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Friedrich Kittler's uncompromising antihumanist stance was as mesmerizing as his terse oracular pronouncements that drew as much on his vast Old European erudition as on his always up-to-date knowledge of the latest developments in computer technology. His fundamental claim was that the technical media and the concomitant discourse networks determine how one speaks and thinks and what can be spoken and thought at a particular historical moment. For this reason, the hardware at the heart of our apparatuses and dispositifs needed to be brought into focus, for it had been systematically obscured by ever more layers of software. At the level of writing the same phenomenon could be observed in a reading practice that had been prevalent since around 1800, and which was aimed at meaning at the cost of forgetting the letter. Kittler's remedy against hermeneutics was attentiveness to the materialities of communication including its enabling discursive conditions.
The handbook in which this program was outlined in detail and with great historical depth, was Discourse Networks 1800/1900, which many of us instinctively recognized as one of those rare books that can change entire academic disciplines and open new fields of inquiry. The work was paradigmatic not only because it was at the forefront of what was to become German media theory, but also because Kittler was capable of combining minute analyses-call it a materialism from the ground up-with sweeping vistas of distinctive discursive regimes and their techno-historical underpinnings. To us, he was a German Foucault of sorts, who unflinchingly took the pioneering genealogies of his French predecessor to their logical conclusion.
In 1994, Kittler participated in a Stanford conference about the two cultures. He took the hard line, which is to say that he rejected the difference between the humanities and the sciences in...