<nettime> Re: (babblefish) Kittlertranslation

[scotartt <scot@systemx.autonomous.org>]

	[friedrich kittler, according to babelfish--tb]


Medium theory with Entlarvungsgestus:  Friedrich Kittler

The citizen of Berlin medium theoretician Friedrich Kittler is a professor
for aesthetics and history of the media at the institute for art and
culture sciences at the Humboldt University of Berlin.  It will be in the
coming year Fellow at the ' international research center culture sciences
' in Vienna.  This organized together with the art-historical museum in
October conference about " Audiovisualitaet before and after good mountain
" - Kittlers <i>key note Speech</i> over " letter, numbers, codes " serves
as cause to argue with Kittlers medium-theoretical beginning a little.
</b></font>

I'm handling the computer - the ' universal machine' - probably troubles
the even Germans a strange omission:  on the human factor to have built,
instead of becoming fair a term of 'intelligence ' in more global, thus
technical way.  As one of the war-crucial factors the ability of the
British Kryptologen team in Bletchley park probably proved to crack the
codings of the German cipher machine ENIGMA.  Which should make Alan Turing
history as performance of a technical intelligence under guidance of the
mathematician, the German armed forces attributed however to simply human
failure.  Their ENIGMA had a highest possible encoding technique, which was
considered as so safe that the leaky place in the submarine war on level of
the espionage was looked up and not on the level of machine codes
themselves.  Exactly this was however the decided point:  to the machine
logic could be answered evenly only with machine logic, how the Turing and
its team proved.

It is this missed insight that the problems of the Kryptologen could be
solved only by Leibniz' counting and not by reflection over possible sense
connections, which a driving motive for the theory formation of Friedrich
Kittler forms.

Is it medium theory?  A medium science does not give it for Kittler, only a
most superficial, in the form of " more kastrierter " film and television
science, which bend " the Kniee " before tone or bit map memories, as he
calls it.  The reality of the media is many more abstract, than
journalism-scientific contents and structural analyses let it suspect at
all.


With the druckerpresse Indian-Arab mathematics of the value broke in this
combination of alphabetical combinations and technical algorithms, chute
into European writing, with the typewriter the druckerpresse, in everyday
writing found.  With the computer the coding became universal finally -
machine codes and software programs does not regard it anybody more whether
they instruct to set easily characters or set however characters.

This quotation carries features of all texts Kittlers, which are ironically
in the lecture held like that for drying written as; the framework of
scientific Serioesitaet is still so far maintained thereby even that
nothing stands to a popularized rezeption in the way.  At the same time
well-known assertion samples are served, in this case trinitarische
thinking, which progress from the father over the son to the holy spirit,
as well as an always noticeable breath of conspiracy theory, which comes
along military-historically verbraemt.

To embody is it only consistent, progress thoughts in its last possible
form, and unsurpassableness mathematical Recodierung codes as abstraction
progress abendlaendischen culture so far to lining era that for finding
thoughts ", from which once Leibniz had geschwaermt at least in the age of
their last valid Materialisierung to justice it happens to those "
computing apparatuses.  To the better understanding it may be completed
that Kittler by any means a Apotheose of the computers (which always may be
- ' he called algorithmic Golems ' her once) does not supply, but bases of
a criticism of the instrumental reason.</i> Yes, because anywhere a more
radical immanent <i>criticism</i> of the computer era does not seem to
initiate itself, than
with Kittler themselves:  a criticism of the acceptance, with the
'universal Turing machine ' would have arrived history (when " Pax
Americana " goes so completely, because without war metaphors it never with
Kittler) actually as theoretically at its end, so that of the possibility
of other programmable machines only any longer one does not think.  The
machine operating with discrete decisions of the digital code behaves to
the nature, which follows similar principles, purely approximately - for
it, according to which it is <i>calculable</i> the theory is however white
only too good that <i>everything</i> that is would not be <i>also</i> 
calculable.  The digital Bitstream does not indicate thereby by any means
the end of all things:  gradual improvements in the predictability do not
seal the end of history, similar data flow leave open still some options -
also into possible further medium worlds -.

Little utopia must already be, even in the era Microsoft, and Kittler is
finally not naively technikglaeubig. 

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