No More Learning

When, during the first third of the eighteenth century, the swords be- latedly realized how far the robes had outdone them as ministers of the state, high nobility modernized the curricula of its knights' schools. From circa 1750, then, the noblesse d' ? ep ? ee alone surrounded the thrones. Alberto Mar- tino even goes so far as to suspect that the whole of the Enlightenment was a cover name for much more earthly goals. French academics and intellec- tuals, newly unemployed, wanted back their power and therefore pro- claimed a revolution. 13
This revolution, sadly, was mistaken. Those who came to power were not priests or physicians, but engineers, teachers, and, admittedly, lawyers.
? ? ? 10. FortheU. S. partofthestory,seeThomasPynchon,TheCryingofLot49(NewYork,1966). 11. SeeHerbertGrundmann,VomUrsprungderUniversita ? timMittelalter(Darmstadt,1964). 12. See Thomas Ellwein, Die deutsche Universita ? t: Vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart
(Wiesbaden, 1997), pp. 47-52.
13. See the first volume of Alberto Martino, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein: Geschichte seiner
Rezeption, 5 vols. (Tu ? bingen, 1978). This fits well with the self-fulfilling prophecies of a better enlightenedfutureanalyzedbyReinhartKoselleck,KritikundKrise:EinBeitragzurPathogenese der bu ? rgerlichen Welt (Freiburg, 1969).
248 Friedrich Kittler / Universities
On the one hand, the early modern university had relied so heavily on printed books in all their multilingual interrelations that the rather simul- taneous emergence of technical, equally infallible construction drawings escaped its notice. Letters, ciphers, and diagrams in their threefold com- bination proved too alien for humanists. The combination, however, of type and woodcut or copperplate enabled scientific visualization at a level of pre- cision unheard of by Greeks and monks. Technology as a science was just the ever-expanding output of this alliance,14 and Carnot's and Monge's E ? cole Polytechnique, founded in 1794, was its earliest institutional instan- tiation. And a brilliant young student of all these technically applied math- ematics, a certain Bonaparte, overran, equipped with Satan's heavy artillery, old Europe. Since that time universities on both sides of the Atlantic have had to cope with engineers. To make a long story short: European emigrants to America's shores settled all these issues and two world wars. 15
On the other hand, an ancient initiation rite came to an abrupt end. The former first faculty, despite its name, was in no way philosophical. The cur- riculum ranged from trivia--the grammatical, rhetorical, and dialectical aspects of language--to the higher quadrivia of Pythagorean mathemat- ics--music and arithmetic, astronomy and geometry in their Greek inter- connection. 16 As such, this faculty had to remain a mere propaedeutic to the other politically relevant faculties and couldn't award doctoral degrees in its own right. The bloody Revolution and its dreamy German counterpart changed all this. In France, the medieval universities remained as unre- formable as ever, but new E ? coles Normales, by teaching future teachers, enabled Napoleon to procure a new elite of bureaucrats. In Prussia, the king made academic professors and high school teachers civil servants so that a dramatically modernized philosophical faculty could invent--by dialogic seminarsandhermeneuticlectures--theso-calledunityofForschungund Lehre (teaching and research) that then fed back from universities to the gymnasia, from philosophy to literary studies. 17 Interpretation was no longer interlinear, but its contrary, as Gadamer, despite the evidence of pro- gramming languages, persuaded Habermas.
Modern mathematics (from Fourier to Hilbert) as well as modern phi-
? ? ? 14. See Johann Beckmann, Entwurf einer allgemeinen Technologie (Leipzig, 1767).
15. See John Gimbel, Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany (Stanford, Calif. , 1990).
16. See Archytas of Taranto, B1, Diels-Kranz. Here is one of those Greek light(ning)s that Curtius's imperial Latinism choose to ignore.
17. See the references given in Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif. , 1990), pp. 148-64. Also see Michel Foucault, "Qu'est- ce qu'un philosophe? " Dits et ? ecrits, ed. Daniel Defert and Franc ? ois Ewald, 4 vols. (Paris, 1994), 1:552.
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 249
losophy (from Hegel to Heidegger) originated from the French and German programs, the two most successful and often copied models of higher stud- ies. 18 Once technological hardware completed a triumvirate with ontology and mathematics, our present-day system was in place. It began with Felix Klein, Hilbert's colleague in Go ? ttingen, and the "wizard" Steinmetz at MIT. They built experimental labs inside their universities19 and, in the first case, with a little help from the kaiser, imposed a doctor title for engineers on reluctant German universities. Otherwise Alan Turing could never have de- vised his famous mathematical machine, which, on the one hand, disproved Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem but, on the other hand, proved that a small, although practically speaking powerful subset of the real numbers is nev- ertheless computable. 20 The Turing machine, then, was, is, and will be the condition of possibility of all computers. Just as in ancient Greece where one and the same alphabet stood at once for speech elements, natural num- bers, and musical pitches,21 our binary system encompasses everything known about culture and nature, which was formerly encoded in letters, images, and sounds.
2. Diagnosis
Universities, however, and to say the least, have utterly forgotten that glorious history. Especially in those parts of Europe where states still feed, control, and starve them, universities do not think of themselves as more venerable than the nation-states, their short-term partners. Instead of seeking a sudden divorce, both universities and nation-states still keep praying for the former's survival. On the other hand--and this is the good news--universities have finally succeeded in forming once again a com- plete media system. Turing's universal machine--vulgo the computer-- processes, stores, and transmits whatever data it receives, whether textbooks, measurements, or algebras. Computers, therefore, have come full circle; from the mathematics departments where they once began, making their way through physics, chemistry, and medicine, they have finally arrived in the humanities. For the second time in its eight centuries, the university is tech-
? ? ? 18. For Heidegger's relation to Hilbert and the mathematical Grundlagenkrise, see Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Halle, 1931), ? 3, p. 9.
19. For MIT, see Steve Heims, The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge, Mass. , 1991); for Klein and Wilhelm II, see Karl-Heinz Manegold, Universita ? t, Technische Hochschule, und Industrie: Ein BeitragzurEmanzipationderTechnikim19. JahrhundertunterbesondererBeru ? cksichtigungder Bestrebungen Felix Kleins (Berlin, 1970).
20. See Alan M. Turing, "On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem," Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 2 (1937): 42.
21. See Johannes Lohmann, Musike ? und Logos, ed. Anastasios Giannara ? s (Stuttgart, 1971), p. 10.
250 Friedrich Kittler / Universities
nically uniform simply because all departments share one and the same hardware.
This logistical fact has yet to be taken into systemic account. It will not do to equip every office or desktop with Microsoft Office and Wintel ma- chines, but we can foresee happy consequences from the new uniformity of knowledges, disciplines, departments. As Heidegger said, early and hum- bly: precisely because the core of the Greek episteme, ontology or the logos of Being, has materialized in computing machines, European philosophy comes to its very end, and thinking may begin again. 22
Clearly, there remains a twofold task. First, we have to organize this end within each single university; second, we must pose a new question.
"La fin de la philosophie se dessine comme le triomphe de l'e ? quipement d'un monde en tant que soumis aux commandes d'une science technicise ? e. Fin de la philosophie signifie: de ? but de la civilisation mondiale en tant qu'elle prend base dans la pense ? e de l'occident europe ? en. "23 In this direc- tion, our universities are well under way. For the first time since Galileo's experiments, mathematicians and physicists work on the same worksta- tions. For the first time since Steinmetz's electrotechnical lab, engineers and scientists pose the same questions about a better hardware design that by itself will create still better questions. And for the first time since the inven- tion of alphabetic library catalogues24 and structured manuscript pages,25 every file in Dewey's sense turns into a file in our computerized sense. 26 Thus, even the humanities' knowledge volatilizes into software libraries. Furthermore, whereas the book-based humanities encountered difficult problems when trying to store or address images, animations, and sounds, computers do not simply record such data but address and process them. The methodical integration of studies in language and music, film and po- etry may begin.
3. Prognosis
And more is to be done. Humboldt's unity of teaching and research re- mains at stake as long as university systems do not overcome the unfortu-
? ? ? 22. "La philosophie prend fin a` l'e ? poque pre ? sente. Elle a trouve ? son lieu dans la prise en vue scientifique de l'humanite ? agissant en milieu social. Le trait fondamental de cette de ? termination scientifique est par ailleurs son caracte` re cyberne ? tique" (Heidegger, "La Fin de la philosophie et la ta^che de la pense ? e," trans. Jean Beaufret and Franc ? ois Fe ? dier, in Kierkegaard vivant [Paris, 1965], p. 178). In those bygone days, cybernetics or elsewhere logistics meant computer science and computer hardware indiscriminately. Many further references could be given.
23. Ibid. , p. 180.
24. See Lloyd W. Daly, Contributions to a History of Alphabetization in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Brussels, 1967).
25. SeeIvanIllich,ImWeinbergdesTextes:AlsdasSchriftbildderModerneentstand(Frankfurt am Main, 1991).
26. See Markus Krajewski, Zettelwirtschaft: Die Geburt der Kartei aus dem Geiste der Bibliothek (Berlin, 2002), pp. 99-121, 150-55.
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 251
nate distinction between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften (humanities and sciences). 27 When the human face dissolves "comme a` la limite de la mer un visage de sable,"28 the humanities would best be known as cultural studies. When, on the other hand, physics is no longer a tran- scendental apperception, informing Kantian scientists on data given in the twofold frame of space and time, but rather some computer-preprocessed data flow, a scientific visualization, or even sonification,29 the distinction maintained between science and engineering would be annulled. Cultural studies vis-a` -vis technical ones would form a smoother constellation of de- partments, offices, and faculties:
1. When the old humanities do not deal with man, their topics are cul- tural technologies such as writing, reading, counting, singing, dancing, drawing--30 surprisingly almost the same skills that every free young boy and girl in Lakedaimon or in Athens once displayed. 31 For the humanities, there is nothing nontechnical to teach and research; thus, we can throw Habermas's infamous opposition between communicative and instrumen- tal reason overboard.
2. The so-called sciences and technologies, far from dealing with ahis- torical truth, are involved in history simply by making it. Computer science, for example, as opposed to Greek or modern mathematics, has quite an- other impact. It follows that the cultural contexts of proofs, experiments, and hypotheses are in no way trivial and do require elucidation.
3. To accomplish these two operations, universities--like their base, phi- losophy--have to exorcise each last remnant of their monotheistic, that is, monkish, legacy,32 dating from the Middle Ages. The gods do play at dice, "and the gods made love. "33
? ? ? 27. It could be factually shown that Wilhelm Dilthey in drawing this distinction did little else than to prevent Helmholtz's growing influence on contemporary departments of philosophy and psychology.
28. Although it is deemed unfashionable now, I quote from the first edition: Foucault, Les Mots et les choses: Une Arch ? eologie des sciences humaines (Paris, 1966), p. 398.
29. See Peter Mittelsta ? dt, The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and the Measurement Process (Cambridge, 1998).
30. Berlin's three universities, for practical purposes, have recently allowed at Humboldt University such an interdiscplinary framework. The Helmholtz-Zentrum fu ? r Kulturtechniken includes, among others, mathematicians, computer scientists, literary critics, art historians, and Kulturwissenschaftler (untranslatable as "cultural studies," in the British sense are all-too-biased for popular culture).
31. I can live with the fact that drawing was facultative, but the other skills obligatory. See, for example, Aristotle, Politics, 8. 3. 1338a40-42.
32. See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, ? 44, p. 229: "Die Behauptung 'ewiger Wahrheiten' ebenso wie die Vermengung der pha ? nomenal gegru ? ndeten 'Idea-lita ? t' des Daseins mit einem idealisierten absoluten Subjekt geho ? ren zuden la ?
ngst noch nicht radikal ausgetriebenen Resten von christlicher Theologie innerhalb der philosophischen Problematik. " Whoever cares, then, about deconstruction straddles Athens and Jerusalem.
33. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Electric Ladyland (1968), MCA 11600.
252 Friedrich Kittler / Universities
? ? In order not to remain merely nominal, these reformulations must have institutional consequences. From now on the cultural sciences need com- puter specialists as well as mathematicians on their teaching staffs, and, in- versely, the technical ones need historians of science. Just as Hegel's Geist was only as deep as its explications,34 today's knowledge is only as powerful as its implementations. The future of the university depends on its faculty to unite separated notation systems of alphabets and mathematical symbols into a superset.
All the risks of this future, however, depend upon a correct diagnosis of our present. What has happened to high technology since the end of World War II must be conceptualized as a recursion of much older stories so that universities will be able to reform themselves. Computer technologies are as academically inflected as Europe's scholarly knowledge, but they are also just as commercialized. The universal discrete machine, still the most in- fluential hardware architecture, was the product of a Ph. D. thesis, the draft of a Princeton mathematician, whose elegance led to a brilliant career inside the Pentagon. UNIX, prototype of all modern operating systems and, there- fore, programming language styles, was developed, it is true, by Bell Labs. Its worldwide success, however, came about only after the University of California at Berkeley had heavily modified it,35 after Linus Torvalds, while a young student at Helsinki Technical University, wrote the free LINUX kernel from scratch in 1991, and, finally, after a whole bunch of hackers, internet-basedstudents,andfacultymembershadhelpedTorvaldsinhelp- ing thirty million people. 36 "When we speak of free software, we are refer- ring to freedom, not price. "37
This is no wonder. A Turing machine, just like the medieval student, is a nearly cost-free copying machine, and a perfect one. The internet is a point-to-point transmission system copying almost infallibly not from men to men but, quite to the contrary, from machine to machine. The liberty to connect whole computer farms throughout the world has strong affinities to the old libertas utrique docendi. Thus, the internet, originally a digital
? 34. See G. W. F. Hegel, Pha ? nomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg, 1952), p. 15: "Die Kraft des Geistes ist nur so gross als ihre A ? usserung, seine Tiefe nur so tief, als er in seiner Auslegung sich auszubreiten und sich zu verlieren getraut. " The key word, to my colleagues' knowledge, seems to be getrauen, "to dare. "
35. See Peter H. Salus, A Quarter Century of UNIX (Reading, Mass. , 1994).
36. See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just for FUN: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (New York, 2001).
37. Richard M. Stallman, "The GNU General Public License," Free Software, Free Society: The Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (Boston, 2002), p. 195. Without GNU/LINUX, nonetheless, I could not teach any programming undergraduate course; all my students would have to spend about a thousand dollars just for editors, compilers, software libraries, and debuggers. Under the GNU license, all these are free.
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 253
connection between military commands and the most brilliant U. S. uni- versities, closely resembles the early modern connection between territorial states and academic mail systems (to pass over the structural identity be- tween middle Latin and my own pidgin English. ) In this regard, universities seem better prepared for their alphanumerical future than any other com- peting institution.
Just as Gutenberg's printing press, although it was only meant to mech- anize the calligraphy of medieval scriptoria, brought about the separation of universities and book markets, Californian universities--as well as some others--have seen before their gates or even on their grounds hardware labs or software companies that actually dominate the information market. Once again, knowledge wanders into private sectors--the free entrepre- neurship so dear to George W. Bush that he wages wars in its name. This change, alas, means secrecy, not openness. The secret manifest in com- mercial chip designs, operating systems, and application program interfaces (APIs) lies in the fact that technical documentation--in screaming contrast to all technical history--is not published anymore. By virtue of their in- accessibility alone, blueprints and source codes earn money. The unique possibility of criticizing so-called late capitalism will be its tremendously practical self-critique; the mass price of computer chips, once they have been designed, sinks rapidly to zero.
This is precisely what the software industry doesn't admit. Instead of source codes and application programming interfaces, it publishes a fu- ture's music celebrating systematic closure. One famous firm has two goals: computers shall hide more and more behind the inconspicuous facade of cars or washing machines; users shall be treated more and more like com- puters, that is, as programmable. Thus, some new medieval darkness threat- ens to separate the monkish elite of a few programmers from the billions of laypeople also known as computer illiterates. Countless proprietary so- lutions, patents, trademarks, and copyrights exist for this very purpose, pro- tected as they are by America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Pentagon, as if to mock four thousand years of mathematics since Babylon or Baghdad, seeks to classify prime number algorithms and others for the sake of the NSA. Patenting or making knowledge secret, however, not only hinders insight and discovery. It threatens sheer survival, and not merely inside computer-directed airbuses or stealth bombers. Aerodynamically unstable airplanes would instantly fall from heaven if their computer sys- tems crashed.
In actual technical systems, errors and failures cannot be ascribed any- more to persons. Therefore, independent control has become just as nec- essary as it is rare. Because the sheer complexity of actual hardware and
? ? 254 Friedrich Kittler / Universities
? ? software excludes infallibility, proprietary solutions prevent even debug- ging. Actual knowledge needs places to produce, store, and transmit itself independently of any company. What better places are there than univer- sities? This applies just as much to digitally processed data as to the digi- talized data of history. In the first case, the plans of enormous scientific publishing houses to monopolize academic journals are probably doomed to failure because Ph. D. advisers, getting at the data much earlier, can pub- lish them digitally. The same holds true for free source code. In the more trivial case of formerly analog data, sounds, and images, their future seems to be up to the gods. Whether or not arts and treasures of bygone cultures can be saved from private digital rights does not seem of primary concern. Whereas in Gutenberg's time the university had to renounce its storage mo- nopoly, its leading role in processing and transmitting now remains as cru- cial as ever. In this climate of academic freedom, ever-new codes and chips have to be developed in order to climb from the all too low level of zeroes and ones to higher levels of filtering and processing digital data streams. Just as in the past neither books nor libraries proved usable without meta- levels of knowledge, now neither algorithms nor databases can do without Wissenswissenschaften ("knowledge of knowledges," histoire des syst`emes de pens ? ee).
If envious states succeed in persuading the university in general and cul- tural studies in particular to think of themselves as a mere compensation and a mere assessment of the consequences of technology, then eight cen- turies from Bologna to Stanford will have passed in vain. The sciences are too good merely to avert attention from what science does.
4. Envoi
However (and forever), "science does not think. "38 To make it possible that tomorrow's universities will still work, may a deeply recursive grate- fulness, throughout our daily labors, stay in our minds and hearts: To all the Minoans and Achaeans, who, fucking, founded Europe long ago; to all the scholars who freed her from the one God--Hebrew, Christian, or Mus- lim. 39 This is what Heidegger's Seinsgeschichte tells us to do. Computers may
? 38. "Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht" (Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? [Tu ? bingen, 1961], p. 4).
39. See Pope Gregor IX, Epistulae saeculi XIII e regestis pontificum Romanorum selectae per G. H. Pertz, ed. Carolus Rodenberg, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1883), 1:653:
Sed quia minus bene ab aliquibus credi posset, quod se verbis non illaquaeverit oris sui, probationis in fidei victoriam sunt parate, quod isto rex pestilenti[a]e [Frederick II. ] a tribus barratoribus, ut eius verbis utamur, scilicet Christo Iesu, Moyse et Machometo, totum mundum fuisse deceptum, et duobus eorum in gloria mortuis, ipsum Iesum in ligno suspensum manifeste proponens, insuper dilucida voce affirmare vel potius mentiri presumpsit, quod omnes illi sunt fatui, qui credunt nasci de virgine Deum, qui creavit naturam et omnia, potuisse; hanc heresim illo errore confirmans, quod nullus nasci potuit,
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 255
? ? be copying machines, but, thanks to Aphrodite, we are not. 40 The way from her to now and back must always be gone over again.
Zukunft der Wissenschaft. - . . . Deshalb muss eine ho ? here Kultur dem Menschen ein Doppelgehirn, gleichsam zwei Hirnkammern geben, ein- mal um Wissenschaft, sodann um Nicht-Wissenschaft zu empfinden: nebeneinanderliegend, ohne Verwirrung, trennbar, abschliessbar; es ist dies eine Forderung der Gesundheit. Im einen Bereiche liegt die Kraft- quelle, im anderen der Regulator: mit Illusionen, Einseitigkeiten, Leidenschaften muss geheizt werden, mit Hilfe der erkennenden Wis- senschaft muss den bo ? sartigen und gefa ? hrlichen Folgen einer U ? berhei- zung vorgebeugt werden. 41
--Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Future of Science"
? ? ? ? ? cuius conceptum viri et mulieris coniunctio non precessit, quod omnes illa sunt fatui, qui credunt nasci de virgine Deum, qui creavit naturam et omnia, potuisse; hanc heresim illo errore confirmans, quod nullus nasci potuit, cuius conceptum viri et mulieres coniunctio non precessit, et homo nichildebet aliud credere, nisi quod potest vi et ratione natur[a]e probare.
Up to us to teach.
40. One of our earliest Greek vase inscriptions, written circa 730 bce on far West Ischia
(Pithakousai) and alluding both to the Iliad and the Odyssey has to say and sing:
Nestor's cup I am good to drink from
He who drinks from this cup on the spot Desire takes him of sweet-garlanded Aphrodite.
Compare Ernst Risch, "Zum Nestorbecher aus Ischia," ZPE 70 (1987): 1-9.
41. Nietzsche, Menschliches Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch fu ? r freie Geister (Stuttgart, 1978), pp. 205-6, ? 251. We scholars are a feedback loop in recursive action. Nietzsche's "Regulator" clearly
evokes James Clerk Maxwell's mathematical theory of "governors" or negative feedback loops, "Kraftquelle," James Watt's first untamed vapor energy.