There are "Sonderwege"
in all humanities and media studies outside
globalized Anglophone academia. Germany is by far not the only country
where publishing in English and participation in international
English-language academic discourses is not a priority. There is just as
much a "Sonderweg" in France and Italy. Take Bernard Stiegler, for
example, an influential contemporary media theoretician in France, but
much less known elsewhere (and not unlikely to be mixed up with either
Bernd Stiegler or Bernhard Siegert in Germany).
Existiert in
Deutschland eine besondere Medientheorieproduktion, die es so in anderen Ländern
nicht gibt? Wenn ja, warum?
The crucial difference lies in the concept of
"media". In Anglophone and
international media studies, "media" mostly stands for contemporary
mass
media, with traditional media studies covering news media, radio and
television and "new media" researching computing and the Internet.
McLuhan is no exception. Although he defines media as synonymous with
any technology in the first chapter of "Understanding Media", he
swiftly
retreats to modern mass communication media in the second.
In the last decade, German humanities have developed a broad, general
and transhistorical notion of media as "mediality"
("Medialität") in
which any material or imaginary carrier of information qualifies as a
medium, from CPUs to angels. The notion of "medium" has thus replaced
and superseded the older semiotic-structuralist term of the "sign".
"Medium" became a key concept in the reorganization of German
humanities
into "Kulturwissenschaft" since, with its help, one could create
common
terminological ground within the various disciplines of the humanities.
If, for example, "memory" is considered as a medium in this sense of
"mediality", then a film scholar, a literary scholar, an art
historian,
an anthropologist, a historian of science and a philosopher can have a
joint colloquium and publish their individual papers and case studies in
a "Sammelband" on memory. "Kulturwissenschaft" thus should
not be mixed
up with Anglo-American "cultural studies". In the German context, it
means cross-disciplinary humanities study of the arts and history of
knowledge.
Ironically or not, the "cultural studies" of the Birmingham School
were
a straightforward adaption of the 1970s post-Frankfurt School German
"Kultursoziologie". When "Kulturwissenschaft" was
relaunched in the
1990s, it was to a considerable degree a post-fall-of-the-wall,
postmodernism-influenced rejection of Marxist Kultursoziologie (yet
first institutionalized by West German scholars in the formerly Marxist
GDR department of Kulturwissenschaft of the Humboldt Universität
Berlin), modeled after the early 20th century artistically conservative
"Kulturwissenschaft" of the Warburg school. Erwin Panofsky's, Raymond
Klibansky's and Fritz Saxl's 1964 study "Saturn und Melancholie",
summing up much of the Warburg school research that began in the 1920s,
could be considered a model book for contemporary Kulturwissenschaft.
Or, to put it into Anglo-American terms: the books of Anthony Grafton are
Kulturwissenschaft while those of the Birmingham School are not, or at
least never really made it into the German university humanities.
Instead, they became canonical in the contemporary art and pop cultural
scenes around magazines like "Texte zur Kunst" and "Spex",
and in art
schools. Correspondingly, the German equivalent of English-language "new
media studies" has mostly been written by people employed in the media
arts sector rather than in universities. To some degree, this also has
to do with the rather reclusive if not monastic institutional structure
of German universities in comparison to Northern America and Anglophone
European academia, with less flexible career paths and a much higher
institutional in-group dependency for people seeking faculty employment.
But this is, again, no "Sonderweg", but a very similar situation to
the
one in France, Italy and Spain.
- With its historical-philological approach, German Medialitätsforschung
however has little if anything to say about contemporary media and
their culture. The lack of perceived German humanities
research on the Internet and Internet culture is not simply an issue of
missing English translations. Much if not most of German research on the
World Wide Web, for example, followed the 1990s US academic hypertext
and hypermedia studies fad, and folded quickly after. Another brief
exception, still before the real breakthrough of the Internet, occurred
in the early 1990s when Friedrich Kittler and his students wrote
discourse analyzes of, among others, Intel chips and Microsoft operating
systems. This research differed from international new media and
cultural studies though since it didn't study the chips and the
software as products of a particular economy and culture, but on the
contrary as cultural a priori.
Winthrop-Young hat zur
Frage, was das spezifisch Deutsche an der Medienwissenschaft sei, in der
Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften (Nr. 2/2008, S. 113ff.) Vorschläge gemacht
(siehe http://medienumbrueche.uni-siegen.de/groups/medienwissenschaften/weblog/fe17f/attachments/ed237/Zeitschrift%20f%C3%BCr%20Kulturwissenschaften%202-2008-2.pdf):
- „Wo es den cultural studies primär auf Differenzerfahrungen ankommt,
registriert die deutsche Medientheorie in erster Linie
Homogenisierungsbestrebungen oder gar -zwänge; und wo die cultural studies
verstärkt auf Selbstbehauptung der Medienbenutzer setzen, weisen vor allem
die neueren deutschen medientheoretischen Ansätze auf eine
Verselbständigung der Medien, mitunter sogar auf eine an Innis gemahnende
Autonomie der Medienentwicklung.“ (S. 122)
The historical roots lie less in Innis than in Heidegger's
philosophy of
technology which itself was influenced by the F.W. Jünger's conservative
cultural critique of technology from the 1930s and 40s. Via French
post-structuralism (with its fair share of being influenced by
cybernetics) and the Kittler school, Heidegger was reimported into the
German humanities. More often than not, this occurred under the hood,
since scholars rather referred to French poststructuralism and Kittler
than to Heidegger himself. But for sure, Jünger and Heidegger built
foundation of the "mediales a priori", the idea that technology is an
ontological fact rather than a social construction, and as second nature
defines the condition of culture (instead of culture, economics,
politics and other discourses defining the development and deployment of
technology).
- Es handele sich um eine einmalige Verbindung
von Medientheorie und Mediengeschichte, eine Praxis des mikrologischen
Spurenlesens, die mit Friedrich Kittler einsetzt.
It could be argued that this practice began much earlier in
the German
and continental humanities. "Saturn and Melancholie" could be cited
yet
another time.
- „Das eigentümliche Profil der deutschen
Szene liegt weniger auf der Ebene halbwegs kompatibler Theorien mittlerer
Reichweite als auf derjenigen inkompatibler Supertheorien“ (S. 118). Aber
ist nicht eine Ermattung gerade dieser „Supertheorien“ spürbar?
They're for sure a legacy of the 19th century, of Hegel and
Marx. Any
theory that argued with such "super theories" was easily seduced into
becoming yet another super theory. (Luhmann would be another such
example, a scholar who continues to be tremendously influential in the
German humanities but is hardly known outside and whose basic concept,
such as the one of society as an operationally closed system, hardly
make sense in socially more diversified countries such as the USA.)
- Nährboden für die Beförderung der
Medien zum Paradigma der Welterklärung ist in Deutschland (wie auch in Kanada),
dass historisch betrachtet Medien schon immer zur Nationenbildung
beitrugen (und nicht, wie in anderen Ländern, politische Strukturen,
Handels- und Verkehrsgebilde).
This is an interesting thought. It is certainly true as an
explanation
why, since the 19th century, the humanities have such a comparatively
high rank and reputation in Germany. Philologists and cultural
researchers like the Grimm brothers were instrumental in creating the
idea of Germany and one German language after all, and, before them,
theologians and linguists like Luther and Schottelius. Heidegger, of
course, is part of that history despite his rejection of idealism.
- Ist somit der neuere medientheoretische
Fokus auf Logistikprozesse lediglich eine Folge des nun auch in der
Medienwissenschaft angekommenen Endes des deutschen Sonderwegs? Rührt die
Produktivität der deutschsprachigen Medienwissenschaften also letztlich
nur daher, „dass sie erst spät an die Medien geraten sind, als die
fraglichen Theorien in anderen Bereichen bereits herangereift waren“? (S.
151f.).
I doubt that because the criticism of what first was called
reproduction
technology and cultural industry, later media, had early and strong
voices in the German and exiled-German humanities, from Benjamin,
Adorno/Horkheimer, Kracauer to Enzensberger and Weizenbaum. It is this
strand of German media theory that continues to be internationally
recognized and influential at least in the proper discipline of media
studies. The "New Media Reader", for example, contains texts by
Enzensberger and Weizenbaum but not any other German-born media critic.
If there's a "Sonderweg", then it began with Heidegger and perhaps
with
a German academic understanding of poststructuralism and postmodernism
that put them, unlike in England and the U.S., squarely in opposition to
"kritische Theorie".
An important pragmatic factor was the deterioration of German
universities since the 1970s, the inner resentment even of progressive
scholars against the mostly vulgar-leftist "Autonomen" mobs that took
over the campuses, and the dead-ends of a formulaic academic
sociological Marxism after the 1970s. Again, this is a strong
historical parallel to Italy and France. To German academia, the wave of
Anglo-American cultural materialism and cultural studies that began in
the 1990s appeared as the zombie return of its own 1970s nightmares, and
was consequently diverted to off-campus subcultures. What's more, media
theory had to prove, after its somewhat dubious McLuhan and Baudrillard
past, that it was a serious "high theory" player in the humanities,
and
therefore sought to disengage itself both from empirical and
contemporary arts-oriented strands of media studies.
Trifft McLuhans Diagnose vom medienkulturellen Sonderfall
Deutschland zu? Ist die deutsche Medienwissenschaft Ergebnis eines
typographisch verspäteten Deutschlands in deren Folge eine Privilegierung der
Rationalität und des Unanschaulichen statt fand? Haben die Deutschen
Niederlagen uns „aus der Besessenheit von visuellen Vorstellungen losgerissen
und in ein Brüten über das resonante ‚Afrika in uns‘ zurückversetzt“ (McLuhan:
Die magischen Kanäle, Düsseldorf 1968, S. 290)? Ist Hitler ein Effekt und
Nutznießer eines spezifisch deutschen Medienumbruchs, wie McLuhan behauptet?
Wurde Deutschland also nur deshalb funktechnisch überwältigt, weil es im
Gegensatz zu den angelsächsischen Ländern noch halb im Mittelalter steckte?
I dare to consider this, just as a lot of what McLuhan
wrote, utter
nonsense.
Gibt es historische
Gründe für den deutschen „Medienapriorismus“?
That, on the other hand, for sure. Media were central to
German cultural
criticism because of their propaganda function in the different regimes
and states of emergency in the 20th century: Kaiserreich, Weimarer
Republik, Third Reich, East German communism, "Deutscher Herbst",
fall
of the wall. It became a crucial question how people could have been
seduced into complicity with regimes. A popular yet perhaps too obvious
conclusion was to consider media as an anonymous, all-powerful
propaganda machinery, with its own embedded agenda overpowering
individual agency. We see the recurrence of this thought pattern when,
for example, German society blames computer games for its domestic high
school massacres. (To my knowledge, Germany is the only country where
such debates exist.) The great risk of this idea of course is that it
exculpates individuals and denies their responsibility.
Ist das Profil der
deutschen Medientheorie der akademische Niederschlag kollektiver
Medienerfahrungen der letzten gut zwei Jahrhunderte (angefangen von der
Napoleonischen Epoche über den Einbruch der Technik in der Gründerzeit, die
technisch fabrizierten Massenabschlachtungen des 1. Weltkriegs, den Einbruch
der amerikanischen Massenmedien in der Weimarer Republik bis zum Medienpopanz
der Nazis)?
The above is an attempt of explanation.
Wenn die spezifisch
deutsche oder auch kanadische Medientheorieproduktion letztlich das Ergebnis
nationaler Medienerfahrungen darstellt (S. 117), ist dann die Beobachtung, dass
in der deutschen Medientheorie über ideologische Gräben hinweg Medien als etwas
Vorgängiges, Bestimmtes, Determiniertes erscheinen (S. 121), eine Folge der
ökonomisch relativ autonomen Medienentwicklungen (wie die des öffentlich-rechtlichen
Fernsehens)?
The same autonomous media conglomerates and constructions
exist in
France and Italy, for example. Even the BBC in the UK is under more
direct state control than German public broadcasting. In France, most
newspapers are subsidized by the state. It's true though that public
broadcasting has an exceptional role in the German media landscape
because it exerts a factual monopoly of domestic audiovisual media
production (to the extent of, for example, co-producing most of most
German films).
Muss man das Deutsche
an der Medienwissenschaft überhaupt historisch erklären? (z.B. die
medientheoretische Zersplitterung als Folge deutscher Raubrittermentalität)
I can't help laughing here.
Kann man mit Karl
Ludwig Pfeiffer (S. 141f.) auch formulieren, „dass man hierzulande
medientheoretisch/-wissenschaftlich zu viel macht, weil man früher zu wenig
(das heißt zu viel an dem vor allem auch in Literatur rumorenden Geist) gemacht
hat“? Haben wir es also mit einem „extremen Slalom zwischen
Technikvergessenheit und Technikbesessenheit“ zu tun?
All these questions fall into the trap of looking for
idealist
"geistesgeschichtliche" answers to a phenomenon that could be
explained in much more sober and pragmatic materialist terms. Media
studies are, in most parts of the world, not autonomous at all, but
intrinsically linked to domestic media industries. More often than not,
they work as their research and development arms, being dependent on
them both for research funding and employment of their graduates. It
is, for example, no coincidence that American new media and software
studies are concentrated in California.
Germany neither has a globally operating audiovisual media industry, nor
major players in the computer games and Internet economy. With
Bertelsmann, Holtzbrinck and Springer Heidelberg, it however has three
genuine global players in book publishing and print media. There is,
consequently, a market for graduates to work as readers and editors for
publishing houses, and a (small but sizable) economic base for people
trained in literary studies and other traditional, book-centric
humanities. Graduates of a hypothetical German Computer Game Studies
studies department, on the other hand, would have a hard time finding
employment in the country.
Bedeutet global
betrachtet German Media Studies in erster Linie Kittler?
Globally seen, German Media Studies firstly means Walter
Benjamin and
Adorno/Horkheimer, Kittler only to a much lesser extent. Here I'm taking
the knowledge of my own students, who come from all over the world, as
empirical evidence. The rule of thumb is that German humanities and
media studies internationally only exist to the degree they are being
cited and referred to in contemporary Anglophone academia.
Ist die Kittler-Schule
nicht ohne Grund allein schon deshalb als stellvertretend für die gesamte
deutsche Medienwissenschaft darzustellen (S. 150), weil geographisch,
ökonomisch und politische Rahmenbedingungen in Deutschland mehr als in anderen
Ländern den Anstoß dafür gaben, die „Fragen nach der Entstehung und dem
Fortbestand von Geist und Gesellschaft primär auf medientechnische Dimensionen
zu beziehen“ (S. 149)? Oder ist dies lediglich eine US-amerikanische Lesart? Muss
man nicht vielmehr konstatieren, dass gerade angesichts des
medienwissenschaftlichen Pluralismus Deutschland ein Ort ist, an dem
medientheoretisch etwas passiert, was anderswo nicht stattfindet?
This supposed pluralism is somewhat deceptive if not a
chimera since
the concept of "media" used in German humanities differs from that in
the
English-speaking world. From an international perspective, German media
studies would mostly be seen as media archeology, or the historical
study of culture and technology.
Handelt es sich bei
der Medienwissenschaft um eine besondere Art von Medien-Panik deutscher
Wissenschaftler oder schlicht um Selbstüberschätzung?
There is a media panic - to the extent of a self-imposed
pressure to
reflect "mediality" in Kulturwissenschaft. A lot of it has to do with
the central research funding structure of German academia, typically
through the DFG, and the peer pressure to reuse particular buzzwords and
refer to a perceived academic community discourse in order to get
funding applications through. Since the 1990s, most of German humanities
research - and most employment for Ph.D. researchers and junior faculty
- has been financed via DFG project grants. This results in a situation
where buzzwords, such as the fairly recent "intermediality"
("Intermedialität"), spread fast while their actual understanding and
application in individual research may greatly vary.
There is, in other words, not so much pressure towards homogenization
("Homogenisierungsbestrebungen oder gar -zwaenge") within the German
media landscape respectively their perception in German media research.
Rather, homogenization pressure applies to the German humanities
themselves as a result of their funding structure and institutional
politics. There is a linguistic reason for that, implied in the
translation of "media studies" into "Medienwissenschaft".
Unlike in
Anglophone academia, the German humanities are considered producers of
research knowledge rather than just academic criticism. Their research
therefore is subject to the same institutional and organizational
structures and benchmarks as scientific research: In order to obtain a
DFG grant, humanities projects have to gather research groups just like
in physics or chemistry, and produce theoretical conclusions as
products. The solution to this problem typically is to find a shared
subject term for a group of projects, leave individual scholars relative
freedom of pursuing it in their own ways, and conclude with a
cross-disciplinary discussions of the meanings, histories and
interpretations of the subject matter.
The pressure towards terminological homogenization is most obvious is
the different "turns" and "paradigms" proclaimed in the
German
humanities (such as the "performative turn" and "iconic
turn").
Hat sich das frühere
Sendungsbewusstsein der Germanisten auf die Medienwissenschaft übertragen?
That for sure is an international phenomenon. Since McLuhan,
all
prominent media theorists have played the prophecy and celebrity game.
Besteht vielleicht
sogar ein Zusammenhang von medientheoretischem Anspruchsdenken und dem
Dotcom-Boom der 1990er Jahre (worauf Hartmut Winkler in seiner Diskursökonomie
hingewiesen hat)? Wenn, wie Winthrop-Young (http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/22/22564/1.html)
behauptet, in den 1990ern jeder eine Medientheorie gründen und alle möglichen
Probleme lösen konnte –ähnlich wie man Internetfirma
gründen und über Nacht zum Millionär werden konnte –, ist dann mit der Finanz-
und Medienkrise auch das Ende der Medienwissenschaft vorprogrammiert?
In fact, it already happened. The "threat" that
the Internet manifested
in the 1990s was to take over and obsolete all existing communication
and publishing media. It would have consequently obsoleted or redefined
all disciplines of the humanities: If books were to vanish, then all
future literary scholars would need to be Internet scholars, and so on.
Media studies was thus the NASDAQ, or "new economy", rising up as the
fresh, promising competition to the blue chips of the established
humanities. This has been, after all, a recurrent pattern in the
rhetoric of media theoreticians from McLuhan via Baudrillard to Kittler.
While McLuhan and Baudrillard, and thus media theory as a whole, had
already been written off as a once-fashionable fad by the 1990s, the
Internet made the field come back with a vengeance.
When the "new economy" crash-landed ten years later, it was the
end of the idea, and panic, that the Internet and media studies would
obsolete the older media and humanities. Media studies consequently
morphed into "mediality research" and history of science and
technology
within the Kulturwissenschaften while it continued as cultural studies
of computing and the Internet wherever the hopes for, or reality of, a
dotcom industry continued to exist. In this whole period, only a handful
of humanities scholars have been appointed media studies professors in
Germany, and most existing media studies departments continue to be
focused on journalism, film and television studies.
Focused research of Internet culture does not exist anywhere on a
professorial level except maybe in social-empirical media studies
("Publizistik"). The most blatant evidence is the recent
"Heidelberger
Manifest" against Google and Open Access publishing about which the
newspaper Die Zeit correctly remarked that most of the people who signed
it were unlikely to have properly understood what they really had
signed. Sadly enough, the list of signers is a Who's Who of the German
humanities. The German literature professor Gerhard Lauer, an advocate
of Open Access publishing, blamed media theory for this backlash of
ignorance: "Der Misserfolg der Medientheorie, die geglaubt hat, mit der
Exegese von ein paar Aufsätzen Walter Benjamins und der Wiederholung
einiger ungedeckter Thesen Michel Foucaults schon etwas Tragfähiges zu
den gegenwärtigen medialen Transformationen zu sagen, hat etwa auf der
Seite der Geisteswissenschaften dazu beigetragen, dass ihr zu ihren
eigenen realen Arbeitsumwelten nicht viel einfällt."
http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=12963&ausgabe=200904
Was hat deutsche
Medienwissenschaft mit der Dominanz der Massenmedien zu tun? Bedeutet das Ende
der Massenmedien auch notwendigerweise eine Auflösung der Medienwissenschaft in
Richtung Software Studies und Techniksoziologie?
Most probably, "Medienwissenschaft" will be
resurrected some day under a
different name and with different theory references, just like its
historical precursors Informationsästhetik, Semiotik and
Kommunikationswissenschaft.
Ist die deutsche
Medientheorie-Produktion wirklich auf der Höhe der Zeit und steckt sie lediglich
sozial im tiefsten Mittelalter, für die die „verkrachte Kabale
konkurrenzbewusster Landes- und Geistesfürsten“ (Friedrich Balke, S. 131) ein
Beleg sein könnte? Oder hat sich dieser Spagat nicht längst nivelliert? Sind
wir nicht theoretisch und sozial noch nicht im 21. Jahrhundert angekommen?
The focus on a professorial discourse certainly doesn't
help. In
contrast, Anglo-American new media studies have been largely shaped by
academics working below the tenured professor level.
Wie steht es um das Schisma
Medienwissenschaft vs. Kommunikationswissenschaft global gesehen? Ist das
Erfolgsgeheimnis vielleicht, dass die deutsche Medientheorie als die
institutionalisierte Dekonstruktion ihres Hauptbegriffs erscheint, weshalb eine
flächendeckende Virulenz der Medien behauptet werden kann? (S. 121, 142)
In the German humanities, "media" are less a
subject of research, but a
research "paradigm" in a sense somewhat figuratively adapted from
Thomas
Kuhn. In other words, media are not considered a real-life phenomenon
to be critically observed and analyzed (following a more or less
empirical research method). Rather, the concept of "media" is seen as
a
theoretical dispositive by itself that allows to put already known
artistic and discursive phenomena - from medieval literature to 19th
century anatomical research - into a new research perspective. In that
respect, "media" has a conceptual and unifying function for
Medialitätsforschung that is equivalent to the notion of "culture" in
British-American cultural materialism and cultural studies.
As such, "media" has substituted the 19th century notion of
"Geist" -
whereas the notion of "culture" continues to be indebted to Hegel and
Marx in its emphasis of human agency and social construction. The
German turn from Geistesgeschichte to Mediengeschichte follows the
earlier German philosophical turn from metaphysics to ontology, i.e.
from Hegel to Heidegger. But what Derrida already observed in the late
1960s, namely that the destruction of metaphysics by its substitution
with something else merely continues metaphysics, is true here as well:
One grand, abstract historical narrative has been replaced with yet
another grand historical narrative that is fairly detached from the
common sense understanding of media and, as such, can comfortably avoid
to engage with their concrete social, economic, artistic [...] issues
and practices.
This all is, truth to be told, much harder to recognize when you're
inside the system. Although I already had my gripes with it when I lived
and worked in German academia, I fell into its idealist traps, too, for
example whenever I was bashing the notion of media for its blurriness
and theoretical inconsistence. Getting outside that system is healthy,
and puts things into perspective.
-F
--
Florian Cramer, Lector
Master Media Design: Networked Media
Research programme Communication in a Digital Age
Piet Zwart Institute
Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam
T +31 (0)10 7947402
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdma
