Margaret Morse on Sat, 29 Oct 2011 14:17:00 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Friedrich Kittler |
Dear Geert, I had the unfortunate vantage point of meeting Kittler in the early 1990's, when perhaps his persuasiveness was fading. As for his person, I was stunned by his open misogyny and a talk he gave in which women were zeros and men were ones (the second being a far more attractive proposition). I followed him outside, where he dragging on a cigarette to ask him if he meant this to be taken seriously. He brushed me off. As I took a closer view of him in the sunlight, I realized that he was covered with cigarette ashes. I, in contrast, had white cat hairs all over my black suit. Your remark about his early death is the thing that moves me about your reminiscences. It suggests how affectionately you remember him. In another way, though, his smoking was such a part of him he seemed to be courting death; furthermore, given that he appeared to be suffering a mental decline, death could have been kind. I wondered whether I should share this memory but I decided it was OK. I seldom describe what it meant to be a woman when confronted with the actual Foucault, for instance, but it is part of the story. It colors the work for me; I can' t think it away, but it doesn't negate what it is. Best wishes, Maggie On Oct 28, 2011, at 12:44 AM, Geert Lovink wrote: > Thanks a lot for posting this, Tim. > > Kittler's dead, for me, somehow mixes in a weird way with OWS and > the Eurocrisis. > > Something is shifting. In a way I associate Kittler's work with > the WWII and the Cold War and the broader history of media and > cybernetics of the 20st century. <...> Margaret Morse Professor of Film and Digital Media University of California Santa Cruz memorse@comcast.net morse@ucsc.edu 1230 Colusa Ave. Berkeley, CA 94707 ph/fax 510 280 5774 Cell 510 316 1865 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org