Re: <nettime> Florian Cramer on Wolfgang Schirmacher: Media Aesthetics in Europe-An Answer

[Florian Cramer <paragram@gmx.net>]

Am Wed, 05.Jan.2000 um 23:35:26 -0800 schrieb Wolfgang Schirmacher:

> Let's get down to business: I have no idea how my lecture from a 1991
> conference in Paris on "The Media in Europe" ended up in your forum but I

It was a common misunderstanding of Geert, Frank and me that your text was
recently written. So I apologize and withdraw much of my critique. For me
- and for Frank, too, I think - it simply seemed as if you had overlooked
the bulk of recent discourse on new media, including the one on Nettime,
and made bold claims from a partially uninformed and outdated perspective.
I am also sorry that you had to remind us of your achievements and career
in philosophy because of my initial confession of not knowing who you are. 

> must congratulate Florian for sniffing out correctly to which time period
> this piece belongs.  German Kulturwissenschaft at its best!

Of course, what else did you think. In reflecting new media, time periods
really count. Otherwise, our initial misunderstanding wouldn't have create
a storm in the teacup. If one speaks of new media, it might not be
unimportant to keep in mind when those media were new. 

> I've never formally published "Media Aesthetics in Europe" (it is only
> included in one of my websites) because of its dated context and somehow
> sweeping generalities.

Ok, I think this may also have been the initial perception of the text in
Nettime and the reason why Frank and I felt the spontaneous urge to
comment upon it. So it doesn't seem as if we have a real controversy here.
We are looking forward to reading the revised edition of your text. 

> Agreed, we all have read Walter Ong and friends, but the NEW phenomenon is
> the ubiquitousness of media roles: Klopstock you could escape (just by
> being one of the illiterate servants), try this with Arnold
> Schwarzenegger!

So does your argument imply that the impact of mass media on communication
has increased because of increased media _literacy_ rather than because of
internal _features_ and configuration of the new media? Or would it be
wrong to separate both aspects from each other; does the internal
configuration of the new media simplify media access and hence improve
media literacy? (I rather doubt the latter for the computer and the
internet; computer literacy is very hard to achieve.) 

> >Is it possible that is has been a _very_ long time since Schirmacher saw a
> European (or German) university? This and the following paragraphs strike
> me as an echo of third-hand banalizations of 1960/1970s Frankfurt School
> scholarship. Everyone who is familiar with 'Kulturwissenschaft' as the
> major trend in German humanities of the 1990s knows that Schirmacher's
> description is without any reality today, although German
> 'Kulturwissenschaft' remains, in its large indeptedness to Aby Warburg,
> Ernst Cassirer and cultural anthropology, quite different from
> Anglo-American 'Cultural Studies'.>
> 
> Vorsicht, Juergen Habermas will not take lightly that you include his
> postmodern opponent among the Frankfurt School followers!

Which is not what I wrote in the above paragraph. I wrote that your
critique of academic technophobia _echoes_ trivialized Frankfurt School,
i.e.  reminded me of people like Bolz and Freyermuth who still think that
(a) the German and European intellectual world is populated with
mass-media-horrified Habermas-epigones and that (b) America is the exact
opposite and (c) it is postmodern thinking to confront them with the exact
opposite standpoint.

(Autobiographical sidenote: Since I studied at, among others, the
University of Massachusetts of Amherst [whose faculty then largely
consisted of traditional leftists], my experience with academic mass
culture-philia and mass culture-phobia were rather the opposite as regards
to such imaginary constructs as 'Europe' and 'America'.) 

> Yet, I'd like to underline my judgment from 1991  >What is missing is an
> unbiased sensual experience with media>> 

Perhaps my perspective is too much a structuralist and too a little a
phenomenological one, but my approach would be to first pay attention to
the formatting/formal conventions imposed on a tv show and thereupon
observe what's different in it, where it subverts those conventions and
whether this subversion is interesting enough to sacrifice time for
watching the show.  (My experiences tend to be bad, but you may prove me
wrong.) Again, I am not sure which one of the both would be the "European"
and which the "American"  approach. 

[On 'European' intellectuals:]

> belief: They still treat technology basically as a tool, understand
> themselves as the masters of the game (or have the paranoid belief, like
> Kittler, hardware has taken over).  Therefore, they stubbornly defend
> their (biased) view of humanity as homo sapiens, homo creator, homo faber. 
> The US situation is trickier with its blatant capitalistic takeover of every
> form of media, including the alternative ones.  One result for

I think that speaking of 'them', what 'they' do in contrast to 'the US
situation' is very brilliant phenomenological (and deconstructive!) 
thinking. 

Florian Cramer

-- 
Florian Cramer, PGP public key ID 6440BA05
<http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/index.cgi>
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