Armin Medosch on Sat, 2 May 2009 15:13:48 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Debating German Media Theory in Siegen |
I am not sure if the world really needs 'German' media theory right now. First of all the term 'German media theory' does indeed suggest a focus on the German nation, whilest leaving out or forcibly connecting to it (Anschluss) other works in the German language by authors from Switzerland and Austria, or Czech/Brasil as in the case of Flusser. That what indeed could count as a 'German' media theory is, as Stefan Heidenreich said, the socalled Kittler school. I am not inclinced to go into any in depth discussion here of this work but would just like to note two tendencies in passing. First, even the translator of the English edition of Grammophone, Film, Typewriter, is quite critical of Kittler and calls him a 'reactionary postmodernist' - and that would be a quite good description of that strand of german media theory. And, second, why I say that can be illustrated by the following example: In 1995 when Ars Electronica dedicated itself to the newly opened up web, Kittler contributed a short statement to the catalogue which said that artists/theorists who hoped that the net had an emancipatory dimension were wrong, because the net had been invented by the military and therefore its core was all about encryption and secrecy. This wild thesis has been thouroughly disproven by empiricism, it has been shown to be wrong, and theorists need to be held to account for the validity of their theories. so why would the world need more of that? More funny is of course the question, how german is 'grammophone, film ...' as it mostly seems to rely on mcLuhan, Focault and Lacan for its theoretic foundations. I think Florian Cramer is right to point out the importance of the big Benjamin revival that has been going on for years and years in anglophone acadmeic discourse. Because of his untimely death Benjamin could not develop a followership or school in the immedeate postwar years in germany, and that maybe explains Stefan's reluctance to see Benjamin's as a 'german' theory of media, but the relevancy of his work is unbroken, as it is one of the few things you have to work with if you are not falling for the negative cultural pessimist assumptions behind so much of media theory or media studies. So maybe German media theory suffers from a diminished influence of the Benjamin, Brecht, Enzensberger line of thought, while French poststructuralists have brought back Heidegger and with that more 'reactionary postmodernism'. Thus, to conclude on the notion if there is such a thing as german media theory, this would either have to be Kittler school, or such a loose and wide definition that it does not make sense to throw those things together at all, as Stefans aid. Take for instance Frank Hartmann's work. One of his best books and I think the last media philosophical one (as subsequently he also turned to history of media) is Mediology, which is, to say it in most abbreviated form, a reading together of Regis Debray and Vilem Flusser. This book is, I agree with Geert, one of many that deserves to be translated and it is true that in all likelihood publishers wont do it themselves. Yet this counts also true for Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and other theories of media. The anglophone world is indeed notoriously translation lazy and at the same time quite hegemonic considering the position of its universities and publishing houses, so there could be a 'project' there. Last not least I am a bit concerned about the notion of capital letters Media Theory. That leaves out a lot of work by artists who deal with media and who also write, yet in a less theoretic style. What would come to my mind in this regard is for instance the work of Valie Export or other feminist artists such as Cornelia Sollfrank, work that says maybe more about the media condition than the big white males/whales such as Kittler, Luhmann, Flusser etc. best armin -- thenextlayer software, art, politics http://www.thenextlayer.org # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org