A ética na imprensa: desafios no exercício ético da profissão de

A chapter on ‘German Media Theory’ is an unusual choice for inclusion in a cultural studies book. What connections are there, if any? What makes German work on media more noteworthy than French, Japanese or American scholarship?¹And why should we care? The Germans, after all, never cared much for cultural studies. The translation into German of key works by Raymond Williams and the CCCS met with little success; and subsequent publications like Mike Brake’s The Sociology of Youth Culture or Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style were treated as extended manuals for decoding juvenile subcultures. Cultural studies, in short, ‘arrived late; its reception was highly selective, and it ended in a pedagogical discourse’ (Horak 1999: 110). In most accounts the culprit behind this unresponsive welcome is the Frankfurt School. Its emphasis on the nefarious consciousness-shaping force of the culture industry could not but dismiss as an exercise in self-delusion any approach that valorised the critical agency of the subject to decode incoming media messages sub-versively. Hence many German theorists came to think as highly of British cultural studies as German automobilists think of British cars or German gourmets of British cuisine: that is, not very. No doubt this biased percep-tion of cultural studies is as uninformed as the reverse stigmatisapercep-tion of the Frankfurt School by cultural studies practitioners as reductionist and elitist. Only recently has the situation begun to change, though there is reason to believe that it is American rather than British cultural studies that is gaining ground, given that the more text-based American approach is more compatible with the philological bias of German scholarship (Mikos 2002).

So why should those with a vested interest in cultural studies care?

Because in the words of Geert Lovink, possibly the most informed non-German observer, ‘since the 1980s a vibrant, globally unique media theory production has evolved in the German-speaking areas’ (Lovink 2004). But

what does this alleged uniqueness consist of? Where did it come from?

And again, why invite it across the channel or across the oceans? I will attempt to answer these questions in this chapter, albeit in a highly select-ive fashion. That said, I am not going to present a balanced, objectselect-ive or comprehensive survey of ‘German Media Theory.’ Instead I will focus on just two theorists – Friedrich Kittler and Niklas Luhmann – and add minor references to a small number of others – among them, Peter Sloterdijk, Klaus Theweleit, Hartmut Winkler and Bernhard Siegert.²To be sure, some of these names will not meet with expert approval. It is highly questionable whether Sloterdijk or Theweleit can be labelled media theorists or whether Luhmann has contributed anything noteworthy to the study of media technology. And while Kittler may (still) be the most important German media theorist, he stands for an extreme position that few of his peers share. My approach, however, is based on the reverse assumption: I believe that German media theory (to echo Lovink’s char-acterisations) is at its most vibrant where it is most extreme, and that these extremes are in fact very representative of the alleged uniqueness of German media-theoretical production. Furthermore, I am not going to provide objective accounts of Kittler and Luhmann. Instead, I will attempt to tease out some of their less conspicuous radical features. Here are – potentially exportable – ideas, thoughts, warnings, or signposts worth scrutinising.

Certain caveats are necessary. Despite what the title of this chapter may indicate there is no such thing as ‘German Media Theory’. There is – to follow a lucid account by Austrian media scholar Stefan Weber – at best a motley crew of media-theoretical paradigms that pit incompatible basic approaches against each other, such as ‘descriptive’ versus ‘prescriptive’,

‘realist’ versus ‘constructivist’, ‘instrumentalist’ or ‘anthropocentric’

versus ‘post’- or ‘anti-humanist’, and so on (Weber 2003). Another informed observer, Reiner Leschke, has argued that this fractured assem-blage is due to the fact that at present in Germany media theories origi-nating outside the domain of media (e.g. Critical Theory, cognitivism, systems theory, Foucauldian discourse analysis) are squaring off against media ontologies, that is, theories (those of Kittler and Vilém Flusser come to mind) that are based on the generalisation of intrinsic media operations (Leschke 2003). Regardless of how you describe this cacophony, the bottom line is that while in many countries media research tends to be organised around one or two hegemonic approaches, the German academic scene is marked by a conspicuous absence of such silverback alpha-theories. Intellectually, the German media-theoretical arena is up-to-date and then some, but socially it is stuck in the (very German) Middle

Ages; that is, it resembles a patchwork of jealously guarded fiefdoms whose in-fighting prevents the establishment of a central authority.

The absence of a theory enjoying a broadly acknowledged dominant status entails a lack of a common understanding of key terms. Just as there is no German Media Theory there is no German Media Theory in as far as there is no general agreement on what terms like ‘medium’ or ‘media’ refer to. For instance, despite their ideological differences, Birmingham-style cultural studies and Frankfurt-style critical theory share pretty straight-forward views of what a mass medium is. But these conceptualisations are incompatible with, say, Niklas Luhmann’s systems-theoretical definition of medium as a ‘loose coupling’ of elements as opposed to the ‘rigid coup-lings’ that go by the name of ‘form’, or Friedrich Kittler’s esoteric account of media as data-processing techniques equipped with differing time-axis-manipulation capabilities that determine historically contingent dis-cursive networks. As a result, theoretical connections or cross-fertilisations that could result in a generally more acceptable definition of media are both rare and difficult. Hartmut Winkler, one of the few practitioners involved in large-scale ecumenical ventures (Winkler 1997, 2002, 2004a), recently attempted a definition of ‘medium’ that would satisfy the most important positions espoused in Germany: tellingly, he needed no fewer than sixty-nine steps to do so (Winkler 2004b). Of course this cannot go on. The German education system is not known for its hospitality to intellectual unruliness. Increasingly German media theory is running into administra-tive and institutional pressure to get its house in order, clear up the mess, establish a binding paradigm, achieve an academically and didactically viable consensus on terms and definitions, and provide a mutually agree-able disciplinary ancestry – in short, to consolidate and canonise. But at this point in time such a demand amounts to building a house during an earthquake – an exercise that is as hazardous to perform as it is instructive to watch from a safe distance.

A first hypothesis: in Germany media managed to attract the intellectual energy that in Britain was invested in the equally fuzzy object culture. These academic foci have to be seen as deposits of differing historical experiences.

German postcolonial scholarship – to cite the most obvious example – is but a fledgling shadow compared to its British counterpart. And how could it not be? The German colonial experience (including its aftermath) was geo-graphically limited and of short duration; and its atrocities were conveni-ently forgotten.³Matters are different when it comes to questions of class.

At the risk of oversimplifying matters I would argue that, due to the more pronounced British tradition of emphasising socio-cultural distinctions – more pronounced, that is, than in Germany – British cultural theory tends

to focus on mechanisms of vertical differentiation. It is no coincidence that Pierre Bourdieu’s work on social distinctions is more successful in Britain than in Germany; or that German cultural theory offers little that can compare to the pioneering British explorations of working-class culture.

German scholarship is instead more prone to investigate questions of homogenisation. The latter is related to a succession of attempts to mold a nation, a people, a race, or a citizenry. These attempts range from the fusing together (by way of books or bombs) of a patchwork of regions into Germany, to the ideologically supercharged elimination of social inequality in the Third Reich – and the latter, if Götz Aly’s widely discussed recent study of the connection between the Holocaust and relieving the German taxpayers’ burden is to be believed, is the basis of the postwar welfare state, the last attempt to engineer a more egalitarian society (Aly 2005). Herein lies a key for the noticeable German focus on media and technology, for these attempts are inextricably linked to a highly visible deployment of media technology. It would require an extensive investigation to explain this in sufficient detail; here I will offer no more than a few abbreviated histori-cal pointers.

First, compared to the development of ‘normal’ nations such as France or Britain – normal because their particular evolution has been internalised as the norm for the genesis of nation-states – Germany is said to be a

‘delayed nation’ (die verspätete Nation). This is usually attributed to the relative atrophy of trade and industry in combination with the strongly divisive political forces (both internal and external) shaping ‘German’ pol-itics up until 1870/1. As a result, cultural production was seen for an extended period as the major cohesive factor in the face of political frag-mentation. The very close relationship established right from the begin-ning of German literary scholarship between nurturing letters and nurturing the nation attests to the early awareness that Germany was a nation that, more than many others, had been written into being. Germany, to put it bluntly, is a kind of media product. (One often feels if it did not exist it would have been invented by theorists from Marshall McLuhan to Benedict Anderson to illustrate the complicity of print and nation.) This explains why so many of the current generation of German media schol-ars started out as scholschol-ars of literature. The noticeable decline in the status of literary studies is directly related to the rise of the importance of media studies. The large-scale escape into relevance from the growing insecurity of traditional humanities not only resulted in the marked philological bias of German media studies, it also ensured that the latter inherited some of the importance that in bygone days accrued to the study of literature.

Where else, Winkler has asked, are media scholars so prone to overestimate

their own capabilities, turning almost any question into a media problem, media themselves into a social a priori, and their own discipline into a pre-sumptive master discipline (2004a: 189)? As already mentioned, many of the most important approaches imported from literary scholarship to the study of media were not originally developed for the study of literature.

The ease with which literary texts were replaced by other media stems from the fact that in most cases there was no corresponding change of approach. This is why Lovink chose the 1980s as the point of emergence of the German scene, for it was during that particular decade that post-structuralist, systems-theoretical and constructivist theories (none of which was home-grown literary scholarship in the first place) migrated from literary studies to challenge the ruling media analyses shaped by the Frankfurt School and the German version of US-style communication studies.

Second, one of the most crucial developments for understanding modern German history is the rapid industrialisation following unification that, within one generation, transformed a primarily agrarian patchwork into an industrial superpower. This transition reached its climax in the technologised mass killings of World War I and was captured by Walter Benjamin’s image of the generation ‘that had gone to school in a horse-drawn streetcar’ and now found itself in an open sky ‘in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions’ (1969: 84). Among the many effects of this traumatic change was an intense intellectual and aesthetic engagement with technology, especially during the first half of the twentieth century.

This included the broad spectrum of – frequently politically extreme – theories of technology or Technikphilosophien (featuring contributions by Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, among others), the rise of ‘reactionary modernism’ (Herf) as a distinctly German right-wing attempt to fuse quintessentially modern technology with pre-modern social philosophy, and the rich futurist imagery of Weimar culture.

These concerns and obsessions are among the most important – though frequently forgotten or even actively suppressed – sources for the very high profile of technology-centred approaches in contemporary German media theory. As Siegfried Kracauer’s famous book title has it, there may be a continuity From Caligari to Hitler; there certainly is one from Caligari to Kittler.

Third, it is important to realise the extent to which dictatorships and lib-erations in modern German history were experienced as media events.

Albert Speer, the chief Nazi technocrat, once described the Third Reich as ‘the first dictatorship of an industrial nation in the age of modern technology’, in which newly developed communication devices made it

possible to turn the state into a giant ‘switchboard [which] could be con-trolled and dominated by someone’s will’ (1970: 522). As an analysis of the highly divisive power structure of the Third Reich this is misleading (not to mention self-exculpatory), but it does point towards the subjective experience of the regime’s excessive cinematographic and radiophonic self-presentation.⁴Continuing this line of thought, Klaus Theweleit – who has not received the recognition he deserves as a media theorist – remarked that 1956/7 marked ‘the most rapid’ generational break ever in recent German history, because that was when American and British army radio stations started broadcasting the top ten rock ’n’ roll tunes (2004: 56).

Allied armies defeated Germany in 1945, but it took another ten years before rock’ n’roll liberated Germans. If Theweleit’s acclaimed Male Fantasieswas an extended examination of the ways in which institutional and technological experiences drilled an entire generation into inhuman-ity, his succeeding works are – among many other things – an extended probing of the media experiences that shaped postwar Germany (cf. 1989:

347–87). Radio had a direct impact on young minds and bodies of the 1950s, an impact that served to exorcise the authoritarian or even Fascist voices that had tried to control these bodies previously. The media focus culminates in Sloterdijk’s provocative portrayal of nations as stressed com-munities that ‘belong’ together because they listen and view the same media products and then get upset together (Sloterdijk 1998).

With this in mind a second, equally blunt hypothesis: a chain of (posi-tively and nega(posi-tively connoted) collective media experiences and socialisa-tions over the last two centuries is the main reason for a common predisposition among German scholars to diagnose different kinds of media-based heteronomy – be it enslavement to the culture industry as sketched by the early Frankfurt School, Kittler’s insistence that ‘media determine our situation’ (1999: xxxix), or Luhmann’s equally apodictic assurance that ‘whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media’ (2000: 1). And this is where matters get interesting. As Nicholas Gane pointed out, Kittler’s work raises important questions regarding the relationship between technological mediation and social relations that need to be addressed in the context of a ‘post-human sociology’ (2005: 40; emphasis in the original). The same could be said of Luhmann and certain other German theorists; and it also applies to what could be called ‘posthuman cultural studies’.

Posthuman cultural studies? What does this imply? It is beyond the scope of this chapter to give an overview – an overview, no less, of some-thing that is not yet in view because it is only currently emerging. The

following points, however, strike me as pertinent when discussing the importance of certain branches of German media theory.

1. The prefix post does not imply that a new type of cultural studies must be developed to engage with a world that allegedly is no longer made by humans. It is not a matter of technologising theory in order to adequately deal with the new, media-based assemblage of cultural machineries and productions that have sidelined all wetware activities.

This would once again invoke the old fallacy of supersession – first humans had the top billing in history, now they are being pushed aside by machines. Posthuman cultural studies does not take its cue from either euphoric or apocalyptic techno-theory but from approaches like the French école des annals, Manuel De Landa’s A Thousand Years of Non-Linear Historyor even highly speculative mega-projects like Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy. The focus is on short-, middle- and long-term structuration processes that have taken place throughout history on various sub- and supra-human levels.

2. The focus on technology cannot be the only crucial foray into posthu-man theory domains; it must be accompanied by a critical engagement with biological matters. Recent attempts to make animals an integral part of a new ‘posthumanist theory’ (Wolfe 2003) are as necessary as Kittler’s media-technological grounding of cultural history (Kittler 2000), or Bernhard Siegert’s archeology of the postal a priori (Siegert 1999). Ultimately, the goal is to provide the possibility for an analysis of history and of the present in terms of interacting ‘grey’ and ‘green’

ecologies – of the configurations that arise from the interaction of climate and computers, mammals and machines, media and microbes.

In this context the work of Luhmann takes on special importance, given that its basic blueprint is a vexing import into sociology of a biological model of differentiation (for more see Winthrop-Young 2003). So let us start with him. At first glance his presence in German media theory is a bit baffling: in contrast to the scope, originality and intellectual rigour of so many of his other studies, his only text that deals directly with mass media, The Reality of the Mass Media, is a disjointed, technologically superficial and not very original ‘private aphorism collection’ (Leschke 2003: 222).

Ultimately, Luhmann’s impact on German media scholarship has to do with the fact that his theory allows for an abstraction and generalisation of the concept of media beyond the technological, as well as for a sociological extension that precludes the naive treatment of media as mere means or transmitters which, if only ‘liberated’, will allow for truly humane,

consensus-based communication. Scott Lash, perhaps the most prominent among the growing number of cultural theorists to have acknowledged Luhmann’s importance, has singled him out alongside Gilles Deleuze as

‘the paradigmatic thinker of the information age’ because of his under-standing ‘that the social bond itself is no longer about exchange in the sym-bolic but has taken on proportions of the communication’ (Lash 2002:

111). Keep in mind, however, that communication, as conceptualised by Luhmann, is something humans despite all their brains and conscious minds cannot do. ‘Only communication can communicate’ (Luhmann 1994: 371). The most radical aspect of this idea is not the tripartition of communication into information, utterance and understanding that con-stantly feed into each other, or the complex notion of structural coupling that ties this communication three-step to human minds. Nor is it the

111). Keep in mind, however, that communication, as conceptualised by Luhmann, is something humans despite all their brains and conscious minds cannot do. ‘Only communication can communicate’ (Luhmann 1994: 371). The most radical aspect of this idea is not the tripartition of communication into information, utterance and understanding that con-stantly feed into each other, or the complex notion of structural coupling that ties this communication three-step to human minds. Nor is it the