Friedrich Kittler

Do you know anything about this Kittler guy. It's interesting to find a whole school of thought you never knew existed. I find this interesting, re-reading an entire philosophical system in a Marxist fashion where it should be interpreted in terms of the technologies of 'mediation' available at the time. Lacan is a rereading of Freud under the conditions of New Media, RSI corresponds to the gramophone,  typewriter and film? Not sure how the recorded music should correspond to the Real.

What could the new sciences and methods be, then? We learned that Jacques Lacan rewrote Sigmund Freud with the help of new media, with computing, in short, since Freud's psychoanalysis was based only on the first industrial revolution, not the second. Subsequently, we were also asked to rewrite the history of whatever branch of or in the humanities in terms of media. That was the task, his aim, or our goal. And we learned many other stories relating theories with technical media... That McLuhan was actually a scholar in literature and that he was strongly inspired by Harold A. Innis and his book "Empire and Communications"... That the famous sentence "The Medium is the Message" was "stolen" from the Bell Labs and was originally called "Fitting the Message to the Line"...

Kittler - he - would go during these days much further than McLuhan and Foucault together. Foucault ended with the typewriter, Kittler evidently claimed. Indeed, we don't read from Foucault anything on radio or on tv or on vinyl as such. Just a bit on the typewriter. The theoretical distinction by Jacques Lacan, the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary, got with Kittler a "historical base": We learned to read RSI as gramophone, typewriter, and film. And so on and so on... In addition, nobody else except Kittler would talk to us about media like Godard or Straub and Huillet. He was the only one in Berlin. So, of course, we went to his lectures again and again. Without question, and questioning Kittler - for us - was a "New Foucault", a Foucault of media - of old media, and with new media in particular.

http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/35/35887/1.html

I've started these Python tutorials, up to lesson 16. You should give them a go, I think you'd be better than me, its just formulas and algorithms, but I am determined to get a handle on programming-not to know it seems to be a kind of new illiteracy.

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/