First thought: „Wow, what a great line-up.“ Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Friedrich Kittler, Geert Lovink, Irmela Schneider, Erhard Schüttpelz and Hartmut Winkler – they will all be at the University of Siegen on April 22.
Second thought: „Wow, what a great nonsense.“ All these brilliant people are actually coming together in order to discuss whether German media studies are on a „Sonderweg“ – a way that somehow sets it apart from media studies in other countries. The most pressing problem German media studies are faced with according to the announcement: Although „scholars all over the world measure themselves against German publications [...] German media scholars have troubles acknowledging their own supremacy.“
Ever since I moved back from Sweden to Germany, the peculiarities of German academia have never ceased to amaze me. Especially the fact that Germany seems to voluntarily shut itself off a lot of the international discussions. Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK, the US, even Austria – they all appear to be engaged in a productive common discourse, but Germany proceeds on largely independent trajectories. Only sometimes, someone decides to translate some text and the discourses are joined for a moment, only to drift off into different directions again.
A good example is Ganaele Langlois’ excellent dissertation “The Technocultural Dimensions of Meaning”, where she develops a „mixed semiotics“ framework inspired by Guattari in order to analyse Amazon and the MediaWiki software. In her argument, she covers a lot of theoretical ground by referring to Kittler and Gumbrecht (and Heidegger), but for the more concrete and up-to-date discussions, she moves on towards Latour, Galloway, Lessig and Manovich – as one would expect in the international discourse.
Obviously, there are plenty of potential points of connection between her argument and current debates in German media studies. It would certainly be interesting to see the fruitful discussions evolving out of such encounters. But what stands in the way for them is simply the lack of English translations of current German texts. Talk about German “supremacy” hardly seems like the right kind of attitude to make these encounters happen. It appears to me that it is not so much the false modesty of German scholars that is at the root of this gap but rather the self-induced isolationism of German academia.
The announcement in its entirety (as my own limping attempt at translating the entwined German academic language):
Without exaggeration the research areas ‘Mediengeschichte’ [media history] and ‘Medientheorie’ [media theory] can be described as idiosyncratic developments of the German ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ [cultural studies]. Therefore, scholars with related interests all over the world measure themselves against German publications. Despite this, there is a persistent belief at German universities that media theory’s ‘Mecca’ just has to be somewhere abroad. For Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University) this inadequate modesty is a display of the effects of, among others, intercultural provincialism. For if German media scholars are already having troubles acknowledging their own supremacy, they would probably consider it outright unthinkable that a research direction that fascinates them does not even exist in many other national academic cultures.
The iconography of the poster is certainly worth a visual culture-inspired study in its own right.
Technorati Tags: media theory
Being a Kittlerian schoolar, I would like to add up to your “thoughts” that in deed, it is difficult to translate Heidegger to into English. Or call it an nearly impossible maneuver. Being in the same “discours” with people, who don´t know what you are talking about, may be a rather alienating expierence German academics choose to withdraw from whenever they can.
Fundamentally speaking, you seem, who have had the pleasure to visit Germany for some time, seem t share a general misunderstanding about what Humboldianians call “Kulturwissenschaft”. Please, be aware of the fact that this word in written in sigular. And that small discret distinction makes the difference. Because in Berlin we choose to differentiate between the sigular Kulturwissenschaft and Kulturwissenschaften in plural. The meaning behind this very fact has been discribed in all introductory texts to Kulturwissenschaft which you seem to share any knowledge of. The reason why we differentiate is that Kulturwissenschaft in singular happens in German language only whereas Kulturwissenschaften in plural happens also in other languages. Therefore, one should be aware of the fact that Germans do consider the bigger international picture whilst also focussing on rather generic mechanisms of understanding that might be unique and may make the German language the more so valuable when regarded as being an academic werkzeug (tool).
I do believe that this adds up to the very legacy to why each country might consider trying to re-iterate their academic “findings” on the basis of social alienisation theories and psychological as well as language inherent precursors which all together interfunction as a matrix of constituting prerequisites (with language of course being Kulturtechnik number one).
And than try to imagine if Friedrich Kittler could have read Marx Kapital when claiming “everything is hardware” (like you might translate from German: “Alles ist Hardware”).
Best regards and all the best,
Peter
(And we all heard of the Dilemma finding oneself being lost in translation:)
Hallo Peter,
bevor die Sprachverwirrung komplett wird mache ich mal auf deutsch weiter. Ich dachte, diese Geschichte würde vor allem Leute im Ausland interessieren, daher die Übersetzung in Englische.
Mir ist schon klar, dass Kulturwissenschaft und Cultural Studies nichts miteinander zu tun haben. Deswegen habe ich die deutschen Begriffe beibehalten und “cultural studies” klein geschrieben, in der Annahme, dass Leserinnen und Leser, die sich für dieses Thema interessieren, die Unterschiede ungefähr kennen. Die Pluralform stammt nicht von mir sondern aus dem Ankündigungstext, die Belehrung wäre dann also eher an diese Stelle zu richten.
Interessant finde ich, dass deine Kommentare meine Vermutungen noch bestätigen – Isolation ist von manchen anscheinend tatsächlich gewollt. Aber wie darf man sich das vorstellen: Allein in Deutschland findet sich die reine Lehre, die dann durch inadäquate Übersetzungen langsam aber sicher verwässert wird? Und wie wäre es dann umgekehrt? Die Tatsache, dass ein so zentraler Begriff wie “Dispositiv” letztlich einer Nicht-Übersetzung der entsprechenden französischen Vokabeln entspringt, scheint ja auch niemanden zu veranlassen, die Legitimität der deutschen Begriffsentwicklung in Frage zu stellen.
Viele Grüße,
Theo
PS: Zur Nicht-Übersetzbarkeit von Heidegger würde ich Hubert Dreyfus Berkeley-Vorlesungen bei iTunes empfehlen: http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/berkeley.edu.1623153808 Ich bin weiß Gott kein Experte, aber ich würde doch annehmen, dass er es schafft, den einen oder anderen Gedanken adäquat ins Englische zu übertragen.
PPS: Zum “Vergnügen”, in Deutschland zu leben, würde ich Tocotronic empfehlen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JeeV9mOxrA Aber vielleicht ist Hamburg auch schon zu weit weg von Berlin