Re: <nettime> Friedrich Kittler

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

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.

He died way too young. This is what concerns me most, to be honest.

It is (or was?) such an odd mix, his timely and untimely character.  
And odd politics: being in fact a very strange radical hippy  
conservative with no ties to the Left and yet providing the  
progressive social movements, artists and critics with so new insights  
and questions concerning the dubious 'nature' of the media  
technologies we are all involved in.

All the best from Geert

On 27 Oct 2011, at 11:13 PM, Timothy Druckrey wrote:

> No doubt lengthy paeans will be forthcoming from the Kittler
> scholars. They will be, of course, well deserved for a thinker whose
> work traversed so many spheres. For us in the media, Kittler's work
> has been an indispensable source of rigor and insight. Back in 1987,
> I read the first chapter of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter in the
> journal October. After that, his name surfaced in many sources and I
> read everything I could find with voracious interest. He was
> regularly in the media festivals and his intense presence was a stark
> challenge to the kind of idiosyncratic history that was/is still so
> prevalent in the media sphere.
<...>


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