our situation.”
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter -
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.”
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“Nur was schaltbar ist, ist überhaupt. [Only that which is switchable, exists.]”
Wikiquote -
“[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.”
Others