My Age, my beast, who will be fit
To look into your eyes
As his blood binds
The vertebrae of two centuries?
Blood, the Builder erupts
From the throats of earth-bound things;
A parasite can but tremble
On the threshold of new days.

Blood, the Builder erupts
From the throats of earth-bound things
And flings burnt fish
Onto the coast of warm sinews from the sea.
And from high bird-nets
From wet azure clods,
It pours casually down
Onto your deadly wound.

So, as the Age wrenches itself out of captivity
So, as a new world begins,
A skein of knotted days
Must be twined within a flute.
This Age is lurching on waves
Of human anguish
And in the grass, a viper breathes
The measure of a golden age.

And buds will still swell,
Green shoots will emerge,
But your vertebrae are shattered,
My beautiful, wretched age!
And with mindless smile
You look back, violent and weak,
Like a once lithe beast,
On your paw prints behind.

(tr. Deborah Marshall & DouglasPenick)

“…only that which can form a circuit, exists.” On that remark, and in his passing, I remember my studies with Prof. Dr. Friedrich Kittler with utmost fondness.  Kittler believed in the irreversibility of the flow of time.  And so, Kittler’s death itself – that is, the death qua death – and perhaps standing for all contemporary deaths from here on out, must not be lamented, for we can remember Rilke’s reflection in the Duino Elegies, “Not angels, not humans, and already knowing animals are aware / that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.”  This is to say: we all live in the shadow of a comet, as Jean-Pierre Dupuy puts it.

Kittler’s mastery of Technische Medien, and the history of technology, was most evident in the elegance with which he linked up the sweep of technological history: from the birth of human-harnessed electricity (the sparking amber brought back from Rhodes – the Greek word for amber is “elektron”), to Galvani’s discovery – although he was a vitalist – of the relationship between electricity and animation, or life (the bioelectric dead frog), through to the strange Pynchon-esque world of twentieth century warfare (the V-2 rocket, Kittler’s elegiac account of the tragedy of Turing, ).  Kittler lamented the cognitive gap between technicians and human beings being too human – which I unoriginally consider to be, at heart, the currently unresolvable parallax between techne and episteme – and in his analysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, observed that the role of the typewriter in the story as a controlled registration device of the medium of (the symbol of) man, renders us all “subjects of machine-based discourse processing gadgets and instruments.” This is in opposition to McLuhan’s notion of technology as an extension of man.  Kittler’s understanding of the continuum of technological autonomy led him to the grammatological conclusion that “there is no more writing,” since the miniaturisation of texts to the level of sub-micrometer sized chips commanding transistors to express differences between voltaic potentials, escapes the bounds of human perception of time and space.  To put it in other words, and in close relation to his famous aphorism “there is no software,” high-level programming languages and user interfaces obscure what at bottom, and at the most privileged access point concealed from users, are local manipulations of electricity.  Furthermore, the content of written media, for Kittler, is the symbolic, which in his reading of Lacan is based in symbols which can be exchanged for other symbols, and do not, as would be supposed, refer to an extra-symbolic real.  However, the radical distinction of technological media is that they ‘produce data that not longer refer to the symbolic world but rather to the material universe, or in other words, to that which cannot be encoded and fixed in writing in the symbolic network.’ (Sybille Kramer)

Many commentators apply a Foucaultian analysis to Kittler’s stance, whereby the power exists in the chip.  Indeed, media are techniques for reading and writing history, manipulating that which passes in irreversible time.  But this does not go far enough: the power, if it can be called that, is in matter itself, manipulated by thrown humans into integrated circuits and burnt silicon, which merely (which is to say magnificently) activate ontically extant possible functions of reality itself: the autoboot and the reset are base ontological functions, which manifest in genes, time, and culture.  Kittler insists on this in the declaration that after Church-Turing, nature itself can be understood as tantamount to a Universal Turing Machine.  In this ontology, data, regardless of human sensory experience, becomes the smallest unit of communication.  Kittler said at least once in interview, “Silicon is nature calculating itself!”  His mortal end leaves rigorously considered traces that can be applied to futuristic resolutions between technology, nature, and data.