Tag: Kittler

“No Deconstruction without Computers” — Alexander R. Galloway at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, March 7, 2023

Poster by Hank Gerba

Please join us at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop on Tuesday March 7th, 5-7PM, for “‘No Deconstruction without Computers’: Learning to Code with Derrida and Kittler” with Alexander Galloway. We will meet in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, as usual. This event is graciously co-sponsored by the Critical Making Collaborative, Art & Art History Department, and Communication Department.

Please register here if attending in person: https://tinyurl.com/mt5n58rf
Zoom, if unavailable in person: https://tinyurl.com/2jyr5f2d

Find a description of the talk below, and a poster for lightweight distribution. We look forward to seeing you there (and at M. Beatrice Fazi’s event next Tuesday the 28th) !

“‘No Deconstruction without Computers’: Learning to Code with Derrida and Kittler”
Alexander R. Galloway

What are the machines that determine thinking? We may approach the question in a number of ways. The typical approach is to consider (or perhaps even craft) a philosophy of media. This comes under the name of media studies or media theory, where media artifacts are taken as the objects of thinking. Yet there is also an alternate approach, the media of philosophy, where the a priori conditions of philosophy themselves take center stage, engulfing thought as a kind of object. For if “media determine our situation,” as Friedrich Kittler once notoriously put it, is it not also true that philosophies shift according to the changing conditions of media technology? In this lecture we will explore the history of philosopher’s devices drawn from the domain of machines and computers, while focusing attention on two of them: Jacques Derrida’s Macintosh Plus and Friedrich Kittler’s MS-DOS machine (he migrated later to Gentoo Linux). This will serve as a backdrop for a different kind of inquiry, not simply that our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts, but also that our thoughts themselves are instruments.

Friedrich Kittler (1943 – 2011)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxYZyOLMRAM]

Friedrich Kittler, whose name has become synonymous with so-called “German media theory,” passed away this week, on October 18, 2011. Kittler’s proclamation that “media determine our situation,” and his use of the phrase “der sogenannte Mensch” to refer to “us” (i.e. humans and our subjectivities), have long been occasions for controversy: for some, they are signs of Kittler’s “genius,” expressed paradoxically in his unrelenting break with the anthropocentric sympathies that would underwrite any such claim to genius; for others, they are merely signs of antihumanism and technological determinism. Whatever one decides, the significance of Kittler’s work cannot be denied; it will undoubtedly continue to play a controversial role and to exert a variety of influences on our attempts to think media in the future. Here, then, are some links that reflect on Kittler’s legacy:

News of Kittler’s death and reflections on his life and work appeared in virtually all the German newspapers. Die Zeit ran an article by Maximilian Probst here, and the taz had a piece by Stefan Heidenreich here. Norbert Bolz’s article in the Tagesspiegel can be found here. Die Welt reprinted parts of an interview with Kittler from earlier this year (here), as well as an obituary by Ulf Poschardt here. Christian Schlüter’s piece in the Berliner Zeitung is here, and Thomas Steinfeld’s obituary in the Süddeutsche Zeitung is here. Jürgen Kaube’s piece in the FAZ  is here.

Meanwhile, in the blogosphere, Thomas Groh has put together a collection of Kittler video clips on his blog Filmtagebuch here.

Finally, for some English-language reflections on Kittler’s legacy, see Jussi Parikka’s thoughts here on his blog Machinology, and Bernard Geogehan’s obituary at Critical Inquiry’s blog here.