Friday Quotations: He's such a Kittler

As sort of promised.... heeeere's Kittler.

Kittler on pop music and poetry:
"With the invention of technical sound storage, the effects that poetry had on its audience migrate to the new lyrics of hit parades and charts. Their text would rather be anonymous than deprived of royalties, their recipients illiterate rather than deprived of love."

Kittler having a Paul Virilio moment:
"A cinematic war may not even take place at all. Invisible enemies that materialize only for seconds and as ghostly apparitions can hardly be said any longer to be killed: they are protected from death by the false immortality of ghosts."

Kittler on video games and those discos that those young people hang out in:
"If the joysticks of the Atari video games make children illiterate, President Reagan welcomed them for just that reason: as a training ground for future bomber pilots. Every culture has its zones of preparation that use lust and power, optically, acoustically, and so on. Our discos are preparing our youth for a retaliatory strike."

Kittler on psychiatrists video-taping patients:
"The age of media (not just since Turing’s game of imitation) renders indistinguishable what is human and what is machine, who is mad and who is faking it. If cinematographers can ‘correct’ in an almost perfect way’ disturbing occurrences of non-madness, they might as well film paid actors instead of asylum inmates."

And Kittler on class and computers:
"The language of the upper echelons of leadership has always been digital."

He also has interesting things to say about women and typewriters. But another time.

Later Days.