Friedrich Kittler. Early Writing: Music, Cuneiform, Egyptian Hieroglyphs. 2011

• published: 18 Dec 2012
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http://www.egs.edu Friedrich Kittler, German post-Structuralist philosopher and media theorist, lecturing on the history of writing. In this lecture he talks about the history of handwriting, of ècriture and schrift, writing as a finite set of signs, Chinese characters, Jacques Derrida's notion of painting as scripts, cave paintings as symbols and not signs, ancient writing systems, ciphers, scripts, archaeologist Alice Kober, spoken language and writing, writing as the first and only medium for a long time, phonetics and pronunciation, the question of since when can humans speak, the idea of humans making noises in order to be recorded for writing systems, Homo sapiens, the five precise notes of a flute found in the Lascaux caves, ancient systems of counting, recording, numbers on bones with notches, incrementing and decrementing as first mathematical operations done by writing, hieroglyphs, historian Karl August Wittfogel, the token system discovered by archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Bresserat from which cuneiform symbols are derived, Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism theory, the scribe, King Hammurabi's stele of the code of law and how it is an analogy of power being passed on to those who can write; the geographical extension of cuneiform writing; Friedrich Hrozny and the deciphering of cuneiform writing; how Egyptian hieroglyphs are inspired by Mesopotamian hieroglyphs; the multi-dimensionality of the hieroglyphic script for "phoenix"; how graphical forms of Semitic hieroglyphs are related to Egyptian hieroglyphs, and consonants. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School (EGS), Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland, Europe. Friedrich Kittler. 2011. Friedrich Adolf Kittler (1943 -2011) was a post-Structuralist philosopher, as well as historian and theorist of media communications and technology. Kittler studied German Studies, Romance Languages and Philosophy at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg/Breisgau. In 1976, he earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation on Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. His work was heavily influenced by both Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. Kittler became a Professor of German at Freiburg in the early eighties. During the decade he held positions as a visiting lecturer and professor at the University of California, in Berkeley and Santa Barbara, and later at the University of Stanford and the University of Basel. In 1984, he completed his Habilitation at the University of Freiburg/Breisgau, and from 1986-1990 headed the DFG's Literature and Media Analysis project in Kassel. Kittler was a Membre associé of the Collège international de philosophie, Paris from 1983-1986. In 1987, Kittler was appointed Professor of Modern German Studies, at Ruhr University and began working as Professor of German at the University of Bochum. In 1993, he received the media arts prize for theory from the ZKM Karlsruhe (Zentrums für Kunst und Medientechnologie); from 1995 to 1997, he headed a Federal Research Group on Theory and History of Media. Kittler was also a member of the Hermann von Helmholtz Centre for Culture and the Bild Schrift Zahl research group. In 1996, Friedrich Kittler was recognized as a Distinguished Scholar by Yale University, and in 1997 as Distinguished Visiting Professor by Columbia University. Kittler died on October 18, 2011 in Berlin. Among his far reaching and eclectic bibliography,his best known books in English are Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. His full bibliography can be found at http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/kittler/kittlerpub.html