Friedrich Kittler was a literary and media scientist [ Medienwissenschaftler ]. His research focused on technical media [ Technischen Medien ] and cultural techniques [ Kulturtechniken ].
Kittler's theory shies away from the Frankfurt School and hermeneutics of Gadamer and Habermas, the dominant literary scientific frameworks in Germany of the s and 80s. Rather, it draws from Heidegger , Foucault discourse analysis, archaeology , Lacan the orders of the real, symbolic and imaginary , and Shannon information theory , but also from Hegel Seinsgeschichte , Nietzsche genealogy , Derrida , Turing universal machine , McLuhan , Virilio , and Pynchon.
Florian Cramer wrote about his legacy: "Kittler never had a chair for media studies, but for literature and later aesthetics. His main concernβand partial success at least in the German-speaking humanitiesβwas to establish technical media in the sense of information technology as a fundamental paradigm, if not a fundamental ontology, of cultural history and humanities. In this sense, Kittler's insistence on media was comparable as well as in competition to the insistence on the sign in structuralist semiology, and the earlier insistence on geist spirit in Hegelian intellectual history, or the insistence on culture in cultural studies.
He proposed a Kulturwissenschaft based on an ontological techno-materialism as a counter-model to cultural studies based on cultural materialism. Not unlike German punks in the early s in their provocations against hippies, he liked to insist on the position that would upset old-style humanities and liberal leftists the most.
Friedrich Adolf Kittler was born in , in Rochlitz, a small town in the vicinity of Dresden in Saxony in what was soon to become East Germany. His elder half-brother Wolf was a former wireless operator who drew on his wartime expertise to assemble illegal radios using parts scavenged from abandoned military aircraft. In , the family fled to West Germany, and settled in Lahr, a small town in the Black Forest near Germany's western border.
