Geert Lovink on Sun, 19 Jan 97 10:34 MET |
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nettime: interview with Hartmut Winkler |
From: "Hartmut Winkler, Frankfurt" <winkler@tfm.uni-frankfurt.de> The Computer: Medium or Calculating Machine? Geert Lovink meets Hartmut Winkler This is a 25%-excerpt of an E-mail discussion which took place in April 1996 and was first published in the online magazin Telepolis, Munich, Germany (http://www.heise.de/tp/co/2038/fhome.htm). G.L.: Hartmut, I first want to introduce you: the media scientist Hartmut Winkler who lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany, just presented a comprehensive critique of the current German media theories. 'Docuverse' is the title of his Habilitation work (in the German academic system the hab. follows the PhD); the manuscript of 420 pp. is subtitled 'On the Media Theory of the Computers'. The book is forthcoming in February 1997 (Boer Verlag, Munich). The background of the text is the Internet and the contemporary transformations in the media landscape shiftig from the image-dominated media to the computers, and Winkler asks about the social motives causing this change. The book focuses on the concept of 'wishes', the "reconstruction of the underlying wishes to which the data universe is the answer". The title 'Docuverse' is borrowed from Ted Nelson and as a term is relevant to Winkler because it forces to think of the data universe as a textbased, socio-technical implementation complex. The term also allows to criticize this idea as a fiction of theory. [...] Hartmut, can you briefly outline what 'Docuverse' is about. H.W.: Drafting the book two of my interests came together: first, the anger about the huge computer-as-medium hype which emerged with the internet and about the fashionable, precipitate character of the debate. Second, writing the book was a chance to recycle my past as a programmer. It was a challenge to confront the computer with certain theories developed in the field of classical media. Then I wanted to see what happened to those categories everybody used to use. The issue yet completely lacking in the debate and worth thinking about is the theory of language. The WWW is exploding as a medium of written texts and nobody thinks about why the media history leaves the technical images (photography, film, television) behind, after a century of unquestioned supremacy, in order to return, as it seems, to writing and language. In the current debate, however, the 'end of the Gutenberg galaxy' is announced which -if at all- happened already around 1900. G.L.: Your critique of media theory is aimed predominantly at a certain group of authors who have published a lot since the end of the eighties. On the one hand, the 'Kassel School' including Kittler, Bolz, Tholen and others, and, on the other hand, the circle around the 'Ars Electronica', Weibel and=7F Roetzer. Would it be possible to describe this discourse a little more precisely? In my perspective there were very distinctive regional, cultural and even historical conditions for this vital text production. The year 1989 comes to my mind: climax of the eighties, of yuppie culture and postmodernism, the fall of the German wall, the birth of techno and the fist appearance of VR and the networks. This group of theorists, now, can neither -in terms of an overall technology skepticism- be characterized as left-progressive, nor as right-wing conservative culture-pessimists. Naturally you can always feel the spirit of Heidegger around, and one could name Lacan as a common background, the latter is even true for you. For a long time in Germany people who were concerned with the media were considered conformist. But I always thought of this as a disease of the Ideologiekritik. The sphere of the media, this is evident, is very real and material (and gets so more and more). Have those authors still anything to say, or should we stop asking about sociological and ideological positions? H.W.: It's true that my book is mainly concerned with the German theory and the authors you mentioned, it undertakes a critical revision and develops its own interpretations and conclusions from this vantage point. That's the project. However, I would locate this debate differently; first of all I don't think that the Ideologiekritik was hostile to media and technology in general. If the authors in question more than evidently distance themselves from the Ideologiekritik (and this also resounds in your presentation to a certain degree), I can see a whole bundle of motives: it is a well justified interest in reaching a more differenciated interpretation of technology and also in overcoming certain aporias in the realm of the Ideologiekritik. Taking distance, though, could also be considered an immediate result of political disappointments; technology offers a way of escaping the complex demands of the social, and whoever considers technology the 'apriori' of social developement can stop caring about a lot of things. And above all, one got around asking what it is that gives technology its drive and direction. Here I would clearly differentiate between Kittler and Bolz: while Kittler makes a real effort to develop a hermeneutics of technology (and tries to win back what the social process inscribed into technology) Bolz turns to an open affirmation with politically reactionary implications. I think, like you do, that the debate is precisely located in place and time. But in my view the year 1989 doesn't stand for an awakening but for a doughy German chancellor and the potential immortalization and globalization of the bourgeois glory. If technology seems to be the only sphere where one can still find some kind of progress, it's no wonder that it's highly appreciated. G.L.: In my opinion the 70s' Ideologiekritik has indeed caused a lot of damage by grossly neglecting the realm of the media and, secondly, by refusing to understand what is so attractive about mass culture, a question that later on was taken up by English cultural studies. [...] H.W.: Dealing with the seventies, you already focus on the followers, and they, I agree, seldomly reached up to the prophets. For the classics of the Frankfurt School, however, your estimation doesn't apply; neither for Benjamin, nor for Kracauer who was very hopeful about mass culture; Brecht articulated the utopian idea of changing the monological character of the mass media, a utopia taken up by Enzensberger in the 60s and which became the basis for a number of practical-democratic media initiatives. The Communal Cinemas, financed by the municipal administrations, were founded in the 60s/70s etc. Above all, I think, that the opposition critical attitude vs. sympathy/understanding/affirmation is much too coarse. If the 'culture industry chapter' of the 'Dialectics of Enlightenment' didn't exist it would need to be written right away - as a contribution to a debate and a very radical perspective which makes visible a particular side of the media. And Adorno's 'Aesthetic Theory', even if repudiating media, jazz, and mass culture, offers many criteria which, in a certain way, are more appropriate for the media than they are for autonomous art which is so favourably treated by Adorno. G.L.: According to me, contemporary German media theory is not rooted any more in the instrumental, rational, technocratic thinking of the last two decades (the Affluent-NATO-Police-Nuclear state). Working neither positivistic nor fromnegation, it mainly seems to trace the inner voice of technology. The de-animated machines, worn by their commodity character, ought to sing again. Since there are mainly people from literature, philosophy, and the arts involved. Such a constellation merely existed in Germany at that time (1989). In other countries, you have to look for media theory in the departments of sociology, communication sciences, and in hardboiled history of technology. Why is the attitude of the German media ideology and their 'virtual class' (if one reallywants to name it this way) so sublime, so poetic? Elsewhere the media specialists do not invent such wonderful and complicated terms in order to describe the grey everyday life of the media. Does Germany, in the international division oflabour, develop more and more into the country of the datapoets and thinkers? H.W.: Jee, now I'm in the position to defend a particular German solution. Although many of the efforts, terms, and results of the debate seem very absurd to me I very much thinkthat the more pragmatic approaches ("sociology, communication sciences, and history of technology") miss their subject matter - the media. Concerning the media, we definitely don't know what we are dealing with. We know that a more or less blind practice brings them into being, but we don't know theimplications of the fact that 'communication' asks for increasingly complicated technical devices. The world of symbols melts into the one of technology. And as long as we don't know, I believe, it's important to work on the terms. 'Communication' is a very good example; you assume without questioning that living people communicate with one another (bilaterally), in contrast to the 'dead' universe of writing. Is that plausible though? Isn't technology 'dead' in the same way as writing is? And isn't that the reason why people want to make them sing again? And that is where my pleading for the "academic ways of thinking" starts. Certainly there are the "rituals of academic writing" that you mentioned; yet this kind of writing opens up the opportunity to distance oneself from common sense and to talk differently - in a way that is unconditioned by the needs and pressures of practice. I'm always astonished about how fast and definitely certain things become established as consensus: multimedia is the natural aim of computer development, the computer is a universal machine etc. If you want to oppose these kinds of consensus, you have to have either good nerves or good arguments (and probably both). In any case you need terms and tools which don't stemn from the debate itself, but from different contexts, and may beeven Lacan and Heidegger. And if the international division of labour assigns this part of theory to the Germans - that's o.k. with me, they (we) did worse jobs in the past. G.L.: Hence, around 1989, in a time of rapid technological developments, a theoretical movement comes into being which doesn't leave the Gutenberg-Galaxy behind, but takes on the whole knowledge of the last centuries into Cyberspace tracing back the history of technology and connecting chip architecture and modern literature. Though people outside that movement wouldn't ever think that way. Doesn't technology work excellent without Nietzsche and the humanities? Isn't it only us, the intellectuals, that need the aid of Kittler and other theorists in order to cope with technology? Are we dealing with a media theory developed for a well educated middle class who has a hard time with the titanic forces of the 'techne'? Or do the heavy volumes of theory serve to give the shares of AEG, Mercedes Benz, Siemens, and Deutsche Bank additional weight? For their power, it seems to me, the metaphysical insights of the German media=7F theory aren't very useful. H.W.: ... I very much hope so. And certainly technology works without Nietzsche. Generally the main problem is not just to cope with technology the way it is. If our society has chosen to inscribe its contents not in texts but into technology, the effect is that the contents aren't visible and discernible any more. They appear as the natural features of the things, as a result of a linear (and necessarily single-track) progress, as unchangeable. It's the same as codification. Things once encoded are the invisible precondition of communication. And whoever argues that a critique of technology is not possible any more and that the times of critique are generally over is taken in by a strategy of naturalization. Thus it would be the task of theory and of the hermeneutics of technology to win back the contents which the society has 'forgotten' into technology. The decisions and values, the social structures and power configurations, the practice which became structural in technology. To show the transformation from practice/discourse into structure (and from structure into practice/discour-se) is the main theoretical project of the book. Your 'internet critique' aims at precisely the same, doesn't it? The grown structure of the net also doesn't depend