Systematically break down silos. A conversation about Friedrich Kittler

Systematically break down silos. A conversation about Friedrich Kittler

March, 31, 2023
Systematically break down silos. A conversation about Friedrich Kittler
Article in Merkur 887 and as a long version by Guido Graf in Merkur blog [German Only!]

“Under technological conditions, literature disappears... into the undeath of its endless perishing.” This is what it says, almost at the end, in Friedrich Kittler's essay Dracula's Legacy from 1982. Together with other texts from this time, it is in the first published volume of Kittler's edition of his works. The edition deals with the technological conditions of digitality and models new standards for how archives and memory can be handled. It is therefore worth thinking together about how the endless death of literature and writing about literature and other media can be shaped. On September 26, 2022, I tried this in a conversation. Moritz Hiller, media scientist at the Bauhaus University Weimar and co-editor of Kittler's works, took part in the conversation; Susanne Holl, who met Kittler, who died in 2011, while he was teaching in Bochum and married in 1995; Kathrin Kur from Data Futures GmbH, a non-profit company from Leipzig that is developing the technical infrastructure for the edition; Tom Lamberty, the publisher of Merve, where the Kittler edition is published; Martin Stingelin, Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Dortmund and also co-editor of the edition.