In 1984, he earned his Habilitation at the University of Freiburg, in the field of Modern German Literary History, by the habilitationsschrift Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 [translated as Discourse Networks 1800/1900].

[4] From 1986 to 1990, he headed the DFG's Literature and Media Analysis project in Kassel and in 1987 he was appointed Professor of Modern German Studies at the Ruhr University.

Kittler was a member of the Hermann von Helmholtz Centre for Culture and the research group Bild Schrift Zahl ("Picture Writing Number") (DFG).

[6] During the late years in Humbolt, he had an entourage of artists and intellectuals, who self-styled as the Kittlerjugend as a provocative joke on the Hitlerjugend.

Among Kittler's theses was his tendency to argue, with a mixture of polemicism, apocalypticism, erudition, and humor, that technological conditions were closely bound up with epistemology and ontology itself.

He expected to write 8 books on this, starting from ancient Greek and ending with Turing machines, but only 2 were finished before his death.

[10] He aimed to provide a foundation to European culture based on ancient Greek, regarding his previous works, which described "man" as a cybernetic data processing system, as correct but too bleak.

[13] He was against leftist politics, and during the 1968 protests, stayed at home listening to The Beatles and Pink Floyd out of "50% laziness and 50% conservatism".

[18] In his later years, he attempted to found European culture upon ancient Greek, music, and love thus his last books titled Musik und Mathematik: Aphrodite and Eros.

[23] Kittler uses this word to mean that literature analysis would be taken on the material level, where instead of reading a book, it is manipulated as a codex of inked papers.

[24] Goethe's Faust (1808) was analyzed in Discourse Networks as a record of how the "republic of scholars" was becoming subsumed by a printed media culture.

Faust's laments about scholarship was a metaphor for the previous republic of scholars that degenerated into endless commentary, "which simply heaves words around".

Faust's rejection was a metaphor for Romanticism, which elevates original genius from true feelings inside each individual.

In the Romanticism discourse network, text is used as sound, and reading is controlled auditory hallucination, thus the focus on poetry.

Modernism rose in opposition to Romanticism, where the bare syllables and sound are foregrounded, while meaningless compositions are not shunned, but experimented with.

[26] By adopting the French post-structuralists' theory, he was working in opposition to hermeneutics and phenomenology then-prevalent in German humanities.

[27] (forward [28]) As a research program against hermeneutic interpretation of text, he used Lacan and Foucault to bypass questions of subjectivity and self-reflection.

[24] He offered a genealogical critique of hermeneutics, that, instead of being about eternal truths, would become just a way of using text depending on 1800s technology, and would become obsolete.

According to Kittler, a discourse network is the collection of "technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data".

During 1800s Europe, universal literacy and a single alphabetical writing system led to the illusion of authors, such as Goethe.

(page xi [22]) He described methods to apply literary criticism to laboratories, factories, mathematics, circuit boards, or any other information systems.

The Imaginary, sustaining the illusion of a unified, coherent subject, corresponds to film that creates illusionary continuity from still images.

The Real corresponds to the phonograph, which stored not only words but also the raw, unfiltered noise that cannot be incorporated into any symbolic system.

The last historic act of writing may thus have been in the late seventies when a team of Intel engineers [plotted] the hardware architecture of their first integrated microprocessor.

We have some fundamental heroes in Germany, really outstanding people on the level of Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, Bataille … Among these are Bazon Brock, Friedrich Kittler, Sloterdijk, Bredekamp, or Hans Belting.

Examples included a maze-solving algorithm based on Shannon's Thesius robot mouse, a Markov chain text generator (worked particularly well at imitating Heidegger), and a digital card index system inspired by Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten.