Mediatization, polarization, and intolerance (between environments, media, and circulation)

Lucrécia D´Alessio Ferrara 270 3. There is no software Friedrich Kittler is pointed out by Gumbrecht (2017), not only as an early scholar of the media, resulting from the cur- rent technique and their genealogy that goes back to the Greek rhetoric, but above all, as an author who sensed the importance that the technique would have in the not-too-distant future of the date of his premature death on October 18, 2011. In “There is no software” published for the first time in 1993, we can find, from the first paragraphs, the basis of this feeling: The East can go ahead and explode. All that mat- ters is what happens in the Western world at the present moment: first and foremost, the implosion of high technologies – and as a result, the implo- sion of a set of signifiers […] that otherwise would still be called ‘World Spirit’ [Weltgeist]. Without computing technology, there would be no decon- struction, Derrida declared in Siegen. Writings and texts no longer exist in perceptible times and spac- es, but rather in the transistor cells of computers. (KITTLER, 2017, p. 373-374) Observing the analogy between Western non-isolative writing and the technologic nature of software, Kittler notes, with the wit of a curious, however suspicious, student of his findings, that software does not exist compared to the complex program- ming of hardware that performs programmed actions and, as a consequence, discrete and unmanipulable, though calculable, as Turing had observed in proposing his machinic invention: This postmodern Tower of Babel reaches from simple operation codes whose linguistic extension is still a hardware configuration, passing through an assembler whose extension is this very opcode, up to high-level programming languages whose extension is that very assembler. […] Formula- tion in Hilbert’s sense does away with theory it- self, insofar as ‘the theory is no longer a system of meaningful propositions, but one of sentences as