Re: <nettime> Friedrich Kittler

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

On 29 Oct 2011, at 7:56 PM, Florian Cramer wrote:

> I find it remarkable how contributors on this mailing list recall the
> personality and intellectual style of Friedrich Kittler, but little is
> being said about the insights and theory he left to the contemporary
> media criticism/activism/arts field.

True, Florian. But one can always do that, later, in one month or a  
century from now.

For me Friedrich Kittler was (also) a human being, a special  
character, one which I had the priviledge to meet every now and  
then, in different occasions. You are right that agency is the big  
mystery, the big missing element in his work. It is funny how he (and  
ssoooo many other humanities scholars and media theorists) misjudged  
the role that Internet was going to play. We often debated this, also  
in public, and in the recent years he admitted that his previous  
judgements were wrong. For Kittler there was only the computer as a  
stand-alone device that mumbles along, caught in all it calculation: a  
very powerful and destructive autonomous (military) machine. The idea  
of agency within networks doesn't fit into this world view. Let alone  
Californian dotcom agendas of venture capitalists and all their  
conservative-liberatarian dreams. That was all fluff. We had to go  
back to the core. Later on in life Kittler himself was an intensive  
internet user but never revised his grand theories to this new  
computer reality. But at least he saw that he was wrong, and that was  
quite human, I thought.

I liked what Hubertus wrote:

Trauer um Prof. Dr. Friedrich Kittler
Mit der Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig trauere ich um den  
großen Denker, den Raucher und Weinkenner, den Poeten, Mathematiker,  
Musiker, um den Ingenieur und genialen Bricoleur Prof. Dr. Friedrich  
Kittler, Germanist, Romanist, Philosoph, Medienwissenschaftler bien  
avant la lettre, den bedeutenden Kulturwissenschaftler, gestorben mit  
68 Jahren am 18. Oktober 2011.

Der Präsident Prof.Dr. Hubertus v. Amelunxen

 Ciao, Geert


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