Media, Culture, and Mediality: New Insights into the Current State of Research [1. Aufl.] 9783839413760

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Preface
MEDIALITY: CONCEPTS AND MODELS
Differentiating Media
The Medium as Form
Transcriptivity Matters: On the Logic of Intra- and Intermedial References in Aesthetic Discourse
Original Copy—Secondary Practices
Rumor—More or Less at Home: On Theories of News Value in the 20th Century
“Get the Message Through.” From the Channel of Communication to the Message of the Medium (1945-1960)
DISCOURSES: DISPOSITIVES AND POLITICS
Picture Events: Abu Ghraib
Voice Politics: Establishing the ‘Loud/Speaker’ in the Political Communication of National Socialism
Electricity, Spirit Mediums, and the Media of Spirits
Normativity and Normality
Mass Media Are Effective: On an Aporetic Cunning of Evidence
Extraordinary Stories of the Ordinary Use of Media
The Governmentality of Media: Television as ‘Problem’ and ‘Instrument’
PROCEDURES: AESTHETICS AND MODES
In Between Languages—In Between Cultures: Walter Benjamin’s “Interlinear Version” of Translation as Inframediality
Finding Openings with Opening Credits
The Reflexivity of Voice
A Handout on the Subject of ‘Talking Hands’
What Hands Can Tell Us: From the ‘Speaking’ to the ‘Expressive’ Hand
Semiotics of the Human: Physiognomy of Images and Literary Transcription in Johann Caspar Lavater and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Ultraparadoxical: On the Gravity of the Human Experiment in Pavlov and Pynchon
Bastards: Text/Image Hybrids in Pop Writing by Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Others
Authors

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Ludwig Jäger, Erika Linz, Irmela Schneider (eds.) Media, Culture, and Mediality

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Ludwig Jäger, Erika Linz, Irmela Schneider (eds.) Media, Culture, and Mediality. New Insights into the Current State of Research

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Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

© 2010 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: 106313/photocase.com Proofread by Erika Linz Typeset by Anna Bienefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-8376-1376-6

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CONTENTS

Preface IRMELA SCHNEIDER, ERIKA LINZ, AND LUDWIG JÄGER 9

MEDIALITY: CONCEPTS AND MODELS Differentiating Media JÜRGEN FOHRMANN 19 The Medium as Form FRIEDRICH BALKE AND LEANDER SCHOLZ 37 Transcriptivity Matters: On the Logic of Intra- and Intermedial References in Aesthetic Discourse LUDWIG JÄGER 49 Original Copy—Secondary Practices GISELA FEHRMANN, ERIKA LINZ, ECKHARD SCHUMACHER, AND BRIGITTE WEINGART 77 Rumor—More or Less at Home: On Theories of News Value in the 20th Century IRMELA SCHNEIDER 87 “Get the Message Through.” From the Channel of Communication to the Message of the Medium (1945-1960) ERHARD SCHÜTTPELZ 109

DISCOURSES: DISPOSITIVES AND POLITICS Picture Events: Abu Ghraib WOLFGANG BEILENHOFF 141 Voice Politics: Establishing the ‘Loud/Speaker’ in the Political Communication of National Socialism CORNELIA EPPING-JÄGER 161 Electricity, Spirit Mediums, and the Media of Spirits HEIKE BEHREND 187 Normativity and Normality LUTZ ELLRICH 201 Mass Media Are Effective: On an Aporetic Cunning of Evidence ISABELL OTTO 231 Extraordinary Stories of the Ordinary Use of Media CHRISTINA BARTZ 249 The Governmentality of Media: Television as ‘Problem’ and ‘Instrument’ MARKUS STAUFF 263

PROCEDURES: AESTHETICS AND MODES In Between Languages—In Between Cultures: Walter Benjamin’s “Interlinear Version” of Translation as Inframediality MICHAEL WETZEL 285 Finding Openings with Opening Credits REMBERT HÜSER 307

The Reflexivity of Voice ERIKA LINZ 333 A Handout on the Subject of ‘Talking Hands’ HEDWIG POMPE 349 What Hands Can Tell Us: From the ‘Speaking’ to the ‘Expressive’ Hand PETRA LÖFFLER 367 Semiotics of the Human: Physiognomy of Images and Literary Transcription in Johann Caspar Lavater and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg WILHELM VOSSKAMP 391 Ultraparadoxical: On the Gravity of the Human Experiment in Pavlov and Pynchon MARCUS KRAUSE 405 Bastards: Text/Image Hybrids in Pop Writing by Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Others BRIGITTE WEINGART 429

Authors 463

Preface IRMELA SCHNEIDER, ERIKA LINZ, AND LUDWIG JÄGER

I. Among the formative developments of the 20th century with farreaching consequences for the relationship between media, communication and culture are the differentiations, expansions and modifications of communication technologies. The dissemination of audiovisual media at the beginning of the 20th century has led to changes in the relationship between text and image as well as to shifts in the relational structure between speaking and writing, between orality and literacy. Since the middle of the 20th century, television was the medium that took root, making audiovisuality into a constitutive factor of culture, challenging the boundaries of established differentiations⎯for example, between globality and locality or between the public and the private realms. With the pervasive expansion of computer technology and the development of networked communication towards the end of the 20th century, renewed shifts in cultural structures could be experienced leading to transformations in the various communicative cultures. These changes on the one hand focused the attention on the increased importance of media for culture and communication in societies, while on the other hand they intensified the questions regarding the development of not only technological media, but also of the developments within the complex interplay and interdependencies between media, communication and culture. With view to the issues and perspectives, theories and methods with which cultural studies have explored the role of media and their development during this time and on the background of these historical findings, three main research directions can be differentiated in a pointed (and therefore simplified) way⎯leaving out the concept of media research as audience research: For one, since the middle of the 1970s initiatives were started within the philologies to expand the research-field of their disciplines. Culture being significantly characterized by audiovisuality—by moving pictures, by technologized speech and voice—proved no longer commensurable with exclusively engaging in studies of literature 9

Irmela Schneider, Erika Linz, and Ludwig Jäger and language and their history, theory and analysis as they had thus far defined the philologies. The question now became which theories and methods should be developed in order to analyze the audiovisual media of storage and dissemination as symbolic worlds constituting an important factor of culture and society and their aesthetics. Apart from this, attention was focused on analyzing the correlations between the developments of media and the changes in communicative forms and structures of mentalities. These undertakings can be distinguished from the second main direction of research that concentrated on technology. The central idea was that the technical a priori of media decide the standards and norms of choice, storage and transfer of data, thus specifying the patterns of perception and experience. And finally, the third direction of research considered the media of dissemination as a social subsystem of functionally organized societies. Questions of the organization and operative modes of these systems as well as of their dominant differentiations characterized the analyses made from this perspective. All three research programs were characterized significantly by the fact that technological media lay at their center; the point of departure therefore was a rather narrow understanding of the term ‘medium.’ This only changed with the intense response to the “Toronto School of Communication,” i.e., to the writings of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and Edmund Carpenter and with the debates on orality and literacy that had been inspired mainly by Eric A. Havelock’s Preface to Plato (1963) and Jack Goody’s and Ian Watt’s The Consequences of Literacy (1963). From this initial position, the initiative of a research group at the universities of Aachen, Bonn, and Cologne was launched in the beginning of the 1990s. The group did not come together in order to continue the previous proposals of media research. Instead, it undertook to break new ground for such research by asking new questions and proposing new perspectives. The focus now was not on technological media alone; rather, the group concentrated on the theories and the history of the relationships and the interplay between media, culture and communication. Initial questions were based on the conviction that this complex area should be analyzed both systematically and in its historical dimension in order to construct the genealogies that in the course of the 20th century had led to the self-descriptions of society as information-, knowledge-, and media-societies. This meant that the group was neither aiming at postulating a technological a priori of media, nor at only placing the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of the pervasive increase of audiovisuality at the center. It also did not intend to analyze media of dissemination as a social system. It wanted to establish a broad termi-

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Preface nology for ‘medium’ and ‘mediality’ instead, a terminology used for media that allowed researchers to focus on the shared terrain on which ‘discourse’ and ‘things,’ technological apparatuses and social communication of meaning meet, establishing specific media-cultural configurations for historical time spans. The guiding principle was twofold: with such a perspective and with the cooperation of different disciplines from the humanities on the one hand new and advanced insights were to be reached, while on the other the object-range of cultural studies with inter- and transdisciplinary questions was to be media-theoretically re-perspectivized. This meant that media were not defined as simply a widening of the research topic of these studies. Rather, it was necessary to examine which new insights into ‘old’ objects could be gained if they would be viewed anew under a media-theoretical perspective. In January 1999, the initiative of this research group led to the founding of the collaborative research center “Media and Cultural Communication” which lasted for ten years until the end of 2008; it redefined German and international research questions regarding media, it widened their methodological and theoretical perspectives and thus lastingly shaped national and international research in this area. The group consisted of scholars in media studies, musicology, linguistics, literary studies, history and ethnology as well as in computer sciences and psychology. Part of the most important scholarly results of the collaborative research center altogether was the shaping of the contours of a media theory oriented on cultural studies and obtaining its profile by developing an operative and difference-logical roster of terms and by structuring the media-comparative and media-historical analyses. Proceeding by way of our guiding theoretical idea of focusing on the reciprocal relationships between media, culture and communication and of using process-oriented terminology, the group was able to avoid creating a hierarchy of concepts from the beginning; thus, it revised the known thought pattern defining culture and media via a relationship between a material basis and its ‘spiritual’ superstructure. The guiding methodical and difference-logical patterns of thought also excluded elevating any one of the terms⎯let us say ‘communication’⎯to a basic category substantiating everything else. This means that cultures neither were marginalized as mere secondary phenomena of certain media technologies, nor were they defined as substantially opposed to media understood primarily from a technological point of view. Rather, the group’s investigations centered on a media-theoretical analysis of the roles of media in forming culture and communication. This operative turn meant that the procedures of media took center stage. Focusing on procedures in its turn led to conceptualizing media and multimedia as infrastruc-

11

Irmela Schneider, Erika Linz, and Ludwig Jäger tural systems that form cultures and their perceptual, epistemological and communicative systems. Thus, one central strategy of our research was the refusal to limit our conceptual work regarding the term ‘medium’ by definitions or stipulations. Rather, the discussions made us realize that we should reformulate questions of what into questions of how. Our focus now became not so much what a medium is but rather how media operate, i.e., which operational logic they are following on the one hand, and which ones they develop while processing on the other. Thus, we were able to compare different media operations synchronically and diachronically. The results of these discussions can be generalized in the following observation: There is only one constructive way of proceeding; namely, by framing methods and problem areas one connects a generalizing theoretical approach regarding media to certain concrete, historically and culturally specifiable problem areas. An encompassing concept of media crystallized and established itself in the discussions of the research center integrating quite different, ‘coexisting’ techniques of generating, distributing and ‘legibilizing’ meaning apart from those electronic technologies of storing, distributing and processing data that already could be found at the center of public interest for several decades. In this broad sense, not only electronic or classical media of storage and dissemination like books, manuscripts, pictures or films are media but also the human body as a carrier of communication and the anthropological and cultural medium language. Working on the term ‘medium’ necessitated developing a further differentiation extending beyond ‘medium’ toward the field of ‘mediality.’ The term ‘mediality’ as worked on and developed by the research center—and that is therefore by now firmly grounded in scholarly discussions—indicates that cultural artifacts and communicative processes are fundamentally organized by media; thus the approach integrates into the media-theoretical analysis also those anthropological means of expression and forms of communication that remain hidden in a use of the term ‘medium’ that is centered on technology or primarily oriented on sociological questions. Moreover, such an expansion of the term ‘medium’ allows for the systematic analysis of inter- and multimedial constellations to supersede the monomedial study of individual media. Here, the focus is not on one medium but on media in media. The transdisciplinary and methodological reflection of the basic research theories characterizing the aims of the research center was decisively promoted by its specific structure, i.e., by the inter-university cooperation and the resulting wide spectrum of the various disciplines cooperating in the research center. Taking various questions from cultural and media studies as its point of departure, this

12

Preface specific research situation allowed for the development of analytical instruments through which traditional fields in cultural studies and other fields of the humanities could be reconceptualized media-theoretically. During this research process and beyond it, new questions and perspectives regarding the by now almost ‘classical’ technological media emerged, also affecting the theory and history of the media of dissemination that in cultural studies continue to remain underdeveloped. And as a final point, with these media-theoretical terminological categories and the analytical instruments differentiated by them, the research center has created a basis for the analysis of the dynamic deployments of media in the 21st century. The basic foundations that made the research at the center possible for ten years were generous grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) and the state of Nordrhein Westfalen, as well as the sustained support of the participating universities.

II. The research center was divided into three project areas individually focused on a particular research field, cooperating with and connected to each other. The main terms and differentiations developed in these three project areas were the decisive factors for the organization of the present anthology. The contributions in the first part of this volume are the results of the first project area centering on mediality and the problematization of media differences. The question with which concepts and models media differences could be differentiated and terminologically grasped occupied a large part of the discussions. Looking at the history reflecting media shows that media differences constituted a central thematic area almost since the beginnings of the history of media. However, while in this venerable history the theoretical model comprehending media and their differences with ontologizing descriptions was widely spread, the goals of the research group was aiming at conceptualizing media procedurally. Mediality has to be reflected upon both from the perspective of generating and of processing differences. Through this perspective, media changes, media upheavals, media competitions, or the co-presence of individual media can be observed as media differences, while at the same time and beyond this terminology allows for meaning to be generated simply by the reciprocal reference of media to each other. Media are defined by difference, but they are also required to bridge this difference. This applies to media platforms or to media within media whose heterogeneity is visible since they are conceptu-

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Irmela Schneider, Erika Linz, and Ludwig Jäger alized as monomedia with terms like writing, image, film, television or computer only retrospectively (in the sense of a constitutive deferral of meaning); it also holds true for ‘archimedia’ like natural languages since they, too, are mixed media. Media differences produce multiple practices of recoding (commenting, paraphrasing, etc.) and it is these practices that have the function to make unreadable or difficult to read works readable or to disrupt established semantic conventions. We might say that these are procedures and activities constituting culture. The second part of this volume incorporates another project area concentrating on the analysis of discourses, specifically media discourses. The term ‘media discourse’ does not in the first place refer to those elements communicated by media; rather, it refers above all to what is said or written about media. Reference can be made here both to individual media and to media in the sense of a plurale tantum. Reconstructing and analyzing media discourses does not ask about social and cultural references in order to describe media as indicators of specific socio-cultural developments. It is rather the pragmatic function of such discourses, i.e., these discourses are always also involved as factors in the processes they are describing. Media discourses form media as dispositives and the politics thereby entered into them can create specific dispositive regimes. Our analyses have shown that discursive events have a disruptive potential so that they can delay or divert the development of media dispositives. Thus, discourses contribute to stabilizing and transforming the terrain of what can be said about or done with media. As the analyses show, practices of discourse are not supplementary semantic operations that are added to media ‘as such’ and that therefore could also be missing; on the contrary, media discourses are a constitutive factor of media processes. The analysis of media discourses on the one hand was aimed at reconstructing the historically necessary epistemological conditions for bringing up the subject of media and constituting them as objects of a media theory. On the other hand, the research groups were interested in the cultural options and scopes of action disclosed by a specific knowledge of media. And thirdly, they were concerned with analyzing the body of statements regarding the patterns of argumentation and the use of rhetorical strategies. With this broad material basis it was possible to frame considerations on the function of media discourses as continuing social self-characterizations circulating in a constellation that casts the assumption of a ‘self’ of society severely into doubt. A third area of research was directed at analyzing the procedures defining cultures of communication. Given its media parameters and its conditions of a maximized diversification of knowledge and of

14

Preface target groups, our initial consideration was that communication is a highly fragile process. Therefore, the question arises how under the present conditions communication is at all possible (not in a normative sense but regarding connectability) and what strategies and methods are generated stabilizing successful communication. With these questions in mind, the groups focused on the aesthetics and modes shaping cultures of communication. With regard to the socio-cultural level of differentiation attained today, it became decisive for the research to realize that inter- and intracultural communication could be successful only if it could fall back on methods of interdiscursive and intermedial reference. Exemplary analyses of various methods occupied with this project area are contained in the third part of this volume. The analyses show in what way certain modes of stating and indicating, of speaking and expressing, and of their aesthetics emerge from the differences of approaches.

III. Apart from the individual work of the authors, all contributions are also a result of intense and continued discussions between the members of the research center. They have developed from the exchange of ideas regarding the exploration of problem-fields and they matured from debates on terms and methods of thought processes. In this respect the contributions are also a result of a sort of collective authorship that emerges as a welcome side effect from a longlasting research collaboration such as this one. The limited dimension of a book made selection necessary. This has created particular problems for us, the editors, since first of all we had to choose from a multiplicity of excellent contributions originating from this research center. Secondly, as members of the research center, and therefore of a research group, we did not want to exclude anyone. Members of the center whose contributions are not included in this volume will nevertheless recognize their contributions to the discussions included in the materials printed here. As editors we owe our thanks to all who have contributed to the discussions—especially to the members of the research center, but also to the colleagues of the three universities and last but not least to the numerous national and international guests who have supported the research done at the center with lectures, workshops, and in discussions. We would also like to thank Anna Bienefeld for the typesetting of this book. And our particular gratitude goes to Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky for the careful attention they gave to the transla-

15

Irmela Schneider, Erika Linz, and Ludwig Jäger tion of the essays as well as for their editorial help with the typographic layout. Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

16

Mediality: Concepts and Models

Differentiating Media JÜRGEN FOHRMANN Looking at terms like “technology,” “media” and, based on these, at “mediality” risks concluding with the stringent argument that has always been characteristic with over-determined theories: “The effects of technology do not occur on the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance” (McLuhan 18). Even if they should be relevant for social communication these effects of technology form media and create through them “the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” (McLuhan 8). Marshall McLuhan has put forth a demand from which according to him all media theory stems in maintaining that it does not suffice analyzing social communications regarding their forms, differentiating them into types of texts or genres and that it certainly is not sufficient to look only at contents. “For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watch-dog of the mind” (18). Forms as well as contents have to be conceived as productions of each respective medium (of this one and not of another). The respective form inevitably contains the traces of its constituting mediality. In other words (playing with Gregory Bateson’s by now famous quote): The medium is the difference that makes the difference. Or even—saluting Kant!—The medium is the emergence of form from its self-inflicted immaturity and dependence. It is difficult to refute these findings, particularly at this moment when digital technologies are in the winning lane and thereby contributing to their general acceptance and their leading place on the hit list of previous and new scholarly projects. However, it is at precisely this same moment that it becomes all the more urgent to look at the implications of these findings more closely. Central to the following analysis will therefore be the attempt to approach the magic formula ‘mediality’ (and its promises) a bit more closely.1 1

Especially concerning the apprehension of contemporary society as a completely mediatized one; see Maresch.

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Jürgen Fohrmann The fact that ‘mediality’ is antecedent and thus unavoidable and universal is as correct as it is non-observable. Therefore, it may be called one of those categories used as unifying formulas with the tendency to become undifferentiated and therefore indefinable. ‘Spirit’ is one of these terms that for a long time had to play a similar role: masked by these forms, a ‘spirit of the epoch’, of the saeculum, of ‘world history’, etc., works as a carrier but as one that at the same time is completely immaterial and can only be felt with mystic awe. Talking of ‘mediality,’ however, changes this role into a mirror of its argumentative context. Behind the forms a material carrier is demasked that supposedly sets apart forms and contents of the statement. The observation of this ‘demasking’ thereby is oscillating between visibility and invisibility, between audibility and non-audibility, between ‘trace’ and ‘blind spot.’2 “Characterizing the cultural format dealing with media, we can say that media remain the blind spot in the use of media,” Sybille Krämer has stated in her book Medien. Computer. Realität (74), continuing that the “formative strength of a medium is realized to its full potential in the dimensions of significance beyond the structures of a conventionalized semantics. It is the materiality of the medium that shapes the foundation for the ‘surplus’ of meaning…” (78-79). As a first example she notes that voice “is related to speech like an unintentional trace is related to an intentional sign” (79). Conceding this, we can conclude that “the medium is not simply the message but rather is the trace of the medium preserved in the message” (81). The white noise or the flickering of a channel in this sense would be that medial trace standing out from the distinct terminological phrase of a message. In order to mark this oscillation between visibility and invisibility only as a function (and fiction) of discourse, in the context of differentiating ‘material carrier—message/meaning’ it may be better to speak of the function of a trace taking over the aspect of an empty but originating principle playing against the full labeling of the fully defined form. Actually, this trace is per se undifferentiated and if it is to be observed then this is only possible as form and therefore as distinction. The white noise in the transmitter thus also becomes a form. A form, however, that instantly refers the listeners to the mediality of the medium, subjecting the medium as a medium to a comparative observational experiment. In the following pages I would like to argue that the function or the performance and the specific characteristics of media can only be reconstructed through a comparative analysis of media and that

2

As can easily be seen: the description uses media-metaphors itself.

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Differentiating Media a reflection of media accompanies this comparative analysis from the beginning. If, for example, Plato in the history of Theuth and Thamus in his Phaedrus discusses the fundamental arguments for and against the introduction of writing especially regarding the positively seen function of personal memory in an oral context, he is observing the function of a medium as medium in comparison with another medium. Only by observing the difference between writing and speech do we learn something about script in relation to a third element, a comparative parameter. Additionally, accepting that reflection occurs also in a medium it becomes clear that in trying to differentiate media we are always dealing with a quintuple relation. Medium a can be differentiated from medium b only in the context of a shared referential parameter c. The assessment likewise is taking place in a medium d, which as a rule in an intricate manner is identical with one of the qualified media. At the same time, the qualification takes place in a specific form e (a text, an image or the like). Thus by means of the medium script (d/a) disguised as oral conversation (b— a media-fiction) that as dialogue also fulfills a textual genre (e), Plato is observing the performance of memory (c) in oral speech (b) using the medium script (a). Schematically we can therefore note: • medium of differentiation d (often also simultaneously a or b) • form of differentiation e • medium to be determined a • differentiating medium b • referential parameter c Therefore anything that can be said about a medium only results from a differentiation of media within the framework of a quintuple relation. It does not result from any ontology of the medium. The resulting characteristics and definitions of the media are products of comparative analysis and the interests that lie behind them. From these premises we can deduct three observations.

First Observation That which we consider a medium has to be analyzed and traced back to another medium (recursivity). Quoting Martin Seel, we can say: “There are no final elements out of which the elements of all other media and their possible forms could have been formed” (247). By refusing to assume a final inventory for the assessment of media, Seel is basically aiming at the thesis that the relationship between material carrier and the use of this material carrier for the 21

Jürgen Fohrmann creation of form has to be thought relationally. If, for example, we take the instrument ‘voice’ as a ‘material carrier’, its articulation would be the technology that uses our physiological apparatus for the production of sound in order to create forms. The question is whether the event of sound-production is the medium or whether it is the speech that has been created by it. Continuing the questioning: Is script a medium in its own right or is it only the notation, the graphic formation of oral speech? However, if script is a medium sui generis, what then is the relationship of print to the medium script? Is print a medium in its own right or does it only normalize script? And what happens when voice is recorded, reproduced and played back or when script is recoded? Is this an amplification of the range of the same media or have we created new media? These questions cannot be answered abstractly because only in relation to specific (non-medial) comparative parameters can we maintain that a medium that emerged historically at a later date is an enhancement, an implementation, a transformation of an earlier medium or that we are dealing with a new medium. In that case the new media would be re-combinations or augmentations and so on of already existing media but in such a way that a qualitative jump resulting from a new technology would become visible. Such conclusions are necessarily defined by specific interests since they are using the specific media-attribution for the continuation of the argument as a causal principle for their contextual interpretations (more on this later). If we agreed with this, then the relativity of a second differentiation, namely the difference between medium and form, would have to be conceded as well.

Second Observation The differentiation between medium and form is also not an absolute one and has to be reasoned relationally. It is therefore the perspective of my view, i.e., my evaluation of the initial clause or of the constitutional correlation that determines what is ‘medium’ and what is ‘form’. Speech can be the medium of the form ‘script’,3 but script can also be the medium of the form ‘print’—or vice versa. Print is the medium in which script as form is ex‘press’ed; script is the medium in which speech is formed, etc. Confirming the specific difference of medium and form depends on the observational, rela-

3

See also the thoughts on speech and writing in Krämer, “Sprache”, esp. 92, 93.

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Differentiating Media tional choice in which both sides of the differentiation can substitute each other.4

Third Observation Thinking about the fact that medium and form can substitute each other is also touching on the difference between hardware and software and the continuing discussion regarding just what is hardware, what is software and what is wetware (to bring in the image of the human, that humid being),5 especially if we concede that practically everything is supposed to be an automatically controlled modulation of the hardware: “Constructing new generations of computers no longer means assembling the individual components mechanically or electrically. This would by far surpass the lives of all existing engineers. Constructing instead means accessing and retrieving all circuit libraries in the program control, to link them and to test them for an optimum. As an extreme example of what is called a technical drawing since the time of Gutenberg, a hardware design can overlap with its own simulation because the ensuing realization can be left to the hardware itself.” (Kittler, “Hardware” 124)

Postulating the preceding investigations, we can propose that the analyses of the capacity to define technically or ontologically what a medium is and what consequences are to be drawn from such ontologies on the one hand makes little sense. On the other hand, they represent the great promise that media theories give with wideranging interpretations. This can be observed to the present day in the infectious Laocoon discussion of the 18th century and its elaborate further applications differentiating an image with the help of simultaneity from script as something successive. Gottfried Boehm for example argues: “What we see as an image rests upon one single basic contrast: the contrast between a tightly structured surface and all that it includes as interior creations. […] That, which images in all their historical multiplicity ‘are’ as images, what 4

5

Here I am expanding Niklas Luhmann’s idea of the difference of medium and form. In my opinion this has to do not only with loose coupling (= medium) or firm coupling (= form) within the contextual frame of a reconstitution of mediality. It also has to do with the possibility of reciprocally substituting both elements in Luhmann’s differentiation when talking about media. As an example: ‘print’ is a form of the medium ‘script’ or is a medium in itself. For the differentiations and as an example for a pleading for hardware see Kittler, “Hardware.”

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Jürgen Fohrmann they ‘show’, what they ‘say’ is owed therefore to a visual basic contrast that at the same time is the birthplace of all visual meaning. Whatever a visual artist wanted to represent, whether in the dusky obscurity of prehistoric caves, in the sacral context of icon painting, in the inspired space of modern studios is owed its existence, its lucidity and its effectiveness to the particular optimization of that element called ‘iconic difference.’” (29f)6

We could also think in this context of the work of Ong and Havelock concerning oral societies (also see Goody) where, according to them, all knowledge was passed on by personal carriers, for example rhapsodists. Here forms specific to the medium developed since it was left to the rhapsodist’s memory to ‘tell’ of things and his way of telling his tales has found its form through the working of his personal memory. He had to keep on using repetitive parts or partial repetitions in order to relieve his memory for a moment, thereby releasing capacities for new expressions. This corresponded to a specific textual structure (i.e., a tight syntax and a preference for parallel constructions, etc.). Ong and Havelock perceived a strong connection between the medium orality and its textual form in relation to a third element, namely a specific process of memorizing characterizing oral cultures. They argue that everything must have changed with the introduction of script. Such a theory therefore operates with strong assumptions and its real promise is that these hypotheses can be ‘truly’ proven in the course of the argument. From the point of view of media studies these may be early examples. The type of argument, however, is still a current one. At present, for example the ‘laus hypertexti’—the law of hypertext—is preached. It intones the superiority of the paradigmatic referential structure in comparison to the linearity of the reading process that is bound to script. As the yardstick for measuring this superiority, it nonetheless serves a rather undifferentiated concept of complexity defining ‘transformations’ one-sidedly as gain (see Bolter, Writing; Landow). In this manner, hypertext is understood as a transformational form. As a starting example the quite thoughtful statement by Knud Böhle, “… that hypertexts succeed in one instance which is denied to the book. While a book’s technology of the text can in the end find no means—despite all references, registers, etc.—to actually link locations with interrelated meanings, hypertexts allow for operative procedures […]: operative references in the text located on the user interface.” (123)

6

See also Gernot Böhme’s sentence: “An image is a gap in being” (7). Mitchell relativizes this.

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Differentiating Media Consequently, we are dealing with the continual work on an infinitely complex concept of texture,7 for which all kinds of pretexts are found: “The essay as a discursive, literary and scholarly form has a lot in common with the principles of the hypertext: it works with fragments, revolts against closed systems, constructions of terminology as ‘work in progress’, standpoints of cultural criticism, crystallization of single elements through movement…” (Idensen 161)

Or else, the hypertext is a continuation of techniques already attempted by authors like Sterne in his Tristram Shandy. On its part, hypertext is amplified through the World Wide Web that could be looked at itself as a huge hypertext, therefore exceeding hitherto existing forms of intertextuality: “The internet universe readable by machines can be seen as the exterritorializing of an intertextuality that was only implicitly contained in traditional texts. The simultaneous referential structure of this net realizes the idea that the meaning of texts is the epitome of their reference to absent texts.” (Krämer, “Vom Mythos” 100)

Even if the analyses of such assets by individual media are often comparative, they nevertheless refer only to an abstract comparative (the one medium can do something better than another). But on such a degree of abstraction as mentioned here the arguments can also always be exactly inverted; respectively the weakness of one mode of linkage can be defined as the strength of another. The iconic difference that, according to Boehm, is created in a painting allows for another type of insight than the palimpsest of the Windows’ screen surface. Reading printed material has other, situational advantages. And the assumed linear linkage-rule of the syntagma in our processing operations is continually interrupted by paradigmatic substitutions (referring back to de Saussure and Jakobson); these are richer than hypertexts, since they displace instead of repeating. It may be that the synaesthetic perceptions of oral communication allow for a lower complexity of the arguments, but they furnish a multiplicity of additional information that is of decisive importance to position living subjects in social contexts. In other words, the comparative parameters remain useless without framing and the frame is always geared to the processes of social and cultural evolution.

7

See for example the statement: “It depends on the material from which and the procedure by which they are made” (Baßler 15). As an attempt to read the metaphor of texture consistently for media history see Flusser.

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Jürgen Fohrmann The analysis of media will obtain hegemony in the field of cultural analysis when it will be possible to establish proof for the idea that processes of social change are significantly influenced by media. Then media can be called an over-determining power; they can even be used to perspectivize social evolution within the framework of continuity theories. The point of departure for such considerations is often a scheme of media evolution in which the media are firstly established as key media in order to then become independent, within these processes thereby structurally contaminating the other media and with them social conditions. To quote Marshall McLuhan once more: “We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture” (16). In order to understand what demands are connected to the reconstruction of media evolutions, we have to consistently turn to McLuhan’s image of the native. Those who can say who is and who is not the native, will underscore the advantage of the medium. Therefore, we have a war of media that in itself can be written as a history of wars. Its hypothesis is that if an epochal key medium can be found (like the computer today), then this ‘key’ that opens doors at the same time painfully slams it in the face of other media. We are dealing here with cutthroat competition between media, the modeling of which I will try to delineate in the following showing five variants of media history.

First Variant: Theory of Evolution Media history is evolution of media. It therefore represents media ‘differentiation’ and ‘differentiation of media’. ‘Media differentiation’ will mean that in the course of technological/human history an increasing store of media has shaped itself that either first emerged from the human body or technically delegated the possibilities of the human body outside, constituting—according to McLuhan—a sort of prosthesis with the help of which the wishes and needs of mediality could be boosted and differentiated. This became an imperative for expansion touching upon individual media and forcing them to internally differentiate to the extent that they had to fulfill tasks that another medium had already fulfilled. Such a differentiation of media leads to a balancing of gain/loss, depending on the perspective. However, it will always be an effect of media differentiation on the basis of evolutionary assumptions using the idea of a key medium. This affects not only the quality, but also the quantity of the other media, as in the following model: during the upcoming ‘spring’ of computers, the ‘autumn’ of the book-market is now once again yielding much fruit in order to survive.

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Differentiating Media

Second Variant: Philosophy of History Here, the idea of key medium is altered into a philosophy of history à la Hegel. It is based on the idea that every medium has its own time defined by a general social acceptance the significance of which is then decided by the actuality of the specific medium (see for example Zielinski 11; see also the commentary by Schumacher 96). All constructions in the entire field of philosophy of history can be found in texts of this type dominated by notions of decline and prognosis, by “cease to exist” or “will exist.” This variant then serves as a remake of known historiographic models. We can therefore underline generally that the so-called evolution of media is rarely being described within notions of theories of evolution; surprisingly, as a rule we experience the renewal of concepts of historiography of the 19th instead of the 20th or 21st century. This same appraisal to my mind is also true for the …

Third Variant: Political Approach Based on the progressive development of technical media the imperative of escalation finds its own in war. The thesis is that almost all of media technology originally is a technology of war. On this note it may be a nice joke to quote Kittler’s dictum that “the entertainment industry in every meaning of the word is an abuse of army equipment” (Grammophone 96f). Research in media of this orientation has pointed to the close connection between military research and the development of media technology regarding the telegraph, radio, amplifiers, radar, television, computer and many others. These then will be used for nonmilitary purposes since their scope is heterogeneous. (However, scholars continually point out that along with the military developments a transformation of the civil realm also took place that fundamentally changed society [see Hagen].) In this technology of war we can observe the principle of the Olympic games turned to seriousness: “altius—citius—fortius” (higher, swifter, stronger). An advantage in range, in speed and in power is to be acquired that can be converted into superiority over one’s opponent, thereby becoming decisive for the outcome of the war. The use of media is included in a concept of the political as the labeling and dispatching with the adversary, the enemy—chief witness for the exponents of these ideas is, not quite wrongly, Carl Schmitt. The history of the structures of this evolution of media is tentatively transferred back into Ereignisgeschichte (event-focused historiography) in order to become visible as a new, surprising

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Jürgen Fohrmann weapon in the friend-enemy constellation. Then it is only the further development of this model when translated into the match Silicon Valley against the rest of the world. And aren’t there other offshoots of this type of apparatus-oriented thought as well which constantly pull new scientific discoveries like omnipotent rabbits out of the magician’s hat only in order to execute a blitzkrieg on the other cultural theorists? Whereupon follows the film The Silence of the Young Men.

Fourth Variant: Typological Approach To identify this approach, we can open almost any of the contributions to current discussions of media, especially those discussions celebrating the farewell from the Gutenberg Galaxy joyfully greeting the end of book culture, or those that welcome hypertexts and the web as a final deliverance from the chains of linear structures as a rule presented by script; they simultaneously attempt to conceptualize them as the realization of poststructuralist theses on presence and différance. As an example we might say with Jay D. Bolters: “In some sense the Web is the fulfillment of the promise of hypertext. A standalone hypertext is a contradiction, because a hypertext always wants to reach out beyond itself and make links with others texts. The implied goal is one single, all-encompassing hypertext […].” (“Internet” 42f)

This completion, according to him, is a liberation of the reader who now has a completely new control over the text, thereby creating in the end a concept of personality and social graces that is commensurate with the new times. Similar ideas can be found in POP describing a DJ-culture whose practices of scratching and sampling are seen as emancipating activities that finally allow the signifiers to dance. Here sometimes curious symbioses with quite dated concepts arise, as for example in Ulf Poschardt: “With very few exceptions the DJ has hitherto remained an unknown entity to scholarship. DJs are unstructured ‘nature,’ mostly unaffected by the episteme” (17). Also Tricia Rose, a theoretician of Rap, is concerned with reinscription or ‘homage:’ “For the most part, sampling, not unlike versioning practices in Caribbean Music, is about paying homage, an invocation of another’s voice to help you to say what you want to say” (117). All these assessments carry an Adventist moment within them that can be called typological: that which one has expected—has expected most ardently—now is fulfilled. Hartmut Winkler has right-

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Differentiating Media fully questioned these theories with regard to their libidinal economy, underlining with regard to the computer that “the new medium seems to be a veritable machine of desire” (11). This libidinal economy reaches its goal in the …

Fifth Variant: The Final Victory of Machines Its prerequisite is the computer’s ascent to the throne and with it that of the digital world. The basis of such theories is the key differentiation ‘analog’—‘digital’ which then is connected to terms like ‘representation’ and ‘simulation’ or methods of (re-)combining. For example, if painting is a ‘copying’ act (to quote an old opinion), thereby however making its methods invisible in order to change its ‘like reality’ into ‘reality,’ then—according to this thesis—the computer breaks with representation. It simulates reality by identifying its visual creations as effects of faster and faster mathematical operations. Its combinatorics leads to quite differentiated possibilities of visualization by creating a product with electric/non-electric configurations that claim for themselves to be simulation and not representation. A signifier for this model is the Taylorization of production that can also be seen as the basic method of computers: “For mechanization is achieved by the fragmentation of any process and by putting the fragmented parts in a series” (McLuhan 11f). For Friedrich Kittler then everything logically leads to the invention of the DIN, claiming that it was again “far from being accidental” that “the German Standards Committee DNA with its German Industrial Norm DIN was formed in World War I” (“Gleichschaltungen” 259). It is a matter of deconstructing and reconstructing according to standards; it is a matter of methods that are not forced to select according to any meaningfulness. This is already appreciated with the phonograph: “Media technology could not proceed in a more exact fashion. Thanks to the phonograph, science is for the first time in possession of a machine that records noises regardless of so-called meaning. Written protocols were always unintentional selections of meaning” (Kittler, Grammophone 85).8 All this is further intensified by the computer. The decisive point is that its simulatory activity at the same time refers us back to the medium since it seems to not only represent reality but also claims that it is again simulating the forms of reality created by other media. The computer thereby becomes the simulation of all other media of the present history; it is the medium of media including all

8

Regarding this see also the criticism by Reck, esp. 232.

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Jürgen Fohrmann other technical media—this, at least, is the assertion. This implies— if not a point of philosophy of history—at least a punch line of media history. If then the computer by itself is able to invalidate all other media, it becomes the super medium, thereby digitally ending the history of the analog era and fabricating a history of media as a revelation of the calculatory impetus that can be met by human beings only with computer literacy if they don’t want to seem analphabets. However, according to Norbert Bolz, this techné will not really compensate for the mental overload of human beings either: “Mankind nowadays mainly seems to be a bottleneck of communication design—multimedia society has problems with the ‘measure of man.’ […] Man is the bottleneck of information society since he is unable to process information in a parallel manner. There is an estimate that 98% of all information is not processed consciously. Actually, only a minuscule section of the world appears on the monitor of perception. It only handles 40 bits per second. Therefore, perception has to eradicate information. We can rephrase this: attentiveness is the most meager of our resources.” (33)

If human beings disappeared, information would finally come to its own in machines. The enumeration of variants has shown that the ‘coding’ of the term ‘medium’ creates differences that demand the highest attention, especially regarding its framing by theories of history or by contexts that go beyond history. Hardly anything is more ‘political’ than the politics of frames of mediality and media theory should also turn to such frame analysis. Below, I would like to return to the variant of theories of evolution, thereby pursuing once more my central conclusion of the political character of the term medium. My initial thesis maintains that all definitions and terms of media are biased because of the systemic context through which and within which they are taking over a function that can be called political in the widest sense. If this thesis is correct, then we neither have a theory of individual nor of general media that would be independent of context (analogous: semiotics or general theories of communication), and it could then not be any more than a simply selectively implemented observation of a second order (i.e., an observation that observes how observation has taken place so far) which then would lead to an analysis of the material again and again. My point of departure is the assumption that the term medium can itself be treated like a “black box” insofar as it receives its classification only with its connection to a frame for which it is taking over a function. Whatever this classification then may be, it will always be dovetailed with the term, the process or the notion of communication and not only when addressing media. 30

Differentiating Media Presupposing this, we may conclude that the term medium is always defined by the place allocated to it by the different levels of communication. Roughly speaking one could differentiate: • structural coupling of psychic systems and society • forms of social communication • machine communication (machine—machine) • structural coupling of machine and human communication Theories of individual media as a rule mix all these levels (more on this later). Generalizing theories, however, that already shaped the arguments in the humanities, cultural and social studies before the discussions on mediality include media into their concepts. A semiotic position for example sees media as variables that create difference in meaning within general sign processes;9 the perspective of empirical communications theory of social conditions studies media as variables for the analysis of scopes and effects (empirical studies of TV or reading, etc.). Sociological theories with political implications already very early on include the analysis of media within their criticism of the cultural industry (see Horkheimer and Adorno), propose a ‘modular construction system’ of media (see Enzensberger), or observe the changes of “information retrieval” (see for example Krippendorff). Theories of information with a mathematical background regard media as those channels that create or minimize redundancies, thereby controlling the path of information retrieval (see Kümmel). Anthropological or psychoanalytical concerns look at media as variables for the attempts to increase or shift desires, for changes of affects or interests or else for modifications of spatial or temporal changes. And a poststructuralist perspective looks at certain specificities of media as performances of meaning that in essence consist of a metonymic movement leading to a network that subverts linearity. By integrating media as variables into already existing theoretical propositions, all these theories create further differentiations thereby enlarging the setting of terminological pairs. Looking at this from a systems theoretical perspective that deals with the scope of theories, we might envision the following: Regarding for example ‘forms of social communication’ after differentiating the media of individual and mass communication and then looking more closely at mass media, we would look initially at the social organization of communication and ask the question which mass media are playing which role for this organization (paradigmatically Luhmann, Reality). As possible functions we would quickly be able to name (diagram 4):

9

On Semiotics as meta-science see for example Posner.

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Jürgen Fohrmann • •

• • •

production of information, control of information and competition of information communicative success and its scope. Here as a rule one would argue quantitatively, at the same time including concepts of time and space: With this medium information reaches its goal faster; this medium occupies a greater field, etc. safeguarding and saving information access regulations forms of communication/information

For instance, in turning to access policies and its coding in the individual social substructures, it becomes visible that politics, economy, the educational system or jurisdiction envision media very differently—and from the logic of their system they have to. In politics, access is often discussed regarding the question of a functioning or non-functioning public, while in economy it is seen merely as universalizing consumers or markets; the educational system conceives of it as socialization through media, and jurisdiction as the codifying of legal regulatory framework, of accepting or denying an ethic of media. The starting point of all subsystems of society is the following: only media allow for access, but the way in which these subsystems describe the access and the media is highly dissimilar, since both access and media are developed from the specific problem areas of the respective social subsystems (autopoiesis). This is also true for all connected terms that have the same formal status so that we instantly can ask: what do I want to analyze when I am looking at ‘interactivity.’ Shifting to discipline: Is it media theory that should answer the questions about the role of media evolution in scientific systems or are these questions subject matter of the history of science that includes considerations of media?10 Can and must the fact that mediality is unavoidable entail a self-contained scholarly subject or do we need as many fields and disciplines of media theory as we have media in social relations? What I am asking is whether media should be dismissed from their systems-specific encoding, thereby making them into an object of investigation of an autonomous academic field. I would like to plead for a qualified ‘yes’. This ‘yes’ makes allowances for the necessary increase of levels of observation without which there would be no possibility to self-monitor media theories

10 As a good example see Leonhard et al. Here every one of the collected individual sciences has the chance to declare itself as media studies and the other disciplines that were not focused on in the particular article then can be declared ancillary or neighboring sciences. The option chosen most is neighboring sciences.

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Differentiating Media and media scholarship. Only in this way the methods can be observed that as transcriptions of metaphors and as transfer of concepts characterize processes of media theory. Such an observation of a third order, however, only seems sensible alternating with those studies that use a media-related perspective for the analysis of a specific frame. For the difference made by one medium can only be (re)constructed by analyzing the difference of media in such a way that does not let it run dry as it does when it is trying to define the ‘being-as-it-is’ (So-Sein) of a medium, i.e., when defining the dispositive of media ontologically, functioning like an algorithm for the explanation of cultural phenomena. If the algorithm takes its point of departure from the “repetition of a possibility” (Kittler, Grammophone 75), the systems that are processing meaning will continually react by implementing the selection between communication and information (to remind us only of basic considerations of Niklas Luhmann [see Social]). But this selection precisely cannot be thought of as a mere incident of repetition but only as iteration, i.e., the simultaneous occurrence of reference and difference. The ontology of media, on the other hand, parts with social systems placing appliance-based processing at its center. Regarding cultural studies, this is not comprehensive enough; if we always know the effects of a medium previously then every historical analysis becomes a mere application, and once we have told the story of the ‘appearance’ and the success of this medium any further research will essentially consist of redundant duplication. For this reason the difference made by a medium will only become productive within an approach of cultural studies; it is a difference for ‘something’ and it is this ‘something’ that is always vindicated by historical and cultural frames that have been reconstructed also in a chain of deviances. That these are cultural frames is grounded in the fact that form is unavoidable: it does not permit distilling a ‘pure content’ that can be analyzed as a substratum without form or age like a ‘langue.’ Thus the historical field is necessarily opened up and inevitably the anti-historicist effects of the enthusiastic or apocalyptic centering on the present with its quickly circulating discussion markers and its narcissistic agents for whom no time is fast enough is also politically thwarted. With a single discipline as the point of departure, a transdisciplinary approach is then required leading to a general media theory in those cases in which the necessity of third order observation arises. It is an essential corrective and considers the transcendental conditions within which one’s business is transacted; no less and no more. Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

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Jürgen Fohrmann

Works Cited Baßler, Moritz. Die Entdeckung der Textur: Unverständlichkeit in der Kurzprosa der emphatischen Moderne 1910-1916. Tübingen, 1994. Print. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago, 1972. Print. Boehm, Gottfried. “Die Wiederkehr der Bilder.” Was ist ein Bild? Ed. Boehm. Munich, 1995. 11-38. Print. Böhle, Knud. “Inkunablenzeit: Theoreme, Paratexte, Hypertexte. Eine Nachlese.” Warnke, Coy, and Tholen 119-150. Böhme, Gernot. Theorie des Bildes. Munich, 1999. Print. Bolter, Jay David. “Das Internet in der Geschichte der Technologien des Schreibens.” Münker and Roesler 37-55. (“The Internet in the History of Technologies of Writing.” MS). —. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsday, 1991. Print. Bolz, Norbert. Die Wirtschaft des Unsichtbaren. Munich, 1999. Print. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. “Baukasten zu einer Medientheorie.” Kursbuch 20 (1979): 160-210. Print. Flusser, Vilém. Lob der Oberflächlichkeit: Für eine Phänomenologie der Medien (Praise of Superficiality/Surfaces). N.p., n.d. Print. Goody, Jack. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge, 1986. Print. Hagen, Wolfgang. “Der Radioruf.” Hard War/Soft War. Ed. Martin Stingelin and Wolfgang Scherer. Munich, 1991. 243-273. Print. Havelock, Eric A. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven, 1986. Print. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Dialectic of Enlightenment. Ed. Horkheimer and Adorno. London, 1997. 120-167. Print. Idensen, Heiko. “Hypertext—Fröhliche Wissenschaft?” Warnke, Coy, and Tholen 151-190. Kittler, Friedrich A. “Gleichschaltungen: Über Normen und Standards der elektronischen Kommunikation.” Geschichte der Medien. Ed. Manfred Faßler and Wulf Halbach. Munich, 1998. 255267. Print. —. Grammophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, 1999. Print. —. “Hardware, das unbekannte Wesen.” Krämer, Medien 119-132. Krämer, Sybille, ed. Medien. Computer. Realität: Wirklichkeitsvorstellungen und Neue Medien. Frankfurt a.M., 1998. Print. —. “Das Medium als Spur und als Apparat.” Krämer, Medien 73-94.

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Differentiating Media —. “Sprache und Schrift oder: Ist Schrift verschriftete Sprache?” Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 15.1 (1996): 92-112. Print. —. “Vom Mythos ‘Künstliche Intelligenz’ zum Mythos ‘Künstliche Kommunikation’ oder: Ist eine nicht-anthropomorphe Beschreibung von Internet-Interaktion möglich?” Münker and Roesler 83-107. Krippendorff, Klaus. “Some Principle of Information Storage and Information in Society.” General Systems 20 (1975): 15-35. Print. Kümmel, Albert. “Mathematische Medientheorien.” Medientheorien: Eine Einführung. Ed. Daniela Kloock and Angela Spahr. 2nd ed. Munich, 2000. 205-236. Print. Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore, 1992. Print. Leonhard, Joachim-Felix, et al., eds. Medienwissenschaft: Ein Handbuch zur Entwicklung der Medien und Kommunikationsformen. Vol. 1. Berlin, 1999. Print. Luhmann, Niklas. The Reality of the Mass Media (Cultural Memory in the Present). Stanford, 2000. Print. —. Social Systems. Stanford, 1995. Print. Maresch, Rudolf. “Mediatisierung: Dispositiv der Öffentlichkeiten 1800/2000.” Medien und Öffentlichkeit: Positionen—Symptome— Simulationsbrüche. Ed. Maresch. Munich, 1996. 11-29. Print. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. New York, 1965. Print. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Der Pictorial Turn.” Privileg Blick: Kritik der visuellen Kultur. Ed. Christian Kravagna. Berlin, 1997. 15-40. Print. Münker, Stefan, and Alexander Roesler, eds. Mythos Internet. Frankfurt a.M., 1997. Print. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London, 1982. Print. Poschardt, Ulf. DJ-Culture. Frankfurt a.M., n.d. Print. Posner, Roland. “Acht Thesen zum wissenschaftstheoretischen Status der Semiotik und zu den Aufgaben des Handbuchs der Semiotik.” Medien/Kultur: Schnittstellen zwischen Medienwissenschaft, Medienpraxis und gesellschaftlicher Kommunikation. Ed. Knut Hickethier and Siegfried Zielinski. Berlin, 1991. 219-224. Print. Reck, Hans Ulrich. “Inszenierte Imagination—zu Programmatik und Perspektiven einer historischen Anthropologie der Medien.” Inszenierte Imagination. Ed. Wolfgang Müller-Funk and Reck. Vienna, 1996. 231-244. Print. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hannover, 1994. Print. Schumacher, Heidemarie. Fernsehen fernsehen: Modelle der Medienund Fernsehtheorie. Cologne, 2000. Print.

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Jürgen Fohrmann Seel, Martin. “Medien der Realität und Realität der Medien.” Krämer, Medien 244-268. Warnke, Martin, Wolfgang Coy, and Georg Christoph Tholen, eds. Hyperkult. Basel, 1997. Print. Winkler, Hartmut. Docuverse: Zur Medientheorie der Computer. Regensburg, 1997. Print. Zielinski, Siegfried. Audiovisionen: Kino und Fernsehen als Zwischenspiele der Geschichte. Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1989. Print.

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The Medium as Form FRIEDRICH BALKE AND LEANDER SCHOLZ

I. In the philosophical tradition from Descartes to Luhmann a recurring thought about mediality can be observed, i.e., the thought that the specific attribute of what a medium can be lies precisely in its having no specific qualities, thereby making it into an excellent carrier of inscriptions.1 As such, mediality appears to be a passive supportive element that can only in contrast to a “thing” or a “form” become in itself thematic. Therefore, the attention of these considerations is directed at the difference between thing and medium, or form and medium, underscoring the difference between a describable shape and shapelessness as the backdrop for this shape. Whereas form and thing have clearly defined borders, mediality is characterized by a state of latency and potentiality. Concurrently with this view on mediality, however, it seems that within this hyletic passivity there permanently resides a ‘desire’ urging the medium to evolve towards ‘becoming animated’ by means of its active form.2 According to Luhmann, the medium—apart from providing loosely linked elements for the creation of form—is not only invisible, unobservable and ‘unformed’, it is also not “self-sufficient” (Kunst 167). Although—unlike in the traditional terminology of form—the form generated from the available and actualized elements on the backdrop of the medium now appears as the volatile and illusory element and the medium conversely appears as the actual one which contrary to the form does not vanish (see Krämer, “Form”), the constitutive role that thereby is attributed to mediality is in the same moment revoked. In this respect its potentiality or—according to Dirk Baecker—its “maximally accessible links” can be envisioned only as allocations for the generation of form (182). Seen this way, the medium only appears as an indeterminate sphere in the sense 1 2

Regarding the continuity of this reasoning see Binczek. Regarding this see Derrida’s analysis of Husserl’s term hylé as a non-intentional component of experience in his “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology”.

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Friedrich Balke and Leander Scholz that this sphere still seems to be determinable. Therefore, following the philosophical tradition, the attention of this concept of mediality is focused again on determinability in the horizon of indeterminacy without asking whether it is not the very threshold-realm of mediality that in itself denotes an activity that consists of more than simply becoming determinate. When Fritz Heider says in his by now classical text Thing and Medium that “media events are significant … only in so far as they are coupled with something important” while otherwise by themselves they are for the most part “nothing,”3 then perhaps it shows most clearly to what extent the question of mediality appears solely on the horizon of a reduction (see Balke). In systems theory, the attention to mediality as a transition to generating forms therefore is heir to a promise that has already been characteristic for theories of symbolic generalization; namely, to make plurality operatively available, thereby uniformly classifying it as “organized complexity” without “destroying” the complexity that is supposed to reproduce itself by simultaneously “constrain[ing] what is possible” and “mak[ing] visible other possibilities” (Luhmann, Social 97). Consequently, the potentiality of mediality always remains an “exclusion” of other possibilities that becomes visible only in the perspective of actual form production as an “inclusion of exclusion” (Baecker 181). To a certain extent any actual production of form is supposed to co-reproduce without loss the potentiality of mediality as the horizon of resources. Despite all differences to the traditional notion of form in this conception of mediality, there still lingers the legacy of a philosophical concept of the world from Kant to Husserl in which reduction is a transcendental condition regarding the generation of form; thus, the question asking what actually a medium could be continues to be considered from the perspective of form. This means that the traditional attribution of passive and active remains untouched. That the medium does not wear out and at the same time tends to “nothingness” if it is not marked by form is therefore only the other side of this reductive notion of the world, revealing that with such a differentiation of medium and form it is true that form in fact not only substantiates the medium but also that the form remains undisturbed by the medium. Against and at the same time with this tradition one could, however, also invert the direction of the argument asking what the latency of the medium can possibly achieve without merging it with the finality of generating form. One would then have to ask what kind of limit or dislimitation, what range of framing or deframing is 3

The end of the sentence containing the remark that “by themselves they are for the most part ‘nothing’” is left out in the above translation [BP/DR; see the German original (Heider, “Ding” 329)].

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The Medium as Form meant with mediality—thereby differentiating it from fixed concepts of borders or frames of the thing and of form where making the decision between “something” and “nothing” always seems to be necessary. If the systematic place of the medium in the above-mentioned tradition always appears as a site of transition, i.e., as a threshold state between two firm conditions then, differing from this tradition, we would like to concentrate on providing this state with somewhat firmer borders by talking of latent, (only seemingly tending to “Nothingness”) transitional realms in the sense of prefigurations that themselves do not disappear behind the creation of form but that conversely are able to contribute to the disappearance of specific form-creations. Gilles Deleuze in his theory of film has spoken of the fact that a close-up of a face changes it “into pure raw material” of affects, “its hylé” (see also Balke 411). Thus the achievement of mediality is not only that it puts loosely linked elements at our disposal, but also that the filmic frame allows changing arbitrary points in space into “intense places.” This type of mediality that in principle differs from addressing a thing, a form or a person and that cannot be understood as undifferentiatedness or de-differentiation, seems to be characterized by a defined revocation of identification so that the elements of a medium can in the first place appear as elements, thereby serving the creation of form. The concept of media as a quantity of elements that is only constituted as quantity by the relation of form seems to suggest asking the question of an antecedent homogeneity of these elements or of the process of becoming elemental.4 While systems theory explains the difference between medium and form by the identification of the medium through its form, this differentiation should now be taken seriously from the inverse perspective and it should be asked in what respect the indeterminacy of mediality as indeterminacy becomes a determining factor. Unlike the addressing and individuation of things and persons, the mediated access should be described as a “watergate” that as boundary or frame differs from a fixed boundary of a thing in that through it zones of indeterminacy are created.5 Then, the historic-systematic location of mediality would consist in a dissociative and disfigurative form of accessing and therefore would not have the complete spectrum of alternatives as alternatives in store that can always be included as excluded possibilities; it would rather first constitute the elements as elements that differentiate inclusion and exclusion.

4 5

Jürgen Link for example has described the “Galton sieve” as a “watergate” for the social process of normalizing (237-246). Étienne Balibar has emphatically called attention to this form of the political management of boundaries (158-163).

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Friedrich Balke and Leander Scholz

II. Sybille Krämer has fixed the two poles between which according to her the present media-theoretical considerations develop with the question: “Do media transfer sense or do they create it?” (“Erfüllen” 80). The suggested answer changes the alternative contained in the question into a conjunction: Media create sense by transferring it. The transferring activity does not leave the transferred elements unchanged since it is carrying out a specific operation of embodiment by giving it a form or by creating a phenomenon. Media then do not only operate on phenomena; they provide the possibility of emergence for something that normally would remain below the threshold of perception or awareness by making it into a phenomenon, into an event that socio-culturally ‘counts.’ To quote Husserl—who is in the present theoretical media discussions often not named but who is nevertheless omnipresent—media can explain the peculiar observation that “one and the same supply of hyletic data can be the common basis of two superimposed [and possibly excluding each other, FB/LS] perceptions” (“Modalisierung” 92). From such a phenomenological or cultural-anthropological perspective of the theory of media, media seem to present themselves as the instances or agents of what Husserl has argued under the problematic title of “modalization of experience.” “Media,” we could then formulate, “stage historically configured potentials for the cultural practice of representation” (Krämer, “Erfüllen” 85) (additionally dividing this representation more specifically into the two main registers of ‘staging’ and ‘transcribing’). In the general argument of phenomenology, what we perceive is always available only as ‘shadow’ effects; it only shows from a certain aspect that—while imposing itself at the same time—points to the fact that something else, which is indispensable for the appearance of the object, remains beneath the limit of actual perception. One therefore can say: “Media have latent effects” (Krämer, “Erfüllen” 81). In philosophizing, especially on media, the importance lies not only in what questions are being asked, but also in where one searches for the answers. It seems to us that the propositions and theories on the role of media theory in philosophy have not significantly gone beyond Husserl’s analysis of the problem that identifies in each actual act of perception a present “core of a phenomenon” to which a “system of references” that structures perception is attached, but that is nevertheless not a given in the same way as the core of this phenomenon. From this, Husserl infers a small phenomenological pedagogy or didactics which has long become an ethics of media theorists: Media could possibly be defined as that “system of references” that confers its real volume—or rather its ‘bodily

40

The Medium as Form form’—to everything existing even though it does not lie at the center of perception. According to Husserl, what we perceive calls out to us in these references: “There is still more to see here, turn me so you can see all my sides, let your gaze run through me, … open me up [the imperative of the techno-philosophical variant of media studies, FB/LS], divide me up; keep on looking me over again and again, turning me to see all sides. You will get to know me like this, all that I am …” (Analyses 41)

As this small didactics of media research illustrates, Husserl’s impulse obviously points to the reanimation of the great philosophical tradition of theoria that was disrupted by the objectivism of the modern sciences. A large percentage of the research being done in media is ultimately impressed by this idea of a more comprehensive perception; scholars are especially concerned with “making the invisible conditions of sign-usage and interpretation thematic”—and this then probably means visible. This interest in opening up the “silent, presignificative procedures of signification” (Krämer, “Erfüllen” 89) is moreover connected with a certain form of ethics/aesthetics that can be summarized in the sentence: “The human form of creativity lies in the change of perspective” (90). Even if we happily agree with this, the question nevertheless remains whether such an acceptance of change of perspective is a characteristic of media-research or whether it is not rather a socially and culturally honored attitude in modern societies in general.

III. Be this as it may, media theory and media research in the realm of phenomenology continue to see themselves as observers of latencies or ‘blind spots.’ In a way, they are calling out to each other ‘I can see something you can’t see.’ However, this striving for a maximized complete cognition of one’s own object of attention (curiositas) is too unspecific, since it has for a long time already been normalized as a cognitive disposition of the sciences so that we cannot see in it the catalyst for a new discipline or a new direction of research in the humanities. Considering the recent plurality of suggestions for the definition of media, the possibility to differentiate between medium and form has been increasingly focused upon. However, regarding the history of philosophy, as a general rule it was not noted that this differentiation gains most of its plausibility from the fact that it is projected onto the difference between potentiality (medium) and actuality (form). This is especially prevalent in the work of Niklas

41

Friedrich Balke and Leander Scholz Luhmann who interestingly enough wants to keep the term medium away from all connotations of the ‘old’ terminology for media in order to see it as a realm of almost unlimited possibilities. Such a positioning of the term from our point of view for the following reason alone is counterintuitive since with it we are not thinking of a function of possibility but of a function of existence (Michel Foucault) that ensures that from an “open majority of possible connections” only certain ‘structural patterns’ are chosen and realized. Therefore, Luhmann strangely enough marks meaning as the “most general medium” (Kunst 173), thereby opposing all opinions that relate mediality to the non-meaningful conditions of the emergence of meaning. The term meaning, however, is owed to a systematic borrowing from the phenomenological concept of perception just sketched out insofar as meaning always appears under two aspects: as actualized meaning (form) and as infinite “referential surplus” (medium). Thanks to the differentiation of medium and form we know that “there is always something else” (Luhmann, Kunst 174). To us, this generalized awareness of contingency does not seem sufficient in order to establish a usable analytical media-concept. The fact that in everything presented also something else is revealed as long as we are prepared to change the perspective is a truism that completely masks the conditions of the concrete selection of meaning and the executing selectors, or, respectively, relocates them into the instance of a choosing subject or system. Much as Luhmann is also opening up his arguments for media research, it only has his interest insofar as he “encourages thinking about other possibilities, i.e., to tentatively variate forms” (Kunst 170, our emphasis). Forms that ‘appear conscious of media’ acquire more leeway in repeatedly adapting to quickly changing circumstances: “Thus forms are always stronger, i.e., more assertive, than the medium itself. The medium does not offer resistance to them” (169). However, quoting Michel Foucault, we “must rather question the divisions or groupings with which we have become so familiar” (Archaeology 22) instead of continuing to rely on the assertiveness of forms and attempting to recognize in the sphere of mediality a pool of variations that can inexhaustibly be exploited. In Luhmann’s Kunst der Gesellschaft (Art of Society), containing his most extensive considerations on the differentiation of medium and form, the determination is astonishing with which all those “completely finalized syntheses” and “groupings” of the history of literature (authors, genres, schools, epochs) or of the history of art are being held onto, as much as to the seemingly more solid unity of book and work. The analysis of media is differentiated from such analyses of form by the fact that it does not refer the given form back to a (creative) origin nor does it let it emerge from a ‘blind process of selection’ originat-

42

The Medium as Form ing in ‘evolution’; rather it refers the form back to the conditions of its appearance and its force of reproduction. The analysis of media cannot exist without a concept of materiality that certainly has to be differentiated from that metaphysical concept of ‘inert matter’ from which Luhmann carefully distinguishes his own media-concept— admittedly, however, at the price of a doubtful spiritualization of the media-concept. (Like the spirit, the medium can only be observed through its products or rather, through its forms and not as such.) Today’s philosophy of media agrees with Luhmann that media above all are not supposed to be ‘things’. But are they consequently therefore already ‘pure possibilities’? Luhmann’s ‘possibilitism’ of media is itself reacting to a crisis of classical object-ontology that can be described media-historically and he is attempting to overcome it with the help of an economy of media. Despite all his criticism of Heider—to whom he owes his distinction—he nevertheless agrees with the Gestalt theoretician in his assessment that “media operations are unimportant.” And like Heider, Luhmann believes that “only insofar as media operations are connected to something important they are of importance; in themselves they are mostly ‘nothing’” (Heider, “Ding” 329). In Heider and Luhmann the same direction of thought can be encountered: The philosophical tradition is criticized for its ontological fixation to the ‘thing’ and this tradition is opposed to the effectiveness of mediality, which in a ‘natural attitude’ is unattainable; in the same breath, however, the medialization of reality is interpreted as a striking socio-cultural symptom of a crisis that can only be met by restabilizing or recentering those processes that threaten to dissolve the oncestable symbolic forms and means of representation. The fact that without the plasticity of media no creation of forms is possible is the constructive side of the thoughts that Heider is inquiring into in his inaugural text of media-theories. The text, however, is also beleaguered by the concern that the media, which first of all make the creation of form possible, at the same time hinder the formation of form, or rather, allow reading it as a pseudo-form, thereby robbing form of its legitimacy, its acceptability.

IV. The following is an example of this effect of medialization. We are taking the example from the arts and more precisely from literature, the context in which Luhmann has initially introduced the differentiation of medium and form. Our example involves Goethe. It was Ernst Robert Curtius, certainly no practicing analyst of media, who for the first time in a short text in 1951 about Goethe’s work no

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Friedrich Balke and Leander Scholz longer classified—as did the current genealogies of literary history— those elements in Goethe’s work that couldn’t be explained or inferred historically to his genius. Instead, he credited those elements to the file management of its author. “The word work and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author’s individuality…” (Foucault, “What” 226). Not Curtius but Foucault has written this, but Curtius in his text is precisely pointing out this disappearance of the author by revealing the rules of production concerning poetic singular individuality. In reality, the disappearance of the author is his change of scene. He always resides where he doesn’t want to be seen. And like any good analyst of media, the philologist does not speculate but (in the sense of the dictum of “cheerful positivism”) he simply describes by quoting Goethe, who—for example in his letters—never made a secret of the media conditions of his writing nor ultimately even of those of his existence. As Curtius points out, Goethe poetically lived mainly from sacks in which he stored all drafts—and not only these. In this regard he wrote to Schiller in January of 1798: “From the beginning I kept a record of it and thus preserved both my errors and my correct steps, and particularly all experiments, experiences and ideas. Now I have separated these volumes, had paper containers made and organized according to a definite plan, and I have put everything into them.” (Goethe, Correspondence 257, letter no. 401, 10 Jan. 1798)

After Curtius had explained Goethe’s complicated filing system, he closes with the following sentence, “Since the end of the century Goethe felt the need to file records about everything” (Curtius 163). This means that before fascination—in this case with a classic author—we encounter (and not only alphabetically in an etymological dictionary) the fascicle, i.e., we encounter a bundle of files.6 The material to which Goethe was attached and from which he drew his masterworks originated from his meticulously kept files. Therefore Curtius could write, “Goethe for quite some time did not manage only administrative operations. He administrated his own existence” (Curtius 164). Quod non est in actis non est in mundo. Modifying a phrase by Cornelia Vismann we could say that files are that which, from a historical and a systematic viewpoint, comes before the text, even if and especially when it is (like a classical text) without doubt a ‘phenomenon’ that seems to owe its radiance to itself. The famous classical ‘impartiality’ similarly as in the case of Hegel’s absolute knowledge has to be attributed here to the circumstance of the 6

Regarding the connection of fascination and fascicle in cultural and media theory and history see Weingart 19.

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The Medium as Form sheer quantity of files. Any point of view that attempted to get the writer’s attention with a certain obstinacy or even irrefutability could be kept in check by simply opening up another paper sack containing further relevant material. The formal requirements of classicism are therefore revealed as effects of a superior mastery of the material and thus of a specific technique of archival storage. When Goethe was beginning a journey that later was to become a literary text he trusted his experiences last. In another letter, he explained to his friend Schiller how one had to do this: “You may take whatever intellectual standpoint you choose, but on a trip you nevertheless see matters only from one side and therefore judge too hastily. […] I made a collection of documents for myself in which I organized all kinds of public papers that I encounter, i.e., newspapers, weeklies, excerpts from sermons, ordinances, comedy announcements, prices, along with my own spontaneous judgments of all I see and notice. I talk about these things in society and express my own opinion, and thus I soon learn how well informed I am and to what extent my judgment agrees with the well informed people. I then add my new experience and information to the dossier. There will therefore be plenty of material which should be interesting enough in the future as a history of the external and the internal situation.” (Curtius 164)7

Works then are neither direct nor defined nor homogenous unities. They emerge from ‘media’ which, however, are not only to be envisioned as abstract realms of possibilities for later creations of form but as fields that open up possibilities of saying, viewing or pointing out, possibilities of presentation or representation (in a broad sense) at the cost of definitively closing out ‘other possibilities.’ An invariable and inescapable part of the management of files is the ultimate exclusion or elimination of ‘possibilities.’ Thus Goethe writes in April, 1830 to Zelter: “[…] after a severe but swift resolve, I have given up all newspaper reading […]” (Goethe, Goethe’s Letters 397). For the field of ‘meaning’ with which Luhmann is tying in his differentiation of medium and form, it may be correct that everything that appears or that can be said is always framed by a ‘surplus of reference’ that allows the ‘users of media’ to casually pass over from the one to the other. Nothing is lost in the realm of meaning. It is a realm of abundance, even overabundance. Here, excluded elements exist only in deferred form to which we therefore can return anytime. However, the form of postponement or—talking technically—of relocating turns out to be a method of keeping files as well; therefore, we would have to ask for the media requirements of Luhmann’s term ‘meaning’. Of course one doesn’t instantly see it in

7

English translation in Goethe, Correspondence 213, letter no. 356 (22 Aug. 1797).

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Friedrich Balke and Leander Scholz Goethe’s work that a complex filing system that has been transferred from the sphere of administration to poetic practice belongs to the mediatized conditions that allow for its very existence. Against the backdrop of a real or effective absence, i.e., of a ‘there isn’t’, the point of analyzing media should be—like in discourse analysis—laying bare a dimension of ‘there is’ or of simply being. To define media in this sense as systems of formation means nothing less than being able to establish rules of a specific appearance, instead of relating this appearance to abundance expressing a special nature or to the supreme initiative of a creative subject. The analysis of media as an analysis of appearance would thus be based on accounting for the reason why something specific appears and not something else. The problem of formation then is most closely connected to power that of course cannot be conceived of as a simple, monotonous constraint that stultifies the spontaneous initiative of subjects. Appearance is always an effect of power: “What appears is so powerful that it can lift itself out of its own insignificance and assert itself against other appearances” (Seitter 117). In all this we are not dealing with the popular game of setting determination off against a presumed freedom of the subjects, but with describing a field or a practice to which this freedom is bound if it wants to become effective. The question is what positions, what attitudes do we have to assume if we want to say, see or present something that is new insofar as it changes the order of the sayable and visible and that at the same time becomes the starting point of an activity incalculably repeating itself, thereby sedimenting as culture. The rules which the analysis of media exposes in the course of describing certain cultural practices link the unique ‘there is’—in other words, the phenomenon of a singular emergence or appearance—with the order of institutions or of the juridic realm insofar as it is interested in clarifying what it is that saves a minimal, hardly perceivable event from instant disappearance, awarding its hardly dazzling physis with a visible body and a materiality that can be repeated. Therefore let us, in order to furnish this point with a certain emblematic distinctness, go back to Goethe’s file management that of course is somewhat offensive for the reader of Goethe, as one can observe from Curtius’ text. This offensiveness can be explained by the fact that here the complete grasp of the most private experiences is being made available by way of invariably continuing the discursivation of events that belongs to the area of public administration. These discourses find their way back into literary production from which simultaneously, however, this ‘paradigmatizing’ practice has been completely effaced. This insight provided by the extent of Goethe’s self-administration must have produced such

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The Medium as Form trepidation in Curtius that he had to vent it in an exclamation the amusement of which is not quite plausible from the philologist: “How funny, how old-Franconian these prickly Latin words in Goethe’s language of files strike us! ‘Agenda’ and ‘exhibenda’, ‘registrata’ and ‘proponenta’, ‘tectura’ and ‘repositura’ are deployed here so that one might really be impressed!” (Curtius 162). With this closing phrase we are faced simultaneously with the specific problematic ‘heading’ of media analysis: How is it possible that something someone has said, seen or shown can succeed in casting off its inconspicuousness and insignificance and then be addressed as canonical cultural representation, i.e., as something with which one can impress. Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

Works Cited Baecker, Dirk. “Kommunikation im Medium der Information.” Kommunikation, Medien, Macht. Ed. Rudolf Maresch and Niels Werber. Frankfurt a.M., 1999. 175-189. Print. Balibar, Étienne. Sind wir Bürger Europas? Politische Integration, soziale Ausgrenzung und die Zukunft des Nationalen. Hamburg, 2003. Print. Balke, Friedrich. “‘Mediumvorgänge sind unwichtig.’ Zur Affektökonomie des Medialen bei Fritz Heider.” Brauns 401-412. Binczek, Natalie. “Medium/Form, dekonstruiert.” Brauns 113-129. Brauns, Jörg, ed. Form und Medium. Weimar, 2000. Print. Curtius, Ernst Robert. “Goethes Aktenführung.” Grundlagen der Literaturwissenschaft: Exemplarische Texte. Ed. Bernhard J. Dotzler. Cologne, 1999. 163. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. London, 1986. Print. Derrida, Jacques. “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology.” Writing and Difference. By Derrida. London, 1978. 154-168. Print. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York, 1972. Print. —. “What is an Author?” The Book History Reader. Ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. London, 2002. 225-230. Print. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Correspondence between Goethe and Schiller 1794-1805. Trans. Liselotte Dieckmann. New York, 1994. Print.

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Friedrich Balke and Leander Scholz —. Goethe’s Letters to Zelter: With Extracts from those of Zelter to Goethe. Trans. A. D. Coleridge. London, 1892. Print. Heider, Fritz. “Ding und Medium.” 1921. Kursbuch Medienkultur: Die maßgeblichen Theorien von Brecht bis Baudrillard. Ed. Claus Pias et al. Stuttgart, 1999. 319-333. Print. —. “Thing and Medium.” On Perception, Event Structure, and Psychological Environment: Selected Papers. By Heider. New York, 1959. 1-34. Print. Psychological Issues 1, no. 3. Husserl, Edmund. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Trans. Anthony J. Steinbock. Dordrecht, 2001. Print. —. “Modalisierung der Erfahrung.” Arbeit an den Phänomenen: Ausgewählte Schriften. By Husserl. Ed. Bernhard Waldenfels. Frankfurt a.M., 1992. 92. Print. Krämer, Sybille. “Erfüllen Medien eine Konstitutionsleistung? Thesen über die Rolle medientheoretischer Erwägungen beim Philosophieren.” Medienphilosophie: Beiträge zur Klärung eines Begriffs. Ed. Stefan Münker, Alexander Roesler, and Mike Sandbothe. Frankfurt a.M., 2003. 78-90. Print. —. “Form als Vollzug oder: Was gewinnen wir mit Niklas Luhmanns Unterscheidung von Medium und Form?” Rechtshistorisches Journal 17 (1998): 558-573. Print. Link, Jürgen. Versuch über den Normalismus: wie Normalität produziert wird. Opladen, 1996. Print. Luhmann, Niklas. Die Kunst der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M., 1997. Print. —. Social Systems. Ed. Timothy Lenoir and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Trans. John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baecker. Stanford, 1995. Print. Seitter, Walter. “Streuung der Analyse.” Das Spektrum der Genealogie. Ed. Michel Foucault and Seitter. Bodenheim, 1996. 113133. Print. Weingart, Brigitte. “Faszinationsanalyse.” Der Stoff, an dem wir hängen: Faszination und Selektion von Material in kulturwissenschaftlicher Arbeit. Ed. Gerald Echterhoff and Michael Eggers. Würzburg, 2002. 19-30. Print.

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Transcriptivity Matters: On the Logic of Intra- and Intermedial References in Aesthetic Discourse LUDWIG JÄGER

Transcriptivity—A Hypothesis In the following essay, I would like to look more closely—even if by nature only sketchily—at the procedural logic that communicative media (be they scriptural, pictorial, analogue or digital) carry out in the economy of cultural semantics. In this procedural logic the main operators have evolved during the long history of (audiovisual) media of language and its multimedia contexts and have immigrated into the intra- and intermedial game of other media (see here and in the following Jäger, “Sprache” 19f; Jäger, “Vom Eigensinn”). I have previously suggested describing this procedural logic as logic of transcriptivity,1 as logic of medialization organizing social stagings of meaning. I have suggested that media procedures of this type are called transcriptive insofar as they organize the processing of intraand intermedial differences as symbolic activities, thereby organizing the mutual reference of media to media. Semantic effects are owed to these interconnections; they restage media scriptures (images, texts, music, etc.) that already circulate in the discourses of cultural economies in pre-transcriptive semantics and that have been stored in the collective memory; thus they are made ‘legible’ in a new or different way for specific addressees. Therefore, the term ‘transcribing’ signifies a procedure that can be observed in diverse dispositives of mediality of mutual intra- and intermedial circumscriptions, inscriptions and re-inscriptions that as basic strategies generating cultural semantics deserve to be looked at more closely. My main hypothesis is the following:

1

For the term transcriptivity see for example Jäger, “Transkriptivität”, “Transkriptionen”, and “Verfahren”. This present text is based on these publications.

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Ludwig Jäger Semantics is principally an effect of transcriptive, i.e., of intraand intermedial references of linguistic and non-linguistic media to non-linguistic and linguistic ones, of texts to texts, of notational systems to notational systems and of signs utilized in performance to silenced (quoted, paraphrased, explained) signs. Monomedial semantics—of language, of images in their different media formats, of music, etc.—as a matter of principle are sedimented effects of transcriptive (intra- and intermedial) processes; namely, there exists no monomedial semantics without transcriptive operations to produce it. The semantic order of monomedia is necessarily owed to the intralinguistic, intertextual and intermedial references of symbols to symbols, of notations to notations that are provided by the rich inventory of transcriptivity.

When Are Media? Nelson Goodman is starting the fourth chapter of his Ways of Worldmaking with the statement: “If attempts to answer the question ‘What is art?’ characteristically end in frustration and confusion, perhaps—as so often in philosophy—the question is the wrong one” (57). As a glance at large areas of media theories in cultural studies can illustrate, the question “What are media?” or “What is mediality” can be regarded as similarly off the mark.2 It is generally known that Ludwig Wittgenstein has subsumed the deliberating attempts that try grasping the “essence of things” (300, par. 116) with the help of ontologizing questions among those that inflict a “jinx [upon our mind] through the means of language” (299, par. 109). But how can we avoid those “bumps” predicted by him that are caused by asking questions of essence while “storming against the limitations of language?” (301, par. 119). Goodman attempts to avoid these ontological jinxes by replacing the question “What is art?” with a temporalized version asking “When is art?” (Ways 57). This probably means: when and under what circumstances can an object function as a piece of art? Even though Goodman does not stick with his deconstruction of ontological questions because he is participating in the search for the characteristics of art (which he earlier had declared as failed) by postulating five symptoms of the aesthetic (Ways 67ff) (a matter of no concern to us here), we neverthe-

2

As an example see Wiegerling. It is a book in which the Table of Contents lists chapter titles like the following: “What does medium mean and what are its characteristics?”, “What do media transport?”, “How can we define human beings vis-à-vis the medium,” etc.

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Transcriptivity Matters less can follow his methodological pointer. We will replace the question what media are, i.e., the search for their supposed constitutive characteristics with a question of their operative logic: “When are media?” Following this question the attempts at defining mediality and individual media are superseded by a program of a “(‘thick’) description of functions of mediality within certain historical and cultural conditions” (Balke 9). Indeed, a lot can be said for Goodman’s strategy of de-ontologizing. Since in this situation of almost unmanageable theoretical considerations of media and mediality nothing could be more unproductive than trying to define what media in reality are,3 an operational theory of media could derive its categories through the observation of the multiplicity of forms of processing in medial practice. In order to focus on the operative logic of media and turning against the attempts to predefine any ‘object’ of ‘media matters’ I would like to propose the following considerations: If media—as it seems—can never be observed directly but always only with the help of those media in which they unfold marks of difference (see Fohrmann), cultures of communication come into view as that field in which the symbolic act of interacting and interwoven media is generating, disrupting, conserving and renewing cultural semantics. If then—and I will argue this in the following—cultural semantics is generally developing not in any one monomedial “way of worldmaking” (as it seems to be the procedural logic in Goodman’s theory of symbols; see esp. Ways) but in processes of intermediality, ontological questions of the essence of mediality have to be replaced with an epistemic interest that analyzes the procedural logic of communicative cultures from the perspective of the logic of its intermedial difference. The operative eye now focuses on the staging-quality of cultural communication and its—in my words—transcriptive procedural logic. If, for example, we think of Cassirer’s humanities’ program of a philosophy of symbolic forms aiming at comprehensively working out the “fundamental forms of man’s ‘understanding’ of the world” quasi as a “‘morphology’ of the human spirit” (69) and also of Gérard Genette’s attempt at designing a typology of “transtextuality” that develops “the entire set of general or transcendent categories—types of discourse, modes of enunciation, literary genres—from which emerges each singular text” (1), then one of the points of my outline is the idea that ‘spirit’ is not seen from the perspective of its sedi-

3

See Dotzler, Schüttpelz, and Stanitzek 9: “We have to be aware of the multiplicity of situations debated under the term medium: media of communication, media of perception, technical media, storage medium, analog or digital media, media of distribution, mass media, media of tradition, etc.”

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Ludwig Jäger mentation in ‘symbolic forms’, but rather from its operative medial formation in historically changing cultures of communication. The dated explanatory view of mental emanatory artifacts thereby opens up allowing for the observation of performative processes of mediated sense-generation. Media can now be described as procedures organizing the specificity of the social staging of meaning— not as autochthonous symbolic ‘ways of worldmaking,’ but as mutually interlinked forms of processualization.4

Prescript—Script—Transcript: Transcriptive Procedures My introductory sketches should have indicated that the term transcription is introduced tentatively as an expression through which a constitutive moment of the procedural logic of medial performances can be viewed: the moment of the staging of meaning by mutually referencing different media, respectively—in the case of language— of symbolic means of the same system to each other. I have chosen the term ‘staging of meaning’ because on the one hand it is open for iterative (reproductive) and constitutive (innovative) moments of the processualization of meaning, however on the other hand also for the fact that not every form of the staging of meaning is aimed at a communication that includes addressees to a 4

I would like to suggest characterizing the semantic management of societies on two levels of categories that intersect: (1) the level of discourse (using the term discourse mostly in Foucault’s sense) and (2) the level of media dispositives by way of which the different language games of a discourse are determined. Media dispositives functioning as frames for symbolic performance (acts of linguistic communication) are determined by different parameters of influence with varying influence: (1) firstly, the perceptuo-motoric conditions of processing linguistic signs, i.e., their modal production and reception (for example auditory, gestural-visually, motoricvisually); (2) secondly, the type of semiological system or the semiological systems within which they are processed (spoken language, sign language, alphabetical script, etc.); (3) thirdly, the discursive order in which the signs are processes (the connection to a discourse or to a dispositive or the types of texts available, mono- or interactivity, etc.), and finally (4) fourthly, the media-technological platform on which the symbolic performances are realized (natural or technically amplified resonance of the voice, telephone, visual signs, televised telephone, parchment, book, monitors, etc.). For example, the discourse of representation by way of which in mediatized knowledge societies semiotic artifacts are transcribed from the political realm of communication into the horizon of reception of a mass public is characterized by different media dispositives, depending on the type of mass medium used (print media, television, hypermedia, etc.).

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Transcriptivity Matters maximum. Stagings of meaning can also be hermetical, ritualistic, enigmatic or arcane. Regarding their semantic and aesthetic form, they can be ‘read’ only to the extent in which they are processed within a cultural frame that is shared by producers and recipients. Transcribing the results of experimental research into specialized texts with graphs, diagrams and statistics just as little serves the inclusion of a general public as does the intimate encoding of love messages or the encrypted data of net-communication. Therefore, even though in my attempt to develop a logic of transcriptivity none of these moments should be excluded from the extension of the term ‘staging of meaning,’ nevertheless in the following considerations the aspect of re-staging a meaning that has become ‘illegible’ is in the foreground of my attention in order to make it again or newly ‘legible’ despite the fact that the excluding renewals of addressees have to be recognized as equally important for the balanced functioning of the semantic economy. Let us look more closely at the constitutive moments of the transcriptive procedural logic, which seems to be characterized by two central types of procedures: (1) First by an intermedial procedure that for instance with regard to the semantics of natural languages uses its “peculiar double structure” (Habermas 104), namely its characteristic to communicate with language about language, thereby discussing and commenting on the meaning of the use of paraphrases, explanation and explication, respectively by monitoring it through self-reception and repairing (see Jäger, “Störung”). Intramedial processes of course can also be found in all forms of intertextuality5 as well as in quotations of images in images,6 or the quotation and variation of themes in musical pieces (e.g., Riethmüller). They are especially important for the emergence of autochthonous monomedial semantics and aesthetics. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations or Johannes Brahms’ Handel Variations in my use of the term are just as much intramedial transcriptions as are Bach’s secular-sacred parodies characteristic for his oratorios. (2) A second type of procedure can be found in those intermedial processes in which at least a second symbolic system of mediality is used for comments, explanation, explication, translation, variation or closure (of the semantics) of a first system, respectively where a 5 6

See for example Kristeva; Riffaterre; Genette. Regarding the semantic function of image quotes in paintings of Dutch paintings of the 17th cent. see Hammer-Tugendhat, “Liebesbriefe” and “Kunst”; on the problems of quoting in language, image, and music see Goodman, Ways 47-50.

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Ludwig Jäger mutual and interactive reference between different media systems is staged resulting in genuine semantic effects. This is the case for example in all forms of image-text relations, relations of image, text and music (for example in film or in multimedial interconnections in hypermedia; see e.g., Bolter and Grusin), but also the arrangements of originals connected with a change of medium (i.e., re-instrumentation), for example the arrangement of Beethoven’s symphonies for piano by Liszt or—according to Ferrucio Busoni—the scriptural notation of a musical idea during compositional work (see for instance Busoni 23). Both procedures perpetuating formations of meaning that range from enabling legibility and recycling to obscuring7 cultural semantics each in different ways help re-addressing, i.e., re-staging the transcribed symbolic structures.8 I would like to call the two procedures of intramedial and intermedial interconnections sketched here ‘transcriptive procedures’. Here, both those symbolic structures that are being created in the transcription process and those that are taken out of the archives of cultural memory for transcription shall in the following be called ‘scriptures’, independently of their status of mediality: images of different origin,9 scores, all auto- and allographic10 creations of art, all textual results of scholarship, poetry, philosophy, history or administration (files; see Vismann), as well as the archived performances in music, theatre and the arts in this sense are scriptures—they circulate in the language games of media dispositives or constitute a silenced reservoir of possible transcriptions in the cultural memory. Regarding their role in transcriptive procedures they can be specified as follows: • Scriptures that are generated by each generating system in the course of transcription are called transcripts. Transcripts then might for example be commentaries (of annotated texts), historical narratives (of sources), remakes (of original films), variations

7

The direction of re-addressing is changed, as it were, by arcanizing transcriptions: while a re-addressing for legibility attempts to increase the extension of addresses by way of inclusion (de-differentiation of addressing), the arcanizing re-addressing is aiming at the reduction of extension of the addresses by way of exclusion (differentiation of addressing). 8 Johann Strauss, for example, has adapted works by Berg, Webern and Schoenberg for their performance in the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen (Society for Private Musical Performances) (see BRM 1: 111f, keyword: “Bearbeitung” [adaptation]). 9 See for example Mitchell; Boehm; Geimer. 10 Regarding the terms “autographic” and “allographic” see Goodman, Languages 112ff.

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Transcriptivity Matters

•

•

of varied themes, samplings11 (of ‘processed’ music), appropriation-art artifacts (of ‘appropriated’ art),12 etc. Those scriptures that are addressed by the process of transcription itself are called scripts; they are for example commented texts commented on by commentaries, the sources used by historical narratives, the films that are re-mediatized by remakes, the themes varied by variations, or the artifacts appropriated by appropriation-art. Scripts then only exist in relation to their transcripts. They are those scriptures the transcripts of which appear as their transcriptions. Finally I propose to call the sources addressed by transcriptions, like (‘original’13) texts, films, or sources, musical themes, musical pieces, etc., prescripts. They consist of a revertive projection to the status before transcription and they are quasi the media material, or better, the scriptures that the transcription is selecting for processing, thereby changing them into scripts.

Both prescript and script are not media events that ontically speaking can be differentiated from each other; rather, they are symbolidentical scriptures in the operative realm of a transcription that are to be differentiated from each other only by asking whether they are observed relating to a transcript (= script) or by disregarding their transcription (= prescript). As a prescript a transcribed scripture can only be identified ex post after it has been entered into a transcriptive process, thereby being changed into a script. Thus a line from poetry is changed into a script through its (literary) parody (its transcription) but it is a prescript if we disregard the perspective that is opened up by the parody, thereby becoming that scripture that had been singled out by the transcription alienating it from its original conditions of reception. This, by the way, can also be seen in analogy to musical parodies despite their different conceptualization.14 Scriptures of this kind therefore are Janus-faced: as prescripts they look backwards at their former state that cannot be 11 Sampling means using parts of earlier recordings, integrating them into a new composition. Samplings are integral parts of many of today’s musical genres. 12 On the problem of the transcriptive relationship of original and copy in the case of sampling and Appropriation Art see for example Fehrmann et al., “Original Copy—Secondary Practices” in this volume. See also the collection of essays edited by Fehrmann et al. Originalkopie: Praktiken des Sekundären. Zum Problem der Appropriationskunst (Original Copy: Practices of the Secondary. On the Problem of Appropriation Art). 13 On the problem of originality see Fehrmann et al., “Original Copy” in this volume. 14 See for this MGG 1394-1416, lemma “Parodie und Kontrafaktur.”

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Ludwig Jäger brought back; as scripts they look forward at their transcriptions through which they are irretrievably semantically contaminated. Scriptures then only acquire the status of transcript or script/ prescript by fulfilling certain roles in transcriptive processes. The operative status of functioning as transcript, as script or as prescript therefore expressively does not denote any ontic characteristic of scriptures. Every scripture can take on any role within this game. The role results only from the constellation and from the condition of each transcriptive procedure and in this process transcripts are always the transcriptions of scriptures that are either silenced until their transcription or are circulated subject to other semantic conditions. I have clearly taken the terminology used here from the lexical field of scripturality, even though I am also using it for non-literate symbolic systems, as the examples have shown. The use of the term ‘-script’ in the composites does decidedly not mean that the signsystems addressed here have to be of a literate nature: paintings, musical pieces, films, photography or texts can be included here as well. Leaving out possible terminological alternatives, I have intentionally borrowed the term from the semantic field of scripturality after careful deliberations for three reasons: (1) Firstly, because alternative terms like ‘transposition’ or ‘transformation,’ etc., are semantically contaminated; these two aforementioned terms for example insinuate that in case of transcriptions we are only dealing with the transport of identical contents from one modal/media field to another, a fact that I categorically exclude here. (2) Secondly, because choosing an alternative terminological variant—for example, introducing a neologism—would have demanded detailed semantic definitions. However, in using an acknowledged term like ‘transcription,’ one can determine the meaning insofar as the fruitful demarcation of differences can be used, thereby specifically differentiating the new use of transcription from the acknowledged one. (3) Finally, the third reason derives from the quite desired effects connected with the reference to the field of scripturality: namely, insofar as the terminological allusion to this realm allows operatively exploiting many processes of “remediatization” or “cultural reconceptualization” (Bolter and Grusin 47). Both have developed in the media realm of the Gutenberg Galaxy and it seems to me that its procedural logic has also become a model for forms of non-scriptural transcriptions.15 My terminology is solely connected to this

15 See especially the procedures of hypertextuality analyzed by Genette in 1997.

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Transcriptivity Matters logic of intra- and intermediality that, though it stems from literate cultures, nevertheless is not limited to scriptural ones; the linkage is not associated with the media format of scripturality itself. The methodical considerations establishing the term ‘transcription’ sketched out here now permit us to take up the thread of terminological clarification again. It can be noted that the procedure of transcription, roughly speaking, consists in the fact that from the scriptures (originating in different media) that circulate in the economy of a culture or that are stored in the cultural memory (for example, also from the poetic or compositional works memorized by an artist), some scriptures are singled out, are semantically re-staged and thereby changed into scripts. This clearly is a widespread process to generate and to sustain cultural semantics. Insofar are transcriptions always and in principle a re-addressing that, quoting Genette, occupies “the privileged fields of operation of the pragmatic dimension” (3) of a scripture, thereby—sometimes by force—separating them from their former semantic frame, i.e., from their ‘original’ condition of circulation in order to semantically and aesthetically stage them anew. Transcriptions efface as it were the prescriptural paratexts of the singled-out scriptures, furnishing them with new frames and new addresses and thereby also with new conditions thus opening them up for new semantic and aesthetic receptions. I would like to illustrate this with a few cases in point: The artist Sherrie Levine, for example, in 1979 singled out canonical artifacts from the history of art—for instance the photographs by Walker Evans16 from 1936—as scriptures hovering in the cultural economy. She transcribed them, thereby changing them into scripts/prescripts by photographing them and exhibiting them in her own name as re-staged artifacts (transcripts) under the title Untitled (after Walker Evans).17 Thus she decontextualized the pictures by Evans exhibited in 1936 under the title First and Last, and

16 In 1936 Walker Evans photographed the Burroughs, a family of sharecroppers in Depression era Alabama. In 1979 in Sherrie Levine re-photographed Walker Evans’ photographs from the exhibition catalog First and Last. The transcriptive chain, however, does not end here. In 2001 Michael Mandiberg has scanned these same photographs, ‘creating’ the website http://www. aftersherrielevine.com, respectively http://afterwalkerevans.com, in order to, as he calls it “facilitate their dissemination as a comment on how we come to know information in this burgeoning digital age.” At the same time the website provides “certificates of authenticity” that the visitors can download, thereby singularizing them by way of entering the name, the signature and the date. 17 I owe the reference to Sherrie Levine and Walker Evans to the essay “Original Copy” by Fehrmann et al. in this volume.

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Ludwig Jäger placed them into a new context by showing her photographic appropriations in an exhibition in 1982 under the title Image Scavenger. This means that the appropriated photograph by Walker Evans that followed the semantic conditions of circulation of a specific discourse (between 1936 and 1979) before it was appropriated by Sherrie Levine as a scripture now through the transcription of the photograph by Sherrie Levine changed into a script/prescript, i.e., into a media scripture the semantic status of which is changing through the relationship to its transcription. Sherrie Levine’s transcriptive reference to the photographs by Walker Evans that—as we can read in the relevant literature—represented an “allegorical mortification”18 of the ‘original’ pictorial semantics, i.e., of the ‘original’ aesthetics and rhetoric of the image, now not only inscribes itself into the semantics of the transcripts, i.e., into the pictures by Levine, but it contaminates also the appropriated images by Walker Evans that were singled out by the Levine-pictures, thereby being expropriated of its prescriptural paratext, namely the exhibition with the title from 1936 First and Last. In the pictures by Sherrie Levine, the photographs by Walker Evans themselves are necessarily read with different eyes, just like for example a competent, bilingual reader who knows the French original text will read the French text differently alongside the (successful) English translation of a poem by Rimbaud. On the occasion of an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zürich in 1991, Sherrie Levine described her method in the following way: “The reproduction to a certain extent represents two photographs—one on top of the other. I am so to speak creating a metaphor by setting two photographs on top of each other and not next to each other. This opens up the possibility to read the work as an allegory.” (Qtd. in Amelunxen 27)

This process of the semantic contamination of a scripture by its transcription now does not have to take place between different scriptures (for example, photographs by Evans and photographs by Levine); rather, it can be inscribed into the logic of the gradual growth of a complex scripture like for example a musical composition. Thus, for instance, the recapitulation of the theme at the end of the Goldberg Variations as well as that of the preceding variations 18 In 1982 the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania exhibited the photographs by Sherrie Levine and other artists of Appropriation Art like Cindy Sherman and Richard Princes in an exhibition entitled Image Scavengers. Thereby, image-recycling was denoted, as Amelunxen called it, “as an allegorical mortification of genuinely aesthetic and publicized rhetorical values for the benefit of the visual realization of social criticism and criticism of ideology” (26f).

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Transcriptivity Matters of the aria changes these into a script that—although it is symbolidentical with its recapitulating transcription, at least as far as I can judge—however nevertheless cannot be read or heard independently of its semantic horizon that the variations had developed through to its symbol-identical recapitulation: “The ‘world’ of the theme […] has obviously changed after having gone through the thirty ‘different changes’; the individual variations have accentuated and developed different aspects of the theme and the theme was highlighted from different sides thereby placing it into different contexts,”

as Axel Spree tells us. To a certain extent, therefore, the aria recapitulated at the end of the composition (the transcript) is not only no longer the same as the aria at the beginning of the work (the script/prescript), it also cannot be heard independently any longer from the semantic work of differentiation that was manifested by the variations. Another example (for which I have to thank Gérard Genette’s book Palimpsests [16ff]) shall further illustrate the issue. Racine, for instance, transcribes (parodies) a line from Corneille’s Le Cid in which it is said in an elevated tone of the father of Chimène: “Ses rides sur son front ont gravé ses exploits” (“The furrows on his brow bear witness to [lit. have engraved his, BP/DR] exploits, and tell us still what he formerly was”) insofar as he attributes this line to one of his own comedies, Les Plaideurs (“The Litigants”), to a quite business-minded bailiff. Racine at first tells us about him and that he makes more money in one day than another in six months, in order to then add the almost identical line by Corneille “Ses rides sur son front gravaient tout ses exploits” (“His exploits were all engrav’d in wrinkles upon his forehead.”) Thus, the transcription by Racine not only affects the semantics of “exploits” that is transcribed from “memorable mission, heroic action” to “profitable court activity,” but it also changes Corneille’s text from its own semantic scripture into a script/prescript that can no longer avoid its relationship to its transcription. And so the text is—as one can formulate with Genette—“a natural and easy prey to parody” (35). For any expert of Corneille’s line and of its parody by Racine, the parodied line itself is changing. It is now indelibly related to its parodistic transcription insofar as also Corneille himself, if he were to read his own text, would be contaminated by the parody. For any audience fulfilling this requirement of reading,19 i.e., an audience that knows both texts, the text by Corneille can not ever recapture the quo ante state of a scripture with the semantic recep19 For this term see Genette.

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Ludwig Jäger tive conditions before it was transcribed. Corneille’s text in a way has lost its own scriptural semantics by way of Racine’s transcription (therefore Corneille was not at all amused about Racine’s jest). Even though transcriptions seemingly leave the symbolic order of the transcribed scripture completely unaffected (symbol-identical), they nevertheless change them unmercifully by setting them into a new context (see Jäger, “Störung”). If we include the transcription that is performed by the German translation of Genette’s book, the example of Corneille and Racine by the way relates to still another story of transcription theory: The translation of Genette’s Palimpsests by the German publishing company Suhrkamp takes up the German free adaptation of the parodying line by Racine (i.e., “Ses rides sur sont front gravaient tout ses exploits”) undertaken by Wilhelm Willige for the Luchterhand publishing company. Willige translated, freely adapting, the line as follows: “Man sah ihm gleich an, was für’n Hauptkerl er war” (“One could see directly, what kind of a rascal he was”).20 Quite independently of one’s assessment of this adaptive translation, it is certain that the transcriptive-parodying reference of Racine’s line to Corneille’s text is removed. Since the German translation of Racine’s line does not take over verbally the German translation of Corneille’s line, of course the parodistic effect is no longer there. It can be seen from this example that the semantic effects of a transcription and their effects of recontextualization only appear in those instances in which a public exists that is familiar with both the conditions of circulation of the transcribed scriptures and with those of the transcriptions. The German adaptive translator obviously does not fulfill this condition insofar as he misses the transcriptive semantics of Racine’s text. It seems that cultural semantics become all the more complex the higher the transcriptive intelligence of the participating communicative actors is, i.e., the more diverse the authorizations of access into the almost incalculable multiplicity of mediated language games have become, between which continually and on the most different thematic levels of mediation transcriptive references are taking place and on which new semantic and aesthetic effects are being created. As these examples show, scriptures only become scripts by way of transcription, i.e., by being changed into scriptures opened up semantically in a new way, namely into scripts/prescripts. Actually every transcription in a certain way represents the foundation of a script, even though the procedure at first encounters a scripture that existed already before it was transcriptively brought into play 20 See Genette 16, which translates the sentence differently: “On his lined brow his deeds were graven clear.” [For better understanding we have opted for our own translation, BP/DR].

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Transcriptivity Matters for re-staging such as in parodying operations by the script. The foundational output exerted by the transcriptions in the direction of the scriptures leading to their alteration into scripts can be illustrated with an example from sampling. If, for example in Pop music—as in Hip-Hop—musicians quote and integrate (transcribe) forgotten traditions of African American music, these quoted (treated) musical themes and rhythms (scriptures) are often only established as ‘originals’ by way of these ‘secondary’ processes: it happens quite often that the holders of the rights (the recording labels) of the quoted musical prescripts file a claim for their copyrights, thereby constituting, by way of legal action, the selected musical scriptures as scripts, i.e., as the ‘originals’ that formed the basis of the transcriptions (see Fehrmann et al., “Original Copy”). In this way one could say that ‘originals’ are always scripts underneath transcriptions; they primarily owe their antecedence to the deferred action of transcriptivity. Thus it is transcription (sampling) as a secondary process that creates the ‘original’, the script. Originals then attain the status of originality only through the activity of retroactive (transcriptive) reuse. Therefore, a rather curious relationship between scripture, script/prescript and transcript is revealed here: even though scriptures precede transcriptions,21 as scripts/prescripts they are only the result of transcription and we cannot assume that media scriptures entering the procedure of transcription as signified concepts precede, as it were, their signification by way of being translated, commented on, appropriated, sampled, etc. Transcriptions are not simply relocations of contents that are neutral to the procedures of their relocation from one mediated language game to another, from one symbolic context to another; rather, they are operations that lastingly change the semantics of the scripture to which the activity refers: (1) For instance, the narrative representation of a historic event as a transcript of data documented in sources is not a reference to these data. Instead, through the narrative selections made, it becomes a sequentially connected narrative, only thereby forming these data into a historical and insofar referentially valuable event. Therefore, Manfred Riedel’s dictum—connecting us back to Droysen—that history is only constituted in the transcendental realm of the knowledge about it (see Riedel 89), does not explicate anything but the transcriptive logic of historiography: only from the perspec21 To be more exact, prescripts do not precede the transcription as prescripts because they reach this status only ex post by way of the transcription. They are only scriptures in some circulatory conditions that are brought into new ones by the transcription. We could say that in the scripts the memory of their prescriptural state still oscillates, even after they have been constituted as scripts.

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Ludwig Jäger tive of a representational transcription of the source-data—the selected scriptures—do these acquire the status of script/prescript, thereby also obtaining a semantics that does not exist independently of its specific transcription with this meaning. Detached of the transcription, these scriptures then would either remain archived and silent or they would have a different meaning in other conditions of distribution by way of different transcriptive situations. The source-data are established as scripts/prescripts by way of their narrative transcription; therefore, in a certain sense, they are being re-staged becoming ‘legible’, namely in the sense claimed by the transcription. Even though the archived source-data in other semantic conditions of distribution as scriptures might well have or have had a pre-transcriptive meaning and in this manner have become ‘legible’ in a different way, they acquire their specific and new semantics—and a symbolic order imparting script-status to them— only by way of the transcription. It is the transcriptive method of the historian that stages the meaning, thus creating a semantics for the archivalia within the depths of the archive that would have to remain silent without their narrative re-staging. (2) We encounter a quite different, but also transcriptive relation in the relationship between writing and oral speech simply put into writing.22 According to Lüdtke’s well-known essay, scripticism for example argues that phonemes—as mental realities in the linguistic knowledge of the speakers—are only the historical result of the alphabetic scripts that had emerged in the Semitic languages. In other words, only systems of writing as transcriptions of non-literate languages had constituted phonological structures in these languages as an effect of the graphematic structures, so to speak.23 Even if one does not support the strong scripticistic position there can be no doubt that to a certain extent only systems of writing—as transcriptions—constitute those (oral and transitory) languages transcribed by them as non-fluid, discontinuous objects, i.e., model them as what I call scripts. Only as the product of their enscripturalization are individual languages discernible as entities. Since for languages like German, English, French or Italian there is no non-arbitrary, discontinuous solution for the continuum of language and dialect it is evident that only its “en-scripturalizing” (Hildegard Tristram) transcription constitutes individual languages as discrete entities, namely as scripts. Only by making them into literate languages they become ‘legible’ in an emphatic sense, there22 For the term “scripting” in contradistinction to “conceptual textualiza-

tion” see Ursula Schäfer. Dialogische Strukturen. Dialogic Structures: Festschrift für Willi Erzgräber zum 70. Geburtstag. Eds. Thomas Kühn and Ursula Schaefer. Tübingen, 1996. 22. Print [BP/DR]. 23 See Lüdtke; see also Vieregge 9ff and Coulmas 95-112.

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Transcriptivity Matters by becoming semantically accessible independent of their spatiotemporal, situational performance.24 Here as well we encounter the curious dialectics of transcriptive procedures: even though individual languages to a certain extent precede their enscripting, as the preceding matter that has to be enscripted they are nevertheless brought forth only by retroactively putting them into writing (enscripting them). As these examples were to illustrate, transcriptions do not require scripts as objects that can be referentialized but rather first of all they create them. To a certain extent—in the semantic respect that creates the transcription—they do not exist without their transcription, even though of course as scriptures they already belonged to the economy of cultural semantics. This means that they were not previously present in the semantic horizon that was only opened up by the transcription, even though in different regards they might have had a possibly eroded legibility or one that had lost its original legibility by way of a different address or simply by being different. At the same time we have to consider the following matter: even though transcriptions constitute scripts transforming scriptures into scripts/prescripts, they nevertheless by way of the transformations often position these into a status of their own with regard to the transcripts: the script in a manner of speaking via its transcriptive creation becomes autonomous with regard to its transcription. In certain cases this becomes evident in that the script demands a right to intervene against the possible illegitimacy of the transcriptions. This is the case, for example, when musical sampling (the transcription) brings forth an ‘original’ (the script) that enforces a juridical claim regarding its originality with reference to its transcription, even though it was only the transcription that created the ‘original’. To give another example: for the sources of a historical narrative this implies that to be placed into the status of a script means to become accessible for those readings that the transcription directly excludes. If a historical representation (the transcript) 24 Of course we have to consider that writing on the one hand only becomes legible by disconnecting it from the immediate performative situation in the more narrow sense; on the other however, it loses information that has to be compensated by further transcriptions. David R. Olson points to this fact by saying: “But what writing gains in permanence it loses in comprehensiveness” (111). In a further meaning of legibility of course also the spatio-temporal, situational performances of pretextual, unenscripted languages are ‘legible’, even though in a very different form than in the reading of writing. Especially during online communication, monitoring—fundamental for the planning of language and thought—as well as the understanding of foreignness because of the structural limitations of the working memory, takes on another form.

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Ludwig Jäger declares source-data (the selected scriptures) as a historical event, thereby imparting the status of script to a certain number of archivalia, these acquire the right to intervene regarding the appropriateness of the transcriptions: the selected scriptures (the sources) now can be judged with regard to the correct reading provided by the historical narration as transcription. The transcription then to a certain extent not only constitutes the script/prescript, it also allows for other readings with the help of a specific semantics with which it endows a scripture. Bach’s variations of the aria constitute a semantic contextualization of this theme, which it exhibits for alternative variations. It is true that like every transcription it excludes possible alternative readings of the script as the option not chosen; however, by doing this it risks legitimacy by postulating its own reading as the preferred or even the only correct reading. The assertion contained in every transcription of a certain reading uses a discursive mode in which the opportunity of doubt, of correction and the whole alternative realm of possible semantic and aesthetic worlds is also necessarily implemented. At least for cases such as the ones discussed here, one could also say that by establishing a script the transcription opens the realm for competitive transcriptions that as script-assertions on their part carry on the iterative-endless game of semantic re-stagings. Formulating this more decisively: it is only the transcription as an assertion that supplies the script with a type of semantics that can be discursively changed and therefore is opened up for semantically connective discourses. In one act it constitutes and virtualizes meaning, i.e., it frees it for further interpretations. In other words, transcriptions are stagings of meaning that the pre-transcriptive meanings cannot evade. At the same time for their part they are the iterative starting point of possible connective discourses through which the never-ending game of effects-generating meaning is carried on.

Addressing and Legibility As a result of the preceding considerations, we now may retain the following: One can describe the act of transcribing as a process that creates scripts from scriptures. The point of this process consists of the fact that in the open and tendentially never-ending network of diverse medial scriptures that circulate in the semantic economy of culture (respectively that are filed in their collective memories) the transcription continually takes up scriptures in order to re-stage them, to make them ‘legible’ as scripts with the help of re-addressing them so that they can be fed into a new semantic movement.

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Transcriptivity Matters Furthermore, it has become evident that the script/prescript does not precede its transcription as a pre-existent signifier because in a certain sense it is only brought forth by the transcription. Therefore, legibility in the semantic sense opened up by the transcription is not an attribute of the scriptures chosen by the transcription—as long as they also do not exist pre-transcriptively as scripts. But at the same time, ultimately it became evident that the fact that the script constitutively is dependent on its transcript cannot be understood as a unidirectional dependency. Rather, the script becomes autonomous in the course of its transcription, making the legitimacy of the semantic assertions contained in their re-staging more fragile. In short, within the realm of cultural semantics transcription executes a fundamental staging of meaning that on the one hand uses the recursive intramedial self-referentiality of media and on the other the intermedial linkage of different media scriptures in order to sustain the symbolic operations of our ways of world-making. There can be little doubt that to the point of their (telematic) status today the transcriptive coupling of symbol-systems has played—and is still playing—an extraordinary role in the historical development of media cultures. The central significance of transcriptivity can not least of all be found in the fact that the intramedial (intertextual) and intermedial interaction of different symbol systems seems to be constitutive for the operational modes of cultural semantics in societies: already oral cultures resorted to the intramedial and intermedial procedure of medial mixture for the storing, distributing and adjusting of cultural knowledge. This is a procedure that will become more differentiated in literate cultures25 and continues to constitute the logic of media conditions in the era of the ‘new media’ which—according to Bolter and Grusin in recent publications—all proceed by way of “remediatization”, i.e., by translating, remodeling and reshaping both on the level of content as well as on the level of form (see also Manovich). Clearly and to a large extent, meaning in human society is formed mainly in such cases in which the recursive transcriptivity is used by media, respectively in those cases only in which different symbol systems are transcriptively connected with each other. Foucault describes this event in the following manner: “In short, I suspect one could find a kind of gradation between different types of discourse within most societies: discourse ‘uttered’ in the course of the day and in casual meetings, and which disappears with the very act which gave rise to it; and those forms of discourse that lie at the origin of a certain number of

25 See for example the works in Assmann and Gladigow.

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Ludwig Jäger new verbal acts, which are reiterated, transformed or discussed […].” (Foucault 220)

This process of interconnecting ‘speech acts’ in media is all the more plausible as in all cultures there is an asymmetrical access to the semantic resources of the cultural memory. The authorization to access the interfaces of cultural knowledge does not underlie an egalitarian principle of distribution in either stratified or in functionally organized societies. Oral cultures, for example, have social elites organizing cultural knowledge as cognitive, theological or juridical experts processing this knowledge in transcriptive processes for the semantics of the non-experts. Analogous transcriptive necessities can be affirmed also for the limited literate and hypoliterate cultures in Europe where the ‘legibility’ of the (as a rule Latin) texts in cultural memory were not available for a wide (and as a rule nonor only rudimentarily literate) public. Therefore, the connection to this knowledge had to be ascertained by application technologies that may be interpreted as a rich inventory of transcriptive procedures.26 Modern knowledge societies as well are characterized by a far-reaching “dispersion of knowledge” (see for this Pfiffner and Stadelmann; Jäger, “Expertenkultur”), even though for other reasons. This crisis has stimulated Niklas Luhmann to ask whether communication and information have not in themselves become social problems (see Ecological). Even though since the 18th century forms of mass communication have increased initiating a universalizing process in communication (and thereby also a rise in communicative accessibility of the members of society), this process nonetheless generated differentiation and an increase in the complexity of the order of addressees (see for this Andriopoulos, Schabacher, and Schumacher), thereby heightening the improbability of communicative success. A fundamental cause for this development can be seen in that, according to Stichweh, “in modern societies the close connection between forming addressees and personalizing has loosened” (28). While in premodern, stratified societies people possessed “clearly defined addresses by way of strata-limitations” (Fuchs 69), in societies that are characterized by differentiated, autonomous functional systems the communicative addressee is characterized, as Peter Fuchs calls it, “beyond the name that minimally identifies them by different specifications in the changing contexts of the functional systems” (69). To quote Fuchs once more: “Modern societies generate polycontextual fragmentized addressees that are not ordered hierarchically but heterarchically” (70).

26 See for this the informative analysis by Epping-Jäger.

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Transcriptivity Matters It is these disruptions of communication produced by complexity to which we owe the formation of a rich inventory of symbolic processes geared to reducing the improbability of communicative success, or, vice versa, to stage just this improbability. Without doubt there is a close connection between the problems of communicative addressing and the expansion of cultural media transcriptivity that allows increasing the probability of connective semantics between the increasingly complex orders of addressees. In the face of the increasing dispersion of knowledge, this could for example be accomplished by negotiating between the different levels of knowledge. Transcriptions, for instance, are using the different options of addressees27 connected to the different genres of individual media in order to re-establish the ‘legibility’ of ‘illegible’ texts, thereby restoring the defects of their pragmatics.28 They provide scriptures with a sense of utility, with those ‘paratexts’ without which their recipients could not be reached. In the field of scripturality we can therefore identify genres as highly specialized instruments of addressing. According to Philippe Lejeune, they are “generic contracts (or pacts)” (Genette 3) that “guide and determine” (Genette 5) the readers’ ‘horizon of expectation’ to a considerable degree with the help of our knowledge about the genres. Thus, genres answer the problems of addressing that emerge in increasingly complex orders of addressees. Separating quasi unaddressed scriptures (circulating in the semantic economy of a culture or archived in its cultural memory) from their symbolic frames that can assist in staging new meanings can be observed particularly in highly developed media cultures in which the two symbolic formats often become clearly asynchronic. Especially writing, which allows separating scriptures both from their authorial sources and from the semantic worlds of possible addressees, has lastingly advanced this asynchrony. The constant de-synchronizing movements of ‘textual’ and ‘paratextual’ symbolic formats produce problems of addressing, thereby creating the necessity of transcription. Transcriptive procedures insofar function as mediating operators that have to be called upon as soon as the interest arises to transfer (unaddressed) information into (addressed) communication. The legibility of scriptures is only assured when intact (non-eroded) address-options are available on the paratextual level or, if you want, on the level of the interface. Transcriptive procedures come into play in those cases in which ‘information’ is not 27 See for example Bernecker 126: “The choice of text type (speech, letter, textbook, manual, picture book) is to a certain extent also oriented to addresses, since these text types correspond to certain attitudes of expectation of the addressees.” 28 Or cryptographically preventing them.

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Ludwig Jäger addressed correctly, i.e., when the inscribed addresses meet orders of addressees that have eroded. But vice versa they possibly also come into play when they cannot be used any longer for aesthetic effectuation because they are overused, only too well known, and therefore have to be substituted. In short, it is the transcriptive logic of media communication that enables cultures to make illegible knowledge legible again, or better, to arcanize legible knowledge; it allows for the expropriation of traditional semantics and for the generation of new semantics and aesthetics. It is this transcriptive logic that permits accessing the semantics silenced in the cultural archives and that allows for the navigation between the different semantics of medial cultures.

Transcriptions and Autochthonous Semantics AUTOCHTHONOUS SEMANTICS Permit me some concluding remarks concerning a question that seems to be central for a theory of semantics and aesthetics of media, central beyond the problem of intermediality and the forms of transcriptive references by media to (other) media/symbol systems: it is the question of the nature of its autochthonous semantics. Semantic tensions between media can only occur in those cases in which individual semantics are playing their intra- and intermedial games. And if it is correct that in the media of language, of image and of music (to name just a few examples) the respective types of meaning are closely connected with the respective substrata of material signs and therefore do not precede these as ‘neutral’ cognitive forms,29 then with the problem of semantics especially in the arts (but not only there) a further problem comes into play: the problem of aesthetics. Only if we presume that mentality, i.e., ‘meaning’, ‘subject matter’ and ‘content’, etc., is not available without being mediated, i.e., without the materiality of the signs in which it is processed and staged, only then aesthetics can acquire a standing 29 If we presuppose this, we cannot base our thoughts, like for example the early Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus (with respect to an Aristotelian model of mentality and mediality), on the idea that the logical form of a notion is identical both in thought and in a spoken or written sentence expressing this notion; we can therefore not assume “that the same form is represented in three different media: the medium of thought, the medium of writing and the medium of speech” (Danto 134; our translation DR/BP). The semantics of non-linguistic media (as in for example images) therefore does not consist in the fact that they are saying something visually that could also be said in language or in a different manner.

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Transcriptivity Matters specific to the medium. Regarding the relationship between an imagined musical idea and its (notational) realization in a medium, Busoni had already pointed out that every notation has always been the “transcription of an abstract idea:” “From the moment in which we put pen to paper the idea loses its original form. Already the intention to write down the idea determines the choice of meter and key. The forms and sound devices about which the composer has to decide all the more determine his direction and his limits.” (Busoni 23)

This means that only when we suppose that semantics specific to certain media do exist can we assume that there are also aesthetics specific to certain media. Or, differently said, a genuine aesthetics of music can only exist if there is a genuine semantics of music. And only if such a genuine (autochthonous) semantics of media can be presumed we can allocate to aesthetics its specific place. The aesthetics of the medium then would be the sensuous-operative moment of procedure in which semantics (for example, in the form of the compositional realization of a musical idea, etc.) receives its media-specific form.

A FAREWELL TO THE MIRROR METAPHOR Assuming that we can undertake these conjectures concerning theories of media and signs, further reaching consequences arise straight away: if semantics and aesthetics are the results of the mechanisms of media (dispositives, agents of staging, etc.) and therefore do not stem from a realm of cognition that is free of media or from an ontological order of the ‘world itself’, then their function in the different media cannot consist only in providing ways of representing, picturing, and/or mirroring a premedial (‘ontological’) world. Then, according to Richard Rorty, we do not have any “transcendental standpoint outside our present set of representations from which we can inspect the relations between those representations and their object” (293), no excentric Archimedean point of reference allowing us to judge the adequacy of our reference to the world independently of mediated systems of representation.30 Rather, we have to rely on a system of semantics, according to Rorty, 30 Whether we can regard music at all as a system of representation that allows for reference to the world of objects and facts is a question I cannot answer here. Recent neuroscientific research on the basis of electroencephalographic measuring (EEG) of event-related brain potentials (ERP) have at least evidenced that both linguistic and musical stimuli can prime the meaning of words and that both can designate equally physiological indices for semantic processing.

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Ludwig Jäger that “does not depend upon mirror-imagery” (299).31 Its effectiveness then consists in the fact that symbolic systems to a certain extent only carry out additional symbolic entries into a world that has forever been symbolically structured. Semantic and aesthetic effects then are not outgrowths of the reference or the different forms of reference of symbol systems to a pre-symbolic world; they result from certain characteristics or forms of processing of the media dispositives themselves. We might also say that they are owed to those types of reference (supplied by the dispositives) that epistemologically do not take place between the symbol systems and the world,32 but that take place (1) on the one hand between different (mediated) symbol systems and (2) on the other also within the same symbol system. Therefore, this is a matter of types of reference and their logic of transcriptive (inter- and particularly also intramedial) organization.

‘EIGENSINN:’33 RECURSIVE TRANSCRIPTIVITY The question what can be called an autochthonous semantics is centrally decided in the field of intermedial references. Fundamentally this is true for natural languages, but in principle also for the semantics of media/symbol systems and—as it appears to me— especially for music. For now let us consider the model of language, which is the most informative for all forms of autochthonous semantics. Namely, in language we can exemplarily see what it means to generate eigensinn, i.e., a sort of meaning that is media specific, or in this case specific to the language. At the same time it becomes clear how the generation of eigensinn is closely connected with processes of self-reference that themselves are intertwined with the creation of aesthetic effects.

31 Therefore we should not, as he formulates, conceive of “knowledge […] as representations in the Mirror of Nature” (164). We have to discard “the mirror of nature” as the leading epistemological model and allow “conversation [to] replace […] confrontation” (170). 32 Of course one can refer to the world with symbol systems, but not to a world that is structured without symbol systems. 33 Translators’ note: We have opted to retain the German term “Eigensinn” that could be translated into English as “obstinacy.” In German, however, “Eigensinn” also contains a more positive connotation: the notions of “eigen” = “innate, one’s own, private, belonging to a self” and “Sinn” = “meaning, significance, sense.” Therefore, “Eigensinn” contains a double meaning that is obliterated by the term “obstinacy” with its negative connotations lacking the double meaning. In mathematics the terms eigenvector, eigenvalue and eigenspace are used as well (DR/BP).

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Transcriptivity Matters The explication of the term eigensinn that is introduced to denote more clearly what I have called the autochthonous semantics of media will be based on ideas regarding the eigensinn of (media-) systems that, for example, Niklas Luhmann has argued in Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (The Society of Society): here Luhmann refers us to the cybernetic-mathematical term “eigenvalue” (217f, 614, 888) borrowed from Heinz von Foerster that systems attain by way of the intriguingly recursive procedure of “utilizing procedures for the results of these procedures” (Luhmann, Gesellschaft 213f).34 According to Luhmann, the “utilization of systems formation for the results of systems formation” (Gesellschaft 614), namely, the utilization of symbolic processes for the results of symbolic processes, generates an “eigenbehavior”, a “production of eigenvalue” of the system. This results in its relative stability and closure vis-à-vis other systems. The eigenbehavior of the system creates “relatively stable attitudes that arise when an operation is utilized for its own results” (1102). The point of Luhmann’s idea of eigensinn therefore could possibly be summarized in the following way: systems—and therefore also media and other symbol systems—tend to generate eigensinn as profit from their characteristic behavioral procedures of recursive self-processing. Their eigensinn can thus be regarded as a direct effect of their operative logic. This means for language that it enjoys an indispensable characteristic to turn back recursively into itself, thereby making its own use of signs the subject matter of further thematizing, commenting, paraphrasing, explicating or quoting use of signs, viz. making this use of signs into the object of self-referential semiological operations in which that element becomes visible that I would like to call recursive transcriptivity of media and symbol systems (see Jäger, “Störung”). Self-recursivity then in this sense is one of the foundational sources of autochthonous semantics. It is a procedure in which scriptures are released from the conditions of their antecedent discursive circulation during the redirection of a symbolic system back to itself and are temporarily silenced, quoted, paraphrased, or explicated for the adaptation or reintroduction into the semantic management under new conditions. Recursive transcriptivity insofar can be seen as an operation of de- and re-semantization. This operation at the beginning of the seventies has been described by Jacques Derrida in a renowned lecture entitled “Signature Event Context” as structural decontextualization (parasitizing) (38). Since all usage of signs can a priori be ‘quoted,’ i.e., decontextualized and since there is no limitation to the extent of possible (re-)contextualizations, every

34 The term ‘eigenbehavior’ refers to a stability that arises in a recursive process from the utilization of the procedures to the results of the procedure.

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Ludwig Jäger sign can “always be lift[ed] from the interlocking chain in which it is caught or given” and can be “inscrib[ed] or graft[ed] into other chains.” Therefore, according to Derrida, “No context can enclose it. Nor can any code …” (27f).35 In this (transcriptive) procedure of the operative recursivity of media systems to their own symbolic creations—for example, in the case of music when developing, varying, parodying, etc., musical transcripts, referring them back to their musical scriptures (scripts/ prescripts)—we are dealing with that process of musical recursivity (i.e., recursive transcriptivity in music) by way of which the semantic and aesthetic eigensinn of music unfolds. More generally put, it seems that in the case of recursive transcriptivity of media systems we are dealing with a defining moment of those procedures of constantly de- and recontextualizing meaning through which cultural semantics at the same time balances and transforms itself. Without transcriptivity, the media machine that creates worlds and keeps the semantic management of cultures going would without a doubt stop because transcriptivity is the specific procedural form to which cultural meaning owes its creation—ergo: transcriptivity matters. Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

Works Cited Aigner, Carl. “Diskurse der Bilder: Photokünstlerische Appropriationen kunsthistorischer Werke.” Seipel 9-22. Amelunxen, Hubertus von. “Aneignung und Simulakrum: Die Einholung des Anderen in der Fotografie.” Seipel 23-37. Andriopoulos, Stefan, Gabriele Schabacher, and Eckhard Schumacher, eds. Die Adresse des Mediums. Cologne, 2001. Print. Assmann, Jan, and Burkhard Gladigow, eds. Text und Kommentar. Munich, 1995. Print. Balke, Friedrich. “Allgemeine Angaben zum Forschungskolleg: Problemfelder, Grundbegriffe, Theorieoptionen.” Finanzierungsantrag 2002-2003-2004 des SFB/FK 427 “Medien und kulturelle Kommunikation” an der Universität zu Köln. Cologne, 2001. 7-23. TS.

35 This translation can be found in “Signature, Event, Context.” A Communication to the Congrès international des Sociétés de philosophie de langue française, Montréal, August 1971. The theme of the colloquium was “Communication.” From Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. 307-330. URL: http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Derrida/Derrida_Sign ature_Event.html, BP/DR.

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Transcriptivity Matters Bernecker, R. “Adressant/Adressat.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Ed. Gert Ueding. Vol. 1. Darmstadt, 1992. 119-130. Print. Boehm, Gottfried, ed. Was ist ein Bild? 2nd ed. Munich, 1995. Print. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. 4th ed. Cambridge, 2001. Print. Busoni, Ferruccio. Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst. Wiesbaden, 1954. Print. [BRM] Brockhaus Riemann Musiklexikon. Ed. Carl Dahlhaus, Hans Eggebrecht, and Kurt Oehl. 5 vols. 3rd ed. Zürich, 1998. Print. Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Vol. 1. New Haven, 1955. Print. Coulmas, Florian. “Reden ist Silber, Schreiben ist Gold.” LiLi—Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 15 (1985): 95112. Print. Danto, Arthur C. “Abbildung und Beschreibung.” Boehm 125-147. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Limited Inc. By Derrida. Evanston, 1988. 1-25. Print. Dotzler, Bernhard, Erhard Schüttpelz, and Georg Stanitzek. “Die Adresse des Mediums: Einleitung.” Introduction. Andriopoulos, Schabacher, and Schumacher 9-19. Epping-Jäger, Cornelia. Die Inszenierung der Schrift: Der Literalisierungsprozeß und die Entstehungsgeschichte des Dramas. Stuttgart, 1996. Print. Fehrmann, Gisela, et al. “Original Copy—Secondary Practices.” In this volume. —, eds. Originalkopie: Praktiken des Sekundären. Cologne, 2004. Print. Fohrmann, Jürgen. “Der Unterschied der Medien.” Fohrmann and Schüttpelz 5-19. Fohrmann, Jürgen, and Erhard Schüttpelz, eds. Die Kommunikation der Medien. Tübingen, 2004. Print. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language. New York, 1972. Print. Fuchs, Peter. “Adressabilität als Grundbegriff der soziologischen Systemtheorie.” Soziale Systeme. Zeitschrift für Soziologische Theorie 3.1 (1997): 57-79. Print. Geimer, Peter, ed. Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit: Fotografie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technologie. Frankfurt a.M., 2002. Print. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln, 1997. Print. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis, 1968. Print. —. Ways of Worldmaking. Hassocks, 1978. Print.

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Ludwig Jäger Habermas, Jürgen. “Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie der kommunikativen Kompetenz.” Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie—Was leistet die Systemforschung? Ed. Habermas and Niklas Luhmann. Frankfurt a.M., 1975. 101-141. Print. Hammer-Tugendhat, Daniela. “Kunst der Imagination/Imagination der Kunst: Die Pantoffeln Samuel van Hoogstratens.” Zum Verhältnis von mentalen und realen Bildern in der frühen Neuzeit. Ed. Klaus Krüger and Alessandro Nova. Frankfurt a.M., 2000. 139-143. Print. —. “Liebesbriefe: Plädoyer für ein neues Text-Bild-Verständnis der holländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts.” Kunsthistoriker. Mitteilungen des österreichischen Kunsthistorikerverbandes 1516 (1999-2000): 126-133. Print. Jäger, Ludwig. “Epistemology of Disruption. Thoughts on the Operative Logic of Media Semantics.” Beyond the Screen. transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres. Ed. Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla. Bielefeld, 2010. Print. —. “Expertenkultur und Sprachkultur: ‘Innersprachliche Mehrsprachigkeit’ und das Problem der Transparenz des Expertenwissens.” Öffentlicher Sprachgebrauch: Praktische, Theoretische und historische Perspektiven. Ed. Karin Böke, Matthias Jung, and Martin Wengeler. Opladen, 1996. 67-76. Print. —. “Sprache als Medium: Über die Sprache als audio-visuelles Dispositiv des Medialen.” Audiovisualität vor und nach Gutenberg— Zur Kulturgeschichte der medialen Umbrüche. Ed. Horst Wenzel, Wilfried Seipel, and Gotthart Wunberg. Vienna, 2001. 19-49. Print. —. “Störung und Transparenz: Skizze zur performativen Logik des Medialen.” Performativität und Medialität. Ed. Sybille Krämer. Munich, 2004. 35-74. Print. —. “Transkriptionen: Inframedial.” Medien in Medien. Ed. Claudia Liebrand and Irmela Schneider. Cologne, 2002. 123-128. Print. —. “Transkriptivität: Zur medialen Logik der kulturellen Semantik.” Transkribieren—Medien/Lektüre. Ed. Jäger and Georg Stanitzek. Munich, 2002. 19-41. Print. —. “Die Verfahren der Medien: Transkribieren—Adressieren—Lokalisieren.” Fohrmann and Schüttpelz 69-79. —. “Vom Eigensinn des Mediums Sprache.” Brisante Semantik: Neuere Konzepte und Forschungsergebnisse einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Semantik. Ed. Dietrich Busse, Thomas Niehr, and Martin Wengeler. Tübingen, 2005. 45-64. Print. Koelsch, Stefan, et al. “Music, Language and Meaning: Brain Signatures of Semantic Processing.” Nature Neuroscience 7.3 (2004): 302-307. Print. Kristeva, Julia. Sèméiôtikè. Paris, 1969. Print.

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Transcriptivity Matters Lüdtke, Herbert. “Die Alphabetschrift und das Problem der Lautsegmentierung.” Phonetik 20 (1969): 147-176. Print. Luhmann, Niklas. Ecological Communication. Chicago, 1986. Print. —. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M., 1997. Print. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, 2001. Print. [MGG] Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik. Sachteil und Personenteil in 28 Bänden inkl. zwei Registerbänden. Established by Friedrich Blume. Ed. Ludwig Finscher. 2nd ed. Stuttgart, n.d. Print. Mitchell, William J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago, 1995. Print. Olson, David R. The World On Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge, 1994. Print. Pfiffner, Martin, and Peter Stadelmann. “Expertenwissen und Wissensexperten.” Expertenwissen. Ed. Ronald Hitzler, Anne Honer, and Christian Maeder. Opladen, 1994. 146-155. Print. Riedel, Manfred. “Positivismuskritik und Historismus: Über den Ursprung des Gegensatzes von Erklären und Verstehen im 19. Jahrhundert.” Positivismus im 19. Jahrhundert. Ed. Jürgen Blühdorn and Joachim Ritter. Frankfurt a.M., 1971. 81-104. Print. Riethmüller, Albrecht. “Zu den Transkriptionen Bachscher Orgelwerke durch Busoni und Reger.” Reger-Studien 3: Analysen und Quellenstudien. Ed. Susanne Popp and Susanne Shigihara. Wiesbaden, 1988. 137-146. Print. Riffaterre, Michael. La production du texte. Paris, 1979. Print. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford, 1980. Print. Seipel, Wilfried, ed. Diskurse der Bilder: Photokünstlerische Reprisen kunsthistorischer Werke. Katalog Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien. Vienna, 1993. Print. Spree, Axel. “Das Ende der Welt.” Semantik der Medien. Ed. Ludwig Jäger. Spec. issue of Sprache und Literatur 90 (2002): 24-36. Print. Stichweh, Rudolf. “Adresse und Lokalisierung in einem globalen Kommunikationssystem.” Andriopoulos, Schabacher, and Schumacher 25-33. Vieregge, Wilhelm H. Phonetische Transkription: Theorie und Praxis der Symbolphonetik. Stuttgart, 1989. Print. Vismann, Cornelia. Akten: Medientechnik und Recht. Frankfurt a.M., 2001. Print. Wiegerling, Klaus. Medienethik. Stuttgart, 1998. Print. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophische Untersuchungen [Philosophical Investigations]. Frankfurt a.M., 1984. Print.

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Original Copy—Secondary Practices GISELA FEHRMANN, ERIKA LINZ, ECKHARD SCHUMACHER, AND BRIGITTE WEINGART

I. The attempts at adapting copyright laws to the changed conditions of a digital media world bring the question of the relationship of original and copy into the center of our attention in a new way, one that has so far not been discussed in the debates of postmodernism nor in the context of recent cultural or media studies. The discussions on the legal changes—through which the problems of authorship, rights of access and the practices of copying and quoting are supposed to be regulated for all media—show that the question of the differentiation between original and copy is in no way anachronistic. Rather, postmodernist platitudes—such as the assertion that in times of digital replication we are already ‘in quotes’ at all times— prove to be as insufficient as the suggestions, fixated on technology, that original and copy cannot be differentiated any more in times of digitalization. The processes of copying, quoting, or reproducing are ubiquitous cultural techniques that on a large scale characterize the realms of the artistic (sampling, appropriation art and so forth), of cultural studies (philology, gender studies, debates on performativity, etc.), of the sciences (gene-sampling, cloning, etc.), as well as the personal realm in its private use of cultural offerings (private digital copies, file sharing, peer-to-peer-networks, etc.). But the questions of utilization of rights, the protection of authors, and access regulation for users seem to defy easy solutions. One of the reasons for this lies in the fact that the premises for discussing the relationship between original and copy are as unclear as the theoretical understanding of the corresponding secondary practices. ‘Secondary practices’ should be understood here as those cultural and mediated processes that specifically focus on the status of the found, the non-authentic or the derivative qualities of their objects or materials, as well as all conscious problematizations of such attributions. Through intentional appropriation, secondary practices differ from those modes of production that, by necessity, also resort to traditional inventories; however, they suppress or displace 77

Gisela Fehrmann, Erika Linz, Eckhard Schumacher, Brigitte Weingart doing so—often by claiming originality or authenticity—or at least they do not explicitly disclose their procedures. In contrast, secondary practices can be observed on different levels: they can be perceived in operations like repetition, quotation, paraphrase, and serialization; in medium-specific procedures like collage, remake or sampling; in more generally applicable genres and concepts like parody or pastiche; or even in technical procedures and those apparatuses that control the access to cultural archives. Even if such practices do not always refute the creator-myths of the original, the deliberate presentation of the ‘secondariness’ leads to irritations in the field of cultural values. The term ‘original copy’ allows us to focus on some of the problems that should be discussed in this context. Even if this term seems to disintegrate the clear separation of original and copy, thereby connecting the two poles of differentiation, it does not mark a new term of unification. The use of the term ‘original copy’ rather demonstrates that the difference between original and copy can be found on several levels and can be—has to be—newly situated as a variable factor depending on the context. Consequently, the term ‘original copy’ can denote—for example, in its use in the context of analog recordings of sound and image1—the status of a copy that is characterized by its immediate proximity to an original. Although used as a master, it can be clearly distinguished from the original as a ‘first generation’ copy, a secondary derivative. In the context of the debates on private or stolen copies, however, the functional locus of the term shifts: records or CDs that are commercially available—original copies in a technical sense—receive the status of ‘original’ and therefore have to be protected from ‘secondary’ exploitation. Thus, in the term ‘original copy,’ we see the connection of two aspects that both characterize the present discourse: on the one hand, the assumption that the original temporally and qualitatively precedes the copy (an assumption that is also reflected in the attribution of authenticity), and on the other hand, the fact that the supposedly secondary artifacts can attain the status of ‘original.’ Digital formats, which allow for loss-free reproduction, thereby making original and copy qualitatively indistinguishable, do not render the distinction obsolete; instead they make it even more distinct by underlining the fact that the relative statuses of ‘original’ and ‘copy’ are not simply a given but are always based on attributes and conventions.

1

In German, Originalkopie also refers to the master copy in music and film technology.

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Original Copy—Secondary Practices

II. It is sometimes assumed that the original can be reduced to objects and events that can be identified as singularities on the grounds of their materiality and/or their spatio-temporal location. This ontological differentiation often lurks in the background of discussions on the dissolution of the distinction between original and copy in the digital era. However, even prior to modern reproduction techniques the difference between original and copy could not operate with reference to defined, or even real, objects. What gets lost is the fact that the copy often constitutes the original. Secondary practices, such as appropriation and repetition become important in cases where original and copy are regarded as categories that are generated and attributed through the act of transcription—as described above with the term ‘original copy.’ Viewing the distinction between original and copy as the product of transcriptive processes means freeing them from the temporal logic of ‘primary’ and ‘derivative.’ Not only do originals establish a multiplicity of cultural discourses; they are in the first place constituted as originals by the discourses themselves. Only in the various practices of copying, imitating, simulating or reproducing and their related aesthetic, legal and economic discourses can a transcriptive process take place that bestows on something the status of ‘original.’ The relationship between original and copy can therefore be described as a form of metaleptic inversion of cause and effect in which the seemingly primary original is only post hoc identified as such. This ‘originalization’ only occurs once the practices of repetition and renewal reveal themselves as secondary procedures. However, assuming a transcriptive relationship between original and copy does not merely imply a simple reversal of temporal logic. The concept of transcriptivity in fact highlights the recursive structure within the metaleptic figure as a process of mutual correlation between these two categories. The “characteristic relational logic” of processes of transcription consists in the fact that on the one hand the reference object precedes the transcription as a “pre-text,” but its “status as a script” is only conferred by this process.2 In this way, for example, quotes or copies only function as quotes or copies by relating to something primary; but at the same time that which is quoted or copied (pre-text) is only lifted out of the mass of existent material and into the status of an original (script) by becoming an object of quotation or copying. On the other hand—and here lies

2

See for this Jäger 30 and 33ff, who clarifies the “characteristic relational logic” of transcriptive procedures with the terms “pre-text,” “script” and “transcript”.

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Gisela Fehrmann, Erika Linz, Eckhard Schumacher, Brigitte Weingart one of the keys to the concept of transcriptivity—the script (in our context the original) becomes autonomous as an object of transcription in relation to the transcript (copy, quote, etc.), and through that process acquires a kind of “right to intervene” (see in more detail Jäger 33), thereby making room for further transcriptions. For even though the reference object in the act of quoting, copying, commenting, sampling, etc., is only designated as the original through the act of transcription, this newly gained status simultaneously makes it the foundation for the appropriateness, legitimacy, and authenticity of the performed transcription. The iterative use of secondary references can therefore lead both to a sanctioning of the original status and to its renewed questioning or displacement. In some cases it is only through the recursive chaining of such transcriptions that the objects of reference—an identifiable symbol, a recognized text form, a connection of genres, a certain style—obtain a specificity to which the term original can be applied, thereby becoming objects of purposeful acts of copying.

III. An example of a secondary practice in which the constitutive functions of transcription can be observed is the artistic use of found images, as established by the historical Avant-gardes and later adapted mainly in pop and appropriation art. This is a particularly salient example, since the procedures in question often refer reflexively to the distinction between ‘original’ and ‘copy,’ and to its traditional significance within the art system. In the context of pop strategies during the sixties and seventies, citations of found images— especially those of mass media—are often used as indicators of cultural ‘vulgarity.’ This means that they are used to serve a programmatical thwarting of the cultural distinction between high and low, a distinction that is traditionally connected to the dichotomy of original and copy. This applies just as much to pop art as it does to the simultaneously emerging forms of pop literature that work with relationships between text and image (but then again, it only partially applies to both tendencies because the exhibition of ‘secondarity’ can also be interpreted as the visual realism of postmodern everyday culture, or as an affirmation of artificiality as second order authenticity). In comparison, several works that were subsumed under the term ‘Appropriation Art’ at the beginning of the eighties focus more on the myth of originality that—challenging the famous diagnoses by Walter Benjamin—survives more or less unchanged even in the age of technical reproduction, particularly in the arts and the art

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Original Copy—Secondary Practices market. If, for example, since the beginning of the eighties the artist Sherry Levine appropriated canonical works of art, for instance by van Gogh, or photographs by Walker Evans, photographing the latter, for example, and assigning to them the title “Untitled (after Walker Evans)” under her own name, then this transcription treats the relationship of original and copy as fundamentally regulated by transcriptivity, by endorsing the creation of something new that is then sanctioned as originality. While the category of ‘influence’—or the reference to tradition—is quite legitimate in the context of art because, as a repetitive variation (“after”), it affirms the original qua original, the ‘mere’ appropriation is a way of radicalizing this logic of reproduction in an age of advanced reproduction. Levine’s strategy of course relies on the breaking of taboos, thereby bringing the discursive construction of the distinction between original and copy to the forefront and making it visible. Her choice of male artists corresponds to this strategy because—especially in the aesthetic field— authorship is not only attributed to an individual ‘genius,’ but is also coupled with gender-attributes. Accordingly, forms of female creativity are traditionally connoted as reproductive, for example in the history of anonymous handcraft. Levine’s provocation worked because her ‘after’-images were not only recognized as parodies of these logics of attribution but were also interpreted as illegitimate transcriptions—in fact, she was accused of stealing. The strategies of appropriation in particular point out both the bi-directionality of transcriptive logic (as explained above) as well as the reentry of the distinction between original and copy within those practices whose aim is to undermine both by relying on ‘secondarity.’ After all, these appropriation strategies themselves profited for a while from being new and original, and thus from the reentry of the figure of the original (as ‘originality’) within the realm of secondary practices. But when today on a website we find works from 2001 with the title Untitled (AfterSherrieLevine.com) that—predictably— represent an appropriation of Levine’s appropriations this does not only provoke the objection of being unoriginal. Levine’s ‘original copy’ retrospectively becomes the ‘original’ that to a certain extent controls its copies and transcriptions (or leaves this control to art criticism, where the ‘unoriginal’ might also just be ignored).

IV. Quotation is central to current debates about the distinction between ‘original’ and ‘copy.’ Even today, discussions about the constitutive characteristics of quotation remain largely within the textual (i.e., written) paradigm of iteration or reference. At the same time,

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Gisela Fehrmann, Erika Linz, Eckhard Schumacher, Brigitte Weingart the indication of the spatio-temporal ‘original coordinates’ of a particular segment is identified with a concept of originality, a concept that is only now, in the course of the advent of digital media, being challenged. In fact, however, the comparison between forms of quotation in Western writing cultures and those of oral cultures show differences that force us to reconsider the terms ‘original’ and ‘copy’ by pointing to the hybrid figure of the ‘original copy.’ With the example of sign languages that—structurally—can be called ‘oral,’ it can be shown that the concept of originality and origin in no way constitutes a necessary prerequisite for practices of quotation; it must instead be understood as a discursive strategy which is dependent on specific media, and is in this case indebted to the textual practice of quotation. In written textual quotations—regardless of whether we are dealing with symbolic representations of images, of sounds, or of language—quotation is bound to a spatio-temporal localization that makes the allegedly ‘original’ context more precise, while at the same time identifying it as the original so that the ‘pre-text’ can be recovered—and this is what distinguishes quotation from other secondary practices. Only by segmentation and recombination is the quoted element repeated, transferred, and logically created as the original. In this process, the elements are taken out of the flow of signs, the selection is fixed and then incorporated into a new context as ‘frozen.’ At the same time, the chosen segment obtains the function of a substitute for the source, the whole context to which it refers. One effect of the process of transcription that becomes particularly obvious in such quotations is the inherent attribution of the qualities ‘once before—once again,’ an attribution which turns an antecedent into something familiar, and a repeated element into a model (and thus into a ‘quotable’ script). As such, the quoted element now retrospectively relates to the transcript (the quote), as much as to its original. Finally, as script, the quoted element is granted authority, namely the right to regulate further transcriptions (and further quotations)—the ‘right to intervene’ mentioned above. In Western literate societies, the convention of reducing the indication of a quoted element to its reference to time, space, or person also found its way into the practices of quotation applied in secondary orality. The concept of ‘original’ is generalized into a category that superimposes itself onto the inherent succession (before/after) of signs. However, if we confront practices of quotation based on literacy with the discursive practices of non-literate sign-using language communities that have not differentiated into everyday writing systems, the spatio-temporally marked practices of quotation turn out

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Original Copy—Secondary Practices to be mediated procedures of Western writing cultures: in structurally ‘oral’ sign languages, quoting does not presuppose but connects. It is not the addresses—the spatio-temporal references to a ‘pre-text’—that are relevant; it is the context itself and it is this context that has to be reconstructed as ‘original copy.’ This can be done with short cuts: By using a brief quote as an ‘example,’ shared knowledge is addressed and more complex contexts are invoked. Or, in cases where this shared knowledge cannot be taken for granted, the segments have to be larger in order to simultaneously preserve and actualize the previous element in the repetition. The oral method of quotation therefore reminds us less of forms of de- and re-contextualization of frozen segments than of a scenically complex reconstruction of connected situations. Certainly, in the spatial articulation of sign language, the repeated element is formally marked via spatial means and thereby confirmed as a quotation. But it is usually not spatio-temporally specified. Instead, quoted elements of speech and action are staged as renewed ‘con-texts’ and are also often somatically commented upon. In this respect, the literate practice of quotation which relies on the source context collides with the procedures applied in primary orality (as exemplified by certain sign languages): the latter relies on the re-actualization of the context of experience, staged as a performance of eye witnessing. All in all, quoting proves to be more of a link between ‘before’ and ‘now’ than a relation between original and copy.

V. Digital sampling in pop music is often interpreted as a form of quotation that makes the distinction between ‘original’ and ‘copy’ into a locus of complex processes of transcription. In the context of digital sound processing, sampling denotes a phono-technical procedure that transforms an analog signal into digital values. Thanks to the increase in sample rates and storage capacities since the end of the 1980s, it is technically possible to make any existing sound digitally available and to reproduce it in such a way that—in contrast to earlier recording methods—a sound-qualitative difference between the sampled original and the digital copy—the sample—can no longer be perceived. Samples can become the foundational elements of music production. Thus, it is not only possible to incorporate individual sounds and fragments of melodies into a completed piece, either in the sense of a quotation or only as an indeterminate element of sound; since the end of the 1980s, pieces are also produced that are based on sequentialized and modulated samples. The method—used mostly in Hip Hop—of generating the rhythmic struc-

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Gisela Fehrmann, Erika Linz, Eckhard Schumacher, Brigitte Weingart ture of pieces by repeating sampled drum beats (especially from Funk and Soul of the 1970s) has in various ways called attention to the question of the relationship between original and copy. What on the one hand (often by the artists) is regarded as homage to and a reminiscence of the partly-forgotten traditions of African-American pop music, on the other hand (often on the part of the record industry and the copyright owners) is understood as illegal use. Therefore, it is now customary to ‘clear’ samples by paying a previously agreed-upon sum and by crediting the original publicly in writing. In this way, not only is the ‘right’ of the script ‘to intervene’ manifested; often the original can only be recognized and identified by way of this ‘clearing’—and in some cases, is put on the market again. Concentrating on such legal matters in the discussions of digital sampling, however, ignores another dimension that often also characterizes the process of transcription observable in this context. What is taken—from a legal and economic perspective—as a reference to an original, can—from the perspective of sound aesthetics— be understood as a separation from a source material, as an autonomization of a sound element. The re-contextualization of samples by a reference to their sources is thereby countered by a process of de-contextualization that is initiated by the repetition and modulation of the samples in repetitive loops. This is particularly true in the techno tracks that often only repeat a rhythmic pattern and, when necessary, marginally vary it in the repetitions. This method also works by referencing a primary element—not, however, an original that is identifiably external to the piece, but rather the constantly renewed original copy that is constantly referencing back to its previous repetition: “every 1.5 seconds the track refers to the moment 1.5 seconds before” (Diederichsen 46). The effects of the present and presence that are attributed to techno can be referred back just as much to this structure of repetition as can the just as often formulated criticism of monotony or, more positively, the differentiation of ritualized patterns. Here we see, albeit in a more rhythmic, serialized and—through processing—abstracted form, a process of sign-usage that in a similar way also characterizes other forms of communication. As ‘original copy,’ the sequentialized sample—the rhythmic pattern in a sequence that, however, is also modulated by the repetition—attains the status of an “iterative utterance” that—as demonstrated in the encounter of speech-act theory and deconstruction—interlocks eventfulness (in the actuality of the communicative act), repetition (of a given pattern), and difference (in the repetition) (cf. Derrida). Like the citation or the sample, other secondary practices can also be understood as instances of a “general citationality”, a “gen-

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Original Copy—Secondary Practices eral iterability” that can no longer be diagnosed and classified by way of seemingly simple oppositions—original/copy, event/repetition, primary/secondary—but that make desirable a “differential typology of forms of iteration” by way of which the “different kinds of … iterable marks” can be analyzed and compared (Derrida 18). However, if one considers the radical dependence of secondary practices on the context—that also has to be understood as a dependence on the medium—the prospects for an abstract typology shrink. The logic of the original copy only helps with the analysis of various secondary practices—without losing sight of their specificity—if it is integrated into a more flexible methodology combining the analysis of the material, reading, and theoretical reflection in accordance with the given situation and subject. Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

Works Cited Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Limited Inc. By Derrida. Trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston, 1988. 123. Print. Diederichsen, Diedrich. “Hören, Wiederhören, Zitieren: Vorschlag einiger Elemente einer Zeichentheorie der Popmusik aus aktuellem Anlass: Beck, Mike Ink, Rockers HiFi.” Spex 1 (1997): 4346. Print. Jäger, Ludwig. “Transkriptivität: Zur medialen Logik der kulturellen Semantik.“ Transkribieren: Medien/Lektüre. Ed. Jäger and Georg Stanitzek. Munich, 2002. 19-41. Print.

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Rumor—More or Less at Home: On Theories of News Value in the 20th Century IRMELA SCHNEIDER

I. On January 24th, 2006 spiegel online headlined the story “Two Germans in the Grip of Kidnappers” (“Geiselgangster”) reporting: “According to information from the Leipziger Volkszeitung, both men are employed by Cryotec, a company in Bennewitz near Wurzen. The two were supposedly only in their third workday at their new job. The director of the company […] indirectly confirmed this case of kidnapping.”

It continued: “Roughly three hours after the kidnapping, according to the Tagesspiegel and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a caller reached the German Embassy in Bagdad. The man announced that two Germans had been taken hostage. German security groups believe it is possible that the caller is part of the kidnappers or belongs to their periphery. However, he also could be an impostor.”1

This is a typical offer in the news business from the ‘hearsay’ department. The short snippet of information regarding the kidnapping produces long newscasts in the following days that are supported by speculation on the background of the kidnapping. A scant news situation does not become simply compensated by rumor,2 as it was believed for quite some time, but leads to an almost infinite interplay between rumor and news. That which is articulated as rumor later on is confirmed, corrected or paraphrased as news. Rumor and news are connected in that both are the precondition for a variety of follow-up information: it makes a difference (and therefore 1 2

The German quotes follow the version documented in the LexisNexis database. See Lauf 15, characterizing rumor as “news replacement.” A variant of this replacement thesis can be found in Kirchmann 78: Rumor represents “an internal mechanism of compensation.”

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Irmela Schneider constitutes information) whether the two kidnapped persons had worked for only three or already for six days in their new job, whether one or several of the kidnappers had contacted the Süddeutsche Zeitung or the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen after not only three but already after two hours, and so on and so forth. The example shows: news reports feed the rumor and rumor feeds news reports. Not only does the abduction in Iraq epitomize this observation. One could detect this as well when observing the papers in the first days after Hans Martin Schleyer was kidnapped in September 1977, or if one read the reports on Bill Clinton’s affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky in the first months of 1998. In all cases of this kind that stand as examples for innumerable others, emerge—as defined by Serres3—the parasitic relations between news and rumor. One can easily find justifications for the reciprocal parasitizing of news and rumor. People repeatedly point to the situation of competition between the media that increases the necessity to be topical, or the permanent acceleration of ‘transportation’ and communication systems is pointed out. This all sounds plausible but it only concerns border areas. Rather, one gets to the center of the problem if one takes one’s point of departure from the news value theory, questioning the relationship between rumor and news and thereby becoming aware of some factors that hitherto have played hardly any role in the debates about rumor and news.

3

See Serres 7: “To be a parasite means to eat next to [sic]. [“To live parasitically means to eat at someone’s table” would be a more adequate translation of the French original; DR/BP]. Let us begin with this literal meaning. The country rat is invited by his colleague from town, who offers him supper. One would think that what is essential is their relation of resemblance or difference. But that is not enough; it never was. The relation of the guest is no longer simple. Giving or receiving, on the rug or on the tablecloth, goes through a black box. I don’t know what happens in there, but it functions like an automatic corrector. There is no exchange, nor will there be one. Abuse appears before use. Gifted in some fashion, the one eating next to, soon eating at the expense of, always eats the same thing, the host, and this eternal host gives over and over, constantly, till he breaks, even till death, drugged, enchanted, fascinated. The host is not a prey, for he offers and continues to give. Not a prey, but the host. The other one is not a predator but a parasite. Would you say that the mother’s breast is the child’s prey? It is more or less a child’s home.”

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II. But first I would like to add a few comments on the historical relationship between news and rumor. The well-known woodcarving from the Emblemata (1566) already points to a connection between the two, since here ‘Fama’ hovers above a book printer.4 The close connection also shows when the news was called a “walking newspaper” or a “walking rumor,”5 as a study of the early 18th century shows us. The relational use is revealed as well in newspaper titles like Die europäische Fama, published from 1702 to 1756 and belonging to the famous publications of the 18th century. Its name was by no means singular; Fama was one of the most familiar newspaper names in the 17th and 18th century (cf. Würgler 28). The “first German theoretical debate concerning the press” that had “a certain climax” (Würgler 27) at the turn of the 17th to the 18th century is also underlining the connection between rumor and news— quite contrary to the news theories of the 20th century where, as I want to show, rumor plays no role. One of the often-quoted publications of the early theoretical debates concerning the press is Kasper Stieler’s well-known leaflet Zeitungs Lust und Nutzen (Newspaper’s Delight and Value). Stieler here asserts “that to attempt finding real truth among so many partisanships and interceptions of so much rumor seems as if I were trying to find noon at twilight time.”6 Stieler’s observation sounds more than sobering if we compare it to the ideal of objectivity and the expectation of truth that was formulated for the news mainly in the second half of the 20th century. Could this be one of the reasons why the relationships between news and rumor that are well known from the history of newspapers have disappeared from sight in the news theories of the 20th century? In the first weekly historico-political newspapers of the 17th century, the news reports, which as a rule were of widely differing origins, were printed in the chronological order in which they arrived at the printers or postal offices. No order that was motivated 4

5

6

See for example the reproduction in Wunderlich 60. In this woodcarving Wunderlich finds proof for the fact that the emergence and circulation of rumor is enhanced by the media change from manuscript to print. Fama counted “from the beginning … to the most important providers of news in the developing mass media.” See Paul Jacob Marperger. “Anleitung zum rechten Verstand und nutzbarer Lesung Allerhand Zeitungen oder Avisen” (“Manual for the Correct Understanding and Profitable Reading of All Kinds of Newspapers or Announcements”). 1726, qtd. in Würgler 27. Hamburg, 1695, qtd. in Würgler 27. Regarding Stieler see also Meyen and Löblich 73-88.

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Irmela Schneider by facts or by subjects existed at the time. As Hedwig Pompe (163) has pointed out, the early newspapers thereby continued a practice that was customary in handwritten newsletters and in the then still irregularly printed first newspapers of the 16th century. In view of such an arrangement of the presentation of news reports, a reproach against this disorder emerged, and directly following this reproach there appeared a double suspicion. On the one hand, one suspected that the news could be wrong; on the other hand, that news reports could have been wrongly chosen with view to the “unlimited plurality of news appearance.” The last point, according to Pompe, marks “the unobservable unity of all communications” (170). This impossibility to observe plays a role in the news value theories that I am dealing with in the following paragraphs insofar as these theories can be seen as strategies leaving invisible everything that cannot be observed. Both suspicious factors—that news reports could be wrong or that they could be wrongly chosen—imply that there could exist accurate reports and correctly chosen ones. This distinction between right and wrong in the news theories is one of the assertions that decree that news items are not observed as parts of communication, but as factors of ‘transportation’ systems. This imputation—that news reports printed in newspapers or spread via audiovisual media are part of ‘transportation’ systems and not of communication—belongs to the fundamental premises of news research. If we follow Dirk Baecker, then this transcription of communication as a ‘transportation’ system not only applies to the news but to communication in media systems in general. According to him, “observations of communication as communication do not take place any longer. […] Until the present […] the term communication is only used to describe all sorts of ‘transportation’ facilities of connection, mediation and messaging as well as their optimizing and selective differentiation.” (“Nach” 153)

If news reports are regarded as factors in ‘transportation’ systems, then rules can be applied that can be followed or not and then a clear division between true and false news can be devised. Observed as communication, a double contingency is inscribed both into news and into rumor. News as a form of communication is a cultural phenomenon and as such one doesn’t get very far “with causal models and theories of factor” (Baecker, Wozu Kultur? 7f). News value theories are grounded in a model of causality and are situated within theories of factor. Here as well we can see: in these theories, news is observed as a factor of the ‘transportation’ system and not as a cultural phenomenon, as communication.

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III. Within the news theories developed during the 20th century, the news value theory occupies a central position.7 This theory is connected with the other news theories of the 20th century in that its definitions of news entirely block out rumor; in this theoretical field it is neither debated nor mentioned that there were relationships between news and rumor nor that there could be any relationships. This is what fundamentally differentiates news theories of the 20th century from earlier newspaper studies. Neither is the exclusion of rumor an oversight nor is it a coincidence; it rather points to a constitutive component of this theory. This does not mean, however, that one would not learn something about rumor in news value theories. If we read these theories not only as news but also as rumor theories, it becomes clearly evident that rumor is inclusively excluded. The parasitical creation of relationships between news and rumor then becomes apparent, which, although it is not mentioned in this theory, remains invested in it. In the second half of the 20th century, especially in the sixties and seventies, the news value theory and its diverse variants were elaborated on in the social sciences and in communications theories, both in the US and in Europe. The numerous studies executed on its basis in the second half of the 20th century (and still until recently) have as their goal to “operationalize”8 attempts at falsification. The assumption is that news can be measured and statistically recorded. Those studies that follow the basic assumptions of news value theories integrate news into the statistical dispositive claiming that prognoses are possible predicting which event will become news and which one won’t. And finally, the news value theory as a study of media effects is aiming at being able to make statements on how news affects users of media and what opinions the users of media have when they are watching news (see as a summary Kepplinger, “Forschungslogik”). At any rate, in the first decades, when the news value theory was of great interest not only in communications studies but also in 7

8

Hans Mathias Kepplinger suspects that the “most important reason for the great attractiveness of the news value theory” lies in its “formal character:” “The news value theory roots the choice of news in causes that are universally valid and therefore (almost) everywhere applicable, durable and therefore free of the spirit of the times, stable and therefore independent of situations as well as supraindividual and therefore documenting professionalism” (“Nachrichtenwert” 22f). See Blumenberg 421 on the promise that is supposed to become operative: “Studies of operation provide optimal problem solutions, but they never remove the doubt whether the problem was correctly presented.”

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Irmela Schneider journalistic discourse, recommendations were deduced on the basis of its conclusions that were related to the work of journalists or the competence of the users of media. In the end, we then find praise or reproach; as a rule, the latter.9 In the sixties—when these theories were formulated—the “McLuhan Galaxy” was established (cf. Castells 378ff). During this time it was widely discussed how press and television were being used and assessed; it was a time in which media competition was debated. Regular surveys on the so-called credibility of the different media were conducted that were supposed to provide data to indicate whether television changes, influences or devalues the use of print media, especially that of the daily newspaper. Numerous empirical studies ask what knowledge of the world the different mass media are providing and what effects this knowledge has on the users. Such studies tie in with US-American “audience research” that was established since the 1920s. The news value theory then in a broader sense also belongs to this context of scholarship.10 The initial question of the news value theory is: to what event do mass media attribute the status to become news? Already this initial question contains numerous aporetic elements that are characteristic for this theory. This concerns first of all the distinction between event and news; secondly, the assumption that for news a value can be established, calculated and measured and, thirdly, in conclusion, the silent prerequisite that news reports are observed as factors of the ‘transportation’ system and not as communication. It would be a misconception to regard the following ideas concerning this theory as a survey of the present state of research. They rather aim at determining the traces left by this theory when one inquires about the relationships between rumor and news. With this aim, one can justify why the fundamental and known reservations that have been mainly formulated from a constructivist perspective do not play any role here.11 9

See Kepplinger, “Nachrichtenwert” 31f, critically observing that “the theoretical discussion from the beginning has been suffering from the mixture of two aspects—the importance of reality indicators for explaining the choice of news on the one hand and the assessment of the quality of the reports on the basis of reality indicators on the other hand.” 10 I can only mention here that news research can be regarded as a variant of opinion polls that, according to Jacques Rancière, follows the “postdemocratic” relationship of scholarship and opinion (106). 11 Regarding this see Schulz, who pleads for a “fundamental theoretical reorientation” in the news theories. He underlines that until recently the attempts at falsification trying to show “that the reality conveyed by media does not correspond to ‘factual’ reality—to ‘what really happened’” are

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Rumor—More or Less at Home In reading news value theories, two problems are of interest in the context that traces the news of rumor and its various fields: Firstly, they concern the traces of rumor in a theory debating news (and not rumor). Such a search for traces reveals that rumor (even if it does not explicitly play any role in this theory) nevertheless—and maybe especially successfully under this condition—parasitically lodges itself in this news theory and its definition of news. Secondly, it involves a functional definition of mass media that is implicitly integrated in this theory, thereby characterizing its concept of news just as much as it is pointing at the inclusive exclusion of rumor. Let us start with some suggestions concerning central differentiations between event and news. Quite unlike in history and philology that discuss the term ‘event’ times and again anew, either discarding or valuing the term (cf. the survey by Rathmann), in the news value theory the term ‘event’ hardly plays a role. The difference between event and news is simply being implied and is only very rarely made into a specific subject of discussion.12 If the differentiation becomes a subject of discussion, then the procedure is fundamentally different from that of the debates in the humanities or in cultural studies. A significant example can be found in the dissertation by Joachim Friedrich Staab developed within the project funded by the German Research Foundation Instrumentelle Aktualisierung. Staab’s argumentation is significant and not only for news theoreticians. Staab substantiates the epistemological problem of the term ‘event’ in the “philosophical aporia of the subject-object-relation” and in his short outline refers to Nicolai Harmann’s “Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis” (Fundamentals of epistemological metaphysics) (100). Staab concludes, utilizing a reductionist variant from the Sociology of Knowledge: “In the place of Hartmann’s transcendental relationships in my analyses [he is talking of the empirical analyses of news] I have substituted the social common sense” (101). The argument seems to be that in the case of analysis of news the simple truth of common sense is at work, implying: There is a difference between event and news and our point of departure is this difference; we neither question it nor do we problematize it. It is fixed: Event and news can be brought into a temporal

“fundamentally unjustified and also impossible for theoretical reasons of communications and epistemology” (25). I cannot follow up in this context whether and to what extent the theoretical reorientation demanded by Schulz has actually taken place. 12 The contribution by Hans Mathias Kepplinger (“Ereignisbegriff”) seems to be an exception. His course of argumentation, however, shows that the epistemological problems accompanying the term are not followed up in this text either; insofar he rather proves the rule.

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Irmela Schneider sequence: In the first place is the event, in the second one the news. This is the unquestioned sensus communis. Staab is by no means the first and only one using the common sense argument. Rather, since the 1950s at the latest, this argumentative figure can be found throughout the media effects studies done in the United States, which in turn became influential for the German studies of media effects. The example that I would like to briefly introduce here is significant and simultaneously representative of many others. It emerged out of the debates concerning the effects of televisual presentations of violence, debates within which since the 1960s numerous and extensive research projects have been conducted that study the effects of violence in media using empirical methods. In an article of the journal Public Opinion Quarterly of 1972, the well-known sociologist and media specialist Leo Bogart is dealing with the expectations from the studies done in media effects, comparing them with the scholarly potentials of this research. According to Bogart, it is expected that the effect of media can be precisely proven with a causal model. In his view, this expectation is confronted with the realization that every causal piece of evidence regarding the effect of media has—as he puts it—a “precarious status.” For Bogart, to even speak of a procedure of “proving” in the case of media and their effects is a grave mistake. He suggests reserving “proof” for the juridical discourse. For the status of findings in the social sciences regarding the effects of media, he suggests the term “evidence.” Initially this sounds plausible. However, in the next paragraph, Bogart does not define what he means by evidence; instead, common sense now gets into the game. Common sense, Bogart asserts with an almost provocative simplicity, tells us that media have effects and that the effects of mediated presentation of violence is damaging. Both basic assumptions, Bogart continues, are supported by “a substantial body of evidence.”13 Bogart’s observations suggest a double conclusion. First of all, from the term ‘common sense’ one can deduce the demand that research done in media effects has to be continued and in fact with the goal of defining more and more precisely the implied media effects that, however, are not to be questioned. That makes studies in media effects an endless project. Secondly, the expectation is builtin into the sensus communis that media effects can be explained 13 “Common sense tells us that communications leave effects and that violence is bad rather than good. A substantial body of evidence supported these premises […]” (506). Regarding the discourse analysis of the debate concerning violence in media see the dissertation by Isabell Otto. I am referring to this study in the example outlined here.

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Rumor—More or Less at Home with a causal model, that they can be proven. Even though this expectation surpasses the present scholarly possibilities, it does not exclude the hope that while the effects of media can not yet be proven, we will approach that goal the longer we work on it. This paradoxical form of a (still) unproven proof could be called the principle of an “approximative causality.” And this principle shows: a department of ‘hearsay’ belongs not only within the hard business of news production, but also within news studies and their effects.14 The reference to common sense functions as a sort of ‘stopping rule’ in the discourse of media effects, as it does in news value theories.15 I suggest that this rule is indispensable for these theories in order for them to conclude their programs without annihilating themselves.

IV. The term ‘news value’ that has lent its name to the news theory discussed here is older than the explicitly called news value theory. Walter Lippmann introduced it in his widely published study Public Opinion (1922).16 Lippmann talks of “news value” when discussing procedures of selection on the basis of which journalists are producing news. The news value, according to Lippmann, refers to those characteristics of events that make it probable that events will become publicized news items (cf. 344). Central for Lippmann’s concept of public opinion is his differentiation between “visible” and “invisible environment” (322). As a rule, news reports refer to an environment invisible to the readers of newspapers. This environment then becomes ‘visible’ in the form of news once it contains certain attributes. Only with the help of certain attributes the invisible environment acquires a news value. Lippmann’s “invisible environment” corresponds to the event in news value theories. The attributes of the invisible environment that Lippmann calls their prerequisite for acquiring news value in news

14 See also Kunczik and Zipfel: the authors discuss different research conclusions regarding violence and in some of these see impressive examples for the fact “that supposedly ‘scientific’ results often are nothing else than hearsay and manipulation of data” (205). 15 This stopping rule has a variant in Kay Kirchmann’s “Das Gerücht und die Medien” where he is discussing the “control of truthfulness as a criterion of the difference between news and rumor” (75f). 16 Almost all studies refer back to Lippmann; regarding further “beginning[s]” of the news value theory see Höfner 11ff.

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Irmela Schneider value theory are read from an event. As attributes defining the news value, Lippmann lists the following: “It may be the act of going into bankruptcy, it may be a fire, a collision, an assault, a riot, an arrest, a denunciation, the introduction of a bill, a speech, a vote, a meeting, the expressed opinion of a well known citizen, an editorial in a newspaper, a sale, a wage-schedule, a price change, the proposal to build a bridge…. There must be a manifestation.” (340)

Those attributes that constitute the news value of events according to Lippmann can be summarized in categories like sensationalism, spatial proximity, unequivocality, conflicts, meaningfulness and surprise (235ff). Of Lippmann’s ideas, two circumstances are important for the argument pursued here: On the one hand, Lippmann illustrates a tendency to allocate the news value to the attributes of the invisible environment, i.e., to the events in an ontologizing way.17 The news value theory then continues this transcription of categories of observation into ‘features,’ into characteristics of events. The second circumstance of interest in Lippmann’s considerations regarding the news value refers to the traces of rumor to be found in the reflections on news, even though rumor is not even involved. We can on the one hand observe here a difference between Lippmann’s considerations and news value theory; on the other hand, there is a proximity between his considerations and theories of rumor connecting him to news value theory. The difference shows in Lippmann’s assessment of the newspaper reader. While news value theories assume that media users take news either for correct or for incorrect, Lippmann contradicts the linking of news to this formula of differentiation: “But the body of the news, though unchecked as a whole by the disinterested reader, consists of items about which some readers have very definite preconceptions. … They are dealing here with a subject matter that to them is indistinguishable from fiction. The canon of truth cannot be applied. They do not boggle over such news if it conforms to their stereotypes, and they continue to read it if it interests them.” (330)

17 I am talking of ‘tendency’ with regard to Lippmann because he is not following any ontologizing argumentation in the context of his thoughts on the necessity of stereotypes. A more detailed discussion of Lippmann’s study and his skeptical position regarding democracy that clearly can be found in his views on the press would go beyond the scope of this contribution.

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Rumor—More or Less at Home According to Lippmann, media users regard the news as truth within the realm of plausibility if it corresponds to their stereotypes; if news reports are of interest to them—for whatever reason—the difference true/false does not play any role; they will continue to read. With this formation of the media user, Lippmann distances himself from such theories that take an “omnicompetent citizen” for granted (364). A certain proximity between rumor and Lippmann’s designation of the news value that makes news into news is already inscribed into the quote about the reader. This proximity becomes even more clearly visible in comparing Lippmann’s description of the news value with the conclusions of psychological studies of rumor. A basis for comparison is offered by the fundamental, widely read study by Gordon W. Allport and Leo Postman, The Psychology of Rumor (1947), in which Allport and Postman attempt for the first time to give a psychological explanation for the emergence and distribution of rumor. The initial question forming the basis of the experimental research to which Allport and Postman refer in their study and from which they deduce their statements can be correlated with that of the news value theory. While news value theory asks how the value of news is established, rumor theory asks what makes for the value to be spread as rumor. The two psychologists call the factors creating this value “leveling,” “sharpening,” and “assimilation” (75ff).18 This triad not only parasitically invades Lippmann’s categories and vice versa; it also becomes clear that news theories define the selective criteria for news in quite similar categories as those theories that are used to describe the emergence of rumor. That which gives value to news also makes rumor interesting. Therefore, news value and rumor value support each other. This relationship between the definition of news and rumor can be observed on another level as well. When we leave the news value theory in a more narrow sense and confront and compare the functional definitions of mass media with those functions that are compiled for rumor, then here as well connections become apparent. An example can be found in Jean-Noel Kapferer and his study of rumor as the oldest mass medium in the world. Kapferer quotes the American sociologist Tamotsu Shibutani, who characterizes rumor as news “that results from a collective thought process” (17).19 Not only 18 Regarding Allport and Postman see also Wunderlich 46 and Neubauer 216ff. 19 See also Bühl 254f: Rumor is “a collective mechanism for solving problems … that creates coordination of action in a situation of insecurity, of lack of information or of the contradictory perception and evaluation of the coordination of action by contributing a normatively binding ‘definition of

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Irmela Schneider is this reminiscent of definitions of mass media that attribute—as does radio legislation—an integrative function to them; it also makes reference to the numerous media theories that bind collective thought processes in modernity to the existence and distribution of mass media. Another example that points to relationships between the functions of rumor and mass media is given by Hans-Joachim Neubauer in his study of rumor, in which he remarks that rumor “constructs coherence in situations of greater insecurity” (cf. 120; 220). This invokes functionalist interpretations of mass media as “practice of mastering contingencies” (Habermas 44). In the following passages, I want to further consider the news value theory that takes up Lippmann’s term ‘news value,’ as it does his basic consideration that events are characterized by specific characteristics from which emerges their news value. In news value theory these characteristics are called news factors. The news value ensues from the quantity of news factors that can be gathered from an event. The path that leads from the characteristic of the event to the news factor, however, is not specifically examined or followed. It passes through a ‘black box.’ This black box is needed if operationalization and falsification are supposed to be aimed at, as in news value theories. Until the end of the 20th century and partially also until today the premise has been: news factors can be derived from events; they are added up as units and their sum amounts to the news value. The scope and the placement of news items can then be assessed with this value. All this can be registered in lists, can be counted and can be visualized in statistics and graphics. These basic assumptions and the goals contained in them are part of that “complex of exactitude” (Meyen 68) that news research and opinion research share.20 These basic attitudes are the basis of news value theories. They completely block out rumor as a separate factor but paradoxically also supply it with a double realm that it can feed on. Since both event and news are defined as separate factors, rumor can live parasitically from both the event as well as from the news. Rumor as a parasite then in news value theory has two hosts: the event and the news. This paradoxical figure is the result of the assumption made in this theory that one can differentiate between event and news. This seems possible since news items are not observed as communication but as factors of ‘transportation’ systems.

the situation’ by taking recourse to the mythical conceptions of collective memory.” 20 With this term Meyen is quoting Rolf Fröhner, who was director of the Emnid-Institute in Bielefeld from 1954-1960.

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V. Both in its European and its US-American variants21 news value theories have mainly dealt with determining news factors and the news value calculable from them. This scope of questions beyond news value theories has a long history launched with the beginning of the press, directing our attention to the beginnings of historiography as well. This corresponds to the fact that the newspaper from its beginning has been seen as a “medium of historiography” (Pompe 21). I will, however, limit my thoughts to the 20th century. The first important impulse for European news value theory was expressed by the Norwegian Einar Östgaard in an article that appeared in the Journal of Peace Research in 1965. With this as a point of departure, the globalization of world news—and in fact in the first place as a political factor and not so much a communications-engineering one—initiated news value theories. Östgaard worked for the International Peace Research Institute (PRIO) founded in 1959 by Johan Galtung in Oslo, who was its director until 1969. PRIO was the first institute explicitly dedicated to peace and conflict studies. Östgaard’s point of departure was the principle of free flow of information. Since its beginnings in the first thirty years of the 20th century, this principle continues to be discussed and criticized from two quite different perspectives. One observation assumes that this phrase, just like that of the globalization of information, pursues mainly interests of power politics. The other observation points at the social-utopian potentials of a free flow of information and asks about the chances and steps to realize this potential. Following are some considerations regarding the background of these debates that were widely publicized during the period in question. In the 1940s and especially during WW II from the point of view of the USA, the British had a monopoly on information. This observation refers to the dominance of the news agency Reuters over world news at that time. Since the second half of the 1940s, this motivated the Americans to advance the implementation of an information monopoly of their own, claiming as a goal the slogan free flow of information.

21 In the US, of which I am here disregarding its news theories, in the 1950s a “relatively stable catalogue of six factors was developed that appear as defining critera for news in the study books for journalists, namely: conflict, immediacy, proximity, prominence, rarity, and meaningfulness” (Pürer 129).

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Irmela Schneider In 1948, during a UN-conference in Geneva, the USA enforced the principle of free flow of information making it possible to collect and globally spread news without restriction. A second perspective regarding free flow traces the principle of publicity, as it has been stated by the Enlightenment: “Everyone should be able to communicate with everybody on everything” (Pompe 236) and, if possible, worldwide. This goal was included in the slogan ‘free flow of information’ as well. This second perspective—or rather this utopia—was restimulated in the second half of the 20th century by peace and conflict studies initiating global information policies as its central subject during these years, taking us back to PRIO in Oslo. The key idea of its global information policies was the following: the monopoly on information by countries with strong informational powers has to be reduced, especially in relationship to less developed countries. At the time this key idea was not even questioned by the critics. But they considered the principle of free flow betrayed since it remained abstract and was useful only for the imperialist power politics of the USA. This was, for example, the argument in the 1960s and 1970s of the sociologist and communications scholar Herbert I. Schiller, who was renowned far beyond the USA. And this argumentation at times also characterized the KSZE Conferences negotiating the subject of “international communication.”22 The discussions regarding the principle of free flow cannot be separated from the media-technological developments and their effects on globalization. Here, satellite and computer technology are playing a central role. In particular, the speedy development above all of satellite technology since the 1950s resulted in discussions about passing legislation on a global information system as a task for world politics. The idea of such an organization had been an issue for UNESCO since its foundation in 1946. Following many outlines, distortions, conflicts and controversies, the so-called MacBride-Report was finally passed by UNESCO in 1980 with the title Many Voices One World (cf. International Commission). This report compiles “Flaws in Communication Flows” (137ff) and subsequently makes a series of suggestions to lessen or possibly even to eliminate the existing

22 See Maresch quoting the Finnish President Urho Kekkonen who in 1973 criticized during a KSZE-Conference in Helsinki that free flow had nothing to do with the “principles of free speech” and only was useful “for the stronger and richer nations.”

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Rumor—More or Less at Home “communication gaps” (12) between the Western world and the less developed countries.23 The report on the one hand advocates for the establishment of institutional, infrastructural and technical parameters for free information flow (cf. ch. 2, “Expanding Infrastructures,” 68ff). On the other hand—and for the functional determination of media this is significant at the time—the report states that a global information organization not only should regulate the public flow of information but also that the organization’s “[d]evelopment strategies should incorporate communication policies as an integral part” (258).24 Therefore, apart from the propositions regarding institutional parameters, “educational preparation and specific professional training” for jobs in the media and especially for journalists are also demanded.25 To mention in passing: the MacBride-Report and its proposals for a world information organization was a significant reason why the USA pulled out of UNESCO in 1984. The beginning and rising importance of news value theories cannot be separated from the proceedings for a world information organization and from the principle of free flow of information. The studies initiated by the news value theories in the 1960s and 1970s attempt to monitor how in practice communication is related to the principle of free flow. The most important result of Östgaard’s studies is the following: events with news value, events of interest and those that are acceptable to the public will be published (cf. 45).26 The result of his content-oriented analyses and interviews with journalists is that news value is calculated from three factors: simplification, identification and sensationalism. Here the traces of rumor studies become clearly visible. But at the time they were not noticed. Östgaard is looking at another issue. He is interested in the discrepancy between the idea of free flow of information represented by PRIO and the politics and practices of choosing news.

23 See also 254: “Since communication is interwoven with every aspect of life, it is clearly of utmost importance that the existing ‘communication gap’ be rapidly narrowed and eventually eliminated” [in italics in the original]. 24 “Development strategies should incorporate communication policies as an integral part in the diagnosis of needs and in the design and implementation of selected priorities. In this respect communication should be considered a major development resource […]” [in italics in the original]. 25 “The act of selecting certain news items for publication, while rejecting others, produces in the minds of the audience a picture of the modern world, that may well be incomplete or distorted. Higher standards are needed for journalists to be able to illuminate the diverse cultures and beliefs of the modern world […]” (263). 26 The categories in the English original are: “newsworthy,” “interesting” und “‘palatable’ to the public.”

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Irmela Schneider Johan Galtung and Marie Holmboe Ruge base their studies on those of Östgaard; they also publish their results in the Journal of Peace Research. The basis of their studies is the analysis of the content of four different Norwegian newspapers reporting on the crisis in Congo, in Cuba and in Cyprus. Galtung and Ruge introduce a multiple-stage model of the mediational process. The first stage is “world events.” On a next one, a “media image” emerges that distorts by selection. Here Galtung and Ruge speak of “selection distortion.” And finally, the reception of the media image by the media users arrives at a “personal image” that the user creates and this image is again defined by distorting selection. By selection, Galtung and Ruge do not only mean choice, but always at the same time distortion as well. Here the relationship between news and rumor emerges. As rumor studies show, rumor is “a medium that distorts all messages” (Stanitzek 134). If a comparison is made with Galtung and Ruge’s observations, this definition can also be applied to news (“selection distortion”). This also suggests why news studies and rumor studies have to move separately in order to continue surviving as two theories. The model proposed by Galtung and Ruge establishes the preconditions that will form the basis for all further news studies in the following decades. For a start, its basic assumptions are not up for discussion; neither are the categories news factor or news value, nor are the differentiations between event and news argued or specified. In the following decades, the list of news factors compiled by Galtung that is being added up to establish the news value is widely discussed, re-grouped and supplemented with new categories. Galtung defines news factors as “events” that become news to the extent in which they fulfill the following requirements: “frequency,” “threshold” (divided into “absolute intensity,” “intensity increase”), “unambiguity,” “meaningfulness” (divided into “cultural proximity” und “relevance”), “consonance” (divided into “predictability” und “demand”), “unexpectedness” (divided into “unpredictability” and “scarcity”), “continuity,” “composition,” “reference to elite nations,” “reference to elite people,” “reference to persons,” and “reference to something negative” (70f).27 This list of twelve news factors is the starting point for those studies that afterwards will build on and expand the news value theories.

27 An overview of the revisions and additions that were undertaken in the following decades can be found in Eilders 28ff.

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VI. That the news value theory with its countable news factors and its calculable news value is so attractive and that the aporias of this theoretical approach pointed out in this essay have not been seen as a problem for such a long time (or in any case only up to a certain point), has its explanation first of all in the separate paths that rumor and news studies are pursuing. Secondly, it lies in the fact that news items are regarded as a factor of ‘transportation’ systems and not as communication. And in the third place it is an effect of the fact that the practices and routines that encode news are measured by the norms extrapolated from the principle of free flow. The debates on the globalization of communication and a world information organization in those years are characterized by the discrepancy that the Norwegian analyses found between the principle of free flow and communication. A second, to some extent related, line of discussion can be traced in German journalism. The discourses in those years, particularly in the case of the situation of German news reporting, reveal a tension between the norms that are codified in the media laws of the German states and in the press code of the German Press Council on the one hand as well as in the everyday practice of news reporting on the other. The global and national points of view converge at that time in negotiating the systemic difference between media law and mass media as a conflict, one—as it was assumed—that the media could resolve. The fact that the jurisdiction regarding mass media and the functioning of the system of mass media point into diverging directions and that they are following different codes during this time was not regarded as a systemic difference then, but was negotiated as a gap that the media—if they could not altogether eliminate it—at least could and should reduce. The fact that news as a factor in the system of mass media does not follow the principle of free flow or that of national media laws but abides by its own rules can be seen from the results of news studies from the beginning—but these results are interpreted in a different way. The code as adhered to by mass media could have been defined—at the latest since Lippmann’s considerations on news value. Categories like sensationalism are already pointing into the direction that the rules applied to mass media—and therefore also to news production—are not the rules of a discursivation of complex or global matters, but rules that follow a “staging of moralizing and scandalizing.” If we go along with Baecker’s arguments, the mass

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Irmela Schneider media need this staging for their “own autopoiesis” (Wozu Kultur? 21). The results of the news value theories therefore have to be doubly read. If we take as our point of departure either the principle of free flow of information as the MacBride-Report has formulated it, or German media laws as a normative guiding principle for news reporting, then the results of news value studies point out deficits. The selectors for newsworthiness then are a ground for complaints about the practice of the news choices, resulting in a call for professionalizing journalism and enhancing educational measures to improve the media competence of users. Both these issues are discussed in the media discourses of the sixties and seventies. The gap between the norms for news and the encoding of news gives rise to criticism regarding the practice of news production. The second version of news studies characterizes moralizing and scandalizing as autopoietic procedures of the system of mass media. From this second point of departure, the results of news value studies explain the operational capabilities of the system of mass media. The difference between these two readings is considerable. It constitutes two completely different parameters that characterize not only news reporting but also mass media and their social function. The guidelines fixed in German media law for news reporting as well as the norms for news items established in the principle of free flow of information are marked by the fact that both see the function of news reporting and therefore that of mass media in an ‘external place’ of news. This externalization is founded in the idea of equal rights for the access to news information for all and—in Lippmann’s words—in that of the “omnicompetent citizen.” This means that this “external” place from which news reports are observed is a political and educational objective. The practices of media, however, permanently disappoint the expectations produced by these objectives because the results of the news value studies of the 20th century are repeatedly showing that the news value is not measured by objectives located externally of media. The self-referential closure practiced by mass media “has to discourage any notion that this structure could be subordinated to any outer purposes” (Stanitzek 137).28 Mass media on the basis of their own codes establish what develops into a news item and what does not. The idea of a competent selection of news items at the service of a third authority—be it the utopia of the free flow of information, the idea of political emancipation or of social integration—is part of the environment of this sys-

28 This “structure” in the sentence syntactically refers to Fama; but with Stanitzek it can be equally applied to mass media.

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Rumor—More or Less at Home tem that may irritate but cannot decree what is valid within the system. The code of news reporting that defines what becomes and what does not become newsworthy within the system of mass media does not exclude rumor; it includes it. Political and educational objectives that are formulated in news value theories for the selection of newsworthiness pursue the goal to exclude rumor. But these efforts clearly cannot change anything regarding the fact that rumor has permanently lodged itself parasitically in the code of news production. The news remains more or less the ‘home of rumor.’ Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

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Rumor—More or Less at Home Meyen, Michael, and Maria Löblich. Klassiker der Kommunikationswissenschaft: Fach- und Theoriegeschichte in Deutschland. Konstanz, 2006. Print. Neubauer, Hans-Joachim. Fama: Eine Geschichte des Gerüchts. Berlin, 1998. Print. Otto, Isabell. Aggressive Medien: Zur moralischen Regulation von Mediengewalt. Diss. Bielefeld, 2008. Print. Vol. 4 of Formationen der Mediennutzung. 4 vols. 2007-08. Östgaard, Einar. “Factors Influencing the Flow of News.” Journal of Peace Research 2.1 (1965): 39-63. Print. Pompe, Hedwig. “Zeitung/Kommunikation: Zur Rekonfiguration von Wissen.” Gelehrte Kommunikation: Wissenschaft und Medium zwischen dem 16. und 20. Jahrhundert. Ed. Jürgen Fohrmann. Vienna, 2005. 157-321. Print. Pürer, Heinz. Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft: Ein Handbuch. Konstanz, 2003. Print. Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis, 1999. Print. Rathmann, Thomas. “Ereignisse, Konstrukte, Geschichten.” Ereignis: Konzeption eines Begriffs in Geschichte, Kunst und Literatur. Ed. Rathmann. Cologne, 2003. 1-20. Print. Schiller, Herbert I. Communication and Cultural Domination. White Plains, 1976. Print. —. Mass Communication and American Empire. White Plains, 1969. Print. Schneider, Irmela, and Christina Bartz, eds. Medienereignisse. Bielefeld, 2007. Print. Vol. 1 of Formationen der Mediennutzung. 4 vols. 2007-08. Schulz, Winfried. Die Konstruktion von Realität in den Nachrichtenmedien. Freiburg, 1976. Print. Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Trans. Lawrence R. Schehr. Minneapolis, 2007. Print. Staab, Joachim Friedrich. Nachrichtenwert-Theorie: Formale Struktur und empirischer Gehalt. Munich, 1990. Print. Stanitzek, Georg. “Fama/Musenkette: Zwei klassische Probleme in der Literaturwissenschaft mit ‘den Medien’.” Stanitzek and Voßkamp 135-50. Stanitzek, Georg, and Wilhelm Voßkamp, eds. Schnittstellen: Medien und kulturelle Kommunikation. Cologne, 2001. Print. Würgler, Andreas. “Fama und Rumor: Gerücht, Aufruhr und Presse im Ancien Régime.” Werkstatt Geschichte 15 (1996): 20-32. Print. Wunderlich, Werner. “Gerücht—Figuren, Prozesse, Begriffe.” Bruhn and Wunderlich 41-65.

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“Get the Message Through.” From the Channel of Communication to the Message of the Medium (1945-1960) ERHARD SCHÜTTPELZ

The Message Between 1946 and 1952 in North America (and also in Europe as a result of research done in America) a whole series of books and essays, canonical to the present day, were written and published in which scholars of different disciplines placed the term ‘communication’ at center stage.1 Their theories in principle postulated a universal validity, breaking up the previously established boundaries of the various disciplines. Therefore, for a short period of time one could claim a scholarly ‘breakthrough’ of the term communication that, made ‘communication’ into an ‘absolute term’—in SchmidtBiggemann’s sense of the word. This meant that it became a term that with the help of the anti-exclusive formula “everything really is …” (communication) could ingest the objects of whole groups of scholarships (and also of other ‘absolute’ terms like history, society, culture, language, etc.). In this perspective, the social facts of a society can be understood via communication alone, just like the internal control and the respective dyades of mechanisms and organisms, and the passages between matter and life, nature and culture, and also the sciences themselves. “The theory of the telephone is, of course, communication engineering, but the theory of the computing machine belongs equally to that domain. Likewise, the theory of the control mechanism involves communication to an effector machine and often from it, although the machine may not be watched by any hu-

1

Among others: Bryson, containing among others Mead, “Some” and “CaseHistory”; Lasswell; Lazarsfeld and Merton;—Wiener, “Time” and Cybernetics;—Shannon and Weaver; Weaver;—Jakobson, see: “an exploratory sally into the very core of verbal communication” (17);—Innis, Empire and Bias;— Ruesch and Bateson;—Miller.

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Erhard Schüttpelz man agent. The neuromuscular mechanism of an animal or of man is certainly a communication instrument, as are the sense organs which receive external impulses. Fundamentally, the social sciences are the study of the means of communication between man and man or, more generally, in a community of any sort of being. The unifying idea of these diverse disciplines is the message, and not any special apparatus acting on messages.” (Wiener, “Time” 225)

This breakthrough and its ideas from which later media theories and cultural studies largely developed through to the present, asks about its own prerequisites. A preliminary glance at the biographies, theories, and institutions that participated in this breakthrough already shows that at least its direct prerequisites are to be found in WWII and the events leading up to it.2 Pointedly one could say that a widely distributed but one-dimensional ‘knowledge of war’ was changed into a ‘knowledge of peace’ and a keyword—probably the most important one—for this change and for the ‘passage’ of the participating groups of scholars, for the return from war to peace (and for the bogging down of this passage in the ‘cold war’; cf. Edwards) was ‘communication.’ This scholarly transformation has been a widely spread topos of the discussions in media history in a different form. According to these, the most important media inventions, among them also the computer, have occurred during WWII or have resulted from it. The general thesis is that the media or the most important media innovations originated from the “abuse of army equipment” (Kittler 96). This thesis omits something from the historical events in the USA which was central shortly after the world war: the academic communication that thematizes ‘media’ less than ‘communication’ and thematizes a lot of the academic communication itself.3 Below, I will attempt to modify different aspects of the change from the knowledge of war to the knowledge of peace in a manner that clarifies, while simultaneously shedding some of its one-dimensionality. It is at any rate a transformation that altered the knowledge of peace into knowledge of war and back into the knowledge of peace—and the participants were aware of this double change because of their careers (and it often quite explicitly affected their entire biography). The collective character of research was just as relevant as the biographical one. All ‘knowledge of war,’ specifically in its military functionalization accepted its subordinate role to social 2

3

A reliable source for the developmental side of communications engineering is still Hagemeyer. I am quoting from the Website of Radio Bremen, where the dissertation was available in 2001. The word ‘medium’ at the end of the 1940s in the centers of research and especially in the center of the research and development of technical media of communication at MIT hardly played a role.

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“Get the Message Through” goals and organizations; this subordination led to altered forms of research organization, to a stress on team-work and to the emergent irrelevancy of copyright questions, as well as to the practical experience of a unified science that demanded and practiced interdisciplinarity by unifying its goals. Apart from the war and its social upheavals, migration from Europe and especially from Germany played a decisive role. In other words, it was not only the transfer of people, methods and concepts (cf. Lang; Rogers), but also the experiences of cultural differences and social mobility that themselves became topics for research in the massively financed war research effort. Apart from the technical realms of research, therefore, programs in social research were established that in WWII served both in the observation of the enemy and also in world-wide observation (the so-called ‘study of culture at a distance’), as well as in observation of the mother country, thereby practically instituting a global program of social studies. Both in the technical as well as in the social studies of WWII, personal networks of research after the war emerged and many of these projects (for example, in engineering) involved the explicit study of communication and its negation: of secret communication and its intrusion, of propaganda and counter propaganda, of observation of the enemy and its cultural premises; but also projects emerged developing the manipulation of their own civilian population and the study of political campaigns at home. Therefore, the breakthrough of the term ‘communication’ after 1945 meant an explicit reversal and above all a theoretical generalization of the applied world war research in which the origin of the motivations often remained clearly recognizable, but was also often successfully obliterated in many areas. It became visible in the change from the theory and practice of secret communication to public communication, from the command basis of military communication to the common user basis of mass communication—between the manipulation of mass communication and its civil population, and old and new promises of autonomy and democracy. And thus ‘communication’ was demilitarized; it lost its propaganda origins, thus becoming a universal and apparently pacifying term. Much later in the 20th century, German communication theory took up this idea of social pacification through communication—this common goal united the two antagonists Habermas and Luhmann in their different pursuits, remaining unaware of the war origins of the breakthrough to communication.4 4

Viewed from the whole century, in the representation of ‘communication’ after WWII we have to consider another modification: a partly analogous academic transformation could already be observed after WWI as the one that led to the breakthrough of the term ‘communication.’ The most well

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The Theory of Messages In the breakthrough of communication in America, different methods for the individual disciplines became effective whose dispersal reaches back decades (mostly to Europe). Only a few theoretical developments can claim to have brought together the different research areas and disciplines to the extent that they had an effect; the only certain candidate remains ‘cybernetics,’ a word for an American academic movement that became central with the breakthrough of the term ‘communication’ (and faded with it as well). In judging ‘cybernetics,’ its scholars and concepts, the fallacy of the “abuse of army equipment” mentioned above has to be avoided: it had been argued that technical concepts were ‘transferred’ to social (and psychological) facts, that the metaphor or the modeling was transferred from (war)technological invention to its sociological use. This genealogical derivation makes us forget, however, that in WWII exactly the opposite was presumed; namely, the continuing social modeling and functionalizing of the technical inventions that it already was building and shaping as apparatuses of communication (by way of constantly implanting a distinction between enemy and friend). The modeling of social facts with the help of a terminology that was developed in times of peace for technical apparatuses (and their processes) therefore remains—seen from the perspective of the known is the intensification of propaganda-studies in Europe and America that among others led to Harold Laswell’s studies in communication and their American continuations. But also in other areas it remains noticeable to what extent WWII creates a break through which on the one hand many studies done before the war underwent a loss of memory—thus the dichotomy of orality and literacy at the end of the fifties is ‘reinvented’ even though in its classic form by Marcel Jousse it had already existed in the 1920s and had been transferred by M. Parry from Europe to America—and by which on the other hand a conscious ‘new establishment’ of old theories becomes possible. Three eminent cases (of three nations or of three international transfers) are: (1) Kurt Lewin’s draft of his “War Landscape” in WWI (1917) which prepared his later German and American field theories; (2) the British side line of linguistics in Malinowski’s and Gardiner’s ‘act of speech’ (1923) that was established only by Austin as ‘speech act theory’ from a perspective of language philosophy; and (3) the reinterpretation of the first extensive theory that shifted social theory to communication, the ‘gift’ from Marcel Mauss (a reaction to WWI and an explicit peace theory) by Claude Lévi-Strauss through which canonic reinterpretation (in the intercontinental transfer) the European and worldwide ‘structuralism’ first was founded (cf. Lévi-Strauss). It is possible that between the reaction to WWI and the decade after WWII still quite other reinterpretations of theories, conscious and unconscious ‘plagiarisms’ and ‘transfers’ were taking place that can only be identified through an anamnesis.

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“Get the Message Through” whole century—primarily a mirroring (and a ‘refraction’) of the modeling of an apparatus-like terminology by social facts having taken place in times of both war and peace.5 ‘Cybernetics’ was the interdisciplinary focus within which this mirroring could take place. Cybernetics, or the Theory of Messages (Wiener, Human 77; see also 17) claimed to make communication as such comprehensible—in the form of technical, biological, or social communication—by way of the (cybernetic) promise to solve the problem of addressing for all of ‘communication’ thereby making it representable, transferring the never-ending circulation of all ‘communication’ into a controllable circle. It maintained that “communication and control” (Wiener, Human 16) are one and the same, and that their models could be represented each by the other, and that they could do this quite concretely in the illustration of the two classical diagrams: for ‘communication’ (i.e., Shannon’s “Diagram of a General Communication System”) and for ‘control’ (the diagram for control loops). Since, moreover, these models can in principle be applied to all processes that can be understood as ‘communication,’ the participating scientists (and above all one of the main initiators 5

The idea that in the mathematical models used (and their diagrammatic ordering) we are dealing with ‘non-semantic’ appliances that would only be re-semanticized by their respective use was a central one for the American rhetoric of this mirroring. How implausible this idea is can be shown with the counter question which models at all would allow for such an asemantic-semantic mirroring. Then one very quickly finds out that only such ‘asemantic’ models could become popular by way of communication studies that already mathematize an irreducible social situation and thus could resocialize it (via re-implementation); the situation of enmity (the zero-sum game) and cooperation (non-zero-sum game); the ‘network’ of the telephone systems, i.e., a certain division of labor and of the small groups and personal relationships; the communication ‘overload:’ The mutual ‘congestion’ of the channel (the talks, neurons, or nerve ducts); ‘homeostasis’ of the body (through which a body controls itself and communicates with itself) that from the beginning also was believed to be able to serve for social modeling (see Tanner); the ‘servo-mechanism’ of controlling vehicles, weapons, living beings, persons—actually the whole vocabulary of ‘controlling,’ etc.—In every respective ‘asemantic’ modeling of communication studies it was a matter of the broken re-implementation and re-socialization of the situation projected into it, the ‘refraction’ of the model. For example, the ‘game’ in game theory was (and is) played mathematically but the stakes consist in the semantics of such words as decision, optimizing, enmity, alliance, scarcity even to the re-interpretation of such basic vocabulary like ‘rationality’ and ‘strategy’ as well as to the identification of the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ with the cold war (see the historical reminiscences of Anatol Rapoport, Introduction and “Prisoner’s”). The mathematical ‘tain of the mirror’ of a deliberately broken (and oracular) social modeling.

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Erhard Schüttpelz of the cybernetic conferences, Gregory Bateson) were able to methodologically ‘jump’ back and forth between the different peripheries of research, between the various psychological, psychiatrical, social (e.g., ethnographic), technical (e.g., from one interface to the next), biological and research-political boundaries. By constantly oscillating between claiming methodological control and unforeseeably ‘jumping,’ which for example was characteristic for Bateson’s writings and for the discussions of the Macy Conferences, the entire antinomy of the cybernetic concept became obvious. Its ideas developed and pulverized between the heteronomy of all programming and the presumed autonomy of all ‘systems,’ between the external development and implementation of programmed control on the one hand and a notion of communication on the other, in which the observer had become an ineluctable participant (and a factor of disruption) of the observed system.6 ‘Communication’ no longer was a functionalistic7 or substantial term,8 but had become an operative concept—at least in the programmatic writings of cybernetics. This notably meant the following: 1. Communication could be recursively decomposed and recomposed; the parts and the sum totals of acts of communication were acts of communication and (by ‘coupling’ the observer) communication was the source of analysis itself. 2. Communication did not operate on the grounds of heteronomous entities; instead it operated on another communication (this circumstance was later called by Luhmann the ‘connectivity’ of com6 7

8

The reasoning of the ‘participating observer:’ Wiener, “Time” (the keyword is “coupling”); Bateson and Ruesch. A typically functionalist theory of communication consists in simply subdividing the functions: communication serves the functions F, G, H (for example linguistically in Malinowski, Bühler and Jakobson). See here Lazarsfeld and Merton 101-105: “the status conferral function,” “the enforcement of social norms,” “the narcotizing dysfunction”; Lasswell 39: “our analysis of communication will deal with the specializations that carry on certain functions, of which the following may be clearly distinguished: (1) The surveillance of the environment; (2) the correlation of the parts of society in responding to the environment; (3) the transmission of the social heritage from one generation to the next.” A substantial notion sets up a ‘substantial’ analogy, for example between (social) to (biological) organisms and (inorganic) mechanisms. One could also attempt to demonstrate in cybernetics that its point of departure lay in substantial analogies, for example in the ‘homeostasis’ of organisms or the ‘automatism’ of servo-mechanisms. But these particular analogies show very quickly that in the vocabulary concerned and in its application it was not a matter of substantial equation since one cannot formulate from the seeming original substance any figurative or argumentative objections to the respective term or theorem—such an objection would be irrelevant.

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“Get the Message Through” munication). Therefore, the reduction or recirculation back to heteronomous factors (be they instincts or mechanisms of the market, attempts at manipulation or prejudices as in ‘mass communication research’) only could itself be understood as a part of certain communicative patterns. 3. Communication could be observed only by paying the price of ‘coupling’—‘one cannot not communicate,’ every one remains a participant observer of communication. If—even today—one spells out the implications of these three closely interwoven postulates, then one quickly begins to realize that as research-programs (as much now as then) they break every disciplinary boundary and every configuration of scholarship.9 It is thus not astonishing that they were implemented only in the beginning as such an empirical ‘program of scholarship;’ therefore, a peculiar light is thrown onto the respective texts from the times of ‘passage’—it was the present of a scholarly future that still has to be proven despite its impracticability.

9

Apart from that and on the basis of the cybernetic research program—‘implementable self-monitoring’—it can be made clear relatively quickly that this program and its promise to transfer the communication circulation into a controllable circle contained two internal borders or threshold levels that therefore also had to be activated in the later history of cybernetics (and systems theory): 1. a coupling of observer and communication that, however, turned out as an unpredictable and uncontrollable circularity, i.e., an anarchic autonomy ‘in the opposite direction;’ 2. a linearity or linearization (of the circle) that was again ‘uncoupled’ after its coupling. And with regard to the second threshold level, it can be easily determined that it met both the social scientists as well as the natural scientists halfway, since the assertion of a successful ‘decoupling’ of the object from the observer that became an almost unsolvable epistemological problem with the emergence of cybernetics (see Bateson and Ruesch; see also Lévi-Strauss)—this assertion of a successful ‘decoupling’ resembled a rather traditional ‘naturalization’ of the object and this meant that social and naturalizing ‘linearization’ ran parallel to a decoupling in such assertions. Thus, for example, Colin Cherry spoke out quite explicitly against the early emphasis of coupling (by Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson, or Ross Ashby and others): “The experimenter is really not forming a ‘communication-link’ with Mother Nature. He is not receiving signs or signals, which are physical embodiments of messages, not words, pictures, or symbols” (63).—And concerning the first threshold level it should not be forgotten in a cultural-historical presentation that with the breakthrough of communication theory after 1945 new social forms emerged—namely in part directly by way of this breakthrough—that aimed at taking the rhetoric of ‘implementable autonomy’ at its word: as autonomy that implements itself. Thus—within Kurt Lewin’s communication studies at that time—the social mode of “sensitivity training” or “encounter” emerged (see Rogers 353).

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Erhard Schüttpelz A decisive strength of the cybernetic notion of communication— that only in part can be inferred from its preliminaries in World War II—lay in its ability to think ‘communication’ via its negations (quite programmatically explicit again by Ruesch and Bateson). Interference, noise, interference suppression and correctibility, self-regulation and self-correction therefore could be found at the center of the model and its interpretations—also and especially in its reorientation towards social theory. By jointly implementing information theory and cybernetics—which in the first decades were often understood as connected theories—two levels of interference-conceptions can be distinguished that later, however, often got caught in terminological conflict situations. These two levels are connected to the names Shannon and Wiener, to Shannon’s communication diagram and his concept of information as well as to Wiener’s mathematical and popular writings on cybernetics. Norbert Wiener’s writings of the early forties are repeatedly pervaded with the motif of the overload of telephone lines which he recognized as a theoretical concern of all kinds of systems and feedback-situations—especially regarding the question of the capacity of the brain, the nerve-ducts and social forms of organization. In the war, these had been formulated earlier as theoretical and practical questions such as the following: Up to which threshold were servomechanisms and organisms still able to correct and direct themselves? On the grounds of which factors would delaying or flooding the—sometimes undecidable—signal-lines have such an effect that the ‘negative’ feedback (the negation of each deviation from the standard value) would be transformed into ‘positive or cumulative’ feedback, thus by self-escalating—by lurching and spluttering—initiating a self-destruction of the respective organism or apparatus or social fabric?10 Shannon’s theory of communication had also emerged from the war—as especially Friedrich-Wilhelm Hagemeyer has clearly demonstrated (cf. chs. III.3.4.2 and III.3.4.3.2)—and particularly from the situation of the cryptographic communication of the secret service. In the cryptographic situation, the optimal encoding coincides with an utmost unhindered decoding by the friendly recipient; at the same time, however, it coincides also with an optimal interference of decoding by the (hostile) recipient who does not (yet) know the decoding key. The decoding itself, then, is therefore simultaneously an ‘interference’ of the desired communication that has to be avoided (or delayed) at all costs and it is the only desired goal that 10 In his discussions with Norbert Wiener, this theoretical concern concerning the sociological and micro-sociological implementation was notably developed by Gregory Bateson (for whom it was obvious anyway) with certainly much more subtlety, ambivalence and empirical saturation than by Wiener’s moralistic sociological explanations.

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“Get the Message Through” has to be ensured by the (mostly separate) sending of the key. Therefore, in the model (and in the social situation) of secret communication, a complete permutation of the relation of interference and interference suppression between friend and foe is taking place and in this model also the maximal (friendly) amount of information (that contains as small as possible a target area for the decoding enemy, i.e., as little as possible redundancy) coincides as well with the maximal amount of interference (from the enemy). This coincidence—the complete reversibility of the interference relation between sender and recipient—was the starting point for Shannon’s most important theorems and for his later diagram of communication: “From the point of view of a cryptanalyst, a secrecy system is almost identical with a noisy communication system. The message (transmitted signal) is operated on by a statistical element, the enciphering system, with its statistically chosen key. The result of this operation is the cryptogram (analogous to the perturbed signal) which is available for analysis.” (685)

From the diagram of the cryptographic war-communication to the general diagram of ‘communication’ (661) (with observer correction), the division of transfer into (1) the sending of an encoded message and (2) the separate sending of the code (i.e., key) was translated into an analogous de-composition and re-composition of (1') the encoding by a source code and (2') the correction by an ‘observer’ (cf. Hagemeyer, ch. III.3.4.3.2. 41). This transfer of a friend-foe communication model to a general model of communication—despite its one-way modeling—contains a step that completely dislocated this model from the cryptographic starting point (i.e., from war to peace or to an emblematic consolidation of the cold war). For it was the translation and reconfiguration of (1) and (2) with the help of (1') and (2') that enabled Shannon’s theorem of the channel capacity, the theoretical proof of the postulate—which caused mostly optimism in the immediate reception of the fifties—that ‘optimal oneway codes,’ i.e., encodings without interference, could be found for every channel as long as one finds oneself below the channel-capacity. “This, however, was a result that went beyond the cryptographic analogy because there it would have implied the influence of the decoder on the choice of codes of his adversary to a certain extent” (Hagemeyer, ch. III.3.4.3.2, p. 41). This most improbable switch, the change from enemy to friend within one model—but on a command basis—was the originating figure for Shannon’s most important theorem—and for the most popular diagram of communication theory in the second half of the 20th century.

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Get the Message Through Cybernetic scholarship hardly touched on the area of ‘mass communication’ and thus of ‘mass media.’ Overall a curious ‘oblivion of media’ can be stated for the breakthrough of the term ‘communication’ around 1950—despite the fact that technical and non-technical media were constantly a matter of discussion. Thus, for example, the following areas of research were named regarding the study of mass media: “Questions about mass media of communication can be divided into (1) what is said, (2) who hears it, and (3) what is the effect” (Miller 264). If once ‘information’ has been defined by Gregory Bateson aphoristically as “the difference that makes a difference,” at the beginning of the fifties it seemed difficult to discuss the ‘information’ or the ‘difference’ constituting a ‘medium.’ Similarly, none of the vocabulary of information technology in its application on technical and non-technical media—‘transfer,’ ‘storage,’ ‘processing,’11 ‘information,’ ‘redundancy,’ or ‘interference,’ etc.—emerged from a media-theoretical vocabulary; rather, communication was at stake and it was not a question of the differences of media but one of the similarities between techniques of communication. In brief: around 1950 communication theory was not media theory, it was something else—but what? In order to answer this question (or to make it understood), we should briefly realize the difficulties that historically distort the talk of a media theory in today’s sense regarding the time between 1946 and 1952 in America. At that time, communication theory was divided into two sections: the areas of information theory with the ambitious transdisciplinary research concepts of cybernetics on the one hand, and the studies of mass communication and its socialpsychological parallels in the various areas of manipulation research on the other. There was very little in between; only some selected individual scholars for reasons of specific interest were moving between the two main camps of communication theory (e.g., Kurt Lewin and Margaret Mead). This situation can be explained among others with the historical preliminaries of the ‘passage’ into the period after the war; the groups of scholars had been assembled in different projects. Already before the US entered WWII, Lasswell and some of his academic friends had—on their own and on the request of the government—established a permanent committee for ‘communication studies’ that was mainly aimed at propaganda

11 In the writings of the late forties one finds, by the way, quite often another triad: ‘transfer,’ ‘saving,’ ‘monitoring,’ i.e., instead of ‘processing’ appears that which Bateson formulates as ‘metacommunication:’ “messages on messages.” See Deutsch 368ff.

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“Get the Message Through” training and analysis. However, it had for this very reason replaced the term ‘propaganda’ (which until then had been Lasswell’s both neutral and polemical technical term) with the more general and more positive term ‘communication.’ This was effected by changing from the critical propaganda analysis of the twenties and thirties— the Institute for Propaganda Analysis: A Non-Profit Corporation to Help the Intelligent Citizen Detect and Analyze Propaganda—to the (not necessarily successful) unit for the study and undertaking of propaganda and espionage, the “War-Time Communications Project” in which the term ‘communication’ itself became a magical word (cf. Rogers 224). In comparison, the theoretical breakthrough of the technical theory of communication falls into the end of the world war (or shortly afterwards) because of the mathematical generalization of all telecommunications through a Mathematical Theory of Communication. Shortly after WWII, therefore, the two areas of research met on a ‘middle level’ in their respective coupling of pure and applied research: telecommunications after its surprising mathematical generalization and purification (induced by the war) was striving (back) towards new commercial usage, and the social-psychological studies—dependent on government orders and commercial usage— were striving for ‘greater honor,’ i.e., for the transfer from being thus far located in the lower ranks of (applied) research and the departments of applied sociology, psychology and political science to the higher ones fixated on genuine problems of the ‘discipline.’ In the period mentioned, a certain crossover of the two fields of research developed, a combined ‘preparation’ of communication, but also a shared ‘blindness.’ Both in cybernetics and in information theory, i.e., where in the technical application really ‘media differences’ were concerned, the terminology mainly dealt with the isomorphism and congruence of all communications and all technologies of communication. “The unifying idea of these diverse disciplines is the message, and not any special apparatus acting on messages” (see above; Wiener, “Time” 225). And also, the breakthrough of information theory rested on a renewed compatibility and mutual transcriptivity of all telecommunications (by Pulse Code Modulation, PCM), which in principle was a reduction to the technology of the telegraph. (Both in the Mathematical Theory of Communication as well as in Pulse Code Modulation the question at the end of the forties was not about the differences of media as such; the interest was in leveling them off; see Hagemeyer, ch. III.2.3, p. 47). In mass communication studies, on the other hand, the attention lay in practically and theoretically optimizing one single element of communication; namely, the efficiency of the transfer from

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Erhard Schüttpelz one broadcasting organization to the many recipients. This meant that the attention lay in ‘audience research,’ a broadcast of ‘one-tomany.’ The message was already set; the addressing was open only with regard to the recipient, and the reception was to be made as efficient as possible for the sender (in order to finance the broadcasting companies with advertisement and advertisement agencies through their customers).12 Here as well a certain isomorphism and compatibility were emphasized. This meant that those studies which might have questioned such an isomorphism of socialpsychological ‘efficiency’—a sociological analysis of the broadcasting companies, for example, where many communicate with many, or a philological exegesis of the messages that would not have regarded them as centrifugal messages (one-to-many), but likewise as centripetal ones (many-to-one)—at first went against such a research bias.13 Therefore, in about 1950, the interest of the two main groups of American communication studies met in models of optimal ‘oneway-communication.’ It should, however, not be forgotten that the research itself, i.e., the empirical study and theory of the ‘one-way12 Also the empirical studies by Adorno and others on the ‘authoritarian character’ are such an ‘audience research’ from a methodological point of view; they were much less experimental than for example Kurt Lewin’s respective studies of democratic, authoritarian and anarchic (‘laissez-faire’) groupstructures in the thirties. 13 It is therefore remarkable that such counter projects developed and were published on the fringes of communication research running contrary to the mainstream of research, especially around 1950. The most significant counter project—from which I have quoted the terms ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ message and in which ‘cultural mass communication’ is not defined (as in Lazarsfeld/Merton, Lasswell and Hovland, the canonized greats of the later ‘communications departments’) as a message ‘one-to-many’ but as a (complementary and therefore quasi ‘anonymous’) centrifugal and centripetal message ‘many-to-many’—is the book by Ruesch and Bateson (16, 42-44). But at least just as interesting (and seen from today perspective more ‘classical’ than the authors of ‘mass communication research’) are the counter models by philologists that reacted to the scholarly breakthrough of ‘communication’ with exegetic proposals for mass communication research: Spitzer; Jakobson; and McLuhan, Mechanical. All these proposals underline the aesthetic construction of mass communication, interpret individual messages ‘centripetally’ (philologists can hardly work differently) and need as backdrop for the development of their ‘centripetal’ message a cultural-anthropological design: that of ‘folklore’ (McLuhan’s subtitle: ‘Folklore of Industrial Man’). The models of the philologists at first remained marginal, and also McLuhan’s book was anything but a success; an aesthetic exegesis of messages of mass communication still had no place for a discipline.

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“Get the Message Through” communication’ to be optimized was situated at the place of the feedback, and had to situate itself there. Therefore, in Shannon’s and Weaver’s Mathematical Theory of Communication, two diagrams can be found: one diagram for the shortening to one single channel of the one-way-communication (from source and transmitter to receiver and destination), and another diagram for the same communication with an observer and a correction channel (in the current issues 5 vs. 37). Accordingly, the social-psychological studies in mass communication all dealt with one-way-communication from the broadcasting company to the recipient; but the analysis itself served the feedback of the broadcasting company and thus new artifacts (technical media) were built in order to simplify (and shortcircuit) this feedback.14 Therefore—in this obvious schizophrenia that only in cybernetics became the reason for a basic theory of the circularity of all communication—one can, along with Friedrich-Wilhelm Hagemeyer, claim a rather homogenous theory of communication for the end of the forties. It was based on the fact that for the respective technical media principally an analogue element of the communication system was placed at the center, especially when comparing the three

14 Especially Lazarsfeld’s ‘Little Annie’ or the so-called Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program-Analyzer: “The Program-Analyzer was a wooden box, two feet long, one foot wide, and one foot high, that contained a constant-speed electric meter driving a six-inch wide roll of white recording paper, which moved at the rate of one-fifth of an inch per second. Mounted just above the roll of paper were ten ink pens, each connected to an electromagnet attached to a six-foot-long electrical cord with an off-on switch at the other end. The Program-Analyzer was placed on a table, with up to ten respondents sitting around the table, each with an off-on switch, marked green for ‘like’ and red for ‘dislike.’ When the dislike (on) switch was pressed, it lifted the corresponding pen slightly off the recording paper. It thus fixed a point in time when a respondent changed his or her reaction to the radio message. The group interview that followed allowed the investigator to probe the reasons for such changes. The data from all ten respondents could be accumulated into a composite distribution as a basis for the group interview” (Rogers 276). “The Program-Analyzer had broad use. Lazarsfeld and Merton and their staff used it in the Radio Research Project. ‘Little Annie’ went to war as a tool to measure U.S. soldiers’ likes and dislikes of training and morale films. […] The Program-Analyzer ‘had a considerable vogue among the entrepreneurs of Hollywood, Broadway, and Madison Avenue’” (277). A digitalized and then resemanticized medium of mass media research? Probably rather a practical apparatus for feedback retrieval and programming.

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Erhard Schüttpelz main media of the forties: telegraph, telephone, and radio. This homogeneity was based on the following factors:15 Since the security of encoding could not be guaranteed despite respective research (for example, with the invention of the Vocoder) for spoken communication, the main war-communication took place in writing; it was telegraphic and cryptographic (based on the telex machine). The theory of the best (and cryptographic) telegraphy— which before and after the war had been of marginal importance— therefore was defined as decisive during the war, and in telegraphy the crucial factor was the ‘information flow’ (a one-way-communication), its speed and its reliable digital transmission, and along with it the struggle with interferences of the signals in the channel. And so it is not astonishing that Shannon’s famous communication diagram is both a telegraphic and a one-way model—a telegram. Because of the war, telegraphy, well equipped and highly modernized, had once again become the foundational theory of all other telecommunication. Shannons’s famous communication model remains a ceaselessly circulating telegram from WWII and its victory. In telephone systems, however, the information flow (as well as the digital level of the information system) consists in the flow between the ‘connections’ of conversations between two listenersspeakers; here it is irreducibly two-way communication, and its interference on the one hand is grounded in the limits of the mutual ‘acoustic comprehensibility’ and on the other takes place in the capacity of the net as a whole, via traffic jams and overload, i.e., via a possible transformation of the flow into (its own) interference. Therefore, no telephone technology was able to function without a ‘network’-theory; and a central problem of interference in every such network consisted in the thresholds (which topically run through especially Norbert Wiener’s and later Gregory Bateson’s cybernetic writings) at which the ‘negative,’ i.e., the self-correcting, feedbacks collapse into uncontrollably escalating ‘positive’ feedbacks. In the American radio system (unlike the European and German one), the decisive target for information flow was the ‘recipient,’ meaning that it had to be determined (for the broadcasting companies and especially for the advertising customers and agencies financing the program) who at all (and when, why, and to what effect) had received the information. For this goal, ‘audience research’ was initiated in which commercial and scholarly interests overlapped. Therefore, it is not very astonishing that this research on the one 15 I am here following a thesis by Hagemeyer that, nevertheless, I necessarily have to complement in comparison to the three media mentioned by him: “Sociological communications theory and information theory therefore in their emergence are functionally analogous theories concerning the problems of efficiency of different techniques” (ch. II.2., p. 51 et passim).

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“Get the Message Through” hand understood the above mentioned kind of communication (‘mass communication’) as the most optimal one-way-communication possible and that, on the other hand—in order to find out about its ‘effect’—it had to locate itself at the place of feedback, i.e., at its circularity. It is also not surprising that the respective ‘audience research’—in order to self-legitimize and to function on a continual basis—with the thesis of the ‘rather marginal media effects’ very quickly came up against the unreliability of the mediated ‘one-way efficiency,’ meaning that the digital level of mass communication (turning the radio on and off: listening to/not listening to the program, psychological acceptance/ignoring) could only be analyzed by following the group-structure of the listeners, by determining opinion leaders in the two-step flow of the reception, i.e., by producing a joined unity of interference (of the optimal information flow) and source (of the acceptance, of the political and the purchasing decisions) (cf. Rogers 287ff). The listener and his group became the ‘channel’ on which it depended, for they decided on the existence of the station and of the program. According to Hagemeyer, this development of mass communication research in the forties on a sociological level therefore corresponds to the technical analysis of the other media: the tricky point of ‘information flow’ in telegraphy was the flow of the ‘connection,’ in telephony the flow of ‘switches’ (and the ‘acoustics’ of the listener), and in the radio the flow of reception, the ‘persuadability’ of the listeners. Therefore, in analyzing this area of optimization, a respective ‘digitalization’ of the task was encountered: digitalizing the signal in telegraphy; the digitality of the connection on the phone: on/off; digitalization of the listening factors: a two-step flow in receiving: receiving/ignoring; but also in sending: via the gatekeeper of the program: sending/not-sending. And in optimizing the respective transmission by asking the same question, one encountered a unity of channel and interference: the physical interferences in the (telegraphic) channel, the overload of the (telephonic) networks, the resistance of the listeners whose attitudes could only be influenced by classifying and addressing their opinion leaders and the factors of an attitude change. In this retrospective analysis, a rather homogenous bias of (almost) all the publicly effective communications studies of the forties comes to the fore; one could also call it a virtual ‘research program’ resting on a unique cultural-historical configuration of certain technical media (before the rise of television in the fifties) with explicit (and explicitly financed) interests in research politics. If one were to summarize this research program as an imperative that with the breakthrough of the term ‘communication’ remained less a task still to be done but rather was an arrival at its goal—then there would

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Erhard Schüttpelz be no better motive for it than the one by the U.S. Signal Corps: “Get the message through.” And this imperative maybe points out (get my message through) why this theory of communication with its two wings, the technical and the social-psychological one, was no ‘media theory’ and probably also could not become one of its own accord. It is not even a matter of naming all ‘gaps’ of the research of that time or to criticize the one-sidedness—what else could it be?— of the concentration on one-way-models that also in technological areas became evident shortly afterwards (e.g., with the research done on feedback channels around 1955). As the collation above shows, there was only one research interest in which technical and sociological questions met: optimizing the codes for a respective information flow, i.e., for a respective ‘channel,’ and the work on an ‘optimal one-way code.’ Technically, the channel was a physical channel, but its optimizing now rested on a fundamental mathematical theory: ‘information’ was neither energy, nor matter, nor acoustics (something quite difficult to understand for European communications engineers coming from physics); social-psychologically, the recipient was the channel to be analyzed and therefore was studied only ‘as channel’—or, amounting to the same, as a gate-keeper (cf. Kurt Lewin): “get the message…” Both sides optimized the (technical or psychological) channel not by asking about the differences in the media but by asking for their greatest common denominator: by way of the isomorphism and compatibility of the technical media of that time on the one hand, and by an assumed social-psychological generalizability of the listeners (recipients, consumers) on the other. This isomorphism and its generalizability was modeled in a ‘one-way-channel,’ but from the position of the ideal short circuit between sending and receiving—from the distributor’s point of view.16 We therefore can summarize American communication theory around 1950 as a ‘channel theory’ that situated itself consciously at the place of the feedback in order to subsequently consciously mask this place in the representation (except in its cybernetic abstraction) with the purpose of optimizing a one-way communication: 16 Obviously in this homogeneity of the two arrangements of that time—in the paroxysm of the (seeming) one-way communication—also lies one important reason for the success of Shannon’s communication model in its reduced form (that started with Weaver’s popularization): the idea that thus ‘optimal communication’ could be imagined had already become established. Therefore, hybridizations of Shannon’s diagram positions with Lasswell’s formula: “Who/Says What/In Which Channel/To Whom/With What Effect” (35) were subsequently constructed again and again; these hybrid ‘models of communication,’ however, almost always had to destroy the elegance of the (technical and rhetorical) initial models.

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“Get the Message Through” “…through.” Therefore, for these studies it was of central importance that they located the beginning and the end and especially the message of the analyzed communication outside of the research done, i.e., that they identified the ‘message’ with a sent message and its reversibility. Had it been different (had the analyzed ‘message’ and its ‘beginning’ changed in the course of communication), this fiction of a one-way communication and the one goal of a oneway observation could not have been maintained. And in the practical work of Paul Lazarsfeld’s, Kurt Lewin’s and even Carl Hovland’s individual social-psychological experiments, this fiction was constantly undermined; otherwise no new results could have been reached. Only a ‘second beginning of the message,’ could be fruitful for research, i.e., the interference as ‘second source.’ This paradox of the research of that time as well, namely, the empirical dependence on interferences retroacting on the observer is their consequence. All in all, it hardly can be overlooked that the communication of that time was tautological, nor can the curious emptiness, the ‘blind fury’ of communication studies and its research imperative at the time—the eye of the storm: “Get the message through.” What message? First of all, the imperative itself,17 the fact that it, and no other, gets through: “Get the message through.”

Destination of the Message At this historical point the question has to be asked at least once: Could, at that time, a communications theory have emerged—the stress lying on could—that joined both wings of communications research and that specifically had brought the advantages of the ‘operative’ (cybernetic) theory in contact with the empirical question of the (mainly functionalistically analyzed) ‘mass communication’? Such a question is not insignificant with view to the historical assessment of the scholarly situation around 1950 and therefore three answers today are still interesting: (a) a respective theoretical study indeed was developed, i.e., the study of a potentially complete theory of messages; (b) this study, published in 1951, offers—quite in the sense of the considerations above—a comprehensive ‘channel theory’ (quasi a cross tabulation of information theory and social psychology, a hybrid of Shannon, Wiener and Lasswell) from which one can conclude that such a ‘channel theory’ could integrate all media, but that it did not outline a media theory; and (c) this study obvi-

17 “Once you begun to/ Think like a gun/ All the days of the year/ Have suddenly/ Gone/ Yes once you begun to/ Feel like a gun/ The days of the year/ Have suddenly/ Gone” (Cale).

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Erhard Schüttpelz ously had no ‘real chance’ of implementing a scholarly guide or research program, neither on the side of mass communication research18 nor on that of cybernetic reception.19 It concerns the following table (Fig. 1) and of course also the book attached to it that to this day is asking some of the least resolved questions of communications and media studies.

The Medium is the Message The provisional development of a historical thesis by FriedrichWilhelm Hagemeyer has led to a rather consistent theory and its historical media foundation on which the term ‘communication’ of the late forties can be based, if one wants to. In observing the conditions of this breakthrough cultural-historically, one rather quickly discovers that the constructed homogeneity at the time was already up for negotiation again and was falling apart, that it had been only transitional and had been meant as an ending from which no respective discipline—let alone a comparative media theory—was developed and probably also could not be developed. Characteristically back then (and to this day) on none of the places of the beginnings of communications theory did the attempt to establish a Department of Communications succeed. Only Wilbur Schramm succeeded with it at a rather marginal university and only by converting the already existing educational tracks ‘journalism’ and ‘speech training’ (cf. Rogers 1ff, 445ff). And if one continues observing what became of the people and the concepts that pursued the breakthrough of the term ‘communication,’ then towards the middle to the end of

18 A derogatory review can be found in the official organ of the Lazarsfeld/ Merton school, the Public Opinion Quarterly 16 (1952): 133-135; also other cybernetic models are dealt with there. 19 Social cybernetics, for example as developed by Karl W. Deutsch, never connected to Ruesch and Bateson. In the first twenty years it was only interested in the most possible central political control of social processes. The two most important theoretical chapters by Bateson were taken up in an anthology by Alfred G. Smith, but neither these nor other articles refer back to them. Especially strange is, however, the reception of the pioneering model by Ruesch and Bateson at the point at which later the concepts developed by Bateson (between 1946 and 1955, i.e., in the ‘passage’ of communication studies) were canonized and popularized, namely in Pragmatics of Human Communication by Paul Watzlawick, Janet H. Beavin, and Don D. Jackson, a volume which is specifically indebted—and in fact even expressly dedicated—to Bateson. There the joint publications by Ruesch and Bateson are consistently ignored, thereby replacing the old textbook (successfully, as we can say today) with a new one.

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“Get the Message Through” Illustration 1: “Table D”

Source: Ruesch and Bateson 277

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Erhard Schüttpelz the 1950s one already finds a whole slew of ‘fission products’ of the early communication studies that then were not called ‘communication’ any more, even though its scholars had worked hard on just this term and even though the new nouns to some extent claimed exclusivity just as ‘absolutely’ as the word ‘communication’ had done earlier: e.g., cognition, mind, structure, bionics, semiotics,20 systems theory, behavioral science. In order to assess the development in the late fifties and of these ‘fission products’ in communication studies, a simple social-historical argument can be formulated: with the breakthrough of ‘communication’ at the end of the forties and its seeming and real congruence, it was a matter of theoretical developments that had occurred during and before the war that with their return into the academic world became both ‘ratified’ and a matter of debate. The American funding of research at the time was characterized by the idea that research could both ‘perpetuate’ the scientific conditions of victory and transfer them into civil life. This was a reason—just as spontaneous as planned—for the cybernetic emphasis on transdisciplinarity, but also for the military and economic conversion of such ‘systemic’ approaches as ‘game theory’ and of operations research shortly after the war (cf. Fortun and Schweber). However, in the mid-fifties, the careers of the people who had been trained after the war by the generation of veterans were of greater interest. During the boom years of the different areas in communication research they had acquired specialized and above all formalized competences. Now, they had to attempt making these competences permanent, stabilizing them—if possible, as privileged research programs (and also preparing them for further educational programs). Thus, for example, along with the first computers a completely new generation of programmers had emerged who had little use for the hardware-orientation any longer, namely for the original connection between mathematical basic research and tinkering (like Shannon, Ashby and others did)—nor for the dogmatic behaviorist framing of the early cybernetics. The result is well known: the behaviorist frame was disrupted; the orientation turned to ‘software,’ to autonomous programming and to cognitivism (cf. Edwards, ch. 8). Shannon’s reduced (linear) model continued to lead; after all, his central theorem created all the optimism of conceiving a one-way 20 Two examples for the smooth transition from ‘communication’ to ‘sign’ can be found in two protagonists of ‘communication’ from 1950, who consider their research between 1950 and 1960 as communication research and who later in the 1960s consider themselves as ‘semiotic’ scholars: Roman Jakobson and Jurgen Ruesch.—Analogous elements can be found in further ‘splitting projects’ of the early communication studies and their exponents and concepts.

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“Get the Message Through” code optimization. The more disturbing thresholds of circularity, on the other hand, were supposed to be warded off with the help of naturalizing the objects—which mainly meant ‘decoupling’ and linearizing them. Therefore, it is not so astonishing that the new, specialized and competent academics (the debut of Chomsky, for example) could no longer deal simply with ‘communication.’ Nor is it surprising that various ‘disciplinary’ spin-off products emerged as well that could possibly become departments while at the same time the wish for inter- and transdisciplinarity continued to exist. And also the ‘media’ from the middle to the end of the fifties in North America can be regarded as ‘fission products’ of communication research, although indeed hardly as the central ones (since there was no central fission product), nor as a ‘goal’ of the hitherto existing research (maybe rather as a conscious answer to the challenge by ‘communication’). Either way, three facts remain historically remarkable: (a) The implementation of the term ‘medium’—which I quite conventionally set down with McLuhan’s dictum The Medium is the Message in the year 1958—does not fall into the ‘passage’ of communication studies; (b) it does not occur at a central nor even a relevant American place of this ‘passage’ (for example, at MIT or in California); however, (c) it does happen quite clearly within an explicit turn to comparative communication studies: Edmund Carpenter’s periodical through which Marshall McLuhan was able to connect to the US-American research at the time was called Explorations in Communication, as did their joint anthology in 1960. Thus, the conspicuous marginality of the first claims to a ‘media theory’ can be asserted: in its current meaning ‘media’ became an area of research only with a detour. As a research area it was able to establish a similarly ‘absolute’ demand as ‘communication’ had shortly after WWII (especially through McLuhan and Carpenter). In fact, this happened on the one hand by making a detour via a North American periphery whose theoretical claims in the beginning were invoking classical theorems of hegemony,21 and on the other by do21 In the theories and books by Harold Innis (see Empire and Bias). In view of the outlined conditions at the beginning of the 1950s, it must have been difficult to recognize a true deviance in Innis’ historical writings from communication studies at the time—to which McLuhan later referred as foundational documents of his media theory; they only too well can be integrated into the research interests of the time. Innis is dealing with a chain of different tendencies of centralization (and this means one-way communication) and therefore it is a matter of political power and manipulation (as in the case of Lasswell and Hovland), and the differences in communication are explained by considering the material ‘channel’ (like the transportation routes of natural resources, goods and persons, the ways

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Erhard Schüttpelz ing research in (or rather by postulating) the dichotomy of ‘orality’ and ‘literacy,’ which had previously been handed down from the 1920s in canonized form. Since this dichotomy played (and to some extent still currently plays) such a decisive part in implementing the term ‘medium,’ we have to briefly ask what kind of scholarship was done in ‘orality’ in the first boom of communication research after the war, i.e., during the time of ‘passage.’ Namely, around 1950, we encounter a very interesting plurality or dissemination of innovative approaches to ‘orality.’ This is maybe not at all coincidental and rather an important social fact when bearing in mind the above sketched written form of communication during WWII (its cryptographic anchoring).22 In the technical war-studies (in the USA as a continuation of the civil Bell system, especially at MIT), the basic factor of remote writing had been, as already mentioned, the (friendly) creation of (cryptographic) incomprehensibility (and its hostile disruption: comprehensibility). On the other hand (because of the technical conditions at the time), the basic factor of remote orality had been the creation of (acoustic) comprehensibility (and its hostile disruption, for example, by jamming the channels). Information theory was developed within the frame of remote writing; shortly after the war it was therefore possible to proceed with the transference of the respective theorems of encoding to orality. It was precisely this that happened in linguistics and psycholinguistics (and especially at MIT) under the influence of Jakobson and Cherry and their attempts to adapt the oral ‘phonemes’ to the ‘bits’ of the computer; and also G. A. Miller (later a main protagonist of the cognitive turn), who was able to connect directly back to his own research done in WWII on acoustic comprehensibility and disruption (cf. Edwards, ch. 7 [on Miller]). However, between 1946 and 1955 one can still find quite different approaches that were aiming at deciphering and documenting a new, unknown ‘encoding’ of oral language, at ‘decoding’ it and therefore (from a retrospective point of view) discovering an unknown and possibilities of conveying messages); all further aspects of using media and of viewing ‘media differences’ were epiphenomenal—as McLuhan himself criticized—because they were deduced from each ‘channel.’ That such a summary seems to be consciously unfair, since it does not underline those elements still interesting in Innis today, namely his hermeneutical underlining of a ‘materiality of communication,’ could not attract attention in 1950: it was a channel theory and it was looking for isomorphism (of hegemonial constellations of power). 22 See Hagemeyer, ch. III.2.3 and esp. Kahn: “Codes had become a cargo almost as essential as food or ammunition” (Kahn qtd. in Hagemeyer 34, 35 the motto of the U.S. Signal Corps: “Get the message through”).

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“Get the Message Through” ‘mediality’ of language. I can only hint at their range of approaches by pointing at some canonical studies that also terminologically can be located within this time frame. As a good example, during the training of diplomats, technicians and businessmen at the American Foreign Service Institute, the traditional limitation inherent in teaching vocal language only was disrupted by linguists and ethnologists with their threefold discovery of what at first on the one hand was called ‘metalinguistics’ and then ‘paralinguistics’ (by George Trager), on the other ‘kinesics’ (by Ray Birdwhistell and others) and later ‘proxemics’ by Edward T. Hall—all three separations (gestures and mimics; movements; spatial behavior during interaction) were divisions of the same engagement with the ‘non-verbal’ linguistic forms of communication (cf. Leeds-Hurwitz).23—By debating the boom of technical and cybernetic theories of communication at MIT in the middle of the 1950s, Roman Jakobson developed his (still oral) linguistic model of communication—against the grain of the technical guidelines, but with quite some success—in which he anchored his aesthetic and philological preferences. And since the beginning of the 1950s, Claude Lévi-Strauss, in a quasi competition with his friend and teacher Jakobson and his ambitions in systematizing world-literature, had begun a far reaching attempt to decipher the mythological code of all oral narratives (of a whole continent: call it America); it was an attempt that should accompany the entire rise and fall of European ‘Structuralism.’ Also J. L. Austin’s speechact theory—which he developed at the end of the forties and read as a lecture at the beginning of the 1950s and in its final version at Harvard in 1955—is the attempt to decode a specific code of oral language (its speech acts). It is known that this had such a success that it became one of the few theories that were established in linguistics, in communication, and in philosophy. Such an enumeration explains24—and that was its goal—that the dichotomy of orality and literacy as it came to the foreground at the end of the fifties represents only a small portion of a much wider spectrum of the research done in orality. We can confidently say that it was a certain relapse into the anthropological topos of the ‘oral peoples’ vs. one’s ‘own literacy.’ After all, the dichotomy liter23 At the Foreign Service Institute as well the first collection of the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf appeared which caused a great controversy in the 1950s with its radical postulates of a connection between grammar and forms of thought; this was without doubt an important inspiration for looking for an unknown ‘encoding’ of oral languages. 24 I have to refrain from correlating, for example, the boom after the war of ‘research in small groups’ by Lewin, his students, and by many others with this interest in the ‘unknown encoding of oral languages’ or with the interest in new techniques of interviewing and documenting.

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Erhard Schüttpelz acy/orality did not have to be reinvented—on the one hand, it had been in part the basis for all anthropological divisions of its research field since the 19th century and had already found its way into America via Jousse and his classical philological ‘Greekization.’ The success of the dichotomization of orality and literacy therefore is connected less with new findings about this dichotomy than with the beginning desire in the scholarship of the end fifties25 to stress the ‘media differences’ in communication more than its isomorphism—a desire that had developed from the innovative approaches in the orality-scholarship of the early fifties. Explorations, published by Carpenter and McLuhan, are both a clear instance and a pacemaker of this development. They tie in quite consciously with the studies on ‘orality’ by those linguists and ethnologists from the Foreign Service Institute who were the examples for the scholars in Toronto and who also repeatedly published in Explorations.26 Consequently, the explicit search for non-literacy and nonlinearity of perception and communication can be found in the early editions of Explorations: a search for non-linearity of time perception, for orality, tactility, gesticulation and mimic, for auditory space—but also for a fusion of writing and imagery. The curious emphasis with which this research is displayed and commented on in Explorations is explained only if we bear in mind that at the bottom of the search for a ‘different mentality’ (of non-literacy) a quite different model was still lurking. Namely, the fact that regarding the ‘medium,’ the issue for Carpenter and McLuhan really was a different phenomenality and mentality, just as it had been postulated by Benjamin Lee Whorf in his speculative reconstructions of an alien, non-standard European grammar/mentality—a fact that from the perspective of today has to seem as improbable as it could be prob-

25 The renewed—successful until today—dichotomization between orality and writing in the 1950s developed from an obvious collaboration and interaction between ethnologists (responsible for orality) and scholars in literary studies (for literacy), for example in Toronto: Edmund Carpenter (cultural anthropologist)/Marshall McLuhan (scholar in literary studies); Havelock’s (ancient philological) recourse to the dichotomies of Lévy-Bruhl (anthropological philosopher); in England: Jack Goody (social anthropologist)/Ian Watt (literary historian); Richard Hoggart’s (scholar in literary studies) pseudo-ethnographic study The Uses of Literacy at the beginning of British Cultural Studies; in France: the beginning of structuralism by Lévi-Strauss (social anthropologist) and Roland Barthes (scholar in literary studies), and later the turn to mythology by Lévi-Strauss (in literary studies); Barthes’ early quasi-cultural-anthropological reaction in Mythologies, among other odd couples. 26 See Carpenter’s late retrospection to the collaboration in Explorations (“That”).

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“Get the Message Through” able at the beginning of the fifties. With Dorothy Lee (cf. Carpenter, “That” 239f), the Explorations quasi owned their appropriate ‘house anthropologist’ who proposed similarly emphatic theses on the connection between grammar and mentality—and here is the decisive step: Carpenter also postulated exactly this connection for the grammar of alien (or reciprocally alien) media and media cultures. This explicit reference to the so-called Sapir-Whorf-hypothesis explains for example the term ‘media grammars’ (Carpenter, Introduction xii)27 (that from today’s perspective can easily be missed) or its clarification: “Explorations explored the grammars of such languages as print, the newspaper format and television” (ix). And as is well known, Carpenter’s and McLuhan’s decisive rhetorical and phenomenal profit came with their correlating the effects of the oldest media (of orality and of space in general, i.e., of ‘acoustic space’) with the effects of the new media, especially those of television. In other words, the quasi-Whorfian emphasis on the alien grammar/mentality—polemically, satirically, elatedly—was related to the immediate future and its socialization: “Paradoxically, at this moment in our culture, we meet once more preliterate man. For him there was no subliminal factor in experience; his mythic forms of explanation explicated all levels of any situation at the same time. This is why Freud makes no sense when applied to pre- and post literate man. […] Just as the Eskimo has been de-tribalized via print, going in the course of a few years from primitive nomad to literate technician, so we, in an equally brief period, are becoming tribalized via electronic channels. The literacy we abandon, he embraces; the oral language he rejects, we accept.” (Carpenter, Introduction xif)

What had happened? The North American distribution of television, without doubt. However, also a quite explicit answer to the challenge by US-American theories of communication,28 quasi upend27 See also FN 23 for the connection with the Foreign Service Institute and Carpenter’s discussion of Dorothy Lee and Whorf in Carpenter, “That” 239. 28 “I don’t know whether you have heard about the present crowd at Mass. Inst. of Tech.? They show more promise than all the literary blokes on this continent. They are what you and Lewis used to refer to as ‘serious characters’” (Marshall McLuhan to Ezra Pound, 5 Jan. 1951).—“The whole tendency of modern communication whether in the press, in advertising or in the high arts is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts. And this major revolution, intimately linked to technology, is one whose consequences have not begun to be studied although they have begun to be felt. […] Deutch’s [sic] interesting pamphlet on communication is thoroughly divorced from any sense of the social functions performed by communication. He is typical of a school likewise in his failure to study the matter in the particular. He is the technician interested in power but un-

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Erhard Schüttpelz ing—from the outside to the inside, from the inside to the outside— all that which had been undisputed regarding the ‘channel theory’ (including the one by Innis). While the ‘channel theory’ in all its USAmerican variants identified with the observer who observes communication on a recipient, i.e., from the point of view of the circle, for an optimal linearization of the (physical and psychological) channel and an optimal centralization of the coupling with the ‘observer,’ Carpenter and McLuhan identified rigorously with the location of the recipient and particularly with his ‘space.’ They also made the scientific observer and each producer into precisely such a ‘recipient’ who was no longer bound to any linearized specifications. Rather, he was bound to the circularity of his or her perceptual control (which had been a fundamental field of studies especially in cybernetics from the beginning) and of the perception of the different channels reciprocally disrupting each other. Almost all elements of this Torontoan ‘upending’ can already be found in 1950 and they have been explicitly formulated: • the two wings of the channel theory that made the recipient into a ‘channel in the channel’ (and thus into a distribution ‘space’ of signal transfers), into an authority that was able to negate any message, with the exception of this double/coupled channel-capacity itself; • the cybernetic and social psychological emphasis of the recipient and the reception as precisely that authority that decides on the actual value of communication; • a possible ‘centripetal’ and not ‘centrifugal’ view of mass communication and of all messages (“many-to-one” and “many-tomany”); • and the historical emphasis of the ‘materiality of communication,’ that Innis identified with its ‘media’ (even though not with the authority of the recipient). Nevertheless, around 1950 no such ‘centripetal’ theory had emerged. Only by referring back to Whorf’s emphasis of an alien and enigmatic ‘grammar’ did the decisive step in this upending of the ‘channel theory’ simultaneously occur: namely, the step that the isomorphism of media was now no longer placed at the center of the

critical and unconcerned with social effect. […] The fallacy in the DeutschWiener approach is its failure to understand the techniques and functions of the traditional arts as the essential type of all human communication. It is instead a dialectical approach born of technology and quite unable of itself to see beyond or around technology. The Medieval schoolmen ultimately ended up on the same dialectical reef” (Marshall McLuhan to Harold Innis, 14 Mar. 1951).—McLuhan, Letters 217f (to Pound), 221f (to Innis).

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“Get the Message Through” theory (like for the ‘observer’) but rather Whorf’s tenet of the incommensurability and phenomenal enigma of alien media worlds—a phenomenality deriving from a source that is phenomenally not accessible.29 But also one’s own media world had become inscrutable at the point at which a historical media upheaval occurred—like in the implementation of television. Without these preconditions of a fundamental incommensurability of different media as ‘total environments’ that still confers all its emphasis even to McLuhan’s later writings, this stress on the individual medium—the ‘coupling’ of all recipients with the dominance of certain individual media—would have been pointless. Communication takes place only in individual media and thus the perception of one’s own and of an alien communication is characterized by the effects of the individual media, because one would have asked about the compatibility and combinability of the ‘channels.’ Only by identifying the (alien and one’s own) media-recipient with the recipient of a quasi-Whorfian message and only by identifying the alien (‘oral’) media difference with a nonunderstood ‘self-difference’ that would catch up with oneself ‘from the past and from the future alike’ could media difference as a message that revolutionizes scholarship (and as a fundamentally hermeneutical assignment) be understood and could trigger off a philological-anthropological research program of ‘understanding media’—so that the ‘channels’ of communication theory could become ‘magical channels’ and media of a media theory.30 And it is probably only through this revaluation that The Medium is the Message could become a slogan and a battle cry that was able to make the isomorphisms and re-linearizations of the channel-theories, the constant demands for the manipulation of mass communication research and of psychological warfare (cf. Simpson), but also one’s own academic (or alphabetic) socialization—the so-often conjured up ‘linearity’ of literate cultures (or of

29 This epistemological model was greatly ‘freudianized’ by McLuhan in the sixties—a fact that doubtlessly contributed to a large extent to the popularity of his thesis, but that should not be mistaken for the beginning context in the Explorations. 30 This hermeneutical program can retrospectively be read into Innis, and the editors of McLuhan’s letters do this when they are quoting the sentence from Innis’ Empire and Communications: “The significance of a basic medium to its civilization is difficult to appraise since the means of appraisal are influenced by the media, and indeed the fact of appraisal appears to be peculiar to certain types of media. A change in the type of medium implies a change in the type of appraisal and hence makes it difficult for one civilization to understand another” (Innis, qtd. in McLuhan, Letters 219f). Only in Carpenter’s and McLuhan’s publications does this rather casual statement of Innis define their research program.

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Erhard Schüttpelz the chains of command of the world war and its telex-models?)— into a target. From the channel theory of ‘communication’ to the message of the ‘medium,’ from the diverse variants of the command basis to the first explicit common user basis of a North American communication theory that called itself ‘media theory’—a first step into civil life after the cold war? The Medium is the Message (1958)31 certainly is a message that has become alien again to current scholarship and whose preconditions from a current perspective have to seem as inscrutable as the ‘non-linear’ external worlds of Dorothy Lee—but not because this message today is so well known that no one could challenge it, nor because of Carpenter’s and McLuhan’s consciously essayistic and amateurish writing style whose empirical studies one could almost see as a travesty that only identifies the travesties that other studies in communication represent, but because this message, like so many other optimistic messages from the 1950s, remained stuck in its own rut of historical circulation and misunderstanding. Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

Works Cited Bateson, Gregory, and Jurgen Ruesch. “Structure and Process in Social Relations.” 1949. Semiotic Approaches to Human Relations. Ed. Ruesch. The Hague, 1972. 417-49. Print. Bryson, Lyman, ed. The Communication of Ideas. New York, 1948. Print. Cale, John. “Gun.” Fear. Island Records, 1974. LP. Carpenter, Edmund. Introduction. Explorations in Communication. By Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan. Boston, 1960. ix-xii. Print. —. “That Not-So-Silent Sea.” The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. Ed. Donald F. Theall. Montreal, 2001. 235-61. Print. Cherry, Colin. On Human Communication. 1957. 2nd ed. Cambridge, 1966. Print. Deutsch, Karl W. “On Communication Models in the Social Sciences.” Public Opinion Quarterly 16 (1952): 356-80. Print. Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, 1996. Print.

31 On the dating of the slogan “The Medium is the Message” (1958) see Marchand 198.

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“Get the Message Through” Fortun, M., and S. S. Schweber. “Scientists and the Legacy of World War II: The Case of Operations Research (OR).” Social Studies of Science 23 (1993): 595-642. Print. Hagemeyer, Friedrich-Wilhelm. Die Entstehung von Informationskonzepten in der Nachrichtentechnik: Eine Fallstudie zur Theoriebildung in der Technik in Industrie- und Kriegsforschung. Diss. Berlin, 1979. Print. Innis, Harold. The Bias of Communication. Toronto, 1951. Print. —. Empire & Communications. Oxford, 1950. Print. Jakobson, Roman. “Language in Operation.” 1949. Selected Writings III. By Jakobson. The Hague, 1981. 7-17. Print. Kahn, David. The Code-Breakers. New York, 1967. Print. Kittler, Friedrich. Grammophone, Film, Typewriter. Ed. Timothy Lenoir and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz. Stanford, 1999. Print. Lang, Kurt. “The Critical Functions of Empirical Communication Research: Observations on German-American Influences.” Media, Culture and Society 1 (1979): 83-96. Print. Lasswell, Harold. “The Structure and Function of Communication in Society.” Bryson 37-52. Lazarsfeld, Paul, and Robert Merton. “Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action.” Bryson 95-118. Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy. “Notes in the History of Intercultural Communication: The Foreign Service Institute and the Mandate for Intercultural Training.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 (1990): 262-81. Print. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss.” Sociologie et anthropologie. By Mauss. Paris, 1950. IX-LII. Print. Marchand, Philip. Marshall McLuhan: Botschafter der Medien. Stuttgart, 1999. Print. McLuhan, Marshall. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Ed. Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye. Toronto, 1987. Print. —. The Mechanical Bride. New York, 1951. Print. Mead, Margaret. “A Case-History in Cross-National Communications.” Bryson 209-30. —. “Some Cultural Approaches to Communication Problems.” Bryson 9-26. Miller, George A. Language and Communication. New York, 1951. Print. Rapoport, Anatol, ed. Game Theory as a Theory of Conflict Resolution. Dordrecht, 1974. Print. —. Introduction. Rapoport, Game 1-14. —. “Prisoner’s Dilemma—Recollections and Observations.” Rapoport, Game 17-34.

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Erhard Schüttpelz Rogers, Everett M. A History of Communication Study. New York, 1994. Print. Ruesch, Jurgen, and Gregory Bateson. Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry. New York, 1951. Print. Shannon, Claude. “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems.” Bell System Technical Journal 28 (1949): 656-715. Print. Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, 1949. Print. Simpson, Christopher. Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945-1960. New York, 1994. Print. Smith, Alfred G., ed. Communication and Culture: Readings in the Codes of Human Interaction. New York, 1966. Print. Spitzer, Leo. “American Advertising Explained As Popular Art.” A Method of Interpreting Literature. By Spitzer. Northampton, 1949. 102-49. Print. Tanner, Jakob. “‘Weisheit des Körpers’ und soziale Homöostase: Physiologie und das Konzept der Selbstregulation.” Physiologie und industrielle Gesellschaft. Ed. Philipp Sarasin and Tanner. Frankfurt a.M., 1998. 129-69. Print. Watzlawick, Paul, Janet H. Beavin, and Don D. Jackson, ed. Pragmatics of Human Communication. New York, 1967. Print. Weaver, Warren. “The Mathematics of Communication.” 1949. Smith 15-24. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Collected Papers in Metalinguistics. Washington, 1952. Print. Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, 1948. Print. —. The Human Use of Human Beings. 1954. 2nd ed. (rpt). London, 1989. Print. —. “Time, Communication and the Nervous System.” 1948. With Commentary by Heinz von Foersters. Collected Works. By Wiener. Vol. IV. Cambridge, 1985. 220-46. Print.

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Discourses: Dispositives and Politics

Picture Events: Abu Ghraib WOLFGANG BEILENHOFF

“What do pictures want?” (W. J. T. Mitchell) On July 23, 2003—almost one whole year before the photographs from Abu Ghraib were made public—Amnesty International had pointed out that torture was taking place at Abu Ghraib, the formerly Iraqi prison that now was under the administration of the American occupying power. However, this information remained completely ineffectual. None of the press agencies or TV companies, and none of the politically relevant institutions took up this news broadcast. This torture for the Western world did not exist for one whole year, even though in Abu Ghraib during this whole year torture was committed. The situation changed immediately as soon as the photographs were made public. “On April 28, 2004 CBS shows pictures of Iraqi prisoners physically abused in Abu Ghraib for the first time. The photographs had been sent by a soldier stationed in Iraq to a comrade in the US, who then passed them on to his superiors. [This CBS-broadcast had already been completed at the beginning of April; its transmission was postponed through pressure from the Pentagon.] On April 29, Terrie England recognizes her daughter on some of the pictures and declares that the incidents were ‘stupid kid things—pranks’ [see “Woman”]. On April 30, the pictures are shown worldwide, also in the Arab stations Al Arabiya (‫ )ةيبرعلا‬and Al Jazeera (‫]…[ )ةريزجلا‬. On May 5, President George W. Bush, Jr. desperately tries to find an explanation for the photographs and apologizes on Arabian TV. On May 6, the Washington Post releases new photographs […]. It is estimated that all in all some 1800 private photographs exist.” (“Chronologie”)1

A significant paradox from a media-theoretical and a media-political point of view is encountered right from the start. While the world was silent to the merely verbal news about Abu Ghraib, the same incidents, once turned into images, become a complex media event: 1

This article is based on research of the database LexisNexis, encompassing the period from April to July 2004. Supplementary details were researched during this time in Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Kölnische Rundschau.

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Wolfgang Beilenhoff “… it was the photographs that made all of this ‘real’ to Bush and his associates [D. Rumsfeld, N. Cheney and others]. Up to then, there had been only words…” (Sontag). True to the constitutive imperative of visibility characteristic of modernism, here everything also starts with an image; starts with photographs and video recordings that—intended as private documents—soon find a worldwide public. They initiate a feedback-loop characteristic of mass media, a loop that in this case takes a whole month.2 This debate was of course always referring to the status of the photographs as visual documents that were presented to the US Senate as proof and evidence, with the effect that Abu Ghraib attained the significance of a political event.3 However, apart from transforming these photographs into documents of a previous event in the political realm, at the same time there developed another quite substantial discourse about their status as images—as images that were now not solely reflected upon regarding their function as visual evidence, but in addition as images, as literal picture-events.4 Therefore, it certainly was not the fact of the torture alone that provoked the scandal connected to Abu Ghraib. The photographs themselves were just as much of a scandal. It was the appearance of those photographs that triggered off this disorientation that elicited very different rationalizations. The art historian Horst Bredekamp, for example, talked of a “specific moment in the history of pictures,” continuing, “We see pictures at the moment that do not represent history; they create it” (“Wir”). And the philosopher Slavoj Žižek underlined the ambivalence of popular images and latent violence inherent in these photographs when he said that one could not avoid thinking of “the obscene underside of US popular culture” that could be “recognized in the photographs” (“Between”). And for the historian Valentin Groebner this “assault” (Sontag)5—central for Susan Sontag in these pictures—shows in the fact that inbuilt in such photographs oscillating on the frontier between representation and participation, between mimesis and act, is a “traumatic evidence” stemming from the realization that the person taking the

2 3 4 5

In Süddeutsche Zeitung in May 2004 appear six, in taz—die tageszeitung eleven long articles. See the results of the respective reports on findings in Strasser. With regard to this and stressing the line of vision that is manifested in the photographs see also Holzer 4. The quote reads: “So now the pictures will continue to ‘assault’ us—as many Americans are bound to feel. Will people get used to them?”

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Picture Events pictures does not prevent the activity that he is photographing (see Groebner 169).6 In view of the pictographic status of the photographs, it should be possible to trace that element in these images that one might call their eventfulness. Under this aspect, I will focus on the central questions of developing strategies and procedures of the mediated creation of events in two steps, the first being with view to the peculiar fact that from the almost one thousand five hundred pictures very few were chosen and distributed by the photo and press agencies, so that one could interpret this process of selection as a procedure constituting an event. Regarding this, one has to ask specifically about the criteria that might have explicitly and implicitly formed the basis for this selection. The point of departure then has to be that the high connectivity of these pictures with existing picture-archives is of unique importance. This question takes up the reversal of the traditional semiotics and hermeneutics of images, provokingly conceived of by W. J. T. Mitchell under the header “What do pictures want?” If a premedial event receives attention through selection, it is equally true that it can thereby become a discourse. Therefore, in a second step, one has to ask about the focusing that results from this ‘discursivation’ of the images. The scandal of these photographs, their “traumatic evidence” (Groebner), is followed by an extremely dense discourse formation that lasted for almost a whole month, resulting in a multiplicity of discourses. I want to follow up especially on those that are focused on the interfaces of image and culture, of image and power, and of image and technology.

Connectivity/Performativity Directing and channeling attention is a common procedure also used by institutions.7 A first step in the regulation of attention is that process of selection which—initiated by the different picture agencies—is then followed up by a conspicuous discursive differentiation. On the one hand, as already mentioned, almost one thousand five hundred photographs exist of the Abu Ghraib tortures. And at the same time only certain ones surfaced out of these streams of pictures; they are the images that subsequently became representative for Abu Ghraib and that secured a solid position

6 7

Groebner here generally refers to images of violence at the beginning of the 21st century. See the current epistemic and aesthetic significance of the term attentiveness (Kiefer).

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Wolfgang Beilenhoff within Western (and Arabian) collective memories. Remaining in the stream of images are those photographs that show the clear ‘normality’ of torture in Abu Ghraib: prisoners, prison guards, rituals of humiliation. Visibly on the other hand remain those images that clearly demonstrate signs of staging, i.e., of theatricality, such as that image depicting a male figure standing on a bucket, his head clad in a sack and connected to wires. Such as also the photograph in which a female figure, Lynndie England, is leading a naked Iraqi soldier on a leash like a dog. And finally, that photograph in which Charles A. Graner and Lynndie England, both grinning with their thumbs up, pose behind heaped-up naked Iraqi prisoners. These three photographs become reference-pictures (see Basting);8 they become images that innately contain an addressing potential9 which results from—as we can variously read—their high cultural connectivity: “The pictures do not only shock because of their crude authenticity, but because of the fact that they are saturated with cultural patterns” (“Folter”). They are saturated with patterns, as I want to show, that point to an ensemble of cultural image-discourses, significant in their heterogeneity, making use of commensurate iconographies: colonialism, Christianity and pornography. The photograph of Charles S. Graner and Lynndie England, with the Americans as perpetrators and the Iraqis as victims in especially explicit form, performs a specific pattern of that visual discourse of colonialism that is inscribed in the photographs of Abu Ghraib:10 Hunting and the connected self-portraits as a central form of the “colonial way of seeing” (Ryan 138; see the respective photographs no. 46 and 47) and its characteristic strategy of exclusion since “for many hunters, soldiers and pioneers, ‘savage’ people were understood as a form of wildlife to be conquered and controlled” (Ryan 139). It is a visual pattern that historically represents an early form of the spiral of power, of greatness and historic mightiness on the one hand and powerlessness, anonymity and dehumanization on the other that, according to Cornelia Brink, is also characteristic for 8

To be seen in connection with the keyword “icon.” Ute Frevert for example is talking of “icons of American hubris” in connection with these pictures. And the jury of the Festival “Visa pour l’image” in Perpignan (France) in October 2004 suggested the pictures for a prize with the argument: “These pictures already today are global icons” (see Basting). 9 The photograph of the “hooded man” is used as the cover photograph of the book publication Abu Ghraib. And Sebastian Moll in “Schock und Aufklärung” (“Shock and Clarification”) says, “The picture of a hooded prisoner will remain one of the persistent images of this conflict.” 10 See the conclusion by Sontag that the “photographs […] are representative of the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation together with the Bush administration’s distinctive policies.”

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Picture Events photographs from concentration camps: “The murderers appear the more powerful, the more powerless their victims are” (171). This discourse then, as can be seen in the posing of the two American soldiers, innately contains a specific direction of gaze. Both the man and the woman pose and thereby expose themselves. The pose is a posture that points out that there is a viewer. Barthes formulates this in the following way, “I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing,’ […] I transform myself in advance into an image” (10). In other words, here is a photograph that directly addresses our gaze by making that which it is showing into a picture. The photograph with the “tortured hooded man” that carries the “inclination to staging to the extreme” (Moll, “Schock”) with its explicit iconography evokes the cultural pattern of Corpus Christi, i.e., the “physical model of the Christian culture” (Belting, Echte 86), and thus we find ourselves at “the center of Christian visual culture” (Groebner 97). Corpus Christi is the injured body incarnate; it is that “physical model” which by licensing fascination with horror via the detour of “compassio”11 lets us experience the horror, the suffering Christ, in ever-new variations. It is an image model or a model image that has accomplished that which today is the function of the mass media: “The formatting of the human being by way of a super image” (Ullrich 25).12 Into this “super image” now the photograph at hand inserts a Muslim body, thereby appropriating an alien body by way of ones own image model. I have pointed out from the beginning that the pictures from Abu Ghraib resemble pornographic pictures.13 Especially noteworthy in that regard is “that photograph on which a young woman seems to be leading an Iraqi, who is lying on the floor, on a leash like a dog” (Lerch). This discourse of pornography of course has a wider context. Here the borders between pornographic and martial violence begin to dissolve. In the narrower context of exercising violence in Abu Ghraib, now the fusion of body politics and the lust for viewing violence becomes relevant, which is characteristic for the pornographic discourse. It is a fusion that is typically manifested in “touching.” “In pornography, like in the representation of extreme violence, touch plays an important role: the touching of the picture, but also the contact with the object before the camera that is pre11 The compassio with suffering Christ is “a training of feelings for the believers on their way to higher wisdom” (Belting, Echte 98). 12 On the historical predecessors of the “visual violence” to be experienced here see Walker Bynum 3. 13 See also Rall referring us to the proximity of these pictures to child pornography. “Here and there the victims helplessly are at the mercy of the perpetrators. Here and there the photographs are to be used ‘internally’ and before they reach the public they serve the lust for viewing brutality.”

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Wolfgang Beilenhoff sented and at the same time prohibited by the picture” (Holzer 14). This touching in the picture at hand is materialized in a leash; that dog’s leash with which Lynndie England is bonding the naked Iraqi prisoner to herself is also the invisible cord connecting the viewer to the picture. This means that the images direct the attention through connectivity. The “problem of viewing” (Geimer) that they present to us has a first solution when we operate within available patterns of interpretation, in our meeting “cultural patterns” and “locking in with instinctive assurance to the stagings of fascist images of violence and sex that themselves serve as models for pop culture” (Reinecke).14 As we can now point out, the pictures from Abu Ghraib stage representative positions of our popular visual culture. They possess a connectivity bridging dominant image-discourses and organizations of visions of Western culture, of colonialism, Christianity and pornography, thereby implementing these images themselves into the collective memory of imagery.15 This bridge from specific pictures to the cultural image-discourse and memories of imagery, however, is in no way a one-way street. Linked to this connectivity is at the same time a retrogressive movement. The concrete image breaks what it itself evokes. As a procedure, connectivity heightens also the reflexive potential of the pictures: “The more familiar elements are contained in the ‘unimaginably’ horrible images of the suffering of others, the more effective they are” (Groebner 171). At the same time one can ask whether this high connectivity and the frequency of cultural patterns connected to it can adequately capture the shattering power of these pictures. The question remains whether there is not a surplus, a remainder of non-legibility that necessitates further theoretical considerations. Peter Geimer likewise observes a noticeable inadequacy in the research done in cultural studies and iconography. He pleads in favor of perceiving the “shocking photographs” with their reference to their “reality” and is vehemently opposed to “bring back these images into the world of artificial imagery the formulaic essence of which one can interpret so well.” Convincing as this classic argument may be, in the present case regarding the factual events it nevertheless also needs, it seems to me, a complementary perspective that can grasp

14 Also see Groys 31: “[…] the images and videos from Abu Ghraib bewilderingly resemble aesthetically the alternative, subversive European and American (film) art of the sixties and seventies.” Both have the “goal to show the naked, vulnerable body caught in the social systems of cultural convention.” 15 See Bredekamp in “Wir”: “Not a thousand bullets but pictures on which prisoners are held on leashes can still in fifty years characterize the US in the Arabian world.”

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Picture Events the specific status of these torture events. I will try and approach this at least tentatively by way of the concept of performativity. The pictures resemble the visual phenomena that in communication studies have been called “key pictures.” This means a modeling of stereotypes characteristic for mass media that direct the process of reception through recognizable attributes, thereby guiding our attention. Joachim Paech is rightfully pointing out that such a “key picture” has to be analyzed beyond the thematic elements (unlike theoreticians like Peter Ludes, who only look at the contents or motives). Paech maintains that it also has to be analyzed in its dimensions of mediality and that between the represented events and its representation a difference inserts itself producing a “distance differentiating the event represented in a medium from the event of its representation in a medium.” It is a “distance” that allows “recognizing the ‘image’ as an identifiable form” (93). This distancing on the one hand points to a general fact that could be called the constitutive difference between event and image. My thesis is that this is a difference that at the same time can be annulled—however, not annulled in such a way that it would be divested of the significance that Paech has rightfully claimed for it. Rather, on the other hand, we can observe a performative annulment of this distance between event and representation, thereby creating a scandalous intermingling of event and medium. Already the term ‘image-event’ used by Bredekamp insinuates this since there is a paradoxical—to be more exact, a perverted—causality at its center that shows in the fact that here a naked, vulnerable body is only tortured in order to become a picture. Therefore, in these images we can recognize a conspicuous double-tracked connectivity. On the one hand these are images that evoke familiar patterns of imagery, pictures of horror that we already know. They are images generating unexpected, norm-infringing interferences between the imaginary and the real, between cinema and terror.16 The sinister overtness of these pictures then is the return of what we already know, of what is familiar to us. And, on the other hand, at the same time we have to consider that this familiar element is not introduced symbolically. The actors occupying these images do not only quote the image-patterns of violence; they also perform them. Thereby we experience this simultaneity of showing and doing, of exhibited violence and real violence; we experience this dissolution of the border between staging and reality that is characteristic for performance. The performative element of these pictures, their surplus that cannot be redeemed iconographi-

16 For a structurally similar situation of September 11, 2001 compare Koschorke.

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Wolfgang Beilenhoff cally or semiotically, then are the bodies that in the present case are staging familiar patterns of images of horror.17 The perpetrators of these pictures, who, as I will show, should better be called ‘snap shooters,’ perform cultural patterns that are not only known to them but also to the viewer, thereby acting them out. This means that the images acquire a clear index of reality. Consequently, they cannot be soothingly filed away in the world of legible, symbolic, distancing images. This reality-index sometimes permits a nullifying of the distance: “The excessive violence represented by them attempts to make the distancing from it as difficult as possible. Herein lies their effect on reader and viewer […]” (Groebner 169).

Phobocracy In a first step I have asked the question how media events are generated and how, bound to this, attention is directed under the aspect of selecting certain images regarding their intense connectivity. Now, as a complementary question, I will examine the intense discursivation that was initiated immediately following the publication of the photographs by CBS. This discourse unfolded within a very short period between the end of April and the end of May 2004. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of June 8, 2004, in an allusion to the codification of the war in Iraq as “Operation Desert Storm,” it is “a first storm of interpretation” (Lensing). It is a discourse that far surpasses normality in its intensity, since by no means are only articles of information and new bulletins being published; there are extensive commentaries and other contributions as well. It is also a discourse that is not only conveyed by professional, institutionalized journalists. Rather, in all German newspapers, commentaries of a variety of guest ‘experts’ appear: art historians and iconographers (Horst Bredekamp), philosophers (Slavo Žižek), cultural philosophers (Klaus Theweleit), cultural historians (Joseph Vogel), theorists of visual art (Peter Geimer) and historians (Ute Frevert). In its most basic form, an event is taking place here; without doubt this is due to the frequency with which the pictures from Abu Ghraib became an issue within a month, an event that also was fortified by the guest commentaries of these well-known authors. One could say that it is downright an exemplary case of the transformation of an incident into a media event. From this it can be seen that Abu Ghraib becomes a concave mirror initiating a whole scope of

17 On the significance of the term ‘performance’ for the concept of a (possible) performative picture see Fischer-Lichte 42ff.

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Picture Events discourses. Of course, and mainly in the beginning and especially in the USA, an extensive discourse is carried on regarding public affairs and censorship which I will disregard here. Rather, I will talk about those discourses that emphasize focal points by exposing and reflecting upon guiding cultural principles like a “We” that forms identities, violence or media. To begin with, the two sides encountering each other in this prison—and in this war—are strikingly correlated to each other in the discourse. It is remarkable that very soon we encounter a symmetrical mirroring in the symbolic field of the images: “Meanwhile the first batch of photographs from Abu Ghraib can also be found in the digital displays of the Islamic world—as scalps of American culture,” writes the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of June 8, 2004 (Lensing). And already one month earlier in taz—die tageszeitung of May 8, 2004 one could find the headline “Both sides have now illustrated their nightmares” (Charim). The image of an antagonistic brotherhood is positioned here, connected in a “fight for the power of images” (Pickert). And thus also The Financial Times Germany states on May 13, 2004, “Even the terrorists have by now realized that their strongest weapon is the public” (Zepelin, Baulig, and Notz). But these symmetrical arrangements are instantly countered with asymmetrical ones. Therefore, it is a matrix, a geometrical pattern serving as a foil for the construction of differences. While Slavoj Žižek is still reflecting the cultural differences as differences of barbarians of ‘equal rights,’18 at the same time the discourse of creating alterity comes to the forefront with unequivocal positionings. Be it as colonization, by “initiating” [the prisoners through torture] into American culture thereby feeling their “obscene underside,” as Žižek puts it (“Amerikaner”), or by making their own “subversive aesthetic stylistics” into a lever “undermining a different, alien culture in an act of violence thereby humiliating their population (instead of humiliating themselves by challenging their own culture),” as Boris Groys phrased it (31).19 Or be it by de-personalizing, by deprivation of identity, by placing a sack over the head of each prisoner by 18 “The fight between the American and the Arab culture is not a fight between barbarians and respect for human dignity. It is a fight between anonymous brutal torture and torture as a media spectacle in which the bodies of the victims are an anonymous background for the stupidly grinning ‘innocent American’ faces of torture. At the same time they are the proof that—paraphrasing Walter Benjamin—every clash of cultures is the clash of the barbarianism at their center” (Žižek, “Amerikaner”). 19 See also the remarks of the Arabian journalist Karim El-Gawhary: “The photographs nourish the feeling of Arabs to be constantly humiliated by an arrogant America.”

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Wolfgang Beilenhoff which this offensive “surplus of negative energy” is felt that is characteristic for each “de-facement” (Taussig 1). As a complementary element to this discourse of creating alterity, to this placement of the self by demarcating borders, another discourse develops questioning the existence of violence in its own culture. Of course this discourse also addresses the juridical aspects of torture and violence. However, the focus is on the question of the possible connection between image and violence—and in fact in a double way. The photographs are not only mentioned as images of violence, as medially omnipresent images of abused, tortures bodies, but at the same time as violence of the images themselves, as the taz—die tageszeitung of May 12, 2004 underlines: “The torturers of Abu Ghraib used the photograph as a means of torture in a double sense. The photograph of tortures is an effective threat of torture—and as such as effective as violence itself, maybe even more effective. And the photographing of the victims adds an additional dimension of cruelty to their agony—their humiliation is made accessible to an uncontrollably proliferating public viewing.”20

At the same time the talk of a “violence of the image” (Nancy) falls back to what I mentioned before regarding the category of a performative picture—with a remarkable difference, however. Now it is not so much the perpetrators of these pictures—the torturers and the ‘snap shooters’—that are the vanishing point; it is those who are addressed—we, the viewers. The collapse of our habitual perception caused by the images is being discursivized primarily with two key terms: “shock” and “complicity.”21 These are key terms that both have their point of departure—irrespective of their oppositional identification of the viewer as victim on the one hand and accomplice on the other—in that in such images we encounter a presence of violence that we have to identify as a “reflection [of violence] in the image” (Sloterdijk). It is a reflection that is necessarily bound to

20 See for this linkage of image and violence also Nancy. Sloterdijk modifies this line of thought under the aspect of the representation of violence as “participation” in violence and at the same time as its “translation into another medium” (339). 21 See Reinecke: “These pictures have hit us without protection. They have

confused the filter of perception with which we sort out the global news of violence assaulting us. […] Our defenses against shock only become porous when the pictures tell something about ourselves.” The category of “complicity” surpassing this by extending the performative also into the position of the viewer can explicitly be found in Bredekamp (“Wir”) and Rall.

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Picture Events procedures and processes of mediality and that therefore also initiates its own discourse, a discourse of the medium. And again, as had been the case in connection with the first Gulf war, an extensive debate about the status of the images of this war develops; this time, however, with a significant difference. While the debate at that time was led mainly under the key term “simulation,” coined by Jean Baudrillard, now, one and a half decades later, the term does not seem to have any discursive value left. Instead, the dominating terms become “archive of images,” “distribution,” “viewer.” It seems to me especially noteworthy that this media discourse—at least implicitly—is suggesting a connection between a technological and a sociological component, between the digitality of these pictures and the attitude of the ‘snap shooters’ characterizing them. Of course, one cannot find any theories of digitality here. The different comments and considerations point to individual aspects that, however, call attention to themselves since they are associated with consequences for the Abu Ghraib pictures. We could name the autopoietically boundless reproduction of pictures, for example. As Susan Sontag observes: “There will be thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable.” If we then are dealing here with a proliferation of the visual that is characteristic of the digital, disencumbered by any ties to the idea of an original, the historian Ute Frevert points to the displacement of vision and perception that is connected with digital images. “Other perspectives will predominate.” Perspectives that will lead to a de-ontologizing of the relationship between image and reality as Frevert’s term “icon” signalizes; the effect will be that we have pictures here “whose correlative to a phenomenal reality now represents only the point of origin of a series of transformation” (Stiegler 109). The frequency with which the image-producing apparatus has become thematic is noteworthy as well. It is constantly stressed that the majority of soldiers own digital cameras. And the following statement by Rumsfeld hints at the dimension of tourism that is characteristic for these soldier-tourists: “[They are] running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise” (qtd. in Sontag). The power speaking here has to acknowledge a displacement that is the result of two ‘substitutions.’ The producers of these images, those images that occupy the imaginary realm of a whole nation now are not any more, to Rumsfeld’s regret, professional photographers but ‘snap shooters’ and amateurs who—clearly like tourists—only carry out the program of their digital cameras, thereby producing pictures among pictures; in other words simply and only

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Wolfgang Beilenhoff pictures. This first substitution generates a second one: not institutions like photo agencies, Magnum Press or the editorial departments of TV stations circulate the pictures, but media. A result of these far-reaching displacements is that the public image of reality that traditionally had been the task of an image elite, of professional photographers, now is provided by snap shooters: “Why do we still need professionals if today anybody can provide important documents with their multimedial cell phone” (“Macht”). Not only the instituting of discourses is displaced here but also the status of what constitutes an “important document.” Without doubt, the photographs from Abu Ghraib mentioned here are treated as ‘documents.’ But they were taken by snap shooters and not by professional photographers. Now the product—and the purpose—of the snap shooter are not so much pictures but snapshots. This means that the snap shooter differs from the professional photographer in that this digital “amateur on the button” (Moll, “Amateure”) ultimately “hardly plays a part any more and instead is producing a stream of thoughtlessly made pictures” (Frank). This stream, however, has far-reaching consequences for our perception of reality: “Like death, the snapshot is a theft, a violent and inconceivable transgression of a threshold plucking the object from its habitual world and placing it in another world and another time” (Metz 349). Which far-reaching implications this institutionalizing of digital amateur photographs as documents has is illuminated when noting that the pictures examined here are simultaneously always pictures of fear, thereby—according to Marie-José Mondzain—becoming operative pictures of a phobocratic regime characterizing the current perception of reality in Western societies. With this she means the present “industry for the exhibition of terror” that produces and distributes pictures of fear, thereby making them into pivotal agents of power discourses. For Mondzain, the fact that the amateur photographs examined here are exemplary for the ambivalence between fear and lust as a crucial strategy of this “industry” makes these pictures into exemplary media events of the “phobocratic market:” “The ambivalence inherent in the phobocratic market has become evident in all its perversity when the humiliations of the Iraqi prisoners were circulated in an allegedly uncontrolled way. In this case it became evident that an industry of fear exists; it is a politically controlled perpetuation of created fears and this industry is in most cases erotically charged.” (35f)

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“Events Take Place” (Michael Snow) The photographs from Abu Ghraib, however, acquire their eventfulness by no means only by way of the so far described two procedures of “connectivity” (launching cultural patterns) and “discursivation” (processing the picture itself). As my point of departure for this third and final particularly noteworthy media aspect of the significance of the photographs as events, I would like to reiterate Rumsfeld’s allusion to the “uncontrolled circulation”22 of the photographs from Abu Ghraib. Here another dimension of their eventfulness is emerging—even though with negative connotations regarding the instances of power—a dimension that is connected with the category of location. With recourse to Michael Snow, we could say that pictures also become events when they have a place, when they “take place.” The question that comes into play here is a question of “relationships between pictures and places” (Belting, “Ort” 61). However, according to the art historian Hans Belting, so far it has been a fairly ignored field. Therefore I would like to pursue it only with regard to its implications for the Abu Ghraib pictures. A possible point of departure is the repeatedly found genealogical parallel between the photographs from Abu Ghraib and photographs in context with the holocaust or the crimes of the German Wehrmacht (see Lensing). In both cases we are dealing with photographs showing and documenting violence and crimes. However, they differ insofar as these photographs take place in quite distinctive locations so that significant differences show in the “relationship between pictures and places.” As the above-mentioned third and further reaching eventfulness, these differences then could be determined as a pragmatics of pictures that results from these “relationships” producing other significant events. The holocaust photographs and the photographs of the German Wehrmacht were mainly deposited in two places: either hidden, for example in ones own wallet, or framed in a photo album. Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius has shown that connected to these dissimilar places were quite different functions and uses. While the photograph in the wallet served as an apotropaical sign, namely as a defense against death by one’s posing alive next to the dead man whom one had conquered (whereby the photograph served as a magical object of protection thus becoming an event in itself), the same photograph placed in the other location—the photo album— attained a quite different status. Photo albums create the familial and at the same time regulate our memories, and the photograph therefore functions as a passage in the narrative of the familial and

22 On August 10, 2008 Google has 666,000,000 hits for the term “pictures.”

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Wolfgang Beilenhoff as a point of departure for an autobiographical discourse. While the NS-photographs then reside in the realm of privacy and the familial, i.e., within a realm of memory, the photographs of the digital snap shooter are characterized from the beginning by a historically new relationship between picture and place: “The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflect a shift in the use made of pictures—less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated” (Sontag). The decisive role is attributed here to the internet as the new address of these pictures. Even though the photographs of the digital snap shooter are also placed at the traditional locations of press and TV, at the same time and from the beginning they are also present in the internet. And thus not only “messages are disseminated” but also the photographs themselves. They differ all of a sudden from the traditional localized pictures in that they, multiplied and mobilized, continually circulate. They are simultaneously in different places and therefore no longer have a permanent place of their own.23 But I want to leave open whether this dispersal of the traditional location indeed results in complete placelessness. Rather, in this context regarding the photographs examined here, it is decisive in what way the concrete displacements result from the fact that it is not the wallet and photo album but the hard disk and the monitor that become the location of the pictures. These are places that are not so much locations in the emphatic sense of the word; they are rather temporary in-between states. Instead of the fixed place, now a transitory in-between condition may have emerged. Taking this as a point of departure, one should now ask just how far this in-between condition of the photographs also imparts a specific operative and aesthetic status to them. They are operative to the extent that the pictures now can, according to Susan Sontag, “assault” us, hit us suddenly as if attacking us; they are aesthetic to the extent that we are facing pictures that because of their transitory character and their immateriality are inherently characterized by the mediality of spookiness and ghastly spectrality. They are pictures that—as media configurations—are “themselves to an unclear extent what they seemingly only represent” (Baßler, Gruber, and Wagner-Egelhaf 11 [Introduction]). Concurrently, they also demonstrate that the question of the “relation between picture and place” can always be conversely read. Thus the eventfulness of these photographs would not least of all consist of the fact that they make us ask to what extent pictures and places produce each other reciprocally. Understanding this, the ghastly spectrality and spookiness of these photographs would then be a pictured index of the

23 On the historical genesis of this ‘placelessness’ see Weibel.

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Picture Events very same ghastliness inherent in such dystopian places as Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo. Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London, 1982. Print. Baßler, Moritz, Bettina Gruber, and Martina Wagner-Egelhaf, eds. Gespenster: Erscheinungen—Medien—Theorien. Würzburg, 2005. Print. Basting, Barbara. “Bilder eines hyperdokumentierten Krieges” (“Pictures of a Hyperdocumented War”). Tages-Anzeiger 12 Oct. 2004: n. pag. Print. Belting, Hans. Das echte Bild: Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen. Munich, 2005. Print. —. “Der Ort der Bilder II: Ein anthropologischer Versuch” (“The Place of Pictures: An Anthropological Attempt”). Bild-Anthropologie. By Belting. Munich, 2001. 57-86. Print. Benvenisti, Meron, ed. Abu Ghraib: The Politics of Torture. With essays by Benvenisti, M. Danner, B. Ehrenreich, et al. Berkeley, 2004. Print. Brink, Cornelia. Ikonen der Vernichtung: Öffentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945. Berlin, 1998. Print. Charim, Isolde. “Interventionen im Imaginären.” taz—die tageszeitung 8 May 2004: n. pag. Print. “Chronologie der Ereignisse” (“Chronology of the Incidents”). taz— die tageszeitung 14 May 2004: n. pag. Print. El-Gawhary, Karim. “Globale entwürdigende Botschaft” [“Global Degrading Message”]. taz—die tageszeitung 11 May 2004: n. pag. Print. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt a.M., 2004. Print. “Folter im Bild: Die Fotos aus dem Irak sprechen von der Schuld des amerikanischen Präsidenten und ebenso von der des Betrachters. Ein Interview mit dem Medienwissenschaftler Joseph Vogl” (“Torture in Images: The Photographs from Iraq Speak of the Guilt of the American President and of That of the Viewer. An Interview with the Media Historian Joseph Vogl”). Die Zeit 21 (13 May 2004): 62. Print. Frank, Arno. “Im digitalen Bildersturm” (“In the Digital Picture Storm”). taz—die tageszeitung 21 Jan. 2005: n. pag. Print.

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Wolfgang Beilenhoff Frevert, Ute. “Momente der Macht. Die Bilder von Abu Ghraib: Opfer, Darsteller und ihre Betrachter” (“Moments of Power. The Pictures of Abu Ghraib: Victims, Actors and Their Viewers”). Frankfurter Rundschau 22 May 2004: n. pag. Print. Geimer, Peter. “Bilder, die man nicht zeigt: Über den schwierigen Umgang mit Schockfotos” [“Pictures One Does Not Show: On the Difficulty of Dealing with Shocking Photographs”]. Neue Zürcher Zeitung 14 July 2005: n. pag. Print. Groebner, Valentin. Ungestalten: Die visuelle Kultur der Gewalt im Mittelalter. Munich, 2003. Print. Groys, Boris. “Das Schicksal der Kunst im Zeitalter des Terrors” (“The Fate of Art in Times of Terror”). Schnitt/Das Filmmagazin 1 (2006): 30-34. Print. Hoffmann-Curtius, Kathrin. “Trophäen und Amulette: Die Fotografien von Wehrmachts- und SS-Verbrechen in den Brieftaschen der Soldaten” (“Trophies and Amuletts: The Photographs of the Wehrmacht- and SS-Crimes in the Wallets of Soldiers”). Fotogeschichte 20.78 (2000): 63-76. Print. Holzer, Anton. “Der lange Schatten von Abu Ghraib: Schaulust und Gewalt in der Kriegsfotografie” (“The Long Shadow of Abu Ghraib: Lusting for Views of Violence in War Photography”). Mittelweg 36 (Feb./Mar. 2006): 4-21. Print. Kiefer, Bernd. “Aufmerksamkeit und Zerstreuung der Wahrnehmung: Mit/nach Walter Benjamin.” Bildtheorie und Film. Ed. Thomas B. Koebner and Thomas Meder. Munich, 2006. 221238. Print. Koschorke, Albrecht. “Staaten und ihre Feinde: Ein Versuch über das Imaginäre der Politik.” Einbildungen. Ed. Jörg Huber. Vienna, 2005. 93-115. Print. Lensing, Leo A. “Die letzten Tage der Menschheit: Vorbilder zu Abu Ghraib” (“The Last Days of Mankind: Models for Abu Ghraib”). Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 8 June 2004: n. pag. Print. Lerch, Wolfgang. “Doppelt zerstörerisch” (“Doubly Destructive”). Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 11 May 2004: n. pag. Print. Maar, Christa, and Hubert Burda, eds. Iconic Turn: Die neue Macht der Bilder. Cologne, 2004. Print. “Die Macht der Amateurbilder” (“The Power of Amateur Photographs”). taz—die tageszeitung 11 Mar. 2005: n. pag. Print. Metz, Christian. “Foto, Fetisch.” 1985. Theorie der Fotografie IV— 1980-1995. Ed. Hubertus von Amelunxen. Munich, 2000. 345355. Print. Mitchell, W. J. T. “What Do Pictures Want?” What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. By Mitchell. Chicago, 2005. 2856. Print.

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Picture Events Moll, Sebastian. “Amateure am Drücker: Fotojournalismus à la Magnum setzt hohe ästhetische Maßstäbe—das öffentliche Bewusstsein heizen derzeit andere Bilder an” (“Amateurs Pushing Buttons: Photojournalism à la Magnum Is Setting High Benchmarks—But Public Perception at the Moment Is Heated up by Other Pictures”). Frankfurter Rundschau 27 May 2004: n. pag. Print. —. “Schock und Aufklärung” (“Shock and Clarification”). taz—die tageszeitung 12 May 2004: n. pag. Print. Mondzain, Marie-José. “Die Angst im Bild: Aspekte der Herrschaft mit Hilfe von Bildern” (“Fear in Pictures: Aspects of Power by Means of Pictures”). Einbildungen. Ed. Jörg Huber. Berlin, 2005. 33-46. Print. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Bild und Gewalt.” Am Grund der Bilder. By Nancy. Berlin, 2006. 31-50. Print. Paech, Joachim. “Medienwissenschaft.” Bildwissenschaft: Disziplinen, Themen, Methoden. Ed. Klaus Sachs-Hombach. Frankfurt a.M., 2005. 79-96. Print. Pickert, Bernd. “Bilder als Waffen.” taz—die tageszeitung 13 May 2004: n. pag. Print. Rall, Veronika. “Kein Ende der Fotostrecken: Schreckensbilder aus Irak” (“Endless Picture Galleries: Horror Photographs from Irak”). Frankfurter Rundschau 13 May 2004: n. pag. Print. Reinecke, Stefan. “Abu Ghraib—das sind wir” (“Abu Ghraib—That’s Us”). taz—die tageszeitung 15 May 2004: n. pag. Print. Ryan, James R. Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire. London, 1997. Print. Sloterdijk, Peter. “Bilder der Gewalt—Gewalt der Bilder: Von der antiken Mythologie zur postmodernen Bilderindustrie.” Maar and Burda 333-348. Sontag, Susan. “Regarding the Torture of Others.” The New York Times 23 May 2004: n. pag. Print. Pub. in Ger. as Susan Sontag. “Endloser Krieg, endloser Strom von Fotos.” Süddeutsche Zeitung 24 May 2004: n. pag. Print. Stiegler, Bernd. “Digitale Photographie als epistemologischer Bruch und historische Wende.” Das Gesicht der Welt: Medien in der digitalen Kultur. Ed. Lorenz Engell and Britta Neitzel. Munich, 2004. 105-125. Print. Strasser, Steven, ed. The Abu Ghraib Investigations: The Official Reports of the Independent Panel and Pentagon on the Shocking Prisoner Abuse in Iraq. New York, 2004. Print. Taussig, Michael. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford, 1999. Print. Ullrich, Wolfgang. Bilder auf Weltreise: Eine Globalisierungskritik. Berlin, 2006. Print.

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Wolfgang Beilenhoff Walker Bynum, Caroline. “Violent Imagery in Late Medieval Piety.” GHI (German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.) 30 (Spring 2002): 3-36. Print. Weibel, Peter. “Ortlosigkeit und Bilderfülle—Auf dem Weg zur Telegesellschaft” (“Placelessness and Pictureplenty: On the Way to Tele-Society”). Maar and Burda 216-226. “Wir sind befreundete Komplizen. Triumphgesten, Ermächtigungsstrategien und Körperpolitik: Der Kunsthistoriker Horst Bredekamp über Bilder der Folter und Exekution im Irak” (“We Are Friends and Accomplices: Gestures of Triumph, Strategies of Power and the Politics of the Body”). Süddeutsche Zeitung 28 May 2004: n. pag. Print. “Woman Soldier in Abuse Spotlight.” BBC News. BBC, 7 May 2004. Web. 28 July 2008. Zepelin, Joachim, Christian Baulig, and Anton Notz. “Massenbelichtungswaffen” [“Mass Exposure Weapons”]. The Financial Times Germany 13 May 2004: n. pag. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. “Die Amerikaner kontrollieren gar nichts! Nicht mal sich selbst” (“The Americans Control Nothing—Not Even Themselves”). Berliner Zeitung 23 June 2004: n. pag. Print. —. “Between Two Deaths: The Culture of Torture.” London Review of Books 3 June 2004: n. pag. Print. Trans. into German as “Warum Comical Ali recht behalten hat: einige Überlegungen über Abu Ghraib und das Unbewusste in der Popkultur.” Berliner Zeitung 23 June 2004: n. pag. Print.

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Illustration 1: 1932

Source: Hoffmann 69

Voice Politics: Establishing the ‘Loud/Speaker’ in the Political Communication of National Socialism CORNELIA EPPING-JÄGER In the following essay, I want to make a case for my thesis that in Germany during the years 1932-1936, a large media experiment was conceived and conducted by the NSDAP as a result of which— combined with the networked dynamics of technological research and the political system—the dispositive ‘loud/speaker’1 was established as an apparatus of discourses that was centered around the mass-communicative distribution of the “voice of the Fuehrer” and its personal substitutes. The progress made by technology in both public address (PA) systems in open areas and also in the means of connecting the PA systems to the disseminating medium radio allowed the NS system to consolidate a community of listeners via media. The dispositive ‘loud/speaker’ that emerged from this great experiment organized the interiorization of power as an acoustical form of the experience of a ‘national community’ that was constituted through the mediated synchronous ubiquity of the ‘voice of the Fuehrer’ and its collective resonance in the populace. The central phase of this experiment can be temporally situated between the election campaign “Hitler over Germany” in 1932, the “May Festival” in 1933 on the Tempelhof Field, and Adolf Hitler’s “election speeches” broadcast from the Krupp Hall in Essen and the Schlageter Hall in Königsberg. Four years passed between these major mass-communicative events, years during which these media dispositives further differentiated, this period thereby becoming a

1

This article was written in the context of the project “Loud/Speaker: Discourse and practice of media in the era of National Socialism” of the Research College of Cultural Theory (SFB/FK 427) “Media and Cultural Communication.” The concept of the dispositive Loud/Speaker here marks a structural connection that—apart from the technical apparatus loudspeaker—also includes the voices of the speakers and their mental dispositions as well as the scenarios of their performative processing.

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Cornelia Epping-Jäger significant—possibly even constitutive—moment of the communicative culture of the NS system.

The NSDAP as Oratorical Party: The Reign of Voice In February of 1925 the NSDAP was newly founded after it had been banned following the march to the Feldherrnhalle in 1924, and it was explicitly constituted as an oratorical party.2 In that same year, a technological periodical reported details about the deployment of large loudspeakers during an American election rally for the first time (see Kollatz). German companies, which at that point were already experimenting with their own electro-acoustic technology to be used by PA systems for the masses, picked up on the American invention and developed it further.3 In churches (see Watson) and cathedrals,4 in big festival halls and industrial buildings (see Trendelenburg, “Experimentalbeitrag”; Zeller) as well as on outside premises (see Willms), this series of experiments was further tested regarding the question (as Hans Gerdien, the head of production of Telefunken, formulated the ‘stable topos’ of the use of the loud2

3

4

For the view that the “competent and experienced public speaker” was seen as “the backbone of the ideological schooling of the NSDAP” see Bundesarchiv, Archivalie NSD 9/65, 1539. In 1927—the same year in which the ban on Hitler’s speaking was abrogated again—the propaganda department of the NSDAP began to reorganize the previous “nature of public speaking.” In 1928 Fritz Reinhardt opened the “School of Public Speech of the NSDAP” in Herrsching on the Ammersee (Lake Ammer), where the students of public speech were introduced to the rules of rhetorics when using a loudspeaker. The “materials of public speech” edited by Reinhardt can be found as a totality in the inventory NS 26 of the Bundesarchiv Berlin (Federal Archives). Regarding the subject of the National Socialist practice of assembly and their schooling of public speakers see Bytwerk. Recently, Claudia Schmölders has also referred to Bytwerk and his translations of Reinhardt’s study materials into American English. Schmölders puts her article into the context of analyzing “charismatic orality” and in this context formulates the thought that Hitler’s “demagogic charisma” did not need the technology of the loudspeaker or the radio but that it was “achieved and stabilized through direct speech” (175f). In all probability a very first electro-acoustic amplification of a political speech through which a hitherto unimaginable number of people could be addressed at the same time already took place in a stadium in San Diego, when Woodrow Wilson spoke about his plan for a League of Nations. On the loudspeaker test facility in the Cologne Cathedral at the end of February and Easter 1927 see Trendelenburg, “Über”; see also Kölnische Volkszeitung 16 Apr. 1927, 2nd morning ed., and 21 Apr. 1927, evening ed.

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Voice Politics speaker already in 1926) how “the huge dimensions of the hall could be completely commandeered by one single voice” (Gerdien 28). At the beginning of the thirties, the Sportpalast (see Arenhövel), the Reichstag (see “Lautsprecher”), the Circuses Busch and Krone as well as a large part of those venues in which the National Socialists held their oratory assemblies were equipped with the appropriate transmission facilities.5 In this phase there seems to have been collaborative work between technological companies and the NSDAP, which—as an oratorical party—had become aware of the possibilities of the loudspeaker technology from very early on.6 It is known that the main speaker of the party, Adolf Hitler, tested the acoustical specifics of venues before his addresses in order to use them operationally in his speeches. As Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary in 1928: “Today the boss is trying out the loudspeakers at the Sportpalast” (Tagebücher 187). Apart from their use of fixed installations, the NSDAP, more intensely than any other party of the Weimar Republic, used transportable loudspeaker facilities that allowed for quick and flexible technical expansions of the public areas to be furnished with sound. While the SPD and the KP used more megaphones—therefore operating from within the masses—the NSDAP used the loud5

6

Regarding the electro-acoustic installations of, for example, AEG see “Lautübertragungsanlagen.” The AEG reports the following use of loudspeakers: At the “Katholikentag” (Assembly-day of Catholics) in Münster in 1930, 120,000 participants were exposed to a PA system; in Cologne in 1931 during a St. Mary’s manifestation, amplifiers and microphones were installed in the choir-circuit of the “St. Aposteln” church and the loudspeakers were mounted on the roof of a house close to the church; when the Ford factory was formally opened in June 1931, loudspeakers supplied sound to the open and the inside area of the factory; for the meeting of communal civil servants at the Circus Busch on March 30, 1931, loudspeakers were hung in the lighting system and speakers were installed in the eating hall as well so that also those could follow the meeting who had not found room in the other hall; in the Westfalenhalle, six movable wooden towers were built on which loudspeakers were mounted; in Hamm, for the County sports festival, loudspeakers were arrayed around the large parade ground so that it could be “acoustically dominated”, and finally, in May 1931, the Düsseldorf Airport was furnished with a loudspeaker installation. By the early thirties at the latest, the NSDAP used their own loudspeaker installations along with experts who had been trained in the installation of loudspeakers. See in this context Schröder 120. Schröder reported on the election campaign in Lippe in January 1933, specifically about a group of loudspeaker technicians who operated their own loudspeaker vehicles led by Gauleiter Leopold Gutterer, in charge of propaganda; Schröder here also mentions the “exemplary loudspeaker installation of party-member Schäfer.”

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Cornelia Epping-Jäger speaker and the voice of the speaker altered by it as a unidirectional acoustic instrument of power, which, in case of its still lacking ‘effectiveness,’ could be augmented by various physically convincing activities of the specifically founded SA organizations.7 With view to the spreading usage and technological developments of loudspeaker technology and its increasing political use, especially by the NSDAP, 1932 heralded a completely new scenario of mediality concerning the use of the loudspeaker, specifically during the election campaign “Hitler over Germany.”8 Between the second round of voting of the election for “Reichspräsident” [President of the German Reich], the election campaigns for the state parliaments, and the election for the “Reichstag” in October, Hitler completed altogether four flights throughout Germany and spoke at 200 rallies (see Schmeer 21; Paul 205f). As a party that did not belong to the Government, the NSDAP was excluded from using the radio; it therefore compensated this exclusion by using an alternative program of mass communication and started an attack of mediality. Joseph Goebbels noted: “A critical innovation: the Leader will conduct this next campaign by plane. By this means he will be able to speak three or four times a day at various places as opportunity serves, and address about one and a half millions of people in spite of the time being so short.” (My Part 63)

A Ro VIII Roland II chartered from the airplane manufacturing company Rohrbach flew the Fuehrer into all parts of the republic. For example, on April 6, 1932 he stopped in Königsberg, Berlin, Würzburg, Nürnberg, and Regensburg; on April 7, 1932 he was in Nürnberg, Frankfurt, Darmstadt, and Ludwigshafen; on April 18 he flew from München via Beuthen and Görlitz to Breslau. According to the numbers of the ‘Fuehrer’s attendant’, Adolf Hitler spoke to 250,000 people in Silesia, to 80,000 in Dresden, 150,000 listened to him in Königsberg and 200,000 in Berlin. Altogether, a public attendance of 10 million people was calculated (see Schmeer 21).

7

8

From 1920 onwards, the SA took over the task to protect the speaker from disturbances. See Hitler 549: “[…] it was quickly recognized that we were the masters of the assembly … and that anyone who should dare even an interjection would mercilessly be thrown out, back to where he had come from.” This is also the title of a richly illustrated volume edited by Heinrich Hoffmann (1932). He declares the election campaign to be “an enlightenment of the people of such enormous dimensions as it has hitherto not been seen by history” (3).

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Voice Politics Illustration 2a and 2b: “A Quarter of a Million Silesians Are Fascinated by the Fuehrer”

Source: Hoffmann 60

This is not the place to trace the media campaign in detail; therefore, I would like to mention only the most important constituents of the mediated stagings. Of central importance is the fact that the election campaigns introduced a new acoustical and temporal structuring of public space. Already days before the actual election speeches, the SA and other propaganda troops prepared for the advent of the Fuehrer with chanted slogans and trucks equipped with loudspeakers belonging to the party. Customarily, election events were limited to speakers arriving and quickly leaving again, who either spoke briefly from within the masses or from locations marked out specifically for the speech. In contrast to this, the NSDAP first spread a carpet of voices and sounds over the venues chosen for the campaign, lasting several days and thereby staging a hitherto un165

Cornelia Epping-Jäger known aural field that was expanded temporally and topologically to an extreme; this prepared a ‘resonating space’ for the speaker to come. The listeners were tightly organized and aimed facing the auditory center: rented trucks, special trains, bus and bicycle columns as well as rallies with marchers converged from different directions, bringing together regions that in some cases lay far apart from each other. Commentator Berchtold, for example, reports from Görlitz: “…immeasurable masses stand in the streets, on roofs, hang in the branches of trees” (Hoffmann 27). The speeches of Adolf Hitler that were purposely calculated to be delayed—especially when dealing with big auditoriums—were scheduled in the evening hours or at night and were transmitted by loudspeakers not only into the halls or tents but also into public spaces: “For days the Frankenhalle had been sold out so that 14 loudspeakers had to carry the Fuehrer’s speech to the tens of thousands who were crowded together outside. […] Sentence after sentence boomed out into the cold night descending into the hearts of the people.” (Hoffmann 23)

And: “An unparalleled mass in the darkness of night: one united people, Germans, nothing but Germans. In the brilliant light above them stands the Fuehrer and through the silence that ceremonially cloaks everyone his clear voice is soaring, mustering his Silesians. He talks until the German anthem is welling out from the overflowing hearts and like a hurricane it is roaring above Görlitz…” (Hoffmann 28)

Breslau. Hitler is speaking at the open velodrome: “Tens of thousands are listening to him and still as many more in the streets; where only yesterday Premier Braun had read from a manuscript, today Adolf Hitler is preaching to the national socialist community” (Hoffmann 29). Due to the gigantic organizational demands, the staging then operated with the principle of a shortage of the resource ‘voice of the Fuehrer’, a shortage, however, that was technologically compensated for by the expansion of the area of transmission. The experiences made during the militarily precise planning phase—including also the possibilities of disturbances—were systematically evaluated and archived in an “organizational memory” that held sample choreographies ready for later mass events.9

9

In the Diaries and in Goebbels’ My Part (51) one can read how tightly the propaganda department was organized in order to win the “election campaign [that] is chiefly to be fought by means of placards and addresses.” Repeatedly, Goebbels is reporting of conferences that systematically listed

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Voice Politics We can therefore summarize: the flights were aimed at the ubiquitous spreading of the voice of the ‘Fuehrer’ of the movement. And even though the concept was certainly first devised as a substitution for the unavailable medium radio and its distributive power, the contours of a new dispositive of mediality were already being revealed that was to be differentiated in the following years but that remained lastingly characterized by a distance to the radio that was never completely abolished. Namely, for the aims of the NSDAP— which viewed itself as a mass movement of social revolution—and its needs for de-differentiation, the ‘mass medium’ radio was in any case problematic because of its differentiated orders of addressing; it therefore hardly seemed an appropriate means for the purpose of setting up mediated communal experiences. “While, if necessary, one can elude the visible propaganda, with the audible propaganda this becomes more difficult. The radio is an exception because it allows you to turn off the speeches of ministers. But already the truck with loudspeakers announces its message without ourselves being able to shut our ears to it.” (Salzmann 35)

As a mass movement, the NSDAP was not at first interested in the anonymous radio-listeners, who were collectively difficult to address and whose reception could hardly be controlled. They were more interested in the individuals congregating as masses in public spaces, who were to be ‘made available’ for direct interaction. The arrangement of mass communication that was organized by the loudspeaker and directed at the control and resonance of auditoriums reflected the central placement of the ‘voice of the Fuehrer’ and its collective space of resonance: contrary to the standard use of the radio, it allowed both for the mediated construction of a communal experience and for its focusing on the ‘moving’ voice of the ‘Fuehrer of the movement’. Moreover, through the simulation of ‘communication in the realm of reciprocal perception’ (see Luhmann), the voice, distanced from the body by the technology of the loudspeaker, could be staged as an ‘embodied voice.’ If in its early phase the NSDAP still had party members disguised as workers assigned to instigate fights so that the papers—if they were not talking about the speaker Hitler—would at least report on the fights taking place around him, this was now no longer necessary in the time of the spectacular election rallies using the the mistakes of previous days, drawing their consequences from them. The archivalia kept at the Federal Archives in Berlin (portfolio NS 22) point to the differentiatedness of this organizational memory of the propaganda departments that give evidence of the minute planning of the propagandist mass events in the variations through different years.

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Cornelia Epping-Jäger loudspeaker because the new voice-performances were clearly being experienced as a fascinating acoustical event, hardly comprehensible by today’s standards. Striking about the activities of the NSDAP is that the knowledge about the innovativeness of the newly emerging dispositive in the early thirties entered the media strategies of the party as a resource that could be operationalized. The party, in a differentiated media network—with special publications, with selections from the mass speeches recorded on records and the respective film recordings10— transcribed the loudspeaker-campaigns in order to make them once again accessible to the individual listener or participant in the assembly as a total work of staging. Formulating with Walter Benjamin, thereby “in big parades and monster rallies, in sports events, […] all of which nowadays are captured by sound recording […] the masses are brought face to face with themselves” (243).

Labor Day, or the Actualism of ‘Being There’ On May 1, 1932 Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary: “The ‘Red’ parties are holding demonstrations for May 1st. But that is no longer of any importance, and it will probably be for the very last time. Next year, possibly, we shall be showing them how May 1st should be celebrated” (My Part 85).11 One year later, on April 26, 1933 the entry reads: “The first of May is ready—on paper” (284). And two days later he specifies: “Work day by day on the preparations for the First of May. It is to be a masterpiece of organization and of demonstration by the masses. […] At Tempelhof enormous stands have been erected. […] The First of May is going to be an event such as the world has never witnessed. […] The experience we have hith-

10 See Goebbels, My Part: “The propaganda department is working at high pressure. […] Now the technical side of the fight begins. […] Fifty thousand gramophone records have been made, which are so small they can be slipped into an ordinary envelope” (50f). “In Berlin everything is going well. A film (of me) is being made and I speak a few words in it for about ten minutes. It is to be shown in the evening in all public gardens and squares of the larger cities” (51). “The film is a great success. One sees oneself for the first time on the screen; it is like meeting a stranger” (53). “We are winning over the cinemas for our propaganda. Although the proprietors try to put obstacles in our way, the public will have what it wants” (53). 11 The entry on May 4th reads: “I discuss with the staff changes in our Propaganda Department. For the next few months the main burden of the work will rest on the propaganda. Our technique has to be worked out to the minutest particular” (87).

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Voice Politics erto gained in the management of masses of people is useful to us now. No other Movement than ours, which knows how to lead the masses, would be able to arrange such a giant demonstration.” (284)

Indeed, with the National Socialist choreography of the May event, one can exemplarily observe how traditional political forms of staging and their semantics are simultaneously pawned and disappropriated. The reason was that May 1st as the “Day of the Workers Movement” became “Labor Day” in 1933 and was transformed into a national holiday.12 The proceedings of disappropriation were executed as a mass communicative staging of “national community,”13 by way of which this semantic transcription draws its evidence and plausibility from the mediated construction of gigantic experiential communities: “Above the remains of the collapsed liberal-capitalist state”—as Goebbels formulated it—“the vision of the national community is elevated”;14 a vision that was also constituted by the discursive scenarios of the ‘loud/speaker’-dispositive. This media concept was aimed at the construction of a new, collective realm of experience, an experiential space that staged an “actualism of being there” in the oscillating choreography, wedding stillness and movement as a contemporary observes (qtd. from Behrens et al. 73, my emphasis, C. E.-J.). With the May celebrations in 1933, a media prototype came into existence that from then on could be organized and ritualized locally and could be distributed and replicated via the mass media. The organizational, discursive and aesthetic constituents of this scenario deserve to be looked at more closely.15 “Labor Day” begins at midnight; in the entire nation organized convoys move towards Berlin; in the city itself propaganda troops chanting slogans make the wake-up call. On ten assembling centers in the Berlin districts, 12 On April 10, 1933 the ‘Reichsgesetzblatt’ (National Law Gazette) published the text of this law that guaranteed the complete protection of a holiday (including wage continuation), thereby making May 1st into a national holiday of the Reich. The elevated position of this holiday thereby is clearly marked because normally the institutionalization of a holiday is exercised by the states. 13 See for this also the rationale of the Department of the Interior of the Reich (BA, R 43 II/1268, Bl. 19): “The introduction of the holiday ‘Labor Day’ on May 1st shall create a visible symbol for the beginning of a new German national community. On this day the German people shall express in celebratory form and animated by a strong hope for the future its inseparable common bond of fate with the German workers and the German worker his solidarity with the whole of the people.” 14 Quotation from the speech held by Goebbels on the morning of May 1, 1933 at the “Berliner Lustgarten”, qtd. from Wendt 18. 15 The following description refers to the statements in Wendt.

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Cornelia Epping-Jäger schoolchildren and teenagers congregate in order to march in kilometer-long processions towards “Lustgarten.” It is there that a monumental choir of 1200 singers singing the hymn “Deutschland, du mein Vaterland” [Germany, you my fatherland] awaits the 200,000 youngsters; subsequently, Goebbels speaks to the children and teenagers, praising them as the “avant-garde of the German revolution.” Marching music resounds from the loudspeakers; airplane squadrons circulate droning above the city. Hitler and Hindenburg arrive at the “Lustgarten;” they address the people. Around 11 a.m., the working population of Berlin,16 having been ordered to exhibit proof of their gratitude and desire to participate, begin to march. Ten marching columns advance from different directions towards the Tempelhof Field. A median number of 60,000 people per column were intended; in reality there are more than 100,000. The times of departure are scaled in such a way that all participants should reach the field around 7.30 p.m.17 On the way, they are marching past wide-open windows and doors of apartments and shops, in which radios are transmitting at full blast the news reports of the progress of the marchers to the field. A simultaneous staging: the masses listen to themselves marching. The columns arrive on the field and, directed via loudspeakers, congregate at their pre-designated areas; professional guilds in their appropriate working attire simulate a society stratified by occupation which, however, in its interior structure is merged into the collective feeling of a national community. Photographs are taken from the airplanes circling above the field verifying how strong the ranks of the individual workers’ groups are: if the columns appear too small, explanations are demanded after the May celebrations. And more airplanes: they bring delegations of workers from the larger Reich and from Vienna to Tempelhof.18

16 The Völkischer Beobachter edition of 1-3 May 1933 names the following groups: National Socialist factory units, council of civil servants, local branches, associations, guilds, and sports organizations. Wendt (22) names “SA and factory units, the organization ‘Stahlhelm’, unorganized groups.” However, also the free and Christian unions had summoned people. On the day before May 1, the Völkischer Beobachter (30 Apr. 1933) had reported on the onslaught of the associations announcing their participation. These ranged from the German Association for Gymnastics to the Associations of Tennis and of Boxing, the Association of Germandom in Foreign Countries, to the ADAC and the German Touring Club, from the Jewellers’ Guild Schöneberg to butchers, bakers, and the Salvation Army. 17 The plan for the march of May 1st is already published one week before in the Völkischer Beobachter but also in all Berlin newspapers. 18 As a sign that the class society is mutated into a national community, the workers will stay in the luxury hotels of the city. The newspaper 12 Uhr

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Voice Politics Around 6 p.m., 1.5 million people fill the field and another million are in the streets. They are entertained with military marches resounding from huge loudspeakers as well as by news coverages beamed directly down onto the streets and squares through loudspeakers attached on the outside of the dirigible “Graf Zeppelin”, which in the meantime has arrived over Berlin: “From the suburbs a thousand rivers are flowing towards one destination, the Tempelhof Field; a thousand rivers towards the German heart and towards the German nation, and all join down there in their large community.”19 The voice of the reporter in the blimp, Alfred Ingemar Brand, is simultaneously recorded and mastered while speaking these sentences and during the course of the day it is then broadcast throughout Germany and—the Anschluss on the level of the radio already anticipated—throughout Austria as well. What could not be seen by some individual participants and could only be comprehended fragmentarily—namely, the monumentality of the mass marches and the image of the mass formations—is now described and pictured for them from above. But not all visitors of the field are formed into columns, not all of them have tickets for the stands. There are free areas—“lawn tickets” for two Reichsmark each. The Berliner Beobachter advertises the ticket sale: “Each visitor of the lawn areas has the possibility to see the Fuehrer in person at all times because the Reichskanzler will drive along the front of the lawn areas when he arrives and when he leaves, and because the podium from which the Fuehrer will hold his important speech can be seen well from all sides.” (1)

Apart from the lawn tickets there are also free seats: zones of transition in which the traditional amusements of the workers’ movement are explicitly allowed. Here picnics are held, children play under surveillance, gymnastic associations perform, sausage vendors and beer wagons offer their wares20—consciously staged moments of popular culture. However, whoever entered this area entered a zone that was controlled by the SA and that, as a rally square, was clear-

Blatt on 24 Apr. 1933 (n. pag.) publishes a list of the hotels that will take in the workers. These workers, as the article specifically remarks, “will receive fruits, flowers, refreshments and reading material after their arrival at the hotel in the evening.” 19 See radio coverage from the Tempelhof Field on May 1, 1933; transcript of the recording by the German radio archive, Frankfurt a.M., archive no. C 12160. 20 Until April 30, 1933 roughly 3000 hawkers had asked for a license; see the newspaper Das 12 Uhr Blatt. Neue Berliner Zeitung [Berlin] 1 May 1933: n. pag.

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Cornelia Epping-Jäger ly distinguishable from an outside that remained untouched by the regularity of these military representations of order (see also Heuel 121). And then at 8 p.m.: Rally of the thousand flags on the speaker’s platform; Reichswehr and police enter the square in front of the grandstand. At the same time, the floodlights begin blazing; seven bands intone “Der Gott, der Eisen wachsen ließ, der wollte keine Knechte” [The god who made iron grow did not want serfs] and the ‘national community’ joins in with the song. The signs for the arrival of the Fuehrer are increasing. Rapturous shouts of “Heil;” SA and SS enter, positioning themselves opposite to the speakers’ platform. Adolf Hitler approaches the field and mounts the 10-meter high platform—detached from it, the speakers’ podium. Illustration 3: “Adolf Hitler Speaks”

Source: Wendt 26f

A glance backstage: The technological logistic that constituted the foundation of this mass celebration was extensive and demanding, and it is most of all the loudspeaker installations that facilitated the

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Voice Politics staging of the voice, which was vital for this celebration. Only the network of functioning electronic installations allowed the “millions of visitors to become immediate massed participants in these celebrations” (“Tempelhof” n. pag.). “It was now necessary to command an area of almost 500,000 square meters with one single voice, to get every single word across to the million and a quarter listeners, to transmit every nuance of tremor of this voice. The technicians have solved this problem! Adolf Hitler’s voice was amplified fifty thousand-fold! […] In only a few days and nights, the largest sound-transmission installation in the world (including America) was constructed.” (Rhein n. pag.)

In the days before, many kilometers of cables were positioned. “Then a network of more than one hundred big loudspeakers was constructed so that no listener was more than 75 meters away from a loudspeaker. If a gap, a ‘silent zone’, had appeared anywhere, a loudspeaker truck would have been quickly positioned and made operational.” (Rhein)

The huge amplifier system was located in a tent and four transformers of altogether 8 kilowatt supplied the DC for the field excitation of the dynamic loudspeakers. “Ten microphones of the most advanced design, distributed on the speakers’ podium, the command tower and the music- and viewers’ stands, were used to capture the sound. And a direct conduit with the radio station also transmitted part of the radio program to the Tempelhof Field.” (Rhein)

From a central production location—the “nerve-center,” the “technical brain” (Rhein)—the microphones were employed to pick-up and record the speeches. This center also contained a cutting table so that the recorded speeches could be cut and spliced on the spot for the immediate production of records, which were directly transported to the radio station. Also, the directional loudspeakers that were placed at the outer longitudinal sides of the field were controlled from this central mixing location; “they transmitted the sound to the ears of the hundreds of thousands of people who were camping outside of the field” (Rhein). As Hans Wendt describes it: “It feels as if the souls of these 1.5 million should unite into one overwhelming apparition, an outcry, a movement, an appearance towering above everything. But it is only the ordering spirit that becomes visible, dominating this mass of people surpassing anything that the world has ever seen in mass movements.” (27)

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Cornelia Epping-Jäger Even the Nordschleswiger Tageszeitung proudly reports that in Italy the speeches of the Duce are still read aloud but that, contrary to this, in Germany they are directly transmitted to the people through loudspeakers and the radio so that everybody has the possibility “to hear the voice of the Fuehrer directly” (Nordschleswiger Tageszeitung 1935 n. pag.). And indeed, on May 1, 1933 the radio as well was part of the media network ‘loud/speaker’-dispositive. For the first time, a program lasting 18 hours was compiled consisting of speeches, radio plays, radio coverages and reports on the May festivities from other cities, imparting the impression that the whole nation was happily including itself into the ‘national community.’ This radio program represented a subtest in the large-scale media experiment: It was tested which radio-specific forms of transmission—whether concert, report, radio play, or bulletin—were best suited as forms of entertainment for the whole event. Most notably, the effect of the “disembodied voices” of the radio was examined and it is revealing that it was precisely the ‘naked voice’ at the center of the radio play, i.e., the voice as a “disembodied essence” (Kolb), that was found to be ineffectual for the dispositive.21 Successful, however, were the coverages that—when reporting from the mass events whose re-entry into the scenarios they commented on—developed their special agitational effects. 21 The media-technological development of the configuration microphone/ amplifier/loudspeaker leading to an enormous expansion of the realm of hearing in the late twenties evoked an intense discourse on voices. The newly developed microphone (earlier ones had still worked with the recording horn) separates speech and hearing: here the speaker who addresses his voice to an ether without resonance; there the listener who has to return the message of the disembodied voice (characterized by the exclusion of all physical elements of rhetorics and by the disconnection from the visual presence of the speaker) into a condition of believable information. The attitude of the radio-people is unambiguous: “Before the listener something existent appears, something that cannot be performed: the voice, breath, the essence” (Heilbut 546). Mostly theoreticians and creators of the radio play voiced this apotheosis of voice. Richard Kolb for example demands for this genre that the intensity of the inner experience in the ‘radio player’ should stimulate the listener’s experiential capabilities to such an extent that the characters of the radio play would become voices of his (the listener’s) heart and conscience: “The disembodied voice of the radio player becomes the voice of the I” (239ff). We know of Goebbels that he was no friend of such a concept of the radio play, which he characterized as an “immature product” that “acted as a deterrent to the listeners with its shouted ecstasies” (Wessels 12). Also the “Symphony of Work” which was broadcast on May 1, 1933 was criticized negatively by the Berliner Morgenpost on May 3, 1933 (n. pag.) as “disharmonious and monotonous.”

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Voice Politics For Adolf Hitler himself, the usefulness of the radio as a medium had been reduced as well to functioning as a medium of propagation: two attempts in February 1933 to speak ‘solitarily’ through a radio microphone failed.22 From that point on, every broadcasted speech was an “embodied speech,” clipped from mass events and impregnated with the acclaim of the mass responses. The voice of the Fuehrer would never again be directly addressing the anonymous collective of the radio listeners live out of a studio; rather, always only indirectly—as an example, an already successful address within a mass event. That the voice, electro-acoustically separated from the body in the performative scenarios of mass speeches, could perform the task of staging mass communication as face-to-face communication was the grounds for the fascination with the loudspeaker use. In his May speech, Adolf Hitler formulated this relationship in the following way: “We have recognized that the recovery of our nation is our main task; the German people have to begin learning to know each other again. Those afflicted by snobbery and class-craziness who could not understand each other any more now have to find a way back to each other.” (Qtd. from Wendt 40)

The dispositive ‘loud/speaker’, with the help of its own discursive organization, excludes all loss of control that is always inherent in the medium radio when the reception cannot be organized as a communal one. Here, the auditorium can be completely controlled. “Even the applause, reverberating again and again” in the ears of Hans Wendt sounds “as if the shouts did not want to interrupt the speaker, as if they did not dare to. Trust was flowing upward to the chancellor of the people” (41). Looking at the perspective of the speaker, at Adolf Hitler, it becomes evident that such a control could only unfold on the backdrop of a voice transmission that was technically secured and aired into the totality of the space;23 moreover, this control was supported

22 On February 1, 1933 Adolf Hitler had his ‘radio-debut’ in front of a microphone placed in the Reichskanzlei. Listeners and radio-manufacturers criticized intonation and vocal professionalism; the next day Hitler repeated his speech for a recording. This time he spoke more clearly but still was not satisfied as he admitted in an interview: “But to use the possibilities of the radio has to be learned first. I was almost desolate before the microphone” (qtd. in Diller 62f). 23 Around noon one of the eight transformers on Tempelhof field had failed so that the overall volume all of a sudden was diminished by one third. Nevertheless none of the listeners noticed this since within seconds one

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Cornelia Epping-Jäger by the tension between feed-back processing, the inductive selfmesmerizing of the speaker, and the simulated direct interaction with the audience. The loudspeaker allowed the speaker to hear his own voice echoed with the help of a technically delayed feedback impregnated by the mass resonance. Since the loudspeaker always transmits the voice signals with a certain temporal delay, the selfperception of the speaker is transcribed through the technically transmitted and temporally deferred resonance from the outside— through the voice that all have heard. The voice, separated from the body by the configuration of microphone and loudspeaker is re-inscribed into the body of the speaker, now with the public’s collective endorsement. It is auratically staged with the help of the configuration of microphone and loudspeaker as a paradox of closeness and distance. The voice is close to itself and still technically distanced; it is mass communication and intimate communication in a ‘realm of reciprocal perception.’ It is this synthesis of a techno-acoustic format and the new forms of a performative staging of the voice that here consolidates the powerful effects of the dispositive ‘loud/ speaker.’ Illustration 4: Tempelhof Field 1933

Source: Wendt 18f

fell back on spare resources and an hour later the transformer was replaced with a transformer-rectifier (see Rhein n. pag.).

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Voice Politics The seemingly authentic voice of the speaker then can be analyzed as the result of a media-manufactured development of the speaker’s voice in mass meetings. To a certain extent then one could speak of a media fiction since the loudspeaker-voice presupposes the fiction of a ‘national community’ that, however, is only created by its production, transmission, and its collective approval. In 1933, this also meant that the not-yet established ‘loud/ speaker’-dispositive had to be secured with measures of force and violence against the still massive resistance of the recipients: from one side of the auditorium the voice of the Fuehrer drones; from the other side SA, SS and the Wehrmacht take up their position. That this configuration was not just a symbolic statement could be seen on May 2: At 9 a.m. on that day, National Socialist task forces in all parts of the Reich set off in order to take over houses and other establishments of the free unions with violence. Within one hour the once strongest workers movement in a non-socialist country disintegrated without any noteworthy resistance. Joseph Goebbels noted on April 17, 1933 in his diary: “We shall make the first of May serve as a fine demonstration of our German purpose. On May 2nd the houses belonging to the Trade Unions are to be seized. This may entail a few days’ disturbance, but then they will be ours” (My Part 280).

The Peace Speech from the Armory On March 7, 1936 the Parliament was convened and Adolf Hitler announced the re-militarization of the Rhineland, the abrogation of the treaty of Locarno, the dissolution of the Reichstag-parliament, and elections for March 29, 1936.24 In the following election campaign, which I will consider using the example of Königsberg (East Prussia), the constitutive elements of the ‘loud/speaker’-dispositive were displayed in the established form that would stay relatively stable for the next nine years. The loudspeaker here became a media-technologically differentiated voicedispositive comprising the ‘voice of the Fuehrer’, its substitutes and extensions in a conjunction of discourses and institutions. Analyzing the discourses, one can see that the non-distributed mass event and the embedded speech for the masses continued to represent the foundational form of discourse for National Socialism. 24 On March 7, 1936 around 1 p.m. as well—at the same time as the climactic point of Hitler’s speech—German troops approached the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne and crossed the river Rhine. Already in the early evening hours of this day it became clear that the coup had succeeded, since neither the French nor the British intervened with military forces.

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Cornelia Epping-Jäger On March 11, 1936 the daily Preußische Zeitung headlines: “Election Campaign opened by Goebbels. Large rally in the Deutschlandhalle:” “The huge Deutschlandhalle in Berlin is now completed but the two enormous halls were not sufficient and no in less than 230 more venues the Berliners heard the speech of their Gauleiter Dr. Goebbels. One hour before beginning, the Deutschlandhalle already had to be barred. Many thousands who had not been able to obtain tickets remained standing outside in the squares and listened to the event through loudspeakers that were hastily assembled on the tops of vehicles.” (Wed. ed., n. pag.)

On the next page we find the description of the respective scenario in Königsberg, showing a local application of the movement-scheme previously tested during the May celebrations: “Party member Dr. Ley opened the election campaign in East Prussia and spoke at the Schlageterhaus to thousands of people: Long before the beginning, men and women had already assembled in front of the big industrial premises and on pre-ordained meeting places in order to repair to the venue in a procession. Music and songs on work and combat and freedom filled the streets and flags were flying over immeasurable crowds. One after the other entered the hall in the Schlageterhaus bathed in light. […]. Within barely one hour, the huge hall was packed and had to be barred by the police. Thousands of people were unable to enter and could only assemble in front of the hall and on the streets close to the loudspeakers in order to participate in the rally. We have won back the workers of our national community, a national community that is not a matter of the head but an affair of the heart.”

Movement is a movement is a movement—the pattern is known: meeting places, marching columns advancing from star-shaped directions, songs, operating with the shortage of the resource ‘Fuehrer’s voice’ in overcrowded halls, the speeches transmitted outside through loudspeakers, the communal listening to the speeches of the ‘community’, silenced and controlled through the preassigned meeting points.25 The difference to 1933 was that by 1936 the distribution of the mass speeches was widened by the radio, which by then was fully 25 In the Preußische Zeitung alone the articles establishing this formula are manifold. Similarly, a report on the speech given by Hitler in Karlsruhe on March 13, 1936: “Tens of thousands had to stay outside; they heard the speech of the Fuehrer through the loudspeakers.” On the occasion of Göring’s speech in Königsberg on March 13, 1936: one hour before the beginning the overcrowded hall already had to be closed off, “and it was similar in the halls allocated for parallel gatherings into which the speech was transmitted by loudspeakers.”

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Voice Politics integrated into the NS-media network. Regarding the transmission of the ‘Fuehrer’s’ speeches, the point of these transmissions was that the radio listeners were supposed to conceive of themselves as natural extensions of the participants in the mass meetings, even if they did not participate in the staging of which they seemed to be a part. The radio listeners did not only hear the voice of the ‘Fuehrer’; they heard the voice of a speaker that was impregnated by the affirmative resonance of a present mass public. Hitler’s voice was not ‘naked’; it was armed by the mass acclamation and the radio public was compelled to become a part of it. With this in mind, National Socialism therefore did not focus on an equally powerful effect of radio- and mass speeches, but rather focused on the radio as a global form of the distribution of successful local communication. The Preußische Zeitung expressed the connection in the following way: “His words will be our faith and our duty. In all local branches of the NSDAP, elaborate communal radio reception is taking place. In the villages and on farms, in the halls and meeting rooms the words of Adolf Hitler will be transmitted by loudspeakers. A whole province will hear him and will renew its pledges. In the streets and in the city of Königsberg, large loudspeakers will transmit the progression of the rally and the speech of the Fuehrer even to the most remotely located ‘national comrade’ [“Volksgenosse”].” (16 Mar. 1936)26

That the radio is not used here in its genuine mediality is revealed by the fact that only in the form of communal reception is it part of the mechanism. This means that the radio functions as the last link in a net of circulatory media. Within the framework ‘loud/speaker’dispositive, reception is basically conceptualized only in the form of a collective reception reaffirming a ‘community’. The classic form of this mechanism generates genuine forms of media discourse—communal reception or mass reception—transforming the voice of the ‘Fuehrer’ into the voice of the people. As the Preußische Zeitung wrote: “Here it is not the single man who speaks; within him the voices of 68 million people are joined who are of one heart and of one mind” (28 Mar. 1936). Besides, it is of central importance that

26 A similar scenario was built in Munich: “On the Theresienwiese alone, where the two largest German loudspeaker manufacturers, together with the technical services of the city, had built up a previously unheard of network of loudspeakers, altogether 250 technicians and helpers worked in order to put up 200 loudspeakers, and as many cable masts, capable of emitting a total speaking output of twice 3000 Watts. Also on the arterial roads of the Bavariaring loudspeakers were erected which will transmit the voice of the Fuehrer far into the streets adjoining the Theresienwiese” (Preußische Zeitung 14 Mar. 1936).

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Cornelia Epping-Jäger the affirmation of the national community has to be repeatedly reiterated as a mass media experience, since it is only in this way that it can stabilize the mediated Volkskörper [“national body”]. Analyzing the institutional side of the matter, we can illustrate the way in which the mechanism was perfected regarding its staging and organization with a scenario that the NSDAP put on stage for the termination of the “election campaign:” “ALL OF GERMANY HEARS THE FUEHRER. BEFORE ADOLF HITLER’S PEACE SPEECH FROM THE ARMORY OF THE THIRD REICH. COMMUNAL RECEPTION OF ALL WORKING PEOPLE. Only a few hours separate us from the appeal that the Fuehrer of the German people will address to all of Germany from the Armory of the German Reich in Essen.27 When the sirens from the Krupp factory will be sounded this afternoon, and this cue echoed by the sirens and alarm devices in all factories, ships, etc., throughout the entire Reich resonating over the land for a whole minute, and when simultaneously from 4 p.m. to 4.01 p.m. all traffic on German roads will stop and be still, then the entire Volk will know it is united as one in its answer to this fanatically appealing will with its passionate commitment to National Socialist politics, which is a politics of peace, of honor, and of equality. All working people in Germany, those of the fist and those of the mind, will be gathered together, united at the communal reception before the public address systems in this historic hour since already at 3.45 p.m. all radio stations will have aired the command: Hoist the flags! With this sign all of Germany openly and outwardly expresses its inner bond with its Fuehrer and Chancellor of the Reich and with the National Socialist Movement under the far-shining sign of the swastika.” (Preußische Zeitung 27 Mar. 1936)

This staging of the national community through a communal reception via the use of PA-systems for the masses needed a technically and institutionally fully differentiated apparatus.

27 Looking at Essen we can see that there as well a similar scenario was arranged: “Already early in the morning one hears the marching of columns in the streets of Essen. SA-ranks march towards their rally squares. The ‘Volksgenossen’ stand closely packed along the long road. The biggest hall in Europe, the Hall for Building Trains at the Krupp Factory, does not suffice to house the masses who want to see and hear the Fuehrer. Four hundred loudspeakers were erected to transmit the words of the Fuehrer to them as well. The whole Ruhr district is on pilgrimage to Essen, the heart of heavy industry on the river Ruhr” (Preußische Zeitung 28 Mar. 1936).

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Voice Politics Illustration 5: Telefunken Mushroom Loudspeaker

Source: Rudolf Herz. Hoffmann & Hitler: Fotografie als Medium des Führer-Mythos. Munich, 1994. 234. Print. In 1934 the Telefunken Company had developed the “Mushroom Loudspeaker” and had made it available for the May festivities of the NSDAP on Tempelhof Field. Contrary to the directional loudspeakers that lost their quality with increased distance and bad weather, and contrary also to their susceptibility to feedback, the mushroom loudspeaker allowed for a qualitatively equal sound transmission in halls and over large areas; this meant that the transmission quality in mass meetings could be improved as did the acoustical conditions for recording the speeches for radio transmission. In Königsberg’s Schlageterhalle, the mushroom speakers were employed for the first time to amplify and transmit a speech by Hitler. “The Fuehrer brought along a lectern that was specially constructed for him and that accompanied him everywhere.” In the hall “close to him […] a control booth is erected including a mixing system which permitted, when necessary, the giving of a cue for recording. For the installation more than 1000 meters of cable were laid,” 181

Cornelia Epping-Jäger and help had been supplied by the city’s administration and the Arbeitsdienst (National Labor Service). 25 specialists worked in the hall: sound technicians, electricians, technicians, film crews. More than 50 mushroom loudspeakers were installed, “among them also three huge super loudspeakers.” In those streets of the city “which the Fuehrer will touch upon on his way,” loudspeakers have also been erected every 200 to 800 meters. Almost 200 engineers, telecommunications- and radio technicians were mobilized by the radio broadcasting department of the district propaganda administration to attend to and operate the powerful installation (all quotes from Preußische Zeitung 18 Mar. 1936). Already on the previous day, regular and special trains brought thousands of people to Königsberg from the province and “[…] in the morning sky muffled roars announced the approach of the two Zeppelin airships. Airplanes had taken off for their reception. From the airships a flood of green election reminder notes rained down, and from the loudspeakers of the huge ships resounded the solemn exhortations to vote.” (Preußische Zeitung 27 Mar. 1936)

Summarizing the conjunction of discourse and institution characterized so far, the “election campaign” of 1936 proves to be an example for the ‘loud/speaker’-dispositive in which at any one time the concentration on one voice—separated from the body of the speaker by the techno-acoustic transformation and extension—was established through the medium as the voice of the national body. At the end of Hitler’s “Appeal to East Prussia,” “a never-ending storm of applause resounded through the hall and across the streets and squares of Königsberg. The whole hall was one single jubilating voice of enthusiasm” (Preußische Zeitung 19 Mar. 1936). In the election on March 29, 1936, 98.9 percent voted “for the list and therefore for the Fuehrer” (Kershaw 590). Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

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Voice Politics Illustration 6 (untitled)

Source: Rudolf Herz. Hoffmann & Hitler: Fotografie als Medium des Führer-Mythos. Munich, 1994. 224. Print.

Works Cited Arenhövel, Alfons. Der Berliner Sportpalast und seine Veranstaltungen 1910-1973. Berlin, 1990. Print. Behrens, Manfred, et al., eds. Faschismus und Ideologie. Berlin, 1980. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Time of Technical Reproduction.” 1936. Illuminations: Walter Benjamin. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. London, 1999. 211-244. Print. Berliner Beobachter: Beiblatt zum Völkischen Beobachter/Berlin 29 April 1933. Print. Bytwerk, Randall L. “Die nationalsozialistische Versammlungspraxis: Die Anfänge vor 1933.” Propaganda in Deutschland: Zur Geschichte der politischen Massenbeeinflussung in Deutschland. Ed. Gerald Diesener and Rainer Gries. Darmstadt, 1996. 30-35. Print. Diller, Ansgar. Rundfunkpolitik im Dritten Reich. Munich, 1980. Print. Gerdien, Hans. “Über die klanggetreue Schallwiedergabe mittels Lautsprechern.” Telefunken-Zeitung 43 (1926): 28-38. Print. Goebbels, Joseph. My Part in Germany’s Fight. Trans. Kurt Fiedler. London, 1935. Print.

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Cornelia Epping-Jäger —. Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente. Ed. Elke Fröhlich. Vol. 2. Munich, 1987. Print. Heilbut, Iwan. “Stimme und Persönlichkeit.” Rufer und Hörer 3 (1933): 546-548. Print. Heuel, Eberhard. Der umworbene Stand: Die ideologische Integration der Arbeiter in den Nationalsozialismus 1933-1935. Frankfurt a.M., 1989. Print. Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. 2 vols. in One. Munich, 1939. Print. Hoffmann, Heinrich, ed. Hitler über Deutschland. By Josef Berchtold. Munich, 1932. Print. Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889-1936. London, 1998. Print. Kolb, Richard. “Die neue Funkkunst des Hörspiels.” Rundfunk und Film im Dienste nationaler Kultur. Ed. Kolb and Heinrich Siekemeier. Düsseldorf, 1933. 239ff. Print. Kollatz, C. W. “Sprachverstärkung für Massenansprachen.” FunkAnzeiger 3 (1925): 343f. Print. “Lautsprecher im Deutschen Reichstag.” Funk 5 (1929): 19. Print. “Lautübertragungsanlagen bei Massenveranstaltungen.” Spec. issue of AEG-Mitteilungen 8 (Sep. 1931). Print. (Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, Historisches Archiv, GS 5183). Luhmann, Niklas. “Einfache Sozialsysteme.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 1 (1972): 51-65. Print. Nordschleswiger Tageszeitung [Flensburg] 2 May 1935: n. pag. Print. Paul, Gerhard. Aufstand der Bilder: Die NS-Propaganda vor 1933. Bonn, 1990. Print. Preußische Zeitung: Amtliches Nachrichtenblatt für alle staatlichen und städtischen Behörden [Königsberg] Mar. 1936: n. pag. Print. Rhein, Eduard. “Mit der Kraft von 5000 Stimmen: Die Großlautsprecher-Anlage für Hitlers Rede auf dem Tempelhofer Feld— Eine Glanzleistung der Technik.” Berliner Morgenpost 3 May 1933: n. pag. Print. Salzmann, Heinrich. “Die Technik der Gestaltung der Propagandamittel.” Unser Wille und Weg 6 (1933): 34-36. Print. Schmeer, Karlheinz. Die Regie des öffentlichen Lebens im Dritten Reich. Munich, 1956. Print. Schmölders, Claudia. “Stimmen von Führern: Auditorische Szenen 1900-1945.” Zwischen Rauschen und Offenbarung: Zur Kulturund Mediengeschichte der Stimme. Ed. Friedrich Kittler, Thomas Macho, and Sigrid Weigel. Berlin, 2002. 175-195. Print. Schröder, Arno. Hitler geht auf die Dörfer. Der Auftakt zur nationalsozialistischen Revolution: Erlebnisse und Bilder von der entscheidenden Januarwahl 1933 in Lippe. Detmold, 1938. Print. “Tempelhof rüstet zum 1. Mai.” Königsberger Hartungsche Zeitung 27 Apr. 1933: n. pag. Print.

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Voice Politics Trendelenburg, Ferdinand. “Experimentalbeitrag zur Raumakustik.” Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen des Siemens-Konzerns. N.p., 1927. 276f. Print. —. “Über Bau und Anwendung von Großlautsprechern.” Elektrotechnische Zeitschrift (1927): 1685-1691. Print. Watson, F. R. “Der akustische Entwurf von Kirchen.” Die Schalltechnik (1928): 1ff. Print. Wendt, Hans. Der Tag der nationalen Einheit: Die Feier des 1. Mai. Berlin, 1933. Print. Wessels, Wolfram. Hörspiele im Dritten Reich: Zur Institutionen-, Theorie- und Literaturgeschichte. Bonn, 1985. Print. Willms, Walter. “Eine Schallübertragungsanlage großen Frequenzumfangs.” Elektrische Nachrichtentechnik (1932): 68f. Print. Zeller, W. “Zur Theorie der Hörsamkeit im Raum, insbesondere in großen Hallen und auf Festplätzen.” Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung (1935): n. pag. Print.

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Electricity, Spirit Mediums, and the Media of Spirits HEIKE BEHREND In the last decades, the growing emergence of occult forces has been observed spreading throughout various parts of Africa (and elsewhere) with an unprecedented energy. Responding to the forces of globalization, the liberalization of the market, new inequalities, and new media in recent years, the renaissance of the occult strongly contests the narrative of a secular modernity. Below, I will deal more in detail with the role of modern technical media in this development. As has been shown by scholars such as Jacques Derrida, Hent de Vries, and Birgit Meyer, the rise of the religious (and occult) forces and of the new media of communication go hand in hand. They cannot be separated; inquiry into the first forms an interpretive key into the latter and vice versa (de Vries 19, citing Derrida). However, I am not only interested in the interface between the religious and modern mass media, but also in the ways global mass media enter the lives and the imaginations of local people. I am interested in the ways global media connect with currently existing local media and how both are reformulated and transformed in the process of localization. Thus, I will attempt to work out the transcultural circulation of various concepts of power and force and their specific mediations as magic power, electricity, and Christian/satanic power, as viewed through the prism of spirit mediums and via the use of technical media. I will begin with the introduction of Western technical media by Western travelers and explorers in Africa in the 19th century. In order to provide a cultural background for the local reinterpretation of African as well as Western media, I will briefly present an African cosmology of force or power that was reformulated with the introduction of electricity. Then I will deal with spirit mediums using their bodies to store and transmit these energies. In the next part, I will briefly give a few examples of hybrid alliances between spirit mediums and western technical media. And lastly I will come back to the “electric cosmology” and spirit possession and attempt to show 187

Heike Behrend how in locally produced videos the visualization of the powers of the Christian God and his adversary, Satan, draw heavily on an iconography of electricity. Finally, pursuing the arguments of Birgit Meyer, I will assert that the visualization of spirits and other powers in videos contributes not only to their reality but also to their proliferation and empowerment.

The Enchantment of Media by Western Explorers While in the European process of secularization miracles as a sign of God’s power and presence became more and more marginalized or disappeared altogether, miracles and wonders were revived again in discourses on technical media; notably after the ‘invention’ of a new medium and before it became habitualized; new media such as the book, photography, radio or TV were celebrated as ‘wonders,’ ‘miracles,’ and ‘magic arts.’ During the colonization of Africa, the ‘wonders’ of Western media were sanctioned in various ways by Western travelers, explorers, and missionaries. Even though—or maybe because—many of the media brought to Africa had already been integrated into European everyday life, made routine and had become dis-enchanted, thus losing their ‘wondrous’ qualities, Europeans still used fireworks, mirrors, laterna magica, the telescope, gramophone, and camera in a twofold way: first, they displayed them as wondrous objects with an eye to introducing them as commodities within a circulation of desire and second, as magical instruments to overpower the ‘natives’ and to furnish themselves with an aura of superhuman power. For example, the very shortsighted Protestant missionary Ludwig Krapf, whom local people named the ‘book man’, accompanied a caravan from the East Coast inland in the mid-19th century, armed only with a Bible and an umbrella. When a wild rhinoceros attacked the porters, they immediately fled and climbed the nearest trees. Krapf, who had not even seen the rhinoceros, remained standing calmly in the tumult, the cause of which he did not understand. When the rhinoceros disappeared and the porters returned to their places and told him what had happened, he held aloft the Book of Books and declared that the Bible had protected him (Krapf). He thus presented the Bible not so much as a secular commodity, but primarily as a magically charged object traceable to a divine, inaccessible, alien origin in the beyond. Joseph Thomson, a Scotsman traveling through East Africa in 1883 on behalf of the Royal Geographical Society, stylized himself as a mganga, a medicine man. With the aid of a camera, he produced magic charms for Maasai warriors to make them brave and

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Electricity, Spirit Mediums, and the Media of Spirits successful in battle. “This I did by simply photographing them, the pretense of making dawa (charms) being a capital and only opportunity of transferring a likeness of the Maasai to my collection” (220). The missionary Francois Coillard, who spent time in the Bulozi kingdom in western Zambia toward the end of the 19th century, used the camera also as a weapon in the struggle against the devil, as he proudly declared. He took photographs on site to prove to the Lozi that he possessed a supernatural power—like Thomson among the Maasai. In addition, he showed prints of executed rebels and recorded that the king’s sister recoiled. “These people (missionaries) are dreadful,” she said. “They carry the living and the dead in their pockets!” (Prins 219, 221). Coillard may have been an extreme case, but in no way an exceptional one. When establishing their mission stations, most Christian missionaries calculatingly employed technical media—the book, the printing press, film, the gramophone, photography—to spread Christian doctrine and its accompanying way of life as effectively as possible, but at the same time also to demonstrate their own and their God’s extraordinary power. The effects of this power are detailed in their reports: The unfamiliar media evoked fear, terror, panic, and submission; the ‘savages’ or ‘heathens’ did not know how to operate the apparatus, ran away screaming, shook with fear, fell on their knees begging for mercy and so on. The travelers’ and missionaries’ reports exhibit a conspicuously large number of variations of these scenes of media-technological superiority; they suggest that Europeans possessed a (technical) knowledge enabling them to magically dazzle the others. Here I would like to underscore that in Africa, Europeans were the ones who initially placed technical media into a context of power, healing, killing, sorcery, and witchcraft. They converted technology into magic. And in Europe as well, photography was used to discipline, identify, and frighten members of the ‘lower’ classes such as the homeless. But while in Europe the spread of amateur photography around 1880 and 1890 increasingly repressed the “profound madness” (Barthes) of photography and turned it into an everyday routine, Europeans used the new medium in Africa as a magical practice to heal as well as to harm, as medicine, as a photographic gun to kill, or as an apparatus ‘to steal souls,’ so that now Africans experienced the fear and terror that the enlightened Victorian gentleman thought he had left behind. It is important to note that while the colonial discourse dramatized the difference and superiority of Western media, in postcolonial times a local counter-discourse developed that questioned this dramatization. This counter-discourse is found less in texts than in local practices and to this day has been infrequently dealt with in

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Heike Behrend scholarly studies on media. In this discourse, African ‘traditional’ media are reformulated retrospectively against the background of the introduction and integration of new Western media. What Europeans thought they were introducing as a radical innovation, as a miracle, a wonder, was already known and used by Africans. Western media then are reinterpreted as variations of already existing African media that in the process of localization were likewise reformulated.

“Electrical Cosmology and Spirit Mediums” In his article on child witches, in “Witchcraft, Confessions and Accusations,” edited by Mary Douglas and published in 1970, Robert Brain tells us that in colonial Cameroon, after the electrification of the main cities, parents in rural areas sent a child who had been identified as being a witch by a witch-finder to the South into the big city. There, it was expected that a few months of contact with electricity would cure the child of its witchcraft (169). The electrified city appeared as a huge container of electrical power that could be used to counter the effects of witchcraft. While in Europe the introduction of electricity1 as an invisible, bodiless and ubiquitous force led to various problematizations and even to a crisis of perception that produced “Electro-Insanes” like, for example, August Strindberg (not to mention even more unusual phantasmas, see Asendorff), electricity, a new power medium in many regions of Africa, was instead identified and connected with the already existing concepts of power and force used for healing and harming. It confirmed and reinforced more than it questioned the local discourse on power. In this local discourse, power or force was part of a cosmology in which this force, somehow diffused through space like the wind that pervades the world, could take possession of things, animals and human beings and empower them. It could be visualized by phe-

1

The history of the discourse on electricity in Europe is highly complicated because it touches on various disciplines and entangled fields of knowledge such as theology, magic, occultism, and natural sciences. In his book titled Theology of Electricity (1970), Ernst Benz shows that magnetism and electricity were seen as signs of the hidden presence of God’s power in the world for a long time. Only when theology was separated from the natural sciences, the ‘electrical fire’ stopped to connect various forms of life, of things, animals and plants.—And Wolfgang Hagen could show that occultspiritistic theories would supplement the not yet really known and proved physical theories about electricity.

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Electricity, Spirit Mediums, and the Media of Spirits nomena such as, for example, lightning during violent electrical storms. Like electricity, this power is invisible, but when activated, links through unseen channels that which is normally separated. Only in alliance with a body of a human being, an animal, or a thing does the force gain materiality and become tangible, visible, and audible. When a person is possessed by this force, he or she is loaded like a battery and can, if knowledgeable, manipulate the force for gaining knowledge, to tele-see or tele-hear, or to heal or harm. In contrast to the colonial discourse that celebrated electricity as progress, as the vehicle of light and enlightenment into ‘dark’ or ‘darkest’ Africa and as, above all, a revolutionary technical innovation, in popular African discourses it was seen as a variation of the already existing more or less ambivalent local concept of power that could be appropriated and integrated into practices of healing and harming. When I did research on witchcraft and healing discourses and practices in Western Uganda, many people explained to me that the power of witches and healers can be best compared to electricity. Thus, the introduction of electricity and its appropriation and integration into local practices led to an explicit reformulation of the local theory of a ubiquitous, empowering force called electricity. And, paradoxically, the integration of electricity into the local (anti-) witchcraft discourse led to its disenchantment (it is not Western magic!) as well as to a confirmation of its (anti-)magical powers.

Spirits as Media and Spirit Mediums As John Beattie has stated, force or power is in the last resort spirit (“Spirit” 170). Or to say it in another way, spirits2 are essentially the personified form of the above-mentioned force or power. Through their capacity to transcend spirits, media are force or power par excellence. They link what is separated, the living and the dead as well as human beings and deities or gods. Thus, spirit mediumship is an indigenous technique of transmission (Morris 4). It offers the often painful possibility to women and men in cults to transform themselves into spirits and thereby participate effectively in the unseen world of otherworldly powers.

2

In Bunyoro and Tooro, there are two kinds of spirits: the mizimu, the spirits of ancestors whose noun class does not belong to that of people but to that of things (Beattie, “Divination” 127); while the other class of spirits, the bacwezi, the spirits of former kings or ‘culture heroes,’ belong to the noun class of people.

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Heike Behrend To be possessed by a spirit is to have power. Indeed, the performances of many spirit mediums are infused by striking verbal imagery, emphasizing movement and flow, but also the blockages of movement and flow. Likewise, the special powers the medium owns when in the state of possession are sometimes dramatically exposed by playing with fire (without getting burned), breaking interdictions, or by prophesying (e.g., tele-seeing or tele-hearing). But the power of spirits is always borrowed; it is granted at the cost of denying oneself, of acknowledging that not the self but the spirit has this power. For example, in the local theory of possession in Western Uganda (and in other parts of Africa), being possessed by a spirit effects a radical break, a sort of death within the medium’s self. The medium’s own consciousness disappears completely and another, the spirit’s, appears in its place. Thus, the transmission is blocked, is interrupted, is disturbed. This is why after possession, mediums cannot recall the speeches and acts the spirit made through them. They often, after the spirit has left them, even theatricalize this forgetting, this amnesia (Morris 8). Either a translator or an audience is needed to relate to the medium what the spirit said and did. From a local perspective, the communication paradoxically takes place only between the spirit and the audience or the translator while the medium is excluded. However, the separation of spirit and medium, the non-identity of spirit and medium, and the theatricalization of forgetting are absolutely necessary to claim the autonomy of spirits; only by divorcing spirits from human interests and desires can their power gain legitimacy.

Technical Media of Spirits Spirit mediumship is a complex ritualized process in which various media such as bodies, drums, rattles, medicines, songs, food, etc., are involved to increase and direct the power of the spirits. Maybe because of this history of practiced multi-mediality, spirit mediums in Western Uganda have found it easy to build up various hybrid alliances with new technical media. In contrast to Shona mediums in Zimbabwe or Dodo mediums in Niger who reject Western commodities, Embandwa spirit mediums in Western Uganda are eager to appropriate novel modes in order to objectify their control over moral and material economies (Masquelier 34f). However, to better understand the striking readiness of Embandwa spirit mediums to appropriate Western technical

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Electricity, Spirit Mediums, and the Media of Spirits media, a short digression into the history of spirit mediumship in Western Uganda is necessary. While spirit mediums in pre-colonial times were highly respected—they formed a sort of counter-power to the kings (according to Berger)—during colonial times and especially thanks to the Christian missionaries they became the epitome of primitivism and the non-modern. Against the background of the introduction of writing and reading, two practices that came to guarantee history, monotheism, and modernity, spirit mediums were identified with the ‘other’ of writing—that is, with orality and rituality. They were repressed and persecuted and often could only work underground. In postcolonial times in Uganda, however, spirit mediums and traditional healers regained power again by building up an alliance with the postcolonial state whose national politics strongly relied on the preservation of its cultural heritage and the wedding of African “traditions” with “progress” and “development.” While the State—anxious to attract Western tourists—continues to promote a plurality of cultures and traditions, Pentecostal and charismatic Christian churches and movements in the last 15 years have started a violent struggle against ‘paganism,’ i.e., nearly everything identified with African pre-colonial religions and traditions. Spirit mediums who dare to keep their ‘pagan’ spirits are now strongly pressured; they have to deal with challenges and provocations of Christian pastors and priests to compete and test the power of their ‘satanic’ spirits against the power of the almighty Christian God. Thus, to get rid of the stigma of being primitive, spirit mediums in Western Uganda have increasingly built up hybrid alliances with various technical media to enhance their power and prove their modernity. However, because most of the spirit mediums in Western Uganda are too poor to afford new technologies such as a televisions or mobile phones,3 they appropriate the technology by transposing or transferring some characteristics of the new (imagined) media to their own media practices, thereby reformulating them. By doing so, they bring new insights into the processes of transcultural circulation, appropriation, and local reinterpretation, permitting for the recognition of those aspects of the new media which best offer 3

This has changed in the last year. Now even in Western Uganda a few rich spirit mediums from Buganda settled down (after having been chased away from Katwe in Kampala, a place where many healers and mediums had established their clinics, but when the king of Buganda claimed this land they had to leave and some came to Western Uganda to reestablish a new living). These spirit mediums own TVs, have mobile phones and buy airtime to advertise their services in the local radio station, the “Voice of Tooro.”

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Heike Behrend themselves or better yet, which are chosen for the connection with already existing discourses and practices. And they allow for the formulation of the interface between the old and the new or even better, between the moment when the new becomes old or already known. In the following sections, I will give two examples of the various alliances between spirit mediums and technical media.

Spirit Mediums and Writing While in Thailand, as Rosalind Morris has brilliantly shown, spirit mediums have come to own photographs and whole archives of video recordings of their séances; in Uganda in the 1980s, spirit mediums4 began to appropriate writing, thus transforming the translator into a secretary who wrote down the spirit’s speech. Writing down the spirit’s speech not only ‘modernized’ the séance, it also counteracted the disturbance of the spirit’s transmission, the blockage, the exclusion of the medium. For the mediums could now, after the spirit had left them, read the spirit’s message. In addition, because of the transcriptions of their secretary, the speeches and messages of the spirits could now be stored in a book that analogous to the Bible, could claim to contain the spirits’ true revelations. Thus, spirit mediumship as a medium of presence was combined with a new medium that kept alive indications of the spirit even in its absence. While in European spiritualism spirit mediums were often writing themselves, their hand viewed as being guided by the spirit and thereby acting merely as tools of the medium of writing itself, the secretary of Ugandan spirit mediums practiced ‘secular’ writing, in the sense of not being possessed himself or overpowered by the spirit, but—in contrast to the medium—by keeping some sort of authorship and subjectivity.

‘Ugandan Telephone’ or ‘Pulling Voices’ Against the background of the previously cited transcultural transference of electricity into magical power (and vice versa), it is understandable that above all electrical media such as radio, telephone,

4

Interestingly, spirit mediums strongly oppose photography, of all Western media, and do not allow the presence of the camera during their séances (see Behrend).

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Electricity, Spirit Mediums, and the Media of Spirits and TV—media to tele-hear and to tele-see—experienced specific local reformulations. John Beattie, a British anthropologist who worked in Western Uganda in the 1950s, mentions a technique of divination in which an ihembe, a ‘magical’ horn filled with medicine was supposed to speak like a person when asked to answer questions (“Divination” 56).5 He mentions that at that time this technique of divination was a fairly recent development. When Beattie undertook his research in the 1950s, spirit possession was not involved in this practice of divination; nowadays it is. Today, a medium possessed by a spirit holds the horn in his or her right hand and sends out the spirit to pull or steal6 the voice of a person who is then forced to speak the truth through the horn. This sort of divination is called the ‘Ugandan telephone.’7 On this background, it seems likely that the apparatus of the western telephone—especially the receiver—became a sort of media a priori that was taken up by divining mediums and that inspired them to use the ihembe, the magical horn, as a receiver to pull or steal the voice of their victim. By interconnecting or interposing the horn into the transmission channel, the medium was freed of its amnesia, for it was the horn through which the stolen voice was speaking and not through the medium. Again, the appropriation of western media was used not only to ‘modernize’ divination but also to counteract the disturbance of the transmission, the blockage, the exclusion of the medium. Thus, hybrid alliances with writing as well as with the telephone allowed mediums to gain more control and authorship during and after the séances. This can be seen as a more general tendency: While spirit mediums, as already pointed out, were thought to perform involuntarily as empty-headed vessels, today some of them insist that they have acquired much more control of consciousness; one medium told me that during possession he was 50 percent conscious and, in addition, he said he was able to switch from consciousness to unconsciousness and back again.

5 6

7

Beattie explains this practice as ventriloquism (“Divination” 61). A parallel to the stealing of a voice is the stealing of electricity. When electricity was stolen, a debate started in the West if this act really was theft, if it was possible to steal a force, something which up to then could not be stolen. In 1900, a law was passed that put the theft of electricity under punishment. Also in other African regions, the telephone has been used already for decades as a means of communication between humans and spirits. Telephones and telephone receiver are found as part of West African Voodooshrines; and there are several popular paintings that show the famous female spirit mami wata with a telephone.

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Heike Behrend While mediums when in the state of full possession could claim no responsibility for what the spirit said and did through them and thus could say what they would not have said otherwise, they now would have to carry at least some partial responsibility. Already in the 19th century, Christian missionaries had stigmatized spirit possession as satanic because it radically contradicted their notion of a self-responsible, self-reliable, self-conscious person. It seems that nowadays—and obviously within the context of the recent Christian revival, as Birgit Meyer (Translating) has also stated—permanent self-control is emphasized more and more, and spirit mediums also try to adapt at least partially within this context, and sometimes, as the example of the horn as telephone receiver shows, they do so through the hybrid alliance with technical media. Again (as in the case of electricity), the appropriation of the telephone led to a new fusion of media and magic that paradoxically dis-enchanted the telephone by integrating it into magical practices. Thus, on the background of processes of globalization and massmediatization, the dis-enchantment of Western media through their appropriation obviously does not intend to disempower them but rather to create a local empowerment, a new magic of modernity.

The Visualization of Spirits in Locally Produced Videos The emergence of a commercial video culture at the end of the 1980s in Western Africa (Ghana and Nigeria) and some years later also in Tanzania and Kenya has to be seen as part of a worldwide change in the political economy of media. This change came along with the privatization of media production and consumption and the decline of the postcolonial nation state that also contributed to the reduction of the authority and morale of older state-based media such as TV and radio (Larkin 2000). While a local celluloid film production industry never really emerged, ‘small’ media such as video offered new possibilities. Because it required little capital and training, in Nigeria (and Ghana) the production of local videos developed into a real industry. Video films, dramatic features shot directly on video, marketed as cassettes and sometimes screened for paying audiences (or as home videos) have become the dominant form of popular culture in Nigeria. Besides American and Indian films, kung fu films and Egyptian soap operas, West African videos created an enormous arena for local cultural expressions and the remakes of films from Hollywood, from Hong Kong, as well as from Bollywood.

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Electricity, Spirit Mediums, and the Media of Spirits Not academic filmmakers trained at film- or art schools in Paris, London or New York, but young men (and a few women) working in traveling theaters or producing so-called popular market literature took up the new media and started producing videos, thereby picking up themes and subjects that often were circulating already in other media such as theater, TV, radio, newspapers, or so-called market-literature. Local political affairs, corruption, ritual murder, the magical production of money, witchcraft, occult forces, romantic love and betrayal were the topics that were visualized (sometimes with computer generated special effects) in these videos. Indeed, the video makers succeeded in visualizing what was not previously visible: spirits and their power. They contributed to the establishment of a new regime of visibility that connected vision and truth in a new way.

Video Makers as Mediums of the Christian God Comparable to the spirit mediums who mediated between human beings and the spirit realm, some video makers in Ghana as well as in Nigeria also started to define themselves as mediators of godly Christian messages. Indeed, the emergence of the new video industry also has to be seen in the context of the previously referred to wave of Christian—as well as Islamic—fundamentalism in many parts of Africa. Especially the new charismatic and Pentecostalist churches (some heavily under the influence of the USA) made use of the new technical media as tools of expansion and as part of a calculated attempt to transform and Christianize popular culture. Media, both print and electronic, play a central role and are deemed an acceptable weapon for Christians in the battle against Satan (Hackett 258). Churches financed and produced various videos. Consequently, the heroes in these videos were Christian pastors and priests who, with the help of the Christian God or the Holy Spirit, finally defeated the agents of Satan. The premiere of these videos took place in churches (as I was allowed to experience in Ghana in 2003), the director, producer, and the main actors praying for the video’s financial success. In the pre-titles sequence or the credits, the Christian God was thanked that He allowed the successful production of the video against the forces of Satan. Indeed, various disturbances, such as the sickness of an actor or the breakdown of the camera, were often perceived as the manifestations of evil forces. Thus, in some cases, the production of a video was already interpreted as a struggle, and when successful, celebrated as a victory over Satan.

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Heike Behrend As already mentioned, against this background various video makers began to define themselves as Christian spirit mediums, prophets or visionaries who received godly messages in dreams or visions. They communicated these messages through their videos. Instead of defining themselves as individual authors, they positioned themselves at the interface of spirit mediumship, religious media, and entertainment. The videos were transformed into godly gifts and the connection to dreams and visions gave them—at least potentially—the status of revelations (Meyer “Visions”; “Religious”).

Visualization of Spiritual Power While spirit mediums in their rituals are not able to visualize the force or power that is driving them—they can only visualize the effects of that power—the video makers succeeded in using computergenerated special effects to give visibility to spiritual powers. In spectacular ways they generated balls of light, fire, beams, flashes, sparkles and rays that visualized evil as well as good Christian forces. By doing so they took recourse to the previously mentioned “electric cosmology” and to an iconography of electricity. This iconography of electricity also has a long tradition in the West, going back to what Ernst Benz called a “theology of electricity” that took lightning, rays, and aura as signs of a godly presence. Through special effects, the video makers opened a new domain of visibility. They succeeded to not only connect and reformulate the cosmology of power, but also to convert technology into magic. Like the Western explorers who converted media into magic, the video makers also enchanted technology through the use of special effects. As Alfred Gell suggested: “Technology is enchanting because it is enchanted, because it is the outcome of some process of barely comprehensible virtuosity which exemplifies an ideal of magical efficacy that people struggle to realize in other domains.”

Videos and the Truth of Occult Forces Obviously, on the background of the new visualization of spiritual powers a new merging of magic and mediality is taking place. Since video, like other modern visual media, encourages the specific hegemony of the visual that characterizes the West by connecting seeing, revealing, and truth, it is important to note that in Western Africa, as well as in Uganda, the visualization of spiritual powers through special effects was not positioned into a domain of fiction. Through the association with the visions and dreams of the video

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Electricity, Spirit Mediums, and the Media of Spirits producers, many videos—as Birgit Meyer (“Visions”; “Religious”) has shown—were experienced by audiences as a kind of enlightenment revealing the truth about evil powers. Of course, videos are also critically examined and debated in Africa and yet the boundary between reality and irreality is drawn in such a way that the existence of occult forces, at least at the moment, is not much doubted. As previously noted, occult powers are seen by many people as part of everyday life, and for the audiences the medium video opens a new perspective, a view—like the one of God—that allows a viewer to see the hidden dimensions of misfortune, disease, and death. While the camera when introduced by Western travelers in the 19th century was turned into a magical object of terror that victimized Africans, the video camera in postcolonial times obviously empowers Africans to see—like God—what otherwise cannot be seen: the ways in which witches, satanic spirits and other evil agents are harming and even killing their victims. While spirits as part of the new regime of visibility gain additional aspects of reality and truth and also proliferate, they simultaneously lose a portion of their power to truly affect reality. While spirits in possession rituals divine, heal or harm, their appearance in videos takes place on the level of representation, without healing or harming effects.

Works Cited Asendorf, Christoph. Ströme und Strahlen: Das langsame Verschwinden der Materie um 1900. Gießen, 1989. Print. Beattie, John. “Divination in Bunyoro.” Sociologus 14.1 (1964). Print. —. “Spirit Mediumship in Bunyoro.” Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa. Ed. Beattie and John Middleton. London, 1969. 159170. Print. Behrend, Heike. “Geisterfotografie: Bruchstücke einer interkulturellen Mediengeschichte der Fotografie.” Zwischen Aneignung und Verfremdung: Ethnologische Gratwanderungen. Festschrift für Karl-Heinz Kohl. Ed. Volker Gottowik, Holger Jebens, and Editha Platte. N.p., 2008. 547-562. Print. Belting, Hans. Das echte Bild: Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen. Munich, 2005. Print. Benz, Ernst. Theologie der Elektrizität. Wiesbaden, 1970. Print. Berger, Iris. “Fertility as Power: Spirit Mediums, Priestesses and the Precolonial State in Interlacustrine East Africa.” Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in Eastern African History. Ed. David M. Anderson and Douglas Johnson. London, 1995. 65-82. Print.

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Heike Behrend Brain, Robert. “Child-Witches.” Witchcraft, Confessions and Accusation. Ed. Mary Douglas. London, 1970. Print. Gell, Alfred. “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology.” Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics. Ed. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton. Oxford, 1992. 40-66. Print. Hackett, Rosalind. “Charismatic/Pentecostal Appropriation of Media Technology in Nigeria and Ghana.” Jour. of Religion in Afr. 28.3 (1998): 258-277. Print. Hagen, Wolfgang. “Die entwendete Elektrizität—zur medialen Genealogie des ‘modernen Spiritismus’.” Grenzgänge zwischen Wahn und Wissen: Zur Koevolution von Experiment und Paranoia 18501910. Ed. Torsten Hahn, Jutta Person, and Nicolas Pethes. Frankfurt a.M., 2002. Print. Krapf, Ludwig. Reisen in Ostafrika (1837-1855). Stuttgart, 1964. Print. Masquelier, Adeline. “The Invention of Anti-Tradition: Dodo Spirits in Southern Niger.” Spirit Possession, Modernity, and Power in Africa. Ed. Heike Behrend and Ute Luig. Oxford, 1999. 34-49. Print. Meyer, Birgit. “Religious Revelation, Secrecy and the Limits of Representation.” Anthropological Theory 6.4 (2006): 431-453. Print. —. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana. Edinburgh, 1999. Print. —. “Visions of Blood, Sex and Money: Fantasy Spaces in Popular Ghanaian Cinema.” Visual Anthropology 16 (2003): 15-41. Print. Morris, Rosalind C. In the Place of Origins: Modernity and its Mediums in Northern Thailand. Durham, 2000. Print. Prins, Gwyn. “The Battle for Control of the Camera in Late Nineteenth-Century Western Zambia.” Anthropology and Photography. Ed. Elizabeth Edwards. New Haven, 1992. Print. Thomson, Joseph. Through Maasai Land. London, 1885. Print. Vries, Hent de. “In Media Res: Global Religion, Public Spheres, and the Task of Contemporary Comparative Religious Studies.” Religion and Media. Ed. de Vries and Samuel Weber. Stanford, 2001. 3-42. Print.

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Normativity and Normality LUTZ ELLRICH In the following I would like to contribute to the answering of the question whether the theory of normalism is considering a discrete mode of social ordering or whether its concepts feed on premises that it has to keep latent. In this context, special attention should be turned to the normative implications of processes of normalization and the main discourses accompanying them, of which the theory of normalism as an attempt at self-thematization of modernity is one. If it could be shown not only that normalistic practices of orientation create blind spots but also that their terminological reconstructions do this as well, then this would seriously weaken the explanatory claim of the approach and would reduce its level of attractiveness far beneath the one already reached.

Topological Classifications The theory of normalism does not count among the outstanding and widely known diagnoses of all those problems that are characteristic for modern and late-modern societies. Its adherents cannot rally around any important sociologist of the 20th century. Weber and Simmel, Park and Parsons, Schütz and Elias, Berger and Luckmann, Goffman and Garfinkel, Bell and Touraine, Coleman and Esser, Bourdieu and Giddens—none of these count among their trailblazers nor their partisans. Even Durkheim’s provocative theses on the normality of crime and suicide do not significantly contribute to the paradigm change of social analysis, for they are part of a theory program that stages the birth of social order from the spirit of morals. And likewise the occasional references to normality by Gehlen, Habermas, Luhmann and Beck lack the necessary consideration of this category and its epistemological status, as well as that of theories of modernism. The study of ‘normalism’ is apparently an offensive launched from behind the front lines, balancing the lack of methodological rigor with audacious interdisciplinary links. No systematically worked-out conceptions conforming to customary sociological stand201

Lutz Ellrich ards have been presented so far. The approach is supplied by analyses and ideas that can be generally found in the works of French scholars of varied backgrounds of which Quetelet, Tarde, Canguilhem, Foucault, Donzelot and Guillaume could be named. It seems that historians owing their decisive impulses to the annalesschool as well as literary theorists with a discourse-analytical bent are among those who are sensitized for ‘normalistic phenomena’. It therefore shouldn’t also be considered simply chance that it was specifically a literary theorist who has undertaken to foray into the “archipelago” of normalism comprehensively and to sort out the diverse areas of knowledge, thereby presenting an interdisciplinary study. Jürgen Link’s Versuch über den Normalismus caused a sensation with his brilliant theses and the variety of the collected material supporting his findings, thus initiating a series of research projects and discussions (see also Waldenfels, Ordnung, esp. 71ff, 221ff; Waldenfels Grenzen). Admittedly, among sociologists (see Link, Loer, and Neuendorff) and philosophers (even among the advocates of common sense), a considerable hesitation is still prevalent regarding considerations of the “ensemble of all procedures, instances and institutions producing ‘normality’” (Link, “Normativ” 30), or to even merely register that forms of self-reflection have developed among members of modern and late-modern societies that could not exist without the (affirmative or critical) reference to the so-called ‘normality’ of its own experiences and behavior. Yet, most individuals today live in a complex, highly differentiated world characterized by confusion that opens up an extremely wide field full of chances and dangers. The considerable necessity of regulation that emerges in such conditions is not only covered by an increased use of those measures that explicitly standardize the behavior of individuals, but also by the development of non-normative1 concepts of orientation providing the individuals with the possibility, among others, to compare themselves (on the basis of mediated, accessible data) with other persons and to decide on a choice that is not determined by moral or juridical regulations. The obstinacy of the theory of normalism lies in the fact that it directs its attention to these non-normative measures of regulation, attributing to them a central significance for the understanding of modern societies. Characteristic for such a theory is not so much the exact evaluation of normative and non-normative concepts of orientation. Whether one makes a rigid case for the thesis that in “contemporary western societies […] a functional dominance of ‘normality’ over ‘normativity’” (Link, “From” 18) is prevalent or whether 1

Usually Link talks of para- and transnormative orientations in order to hint at differences of proficiency in the field of non-normative means of regulation.

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Normativity and Normality one only maintains that “in reality […] there are always links between the two discursive regimes […]” that lead to different “variations between collision and symbiotic compromise” (Link, Zum Anteil 4) is not of primary importance but is rather an empirical question. However, it is the topological definition of the non-normative ‘regime’ that is decisive. No sociological or social-philosophical representation of modernism of any importance has ever disputed the existence of normatively neutralized coordinations of action, but special sectors of society were always assigned to these specific ways of regulation. Hegel, for example, sees the capitalistically organized sphere of economy (the so-called “bourgeois society”) as a differentiated realm obeying purposes and needs that, however, does not function according to those normative rules characterizing family and state. Therefore, he is attributing to corporations the task to mediate “the various need-systems” (see Kainz 34, § 199-208) with the moral core zones of society. Habermas goes even a step further adding social fields that are organized by functional considerations to the nonnormative integration type. On one side then stands the value oriented life world (family, friendships, civil society) characterized by norms, and on the other a realm determined by the media money and power that seem uncoupled from norms. This release of the administrative use of power and of the market-oriented economy of the social world from normative and value oriented elements we can see with Hegel as a sacrifice to the “inorganic” (495) that historically cannot be avoided, and that also seems justified by the advantages that it entails. The situation is becoming problematic and tendentially pathological only (according to Habermas’ diagnosis) when the non-normative systems take a hold of the life world and literally “colonize” it. Then “monetarization and bureaucratization […] overstep the boundaries of normality” that alone “appear” to be guaranteed by the stable differentiation of the spheres (Habermas 323).2 In contrast to this, the theory of normalism attempts to show that transnormative orientations and mechanisms of regulation affect all social spheres3 and therefore cannot necessarily be classified with specific systems.4 In detailed analyses, the theory shows spe2 3 4

Normality then for Habermas only exists if the normativist orientation of life-world is guaranteed. The fact that “normality pervades, respectively permeates, individual functional systems” has also been stressed by Balke, “Frühe Soziologie” 71. Niklas Luhmann’s differentiation between normative and cognitive expectations also slants away from the differentiation of the individual functional systems. Normative expectations imply strong (even though not necessarily moral) demands because they are not given up even in case of disappointment (contrary to cognitive expectations).

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Lutz Ellrich cifically to what extent the life world of subjects is extremely infused with practices that rest on normalistic attitudes (and a related use of mass media like press, TV and Internet). Habermas’ strategy to first fixate non-normative regulative factors topologically in order to then reveal their occurrence somewhere else as a problem with regard to the aforementioned findings seems remarkably helpless. But also Foucault’s analyses, to which the theory of normalism owes essential insights, do not seem to do justice to the state of affairs. Foucault observes that processes of normalization in modernism initially proceed behind the scenes of the prevalent social semantics. He meticulously works out that moral and juridical discourses veil the structural transformation of concepts of social selforganization: There is “a whole continual and clamorous legislative activity” (144)5 that drowns out the continuously increasing normalization of human ways of life, which is implemented in the closed sectors of disciplining institutions. This background noise of normative discourses in late modernism has by no means disappeared;6 however, it is confronted with the open “media normalism” (see Ellrich, “Medialer”) as a loud and visually powerful competitor. In the sound and light spaces of today’s media, the difference between the ‘visible’ and the ‘sayable’ has dissolved and the subjects invest a considerable part of their attention into the mediated representation of the social world because they find material for orientation right there: material for orientation that gives them precise clues without establishing concrete rules. Therefore, the individual remains free to decide in which form and to what extent to use the supply of data and which decisions can possibly be made on the basis of the information received. Even though Foucault in his studies on the microphysics of power lets himself be inspired by Durkheim’s groundbreaking idea that in the course of processes of modernization both the individualization of subjects and their socialization increases, he does not succeed in linking both aspects in his discourse analysis. The fascinating program of representing both the repressive effects of a network of rampaging power constellations and their productive, subject-constitutive ones conflicts with his analyses of the dynamics of normalization. At the end of his thought process, Foucault is sketching a modern ‘ideal subject’ that has to brace itself against normalistic socialization in order to find an adequate relationship to itself. The genesis of individual sovereignty does not culminate in the flexible and voluntary use of socially created data, but in the 5 6

See also Habermas’ ideas on the excessive juridification of modern societies (522ff). I will return to this again in the last paragraph on the ‘moralization’ of media.

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Normativity and Normality adaptation of a normative project that is nourished by the authorities of antique ethics. A new variety of obligation, imitating a welltried script, or that only uses it as a pale model, all of a sudden enters the arena of the social competition for resources. The fact that the suggested ‘self practices’ using the speech acts of prescription, communication and advice can be an appealing alternative to traditional morals can not hide the difficulties into which the theory of normalism is brought by Foucault’s late works. It would be theoretically dishonest to confront the problem brought up by Foucault with categorical maneuvers of appeasement and to bring Jürgen Link’s (already quoted) comment on the empirically always-present “links between the two discursive regimes” into the discussion. Also, the clever suggestion that subject-constitution could be reconstructed as a delicate compromise between normalistic and normativistic elements would only evade Foucault’s challenge—even though it might possibly contain more than a grain of truth. It would without doubt be more interesting to talk willingly of a “collision” and to analyze more closely the constitution of the subject so provokingly put on the agenda by Foucault. But like the other suggestions, this undertaking, important as it is, loses from its view the core of the problem. For Foucault’s ‘change of direction’ raises the fundamental question whether the normalistic regime contains a hidden normative drive becoming evident sooner or later, thereby propelling forth the potentials of its own subversion with almost dialectical energy. Do we then have to question the central theses of the theory of normalism, namely, first that para- and transnormative ways of orientation permeate all areas of society and, second that they partially replace existing normative orientations, or let them degenerate into rhetorical masquerades?7 Of course not, but recalling Foucault’s astonishing transformation from an archeologist of anonymous discourses into an architect of a model of subjectivity in which the spirit of stoic ethics and political revolt are simultaneously at home gives a convenient reason for investigations foraying into realms that ‘normally’ are part of the routine of the self-analysis of any ambitious scholarly research. Therefore, the question arises whether the theory of normalism with its “analytical division of normativity and normality” that according to Link is “indispensable for understanding modern western societies” (Zum Anteil 4), does not fall into the trap of social semantics by taking a discursive statement at face value. Some theoreticians, in diagnosing the crisis of norms and 7

In this case we would be dealing with a semantics that is effectively covering up structural breaks for the actors and that with this protective psychohygienic protection offers up the possibility of gradually adapting to reality. On the difference of semantics and structure see Luhmann, Gesellschaftsstruktur; Ellrich, “Semantik”.

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Lutz Ellrich values while also not overlooking the social importance of talking of the normal―or rather the average―have expressly pointed out the latent normative implications of this form of discourse and have expressed the assumption that the normative power of the normal results specifically from the veiling of the obligatory and imperative aspects of the new patterns of orientation. Pierre Bourdieu, for example, advocates that one of the central practices of normalism, namely the mediated presentation of statistical data always implies the danger of being taken as “[…] a surreptitiously performative statement which, under the appearance of simply saying what is, tends additionally and tacitly to say what ought to be.” In reality, however, the “official statistics […] merely register the result of struggles for the determination of the legitimate distribution.” From the perspective of a critical sociological viewpoint, therefore, the so-called ‘normative power of facts’ represents an effect of a political staging that is supposed to elicit an “original acceptance of the world as it is” from the viewers (Bourdieu 187). In the works of other authors the statistically grounded normalism appears as a guiding principle of modernism, as a latent “super-rule” (Sloterdijk, Verachtung 42). The data-pool is not interpreted as a 'neutral' media product that the recipients can use or ignore any way they want, but rather as a socially constitutive phenomenon. Here, obviously, the impression prevails that the normalistic description of the world urges all individuals to comply with predefined patterns and to behave mimetically. In the normalistic discourse, according to the prevailing suspicion, a powerful demand is expressed from which the individual cannot withdraw. The general idea of this demand cannot be made accessible by taking recourse to the laws and rules of traditional morals; they at most can be expressed by the abstract formula: ‘Take a stance regarding the mediated data, decide, and take a position within the field of mediated information!’ Such a description of the normative implications of normalism, however, raises several questions: What status does the demand mentioned have? Does it have the character of a recommendation, a suggestion, an imperative? And upon what do its validity and its binding force rest? In order to get answers to these questions, it seems initially appealing to take up those findings of psychological theories that refer equally to individuals and to social conditions. The most useful psychological theory for an explanation of the genesis and functioning of social demands was certainly provided by Sigmund Freud with his model of the Oedipus complex. This well-known model describes the very precarious emotional structure that characterizes the rela-

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Normativity and Normality tionships in the core family. It deals with the developmental dynamics of the gender-specific distribution of emotions like love, hate and jealousy that children have towards their parents and that they act out with different degrees of intensity and in the various phases depending on their development. During a ‘normal’ development, which can be disturbed by a series of pathological deviations, a step-bystep process of periods of latency and reanimation begins that in the end can lead to the “The Passing of the Oedipus-complex:” “The [oedipal] object-cathexes are given up and replaced by identification. The authority of the father or the parents is introjected into the ego and there forms the kernel of the super-ego…” (Freud 273).

The Crisis of Internalizing In a post-oedipal (see Žižek, Parallaxe 402) media society that long ago has become ‘fatherless’ (see Mitscherlich) having resulted in a much-weakened authority of parents, this process of creating the Super-Ego does not seem to function any more. But does this also mean that an authority that can be compared to or is functionally equivalent to the Super-Ego is no longer formed, or if, then only rudimentarily? Has an authority like this become obsolete? Or does it only take on a different shape that may produce just as many (neurotic) personality disorders like the ‘classic’ Super-Ego? Some theoreticians assume that mass media—first and foremost television—have created a replacement-Super-Ego: The identification with fictitious serial heroes may tend to have replaced the role of the prime exponents of familial role models and other traditional educational authorities. Such theses can rest (at least on a first glance) on results of research done in television studies. Authors like Horton and Wohl have already called the relationship of viewers and serial heroes a “para-social” interaction. Nevertheless, the results of effect analysis should be interpreted very loosely in order to invest in television that place from which the new Super-Ego is trumpeting itself. The assumption that the demands of the SuperEgo have not only changed their contents but have also increased the pressure with which they are heralded is, however, much more interesting than this insinuation. Which, then, are the new contents and demands with which the mass media confront us today? And which (possibly pathological) effects do they evoke? Two prominent authors, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Ehrenberg, answer these questions in such a way that currently they have quite a public impact. Žižek hypothesizes that “today we are bombarded from all sides with the different versions of the Super-Ego-command ‘Enjoy!’—from immediate sexual gratifications to the joys of profes-

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Lutz Ellrich sional success and spiritual awakening” (Politische 33). Regarding this demand (according to Žižek) it is especially fatal that it is made ever more rigorously the more people listen to it so that we get inescapably caught in a situation of total overload. Ehrenberg comes to a similar conclusion developing the following chain of argumentation: Today “no moral law and no tradition [tells us] any longer who we have to be and how we have to behave” (8). The force of prohibiting and the power of disciplining by the classic authorities like parents, kindergarten, peer-group, school, military, office, factory, and so on, diminish. Now we no longer have to obey in the first place; rather, we have to make decisions. It is all about personal initiative. “Project, motivation, communication” are the key terms that magically draw us. By mere “conformity with a law,” we cannot do justice any longer to the situations into which we are placed. The “external order” is no longer a stabilizing factor; we have to “fall back onto internal drives” and “mental abilities.” This new demand to take something into our own hands and to manage our own selves has a weird status: It is not our own wish, not our own request; we do not have the impression that we have finally uncovered the sources of our ‘self’ in this way and thus understand ourselves better than ever before. The demand confronts us as our own impulse and nevertheless as something foreign and inappropriate. But we cannot define it simply as an external power and therefore reject it. Rather, there seem to be “new norms” that we have already internalized and that have become the authority of a “Neo-Super-Ego” in the course of this internalization. Furthermore, we are far more at the mercy of these “new norms” than we were from the earlier sets of norms— this is where Ehrenberg’s diagnosis meets Žižek’s theses. This extreme form of dependence on these “new norms” that form the catalogue of demands of a particularly strict Super-Ego shows in how we get into situations of conflict with these demands or orders less and less often, and how we more and more rarely take a stand supporting our drives or strong wishes against the Super-Ego. If we do not meet with its demand, we rather see ourselves as flawed. The Neo-Super-Ego turns out to be a sort of Ultra-Super-Ego that demands too much of us and drives us into the arms of depression. We feel exhausted and inadequate, without feeling guilty. We do not suffer concretely and immediately from any external power of disciplining or control, but rather from our own deficiency. The weight of the new self-responsibility, the new sovereignty, crushes us by barricading the individual realms of free self-development more and more instead of opening them up. Obviously, Žižek and Ehrenberg are using the term Super-Ego, or a functionally comparably psychological authority, with their diagnoses of the current social crisis. Their point of departure is that

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Normativity and Normality society continues to be directed via rules, prohibitions, norms and values. They further assume that the social demands kept in circulation by the mass media are now linked with considerable subjective emotions and that specifically because of this connection the individuals end up in (new forms of) difficulties (exhaustion, humiliation, feelings of deficiency, depression). The emotional attachment to the social demands, which the individuals are less and less able to fulfill, is explained with the idea that social norms (of whatever content) are still subjectively internalized. And this means: Because the Super-Ego continues to occupy a stable place in the psychological economy of the subject, its unrelenting demands and orders are able to have those (often devastating) effects of which Žižek and Ehrenberg are talking. But maybe this thesis has its point of departure in a premise that is no longer valid. If we concede that family and school fulfill the traditional functions of socialization inadequately, and if we nevertheless assume that individuals continue to be directed by a sort of Super-Ego that spreads its messages through television and the internet, then we ascribe to the mass media as authorities of the creation and stabilization of the new Super-Ego a downright suggestive and manipulative power. Such a strong suspicion, however, can scarcely be supported by the available evidence. Even though the research in media reception demonstrates the great importance that media specifically have for the control of individual behavior, it hardly offers up a motive for interpreting media and their ‘messages’ as replacements for the Super-Ego. We might express the tenor of this research in the following way: Media do not send open or hidden orders, nor do they make rigorous demands; with their various formats, they make offers that the individuals can—but don’t have to—use (in a new way) for the orientation of their behavior (see Barbour; McQuail; Imhof, Jarren, and Blum; Reize and Ritzer). Clearly media, with their widely extended offers, further a specific form of selecting activities, behavior, self- and other-interpretations and so on that no longer refer to internalized benchmarks (like norms, values, ideals). The assumption that our behavior is controlled by a program that we have internalized in painful processes of socialization with view to current social and media developments can hardly be upheld any longer. Saying good-bye to the concept of interiorization of action-oriented patterns admittedly is not only suggested by an analysis of media; in sociology it was heralded previously more than fifty years ago in the book The Lonely Crowd (Riesman, Glazer, and Denney). David Riesman and his collaborators, on the basis of their research in 1950, voiced the assumption that the so-called inner-directed person is only characteristic for a certain historical phase starting

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Lutz Ellrich in the 15th century with Protestantism and ending in the middle of the 20th century. Riesmann assumes that in post-industrial society a new type of person emerges who functions in an other-directed way. People of this type concentrate on external points of orientation, and base their actions on these. This reorganization does not only have advantages. The loss of an interior authority that tells people what and what not to do has the result that people constantly observe their environment and (much more than ever before) the behavior and linguistic utterances of their fellow men. Other-directed people are constantly on the alert and have to explicitly plan the phases of tuning out and relaxing, and always have to be ready to interrupt these moratoria. The place of classic neurosis, the result of the two-fronted war of the Ego both with impulsive drives and the Super-Ego, is now replaced by an unfocused, quasi freely floating fear (to miss something, to fail to spot an important piece of information, not to be up to date). If this diagnosis is only partly true, then Freud’s differentiation of Id, Ego, and Super-Ego loses its empirical point of reference and proves to be historically dated. With view to Riesman’s taking stock of the situation, the neo- or post-Freudian attempts by Žižek and Ehrenberg also seem to be not much less implausible. It is, however, remarkable that Riesman himself shied away from drawing categorical consequences from his analysis of the “other-directed character,” completely giving up the model of interiorization. Today, according to him, we could no longer speak of parents’ introjecting concrete behavioral guidelines (norms and values) into their children “in the course of education” and he also believes that the new “source” of the other-directed person still results from a process of interiorization. In the course of this process of socialization in children “early in life” there is implanted “a feeling of dependence […] for guidance in life” from all those “contemporaries” with whose manners and opinions they are acquainted both directly in personal intercourse and “indirectly through friends and through the mass media.” A successful education therefore is measured by whether it has led to the creation of an efficient interior “radar” system that can catch and process the outer impulses (15, 21, 41).8 From this—just as artistic as artificial—construction we can deduct terminological embarrassment and a manifest explanatory state of emergency. Completely unclear remains the question, namely, from which sources the older generation obtains the competence for using a new style of education that no longer ‘impresses’ appropri8

On the diagnostic power of Riesman’s theory see also Lethen, esp. 235ff. In his study Lethen focuses explicitly on the normative, therapeutic and compensational aspects of a self-description of the subject as an other-directed person.

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Normativity and Normality ate behavior with well-practiced strategies of sanction and gratification, but that rather on the one hand furnishes concepts for observing a constantly changing environment and on the other hand procures criteria for selecting behavioral modes from a widely spread spectrum of possibilities. Sociologists who do not observe the widening of subjective areas of activity and who simultaneously register the increase in conformity and the acceptance of highly unequal social states get into similar difficulties as does Riesman. An appealing attempt to cope with this ambivalence is depicted in the differentiation between disciplinary order and control society that Gilles Deleuze hit upon after Foucault. Thus, the possibility arises to analyze the change in social forms of regulation or of paradigmata of power without giving up the figure of interiorization that in both cases is supposed to denote the social seizure of individuals.9 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri therefore speak of the fact that in the “society of control” that can be understood as “that society which […] opens toward the postmodern,” in which “mechanisms of command become even more ‘democratic,’ ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens.” This circumstance leads the authors without any further intermediate steps to the thesis that “[t]he behaviors of social integration and exclusion […] are thus increasingly interiorized within the subjects themselves.” This then results in the following consideration: “The society of control might thus be characterized by an intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices, but in contrast to discipline, this control extends well outside the structured sites of social institutions through flexible and fluctuating networks.” (23)

If we take this description at its word, it leads to the thesis that the manifest liberties, scopes of operation and options of the individuals in late modernism are only surface phenomena that cover up a historically so-far unrivalled and therefore singular way of domination and self-alienation of human beings.

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If worst comes to worst, it is at most the place at which social means of regulation start. The power to discipline results in an embodiment of orientational patterns; the power to control in their mental representation. In this context, Bourdieu’s term habitus is interesting, since it is admittedly aimed at effects of embodiment, but it also encompasses a relatively stable mental cast as well. For a comparison of normalism with the theory of the habitus-field see Link, Loer, and Neuendorff 121-162.

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Individual Freedom and Social Constraints In contrast, the theory of normalism attempts to grasp the individual autonomy and the novel potentials of the late modern ‘self’ as genuine phenomena and to relate them adequately to social constraints. The dependence of individuals on mediated data regarding the behavior and ideas of their fellow man is assessed to the same extent as the subjective capacities for free decision. Jürgen Link’s term “flexible normalism” is tailor-made for this interplay of individual sovereignty and social integration. The complex events leading to the constitution of activity controlling ego formation cannot adequately be reconstructed with the term ‘interiorization’ of an exterior social power or structure, etc. Without the involvement of an independent ‘self’, flexible attitudes towards social conditions in the form of data are impossible. Processes of normalization in late modernism are also taking place as acts of self-normalizing. In order to underline the importance of the subjective factor encompassing elements like calculation, spontaneity and free choice, Link has suggested interpreting the “ability of self-normalization” as a competence that “presupposes a new type of inner-direction” (“From” 29). While that form of inner-direction that Riesman attributes to middle-class subject-constitution is only seen as an effect of the imprint of systems of social rule in early childhood, the ‘real’ inner-direction develops the irreducible obstinacy of individuals who, though they make their decisions with a sharpened view to exterior reference points, nevertheless decide autonomously.10 The theory of normalism thus fulfils a demand that the scholars of economy have been asking of sociology for a long time already: to grant a due space to individual freedom in their theoretical designs.11 Considering that this factor does not arise from any normatively founded objection against social constraints and determinants, it is rather seen as an empirical datum. Therefore, Link does not get into the fatal position into which Ronald D. Laing once maneuvered himself with his critique of parental practices of education and pedagogical strategies of training. Laing has described the irresistible power of processes of socialization in which the authoritative power of society is embodied as normality, and he at the same time invoked the phenomenon of experience as an indestructible counterforce of emancipatory impulses: “In school the external nightmare is internalized for life […] To be successful in our culture one must learn to dream 10 See also Link’s statement that “in the flexible-normalist [media strategies] a new, fascinating version of ‘inner-direction’ can be found” (“Aspekte” 85). 11 With respect to the “often quoted bon mot of James Duesenberry that economy is about people making decisions and that sociology is about the fact that they have no choice” see Funken 19.

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Normativity and Normality of failure” (Henry 295f). This is how Jules Henry said it in a nutshell—and Laing affirmatively quoting him drew the following conclusion: “What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection, and other forms of destructive action on experience” (27). It remains incomprehensible how under these circumstances experience, in the sense of a source of critical objection and of resistance, should be possible. The theory of normalism shows us a way out of this dead-end. If—in contrast to Laing—we understand normality as a product that individuals produce specifically by utilizing their freedom rather than denying it, then we can develop a model in which the findings on the other-direction of the late modern subject can be combined with the evidence for its inner-direction (see Ellrich, “Medialer” 382). In this way the objections of Richard Sennett against Riesman can also be taken into account. Sennett, in his study on the current situation regarding the relationship between private and public realms in 1974, had found that “Western societies are moving from something like an other-directed condition to an inner-directed condition” (Fall 5). With regard to this, however, Sennett did not affirm the idea of an increasing interiorization of norms as representatives of social order; with his thesis he rather aimed at the tendentially pathological self-image of individuals who react to the loosening of social constraints with narcissist projects of authenticity.

The Problem of Security and the Basic Fears of Modernism In considering the subjective potentials of freedom12 implied by the concept of “flexible normalism,” we also impose on the theory of normalism a specific burden of proof. Now it has to explain why under such favorable conditions that could provide for a great breadth of choices of individual selections and activities we encounter such remarkable accumulations of behavior and attitudes in the ‘middle range.’ It is specifically the flexible-normalist subject who in the most varied social fields or sectors makes decisions whose static record results in scenarios of distribution that can be represented by bell curves with slight shifts to the left or to the right.

12 It would be theoretically premature and unproductive if we were to denounce this potential of freedom as a neoliberalist projection or to just underline the connected emergence of novel constraints. Regarding the problems and facets of individual freedom in a ‘control society’ and the individuation of late modern subjectivity outside of the inner- or outer-directed character see Krassmann, esp. 112f.

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Lutz Ellrich If we look for explanations that do not take recourse to normative powers of obligation or validity for this,13 then first of all well known suggestions of interpretation have to be examined for their suitability. Gabriel Tarde, for example, takes basic mimetic needs into account and summarizes his ideas in the following way: “Already the mere knowledge that a large number of our contemporaries adhere to one opinion makes us want to decide in the same way” (6). In contrast, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann argues with a general human fear of isolation in the context of her theory of the ‘spiral of silence’ that can only be assuaged by conformist behavior and by adapting to existing majority opinions. Modern conditions of life in which increasingly anonymous conditions of communication step into the place of communal bonds increase this anthropologically deeply rooted discomfort, but they simultaneously also offer effective remedies by way of the mediated presentation of the others. The orientation on the average and on the majority and the resulting conformist behavior is not seen as a reaction to media appeals, normative insinuations or social constraints, but as an answer to the precarious situation of the individual in mass society by both authors. Link uses similarly strong arguments as well: The ‘open society’ of modernism and, in particular, of late modernism starting—depending on the criteria—in 1948 or 1968, generates, according to him, a dramatic “need for ‘assurance’ and ‘insurance’” (Link, Versuch 336).14 But why can’t this need be sufficiently fulfilled by fitting norms, regulations, rules, laws, etc.? And why don’t all those forms of routine, of everyday behavior, of habitualization, of institutionalization and crystallization suffice guaranteeing that which sociologists15 have always pointed at—the “orientation on the middle” (Link, Versuch 337)? In his answer to these questions, Link names the “exponential dynamics” (313, 336) of modernism as the decisive cause: All means that are oriented on duration and stability do not measure up to the “temporal structures of modern society.”16 Link describes normalization as an effect that almost inevitably results from the increasing functional differentiation of society and the escalation of speed with which the operations within the individual social sections proceed. And he assumes that it is enough to point out 13 Otherwise we would immediately concede that ‘normalism’ is only a hidden normativism. 14 Also Balke (“Frühe Soziologie” 74) stresses this. On the role of the insurance dispositive in modernism see Ellrich, “(Un)Berechenbarkeit.” 15 Link himself names Max Weber, Arnold Gehlen and the literary theoretician Viktor Šklovskij in Versuch 313. But he also could have named Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of ‘habituated fields’ that unfortunately is nowhere to be found in Versuch über den Normalismus. 16 This is the paradoxical terminology that Luhmann (“Zukunft”) has suggested.

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Normativity and Normality the two hardly disputable ‘social facts’ (namely, the clear processes of differentiation and acceleration) in order to explain why the “basic anthropological rhythms of life under modern conditions” are “dependent on normality” and specifically not on norms or crystalline institutions (Versuch 337). It seems to be a historical necessity that in “contemporary Western societies […] a functional dominance exists of ‘normality’ over ‘normativity’” (Link, “From” 18).17 Normative rules in the sense of clear regulations that prescribe what is right and what is wrong, what is demanded and what is forbidden are reshaped or replaced by scripts that furnish only gradual definitions within a continuum. Even though this epochal transformation of a social means of control admittedly defuses structural problems of modernism it creates new problems at the same time. Although the homogenizing of the different fields of action and events first of all creates the prerequisites for the “connectivity of social objectivities” (Link, Versuch 313), it elicits “an enormous fear” (Link, “From” 265) in the subjects who have to accept the softening of the sharp difference between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal.’ Link speaks of the “basic fear of modernism” culminating in the concern “not to be normal” (Versuch 337). Within the normalistic view of the world, two strategies are available for the management of this fear: Firstly, an “‘obsessive-compulsive orientation’ on rigid and fixed norms” that, however, “in many cases cannot be kept up” and becomes “‘façade-normality’, i.e., a ‘double-life’” and secondly, the “flexible-normalistic” orientation that enables subjects “to check out border areas of normality in order to find out where possible borders of normality are moving” so that “clear spaces” can be opened (Link, Versuch 337f). With the categorical means of the theory of normalism, it cannot be judged how far and with which results such explorations into unknown social areas can venture. Therefore, Friedrich Balke—following Gilles Deleuze—has attempted to sketch the model of a ‘nomadic distribution’ (“Frühe Soziologie” 77ff). The “fear of de-normalizing” here seems to have given way to a joy of sudden movements that cannot be measured or registered in homogenous fields of comparison. Link, however, is pointing out that “the longing for the intensities that were bracketed out and evacuated” easily “becomes a longing for forms of existence that principally cannot be normalized,” and therefore only represents a “new paradoxical form of the fear of denormalizing” (Versuch 435). Link’s diagnosis that flexible-normalistic (i.e., no longer primarily normatively oriented) subjects are also not protected against the

17 See also Link’s much more careful analyses, already quoted above, of the relationship of normality and normativity in Zum Anteil (4).

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Lutz Ellrich “basic fear of modernism” could awaken doubt in the notion that transnormative orientations of action in the conditions of late modernism are more efficient than, for example, moral norms. The new freedom of choice and action of humans freed from the net of rules is apparently quite limited. The flexible-normalistic subject, according to his or her own judgment, may not necessarily need the orientation that data place at the disposal of the broad majority. But the complete spectrum of his or her activities supplies us with a different image as soon as it is statistically measured. The “flexibility of the normalistic subject” does “not consist in the constant location at the fringes (this would entail too great a risk of abnormality), but in a relatively wide ‘breadth of oscillation’ that, however, oscillates around the average and therefore remains within it” (Link, Versuch 339). Lastly, Link’s stocktaking leads to the claim that even the “flexible person”18 has to (consciously or subconsciously) compensate for the dissolution of the clear normative differences between right and wrong. Link has to assume that the normalistic dispositives as such create a strange mixture of discomfort and relief in the subjects concerned. The sign stimulus eliciting discomfort and fear seems to be the phenomenon of ‘homogenization’19 (because of the concern connected with it that one could gradually and unknowingly slide into the fringes) while the specific ‘bell-shaped’ distribution of the events has an effect of relief. The bell-shaped ensemble of data therefore furnishes that modeling of the world that leaves the feeling of security and calm in the viewers most easily. It takes over the function of a model with the help of which the current events can be recorded and distributed via media in order to make the necessary society-wide coordination of individual activities possible. One of the noticeable attributes of Link’s Versuch über den Normalismus is that the so-called “basic fear of modernism” is described as a state of feeling that takes on much more dramatic forms and reaches down into much deeper existential levels than that “diffuse anxiety” that Riesman has denoted as the “control equipment” of the “other-directed character” (Riesman, Glazer, and Denney).20 The expression “basic fear” signalizes a sophisticated theoretical program that the concrete analysis, however, cannot meet. Probably it would be advantageous to the theory of normalism if its representatives could decide to discuss the problem that is addressed with the term ‘fear’ in connection with studies on modern forms of raised levels of awareness. It very likely would also be more productive to make the diagnosis historically and sociologically 18 On the fascination and problems of this type of thought see Sennett, Corrosion and Culture. 19 Here I mean the continual, homogenous arrangement of data in the field. 20 I am quoting from the key terms of the revised edition of 2001, p. 25.

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Normativity and Normality more precise instead of coloring it anthropologically. Then it could be sufficient to speak of a controversial crisis of orientation in late modernism on the one hand and on the other to not name as its causes such trivial factors as social processes of differentiation and the acceleration of processes of communication and action, but rather to invoke that “massive vulnerability” the eminent importance of which has been analyzed historically and systematically by Robert Castel (see 142ff, 336ff). If, however, the assumption is correct that the current ways of orientation have to prove their efficiency when dealing with an inevitable “basic fear of modernism,” then things might look bad for the program of flexible normalism. With which arguments then could the view be refuted that the substitution of sanctioning regulations with mediated notes and transcripts only works as a social fair weather strategy and that in times of crisis it would encourage a relapse into fundamentalist positions?21 And the series of misgivings along these lines could be continued without problems: Instead of reasonably substantiating norms or of practicing the difficult tasks of generating norms, the flexible-normalistic subject would then be blamed for operating in the mild climate of the freedom of choice within offered possibilities and for not being up to the turbulences and hardships connected to critical situations. Then it would show most markedly in these extreme situations that transnormative forms of orientation do not possess any internal strategies of immunization in order not to succumb to the attractiveness of simplistic strategies of problem solutions that work with pre-rational evaluations and assessments. It is easy to formulate the quintessence of such reservations: The claimed need of the subjects’ security can only be partially and temporarily supplied by way of normalistic concepts, without a lasting effect. The theory of normalism will only hold up to the impact of these critical questions if it concedes that the decisive problems of modernism are not deep and enigmatic but instead banal and insistent. This could be one of the concessions that could ring in the self-normalizing of the theory. The point of departure could be the understanding that the pathetically summoned notion of ‘basic fear’ appears only rarely. Thus, instead of invoking a state of feeling that only possesses a rare statistical value, the theory of normalism would find itself obliged to move daily misery and difficulties to the center of the analysis. Sharks and tigers from which one can escape are not the problem, as Brecht says; it’s the quite ordinary bedbugs that eat you up. 21 The fine difference between proto-normalistic attitudes and rigid norms that are unable to be rationally justified in this perspective of questioning is irrelevant anyway.

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Lutz Ellrich In this context, one becomes admittedly suspicious that remaining in the wide middle layers might be due to the secret allure to search here and nowhere else for salvation. In the passage quoted in the beginning, Sloterdijk has gotten to the bottom of this suspicion and has finally characterized normalism as a normative ‘program’ of modernism; he maintains that its quasi-metaphysical homage of the average can only be countered with a no less value-founded sense for eccentric attitudes (see Verachtung 42).22 This diagnosis—differing from the already discussed assertion that normalistic ways of orientation lead to an overtaxing of the subjects by raising the pressure for competition and responsibility—operates with the allusion to the destructive effects that inevitably have to arise when the average will become the general point of reference for action. It is not overtaxing which is the alleged problem; instead, it is the underchallenging which normalism produces given its corrosion of rational objective standards for the burdens and compensations of the chronically overstrained subjects. Therefore, the quintessence of these misgivings could be: Even though the security requirements of the individuals are satisfied normalistically, the price that society as a whole has to pay for it is too high. Hegel used the expression “bogging down in morass” (Kainz, par. 324, addition) for such conditions, aiming at the attitudes of that bourgeois who withdrew into a comfortable private life completely lacking any patriotic feeling that, if needed, would also give its own life for the fatherland. Hermann Schwengel likewise considers the production of the necessary new forces at the top of social life endangered: “Flexible normalism […] creates not a new but rather an inert middle that initially is only imitated in the coordination of elites, without calling upon the functional elites’ highly differentiated intelligence and competence” (239). However, all these objections and misgivings leave out that the modern processes of individualization offer fields of action and incentives to the individual whose subjective use can neither be effectively prevented by prohibitions or by warnings nor be forced by orders and directives. After the sweeping disintegration of the homogenous world-pictures offered by religions, myths and ideologies, today’s media-versed individuals mainly move expertly in the homogenous fields of data.23 They also reveal their potentials in such an 22 Sloterdijk develops his counter-program that amounts to a rejuvenation of a “psychology of a sense of self-value and powers of self-assertion” in his Zorn und Zeit (34). 23 Here homogeneity (the total linking of data) is seen rather as an exhilarating than as an intimidating phenomenon. One is almost bathing in the ‘flow’ of information. However, whether one should judge the displacement of the homogeneity of horizons of world-pictures by data-homogeneity as an epochal offer of compensation remains to be seen.

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Normativity and Normality offensive manner that in the first place the impression does arise that their activities could be hindered by excessive reflection or by way of the moderating effects of a mediocrity that has advanced into the defining culture. If objections against the normalistic concepts of orientation are appropriate, then they are appropriate with view to the liberated activism and rigorism of modern (respectively late modern) subjects that to a large extent have been freed of all safety latches and all inhibitions. That the ‘normative neutralization’ could veer into a radical normativism had already become an issue in Foucault’s ideas found in his late works. Two figures of the normalistic activism in which features of normatively directed decisiveness can be detected should be observed here with particular attention. (1) It is noteworthy that the representatives (i.e., the press speakers) of certain political, cultural, medical initiatives in public debates increase their use of normalistic rhetoric as soon as they are affected by the pressures of legitimation. Instead of the copiously analyzed discourse on the so-called normalizing of National Socialism, as a striking example the current method of dealing with problems of genetic technology can be named. To all appearances, we are dealing here with interventions advanced by specific interests wanting to establish an “alternative ethics” under the cover of an “alternative to ethics.” The advocates of each particular initiative declare that certain activities are already part of normality or that they can be used to finally establish normal conditions, thereby rectifying pathological deviations. If Link’s assumption is correct, then we are dealing here with an attitude that can be characterized as a “confident optimism of a transnormative type” pursuing a sort of “politics of happiness” that possibly has devastating consequences. Breeding-fantasies of all kinds find their anchor here: Sir Francis Galton, to whom the theory of normal distribution is indebted for his important stimuli, already reflected upon the advancement of the whole field in 1907; it obviously meant a lot to him that, for example in the realm of intelligence, “supernormality” should increase, should pull up the normal realm (i.e., the widespread realm of the average) thereby in the end thinning out “subnormality” (Link, “Normativität” 185, 195). In whatever way we interpret these examples, they show at least how easily normalistic inventories can be connected with normative impulses of different shades. Link himself falls into terminological difficulties when describing the phenomenon, making moral judgments for which he does not present any criteria: “To begin with, the very beneficial and politically correct positive possibilities of normalism should be stressed that result from its high suitability for the dy-

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Lutz Ellrich namic processes of modernism. Normalism in many cases was able to create a positive para- and transnormative acceptance because of its applicability to the masses, its continuum and its gradualism; in the long run, this acceptance also eliminated dated and harmful normativities, as was especially the case in the realms of the social, of sexuality and of disability. These are strong reasons for the clean conscience of the normalists, for example in the area of reproductive medicine.” (Zum Anteil 4)

(2) On a first glance, it may seem astonishing that the dynamics of growth in modernism, as far as it can be statistically covered and illustrated, exhibits a plurality of curve-landscapes presenting a similar profile. “In almost all main social sectors” as Friedrich Balke has established, “the developments [are oriented] automatically on the course of Gauss’ normal curve” (“Frühe Soziologie” 74). This ‘automatism’, about which Balke makes no further statements, could now emerge from the objective logic of the matter, or it could be the unrecognized product of a displacement of alternative types of ‘data-izing’ the world. If the normal curve indeed procures the feeling of security by way of the suggestive presentation of a tightly packed center and of two rarely frequented fringes, then it seems a likely supposition that at the back of the reassuring image of an ‘automatically’ normalizing course of the relevant social processes, a power is at work that does not show in the curves and diagrams. Far more decisively than Link, who uses the term “normalizing intention” (Versuch 300) in order to explain prevalent statistical ‘procedures of adjustment’, Balke connects the grounds for suspicion against the normal curve to a chain of evidence, thereby reaching the following conclusion: “The absolute dominance of Gauss’ normal curve […] demonstrates a ‘normalistic intention’ to intervene and to redistribute ‘success’ into, symbolically phrased,—admittedly always dynamically!—‘taking countermeasures’, and in fact always at the point when the real courses of development are documenting a denormalizing swing of the ‘numbers’, i.e., a thinning out of the middle zones and an increasing of the extreme values.” (“Frühe Soziologie” 74)

This view contains a large amount of requirements. Balke does not content himself with the assumption that every orientation of action within the strong middle area of the field of data implies the fundamental compliance of the acting persons to defend the statistical ‘hump’ with all their might. Instead, he is sketching quite confusingly dialectical conditions: On the one hand, the ‘deliberately’ normalistic modeling of the world is objective enough in order to also contain ‘numbers’ on extreme divergences from the median values, thereby furnishing a reason for corrective interventions whose clearly normative slogan is “The middle range should not be thinned

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Normativity and Normality out!” On the other hand, such ‘gaussoide’ images of the ‘data-ized’ events are so permanently emerging that the production of the normal appears as an automatism that is not dependent on any generating or intervening will. Therefore, the statistics appear in two completely different roles: here, as an intentionally anchored social construction creating images that the acting persons are using in a normalizing-securing, fear-alleviating way, and there, as a source (that has remained quite free of subjective soiling) from which we can deduce exact and therefore sometimes quite unsettling information about reality and its potential dangers. Intention confronts automatism, construction of reality faces reflection of reality. Maybe the intricate terminological design of this presentation can be made more plausible with the help of a feedback model. Thus, interventions show up as preventions, acts of will as belated allocations of automatic courses of events to a collective creator-subject. However, Balke’s text is not primarily revealing for its ambitious statements about structures and functions, causes and effects of a normalistic description of the world, but more so due to its clear identification of the normative idea that motivates groups or organizations to intervene in the social machinery in order to create room for the normal: the ‘normalistic will to intervention’ behind which one can even sense Nietzsche’s “will to power.”

Media as Agencies of Normalizing Reviewing the previous considerations, one might have the impression that the quantity and quality of the evidence for the independence of these transnormative ways of orientation—that are supposedly at home in all of today’s social spheres—is still exceedingly insufficient in order to fulfill the demands for explanations and validations of the theory of normalism. My analysis has repeatedly brought evidence to the surface pointing to the normative premises of normalism. This means that these findings awaken doubt in the thesis that in late modernism a relevant part of activity orientation is not directed by rules but by mediated notes and transcriptions. But maybe this impression will change if we take a closer look at the concrete use that the subjects are making of normalistic data. First of all, it becomes evident that media only function as “agencies of normalization” (Hickethier 42) because the recipients are ready and willing to interpret them as agents of self-normalization. Flexiblynormalistically motivated individuals clearly develop a new user profile. But this specific relationship to media is not only a phenomenon of reception. It therefore cannot be referred back to changed subjective attitudes and perspectives alone. Rather, it is the result

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Lutz Ellrich of a process that relates the subjective needs of media users with achievements of media. Today, media do not only offer imaginary worlds of wish fulfillment and artificial agitations or eliminations of ‘lust for fear.’ They do not only furnish impulses for consumption and formats of entertainment; they are simultaneously and even primarily authorities with which society observes itself or, to say this even more precisely, with which society observes the behavior and utterances of its members with the goal of communicating the data obtained back to society in order to thus provide the individuals with an orientation for their experience and action. The normalistic use of media implies a specific attitude about media whose importance within media theory has not been sufficiently reflected upon. That which now appears in a new light—saying it without beating about the bush—is the way in which world and media behave towards each other, because now they appear as ‘ontological twins’ whose phenomenal differences are the prerequisite for a functional coupling. The point of departure for the normalistic mentality of media is a typically modern experience. Both the ‘exterior’ world of things, events and fellow men, and the ‘interior’ world of feelings, intentions and needs present themselves as confusing and distressing areas that do not provide sufficiently structured guidelines on which one could directly orient oneself. Media, on the other hand, with their different formats that constantly combine redundant and novel material, make an extensive and nevertheless instructive supply of information available from which the users can choose whatever is profitable for them and employable for the construction of their own worldview. In the context of media use, the world becomes operable and the previously latent ways of behavior, options and opinions of our fellow men and women come to the forefront. To the qualitative determination of that which exists and is currently ‘in demand’ is added information on the quantitative distribution and the probable chances of success and risk that are of particular interest for individuals in need of orientation. Such knowledge can in no way—and this is the decisive point—be gained from direct experience. Only the offers from media (and especially the quantitatively exact ‘data-izing’ of behaviors and opinions, as well as the setting up of testing arenas in which trial behavior24 in prepared scenes can be observed) make available a knowledge which is so unquestionably usable that unpleasant results of its use are not primarily ascribed to the unsuitableness of the offered data, but instead to the acting 24 I mean game shows, talk shows, reality soaps, etc., that put areas of experimentation at our disposal in which can be discussed and (possibly by way of asking participants and viewers) also decided what currently is acceptable and what is not worth considering.

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Normativity and Normality individuals. When viewed specifically from practical points of view, the offers made by media seem to have no practical alternatives. Under the present circumstances, they alone grant the chance to find one’s way around the world. Of course, the possibility still exists that in the attempt to put into action behavioral patterns and ideas from the media, the acting persons are quasi put into their place by the world’s reality. But this ‘failure’ presents a special case that is calculable and from which one can easily prove that those who act could have informed themselves sufficiently in advance about the risks of their operations. Madame Bovary, who takes over her ideas on love from the mass media, namely from trivial romances, and who believes that the fruits of her reading endeavors can also be gathered in reality, would have been warned ahead of time today (in case she were ready to take over a normalistic reception attitude) with a single glance at statistical material or relevant findings of documentaries, and she would have been able to define the degree of probability for her failure quite precisely. Flexible normalistic persons recognize that the media offer something that the ‘direct’ meeting with the world does not—or does not any more—grant. Therefore, they are far removed from confusing their lives or their work with the data and stagings of the media (shows, spectacular cases, etc.). They respect the media as producers of a both encompassing and condensed representation of the modern world that in its entirety, complexity and multiplicity eludes the individual and his or her clearly limited possibilities of experience more and more. Thus, a high degree of media awareness and the increasing interest in the development of media competence count among the characteristic qualities of the practicing ‘normalist.’ The media provide him or her with orientational options because he or she experiences them as technical achievements that are manifested in their excellent function and uses them accordingly. The media are useful because what they have to offer differs distinctly from the world, i.e., from the mode in which the world emerges as something chaotic and unfathomable. Without hiding it, the media provide a construction of the world, especially of the social world, that can be used for establishing purposes of action. It is specifically with this quality that the media as important innovations come to the fore. By virtue of their technical-material qualities and their symbolic means of representation they are accessible for the direct experiences of the users, while the world, as it ‘is’, appears as a sphere that is changed into a zone in which subjects can only act in a meaningful and promising way with the help of the mediated presentations.

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Lutz Ellrich Normalists are immune against irritating questions regarding truth, even though they perceive media as media and interpret this perception neither as an effect of a disturbance nor as a fascinating result of an artificial special perspective but instead as a ‘normal’ social interaction. Cognitive or operative practices in which the ‘functional mechanisms’ of media are unveiled do not bring on irritations or even shocks because ‘true’ statements about the condition of ‘mediality’ precisely do not diminish the orientational achievements of media but rather strengthen their acceptance as an admirable evolutionary achievement for the overcoming of problems. The manifestation of media as authorities of data-based structuring, selection, reduction, etc., that step, so to speak, like an umbrella between the world and the subjects, can certainly only strengthen the validity of media if the subjects attribute a higher importance to orientational accomplishments than to questions of truth. Only under this condition does media consciousness become central. What is now mostly at stake is to make the world (such as it inflicts itself on us immediately) undergo a process of transformation that makes it operable without pressing the means that are used for this into a state of latency. The pronounced consciousness of media alone immunizes against a naïve belief in the mediated world. Educational campaigns on the manipulability of signs, images, statistics (see Krämer), etc., are therefore not necessary. The accomplishment of media is not seen in the fact that they create a completed construction of the world, but in that they supply us with a clearly laid out, manageable set of building components for our own construction of a social system of reference and action. In the background of this flexible-normalistic attitude governs no metaphysically based ‘will to intervene’. Rather, it is conspicuously noticeable that there exists a readiness and an ability to make decisions that is not paralyzed by the abundance of material made available by the media. The inevitable choice that refers back to— previously already mentioned several times—the sufficiently prestructured assortment of data, scenes, test-arenas and discourses of media is more of a pleasure than a torture. Appeals, challenges, super-ego announcements and other normative insinuations are not necessary requirements for finding a position within the wide field of data. Media (neither because of direct commands nor via indirect control) follow in the footsteps of educational authorities; they are not the new administrators of the ‘thou shall.’ From the perspective of the flexible normalistic subjects they only submit offers from which the subjects can choose something and adopt it. Whether this voluntary and liberal manner is possible only if the subjects trust that the social order in which they can move naturally remains stabilized by a wide average zone (even though it may be

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Normativity and Normality quite flexible) is after all still an open question. We are still waiting for the empirically productive studies. At least we have the results of studies that have analyzed the ‘digital elite’ as a ‘core group’ of flexible normalism (see Ellrich, “Medialer”).25 They suggest: When people use media and their presentations for reassurance this does not echo the ‘content’ of the media, i.e., not the statistical average values and the suggestive images of often visited ‘hump’-areas, but they rely on the masterly utilizability of technically advanced apparatuses. The fact that with computer technology an instrument exists that offers unheard-of possibilities for the opening up of the world and the transformation of it, stabilizes more than does the knowledge about the sucking effect of the average middle realm. The members of the ‘digital elite’ are therefore also immune against a “mass-oriented ‘ethics of the normalistic salvation’” (Link, “Normativität” 205). At the moment, these findings can only be transferred conditionally to all social actors and fields; it is, however, quite possible that the developments in the techniques of information and communication give a new orientation to the human needs for security or that they at least provide a new area for our projections. The theory of normalism can contribute to the investigation of those modifications that affect the future importance of alternative concepts of orientation and protection. It is, after all, not predetermined to locate the transnormative elements of normalistic ensembles of data between an anonymous automatism and a (collective, group-specific, or heroic-individual) ‘will to intervene’, or to let it oscillate between these two poles. If it remained in such topological determinations, its sociological relevance would be limited. Friedrich Balke has probably observed this as well since he suggests reading “Link’s Versuch über den Normalismus as a spelling out” of that social border-paradox that Deleuze and Guattari have worked out in their Anti-Oedipus: “Briefly speaking, the ‘paradox of the normality border’ consists of the fact that despite all the dynamics of deterritorialization, there absolutely has to be a border—even under the conditions of flexible normalism—but this border can no longer demand any ontological dignity, but has at all times only provisory validity and is merely a statistical one.” (Balke, “Zwang” 142)

The patterns of attitudes and practices of the ‘digital elite’ exemplarily show how merely provisional points of reference and a simultaneous orientation on media-provided data can be productively handled. This group of persons expressly sees media as agents of a transnormative attitude with respect to the social world and the interactions that have to occur within it between present or absent 25 See also Ellrich, “Digitale Elite” and further material in that anthology.

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Lutz Ellrich subjects. With this, the members of the ‘digital elite’ affirm the assumption of the theory of normalism that the gradual replacement of normative perspectives with alternative ones that are not based on rules, demands and obligations of regulation, was and is only possible in the context of two simultaneously proceeding processes, namely on the one hand by creating data of all relevant social events and on the other through the distribution of the data by mass media in the different formats or representations (report, advertisement, games, case-histories or script, image, info-graphics, etc.). But does this concept of media conform to the actual practice of media after all? How can proficient users—at a quick glance—arrive at such a one-dimensional view considering the wide range of media offers? And aren’t especially the mass media subtle advocates and unscrupulous propagandists of the “thou shall” in all its variants and nuances? I have already previously discussed the notion that the role of the Super-Ego in the mental economy of the subjects is appropriated today by mass media. This assertion was refuted by a critique of the concept of internalization. But how can we, with the diagnostic means of the theory of normalism, confront the consideration that the media (press, television, and internet) vociferously pursue late modern society’s moral self-alarming? The evidence can hardly be challenged: Thus, the media with the help of ostentatiously staged scandals submit their public— comprised of acting persons and viewers, participants and non-participants—to a sort of continual purgatory that nobody can ignore. The level of a general hyper-moral indignation is kept extremely high by the constant addition of new factual statements that are brought into the open. When one looks more closely (Ziemann 72ff), one can see that the presentation of normative contents and standards by the media dulls rather than sharpens the criteria for ‘correct’ and ‘wrong’ behavior, for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ attitudes. Even though the binary code of moral judgment and censure remains astonishingly constant, nevertheless the objects, the perspectives of observers, the conceptions of consequences, etc., end up in the undertow of arbitrariness. Morals become a worn-out passion that briefly swirls up and then collapses. Fury, rage, aggression are directed towards persons and well-known institutions and, at the same time, the impression arises that it is the principle of chance that decides which facts of the matter and which originators happen to have landed in the view of the media. The normative appeals do not aim at concrete exemplary behavior that eliminates the grievances; instead, they aim at the production of entertainment values and at the measurable profit of that just as quickly agitated as van-

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Normativity and Normality ishing attention, the ‘viewer-treasure’ so sought after as a scarce commodity. In this way, the media as ‘makers of morals’ permanently call up powers of commitment whose sources they simultaneously cause to run dry by conjuring up countless cases of corruption and sin in an inflationary way. In these spectacles of scandalous behavior, no ideas of normative validity can emerge, no stable rules for doing or not doing something but, at best, subjective calculation can emerge with which the fact of the ‘lapse’ as something ‘normal’ is taken just as much into account as the everyday-moral practices that have become the agenda of the media (mostly on the occasion of catastrophes) that stand the test in gratuitous emergency and welfare services, in charity fund-raising campaigns, citizen’s initiatives and sometimes also in forms of a neo-heroic readiness to make sacrifices. Ultimately then, it is especially the spectacles of media operating with normatively directed appeals, compromising exposures and signals of alarm that refer the viewers back to themselves. It is their free decision what they do with the offers made by the media, how they can weigh the different offers and what meaning is given especially to the ostentatious data regarding average behavior. For in contrast to the scenarios of the widely appreciated approach of rational choice, the normalism-theoretical inventories do not provide any criteria (and especially not rational ones) for decisions for individual action. Rather, they free the subject (if we disregard the occasional scruples of the discursively influential authors).26 And this freedom extends so far that surveying the transnormative landscapes of data in late modernism can also lead to a ‘moral point of view’—although it certainly does not have to. Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

26 For such a form of subjective autonomy, sociological analyses rarely provide a prominent space, especially not those theories that explain human behavior through recourse to norms. Moral philosophy on this point is much more sensitive. As an example I would like to point only to Ernst Tugendhat’s thesis that the “moral judgment” cannot be understood correctly without taking into account “moments of autonomy” or respectively the figure of “I want to” (89, 62).

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Works Cited Balke, Friedrich. “Eine frühe Soziologie der Differenz: Gabriel Tarde.” Eigentlich könnte alles auch anders sein. Ed. Peter Zimmermann and Natalie Binczek. Cologne, 1998. 55-82. Print. —. “Der Zwang zum ‘Habitus’.” Link, Loer, and Neuendorff 135-149. Print. Barbour, William, ed. Mass Media: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego, 1994. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, 2000. Print. Brecht, Bertolt. “Epitaph für M.” Gesammelte Werke. By Brecht. Vol. 3. Frankfurt a.M., 1967. 942. Print. Castel, Robert. Die Metamorphosen der sozialen Frage. 1995. Frankfurt a.M., 2000. Print. Ehrenberg, Alain. Das erschöpfte Selbst. 1998. Frankfurt a.M., 2004. Print. Ellrich, Lutz. “Die ‘digitale Elite’ als Impulsgeber für sozialen Wandel.” Medien der Gesellschaft—Gesellschaft der Medien. Ed. Andreas Ziemann. Konstanz, 2006. 141-160. Print. —. “Medialer Normalismus und die Rolle der ‘digitalen Eliten’.” Gute Gesellschaft? Zur Konstruktion sozialer Ordnung. Ed. Jutta Allmendinger. Opladen, 2001. 372-398. Print. —. “Semantik und Paradoxie.” Germanistik und Komparatistik. Ed. Hendrik Birus. Munich, 1995. 378-398. Print. —. “Die (Un)Berechenbarkeit des Schlimmsten.” Transkriptionen 6 (2006): 12-15. Print. Foucault, Michel. An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York, 1990. Print. Vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality. 3 vols. 19771986. Freud, Sigmund. “The Passing of the Oedipus-Complex.” Clinical Papers: Papers on Technique. By Freud. Trans. Joan Riviere. 8th ed. London, 1953. 269-276. Print. Funken, Christiane. “Einleitung: Künstliche Grenzen.” Introduction. Soziologischer Eigensinn. By Funken. Opladen, 2002. 7-28. Print. Habermas, Jürgen. Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston, 1989. Print. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, 2000. Print. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Jenaer Schriften 1801-1807. Frankfurt a.M., 1970. Print. Henry, Jules. Culture Against Man. New York, 1963. Print. Hickethier, Knut. “Katastrophenmelder, Skandalisierungsinstrument und Normalisierungsagentur: Die Risiken der Medien.” Ästhetik und Kommunikation 33.16 (2002): 41-46. Print.

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Normativity and Normality Horton, Donald, and Richard Wohl. “Mass Communications and Para-social Interactions: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.” Psychiatry 19.3 (1956): 215-229. Print. Imhof, Kurt, Otfried Jarren, and Roger Blum, eds. Integration und Medien. Opladen, 2002. Print. Kainz, Howard P. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, with Marx’s Commentary: a Handbook for Students. The Hague, 1974. Print. Krämer, Walter. So lügt man mit Statistik. Frankfurt a.M., 1998. Print. Krassmann, Susanne. “Regieren über Freiheit: Zur Analyse der Kontrollgesellschaft in foucaultscher Perspektive.” Kriminologisches Jour. 31.1 (1999): 107-121. Print. Laing, Ronald D. The Politics of Experience. New York, 1967. Print. Lethen, Helmut. Verhaltenslehren der Kälte. Frankfurt a.M., 1994. Print. Link, Jürgen. “Aspekte der Normalisierung von Subjekten.” Infografiken, Medien, Normalisierung. Ed. Ute Gerhard, Link, and Ernst Schulte-Holtey. Heidelberg, 2001. 77-92. Print. —. “From the ‘Power of the Norm’ to ‘Flexible Normalism:’ Considerations after Foucault.” Cultural Critique 57 (2004): 14-32. Print. —. “Normativität versus Normalität: Kulturelle Aspekte des guten Gewissens im Streit um die Gentechnik.” Biopolitik und Rassismus. Ed. Martin Stingelin. Frankfurt a.M., 2005. 184-205. Print. —. “Normativ oder Normal?” Normalität und Abweichung: Studien zur Theorie und Geschichte der Normalisierungsgesellschaft. Ed. Werner Sohn and Herbert Mehrtens. Opladen, 1999. 30-44. Print. —. Versuch über den Normalismus. Opladen, 1996. Print. (2nd expanded ed. 1999). —. Zum Anteil des Normalismus an der Problematik von Selbstbestimmung und Eigenverantwortung in der Biomedizin: Zehn Thesen. Berlin, 2006. MS. Link, Jürgen, Thomas Loer, and Hartmut Neuendorff, eds. ‘Normalität’ im Diskursnetz soziologischer Begriffe. Heidelberg, 2003. Print. Luhmann, Niklas. Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. 4 vols. Frankfurt a.M., 1993-1999. Print. —. “Die Zukunft kann nicht beginnen: Temporalstrukturen der modernen Gesellschaft” [“The Future Cannot Start: Temporal Structures of Modern Society”]. Vor der Jahrtausendwende: Bericht zur Lage der Zukunft. Ed. Peter Sloterdijk. Frankfurt a.M., 1990. 119-150. Print. McQuail, Denis. Mass Communication Theory. London, 1994. Print. Mitscherlich, Alexander. Auf dem Weg zur vaterlosen Gesellschaft. Munich, 1963. Print.

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Lutz Ellrich Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. Die Theorie der Schweigespirale: Öffentliche Meinung und soziale Kontrolle. Munich, 1980. Print. Reize, Helmut, and Christa-Maria Ritzer, eds. Massenkommunikation VII: Eine Langzeitstudie zur Mediennutzung und Medienbewertung 1964-2005. Baden-Baden, 2006. Print. Riesman, David, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven, 1961. Print. Schwengel, Hermann. Globalisierung mit europäischem Gesicht. Berlin, 1999. Print. Sennett, Richard. The Corrosion of Character. New York, 1998. Print. —. The Culture of New Capitalism. New Haven, 2005. Print. —. The Fall of Public Man. London, 1992. Print. Sloterdijk, Peter. Die Verachtung der Massen. Frankfurt a.M., 2000. Print. —. Zorn und Zeit. Frankfurt a.M., 2006. Print. Tarde, Gabriel. L’opinion de la foule. Paris, 1901. Print. Tugendhat, Ernst. Vorlesungen über Ethik. Frankfurt a.M., 1993. Print. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Grenzen der Normalisierung. Frankfurt a.M., 1998. Print. —. Ordnung im Zwielicht. Frankfurt a.M., 1987. Print. Ziemann, Andreas. Soziologie der Medien. Bielefeld, 2007. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. Parallaxe. Frankfurt a.M., 2006. Print. —. Die politische Suspension des Ethischen. Frankfurt a.M., 2005. Print.

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Mass Media Are Effective: On an Aporetic Cunning of Evidence ISABELL OTTO

The Crisis in Effects Analysis In the self-historicizing efforts propagated in the textbooks of communications studies regarding media effect analysis, the 1940s through the 1960s are perceived as a period of disillusionment and revision. Following a time in which one had believed in the extremely powerful effects of media, with the help of intricate empirical methods it became evident through these studies that media have only a limited effect on their users (see for example Burkart 191197; Schenk 57f). At the end of the 1960s, the social psychologist William McGuire accordingly sketched a pessimistic picture of the research situation: “A tremendous amount of applied research has been carried out to test the effectiveness of the mass media by those who work in the marketing, advertising, and political-behavior areas” (227). However, according to McGuire, for those responsible for such testing campaigns, the results have been extraordinarily unsatisfactory since the determined media effects were extremely weak. It was, according to him, not to be proven empirically that mass media change the attitudes of their users and especially not in such all-encompassing behavioral complexes like decision-making for purchasing or voting. It is not only the impossibility to plan the effects of media in the sense of commercial and political interests that McGuire is pointing to with his reference to the lack of evidence; it is a fundamental crisis in which the effects analysis of media finds itself soon after its institutionalization.1 By stating that the effect of media is at best very minor, a prominent and until then quite influential procedure of making the media user visible becomes problematic, a procedure that exists especially in proving the effects of media empirically. In this essay I will analyze how the effects analysis of media entangled itself in this crisis. The cunning of evidence, “mass media 1

For the diagnosis of this crisis see Noelle-Neumann, “Einfluß”.

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Isabell Otto are effective”—and this is my initial consideration—was characterized since the earliest times of audience research by an aporia: effects analysis cannot be successful in making a media public visible because its claims are contradistinctive. But effects analysis pursues these claims not only because it aims at the proof of successful persuasion or media effects but also because it wants to hide the fundamental trick that is at work during the evident process of making the media public visible: a greater part of the research attempts not only to itemize media users in lists of numbers, but to represent them directly as ‘living individuals.’ My following thoughts will focus on texts from the subject area of empirical research that have found a prominent place in the selfhistoricizing of the effects analysis of media. This means that we are dealing with a field of tension within research, a self-produced problem that leads to a mutual conflict of the ‘operative fictions’ of research. At the center will be the self-historicizing and empirical studies by Paul Lazarsfeld and his collaborators.2 This orientation develops not only on methodological grounds. Rather, apart from analyzing how audience research gets into a crisis, it is also a question of how the history of textbooks is dealing with the aporetic cunning of evidence and the resulting crisis.

Success Goal: Persuasion When a scholarly undertaking developed at the beginning of the 20th century dealing with the empirical measuring of media use and when this undertaking found entrance into the research institutes as ‘listener research’ or ‘audience research’, then from the beginning the question of the effects of media took center stage. Often done at the request of radio stations, advertisement agencies or within the framework of propaganda research, the intent of empiricizing the use of media focused mostly on answering the question of effects, and this meant reliably proving whether and how the individual media user connects to media communications. This direction of research therefore takes its point of departure from communication and persuasion. Communication is seen as the process “by which an individual (the communicator) transmits stimuli (mostly verbally) in order to change the behavior of other individuals (the public)” (Schenk 13).3

2 3

Lazarsfeld is considered the founder of effect centered audience research in the USA. See for example Schramm. The experimentally working social psychologist Carl I. Hovland is considered the main representative of persuasion research—apart from Paul F.

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Mass Media Are Effective Since the audience research takes persuasion, “the real goal of rhetorical, i.e., strategic-communicative practice” (Knape, col. 874), as its central point of reference, an important trace of its genealogy can be tracked back into the theories of rhetorics in antiquity. According to this trace, one could assume that media effect analysis emerges because the preconditions of traditional rhetorics no longer exist, i.e., because communication is no longer a communication that is situatively limited to those present. Under the conditions of communication over distance with the help of technical media of distribution exactly these media become the objects of research for the rhetorical-communicative interests (see Knape, col. 880f). The way in which the analysis of media effects places itself within the antique tradition of rhetorics, however, goes beyond the utilization of rhetorical means: effects analysis not only uses it simply in order to persuade the media users; it uses these means primarily in order to make the media user, who has become invisible, visible as a part of the dispersed public of the technical media of distribution. As I will show, the central rhetorical medium here is the procedure of evidencing. Reasoning and the evidential visualization that mass media are effective are procedures that make the invisible public of technical media of distribution visible with the help of empirical methods. We are dealing here with a ‘cunning of evidence’ in the sense that the addressee of persuasion is in the first place a fabrication arising out of the employed persuasive techniques. In order to measure media utilization, audience research is using empirical procedures of quantification from the pool of a tradition that since the late 17th century has made the realm of the social describable with the help of mathematical probability theories and statistics. Audience research in this sense measures the media public. It translates the use of media into a “language of numbers”4 and makes the media public visible in statistical lists. This quantification via statistics abbreviates the use of media; this means it presents a complex social connection as something immediately plausible. As Rüdiger Campe has shown, the tradition of antique rhetorics thrives in the statistical tables of modernism. Representations of statistics follow the rules of a rhetorical formula in order to produce evidence because they show instead of speaking; in the rhetorical sense, they are image and not text. They are figures of the ante oculos ponere, i.e., they follow a technique of almost pictorially ‘placing before the eyes.’ The statistical table, according to Campe, can be compared with a quite specific technique of evidencing, namely with

4

Lazarsfeld, who is centrally located in the following considerations. See Hovland, Janis, and Kelley. See for this the textbook on social statistics by Hans Zeisel (Sprache).

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Isabell Otto enumeratio that can be found at the end of a speech as a recapitulative enumeration. As a figure of abbreviation, the table makes something complex clearly visible in a condensed form and not, as it were, “because of semantic attributes like sensuality or liveliness, but as an effect of spatializing repetition, changing narration and discussion into something simultaneous and graphematic” (Spiel 241). The table repeats the social issues which it has extensively measured and tabularizes its statistical regularities. In its self-conception, statistics gives an image of a social structure and illustrates it. However, the social structure to which a table like this refers becomes visible only via that reference. Felix Keller in his Archäologie der Meinungsforschung has explained the performative aspect of the statistical test. The universe referred to in this test is not the social issue that has to be described, but rather is based all along on a construction: “The illustration says what it is recording, not what it is representing. Already the reference of the test is to a mapping of the social […]. Even more: the representation itself is producing the ‘map’, a catalogue of society” (160). As Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking have made plausible in several cases, the statistical method is situated within the frame of a bio-power (see Foucault, Security 1). Ostensibly, the immense bureaucratic machine that has been created as a result of the collections of statistics only supplies information. But it is itself a part of the technologies of power in a modern state creating determining classifications (see Hacking). In his remarks on Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78, Foucault assigns the statistical compilation to the ‘dispositives of security’ that begin to administer and attempt to normalize the behavior of the population since the 18th century. Statistics and the calculations of theories of probability create a curve of normal distribution whose technique consists in trying “to reduce the most unfavorable, deviant normalities in relation to the normal, general curve, to bring them in line with this normal, general curve” (62). From the random selection and interviewing of a group of people via the statistical projection in line with theories of probability to the condensation of the results in a tabularized representation, processes are manufactured that remain invisible in the evidence of statistical listings. The end product of the statistical table also shortens the path of its production. The specific trick of this social statistical evidence consists in the performativity of the representation. This trick is also at work when the media public is measured and media statistics become especially persuasive when they can show a causal relationship between medium and user. It is furthermore important that audience research is not only using the tradition of social statistics with all its implications from

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Mass Media Are Effective the rhetorical tradition methodically, but also that it multifariously comments in self-historicizing stories—recounted as success stories—on how it sees itself in the relationship with this tradition. The research program of the school of Paul Lazarsfeld, who is referred to in the history of textbooks as the founding father of effect analysis, conceptualizes this tradition on a historical backdrop.

Living Statistics Already the first editions of the study Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community that had been conducted by Marie Jahoda, Paul Lazarsfeld and Hans Zeisel by the end of the 1930s and that widely qualifies as the ‘grounding’ text of sociography has an appendix, “Toward a History of Sociography,” in which the research program of the Lazarsfeld School is clearly pointed to. This appendix by Hans Zeisel describes a history of the successes of social studies that culminates in the study on Marienthal. In his foray into the tradition of social studies, Zeisel attributes important positions to the Belgian astronomer and social statistician Adolphe Quételet and the French sociologist Fréderic Le Play in the development of the sociographic method. Each of the two scholars represents one of the two poles that the Viennese group of scholars was attempting to synthesize. The text characterizes Quételet’s decisive achievement with his having related a statistics based on theories of probability to the entirety of human behavior. Quételet, according to him, made the social realm measurable and—oriented to the law of large numbers—uncovered the reasons for behavior in a form of statistical dependencies. However, Zeisel is criticizing the manner in which Quételet chooses his data because supposedly he simply evaluated incidentally yielded statistics of administration: crimes, divorces, children out of wedlock or school attendance. For the adequate description of social facts, leftovers such as these are too crude and insufficient, Zeisel maintains. Only the idea of surveying detailed characteristics as an inventory of one’s own inquiries approaches the solution of the problem. Zeisel sees this idea of inventory realized by Le Play, who, in his so-called family monographs, had drawn up complete inventories of the yearly budgets of 36 European workers’ families and in which he thoroughly recorded and detailed all his procedures. Zeisel describes Le Play’s monographs in contrast to the mere quantification of social life as an “actual image of life itself:” “It had been Le Play’s desire to replace the ‘dead rows of figures’ of the statistical survey with a living inventory and attention to graphic detail” (111).

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Isabell Otto The Viennese group of scholars then is concerned with arriving at a synthesis of the ‘dead rows of figures’ of an objectifying statistics and the living inventory of detailed characteristics, a ‘living statistics,’ as it were.5 Zeisel further pursues this field of tension through the tradition of sociography. It is therefore not surprising that he finds his decisive solution in the investigative work of the developmental psychologist Charlotte Bühler in Vienna, in which for the first time statistical methods were applied for assessing psychological characteristics of the individual; the research group of Paul Lazarsfeld and his students of the Marienthal study stems from Charlotte Bühler’s school. Lazarsfeld himself also underlines this connection even forty years later: “I was part of an academic institution where it would have been uninteresting to simply count numbers” (“Zwei Wege” 198). And in the introduction to the new edition of the Marienthal study, he writes: “We could not be satisfied with simply ‘counting’ units of behavior; it was our ambition to gather complex forms of experience empirically. The often maintained contradiction between ‘statistics’ and phenomenological abundance was from the beginning of our work both suspended and preserved, because it was precisely the synthesis of the two approaches that seemed to us the true challenge.” (“Vorspruch” 14)

In its research program, the school of Lazarsfeld was aiming at an interplay of methods that in the later social studies were controversially discussed in most cases under the heading ‘quantitative vs. qualitative’ (see Merton, Coleman, and Rossi). Furthermore, the synthesis of objectifying statistics and living inventory, i.e., the scheme to provide the average man of Quételet with the individual characteristics of Le Play can be understood as the attempt to conceal the trickery of producing evidence while surveying the social realm, which is simultaneously a matter of representation and production. To be more exact: the performative aspect of the abbreviatory statistical tabulation is supposed to remain masked by opposing it with details that pretend to have in themselves caught the living social reality.

5

Zeisel’s juxtaposition of ‘living inventory’ and ‘dead statistics’ is irritating if we follow François Ewald’s remarks on the question that the calculation with probabilities demands a more and more detailed statistical register in the sense of an “infinite inventory” (181). Zeisel’s appeal for a ‘living statistics’ probably has to be seen together with the critique of Quételet’s average man that Ewald characterizes as having difficulty with the sociological de-centering of the subject (see Ewald 191).

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Mass Media Are Effective But also the itemizing and reviving procedures are in a rhetorical sense techniques of illustration, i.e., figures of evidence.6 The attempted synthesis by the school of Lazarsfeld only weighs two formulas of evidence against each other that follow contrary paths of illustration. As Campe has shown, the lack of ‘semantic qualities like sensuality or liveliness’ in the statistical table is supposed to be compensated for—however, without again losing the effect of evidence of the abbreviating-productive representation. What the Lazarsfeld School in reality rejects in the statistical enumeratio is the affective component that is supposed to evoke an immediate insight into the represented problems. The rhetorical affect is supposed to be produced by detailing dramatic descriptions of individual cases (for example in the Marienthal study). The envisioned program is insofar problematic as Quételet, with his concept of the average man, is specifically attempting to find the general law spanning the differences of the individual phenomena. According to Quételet, the individual cannot be recognized directly. In order to be able to make statements about it, it is necessary to combine the plurality of individuals into a collective. Only if one surveys a great number of individuals and interprets the statistical enumeration with the help of probability calculation and represents it in the normal curve is one permitted an insight into a society that is not visible on the level of individuals. Quételets collective subjects then individualize the individual with regard to the collective (see Ewald 171-206; Daston). His anti-psychological and anti-individualistic conviction that regular patterns only become visible on the social level is not acknowledged by the Lazarsfeld School. Their program to reintroduce the substantial experiential world of the individual persons surveyed into the ‘dead statistics’—with the help of case studies modeled on those of Le Play—measured through Quételet’s concept would not be a revitalization but simply a survey that loses the surveyed from its view. If one understands statistical recording as a prominent procedure of normalization, then according to Foucault this process implies a standardized individualization: individualization with view to a collective. This means that the research group around Lazarsfeld programmatically suppressed the program of individualizing statistics in order to point out this very program in a following step as a desideratum for research. In this way then could their own research be positioned. The simultaneity of normalization and individualization in the Lazarsfeld School is problematic7—as it is already fore6 7

For the procedure of particularization see Kemmann, col. 40. For the different procedures of creating evidence see Campe, “Evidenz”. Regarding normalization as individualization see for example Michel Foucault, Discipline.

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Isabell Otto shadowed in the research program of the Marienthal study. Here the ‘individual’ is conceived of in a way that can be understood rather as a variant of the counter-program for the “dissolution of individuality”8 in the 20th century. The unique individual of the phenomenological case study in this counter-concept is in its self-conception also not congruent with the notion of ‘case,’ described as it was by Foucault as the decisive element of the ‘security dispositives:’ a case, “which is not the individual case, but a way of individualizing the collective phenomenon” (Security 60). Conversely, the ‘living inventory’ of the Lazarsfeld School is aiming at showing an individual that pretends to be able to directly grasp the social reality of the single person outside of the average realm. The ruse of this abbreviation, consisting in first of all manufacturing social facts with the help of a ‘map of the social,’ is kept invisible throughout this operation by propagating a realistic claim9 to the abbreviating representation of the social realm. Two exemplary observations of research projects—the first media study and then the first media effects analysis—in each of which Lazarsfeld and his collaborators proceeded according to the described research program, will show how difficult it is to solve this problem. As will be shown in the following paragraph, the Lazarsfeld School swings from one pole to the other in this field of tension without being able to rewrite and synthesize the concepts of traditional social statistics and sociography.

The Traditional Listener Lazarsfeld’s first media study was contracted in 1931 by the “RadioVerkehrs-A.G.,” RAVAG for short. This study surveyed Austrian radio audiences regarding their preferences for programs. Under the title “RAVAG-Studie,” it became a classic of empirical studies. Although prior to this study research had already been done that had undertaken to survey the radio audience—for example the ratings that had been carried out by American poling institutes. In these early forms of audience surveys, as for example Paul Neurath describes, it was only a matter of the “pure number of listeners […], only the program ratings without any further differentiations, which listeners were listening to what programs” (11). It is precisely here that the above-mentioned discourse of an effect analysis that makes

8

9

See Sonntag 232: “The boom of psychology/ies in the 20th century is anything but a proof for the growing social importance of individuality; it rather testifies to its standardization.” A claim that Quételet for example never made. See Ewald 190.

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Mass Media Are Effective self-historicizing attempts sees the novelty of Lazarsfeld’s listener survey: Lazarsfeld redirects the perspective of observation away from the mere program ratings—the ‘dead numbers’—to a more differentiated perspective of the ‘living inventory.’ The basic concept of the RAVAG study is to make a connection between the program demands of the listeners and their social structure, i.e., to correlate age, gender, occupation, and place of residence in correlation with program preferences because ‘to only count would be uninteresting.’ The RAVAG study then has the goal to compile social activities in a differentiated, detailed manner; it is also concerned with a ‘living statistics.’ However, it approaches the matter in the following way: The study asks the individual listener about his or her opinion concerning the individual radio programs. The listeners are supposed to judge it with the symbols +, - or =, depending on whether they want to hear more or less of a certain program or whether they agree with it. The following quote shows that we encounter the same problem here: “We have pondered for a long time how one could devise the statistic in such a way that the opinion of the listeners comes out as correctly as possible and that we nevertheless succeed in understandably representing the results. […]10 Let us assume that all senders would come into a hall and they would vote on the broadcast; those who would want more should clap, those who would want less should hiss and those who are content should be quiet. RAVAG would listen and depending on whether the hissing or the clapping is stronger, they would know whether more or less of the broadcast is demanded. Silence— according to the old Roman saying—would mean an agreement with the present state; the same would go for a mutual suspension of clapping and hissing. In this way the listeners as a whole would utter an opinion and RAVAG would understand it, to the extent as their ‘listeners’ were up to this concert. This image now can be very easily conveyed with one single number. We take the percentage of the clappers (the + group) and subtract from it the percentage of the hissers (the—group). […] With the help of such a number—which one would call a coefficient (C)—one can now easily come to an understanding.” (Lazarsfeld, “Hörerbefragung” 27f)

It becomes quite clear that the empirical execution of a ‘living statistics’ looks altogether different from what is being claimed. Because, as Dominik Schrage quite aptly remarks, “already in the date of the filled out questionnaires […] the subjective element of each participation in radio programs is reduced to the minimum ‘+,’ ‘-’ and ‘=’” (309). Via the statistical evaluation of the date then the sum of the 10 It is striking to what extent the contradictory claim to an ‘abbreviatory itemization’ or a ‘living statistics’ aporia is also inscribing itself even in the sense of rhetorics. Searching for the correct solution therefore is staged as an obvious uncertainty. Regarding this thought see Matuschek.

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Isabell Otto audience opinions is melted down into an average opinion of the public and reduced to one single number about which “one can now easily come to an understanding.” The connection of the program preferences of the individual listener with his social position then does not represent a living individual; rather, it aims at a believable and graphic visualization of an average opinion of the public.11 The synthesis of the ‘dead rows of numbers’ of the statistics and the ‘living inventory’ of the ‘individual’ into a ‘living statistics’ is always guided by questions of representability and readability. This was, for example, made clear in Hans Zeisel’s statistical textbook Die Sprache der Zahlen. According to Zeisel, the goal to represent connections should not be endangered by overdone exactitude; the “clarity demanded by a good statistical table” (63) should not be lost under any circumstance. Here it became evident how the reduction of the statistics conflicted with the complexity of the living detail because making the audience visible cannot be at the same time abridged and complex, graphically represented and alive, normalized and individualized. The RAVAG study can only actualize one side of its contradictory demands. It represents the average opinion of an audience, thereby creating the audience; it abridges in Quételet’s sense by conceptualizing the average listeners or collective subjects. Like Quételet’s research, the RAVAG study is also enabled by the law of large numbers to make statements on general social regularities. It finds correlations; it succeeds in rewriting social structure and preferences of programs into concepts of cause and effect, to correlate them, and to make this correlation immediately comprehensible by reducing it to a few, simple numbers. But at the same time it loses sight of the other side of its own claim: the individual radio listener.

The Moods of Individuals Another central discursive event in the self-historicizing of effect analysis leads us to 1940, when Lazarsfeld—by now director of the Office of Radio Research at Columbia University—again starts a survey, together with Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet, which is considered one of the first media effect analyses. They investigate how and why in the whole election year of the presidential election 11 “In the RAVAG study […] not data is being surveyed that concern individuals but the social correlates of its preferences; thereby the structure of the audience becomes visible as a field in which target groups are distributed through the social data and their attributed preferences as program correlates. This audience is not composed of individuals but of quantitative ratios of distribution” (Schrage 309).

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Mass Media Are Effective campaign of 1940 people in rural Erie County decide for electing one of the two candidates, Roosevelt or Willkie. They are using the then quite new panel technique, i.e., in repeated surveys throughout the entire year up to election day itself, the questions are always posed to the same subjects. The results of the survey are known as The People’s Choice. The study publishes its procedures of abbreviation. The place of the survey is seen as a representative place for the Western and Northern sections of the USA. Three thousand people are chosen from Erie County who supposedly represent as closely as possible the complete population of the county: “This group—the poll—resembled the county in age, sex, residence, education, telephone and car ownership, and nativity.” The poll again is divided into groups of 600 people, and again in such a way that each group “was closely matched to the others and constituted, in effect, a miniature sample of the whole poll and of the whole county itself” (3). Only one of these groups of 600 people is the panel, the main object of the survey. The other groups are only used as controls. This means that the panel is a miniature version of the poll; the poll is a representative abbreviation of the County, and with limitations the County can be seen as representative of the whole nation, so that in the end the voting decision of the 600 people of one panel can be called “the people’s choice.” Specifically by so prominently displaying the steps of the abbreviation of a ‘real’ social quantity the study masks the aspect of the fabrication of this quantity which is at work in its statistical representations. But at the center of a rhetoric with which it is hiding its trick of evidence, the study discusses its methods of interviewing. In the preface to the second edition of the study, Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet are describing the progress that their undertaking means for opinion polls—precisely by using the panel technique in interviewing the same people repeatedly. In the self-conception of the study, it thereby accomplishes its goal of representing the process of deciding before an election: “We did not describe opinion; we studied it in the making” (xxii).12 In contrast to the then prevalent public opinion polls that were using unrelated people, the panel method can, according to Lazarsfeld and his collaborators, go far beyond making only rough determinations of tendencies in public opinion. Instead, the panel technique makes it possible to observe who changes their opinion. It succeeds in personalizing the changes in political opinions. The Erie County study is interested in “the vagaries of the individual voter along the path to his vote” (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 2). In this way it hopes to be able

12 For a discussion of the panel method see also Lazarsfeld and Fiske.

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Isabell Otto to clear up the role of the different influencing factors for the election decisions of the individual voter. Among the influences that the study is looking at—and this makes it into a work of major importance in media effect analysis—are the media radio and press. The study spearheads a young man from the panel as a showcase for the change in opinion of one single voter. He still had been undecided in an interview in May and in November he ultimately voted for Roosevelt. Significantly, as we will see, media here do not play any role at all. The path of this young man to his decision is not a direct one; the subject changes direction several times in the course of the interviews: In July he states he will vote for Roosevelt for his grandfather’s sake, who is a member of the Democratic Party. In August he wants to give his vote to Willkie, because he does not concur with Roosevelt about his attitude concerning the draft. Then he again becomes undecided because he knows too little about Willkie and states that he does not want to vote at all. And, finally, in November the test subject votes after all and justifies his decision for Roosevelt with his fears concerning Willkie’s obvious vote catching (5f). As the study makes clear, this intricate route to his final decision could not have been delineated without the new panel technique.13 Here the research program that the Lazarsfeld School had worked out at the beginning of the 1930s in Vienna and had recapitulated again and again emerges—the synthesis of ‘dead numbers’ and ‘living inventory’ into the aporetic form of the ‘living statistics:’ On the one hand, the study wants to abbreviate—the panel is supposed to be representative for the whole range of voters—and on the other hand, it wants to detail and personify, i.e., it wants to delineate the complexity of the individual processes leading up to the actual voter’s decision in all its facets. The Erie County study formulates the personified illustration by conceptualizing a voter-individual whose mood-dependent unpredictability the panel technique is able to represent. With the help of a thus attained concept of an individual, social life is reintroduced in measurable form into its abbreviation. But the cunning of evidence—the simultaneous representation and manufacturing of a social complexity via abbreviation—in this case also leads to problems, but in a somewhat contrasting manner 13 “[…] [T]he panel was devised as a more effective method of getting at the important questions. What is the effect of social status upon vote? How are people influenced by the party conventions and the nominations? What role does formal propaganda play? How about the press and the radio? What of the influences of family and friends? Where do issues come in, and how? Why do some people settle their vote early and some late? In short: how do votes develop? Why do people vote as they do?” (6f).

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Mass Media Are Effective than in the RAVAG study. It is not the individual radio listener who drops out of sight, but instead those social regularities that—in accordance with empirical social research—are only visible within the law of large numbers that can be seen as correlations of cause and effect. As a classic of the early media effect analysis, the Erie County study arrives at the quite surprising conclusion that media, if at all, have only a very small effect: “In the election period of 1940, the role of mass media turned out to be rather small” (vi). Instead, the Erie County study finds out that undecided voters are oriented to their direct social environment in their decisions rather than to mass media. Face-to-face communication is regarded as more important than mass communication, personal influence surpasses media influence: “In comparison with the formal media of communication, personal relationships are potentially more influential for two reasons: their coverage is greater and they have certain psychological advantages over the formal media” (151). The Erie County researchers describe how personal contacts influence voting decisions by way of the concept of the “Two-Step Flow of Communications,” according to which the interested, politically active people take up ideas from radio or TV and convey them via face-to-face communication to the less interested and less active people. Those persons who would potentially be receptive to the effects of media in the sense of affecting a change in the voting decision are reached by the media campaigns only in an indirect way. Mass media in this conception then are not almighty instruments of propaganda; they only have limited effects. In the understanding of the researchers “the full richness of personal relationship” (158) surpasses the communication transmitted by media. By following the winding paths of the individual, the Erie County study loses sight of the totality of the social structure, whose representation it had taken upon itself with the claim to represent “the people’s choice.” In comparison to the RAVAG study, it actualizes the other side of its contradictory claim of a living statistic and it is oriented on Le Play’s program of the inventory. However, pushed into the background is Quételet’s concept of an objectivizing social science that takes its point of departure in the idea that the activities of the individual, as soon as they appear in great numbers, underlie certain laws that are similar to natural laws. The detailed description in the Erie County study wins over abbreviation with the result that general regularities and statistical dependencies are in danger of extinction. Consequently, the study cannot fabricate the entirety of the media audience by representation. To be more exact, it can no longer create an audience of mass media out of a voter population because by concentrating on details and personifica-

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Isabell Otto tions, one of the central procedures has disappeared: the effects of mass media. Some years later Joseph T. Klapper, a student of Lazarsfeld, points this out. According to him, when we observe intervening factors, the effects of media as the original object of analysis is lost from view: “It is possible that the phenomenistic approach may so divert our attention to the factors with which mass communication is in interplay, or to the fact that interplay exists, that we forget our original goal of determining the effects of mass communication itself.” (6)

The media user, conceived of as a unique, individual case so unpredictable that media have no effect on him or her, cannot be made visible successfully by effect analysis that relies too much on the procedure of evidence by detail, when it is not only verifying the success of persuasion but also constructing the addressee of persuasion in this manner. Media effect analysis has lost the media effect from its view.

The Success Program of the Textbook History McGuire’s diagnosis of crisis sketched out in the beginning is commenting on a state of research that has entered the textbook history of the effect analysis of media within the paradigm of limited effects; the Erie County study by Lazarsfeld is seen as the initiator and empirical precedence of this paradigm (see Burkart 207f). The textbook history of the media effect analysis does not stop at this crisis; it rewrites it into a change of paradigm. It designs a model of historization in which a change within the assumption of weak and strong media effects is presupposed.14 Other renowned scholars are also connected with the change of paradigm that is supposed to overcome the crisis, among them Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann who at the beginning of the 1970s has proclaimed the return to the concept of strong media effects. Noelle-Neumann blames Lazarsfeld’s Erie County study for not having considered the conditions of mass communication and having therefore lost collective phenomena like an opinion climate from its view (see “Return” 109). In discussions of method, it becomes clear that Noelle-Neumann does not even attempt the balancing act between ‘dead statistics’ and ‘living inventory;’ instead, she immedi14 This model was introduced for the first time by Denis McQuail in 1977 and since then has been extended and modified by him and other historiographers.

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Mass Media Are Effective ately takes her point of departure from the idea that demoscopic procedures per se are abbreviations that mask the individual realm. In an introduction into the methods of demoscopic procedures, she is unmistakably pointing out: “The theory of random testing is a mathematical model. It cannot be used for analyzing individuals” (Noelle-Neumann and Petersen 219). If ideas from the individual realm are transferred into that of the greater number, this only creates misunderstandings. Noelle-Neumann therefore requests not to demand more of opinion polls than they can supply—and the same applies to the media effect analysis.15 The model of historicizing presupposing a change within the assumption of weak and strong media effects then modifies into a temporal succession the unsolvable demand of cutting short while simultaneously taking the long path via the individual. The aporia of the cunning of evidence suggesting that ‘mass media have effects’ within the respective self-historicizing projects is turned into something positive; it is rewritten into a success program of the analysis of media effects. But this program cannot be fulfilled. Also NoelleNeumann cannot dissolve the aporia; she sees herself confronted with the charge of doing what Lazarsfeld wanted to avoid: to simply count, thereby not doing justice to the realm of the individual.16 The continuing but irresolvable methodical differentiation through which empirical research has been attempting to answer the question of media effects to the present day—and which it also pretends to be able to answer in a better and better way—can be understood as a continuing discussion of the described aporia of media effects. The progress program of media effect analysis can be fulfilled just as little as the deceit of its fundamental trick of evidence can remain invisible. Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

15 “These understandable demands that spring from the […] need to fully understand, grasp, enter the complex course of life, the need for the ‘totality’ of the individual realm that is transferred to the world of numbers, these demands cannot be fulfilled by methods of polls. The expectations with which we approach them rest on a misunderstanding and have to be disappointed” (Noelle-Neumann, Umfragen 28). 16 See for example Roland Nitsche’s criticism of Noelle-Neumann’s hypothesis to abstract from the “realm of the individual and personality: “At least since the Kinsey report we have to ask what remnant of the human being is still regarded as personal in statistics. […] Alarming is the fact that the conception of the human as a mass particle is developing into a normative authority as well.”

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Works Cited Burkart, Roland. Kommunikationswissenschaft. 4th ed. Vienna, 2002. Print. Campe, Rüdiger. “Evidenz als Verfahren: Skizze eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Konzepts.” Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus. Ed. Uwe Fleckner et al. Vol. 8. Berlin, 2004. 107-133. Print. —. Spiel der Wahrscheinlichkeit: Literatur und Berechnung zwischen Pascal und Kleist. Göttingen, 2003. Print. Daston, Lorraine J. “Rational Individuals versus Laws of Society: From Probability to Statistics.” The Probabilistic Revolution. Ed. Lorenz Krüger, Daston, and Michael Heidelberger. Cambridge, 1987. 295-304. Print. Ewald, François. Der Vorsorgestaat. Frankfurt a.M., 1993. Print. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York, 1977. Print. —. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Ed. Michel Sennelart et al. Trans. Graham Burchell. Hampshire, 2007. Print. Hacking, Ian. “How Should We Do the History of Statistics?” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. London, 1984. 181-195. Print. Hovland, Carl I., I. L. Janis, and H. H. Kelley. Communication and Persuasion. New Haven, 1953. Print. Keller, Felix. Archäologie der Meinungsforschung: Mathematik und die Erzählbarkeit des Politischen. Konstanz, 2001. Print. Kemmann, A. “Evidentia, Evidenz.” Ueding 3: col. 33-47. Klapper, Joseph T. The Effects of Mass Communication. New York, 1960. Print. Knape, J. “Persuasion.” Ueding 6: col. 874-907. Lazarsfeld, Paul. “Hörerbefragung der Ravag.” Mark 27-66. —. “Vorspruch zur neuen Auflage.” Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal. 1933. By Marie Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and Hans Zeisel. Frankfurt a.M., 1975. 11-23. Print. —. “Zwei Wege der Kommunikationsforschung.” Schatz 197-222. Lazarsfeld, Paul, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet. The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes up his Mind in a Presidential Campaign. 1944. 3rd ed. New York, 1968. Print. Lazarsfeld, Paul, and Marjorie Fiske. “The ‘Panel’ as a New Tool for Measuring Opinion.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 2.4 (1938): 596-612. Print. Mark, Desmond, ed. Paul Lazarsfelds Wiener RAVAG-Studie 1932: Der Beginn der modernen Rundfunkforschung. Vienna, 1996. Print. Matuschek, Stefan. “Aporie.” Ueding 1: col. 826-828.

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Mass Media Are Effective McGuire, William J. “The Nature of Attitudes and Attitude Change.” The Handbook of Social Psychology. Ed. Lindzey Gardner and Elliot Aronson. 2nd ed. Reading, 1969. 136-314. Print. McQuail, Denis. “The Influence and Effects of Mass Media.” Mass Communication and Society. Ed. J. Curran, M. Gurevitch, and J. Wollacott. London, 1977. 70-94. Print. Merton, Robert K., James S. Coleman, and Peter H. Rossi. Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research: Papers in Honor of Paul F. Lazarsfeld. New York, 1979. Print. Neurath, Paul. “Die methodische Bedeutung der RAVAG-Studie von Paul Lazarsfeld: Der Wiener Bericht von 1932 und seine Rolle für die Entwicklung in Amerika.” Mark 11-26. Nitsche, Roland. “Vom Unfug, Köpfe zu zählen: Prolegomena einer gegenwärtigen Metaphysik der Statistik.” Neues Forum 14.158 (1967): 200-202. Print. Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. “Der Einfluß der Massenmedien auf die quasistatistische Wahrnehmung des Meinungsklimas als Beispiel, warum die Wirkungsforschung neue Fragen stellen muß.” Schatz 177-196. —. “Return to the Concept of Powerful Mass Media.” Studies of Broadcasting 9 (1973): 67-112. Print. —. Umfragen in der Massengesellschaft: Einführung in die Methoden der Demoskopie. Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1963. Print. Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth, and Thomas Petersen. Alle, nicht jeder: Einführung in die Methoden der Demoskopie. Munich, 1996. Print. Schatz, Oskar, ed. Die elektronische Revolution: Wie gefährlich sind die Massenmedien? Graz, 1975. Print. Schenk, Michael. Medienwirkungsforschung. 1987. 2nd ed. Tübingen, 2002. Print. Schrage, Dominik. Psychotechnik und Radiophonie: Subjektkonstruktionen in artifiziellen Wirklichkeiten 1918-1932. Munich, 2001. Print. Schramm, Wilbur. “Kommunikationsforschung in den Vereinigten Staaten.” 1963. Grundfragen der Kommunikationsforschung. By Schramm. Munich, 1971. 9-26. Print. Sonntag, Michael. “Das Verborgene des Herzens:” Zur Geschichte der Individualität. Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1999. Print. Ueding, Gert, ed. Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. 9 vols. to date. Tübingen 1992- . Print. Zeisel, Hans. Die Sprache der Zahlen. Cologne, 1970. Print. —. “Toward a History of Sociography.” Appendix. Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community. By Marie Jahoda, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel. Transl. by the authors with John Reginall and Thomas Elsaesser. Chicago, 1971. 99-125. Print.

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Extraordinary Stories of the Ordinary Use of Media CHRISTINA BARTZ Press, radio and television regularly comment on the harmful effects of audiovisual media. In these comments, diverse effects are attributed to these media ranging from difficulties with concentration to loss of contact with reality, from addictive behavior to elevated levels of violence—to mention only some of the presumed effects. Even though these effects of media are repeatedly described in the reports, the descriptions can usually be attributed to specific occasions: When something concrete and new has occurred a report on the effects of media is launched in a more or less consistent pattern in that it repeatedly points out the same elements. Below, I will focus on these specific reports—two of them, to be exact. The first of these involves the extensive reports concerning the two-year old James Bulger who in 1993 was kidnapped in a shopping center in Liverpool and subsequently murdered by two ten-year old children. The deed, which was marked by extraordinary brutality, resulted in a debate on the effects of representations of violence. It was said that the murder was a copycat crime and that when they tortured and killed the two-year old, the children had imitated a media model created in the horror movie Chucky 3 (see “So sehen” 9). As a result, the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons) censored the film on the grounds that the combination of the film’s lack of plot and its representation of violence resulted in a fixation on the killing scenes (see Riepe). The film mainly consists of illustrating murders perpetuated by a puppet called Good Guy that among other crimes also cuts children into pieces. By comparing the contents of the film with the statements of material witnesses involved with the murder and finding analogies, the imitation thesis becomes evident. Secondly, ten years later, a related comparison resulted in judging the murder of Vanessa by Michael Weinhold as a copycat crime. In 2002, during Carnival, the masked and cloaked Weinhold broke into Vanessa’s parents’ house and stabbed the sleeping girl. Be249

Christina Bartz cause of his costume, the judge inferred that Weinhold had chosen the films Scream or Halloween as models for his deed. The imitation thesis is controversial in the cases of Vanessa and Bulger, but it is for precisely this reason that it is repeatedly invoked and explained in the reports, resulting in a constant revisiting of the cases. The question is persistently debated, which model is the deed imitating? Does Weinhold’s costume resemble more the one in Scream or the one in Halloween? But this question is of less interest here. Rather, it is remarkable that from such alleged copycat crimes a general conclusion on the effects of media is drawn. We should ask ourselves how this nexus is established. How can the deed of an individual provide information on the ‘normal’ effects of media? And if we look at the reports on mass media (and their lethal consequences), the impression imposes itself that it is normal that they seem ‘de-normalizing’, i.e., that their effects belong to the realm of deviance. The question therefore is in what way mass media themselves spread ideas regarding the normal effects of media and which significance abnormality has within this framework. In order to answer this question, I would like to follow some of Jürgen Link’s theories of normalism describing normality mainly with regard to the statistical average. But when we are dealing with the reciprocal relationship between normal and abnormal, this definition does not suffice. Therefore, those considerations in the theory of normalism that surpass the basis for this description and that begin at the point where the average does not become visible through its statistical representation below will become central.

Scenarios of De- and Renormalizing Link’s theory of normalism is a model for the connection between normality, statistics, and mass media. According to him, at present, media societies operate on the basis of an understanding of normality that is defined in relationship to statistical clusters resulting from a mass compilation of data and their accounting. These processed data create a statistical dispositive that is differentiated into frequent average and rare extreme values, thus defining realms of normality. This means that normality is oriented on data and accordingly—contrary to normativity—is retroactive and variable. It concerns zones surrounding the core of normality that can be loosely determined so that a clear borderline towards the edges is impeded. Instead of fixed borders of normality, loose normalism produces a normalistic continuum with the effect of creating fear of denormalizing, i.e., the fear of gliding into a realm of extremity.

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Extraordinary Stories of the Ordinary Use of Media Mass media function within a framework of producing normalistic knowledge as the distributing authorities of statistical data and the realms of normality connected to them (see Gerhard, Link, and Schulte-Holtey 8). This mass media distribution is achieved via diverse procedures. Using as an example the tabloid papers Bild or Sun, Link shows that normalizing can be organized by means of “socalled concrete cases” or by “hair-raising ‘individual cases’” (34).1 According to Link, these individual cases do not present a picture of normal behavior from the outset; rather, they graphically show the reader abnormalities—for example, murders committed by children. These detailed abnormalities are not only characterized by their aberration from the average, but are “extreme” even within the framework of deviation. Thus, as Link writes, Bild diminishes “[…] the fear of the normalistic continuum and of the imperceptible gliding into ‘abnormality’ by leaping into abnormal-infinity […]. At the same time, it nevertheless reports in an ambivalent way both on miraculous leaps across limits or on diabolic transformations of quite normal individuals.” (34f)

The hair-raising individual cases are therefore characterized by their enormous distance from the normalist continuum. This distance functions as a fictitious security mechanism by making visible a ‘leap’ instead of a ‘gliding.’ The lack of defining a border between normal and abnormal is made invisible and thereby the fear of becoming abnormal, i.e., the apprehension to be affected by the realm of abnormal behavior, is circumvented. But is this strategy—using the ‘hair-raising individual cases’— really only a strategy of avoiding the fear of denormalizing? Or does not normality rather emerge nakedly visible out of the extremes that the reported and hair-raising cases constitute? Ultimately, we are not dealing with ‘diabolic transformations’ only; we are dealing with the transformations of ‘quite normal individuals.’ When Bild and also other media organizations make exceptional cases into objects of their reports, they do not only give an impression of extreme deviations; they also suggest a notion of normality. Therefore, and contrary to Link’s observations, below I will consider the thesis that the normal realm becomes visible through extremes by relocating abnormality back into normality step by step, i.e., through continuous reporting. The extreme is reintegrated normalistically. Following a phrasing by Matthias Thiele, it is a matter of “scenarios of de- and renormalizing” (134). The unusual element that is contained in the news report and that is the motive for the report is fed back into the normal field. At the same time, however, a counter-movement is 1

For these concrete cases Link also uses the term “symbolic example stories (Exempla).”

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Christina Bartz taking place; the realm of normality crosses its borders; it seems to move into the direction of deviation. This is not only true for Bild, whose reports on sensational cases are analyzed by Link. The reports of other journalistic organs are also oriented on individual cases. Even though we have to grant essential differences between Bild/Sun and, for example, the Süddeutsche Zeitung/New York Times, general conclusions can nevertheless be formulated regarding journalistic procedures and the functioning of public news communication. Orienting the report on a concrete occasion is one of these fundamental procedures—regardless whether some occasions deduce unequivocal connections (Bild) and others spark off critical debates (i.e., Der Spiegel). Here the problem arises how in public commentaries assumptions of normality and concrete cases of abnormality are related to each other. Using as an example the aforementioned cases of Vanessa and Bulger and the debates regarding the misguided media usage connected to them, I will consider these reciprocal relationships. As for the question concerning media usage, the journalistic presentation is focused only upon the perpetrators and not upon the victims.2

Normal Causes The news-factor approach is dealing with the question of common journalistic procedures as well, more closely outlining the form of the motives for the reports. According to this approach, news production is affected by a number of criteria of selection. A journalistic report consists of specific characteristics that accounts for its news value. Some of these characteristics are central within the present context; among them, the threshold and the surprise factors. News reports outbid a threshold value of conspicuity that can, for example, refer to quantities or just to the ages of perpetrator and victim as in the example of Bulger. Bulger’s murderers are the youngest convicts in England in the past 250 years. Above all, news reports are surprising in that they report on curiosities or rarities and they are therefore unpredictable.3 But this means that precisely that el-

2

3

The two cases were named after the victims probably mainly for the reason that their names were known before those of the perpetrators. Generally the perpetrator has to be found only after a murder has been committed. Once he is known, however, he seems to be of greater interest for the report than the victim is. In this case it is often his misplaced use of media that is made responsible for the deed. An abundance of literature exists on the news factor approach. I am referring here to the publication by Heinz Pürer (128-133) that—like many ana-

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Extraordinary Stories of the Ordinary Use of Media ement is excluded from the report which is labeled as an average and belonging to a statistical cluster. In other words, that which occurs many times in an identical or similar manner is not interesting. And that which does not display any conspicuousness and therefore does not differ from the realm of normality is not newsworthy. Normality and news exclude each other. However, contrary to the above, significance and consonance are also part of the journalistic criteria for selection. News reports usually conform to existing ideas and hence contain a certain factor of repetition, all the more so relevant for the recipient when they affect or reflect his or her everyday life. News reports thus also make everyday occurrences and common events into their subjects (see Thiele 130-133) and consequently one of the original elements of news is the oscillation between the presentation of extremes and normality while simultaneously actualizing both, uniting them. Nevertheless, normality appears not only in the sense of something common or everyday but also precisely as an outgrowth of the continuous coverage. According to the news factor approach, a news report often forces further reporting on the subject (see Pürer 128133) and this continuous journalistic exposure increasingly transforms the murderers of Vanessa and Bulger into normal individuals as more and more details on them are accumulated. Thus, the reader of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung learns about Weinhold: “The Saxony-born murderer of Vanessa had moved with his parents to Gersthof in Swabia in 1999. According to news reports, he grew up in Rodewisch in the Vogtland. After attending a special school, he last was taught metalwork in a Catholic vocational school in Augsburg. His superiors described him as an open young man who had, however, difficulties learning.” (“Motiv” 11)4

The perpetrator acquires a name. He is provided with a family and with schooling and a job history. Moreover, his habits, his characteristics and modes of conduct are documented so that he is given a whole biography. The arrangement of the biographical elements on the one hand is based on assumptions of normality: The reports impart the impression of an ordinary development. On the other hand, a chain of causality that is directed at the reported event—the murder—is realized in such presentations. Weinhold comes from “unpleasant family conditions” (Truscheit 9) and the murderers of Bulger live in a slum (see Ritterband; see also Heim-

4

logous commentaries—is mainly concerned with the central publication regarding this subject by Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge. The account briefly summarized here in Der Spiegel is reported on extensively for several pages. See Brinkbäumer.

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Christina Bartz rich, “Regina”) that one can extensively read about in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Thus, the news report becomes a narrative that leads from normality to sensation with the help of the cause and effect principle, or rather that traces the path focused on the change from a normal individual to a diabolic one via causal logic. A narrative with “critical aggravation” and with a dramatic and detailed depiction of the circumstances is being developed. The narrative or the biography of the perpetrator respectively that is manifested in the continuous reporting at the same time specifies the “biographical turning point” (Pethes 71, 80), i.e., the detail of his life’s history that supposedly is the cause for the act. Apart from the conditions at home, the social background or the school, it is mostly the mass media that are blamed as the main cause for violent juvenile delinquency. Alternatively, a causal connection is created from several factors: The press, for example, states that the conditions at home and the bad relationship with his mother made Weinhold long for more diversions, resulting in his watching videos—“sometimes all weekend” (Truscheit 9). On Carnival Monday before he committed the murder, he was watching the karate movie Rome Must Die (see Truscheit). The weekly Welt am Sonntag reports: “In the apartment of the child-murderer the police found 72 videos with violent movies, 60 of which are indexed because of their extreme brutality” (Schupelius). The cause for this crime seems to be rooted somewhere in this collection of videos since, according to Welt am Sonntag, Vanessa was killed as a result of an imitation of a filmic model (see Schupelius 9).5 Such causality is also asserted in the case of Bulger. This, however, is peculiar, since because of the young age of the murderers their biographies hardly ever played a role in the reports. By judicial decision, it was prohibited to inform the public about the names of the defendants or any other personal details during the trial. They were called Child A and Child B (see “Schuldsprüche”). Therefore, many details about the perpetrators remain unknown but nevertheless their use of media obviously is not unknown to public reports, for as the Süddeutsche Zeitung discerns from the pronouncement of the judgment: “The father of one of the perpetrators had had horror films in his house and we could not help suspecting that the son might have watched them, too” (Kröncke, “London” 12). Other papers as well are pointing out that the father of one of the perpetrators had owned the film Chucky 3 and that from this fact the judge had drawn the conclusion that “the contact with films of violence had made the children into murderers” (Heimrich, “Nach” 9). The 5

Hardly any newspaper is as explicit in describing the thesis of imitating media examples. Regarding the case of Bulger see also “So sehen” and Weale, qtd. in Vowe et al.

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Extraordinary Stories of the Ordinary Use of Media use of media as a biographical fact in the lives of the murderers of Bulger then can be made into the cause for the act. We can, however, infer from a suggestion by Manfred Riepe from the newspaper taz, that this information does not suggest any knowledge about the perpetrators. Riepe is a forceful critic of the copycat thesis and of the effect of violence in movies in general: “The question regarding who had mentioned Chucky 3 in the first place became clear in a discussion following the initial airing of the film shown under pressure from the public by the TV station Premiere on December 10, 1993. There, the retired professor of pedagogy Werner Glogauer said that he had written to the District Court in Liverpool mentioning the connection between the film and the murder.” (15)

According to this, the assumption alone of an analogy between the murder and the film’s content leads to recognizing the connection. It is not so much information about which films were accessible by the child that mattered as much as the question which reproduction of violence was the reason for the act. In other words, it is not the accounting of the biographical details that led to knowledge about the effect of media. Only retrospectively, after the analogy has been established, are these details considered relevant for the act. Especially in the case of Bulger this becomes evident because of the overall lack of available information. This lack of information gives rise to the fact that no reasons for the act can be concluded from any biographical details. Therefore, in a certain way the copycat thesis proves the causality that then is mentioned in combination with the biography.

Normal Biographies The biographies presented here do not revolve around causalities only; rather, they amount to more than imagining a possible cause. Apart from such causes, a previous and parallel normality is recounted as well. On the one hand, the turning point of the story implies a chapter in that life that hasn’t yet been reached, but that is nevertheless being integrated into the biographical narrative. Der Spiegel quotes Weinhold’s statement about his birthplace Rodewisch: “At that time everything still had been good […]” (Brinkbäumer 48).6 Subsequently, the story leading to the murder follows and it is filled with potential causes. In this way the so-called background stories of the sensational acts of an individual actualize at the same time 6

Regarding the Bulger case see Kröncke, “Fassungslos” 3: One of the perpetrators allegedly “was not any different than others of his age….”

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Christina Bartz an unusual but also a normal biography—up to a certain point in time. On the grounds of the exceptional individual case, normality can be chronicled. Against the backdrop of a preexisting understanding of normality, the normal life of a person can be narrated on the basis of these exceptional grounds. On the other hand, however, even after the cause for the act has been determined, a normal biography is still insinuated. Weinhold was ‘an open young man with difficulties learning,’ really nothing unusual. Only his use of media is unusual; his ownership of 60 singularly brutal, violent films or, as Der Spiegel pointed out, the fact that Weinhold had watched Scream and Halloween 50 times each (see Brinkbäumer 47). Along with this type of search for causes and also through the biographic accounts, each report begins to appear more and more like a case history in terms of scientific procedures within the medical or juridical system. The case history documents, reflects, and illustrates pathological deviation in comparison to a ‘normal’ biography. Just as these case histories did, today’s reports tell of causal connections leading up to a dramatic culmination. And analogous to those case histories, the current journalistic organs also print true-to-life presentations that more easily permit the comprehension of events, despite their spectacular and unusual character (see Pethes 69). These attributes—‘comprehensibility’ and ‘true-to-life character’ —are applicable to the case histories as they are shown in the current reports. This is also supported by the news factor approach describing the reports on the everyday life of the ‘recipient’ as a decisive factor for selection in news production (see Pürer 128-133). However, comprehensibility means that Weinhold does not appear solely as a psychopathic child murderer; he also appears as a quite normal individual who had experienced a happy childhood in a still intact home in Saxony. This ‘normalizing’ of the child murderer, however, has the effect that normality approaches the realm of extremes. The reports on unusual cases then do not only imply their normalistic reintegration, but also the fact that what is understood as normal from the statistical clusters is problematized. Nicolas Pethes, who has worked on the central characteristics of medical case histories in the 18th century, shows the various forms in which the unusual elements of the case history grab a hold of the normal ones, i.e., how from the accounts and documentations of exceptional cases knowledge of normality is gained. Initially, the individual case is generalized. This means that it illustrates on the one hand already existent knowledge; on the other hand, from the case history new knowledge is inferred by generalizing the concrete observations. Knowledge then emerges only from the observations re-

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Extraordinary Stories of the Ordinary Use of Media lating to the case. With the help of this knowledge, the normal process of deviance is determined. The individual case allows introducing general causal connections demonstrating the causes for deviance. This means that through the case a general cause for a problematic characteristic is inferred and illustrated (see Pethes 68-72). In this sense, the cases of the above-mentioned murderers of Vanessa and Bulger illustrate a specific use of media and their effect that supposedly was manifested in the reported events. From the case history that causally connects the use of media with the event a general knowledge about the effects of media is generated. The general thesis is established that mass media are the cause for extreme forms of violent acts. By being acquainted with the effects of the media contacts in this case, an unproblematic use of media can be inferred ex negativo as well. The characteristic ‘unproblematic’ then relates only to the absence of a specific criterion of the use of media in this case— i.e., ‘not as much’ as Weinhold or ‘not the same contents.’ In this way, the case history obtains the function of serving as a counter example or as an example of a scare campaign. In this scare campaign example, individual events are introduced as generalized dangers to which everyone is subjected unless he or she rejects the cause for deviance introduced in the case. It is demanded of the reader of this case to comprehend the story as an instructive example not to be imitated because the narrative suggests that potentially anyone could be affected by the described symptoms (see Pethes 80).7 The case history then authenticates the normalistic continuum insofar as in this form it provides evidence for the general possibility to be affected by deviance. In the case introduced here this is vividly and quite plainly shown, just as it also continues to be true for the news of the 20th and 21st century. According to this flexible normalism, the extremes presented in the reported event appear to be an obvious possibility. In terms of a fear of denormalizing for the individual, the danger exists of gliding into abnormality. The function of a news report oriented on hair-raising cases like those that Link specifies for Bild then precisely does not reside in making the possibility of denormalizing invisible. On the contrary, by reporting on the cases, the possibility is illustrated vividly. In the case history of Vanessa and the murder connected to it, normality then presents itself in a double sense: once as the opposite of the abnormal behavior of the perpetrator, once as a normal effect. Of course, it is necessary to note that here we are dealing 7

Many of the articles insinuate that everyone has to decide for himself about his use of media. See for example Gerd Kröncke (“Fassungslos” 3) quoting Tony Blair: “People have the choice…” See also Au, “Verrohung” and “Haben”, and Lindner. The last three articles are qtd. in Vowe et al.

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Christina Bartz with normality in the realm of deviance. However, the assumed cause for the extreme action is a normal one: mass media. Mass media operate using the maximum social range of coverage. They address an unknown number of recipients and it is normal that they exist and that one uses them because they operate on a massive scale. Even if their effect is presented as dangerous, as in a case of copycat action, mass media rank as normal. Normality as statistic cluster, however, is realized by further factors as well. Apart from the imitation proposition, research on the effects of violence also knows the so-called thesis of habitualization. But the reports do not separate the two theses; rather, they usually invoke both ideas at the same time. The thesis of habitualization implies that by regular contact with the representation of violence the recipient is desensitized. According to this thesis, the viewers of acts of violence develop greater tolerance vis-à-vis violent behavior since it is regarded as everyday behavior because it is experienced so often.8 In the press, this is usually argued as a ‘lowering of the inhibition level’ (see e.g., “Kältetod” 233; Plog). The appearance of the thesis of habitualization produces the effect that the leap that becomes visible in this case now is transferred into a continuum of problematic behavior. We can apply the thesis of habitualization to the murderers of Bulger who seemingly without any sympathy tortured and murdered a child; it can also be applied to the exercise or reception of milder forms of violence. Shortly after the murder of Bulger, Der Spiegel headlined: “Already in kindergarten children attack each other—they know violence from TV and family” (“Strahlende Augen” 111). This no longer involves imitation; it involves the knowledge of the habitualization of acts of violence that then emerge in the form of fights in kindergarten. The forms of behavior described in the thesis of habitualization are therefore varied and represent a whole spectrum of possible behaviors. The thesis of habitualization is used to explain the causes of extreme behavior with the consequence that we can assume a far-reaching disposition to violence. The central problem is that the habitualization thesis negates qualitative differences of violence, leading to a quantitative increase of reported acts of violence. This impression of a quantitative increase is further augmented by furnishing the proof that almost every minor has regular contact with representations of violence. The numbers of horror films produced and sold are used as evidence for this pervasiveness. The additional analysis of the daily TV program has the function to verify the violence of the television broadcasts. The video clips of Ice-T, Public Enemy, and MTV in general are accused of daily presenting

8

For the scholarly context see Kunczik and Zipfel 113-119.

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Extraordinary Stories of the Ordinary Use of Media violence to the viewers (see “Kältetod” 235; Au, “Haben”). This means that the reception of violence is viewed less as an exception but rather as a part of the everyday life of minors. According to such data then, violence is part of the habitual reception of every single person. Thereby, it is then explained why copycat crimes occur as often as the reports make us believe they do, since another policy of mass media is the enumeration of similar acts. Four more acts of violence are listed by Der Spiegel in the article on Bulger’s murder supposedly comparable to Bulger’s case.9 Thus, the report assimilates the accounts of earlier incidents and scrutinizes them under the aspect of similarity regarding the present case. The individual act thus becomes a whole series of acts (see Thiele 133; Kepplinger and Hartung 407-427). And this means that the extraordinary incident obtains the status of a normal event.

Conclusion In both the cases of Bulger and Vanessa, the procedures through which the report on an exceptional event is reintegrated into normality can consequently be observed exemplarily. Of course and without doubt we must concede that we are dealing with merely two cases that involve only the two limited areas of violence and the use of media. General conclusions were drawn from this: on the one hand, on the functioning of mass media regarding normalistic knowledge and, on the other hand, on the production of knowledge regarding the effects of media. Concerning these two areas, my aim was to show how intricately the journalistic representation of deviance and normality are connected to each other. To be more precise: In the presentation of deviance, knowledge about normality is also being produced. However, insofar as the report functions in terms of specific events, this normality is threatened. The normal makes its appearance adjoined to deviance. This also affects the social conception of media effects that as a consequence is being fundamentally debated with its problematic variants. The reported event, sensational precisely because it is extreme, appears at the end of the causal chain into which mass media are integrated. At the same time, there are a number of procedures conceptualizing this extreme as normal in the sense of statistical clusters: the explanation of the habitualization thesis, the as-

9

See “Kältetod” 237-240; Au, “Verrohung” and “Haben.” The paper Berliner Zeitung abbreviates the conclusion of the series by pointing out: “Kein Einzelfall!” (“Schon wieder”, qtd. in Vowe et al.).

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Christina Bartz sumed range of mass media, the sequencing of similar events, and the invocation of statistics. These procedures appear as part of the never-ending journalistic discussions following special occasions, and the resulting consequence is that normality materializes in the form of denormalizing tendencies. This is a result of the specific techniques of mass media. Here they do not only take over the function of a circulation agency; they are also a party to the production of normalist knowledge. But by being so oriented to deviance, normalist knowledge also obtains a corresponding form. Moreover, it is not only a question of producing but also of reproducing concepts of normality. News reports connect to existing knowledge and refer to it (see Pürer 128-133). In this way, two results are achieved: Firstly, the perception of the damaging effect of media is reproduced regularly and usually on the occasion of a special event. Reversing the path of a causal chain of effects from crimes of violence to mass media is also simple to invoke and does not have to be specifically established. Thus, the knowledge is then primarily actualized via the case and undoubtedly also reformulated, but it is not knowledge that is newly obtained. Secondly, in the deviance a narrative of the normal can be realized as well. Since knowledge of normality already exists, it can become manifest in the deviance and the biographical turning point that has led to the deviance can moreover be identified. This identification is based on the knowledge of the normal. The news reports then do not only talk about psychopathic murderers, but also of normal individuals. And by reporting on the effect of mass media, they also talk about quite normal causes. If one then changes the focus from the statistic dispositive to mass media and their techniques, normality is not necessarily established only retrospectively—even though it denotes frequency— but also by renewal. It therefore does not only have to be produced by way of data and distributed via mass media; rather, it keeps being invoked anew through the methods employed by mass media. Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

Works Cited Au, Eberhard. “Haben wir unsere Kinder verdorben?” [“Did We Spoil Our Children?”]. Berliner Zeitung 28 Nov. 1993: n. pag. Print. —. “Die Verrohung beginnt im Kinderzimmer” [“Brutalization Starts In the Nursery”]. Berliner Zeitung 27 Nov. 1993: n. pag. Print. Brinkbäumer, Klaus. “Die Luft ging raus aus ihr” [“The Air Went Out of Her”]. Der Spiegel 4.57 (2003): 46-49. Print.

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Extraordinary Stories of the Ordinary Use of Media Galtung, Johan, and Mari Holmboe Ruge. “The Structure of Foreign News: The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crisis in Four Norwegian Newspapers.” Jour. of Peace Research 2 (1965): 64-91. Print. Gerhard, Ute, Jürgen Link, and Ernst Schulte-Holtey. “Infografiken, Medien, Normalisierung—Einleitung.” Introduction. Infografiken, Medien, Normalisierung: Zur Kartografie politisch-sozialer Landschaften. Ed. Gerhard, Link, and Schulte-Holtey. Heidelberg, 2001. 7-22. Print. Heimrich, Bernhard. “Nach dem Schuldspruch von Preston bleibt Ratlosigkeit” [“Perplexity Remains after the Preston Conviction”]. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 26 Nov. 1993: 9. Print. —. “Regina versus A. und B.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 11 Nov. 1993: 9. Print. “‘Kältetod der Menschlichkeit’” [“‘Humanities Death by Hypothermia’”]. Der Spiegel 9.47 (1993): 232-240. Print. Kepplinger, Hans Matthias, and Uwe Hartung. Störfall-Fieber: Wie ein Unfall zum Schlüsselereignis einer Unfallserie wird. Freiburg i.Br., 1995. Print. Kröncke, Gerd. “Fassungslos die Seele suchen” [“Stunned We Are Looking For the Soul”]. Süddeutsche Zeitung 25 Feb. 1993: 3. Print. —. “London kämpft gegen Gewalt-Videos” [“London Fights Against Violent Videos”]. Süddeutsche Zeitung 14 Apr. 1994: 12. Print. Kunczik, Michael, and Astrid Zipfel. Gewalt und Medien: Ein Studienhandbuch. Cologne, 2006. Print. Lindner, Helga. “‘Montags-Syndrom’ signalisiert Gefahr” [“Monday Syndrome Signalizes Danger”]. Neue Zeit 12 Mar. 1993: n. pag. Print. Link, Jürgen. “Grenzen des flexiblen Normalismus?” Grenzmarkierungen: Normalisierung und diskursive Ausgrenzung. Ed. Ernst Schulte-Holtey. Duisburg, 1995. 24-39. Print. “Motiv unklar” [“Motif Unclear”]. Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung 24 Feb. 2002: 11. Print. Pethes, Nicolas. “Vom Einzelfall zur Menschheit: Die Fallgeschichte als Medium der Wissenspopularisierung zwischen Recht, Medizin und Literatur.” Popularisierung und Popularität. Ed. Gereon Blaseio, Hedwig Pompe, and Jens Ruchatz. Cologne, 2005. 6392. Print. Plog, Jobst. “Wer zuletzt kotzt, hat gewonnen” [“Puking Last Wins”]. Süddeutsche Zeitung 9 Oct. 1993: Supp. III. Print. Pürer, Heinz. Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft: Ein Handbuch. Konstanz, 2003. Print.

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Christina Bartz Riepe, Manfred. “Wer die Toten zählt” [“Counting the Dead”]. taz— die tageszeitung. taz—die tageszeitung, 24 Apr. 2003. Web. 15 Dec. 2003. Ritterband, Charles. “Großbritannien im Bann eines Kindesmordes” [“Great Britain Fascinated by a Child Murder”]. LexisNexis. LexisNexis, 18 Feb. 1993 [rpt. from Neue Zürcher Zeitung]. Web. 31 Aug. 2005. “Schon wieder eine Gewalt-Orgie” [“One More Orgy of Violence”]. Berliner Zeitung 28 Nov. 1993: n. pag. Print. “Schuldsprüche in Kindermordprozess von Preston” [“After the Convictions in the Child Murder Case in Preston”]. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 25 Nov. 1993: 1. Print. Schupelius, Gunnar. “Der Film zum Mord.” Welt am Sonntag. Welt am Sonntag, 9 Feb. 2003. Web. 24 May 2005. “So sehen heute Mörder aus” [“This Is How Murderers Look Nowadays”]. Bild 27 Nov. 1993: 1+. Print. “Strahlende Augen” [“Radiant Eyes”]. Der Spiegel 42.47 (1993): 111113. Print. Thiele, Matthias. “Ereignis und Normalität: Zur normalistischen Logik medialer und diskursiver Ereignisproduktion im Fernsehen.” Philosophie des Fernsehens. Ed. Oliver Fahle and Lorenz Engell. Munich, 2006. 121-136. Print. Truscheit, Karin. “Der Sensemann hat eine Sense” [“The Grim Reaper Has a Scythe”]. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 28 Jan. 2003: 9. Print. Vowe, Gerhard, et al., eds. Medien und Gewalt: Fakten—Theorien— Konsequenzen. Berlin, 1994. Print. Weale, Sally. “Child’s Play Teil drei—der Film zum Mord.” Wochenpost 2 Dec. 1993: n. pag. Print.

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The Governmentality of Media: Television as ‘Problem’ and ‘Instrument’1 MARKUS STAUFF The current constellation of media is in constant flux. New techniques, products, and forms are added to those already in existence, changing their significance. The idea that society is shaped by one dominant medium and its specific structures of perception and communication is thereby challenged. I would like to take this occasion in discussing a model that permits the understanding of media in general as strategic fields, arguing that a decisive reason for their social ‘effectivity’ lies—according to my thesis—in the fact that technology, institutions and ‘contents’ of media are continually up for discussion. The actual, but also the only possible, transformations of media are simultaneously linked with interventions in social and cultural fields. Therefore I suggest understanding media according to Michel Foucault’s thoughts on governmentality in Security, Territory, Population as “technologies of government,” i.e., as procedures that allow for strategic accesses to modes of conduct of individuals and population, but only insofar as they recognize and account for the ‘nature’ of these subject areas. This means that media are likewise formed by ‘problematizing’ social and cultural practices, in their turn conversely allowing for the manipulation of these practices. So far the model of governmentality in media studies has mostly been used for describing the emergence of new formats whose common goals consist not in representing reality but in modifying it (cf. Bratich). Above all, so-called reality-formats present processes of transformation of individuals in such a way that at the same time the viewers are offered possible goals and methods for modifying their own conduct and their own individuality (cf. Oullette and Hay; Seier; McMurria). Additionally, however, such texts also exist (even though in some cases they are using a different terminology) which more fundamentally are centered on the ‘problematizing’ and the resulting strategic productivity of media “as a whole” (e.g., Oullette 1

This is a revised version of an article published in Gethmann, Daniel, and Markus Stauff, eds. Politiken der Medien. Berlin, 2005. Print.

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Markus Stauff and Hay; Seier; McCarthy 2008; McMurria). These studies are the background for my following considerations, asking which consequences it has for our ideas of media and for the analysis of their political relevance if we consider them as “technologies of government.”

Governmentality: Problematizations/Technologies/Rationalities Beyond media policy (in the sense of a governmental formation of media) and beyond the propagation or mediation of politics in media (in the sense of ‘manipulation’ or ‘the public’), the ‘politics of media’ can also be located in that area where media contribute to the shaping and structuring of social relationships and modes of conduct, allowing this structuring to appear as necessary while simultaneously also as manageable. Such a perspective raises methodological and (media-)theoretical questions: To what extent do media contribute to the problematization and to the governance of modes of conduct? To what extent do the discourses and practices of governing contribute to the constitution of media—and their political effectivity? Michel Foucault defines governmentality as the ensemble of reflections, strategies and technologies that are aimed at control and the processing of a subject area. There are mainly two aspects that differentiate the model of governmentality historically and theoretically from other forms of control, governance or regulation. For one, the subject area (to be regulated) is not considered as a preexisting or ‘natural’ one, not as a given ‘problem’ that demands a ‘solution,’ but as problematization that has to be located on the same level with the methods and goal-definitions of the regulation.2 Those methods producing knowledge about specific operations and situations, the technologies permitting access to specific operations and situations, and the subject area with its specific ‘interior’ rules constitute each other reciprocally. Secondly, governmentality is characterized by a certain mode of using power that Foucault defines with the term government. In contrast to a regime that simply subordinates, governing aims at considering the peculiarities of each subject area and making them productive. Thus, the necessity arises to gather 2

“Problematization doesn’t mean representation of a pre-existing object, nor the creation by discourse of an object that doesn’t exist. It’s the totality of discursive or non-discursive practices that introduces something into the play of true and false and constitutes it as an object for thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.)” (Foucault, Concern 257; see also Castel).

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The Governmentality of Media knowledge about the governed subject. In place of the general normative rules the question emerges how to adequately guide behaviors. This question, however, is rather an indirect one since it strengthens and structures the potentials of ‘self-government’ that can be found within the subject area. Governing others appears to be “guiding the possibility of conduct” (“Subject” 789) and insofar it is closely connected with the possibility of governing oneself, thereby obtaining incentives and being presented with certain options. Governmental technologies then are all those procedures, institutions, but also regulated practices and discourses that define a subject area, produce knowledge about it and link regulating approaches with the practices of self-government. Originally, this model has its historical points of reference in the tradition of the Christian pastoral power (the ‘shepherd’ who takes care of his ‘flock’ and therefore attempts to truly know his individual ‘sheep’); through the secularization and dissemination affecting the most varied areas of the uses of this pastoral power, a “problematic of government in general” (Foucault, Security 89) finally emerged in the 16th century that established new forms of analyzing and judging behavior for such different areas as the administration of a state or the domestic budget. In the 18th and 19th centuries, governmentality gains precedence in comparison with the power-forms ‘sovereignty’ and ‘discipline’ since it discovers new subject areas (for example, ‘the population’ or ‘the economy’) which can be viewed equally as an “end and instrument of government” (Foucault, Security 105). The 20th century is characterized by an increasing dominance of a neo-liberal governmentality governing by orienting conduct in all areas of practice on the model of ‘entrepreneurial activity’ (cf. Lemke, Krasmann, and Bröckling; Rose and Miller, “Political”). The historically different forms of governmentality each contain a specific rationality—a series of strategies and goals as well as rules that make the different practices plausible and organize the subject area. Here as well, these rationalities also ensue from the specific interconnections of forms of knowledge, instruments and subject areas. With the help of access techniques it is possible to recognize and systematize peculiarities of a subject area that then characterize the strategic deployment of the instruments: “‘Knowing’ an object in such a way that it can be governed is more than a purely speculative activity: it requires the invention of procedures of notation, ways of collecting and presenting statistics, the transportation of these to centres where calculations and judgments can be made, and so forth.” (Rose and Miller, Governing 30)

Thus, it is a characteristic of the workings of government to continue problematizing subject areas, strategies and goals; it is not the in265

Markus Stauff stallation of a stable procedure of regulation but rather the continual modification, adaptation and questioning that characterizes governmental politics, which realize adequate forms of guidance precisely through these disputes. If one regards media as technologies of government, then the question arises how media contribute to the problematization, to the production of knowledge, and to the control of subject areas. On the one hand, media can establish the appearance of new subject areas and problems to which one then—on the grounds of their media-structure—can attribute their own regularities. This, for example, is true in health and social politics for the procedures of computer-aided conversion into data that purely arithmetically identify ‘problem groups’ for which then specific strategies are designed, based on their calculated ‘profiles.’3 In these cases, media become productive with regard to technologies of government especially by remaining unproblematic themselves. On the other hand, media can also appear as subject areas themselves for which an adequate access is wanted. In Foucault’s perspective then it would be necessary to determine which forms of knowledge and techniques of access define this subject area—‘the media’—providing them with a specific rationality. It seems to me that especially characteristic for the modern mass media is the fact that they appear equally “as end and instrument” (see above). They are themselves a subject area to which specific regularities are attributed and for which the adequate access is sought out, but they also constitute instrument—precisely, the technology of government —that is able to record, systematize and direct subject areas. Therefore, below I suggest speaking specifically of a ‘governmentality of media’ especially at that point at which media contribute to the direction of behaviors and to the interconnection of other-directedness and self-directedness precisely by the fact that they become problematized themselves, are being discussed and thus become objects of concern and guidance. Such a perspective on the ‘politics of media’ relativizes the established dichotomization into a media policy that is concerned with the regulation of media and into politics of media that are a result of the effects of the ‘contents,’ or the 3

For the use of computers in health studies see Bauer 214: “Bio-mathematical methods change views of the world by letting ‘diseases’ visibly emerge on the population level only by comparative calculation and connecting it by way of risk calculation with optional influencing factors. […] These standardized compilation practices determine the discursive and social mode of negotiation for the bio-medical talk about ‘health’ and ‘disease.’ As mediated technologies, their specific productivity takes a back seat in comparison to the efficacy of the facts stabilized in them.” On the government’s technological use of the computer in social policy see Henman.

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The Governmentality of Media ‘technology’ of the media ‘themselves.’ The regulation of media—the measures that are aimed at the knowledge and the change of media—constitute media (their contents, their technologies, etc.) as a problematic complex that becomes strategically productive precisely because it is constantly being developed. Moreover, its problematization is always a double one: the considerations of the medium’s apparent peculiarities are linked to the examination (and utilization, where applicable) of the media-users’ peculiarities. The constitution of media as technologies of government therefore cannot be separated from a concept of media as self-technologies. Not least for this reason it is specifically the heterogeneity of media and the fact that they are interwoven with (other) practices and institutions that account for their governmental effectiveness.

Governing Public Spaces: The Museum If one regards (modern mass-)media as governmental technologies, then some of its special features (for example, technical reproduction) are relativized; at the same time, similarities and reciprocities with other cultural institutions—the museum, the library and so on—become apparent. The example of the museum lends itself as point of reference because Tony Bennett has shown in detail in his studies The Birth of the Museum (1995) und Culture: A Reformer’s Science (1998) how museums in the transition from the 18th to the 19th century (and thus parallel to the discovery of population and bio-power) became governmental technologies with specific rationalities and power effects. Consequently, they are there at the beginning of the media-cultural governing of public and private realms, of gender and generational relations. The museum also creates a theoretical backdrop that is supposed to make possible the working out of some specifics of modern mass media characterized less than the museum by the spatial structuring of ‘use,’ and more than the museum by problematizing everyday life. Political strategies that by no means took their starting point only from the state but obtained a dynamics of their own in the cultural institutions and practices changed the museum into complex instruments of governing individuals and population. If until the end of the 18th century museums still had the function to represent the power of the sovereign, now they were assigned the task of extending a ‘reforming’ and ‘civilizing’ influence on the modes of conduct and morals of the visitors. This transformation of the museum presupposed the reflection on its ends and means just as much as the production of a differentiated knowledge about the characteristic features of the museum, its exhibits and its visitors. The spatial

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Markus Stauff and temporal order of museums—the architecture, circulation, presentation and choice of exhibits, but also the guiding and teaching of the visitors—were up for negotiation with regard to its most effective use. The museum was transformed into a complex machine whose individual elements were isolated, classified, and thus examined in terms of their specific contribution for the guidance of modes of conduct. “[…] culture is thought of as something that might be parcelled into different quantities, broken down into units of different values, in such a way that the utility, the civilising effect, to be derived from making available large amounts of relatively low-quality art to the masses might be weighed and balanced against the value to be derived from reserving the very best art for more exclusive forms of consumption by the educated classes.” (Bennett, Culture 115)

Significantly, the practices and social profiles of the visitors also became part of this machinery as productive elements. Initially they appeared as ‘problems,’ for example when the question of the adequate choice and arrangement of the exhibits for the socially differentiated visitors was discussed. However, at the same time the visitors in many respects also represented ‘instruments’ for the working out of the ‘problems.’ On the one hand, particularly their own activity—within a pre-structured frame—was supposed to heighten the effect of the exhibits. On the other, the differences (defined outside of the medium) between classes and genders were used as effective instruments in the spatial organization of the museum.4 The working class was not only supposed to view the exhibits in the museum, but also the conduct of the bourgeoisie and practice—under the stress of being observed by the public of whom they themselves were a part—taking over these types of behavior. Accordingly, the mere presence of women (also those of the working class) was considered a controlling and moderating measure for male conduct. “[…] there was a common pattern in which women, in being welcomed out of the ‘separate sphere’ of domesticity to which their naturalization had earlier confined them, were accorded a role in which the attributes associated with that sphere were enlisted for reformatory purposes—as culture’s instruments rather than its targets.” (Bennett, Birth 33)

And so the visitors were not conceived of as empty shells that were imprinted in the museum; rather, the politics of the museum were

4

The museum additionally enabled further knowledge about social differences when, for example, it was observed and counted which paintings were viewed by representatives of the ‘lower’ classes; subsequently the ‘taste’ of a social class could be identified (cf. Bennett, Culture 133ff).

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The Governmentality of Media based on existing classifications that obtained a new significance in the museum, thus contributing to its productivity. Also some further aspects important for the governmentality of media outside of the museum can already be recognized here, especially with regard to the status of ‘technology’ and ‘contents:’ the rationality of the museum is a result of a flexible connectability of spaces, techniques, practices and discourses. Initially, the museum as a material arrangement (in the sense of the architectonically realized structure ‘in stone’) is only a realm of possibility for the realization of flexible strategies and constellations. The stone architecture specifies neither unequivocal procedures nor goals. And the exhibits constitute just as little a center or a point of departure for effects of power; far more also they obtain their status from the relational fabric into which, as I have shown, factors are entering that ‘the museum’ does not possess. The ‘problems’ identified and worked on in the museum are in no way more original than the ‘solutions;’ they are jointly produced by way of the arrangement of spaces, the discursivation of the elements and the formation of specific government technologies. Despite this “tactical polyvalence” (Foucault, History 100) of the spaces and exhibits there is a tendency—not only in Bennett’s argumentation but also in many publications in media studies following him—to consider the given spatial structure as a decisive source for the effects of power. Clive Barnett has pointed out that this, with a reductionist reference, can be traced back not least of all to Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon postulating that the architecture of the prison alone guarantees the automatization and internalization of the effects of power. This model is used in a wide variety of forms when discussing the conditions of visibility of modern mass media (cf. Elmer). However, the decisive point of radio and television —namely, the spatial decoupling of not only production/reception (i.e., of the subjects and objects of governing), but also that of the widely spread viewers—is thereby masked. It is specifically this decoupling that forms the basis of the proliferation of indirect forms of conduct (cf. Barnett 385). Therefore, mass media should be less regarded analogously to the Panopticon and more so to Foucault’s analysis of sexuality (cf. Stauff 109-78). They are less cultural techniques in the sense of symbolic practices (like reading, writing, or calculating) or media technological constellations (like printing or the alphabet) which remain constant over a long time hallmarking a culture. They are rather technologies that continuously work on culture and are themselves culturally constituted and differentiated in this process. From this perspective, the productivity of media does not result from establishing structures of communication and forms of perception but (mainly) from putting these up for discussion and making

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Markus Stauff them manipulable. Therefore, media do not function as the basic technique of a culture—they function as a (in the widest sense) technological production and processing of cultural differentiations by way of the cultural differentiation of technologies; they are working on problem areas that are established with the media. Thereby also the complementary and competing simultaneity of different media as productive factors can be seen insofar as they always make different promises and particularly in their interaction continue producing new deficits.5

Governing Private Realms: Television Even more pronounced than for other media, the existence and effects of television are to a large extent identical with the continuous problematizations of this medium. It is discussed, regulated, changed and multiplied incessantly so that it stands to reason not to locate the ‘politics of television’ (only) in its ‘contents,’ in its ways of perception, or in its ownership but in the countless strategies aiming at defining, classifying, modifying television—its apparatuses, its forms of reception, its programs—and thereby contributing persistently to the (self-)direction of individuals and populations. In the course of television’s historical transformations, a number of different government-technological rationalities and strategies are realized that are accompanied by technical and institutional changes but that are in no way defined and disambiguated. If I am going to retrace some aspects of this problematization here once more, then it is mainly in order to show in what way the model of a “governmentality of media” can be differentiated from other models. On the one hand— against the popular thesis that the medium becomes invisible once it is habituated—I maintain that it is ‘planted’ into everyday life as a problem that needs to be worked on. On the other—against the notion of media as stable arrangements that structure spaces and time in a specific way—I maintain that television provides options of (self-)structuring.

5

This kind of immanence (or even dialectic) of problems and problem solutions occasionally is also used as ‘motor’ of media history. “Media are … productive, they procreate because they are also increasing the problems that they are solving” (Engell 298). In a similar way, Hartmut Winkler sees the history of media as a chain of attempts to overcome the differentiating constraints of writing and to establish an equally universal as transparent order of signifiers; every medium, however, not only is added as an additional order of signifiers to the already existent ones but beyond that also creates internal fragmentations (cf. 14-17).

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The Governmentality of Media Already long before television was realized technically and institutionally in the 1930s and 1940s, the media-technological television was discussed. The “functional utopias” for a future television were continuously “nurtured by a freely rambling imagination of technical and social change” (Elsner, Müller, and Spangenberg, “Der lange Weg” 167). Since the 1920s the experimental forms of realizing television (in the context of establishing the radio) are accompanied systematically by discussions on the effects and functions of the new medium on the society as a whole. Already in 1926 (and thus three years before the first official test broadcasting in Germany), the Berliner Zeitung examined—still without concrete notions of its functioning—whether television would disturb sociability in the family;6 its individual ‘laws’ and ‘rules’ were discussed in order to grant it—in addition to or replacement of other media—a certain efficiency in working out social problems (cf. Hickethier, Geschichte 29f). Also during the time of National Socialism the only rudimentarily present television consistently created a “place for discussion and of cultural paradox” (Uricchio, “Fernsehen” 237). The state institutions—like the military, the ministries of postal affairs or of propaganda—were discussing various ‘potentials’ and ‘specifics’ of the medium on the background of their different goals and rationalities, developing contradictory models of its “organization, programming and possible widespread impact” (236). The “Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda” (Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) advocated for a realization of ‘television rooms’ for public and collective reception in which mainly the reciprocal control of the jointly viewing public was considered desirable.7 Disapproving commentaries that could have undermined the propaganda effects in the intimate realm of an apartment should be suppressed in this way (cf. Uricchio, “Fernsehen” 241). The assumed specific characteristics of the new medium that served as seemingly self-evident points of reference for one or the other form of realization had to be brought forth each time as appropriate complex configurations of elements, as “end and instrument of government.” Above all, however, all these examples show that not only the specifically realized constellations contribute to the ‘politics of me6

7

Regarding these early problematizations of television see esp. Elsner, Müller, and Spangenberg, “Der lange Weg” and “Zur Entstehungsgeschichte”; Andriopoulos; Hickethier, “Fließband”. The ministry of postal affairs, on the other hand, which had advocated for a decentralized introduction of television to homes because of its connections to industry, still suggested in 1943—when there had already been no television broadcasts for a long time—to broadcast live news around the clock as the adequate form of broadcasting an individualized television.

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Markus Stauff dia’ but already the multiple attempts to establish a certain constellation with its specific effects. Although it was only exemplarily realized, i.e., only in unique instances, television nevertheless was able to become effective on a massive scale and productive as cultural technology. Even if since the late 1950s a seemingly stable form was realized for television as the “televisual medium of familial privacy for the living-room” (Zielinski 8), the medium remained a problematic and problematized object. The ‘domestication’ of television in no way accompanied the fact that its functions, effects and ways of usage were immobilized and made less problematic. Rather, the combination of television with the existing mechanisms and economies of the home established the starting point of a particularly intense cultural-technological differentiation: now the education of the children, gender relations, the development of a national or European identity as well as the improvement of individual tastes and lifestyles were at stake and had to be regulated or ruled. Television was accompanied by problems and ambivalences that attained plausibility through the medium and that had to be worked out in discussing it. It became a constant task for the family and specifically for the mother to domesticate television and at the same time to domesticate with the help of television. In the history of television, an unequivocal, ‘harmonious,’ and tacit mutual adjustment of everyday practices on the one hand and the functional modes of the medium on the other never became a habit (see on the other hand Elsner and Müller). This becomes especially visible in those problem areas that link television with the restructuring of the domestic realm in the sense of the relationships of the genders and generations. The privileged access of television to the world, to the ‘outside’ or the public, the overwhelming effect of presence, of ‘being there’ and of simultaneity is not simply given with television (with the help of technology, for example); rather, they are staged in many ways. Already the advertisement for the first television sets made pictures of sports events or (far away) landscapes visible (cf. Bernold 66f). The field of tension between this emphatic relation to the world and the sphere of private consumption and reproductive ‘amenities’—which television has also stressed—brings up a series of questions (cf. Hartley 99-107). Not only the taking part in social events at home (like, for example, the viewing of opera broadcasts sitting in front of television dressed in evening attire) was a question, but also how social events could be created at home through television by inviting guests and appropriately entertaining them (cf. Spigel 99-135). What form of intimacy, which circle of people, what kind of attention is adequate for which section of the world that is being broadcast? How can the

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The Governmentality of Media family create an appropriate connection to the exterior world via television? How can the familial intimate world be strengthened by television (or protected from it)? In any case, the coordination of the private and public realms, of the familial and the exterior world was a task that could be mastered; the apparatus, the programs and the familial use of television provided multi-voiced instruments for it. The irritations and ambivalences made television productive because they guaranteed that it became a matter of permanent attention and concern. The (always ‘problematic’) relations between the genders and generations that make up the ‘familial circle’ as a sensitive fabric constituted both the conditions and the effects of the familial-televisual governmentality. Periodicals and pedagogical guides gave advice on the appropriate television-programs for women and children and thus, thanks to television, being a woman or a child was simultaneously defined and shaped. This is even truer since in the programs and in the technical modifications the categories of these problematizations could be found again and thus became concretely manageable. Types of programs and apparatuses were developed, supposed to guarantee a smooth integration of television and household chores—in order to optimize (i.e., with advertisement for household appliances, cooking and family programs, etc., directed at specific target groups) the task of being a homemaker and mother. Women’s magazines gave advice on how the day could be structured with the help of television and thus instigated the self-technological use of the medium (cf. Spigel 73-98). By referring to the seemingly contradictory interests of man and woman, industry was advertising the purchase of second television sets. Parallel to this, suggestions were developed how men, women, parents and children each could view their own (gender- and age-)specific programs without disturbing the familial peace. From the differentiating categories of the family, television (i.e., its technology, its programs, its use and its placement in the family) was provided with a specific rationality and at the same time it contributed to its own government-technological manageability. During the first ten years of the development of the television, it is easy to see the emerging shift from technological-apparative questions to a problematization of the programs and ‘contents,’ as well as the forms of reception, thanks to the habitualization and the incremental concealment of the (‘complicated’) technicity of the medium. The debate regarding programs and ‘contents,’ however, establishes goals and rationalities that function just as ‘technologically’ as the apparatuses themselves. To this day, zappers and couch potatoes—not much different from the early radio- (and television-) tinkerers—operate in a heterogeneous field of operating instruc-

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Markus Stauff tions, contradictory rationalities, economical or familialistic strategies, and not least of all their own experimentations; that is, they operate in a field that makes variously structured options available for optimizing the medium, ones own relationship to it and thus also ones own everyday behavior. The smooth transition intimates that technology and program structures can indeed take over equivalent functions for the (cultural-)technological regulation and do not in any way represent levels of the medium that categorically have to be differentiated.

The Structuring or Problematization of Space This simultaneously addresses a decisive media-theoretical shift that results from perspectivizing media as technologies of government. While the model proposed here locates the ‘politics of media’ on the level of its problematizations and thus on the level of multiple strategies, other approaches center on the standardizing effects. It is specifically with the question of the mediated structuring of space and time that the difference in perspectives can be illustrated. When Marshall McLuhan very directly links “tribal society,” “national state” or the “global village” with specific media, he postulates that the social and cultural spaces, relatively speaking, result directly from the technologically defined range, the speed and the capacity of reproduction of the media. Thus, a specific but to a large extent unequivocal space-structuring effect can be attributed to each medium. By explicitly referring to McLuhan, Joshua Meyrowitz has analyzed the restructuring of social and notably domestic realms by television. In his study No Sense of Place, Meyrowitz postulates that media become socially effective by shaping the delimitation and accessibility of different social spaces. Every individual medium leads to a specific structuring of the social realms (cf. Meyrowitz, “Medium” 59). It thus would be characteristic for television that it undermines a sharp differentiation of social spaces that to date had been characterized by book culture and thereby effectuates a dissolution (or at least a blurring) of so far distinctive social subjectivities—and in fact irrespective of its specific contents: one watches television together (while one reads alone); one sees—in the flow of the program—not only the most different situations; one also can (contrary to the book) see concretely what other persons see. By submitting the most varied situations to the observation of a socially undifferentiated public, television questions spatial delimitations. The “structure of social ‘situations’” established by television thus undermines the socially differentiating function of spatial structures (Meyrowitz,

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The Governmentality of Media No Sense 4). Central effects of this spatial organization through television, as diagnosed by Meyrowitz—apart from a sinking relevance of figures of authority that now are observed in ‘private’ situations as well—is a blurring of group identities (his example here is the relationship of the genders) and a suspension of clearly delimited role transitions (his example here is the transition from childhood to maturity). A specific organization of space is thus attributed to television that becomes effective always in the same and compulsive way, at odds with the different practical realms. This argumentation then resembles the simplified use of the term Panopticon in some of the studies in media research already discussed above. From the media characteristics of television, Meyrowitz deduces its indisputable effectiveness. Thus, relationships of genders or generations can be different from one medium to the next, but they are always unequivocally defined by them, and so they do not emerge as argumentative fields or strategies that come into view as a reaction to and a link with the space-structuring effects of television in order to change them, to use or to support them. “In Meyrowitz’s account there is […] politics, but no discursive power; appropriation, but no containment; technology, but no technique” (Berland 150). If, on the other hand, we take into account the strategical modifications, the practices and problematizations of the medium, then the space-structuring effects of television (and thus also their importance for social differentiations) remain basically ambivalent. It is true that with the introduction of television the established spatial organization of the familial domestic realm is changed and the relationship of public and private space is modified; but this is seen as a change in the set of problems and the strategic field of the familial organization of space. Television does not establish one spatial organization; rather, through intersecting its own technology, its communicative structures and the forms of its programs with the existing mechanisms structuring space, it constitutes a series of problems and simultaneously a series of instruments of spatial organization. The relationships of the genders or the generations are not simple effects of media structuring space; they are relatively independent mechanisms (i.e., relevant in a plurality of practices and discourses) that in the first place make television spatially effective. The gender-differentiation of spaces and times of the day (as can be seen, for example, from the clearly different advertisements shown during daytime and prime time television) for economical reasons alone is reproduced and modified by television; it becomes a specifically productive problem of television because it is also managed by other mechanisms. The spatial ambivalence of television thus turns out to be neither an original (and soon to be mastered) problem, nor

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Markus Stauff an effect determined by media technology; it rather has the character of a permanent task.

Media as Institutionalized Problems A considerable part of media communication is communication ‘on’ media. The ‘governmentality of media’ is realized by its continuing problematization, and it is of great importance for the governmental technology ‘television’ that it is a ‘lay technique.’ Even large and expert technologies are repeatedly the subject of ambivalent fascination and of disputes about their dangers and chances. For example, in the current debates on genetic technology both the dichotomizing patterns of argumentation can be found, as can indications that these are old ones. Particularly the links between apparatuses, practices and discourses and thus also the coupling between machinery and self-technology fundamentally differ between lay and expert technologies. If, for example, a technology like nuclear energy becomes a matter of social discussion, this hardly has strategic and cultural-technological consequences.8 Even though—as both its opponents and its advocates are pointing out in the same way—nuclear energy also has effects in our everyday life (be it because it necessitates the structures of a police state, or be it because it brings inexpensive electricity independent of oil supply to the households) it is neither present in everyday life as a differentiated object region that opens up a variety of manners, nor can differentiated effects for differentiated forms of use be directly observed and managed (one only has to compare the difficulties of proving a raised risk of cancer in the environment of atomic plants and react to it individually with the clearly direct evidence of the so-called Monday syndrome of fidgety children). Significantly, the dominant protests are those that refer to nuclear energy, fundamentally against its use, while those (much less public) protests regarding television rather are aiming at its regulation and its optimization: either parents’ initiatives demand less violence and sex, or fan groups want to prevent the discontinuance of a series. The cultural technologies of media can thus be located between inaccessibly complex technologies and largely unproblematic technical apparatuses or instruments (electric drill, iron, etc.): on the 8

A comparison between television and nuclear energy is not as far fetched as one might at first think; in 1979, the then Federal Chancellor of Germany Helmut Schmidt supposedly had declined approving plans for a cable network with the following words: “We should not stumble into dangers that are more acute and more dangerous than nuclear energy” (Tagesspiegel 28 Dec. 2003, n. pag.).

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The Governmentality of Media one hand accessible for all, while on the other an interface of manifold and oppositional techniques, practices, and discourses that do not come together into a stable constellation but that constantly need technological control. Much more than the museum or the movies, radio and television install permanent government-technological machinery that is intertwined with most of (everyday) practices.

Individualization as Optimization of Media Use The problematic fields and rationalities that let television become productive have shifted over and over again. Video recorders and remote controls have just as much contributed to reorganizing (and thus problematizing) temporal structures and keeping their public as has the increasing economization to which television was exposed, at least in Europe. The cultural-technological way of functioning—the care for the family, etc.—is nevertheless in no way replaced by ‘mere’ economical maxims. After all, an economic profit orientation (contrary to all other assertions) cannot be clearly inscribed into technology nor into ‘contents;’ it erects itself an experimental field implying the linkage of manifold partial mechanisms (ratings and mail of viewers, program politics and image of the broadcasting company, industrial and intermedial cooperation, etc.). It can be observed, however, that the cultural-technological productivity of television is approaching the constellation of neoliberalism. In the course of the pluralization of programs, of digitization and diverse ‘interactive’ formats, the successful individualization increasingly becomes a central problem that is supposed to be dealt with by television. Be it with hard-disc recorders or with sports shows without advertisement: The promise that we ‘will no longer miss anything’ and that, in the light of the variety of programs we will always find what ‘corresponds to our personal wishes’ with the help of electronic program guides, this promise has to be seen at the same time as an invitation to realize and to optimize ones personality through ones own television. An individualized management of time and content is demanded of television just as much as it is made possible by it (cf. Stauff). The fact that this changed constellation does not function as ‘liberation’ from the seemingly restrictive guidelines of a conventional, familialistic television should have become clear on the background of Foucault’s perspective. At the same time, however, the promises of individuality, choice and interactivity can also not be exposed as mere ideology to which reality does not correspond in any way. The current constellation of media indeed puts technologies at our disposal that in this way allow individual-

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Markus Stauff ity, one’s own taste, optimization of ones own use of media not only to become desirable, but makes it also plausible and manageable. The governmentality of media cannot be located between the poles of liberation and suppression, between enlightenment and manipulation. Instead we have to ask how media are made into something manageable with ‘potentials’ and ‘dangers’ whose rational management again makes practices, family conditions, subjectivities, and populations accessible for regulating and/or ruling. ‘The media’ (and every individual medium itself) obtain their ‘identity’ and thus also their politics only through the problematizations, the discursive reproductions and the media-technological practices that integrate them into governmental rationalities. Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

Works Cited Andriopoulos, Stefan. “Okkulte und technische Television.” 1929: Beiträge zur Archäologie der Medien. Ed. Andriopoulos and Bernhard J. Dotzler. Frankfurt a.M., 2002. 31-53. Print. Barnett, Clive. “Culture, Government and Spatiality: Reassessing the ‘Foucault Effect’ in Cultural-Policy Studies.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2.3 (1999): 369-97. Print. Bauer, Susanne. “Krankheit im Raster des Umweltgenomprojekts: Koordinaten, Lokalisationen und Fakten auf der Flucht.” Rasterfahndungen: Darstellungstechniken, Normierungsverfahren, Wahrnehmungskonstitution. Ed. Tanja Nusser and Elisabeth Strowick. Bielefeld, 2003. 199-218. Print. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London, 1995. Print. —. Culture: A Reformer’s Science. London, 1998. Print. Berland, Jody. “Placing Television.” New Formations 4 (1988): 14554. Print. Bernold, Monika. Der Einzug des Fernsehers ins Wohnzimmer: Repräsentationsformen von Fernsehen und Familie in Österreich 1955-1967. Vienna, 1995. Print. Bratich, Jack Z. “‘Nothing is Left Alone for Too Long.’ Reality Programming and Control Society Subjects.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 30.1 (2006): 65-83. Print. Castel, Robert. “‘Problematization’ as a Mode of Reading History.” Foucault and the Writing of History. Ed. Jan Goldstein. Oxford, 1994. 237-52. Print.

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The Governmentality of Media Elmer, Greg. “A Diagram of Panoptic Surveillance.” New Media & Society 5.2 (2003): 231-47. Print. Elsner, Monika, and Thomas Müller. “Der angewachsene Fernseher.” Materialität der Kommunikation. Ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer. Frankfurt a.M., 1988. 392-415. Elsner, Monika, Thomas Müller, and Peter M. Spangenberg. “Der lange Weg eines schnellen Mediums: Zur Frühgeschichte des deutschen Fernsehens.” Uricchio, Anfänge 153-207. —. “Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Dispositivs Fernsehen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland der fünfziger Jahre.” Institution, Technik und Programm: Rahmenaspekte der Programmgeschichte des Fernsehens. Ed. Knut Hickethier. München, 1993. 31-66. Print. Vol. 1 of Geschichte des Fernsehens in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Ed. Helmut Kreuzer and Christian W. Thomsen. Engell, Lorenz. Ausfahrt nach Babylon: Essais und Vorträge zur Kritik der Medienkultur. Weimar, 2000. Print. Foucault, Michel. “The Concern for Truth.” Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and other Writings 1977-1984. By Foucault. New York, 1988. 255-67. Print. —. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol. 1. New York, 1990. Print. —. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978. Houndmills, 2007. Print. —. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8.4 (1982): 777-95. Print. Grieveson, Lee. “On Governmentality and Screens.” Screen 50.1 (2009): 180-87. Print. Hartley, John. Uses of Television. London, 1999. Print. Hay, James. “Unaided Virtues: The (Neo-)Liberalization of the Domestic Space.” Television & New Media 1.1 (2000): 53-73. Print. Henman, Paul. “Computer Technology—A Political Player in Social Policy Process.” Journal of Social Policy 26.3 (1997): 323-40. Print. Hickethier, Knut. “‘Fließband des Vergnügens’ oder Ort ‘innerer Sammlung’? Erwartungen an das Fernsehen und erste Programmkonzepte in den frühen fünfziger Jahren.” Der Zauberspiegel—Das Fenster zur Welt: Untersuchungen zum Fernsehprogramm der fünfziger Jahre. Ed. Hickethier. Siegen, 1990. 4-32. Print. —. Geschichte des deutschen Fernsehens. In collaboration with Peter Hoff. Stuttgart, 1998. Print. Lemke, Thomas. Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft: Foucaults Analyse der modernen Gouvernementalität. Hamburg, 1998. Print. Lemke, Thomas, Susanne Krasmann, and Ulrich Bröckling. “Gouvernementalität, Neoliberalismus und Selbsttechnologien. Eine

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Markus Stauff Einleitung.” Introduction. Gouvernementalität der Gegenwart: Studien zur Ökonomisierung des Sozialen. Ed. Bröckling, Krasmann, and Lemke. Frankfurt a.M., 2000. 7-40. Print. McCarthy, Anna. “Governing by Television.” Explorations in Communication and History. Ed. Barbie Zelizer. London, 2008. 119-135. Print. McLuhan, Marshall. Die magischen Kanäle: Understanding Media. 1964. Frankfurt a.M., 1970. Print. McMurria, John. “Desperate Citizens and Good Samaritans: Neoliberalism and Makeover Reality TV.” Television & New Media 9.4 (2008): 305-32. Print. Meyrowitz, Joshua. “Medium Theory.” Communication Theory Today. Ed. David Crowley and David Mitchell. Cambridge, 1994. 50-77. Print. —. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. Oxford, 1985. Print. Miller, Peter, and Nikolas Rose. “Das ökonomische Leben regieren.” Zur Genealogie der Regulation: Anschlüsse an Michel Foucault. By Jacques Donzelot et al. Ed. Richard Schwarz. Mainz, 1994. 54-108. Print. Oullette, Laurie. “TV Viewing as Good Citizenship? Political Rationality, Enlightened Democracy and PBS.” Cultural Studies 13.1 (1999): 62-90. Print. Oullette, Laurie, and James Hay. “Makeover Television, Governmentality and the Good Citizen.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22.4 (2008): 471-84. Print. Reiss, Erwin. “Wir senden Frohsinn.” Fernsehen unterm Faschismus. Berlin, 1979. Print. Rose, Nikolas, and Peter Miller. Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life. Cambridge, 2008. Print. —. “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government.” The British Journal of Sociology 43.2 (1992): 173-205. Print. Seier, Andrea. “Fernsehen der Mikropolitiken: Televisuelle Formen der Selbstführung.” Visuelle Lektüren—Lektüren des Visuellen: Bild-Praktiken, Bild-Prozess, Bild-Verhältnisse. Ed. Hanne Loreck and Kathrin Mayer. Hamburg, 2009. Print. Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago, 1992. Print. Stauff, Markus. “Das neue Fernsehen.” Machteffekte einer heterogenen Kulturtechnologie. Hamburg, 2004. Print. Uricchio, William, ed. Die Anfänge des Deutschen Fernsehens: Kritische Annäherungen an die Entwicklung bis 1945. Tübingen, 1991. Print. —. “Fernsehen als Geschichte: Die Darstellung des deutschen Fernsehens zwischen 1935 und 1944.” Uricchio, Anfänge 235-81.

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The Governmentality of Media —. Media, Simultaneity, Convergence: Culture and Technology in an Age of Intermediality. Utrecht, 1997. Print. Winkler, Hartmut. Docuverse: Zur Medientheorie der Computer. Regensburg, 1997. Print. Zielinski, Siegfried. Audiovisionen: Kino und Fernsehen als Zwischenspiele in der Geschichte. Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1989. Print.

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Procedures: Aesthetics and Modes

In Between Languages—In Between Cultures: Walter Benjamin’s “Interlinear Version” of Translation as Inframediality1 MICHAEL WETZEL “[…] that in the intermediate space between the images a new realm (which maybe is not quite so new) of mediated imaginations has emerged that is discrete and discrediting, affirming and resistant and that has instated a paradoxical interface.” (Joachim Paech)

I. As a rule, the task of translating is limited to the field of literature and communication. One thinks of the transfer from one language into another; one also thinks of interpreters. In the time of globalization, translating certainly has experienced a stimulating boost because an ever-growing number of nations more and more often directly communicate with each other. However, at the same time it becomes more than obvious that the term ‘to translate’ is not only limited to a merely linguistic field of meaning—to say nothing of the psychodynamic term ‘transfer’ that was introduced by Freud for the explanation of activities in the economy of drives by way of a displacement of affective energies. Today the technical-mechanistic aspect of meaning has almost surpassed the linguistic one, even in its semiotic expansions into transcription or transmission. Here, the point is to transfer energies into various ‘gears’—also referred to as conditions of translation (that which is usually done by a transmission, quite without any deeper psychoanalytic meaning). Other transfer-activities concern the means of transport, from transit to transmitters. If we believe some all-too-bold biologistic metaphors, then

1

First published in German in Medien in Medien. Ed. Claudia Liebrand and Irmela Schneider. Cologne, 2002. 154-175. Print. Vol. 6 of Mediologie.

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Michael Wetzel all of life is basically nothing else but a work of translation—from the production of energy to genetic control. In images, the question of visibility also proves to be overdetermined because of the passage of visual condensations in the course of which every individual image is brought out only in the choir of a communal rhetoric of the image. This means, in other words, that every image is already a translation of other images and is at the same time material for the translation into still other images, since no single image can be established as an authentically completed one. Just like, by the way, one of the oldest “Querelles” between original and translation, i.e., the one of “ut pictura poiesis” in its mutual usurpation of originality cannot be decided, thus also the immanent structure of its two media—text and image—presents itself as a process of transcription neither of which is rooted in an archetypology nor in an ektypology, but is rather indebted to the potentiality of transfer. Already the classic ideal of aesthetics by Lessing determines the artistic moment as a transitory effect whose conciseness is owed to the conjunction of two moments. With the advent of the cinematographic moving image, this logic of difference becomes constitutive. Joachim Paech has impressively described it with the function of the inter-image: only on the “margin of image transmission” is the energy field of the image-motion charged; in other words: the images only learn to move thanks to the mechanism of transfer: “Only through the figurative difference between the stationary images quickly following each other is the impression of movement generated that in the projector is real but that remains invisible among the visibilities of the images, on their margin. The movement in the film is the liminal, virtual inter-image of movement as difference in the repetition of motionless phased images. […] The operative inter-image is pure movement without image, pure difference that is augmented with the figurative difference of the two adjoining images.” (“Das Bild” 168f)

The elements that Paech is stating here for the cinematographic dispositive nevertheless also, in a nutshell, holds true for the philological primal scene of translation that discourse-historically seems to lie at the basis of all transfers: it only moves in language and—wellunderstood—only in one and the same language, because one is translating word for word or word by word. Before a so-called foreign language comes to the fore of the considerations at all, already transfer, difference, passage are at work. Basically, everything starts with the translation of “translation:” transfer, transmission, transposition, transcription, transport, transit, transduction, tradition— all these language-monsters created with ‘trans-’ and ‘tra’ that can be arbitrarily exponentiated with the German prefix nach (nachtra286

In Between Languages—In Between Cultures gen, nachmachen, nachdichten) and the Greek meta and meto. The deferral of all mythical origins always implies a media-problem: Babel, Hermes, Christ—it is always a question of the mediator, of mediation (i.e., also of communication, of message, coupling, of relays) that belatedly establishes the very community the loss of which it is allegedly supposed to compensate. However, transcriptions indeed appear with a positive claim of mediation: namely, to make something unreadable—because it is written in an incomprehensible language or in none at all—readable. But who can escape the double bind of meaning? In any case, the circumlocutions cannot since they unavoidably have to transcribe the text of their circumlocution by overwriting the transferred element like a palimpsest. In the beginning then was not the word but the translation, as Derrida conjugates into all directions (“sens!”): “Between rhetoric and the psycho-physical relation, within each one and from one to the other, there is only translation (Übersetzung), metaphor (Übertragung), ‘transfers,’ ‘transpositions,’ analogical conversions, and above all transfers of transfers: über, meta, tele: these words transcribe the same formal order, the same chain and as our discourse on this passage [passage] is taking place [se passe] in Latin, add trans to your list as well.” (“Telepathy” 19)

The assignment or—to be more modest—the task of translating between different languages with view to this ontic-ontological difference is only an insignificant epiphenomenon. Making sense is what is asked for and the decisive question is whether this sense is to be understood as a secret one, secured in the original, or as one that is simply given in the translator’s own language. Already the pre-romantic Johann Georg Hamann in his program of Aesthetica in Nuce had shattered the simple opposition of producing meaning and had nominated poetry as “the mother-tongue of the human race” with the basic consequence: “Speaking is translation—from a tongue of angels into a human tongue, that is, thoughts in[to] words—things in[to] names—images in[to] signs [and they] can be poetic or kyriological, historical, or symbolic or hieroglyphic—and philosophical or characteristic” (413). On a first glance this seems to be a classic theory of reproduction: languages of angels, thoughts, things and images here are listed like the originals in oppositions to the series: human language, words, names and signs as their translation. But Hamann’s concern is no less than a chorismos of two worlds of meaning: he compares it with the two sides of wallpaper, i.e., he interprets their relationship as that of texture from whose immanent, intrinsic shape emerges the difference between original and translation and with that the movement of transfer. It cannot be referred back to static poles as some all-too-plausible semiotic models of sender and re287

Michael Wetzel ceiver might suggest; it is a movement, a being-in-transit, a consistent beginning-again and a happening that Hamann in particular (and I mention only his thesis of god’s condescension in his creation) in all radicalism had felt. His ideal was the freely floating interlinear version of speech that, from a hermeneutic point of view as the arrival of sense (i.e., of understanding as the anchoring of transfer), can only be declared as “nonsense,” because—as he says in a letter— “I express myself in many tongues and speak the language of the Sophists, of the word-players, of the Cretans and Arabs, of the Whites and the Moors and the Creoles, because I babble in shambles criticism, mythology, rebus puzzles and axioms and sometimes argue from a human standpoint (kat anthropon) and sometimes from the standpoint of the universe (kat exochen).” (“Letter” 396)

This does not help the professional translator confronting the text. He has to deliver a readable transcription—even if the simile of “traduttore”—“traditore” (translator—traitor) is readily quoted. The bantering comparison of the translator with the traitor playfully disburdens at least of the demand for fidelity. But who would openly dare to claim this license to a freedom of transfer—apart from the translating poets who already, subject to their profession, are liars. In particular, scholarly translations absolutely demand and even require accuracy and reliability for their potential use. Who would tolerate it if a translator would attribute his inventions to untranslatability? One wants to read the correct, the fitting or rather the adequate word in English for the original one while secretly harboring the scientific dream of a universal philosophical language, of the lingua franca of the republic of scholars that supposedly resonates in all versions of national languages. But at the same time one demands something impossible or one dumps the poor translator into a state of ambivalence. For the more correct, the more fitting, the more adequate a term is in English, the more it has to veer away from the original and the more the translator stays true to the original, the more foreign and incomprehensible it becomes. Between these two extremes, between “anglicizing” and “neologisms,” the translator somehow has to find a middle way; it would be wrong to ask of her or him only a good knowledge of the foreign language. What mainly matters is that their ‘trans-lation’ arrives in their own language, that it quasi goes ashore because—to stay true to the image—the transfer between languages in reality has something in common with a ferry service. It is taking place between the languages; it is a constant movement that, to be exact, does not come to any final berth on either of the two shores; rather, in the constant back and forth between original and ‘transfer’ it also can288

In Between Languages—In Between Cultures not result in the creation of a third level. The new element that is created by the translation thus develops within the relationship into which original and translation are brought and by which they are separated from each other and through which both, the language from which and the language into which the translation takes place, are expanded.

II. Thus it is never quite clear where translators have their place. With one leg in the original text, they have to keep the other leg free for the intricate paths that they follow in their own, in the translating language, in order to measure the range of meaning. Determining the remaining threshold value certainly has to dispense with one aspect—namely, the creation of a place to stay, of an abode. If we can think at all of such a one for translators, then it is a ruin, exemplarily represented by the Tower of Babel that Brueghel’s painting has made into an icon, criss-crossed by the fissures of the confusion of tongues—we might also call it the loss of unity between signifier and signified—after the primeval Babylonian incident. Jacques Derrida has reminded us that Babel is also a proper name for “an incompletion,” or rather for “the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing something” (Difference 104). Translating then recalls the narcissistic crisis of speaking in general: never to be able to say everything. One can want to say it better, but the new version always falls behind in comparison with the original at which one never arrives because one constantly moves away from it. Nobody has known this better than Walter Benjamin, who not only was a wanderer between languages and cultures—especially German and French—but who also had to scrape together a living by doing translations and who, as a philosopher of language, has reflected upon the loss of the perfect and holy primeval Ursprache— especially in his essay on the unsurpassable painting of the apocalyptic Angelus Novus, who is driven on by a storm blowing in from paradise propelling him into the future of an eschatological recovery of the lost paradise while his face is turned backwards piling collapsing ruins before his eyes (cf. “Über den Begriff” 697f). In his explicit statement on the problem of translation—that also was, as I have to stress, a very engaged, partisan quasi-apology in the form of a preface to his own translation-project of Baudelaire’s poems— Benjamin has not resorted to Hamann, even though as a scholar of romanticism he was familiar with his achievements in the philosophy of language. In Benjamin’s early work Über die Sprache über-

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Michael Wetzel haupt und über die Sprache des Menschen, Hamann is the authority for a deep ontological theory of translation that intertwines the different linguistic levels of elements concerning human language (cf. 150ff). Nevertheless, also in “The Task of the Translator” his interest in a poetic view of language can be felt, if nowhere else then in two polemic qualifications: the preservation of poetic mystery regarding all communication or statements directed at comprehension and the thesis of the survival of the original in the supplementary development of its transfers in which, as it were, the figure of the origin as a vortex of becoming from his The Origin of German Tragic Drama is hinted at. Lastly, it is a matter of freeing translators from a misunderstood corvée serving an aesthetic of reception; their task according to Benjamin is not to take ‘the receiver’ into ‘consideration’ or to communicate something to him. Translators rather should without reserve set something free that Benjamin essentially calls the intention, in which the languages supplement each other but in which they also differ from each other. The well-nigh yearning conjuration of an ‘afterlife’ of the original in its translation, of a “maturing process” of “words with fixed meaning” (“Task” 73) is supposed to facilitate the task of translators. Benjamin here is following a tried and true model of the turn from mimesis to ‘value-added’-montage—from Goethe’s notion of education as perfection of nature to Kierkegaard’s argument of repetition that is only such by the alterity of the repeater. Thus, also Benjamin is speaking of a “transformation and a renewal of something living” (73) which simultaneously “rises into a higher and purer linguistic air” (75). Unlike in the earlier essay on language, he does not translate, as Hamann called it, thoughts into images, or images into signs, i.e., does not translate between two media, but within one medium: that of language, or more precisely, of writing. This means that the task of the translator is almost an unsolvable one; namely, because it is the task of an ‘alter-ation’ of himself, of his own language. As Kristeva said, we, the translators, become Étrangers à nous-mêmes, strangers to ourselves.2 Even though the translators are given something, this gift only becomes a present if they add to it their autonomous fate. On this margin between gift 2

[The term “alter-ation” is an attempt to transfer the German term “Veranderung” (from German “anders” ≈ “different” and “der Andere” ≈ “the other”) that connotes also “Veränderung” ≈ transformation, alteration, BP/DR.] The term ‘Veranderung’ (othering) is not a revertive translation from a French neologism, but a term coined by Michael Theunissen, who has differentiated Husserl’s notion of “becoming another” (“Zu-einem-Anderen-werden”) directing it towards the notion of an “immanent ‘alter-ation’” (“immanente Veranderung”) (see 84, 141-51).

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In Between Languages—In Between Cultures and ‘rendering’ she or he gets into a veritable double bind. Already the ambiguity of the title “The Task of the Translator” makes us sense the depth of the meaning. Discharging the duty of impartation, translators in light of the mysterious incommunicability of all languages can only give up. This, however, does not mean that a goal does not still remain—namely, the task to find once more the intention of the foreign language, its “mode of signification” in his or her own language as the “intended effect […] upon the language” into which the translation takes place, but also upon language in general, upon “pure language” (77f). But what is meant by intention? Certainly not the psychological meaning of a purpose or a will. The pathos with which Benjamin puts this term at the center of his concept of language is owed rather to a gnoseological or even an ontological meaning that can be traced back to the scholastic tradition of “intentio” (or “intentio recta”) as something that is directed or focused on the object of knowledge. Peter Szondi has pointed to a possible influence by Fritz Mauthner, who has defined the medieval meaning of “intentio” as “energy” or “tension” by invoking the etymological connections to archery (Mauthner 585; see also Szondi 325). But probably the term is also marked by Husserl’s phenomenology of intentional acts, directed as well against the psychologism that can be understood as specially ‘noticing’ or ‘aiming at something,’ or rather more concretely as ‘hitting the mark.’ Regarding the “intentional content,” Husserl moreover differentiates between “the object as it is intended,” and “the object … which is intended” (572f, 578). In any case, Benjamin, in reading Heidegger’s habilitation on Duns Scotus’ philosophy of language (which he hated), got to know both the scholastic term of “intentio” (oriented at objects and which Heidegger translated with “mindset” in the technical sense of adjustment or adaption) and its transfer into Husserl’s contradistinction of the noetic act of forming attitudes and its noematic content.3 The fact that he is disparaging the achievement of the work as “only a piece of good translation work” has to astonish—unless in Heidegger’s usage of ‘intention’ he misses that which ten years later he would call “l’entre-choc” between his own idea of history and Heidegger’s, namely the clash of opposites or—like Samuel Weber translates—the ZwischenFall (in the sense of inter-cision) (cf. Benjamin, Briefe 246, 506).4 Because for Benjamin, in ‘intention’ as ‘dispositioning’ (Ein-Stellung) simultaneously a moment of ‘de-positioning’ 3 4

See Heidegger, Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre 279-81; see also Walter Benjamin’s letter to Gershom Scholem from 1920 (Briefe 1: 246). See for this also Weber 181f, who translates the term “l’entre choc” into German as “ZwischenFall” [which can verbally be translated into “incident” or “contretemps,” but also connotes “to fall in between,” BP/DR].

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Michael Wetzel (Ent-Stellung)5 is taking effect, namely the exploding power of discontinuous time that comes as a shock (‘choc’) and for which particularly film as a differential montage of perceptive “intermittences” (formulated in Paech’s sense as an “entre-choc” of the “entre-image,” as incident of the inter-image) is the privileged medium (cf. Benjamin, Arcades 843; see also Weber 184). When talking about intention, we are then talking of alter-ation, of becoming ‘other,’ of being ‘beside’ oneself in the sense of ‘tensing’ oneself for something in which from the side of the object or from the intention the driving force of the ‘inter-est’ becomes recognizable that disrupts every intention of the subject that is perfectly balanced. In the intention of speech an energy is articulated, an energetic force (energeia) drifting beyond the completion of any individual linguistic work (ergon) that is mediating between languages as perspectivizing dispositions, but that in virtue of its function as a “medium,” as “critical medium between the realm of the signifier and that of the signified” (Benjamin, “Fragmente” 23)6 is bringing forth the distinction in the first place. It is intensity as the temporality of a transfer by virtue of the difference of an in-between ‘margin,’ a variation that at the same time is taking care of the deferral of the identical in a transtemporal, transhistorical-eschatological or prebabylonial sense. Therefore, Benjamin very accurately formulates a dynamics of intention doubled or encapsulated within itself when he distinguishes between the “intended object” and the “mode of intention:” “Without distinguishing the intended object from the mode of intention, no firm grasp of this basic law of a philosophy of language can be achieved. The words Brot and pain ‘intend’ the same object, but the modes of this intention are not the same. It is owing to these modes that the word Brot means something different to a German than the word pain to a Frenchman, that these words are not interchangeable to them, that, in fact, they strive to exclude each other. As to the intended object, however, the two words mean the very same thing.” (“Task” 75)

With this differentiation Benjamin certainly is up-to-date with the reflections in the philosophy of language of his era whose main characteristics in analytical philosophy, neo-Kantianism (explicitly

5

6

Unfortunately the translation into English does not allow for the word-play of the German “Ein-stellung” and “Ent-stellung” that also suggests that a positioning of a single entity would mean a distortion. See also Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften VI: 14, where the early Benjamin is speaking against a semiological and for a referential semantics: “The sign never necessarily refers to the signified; thus, it does not refer to the object because that only reveals itself to the necessarily inward intention.”

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In Between Languages—In Between Cultures by connecting to Kant’s differentiation between noumenon and phaenomenon) and phenomenology essentially underlined the distinction between the linguistically intended and linguistic intending. One of the precursors, for example, was Gottlob Frege who defined this distinction as that of sense [Sinn] and reference [Bedeutung]. While the latter refers to the object as such, sense is defined as “the mode of presentation” (143).7 The example chosen by Frege originates from astronomy; it is the planet Venus (named in its essentialist, substantialist being), whose appearance is compartmentalized into evening star or morning star, depending on its hour of observation. It is decisive for this example, however, that regarding ‘sense’ and ‘reference’ we are not dealing with two comparable ways of object perception, but with the fact that each connection to the object as something meant or signified can only be effected by its character of givenness, beyond meaning or denoting, only in the medium of sense as intending. The example of the twice-appearing planet Venus demonstrates to what extent meaning—this side of the ‘scientific’ classification which also in reality does not correspond to the spoken lingua franca—is playing a double game with sense, or better with the senses that are open for associative or even mythological allocations and translations, a double game of approaching and retreating that can only be represented metaphorically. At the same time and in one stroke, the metaphor is marking a sort of revocation of the object and its translation by the senses which also holds true for linguistic levels: “Pure language” in the name of the essence of things retreats from the varieties of meaning and defers regarding the veracity of being—being able to speak only metaphorically—since, like the fragments of an amphora (following the image of Benjamin: the “doubly carrying one”), it assembles into “ammetaphorics” (cf. Derrida, “Retrait”).8 Because “pure language” does not exist as a given of the senses, it remains assigned as an ‘unsensual’ likeness of the signified. In fact, it does it by the continuation of the life and the ripening of an original that—as Paul de Man clearly has recognized with Derrida—is always also threatened by an “errance” that as the fate of the history of origins only bears witness to the progressive proliferation of difference, “as a permanent disjunction which inhabits all languages as such, including and especially the language one calls one’s own” (De Man 92).9 7 8 9

Benjamin had heard about Frege from Scholem (as about Mauthner), see Scholem 66f. On “ammetaphorics” see Derrida, Difference. The figures of ‘fate’ and of ‘errance’ (“destinerrance”) Derrida has mainly developed in his La carte postale, which took its point of departure from his debate of Lacan’s interpretation of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.”

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Michael Wetzel Therefore, for Benjamin the task of the translator is to find the meaning of what is meant in the sense of his own—translating— language, despite all the particularity and performativity of his own mode of meaning that becomes the echo, the resonance of harmony: “The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect [Intention] upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original. […] Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the centre of a language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one.” (“Task” 77)

Therefore, when experiencing language, Benjamin’s translator does not promenade on the summits of pure language but in the valleys where the effects of echoes and sound are ruling, offering orientation in the thickets of the mountain forests. To stay within the image, we might say that the translator is always ‘on the other side’ and can only ascertain the touching of the original text as an echo. In this translators’ dilemma, Benjamin sidesteps the demand of doing justice to the meaning of the original. His withdrawal into ‘langue’ as the adequate native equivalence to ‘langage,’ “that pure language which is under the spell of another” is dreaming of transferring the arbitrariness of the signifier into the symbolized as a sort of transcendental signified, thereby regaining pure language in order “to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work” (80). Rainer Nägele (22f, 32f) has pointed out all the “inter- and intratextual resonances” to the poetological and especially the romantic realms of forest and echo, not least to the poem “Correspondances” by Baudelaire that conspicuously was not translated by Benjamin and in which the sound-structure of ‘correspondence’ already can be found on the threshold of a passage from forested nature to the architectural symbolism of a Babylonian urban culture. And in fact it becomes apparent in the basic figure of correspondence that beneath the polemical term ‘communication’ in communication theory, which Benjamin at the beginning emphatically rejects for translation, another term establishes itself that is affiliated with his use of language in his earlier essay on language. There, he talks of the fact that language as a medium communicates the “linguistic spirit of things” which imparts itself to humans—another way of reading the linguistic intentio—so that they would give it a name (“Über Sprache” 142f). In this revealing sense of disclosure as a kind of imparting, the “task” of the translator is also affected since his work is supposed to partake in an emphatic way in pure language. That other communi294

In Between Languages—In Between Cultures cation, by contrast, which is dismissed as the nonessential element of translation, refers more to the need for information in a world that is sealed to experiences as Benjamin found it in Baudelaire’s urban images. Here is also located the architectonic (not to say ‘architextural’) space of resonance in which the correspondence is taking place: the Tower of Babel. Symbol of human hubris towards the authentic divine primeval language and allegory of the task of translating between all these bewildering dialects, the Tower of Babel is impressive not least by the iconic conciseness of Bruegel’s painting —its aspect of a ruin—a motif that Benjamin in his Origin of German Tragic Drama has made, as is well-known, into the central category of the allegorical, respectively of “allegorical writing” as “characters of transience” that obtains actuality “as that [amorphous] remnant” in “form of the ruin.” The inscrutable density of this formulation, or more precisely of the problem of translation, suggests already that most noble of all ruins that adorns the name Babel. It also governs or beleaguers that articulation of “longing for linguistic complementation” that is quasi one of the most popular definitions of Benjamin’s interpretation of translation. According to him, the ideal translation approaches this not by concealing the original, but by letting it shine through, letting the limits of language become transparent through a diaphanous effect as it is maybe dreamt of in the Pentecostal experience in the Christian tradition. Benjamin here is speaking of “arcades” that leave a certain literality as openings in the “wall” of the syntactic form of one’s own or another’s language of translation—thus this opposition is also pointing to Baudelaire and his Parisian dream as “Babel of stairways and arcades” (“Babel d’escaliers et d’arcades”) and as one “of metal walls” (“des murailles de métal”). “A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade.” (“Task” 79f)

Much could be said about Benjamin’s program summarized here— his repeated rejection of predicative or syntagmatic theories of language or his divinatorial anticipation of hypermedial structures in “key-word-linking”—nevertheless, it should be noted that with the image of ‘arcade’ already at an early state the later image of his “Arcades” project can be seen—as Baudelaire’s figure of correspondence anticipates the basic one of constellation in the book on Tragic Drama. In any case, the matured categories help in keeping away misunderstandings from the path of their differentiation, particu295

Michael Wetzel larly concerning the suspicion of an archetypological Platonism that could be imputed to this double game of essence and translucency. Like this, however, it stands to reason to conceive of pure language as an idea that emerges on the horizon of the constellation of the amorphous remnants of individual languages which again in the intense totality of their conceptual fragments break and diffuse the ray of light of the quasi laser-guided correspondence like in kaleidoscopes; in short, lets it (come to) pass. Clearly it is a matter of no less than the possibility of ‘imparting’ in the sense of a practically universal divisibility of the amorphous remnants each of which is not only an element of the constellation of the whole but also represents it; namely, as the non-impartable, as the ‘symbolizing’ or the ‘symbolized.’ Benjamin is already using a phrase here that he would later strengthen in the context of his theory of photography with the topos of the ‘aura;’ namely, the appearance of an irreducible remoteness in light of the greatest proximity. It is a matter of “some ultimate, decisive element” beyond all meaning “quite close and yet infinitely remote, concealed or … fragmented or powerful” (“Task” 79f). Then it is the goal of the movement of language in translation “to turn the symbolizing into the symbolized, to regain pure language fully formed in the linguistic flux” as pure language “which no longer means or expresses anything” (80). Thus underneath the task of translation a salvific dimension is revealed that Benjamin indentifies as “freedom in translation,” a freedom that is redeemed for the sake of pure language in the translator’s own and that culminates in the task of the translator, namely, “to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work” (80). All these paradoxes culminating in the inexpressiveness, devoid of reference or context, of an almost apocalyptic fulfillment of the intention (liberation as expiring), from beginning to end exist under the patronage of a poetological radicalization of language. It is a radicalization (in the original sense of the word) of a ‘rootedness’ to be found in the ultimate that is not only poetologically reminiscent of Hamann’s motif of the language of the angels. It also is alluding to Novalis’ romantic radicalism of monologism/monolinguism, who already had propagated the ideal of an autoreferentiality of speaking that takes care only of language and is directed against factual comprehension; an irreducible difference and unadoptable anonymity of the one language that Derrida underlines for the moment of the “absolute translation” in every language, e.g., of a transcriptivity without origin or reference hovering on the margin between cultures (see Novalis 672; Derrida, Le monolinguisme 21, 117).

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III. At the end of the essay, Benjamin once more takes up Baudelaire’s arcades-image of the literality of translation that should be compatible tension-free with “freedom in translation.” The ruins of Babel and the revelation of meaning should coincide with what he calls interlinear version: “For to some degree all great texts contain their potential translation between the lines; this is true to the highest degree of sacred writings. The interlinear version of the Scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all translation” (“Task” 82). Again Benjamin, in propagating just this model as the ideal of translation, is playing with paradox, because the interlinear version as a word-by-word translation regardless of grammatical or idiomatic differences is considered a rather primitive early form of the appropriation of texts in a foreign language. But here the interlinear version means a sort of immanent or implicit anticipation of all other languages, a sort of virtual multiglottism like it has been conceived of in the Christian tradition as the experience of the Pentecostal revelation or as a sort of sum total of all possible translations in the sense of an intention raised to a higher power. In any case it is again a matter of a paradoxical synchronicity of claim and completion, particularity and totality, finiteness and purity, profaneness and holiness as it already had permeated the naming of “intention,” “arcade,” or “passage,” the “constellation,” and in general the “task,” and namely in form of the doubling of original text and subtext in the interlinear version of translating. It is precisely this duplicity that also the contributions in the volume recently edited by Christiaan Hart Nibbrig, Übersetzen: Walter Benjamin have addressed. It deals with translation’s peculiar mediality of being in between, replacing something of which originally there was no lack. The point of departure is Benjamin’s insight that translation does not only start when passing over into another language but is already taking place in the original, the so-called native language. Yes, translatability only exists because speaking is always already translation. Thus, the translator’s “art of combination” and the “technique of montage”—as Alexander Düttmann explicates in his appeal for “translatability” (“Von” 131)—expose only the artificial and conventional character of any language or culture as a process, thereby disavowing the hermeneutic correctness of direct communication. The utopian goal of interlinearity then is not multiculturalism but the remembrance of a—to some extent—transcendent “between the contexts or cultures” that nevertheless does not create a specific space or cannot be determined as movement “on the margin” (Düttmann, Zwischen 92). Werner Hamacher in this sense is taking up a choice of words by Benjamin when speaking of an “in-

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Michael Wetzel tensive language” in which the momentum of mediality in line with the interlinearity of communicability, translatability or perceptibility—as in the relationship between original and translation—does “not live” but “survive” or “live on” (174f, 183). This is how the editor actually wants to have the colon understood after the title “Translation:” as a task, as a signal of taking notice, in which exemplarily a name—Benjamin’s name—is “translatorically” transferred, thereby surviving “transfiguratively:” to a certain extent as the imperative of translating, as the linguistic imperative of speaking, whose law is translation or “the law itself as translation” (Derrida, Le monolinguisme 25; see also Nibbrig, “An der Stelle”; Hamacher 182f). It is an oscillation of the imagination of the translator not only between two variants of a new version but also between at least two languages—if not, in the best Babel-tradition, between many more languages within his own. But this ‘in between’ is and remains unattainable; as the fate of translating it evades every hermeneutic disposition and every communicative calculation and cannot be closed as a gap in the edifice of language. In this sense the interlinear, interlingual, intertextual, intercultural or interpretatorial constellations concurrently take on the significance of a ‘sub-’ in the sense of which the subtext of the interlinear version in reality activates a subliminally transcendental level of language. Maybe instead of an inter- we are dealing with an infralinear version in which all virtually inherent references of every language are covertly collected and which as a latently effective infrastructure of language is governing the immanent process of its manifestations. Thus Benjamin is prompting an ontosemiology, as also Heidegger in Unterwegs zur Sprache is developing it as the “call[ing] here and there” of language, as an “inter” which he leads on the path of translating from the Latin “inter” to the German “unter” (among/beneath/sub-) into the formula of speaking as Unter-Schied (sub-division, dif-ference, distinction or division beneath) and Entsprechen (corresponding, connoting ‘de- or un-speaking’): “In the midst of the two, [on the ‘in’] ‘between’ of world and thing, in their inter-, [in this ‘sub-,’] division prevails” (Heidegger, Poetry 201).10 The transition of this ‘sub-division’ initially attempts to transfer the passage from figurativeness to literality into readability. Yet, it cannot be won in a horizontal comparison but only in the vertical substitution of an infrastructural effectiveness of the dialectic image, i.e., by way of a 10 As the official translation seems to be too inconclusive, the translators of this essay would like to somewhat clarify: the German Unterschied means “distinction or division,” however, it also connotes an element ‘beneath’ something else; Entsprechen means “corresponding to,” however it also connotes ‘de-speaking’ in the sense of a lack of communication. We therefore have somewhat altered the official translation, BP/DR.

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In Between Languages—In Between Cultures historical reading of the ‘sub’—as tension between what is latently past and what is currently manifest. “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural (bildlich). Only dialectical images are genuinely historical—that is, not archaic—images. The image that is read—which is to say, the image of the now in its recognizability—bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded.” (Benjamin, Arcades 463)

When transferring these thoughts to the question or task of translation, the relevance of this dialectic image can be quite easily developed. We only have to follow the already mentioned equation between recognizability and translatability in order to include at the same time the tension between image and concept. Thereby, the instantaneous character of this constellation would encounter the inactive principle of the Arcadian diaphanousness, but the infrastructural latency of both would shatter the surface structure of the manifest language. However, to this function of the image that so far only has been talked about cursorily (namely, that inter-image as a medium of transfer), Benjamin himself assigns a decisive role with a quotation by André Monglond in using the photographic metaphor of the historical negative and its later developmental steps via new reverse processes (cf. Arcades; see also the “Kommentarteil zu Benjamin” in Gesammelte Schriften I: 1238). For whenever an argumentative step is taken in Benjamin’s text—which is more often than not taken for esoterical or simply incomprehensible—new images enter into a function of mediation by way of at first quite classical tropes. We can distinguish five groups of images altogether: 1. The “bios”-model as • “afterlife” or “continued life” of language in the translation as “maturing process” • “hidden seed” of a “higher,” pure language, matured through translation, • growing up into a “higher and purer linguistic air” through translation • relationship of content and language like a “fruit and its skin,” the language of the translation envelops its content “like a royal robe with ample folds.”

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Michael Wetzel 2. The alpine model of language as being in the “centre of a language forest” together with the acoustic phenomenon of call, reverberation, echo, correspondence. 3. The plastic or rather architectonic model of translation as the assembly of the “fragments of a vessel” (the metaphor of the amphora taken up by Derrida) or the permeating of the syntactic wall with translucent arcades. 4. The geometrical model of the freedom of translation as a tangent that “touches a circle lightly and at but one point […], touches the original […] only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the law of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.” 5. The lyrical model of the Aeolian harp implying that sense is touched by the breeze of language (Benjamin, “Task” 75-80). It is striking that the suggestion of a closed-off, integral body reminding of the old philosophical paradigm of the monad is prevalent in all these images. Benjamin seems to have conceived of languages as something monad-like, restful, at peace in their relationship to each other and to pure language in Leibniz’ sense of a prestabilized harmony. Therefore, shortly after Benjamin in his book on The Origin of German Tragic Drama had quoted himself with his essay on the translator, he also defined the constellative idea as “monad” that “with its past and subsequent history, brings—concealed in its own form—an indistinct abbreviation of the rest of the world of ideas;” a monad, in which resides “the pre-stabilized representation of phenomena … as in their objective interpretation” (47). This corresponds to what the interlinear version—that with regard to the immanent, subcutaneous anticipation of the relationship to something else turns out to be an infralinear version—is supposed to accomplish. Because we should read the linguistic self-reference of the translation process as an infrastructural relationship, namely as that quality of pure language, “quite close and yet infinitely far, hidden beneath or broken or more powerful” which—to speak once more with Leibniz—expresses itself inframedially by “petites perceptions,” by “insensible perceptions,” “unaccompanied by awareness or reflection” (par. 53). But what do I mean with this term ‘infra-mediality’? In a manner of speaking, it represents an answer to the question about the monadologic character of language and its translatability. In contrast to the horizon shifts of intermediality, we are now dealing with an increased attention to the vertical consolidation of heterogeneity, i.e., shifting the moments of intermediality that Paech has specified—“breaks, gaps, intervals or interstices, but also borders and thresholds in which its media-differential appears” (“Mediales” 25)—into the interior of its structure, into its internal

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In Between Languages—In Between Cultures structure with its laminations, faults and thresholds: as a potentiality or intensity of the inner, infrastructural ‘alter-ation.’ According to Leibniz, monads have no window—but this does not mean that they cannot enter constellations or represent these themselves. They have to do this as monads, i.e., as fragments of a whole in order to comply with “pure language” as a quasi infralinguistic category. On the backdrop of this monadologic-infrastructurally differentiated cultural context, Benjamin’s recursive backwards movement of translation now can be understood; it backs off from imitation as an objective resemblance and shifts towards the principle of an autonomous form, of a “creative imitation” in terms of classicist aesthetics that as a derivative or novel creation of a power is operating from within and is leaving the complete freedom of the tangential. All the images of maturation (instead of dead copying), of germination and of growing upward can be found in the tradition of this organological model of an infrastructural entelechy that, however, always remains at the mercy of the indecidability of its intention. Derrida has described this veritable aporia as the insoluble dissonance between idiomatic shibboleth and excessive hospitality, i.e., between an intranslatability of the ‘own’ and an infralinear (always already there) translation/-gression of the limitations within one’s own language. “Then ‘Babelization’ is not waiting for the multiplicity of languages. The identity of a language can only affirm itself as identity by opening up to the hospitality of self-difference or of a difference of being-with-oneself” (Apories 28). In terms of the imminence of this self-transgression (that does not point to a demise of the identity of language as a post-historical downfall, but that—as I have repeatedly stressed—represents precisely the prerequisite for the possibility of ‘survival’) Derrida reminds us also of the platonic topos of chora which he has dealt with in detail. It provides Plato in his Timaios with the possibility to transfer the two genera of the eternal ‘being’ (without becoming or decaying) and the eternal ‘becoming’ (the never being) as archetypes and reproductions of a difficult and obscure mediation by establishing a third one (“tritos genos”): a “[w]herein of becoming” “that is the receptacle [‘chora’], and as it were nurse, of all generation” but that concomitantly is neither part of the one nor of the other, neither the elementary nor that which emerged from it, an “invisible species, and a formless universal recipient,” a “forming power” becoming “agitated and figured through the supernally intromitted forms: and through these it exhibits a different appearance at different times” (Plato 167f).11 Derrida has recognized this latently effectual tertium 11 Etymologically “chora” refers to an encompassed, captured realm, or location, place or spot, but also to country, district, area, even to country in distinction to city.—Thomas Taylor provides another, somewhat different

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Michael Wetzel datur as the fundamental problem of all translation consisting in a rhythmic back and forth between original and interpretation which is precisely owed to such an idiosyncratic intermediate space that has to be kept open as “location,” “place,” “district,” or “area” for that occurrence which Derrida identifies as the fundamental event of this third element: namely “to grant (a place)” (‘Statt-Geben’), i.e., “donnant lieu” (Khôra 18, 23f, 91f). With infra then, in terms of a subtextual Statt-Geben within the intangible, more is meant than just the immanent, internal. Rather, it is a question of an internal inclusion, of subcutaneous virtualities, of something concealed underneath, but also something that is not preexistent as something substantial, that rather—like the energy of infrared—discloses itself in its deferred effects. The use of the term can be found in Duchamp in his phrase “infra-mince” as something that is itself a gossamer, minuscule discrepancy (like the options in translation); it lies quasi between Plato’s “chora” and Derrida’s “différance” (compared to the homophone “différence”). It also appears in the poem of the same title (“When the tobacco smoke smells also of/the mouth which exhales it, the two odors/ marry by infra mince”) and refers to the identification of the transition from potential to becoming or to the difference “between two serially produced objects (from the same mold),” which can be taken as the relationship between a trace and that which the trace left (cf. Tono). Inframediality then means the infrastructure of mediality as a virtual dispositive of the medium, or—to return to the beginning— of the inner transmission: as a performance of an interior translation or, as it were, as a ‘(sub-)liminal line.’ The interlinear version accordingly can be seen as such a subtext that is written underneath, as infra, working ‘beneath’ or ‘within;’ it might also represent something like a dispositive or an invisible—maybe also a unconscious—‘matrix,’ but functioning as a cipher for an unconscious element of language (cf. Lyotard 339). Generally the intention (as this interior outside) now turns out to be an infrastructure—not least in the idiosyncratic choice of words by Benjamin who is talking of the ‘in,’ i.e., of the being-inside of the distinction of the character of meaning “within the intention of what was meant.” A similar meaning is attributed to the use of “over/on” in the text, as Nägele (24) has pointed out lately. Already the title of the earlier essay on language provides us with a threefold echo: Über die Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen (On language in general and on human language). The “über” here corresponds to the infra, respectively it enters a constellation of the sub-

translation in his translation of The Timæus and Critias of Plato on p. 169f. (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing. 2003) BP/DR.

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In Between Languages—In Between Cultures surface of language and translation (Übersetzung). But this “über” can also be read inframedially within the structure of mediality as lingering on the line. The famous controversy of the “Über die Linie” (across/over/on the line) between Heidegger and Jünger illustrates this. Heidegger’s argument—the complexity of which in this context hardly can be explained sufficiently—is based on the ambiguity of the German word “über” that for Jünger takes on the meaning of “beyond, trans, meta,” while Heidegger pretends to understand the “über” only in the meaning of “about” or “around” (“peri”) and therefore he ‘encircles’ the line as a “zone.” “Remaining within the image of the line, one discovers that it is situated in a realm that itself is defined by/as a location. The location assembles. The assembly brings the assembled to its essence. From the location of the line results the origin of essential being” (Heidegger, “Zur Seinsfrage” 386). The complication of the threefold meaning of “über die Linie” (threefold since the third dimension of the beyond, the “supra lineam,” has to be added to the “trans lineam” and the “de linea”) apparently is also indicating the Hegelian dialectics of Aufhebung; and indeed we are dealing here with the decision, or rather the undecidability between preserving, keeping and establishing—for example the meaning of the original in the translation. We are never beyond the line in terms of a transgression of a cultural frontier, we are always a culture ‘in between’ others and the alien as a cultural ‘yeast’ is always already taking effect in the ‘kn/own:’ as subculture. Heidegger is conscious of the fact that beyond the line speech should be altered in its relationship to language. In its essential ambiguity and polyglot character, however, it also shows how the drawing of a line can have a spatializing effect. We can call this creation an (in-) between, a margin, interlinearity or chora—there is always the distance that has to be overcome—speaking with Duchamp “inframince” or, with the inventor of monadology, “infinitesimal.” Then, in Heidegger’s ontological perspective, the “Aufder-Linie” becomes also the inframedial ‘interleaving’ of sub-jectivity and trans-cendence— as in the image from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra of human existence as a rope stretched over an abyss traversed by man: “Man not only stands in the critical zone of the line. He is himself—but not by himself let alone by his own doing—this zone and thus the line. In no way this line is such that it lies before man as transgressable. But then, also the possibility of trans lineam and its traversal is obsolete.” (Heidegger, “Zur Seinsfrage” 412)

Political reasons may have been the cause for Heidegger’s refraining from widening this metaphoric field with its unique possibilities of the German language that has produced such spectacular shapes 303

Michael Wetzel as the “Interzone.”12 To go one step further in constructing an infrazone would mean that we would take into account that this shape— having demanded facticity and recognition for forty years—in reality did not take up a third space of its own between the zones but had only the function of delimiting the other two zones, the function of deferring this distinction as inframedial “différance.” Maybe, however, in general the term ‘zone’ in the sense of Tarkovsky’s film The Stalker is a non-location of the never-entered, the never-to-beentered. Benjamin knew this place—this no man’s land between the zones as Derrida already quite early had noted on the occasion of the homage to Adami’s portrait of Benjamin: “a montage of partitions, caesurae, limits” that reminds us how the “subject” has surrendered to defeat on the “line of demarcation” because it wanted to transgress (Derrida, Truth 175, 180). But the fact that Benjamin lost his life between the zones, between the frontlines does not refute his theory of translation but bears witness to the violence of the enforced notion of ‘identity’ that loves the (in)between just as little as the dialectician Hegel loved the night in which supposedly all cows are grey. The ‘true’ substance of language as language or pure language cannot be captured by a thing or in a location. It is always somewhere else. Where? At home or in far-away colonies? No, it is always in between languages, in between cultures, on their margin, liminal, neither here nor gone, always infra! Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, 1999. Print. —. Briefe. Ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno. 2 vols. Frankfurt a.M., 1978. Print. —. “Fragmente zur Sprachphilosophie und Erkenntniskritik.” Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften VI: 23. —. Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. 7 vols. Frankfurt a.M., 1972-1989. Print. —. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London, 1998. Print. —. “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens.” Illuminations. By Benjamin.

12 The “Interzone” and its derivatives “Interzonenzug” (interzone train) and “Interzonenverkehr” (interzone traffic) designated the possibility to cross between the occupied zones in Germany between 1945-1973, BP/DR.

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In Between Languages—In Between Cultures Trans. Harry Zorn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. London, 1999. 70-82. Print. —. “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” 1942. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften I: 691-704. —. “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen.” 1916. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften II: 140-57. De Man, Paul. “‘Conclusions:’ Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’.” The Resistance to Theory. By De Man. Minneapolis, 1986. 73-105. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Apories: Mourir—s’attendre aux “limites de la vérité”. Paris, 1996. Print. —. La carte postale: De Socrate jusqu’à Freud—et au-delà. Paris, 1980. Print. —. Difference in Translation. Ed. Joseph E. Graham. Ithaca, 1985. Print. —. Khôra. Paris, 1993. Print. —. Le monolinguisme de l’autre. Paris, 1996. Print. —. “The Retrait of Metaphor.” Psyche: Inventions of the Other. By Derrida. Ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Trans. Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. U. Vol. I. Stanford, 2007. 48-80. Print. —. “Telepathy.” Trans. Nicholas Royle. Oxford Literary Review 10 (1988): 3-41. Print. Trans. of “Telepathie.” Psyché: Invention de l’autre. By Derrida. Paris, 1978. 237-71. —. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago, 1987. Print. Düttmann, Alexander Garcia. “Von der Übersetzbarkeit.” Nibbrig, Übersetzen 131-46. —. Zwischen den Kulturen: Spannungen im Kampf um Anerkennung. Frankfurt a.M., 1997. Print. Frege, Gottlob. “On Sense and Reference.” Basic Topics in the Philosophy of Language. Trans. Peter Geach and Max Black. Ed. Robert M. Harnish. New York, 1994. 142-60. Print. Hamacher, Werner. “Intensive Sprachen.” Nibbrig, Übersetzen 174235. Hamann, Johann Georg. “Aesthetica in Nuce.” Johann Georg Hamann’s Relational Metacriticism. Ed. and trans. Gwen Griffith Dickson. Berlin, 1995. 409-31. Print. —. “Letter to Johann Gotthelf Lindner.” 18 Aug. 1759. Briefwechsel. By Hamann. Ed. Walther Ziesemer and Arthur Henkel. Vol. I. Wiesbaden, 1954. 396. Print. Heidegger, Martin. Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus. 1916. Gesamtausgabe. By Heidegger. I. Abteilung. Vol. 1. Frankfurt a.M., 1978. 189-411. Print. —. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York, 1990. Print.

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Michael Wetzel —. “Zur Seinsfrage.” Wegmarken, Gesamtausgabe. By Heidegger. I. Abteilung. Vol. 9. Frankfurt a.M., 1976. 385-426. Print. Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations. Ed. Ted Honderich. Trans. J. N. Findlay. London, 1970. Print. Kristeva, Julia. Étrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris, 1988. Print. Leibniz, G. W. “Preface.” New Essays on Human Understanding. By Leibniz. Ed. and trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett. Cambridge, 1996. N. pag. Print. Lyotard, Jean-François. Discours, Figure. Paris, 1971. Print. Mauthner, Fritz. Wörterbuch der Philosophie: Neue Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache. Vol. 1. Munich, 1910. Print. Nägele, Rainer. “Echolalie.” Nibbrig, Übersetzen 17-37. Nibbrig, Christiaan L. Hart. “An der Stelle, statt anstatt eines Vorwortes.” Nibbrig, Übersetzen 7-16. —, ed. Übersetzen: Walter Benjamin. Frankfurt a.M., 2001. Print. Novalis. “Monolog.” 1799. Schriften. By Novalis. Ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel. Vol. II. Stuttgart, 1964. 672-73. Print. Paech, Joachim. “Das Bild zwischen den Bildern.” Film, Fernsehen, Video und die Künste: Strategien der Intermedialität. Ed. Paech. Stuttgart, 1994. 163-78. Print. —. “Mediales Differenzial und transformative Figurationen.” Intermedialität: Theorie und Praxis eines interdisziplinären Forschungsgebiets. Ed. Jörg Helbig. Berlin, 1998. 14-31. Print. Plato. The Timæus and The Critias or Atlanticus. Trans. Thomas Taylor. New Jersey, 1968. Print. Scholem, Gershom. Tagebücher 1917-1923. Ed. Karlfried Gründer, Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, and Friedrich Niewöhner. Frankfurt a.M., 2000. Print. Szondi, Peter. “Poetry of Constancy—Poetik der Beständigkeit.” 1971. Schriften II. By Szondi. Frankfurt a.M., 1977. 321-44. Print. Theunissen, Michael. Der Andere. Berlin, 1965. Print. Tono, Yoshiaki. “Duchamp und ‘Inframince’.” Duchamp: Eine Ausstellung im Museum Ludwig (An exhibition at the Museum Ludwig). Cologne, 1984. 55-9. Print. Weber, Samuel. “Der posthume Zwischenfall: Eine Live Sendung.” Zeit-Zeichen: Aufschübe und Interferenzen zwischen Endzeit und Echtzeit. Ed. Georg Christoph Tholen and Michael Scholl. Weinheim, 1990. 177-98. Print.

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Finding Openings with Opening Credits REMBERT HÜSER The four main film registers—feature film, documentary film, animated film, and experimental or avant-garde film—die hard within film studies. “When we set out to write an introduction to film in 1976, we could not have anticipated that it would have met with a welcome warm enough to carry it through five editions. […] We have again tried to make the book […] up to date. The book’s approach to film form and technique remains constant from prior editions.” (Bordwell and Thompson, “Preface” xi)

In 1997, still uncomfortable with their basic assumptions of 20 years earlier, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson further differentiate the “basic types of films” as “Documentary vs. Fiction,” “Animated Film,” and “Experimental and Avant-Garde Film:” “Yet these categories are not watertight; they often mix and combine. Before we see a film we nearly always have some sense whether it is a [xy] or a piece of [yz]” (Film 42).1 The suppressed malaise regarding a general order that is not watertight has some consequences regarding the organization of its subject area. Thus, along with the arrival of the differentiation of the basic types, a series of secondary differentiations determines the opinion of how a film proceeds in detail “before we see it.” Various spheres of authority are established. Roughly translated, the basic types differentiate into entertainment, society, youth, and art. And because we cannot really in all seriousness believe in art, in youth, or in society, what remains in the end for film is entertainment. And this can then be made more artistic, more relevant, and more youthful depending on ones taste. Film histories, which again could be divided into four areas⎯aesthetic, technologic, economic, and social (see Allen and Gomery 37f)⎯as a rule select one single film register, simultaneously making the other registers invisible. To this day, film history is the history of feature films.

1

“As you might expect, filmmakers have sometimes sought to blur the lines separating documentary and fiction. A notorious example is […]” (46).

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Rembert Hüser Experimental film (avant-garde film) within the conventional histories of film is considered in an extremely limited way. For many authors, this genre seems to not even belong with film. Movies fundamentally limit themselves to the narrative feature film produced within the system of the commercial film industry; in some individual cases, works from the realm of the documentary film are grouped with it as well (see Gregor 9). “Once the cinema was stabilized as a technology, it cut all references to its origins in artifice. […] Twentieth-century animation became a depository for nineteenth-century moving-image techniques left behind by cinema. […] [T]echniques that allowed filmmakers to construct and alter moving images, and thus could reveal that cinema was not really different from animation, were pushed to cinema’s periphery by its practicioners, historians, and critics.” (Manovich 298-9)

The main film registers have become cases of the “versus” and the “and.” How can we extend the range of the “vs.” (that in the latest version of Film Art we find dutifully inserted between “Documentary” and “Fiction”) and the “and” (that we find between “Experimental” and “Avant-Garde Film”) also to the other registers? How can the “vs.” and the “and” finally come into their own in film analysis? How can we become more versatile in our writings about film? How can we replace the pitiless logic of the “either⎯or” with the logic of the “both⎯and?” That the four main film registers mainly obstruct selectivity in the analysis of a film is a “truism” (Odin 263) dating back long before the terminological distinctions had ultimately been set up in a way that commonly conceals their basic principle⎯they are strictly relational terms: “…a law of impurity or a principle of contamination” (Derrida 57). “The border between fiction and documentary is naturally a fluid one. The differentiating criteria fail. Within fictional films one can at most differentiate levels of permeation with documentary aspects” (Odin 276). Seen from the perspective of a documentary film one could also say: “Every film is a fictional film” (Metz, Imaginary 44). But this is also true the other way around. Why can’t we put into practice what we’ve known for decades? Why do we have to repeat the same old ‘same old’ all over again? Is it really necessary to continue homogenizing our permanently shifting multiplicity of expectations over and over again? One of the main obstacles to finally get moving with moving images lies in the continued categorization of works as a whole also in this realm. The preface to the first edition of Film Art (which is still the actual one) unmistakably sets this into stone from the beginning: “Crucial to this approach is an emphasis on the whole film. Audiences experience entire films, not snippets” (ix). While this claim is difficult to 308

Finding Openings with Opening Credits maintain the closer one looks at how spectatorship actually works, it also leads to a considerable loss of the abilities to differentiate what we are about to see and why we do so. Instead of proceeding with a guilty conscience, it seems about time to begin to think about moving images in constellations that are flexible enough to reflect on how the distinctions that we make about them come into being in the very first place. “I was a little disappointed about the reaction to Histoire(s) du cinéma. […] It was something like: ‘The author wanted this or that… Great! Super!’ but there wasn’t a single one who would have said, ‘This image shouldn’t have been shown.’” (Rancière and Tesson 32)2

Of course films can be construed as feature films or as documentaries or as avant-garde films or as animation films; however, the mistake should not be made to ontologize an observational perspective into a basic register. And it should be kept in mind that because of the polyphonous organization of every form of filmic statement, the mode in which we watch a film can be switched at any moment. From one moment to the next,3 we can observe films from a fictitious perspective or from the perspective of a documentary or from still another perspective,4 and what this means is that of course one and the same sequence can always be conceptualized as simultaneously moving into different directions. But how should readings look that take this into account? Don’t we need the basic film registers for pragmatic reasons alone? To have something to start with? One can react to the pragmatist dilemma by describing film histories meta-discursively as effects of their respective decisions for a specific observational perspective. But one can also attempt to solve the problem with the help of a different material basis, a basis that no longer takes its point of departure from the ontological assump-

2

3

4

“Sinon, j’étais un peu chagriné par l’accueil qu’avaient reçu les Histoire(s) du cinéma. […] Tandis qu’avec les autres non, c’était: ‘L’auteur a voulu ci ou ça… Magnifique! Superbe!’, mais il n’y en a pas un qui m’ait dit: ‘Ce n’est pas cette image-là qu’il aurait fallu mettre’.” A lexicon of the enunciative inscriptions in the opening credits (“the book,” “the curtain,” etc.) would not make a lot of sense. “[C]inema does not have a closed list of enunciative signs, but it uses any sign (as in my example of the window) in an enunciative manner, so that the sign can be removed from the diegesis and immediately come back to it. The construction will have, for an instant, assumed an enunciative value” (Metz, “Impersonal” 754-5). “Of course it is beyond debate claiming here that only two types of reading exist in the realm of cinematography” (Odin 277).

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Rembert Hüser tions of the “whole work” but from scenes in the films,5 scenes capable of pulling out all the stops.6 I would like to suggest a perspective that initially takes its point of departure from the most intelligent part of a film, and I mean by that the structurally most intelligent scene. (Of course, in individual cases it may even be badly executed.) My main interest is in one basic film type, the only one that I 5

6

The genesis of the Cinema Book shows us that especially the concentration on filmic scenes and their sequencing inevitably leads to the loss of basic types: “The Cinema Book began life as a catalogue of the film study extract material held by the British Film Institute Film and Video Library, selected over the years by the BFI Educational Department to facilitate the teaching of film. The existing Extract Catalogue was in the form of an unwieldy set of duplicated documents dating back to the inception of the extract collection in the early 60s. The intention was to update these documents, expanding on the teaching categories which had informed extract selection, and showing how extracts could be used in the context of these categories. It soon became clear that this would entail the larger task of charting the history of the arguments covered in each category. Rather than a catalogue of extracts, the book became an account of the Education Department’s involvement in the shifting terrain of Film Studies over a certain period” (Cook viii). Almost 15 years later the questions have shifted correspondingly: “Film History itself has a history. […] The remarkable development of audio-visual technology in the last two decades explains how one important element in the first edition, with its five main parts reflecting five major directions of research and teaching in eighties’ Britain, based on the BFI extract catalogue as primary source material, has been superseded by the far wider range of accessible primary material now available to teachers, students and the general reader” (Bernink vii). See Godard 23: “I do have an idea of the method, but I don’t have the means. […] We have to be able to see the film, but not as a projection because once we have it projected, we have to talk, we have to say: ‘Ah! Do you remember, 45 minutes ago we saw that …’ And that’s not interesting. What’s interesting is to see it and then later maybe another close-up—but I don’t know films well enough to dare—that would have been like showing you a reel from Fallen Angels and then another from A Bout de Souffle. That would be somewhat arbitrary but it could be interesting to do this in small pieces.” (“J’ai l’idée de la méthode mais je n’ai pas les moyens. […] Il faut pouvoir passer le film, non pas en projection car une fois qu’on l’a en projection, il faut parler, il faut dire: ‘Ah! vous vous souvenez, il y a trois quarts d’heure, on a vu que…’ Or ce n’est pas ça qui est intéressant. Ce qui est intéressant, c’est de le voir et puis de voir après peut-être plus intéressant… - mais je ne connais pas assez bien les films pour oser le faire— cela aurait été de vous passer une bobine de Fallen Angel et puis ensuite une bobine d’A Bout de Souffle. C’est un peu arbitraire, mais il pourrait être intéressant de le faire en petit car on aurait peut-être vu qu’au bout de vingt minutes, il n’y a rien à en tirer; à ce moment-là, on monte et on va chercher un autre film.”)

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Finding Openings with Opening Credits believe in: the documentary avant-garde-animation-feature film. And I maintain that this type of film exists in every film. In fact, already with the opening credits. In 1984, Odin, in his text “Film documentaire et lecture documentarisante,” defines opening credits as the only concrete internal mode of production of a documentarizing reading. The other more general internal mode of production mentioned in his book emerges from the respective combinatorics of a film, from its stylistic systems and its sub-ensembles: “The difference between external and internal commands is […] especially important: it specifically allows simultaneously explaining the intuition of the viewers who divide the cinematographic field into ensembles recognizing also the existence of a documentary ensemble, and the fact that every film can be read as a documentary.” (275)

By way of the opening credits, the internal production to a certain extent takes counter-measures against the external production by the viewer or the institution because—against the extensive freedom of decision how one would at any moment like to view something— they “expressly demand [that the film] is viewed in this specific way” (264). This means that they program a specific form of reading. The opening credits, therefore, are able to suspend somewhat the fictivizing reading that “is the result of the commands of the ruling cinematographic institution” (271), to break apart, if you will, the internalized convention that also orders our film histories. And this, if nothing else, on its very own territory by fictivizing realms that we are not used to seeing displayed in a fictitious form. Now, of course the production of a reading is not a purely voluntaristic matter. “It can emerge in a completely unexpected and sudden manner, like a rupture the extent of which we can neither measure nor anticipate” (270). The opening credits at any rate raise an awareness of these ruptures in the film, awakening our intermedial attention. The first most intelligent scene leads us to further most intelligent scenes. As for Odin’s concrete definitions of opening credits as instructions for documentary readings: not a single one really convinces me. I do not believe that “the fact that the actors are named in the front credits impedes the possibility of constructing the characters as real enunciators” (270). This may be the case for the first two or three names mentioned (the stars, the names that one knows) but actually not even there; the names of the actors in the opening credits enumerate the contributors to a film; they are never marked as actors, and many documentaries name the members of the observed group in the opening credits, and casting is no less important here than there. I also no more share Odin’s conviction that “titles like Our Planet Earth (Painlevé), The Cooper, The Cartwright (Roquier), 311

Rembert Hüser Manouane River Lumberjacks (Lamothe) unmistakably announce a documentary” (272) than I share Adorno’s announcement of an unmistakable truth that “…true […] is the judgment that the landscape of Tuscany is more beautiful than the surroundings of Gelsenkirchen” (Adorno 72). There is nothing more beautiful than the surroundings of Gelsenkirchen. It is no different with the “lack of the opening credits” in Odin’s text. If “this sign marked by absence […] attests to the weak elaboration of the filmic text presented that neither appears as a ‘work’ nor as a ‘message’ but as a simple document” (Odin 272), then films like Apocalypse Now and Touch of Evil, to name just a few, were also weakly worked out simple documents without any message. Odin did consider counter examples of this type in his text. He ends his final enumeration of possible objections with three dots— quite a bit more could be added here. The semio-pragmatic calls himself a “theoretician without rear protection” stating that the relationship between film, reader, and institution in the course of a reading is anything but stable: “Sometimes the reader adapts to the demands of the film; sometimes he lets himself be carried away to all other definitions unless he does not simultaneously mobilize several ways of viewing…” (275). Yet again three dots—the text is uncertain in a quite pleasing manner. But maybe it is sufficient to simply state that opening credits demand that a film wants to be viewed in a certain manner. The opening credits are made intelligent by specifically disclaiming any fixed definition and Odin’s text demonstrates just this in his argumentation. Opening credits demand “switching,” demand being read on different levels at the same time. By insisting on a mere documentary reading apart from a first fracture of the fictionalizing convention, nothing much is gained yet. With the opening credits at the beginning of a film, a reading guideline is established that demands some parallel observations. It keeps us aware that one single level will not be sufficient for the understanding of the film. With the help of the opening credits, films demand readings that rely on hybridity (cf. Stanitzek passim). In 1970, in the opening credits of Catch-22 the sun is slowly rising. “And I loved the book. I knew the book. And Nichols called me in to take a look at it and ran the film, and he said, ‘I shot some material for titles.’ I said, ‘Oh, let me see.’ And what he had shot was a lot of film that he was trying to say that war destroyed nature, that it fouled the air, that it was really destructive, and I looked at it and the footage was … okay. It wasn’t great, but there was a lot of it and we might have been able to do it. But I said your talking about it destroys these things that are natural. And I said as soon as I put ‘costumes by somebody’ on top of it, I’ve destroyed the naturalness of it. It’s never gonna

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Rembert Hüser work. You can’t get there from here, you know. We will destroy it just putting titles on it. […] But I said you got one shot. That is this book. This book is surreal. And they had a time-lapse shot of the sunrise. And I said: ‘That’s it!’ Just show the one shot. And then after that, […] we ended up with three four-foot cuts. And there was a shot of a wheel going through, and some grass, there’s a bird flies out of the dust, and an engine turns over and the exhaust follows the air, and in sound, while the sunrise is comin’ up, the sound is destroyed by the cranking up of the engine. So with three cuts that lasted approximately eight seconds we told his story with the footage that he had. So we edited down this, you know, whatever, 6000 feet of film to twelve feet. But the timing also was wrong on the shot. He shot a certain way. That shot’s doctored. To get that, that timing to be the timing we wanted it to be. And we played around with it a lot to get it. And also then was the question of when does the audience know they’re seeing something. ‘Cause what appears to be just titles on black. And then you hear a dog barking off in the distance. So you know there’s something going on. So … we were running a title one day over at Paramount. We went in and somebody was in there, sitting in the theater, and I said: ‘Do you mind if we run this?’ And they said: ‘No, go ahead.’ They didn’t know what it was. So we ran it. It was quiet. And I’m sittin’ behind them… . And finally, about half way through or two-thirds through he turns to the other person and says: ‘Something’s going on back there.’ GOTCHA!” (Fitzgerald)

Something’s been going on for a long time already. Feature film, documentary film, Hollywood film: Wayne Fitzgerald’s opening credits catch us all off balance. His transcription of a filming technique (“fade in”) in documentary material, or the static, single shot at the beginning of a war film precisely describes the situation of movie screening, describes the “When does the audience know they’re seeing something”—and therefore themselves; describes it as the “procession rituelle” (Metz, “Pour” 8)—the zone that is responsible in film for the attunement, the first introduction and the staging of the copyright. The opening credits of Catch-22 here are playing with the relationship of structure and content. The basic movement moves from the black image, seemingly from graphics, via the real film to the lit-up white image of the screen. The opening credits switch on the screening. The sun allowing the scene to emerge—at this point equally the setting of the film’s shooting and the location of the unfolding diegesis: WW II—is only the material substitute of the projection beam illuminating dark space. The sound of the engine cranking up one time on the audio track closing off the sequence at this point does not allow clearly distinguishing between war machinery and filming technique. On another level, however, Fitzgerald’s opening credits transcribe the first sentence of the literary original: “It was love at first sight” (Heller 5). It is the opening credits that from the very beginning present us with something to see. They show the production of a film: on the set, in the theater, in our heads. And all of this with one single shot, 314

Finding Openings with Opening Credits with three cuts (“a doctored sunrise”), and a few effects on the audio track. For this doctoring on foreign material, on the “stock footage” that had been made available by the director of the film as possible material for the opening credits (“just check whether you can use something there”), the title-director in the opening credits of Catch22—and this does not happen so often in the history of opening credits sequences—gets an author’s credit. Opening credits are concept-films. And likewise⎯ “Gotcha!”⎯there is always the surprise that the film has already started long ago. Opening credits and found-footage film have many things in common. Both accentuate montage; first and foremost these films are not shot, they are edited (cf. MacDonald 255). A primacy of the camera does not exist. Both opening credits and found-footage films work with associative cuts or polyvalent montage (in opening credits this becomes especially clear in the transition to filmic diegesis), where the associative connection between the images is continually and unexpectedly shifted (cf. Carroll 71ff), and both obtain their power from a distinctive meta-discursive level. In both cases we are dealing with filmic readings of film, differentiated mainly by two preferred connective techniques: a conceptual one relying on “thematic repetition or contrast of the images” that mainly uses the generation of metaphors, and a graphic one “based on the repetition of colors, forms, or movements in the images” (Petersen, “Found” 56). At first glance these films are not at all so simple. “The compilation narrative draws little from the ‘baseline’ that would be so liberally represented in classical narratives and pulls a great deal of material from […] metaphorical replacements. At the same time, it relies heavily on our ability to infer the metonymic links between represented events.” (Peterson, “Bruce” 56f)

The classic of found-footage films, A Movie by Bruce Conner, consistently uses the rhetorics and procedures of opening credits.7 And actually it seems to state right from the start: ‘I⎯A Movie⎯am actually the opening credits.’ On the one hand, there are the multiple repetitions, the driving home of the title itself, its dismantling, its inversion—it is turned upside down—its self-denial (by other titles such as “Castle Film presents” and so on). And then there is the

7

“Segment 1. This segment does far more than give us the title and filmmaker’s name, and for that reason we have numbered it as the first segment rather than separating it off as a credits sequence” (Bordwell and Thompson, Film 158). A sequence of opening credits also does a lot more than just giving the title and the name of the director.

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Rembert Hüser playing with the length of the take of the director’s slate.8 It reflects the valence of positioning and the anticipation of the narcissism of “possessory titles” (“a movie by”⎯originally a particular distinction but now being used in an inflationary way). The A of A Movie, however, is not only an indefinite article; it is itself a beginning (something that is stressed once more by its isolation). But we are waiting in vain for its B, its continuation. The specifically composed material of images introduces us into a film that does not proceed. What we are waiting for therefore becomes the rule. The film A Movie presents itself as a ‘blueprint A’ for most films.9 However, the B arrives later after all—off center: once also isolated, playing with the parechesis BY (good-bye), underlined by THE END, separated by the same distance and in alternating rhythm, i.e., A X BY X THE END. A second time then on the image-level by using material from a Hopalong Cassidy Western with which the film starts: A Movie—BMovie.10 But in contrast to the trailer, the sequencing of the story segments remains without a plot. Found-footage films exist since the early movies; it was even a rather popular practice reacting to the early differentiation of a mass market: “Towards the end of the 1910s it […] often happened that cutters and producers rummaged through the meticulously established sequence catalogues in order to make their films more ‘colorful.’ In order to give more character to a film the filmic stock was used that every cutter simply had to have. […] Thus those takes that had been eliminated or that had been already used could be included in another film in order to produce special effects.” (Beauvais 5)

As a meta-discursive procedure, the found-footage film came into existence at the end of the 1920s or the beginning of the 1930s, in 8

“Then the words ‘Bruce Conner’ appear, remaining on the screen for many seconds. As we do not need that much time to read the name, we may begin to sense that this film will playfully thwart our expectations” (Bordwell and Thompson, Film 158). In 1998 the opening credits of Buffalo ‘66— opening credits by Vincent Gallo—quotes A Movie adding an ironical, narcissistic little sparkle to it with the over-dimensional typeface and the reversal of the black-and-white-contrast that suggests a change from negative to positive. 9 “Moreover, the flicker and leader markings stress the physical qualities of the film medium itself. The title A Movie reinforces this reference to the medium, cueing us to watch this assemblage of shots as bits of film. This segment also suggests the implicit meaning that this opening is mocking the opening portions of most films” (Bordwell and Thompson, Film 159). 10 “[T]he B movies and the B studios should always be remembered as the ultimate expression of that brief time when Hollywood was truly a movie factory” (Flynn and McCarthy 43).

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Finding Openings with Opening Credits the period of transition to the sound film. Specifically, cutters and specialists in title links experimented with found-footage film. The title directors of post-production in those years were predestined for these kinds of reflections on montage, since title links mainly depend on one element: avoiding a repetition of the image. “‘John decides to go to Africa’ is obviously hopeless as a title, unless perhaps there is a surprise or a contradiction in the scene that follows” (Brunel 114). On the one hand this proves Godard’s thesis—“So what did the invention of the talkies consist in?… Ok, they just took out the one frame…the frame of the intertitles and they stuck together the other frames;”11 on the other hand, however, it allows for the description of the two types of film—found-footage and opening credits—as silent film12 by exploring the iconic contents of writing.13 Opening credits are late early movies.14 How precisely film is being observed in A Movie is shown through the appearance of a naked woman taking off her stockings in the filmed leader-countdown. It is the first moving image of A Movie, and it seems as if the film purposely sets forth with the climax: 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, “Nudie!” (Normally, women in films only undress later.)

11 Godard 106: “Alors ça consistait en quoi l’invention du parlant? … bien, on a enlevé le plan… le plan des sous-titres et on a mis côte à côte le plan…” 12 “I am the last of the silent movie directors. I’ve directed film for forty-five years, I never directed a frame of sound. Basically what we’re doing is what I call ‘tableaux’” (Fitzgerald). 13 “In the found-footage film, graphism—playing with letters—becomes more and more important, especially for the Lettrists who put it at the center of their creative work calling it ‘chiseling.’ Here, it was a matter of directly interfering with the film as material to be created, mainly by way of scraping off and scratching, stamping and chemical alterations. […] Like Bruce Connor, [Maurice Lemaître] had a soft spot for opening-credit reels with technical recordings. During all stages of the production, he liked to include into his films all remarks and recordings of the laboratory-technicians (development, copying, color timer, synchronization). These graphic elements for the Lettrists of course are wonderful calligraphies, almost ready-mades, with whose so-called uselessness they are working” (Beauvais 9f). 14 See also “It seems that I have been guilty of a sort of trade union disloyalty—I have given the game away. I should have let the novice find out for himself. […] I mean this to be a simple exposition of the technique of dialogue or silent pictures, but I have written, for the most part, from the point of view of the silent film-maker […]. [T]he basis of talking-film production is—apart from the technique of recording—almost entirely the same as for silent films. […] In fact, I think I might claim that a grasp of silent technique is more important than ever—even for the ‘100 per cent dialogue’ subjects” (Brunel vii).

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Rembert Hüser “Conner exposes this unscreened domain of the filmic materials utilized by the labs that manufacture the prints and by the projectionists who thread them onto projectors, focus, frame, and finally screen them. It is into this private part of the movie—cinema’s ‘secret area’—that he then introduces his first moving image: a single shot of a woman undressing, clipped from [a] purloined girlie movie.” (Jenkins 190)

Girls in media. Secondary literature is embarrassed: “Here A Movie helps us to focus our expectations by suggesting that it will involve more ‘found footage’ of this type” (Bordwell and Thompson, Film 159).15 “Here he may well be commenting on one of the fundamental formulas of mainstream cinema—the familiar narrative trajectory that is completed when the hero gets the girl” (Jenkins 190).16 A Movie is much more precise here.

15 “After the nude shot, the countdown leader continues to ‘1,’ then the words ‘The End’ appear. Another joke: This is the end of the leader, not of the film.”—Nope, this is first of all the end of a 10-second silent film Naked Woman Taking Off Her Stockings. “Yet even this is untrue, since more leader appears” (Bordwell and Thompson, Film 159). 16 “Two taboos of standard practice are broken here: the inclusion of sexually suggestive footage and the insertion of purely functional graphic materials of projection into the body of the film. In immediately breaking the boundaries between the acceptable and the taboo, Conner concisely announces his intention to expose the persistent (but unseen) ideological filters and viewing procedures that shape the mainstream media. After this false ending, the film’s title briefly reappears—this time upside down—[…]. We can now presume that in this ‘movie’ all rules may be turned on their heads” (Jenkins 190).

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Gabi Horndasch’s versteckte cathrine from 1999-2000, itself a variant of the found-footage film that at exactly the same place in the countdown leader—I count to three—does not add one but quite many shots of women, shows that Conner’s film does a lot more than just marking the ‘secret area’ (“cinema’s ‘secret area’”, whatever that may mean) of the film with a snippet of pornography. The woman displayed by Conner is, after all, an integral part of every filmic countdown. Here, the point is not the model “hero gets woman,” the old nursery rhyme. With Conner’s naked undressing woman, we are still on the level of the leader countdown. It is the current practice of the color coordination in the processing laboratory by way of the so-called “China Girls” that becomes thematic in the black and white film. A “China Girl” is a technical term. “The processing laboratories have to master different variables in order to create consistently good copies of films, especially when creating multi-stage duplication. The different characteristics of the film, exposure of the original, exposure in the copier and development have to be coordinated. […] What’s missing […] so far is a non-laborious, simply executed, and universally usable quality control for the production of master positives and duplicating-negatives from the original negatives […] 3a). A VCA [Video Color Analyzer] can be adjusted either with the help of a China Girl test or with LAD-standards. If the China Girl is preferred, one puts a China Girl negative into the film carrier and a copy with the required density and color balance into the color coordinator. The buttons for color correction are then adjusted according to the specifications in 2c, 2d, and 2e. The coordination of the video image and the comparative image is done with the help of the trimmer potentiometer.” (Knippel 6)

Conner makes explicit the implicit sexism of this part of the production on the filmstrip shortly before “the film,” which no one but the 319

Rembert Hüser projectionist and the processing laboratory gets to see. And he parades it. By using more than 24 frames of the inserted moving image, which usually uses less than 5 frames of the leader strip, he hauls out the one who in every filmic image works in the background without pay from behind the scenes⎯the China Girl⎯and literally makes the most of it in his presentation. The decision for using this snippet from a voyeur film in this spot is proof for the fact that the real-image is purposely omitted. We are located at the outer edges of filmic representation; the structural sexism has long been installed. If a China Girl were to be shown in the movies, one would not see it. It would be a short irritation of one’s eye at best. With Conner however, to be suddenly confronted by something one might prefer to have simply pass by, something that maybe one might not really want to know so much about, creates—apart from desire—a feeling of malaise in the viewer. Fear.17 In the context of the American media discourse at the end of the 1950s, Conner’s open-secret-seductress is at the same time an ironic commentary regarding the icecream-image-in-the-movies hysteria. “The London Sunday Times front-paged a report in mid-1956 that certain United States advertisers were experimenting with ‘subthreshold effects’ in seeking to insinuate sale messages to people past their conscious guard. It cited the case of a cinema in New Jersey that it said was flashing ice-cream ads on to the screen during regular showings of film. These flashes of message were splitsecond, too short for people in the audience to recognize them consciously but still long enough to be absorbed unconsciously. A result, it reported, was a clear and otherwise unaccountable boost in ice-cream sales. […] It speculated that political indoctrination might be possible without the subject being conscious of any influence being brought to bear on him. When I queried Dr. Smith about the alleged ice-cream experiment he said he had not heard of it before and expressed skepticism.” (Packard, Hidden 41f)

17 “The discursive landscape of postwar America is exemplary of what Dana Polan has described as dialectics of power and paranoia. Against, and in response to, the emergence of nuclear weapons, Americanized psychoanalysis, social science, and consumer capitalism there developed parallel discourses of hysteria, paranoia, delinquency, sexual excess, and anxiety. The symbiotic structure of containment and excess becomes legible in the image bank of this period, as television and film were deeply implicated in the network of new technologies and fears. In fragmented archival form, the imagery from this period—including home movies made by the newly available eight-millimeter Kodak camera—constitutes a fictional document, or an allegory of history” (Russell 242).

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Finding Openings with Opening Credits Too late.18 (For quite some time, in honor of the China Girls, directly before the running of the film in the movie theater, the light used to go on and the audience was asked whether they want ice cream.) In 1965/66, George Landow in Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc. defines the preprojected image of the China Girls as frames for the take. By placing two filmstrips next to each other, the particular perforations, the letters and numbers on the edge suddenly become the moving image in the centre of the screen, the true film. The new frame—at the spot where the mechanics take hold (the new perforation is of course outside the image again)—will be the old image: four takes of a China Girl, seemingly four identical (static) photographs, but of which China Girl 3, clockwise the one on the bottom right, all of a sudden begins to wink at you—this old image becomes the new frame. It becomes individualized. Ironic (and at the same time standardized like a holiday 3-D postcard). Her colleague on the upper right joins and serializes everything again.

18 “In the original edition of this book, I devoted only a couple of pages to the technique known as subliminal stimulation. […] Time has credited me with exposing the technique. Actually, this book was going to press, when I first got wind of it and I was able only to confirm that the technique had a substantial psychological base and was being tried. During the following months there was quite a hullabaloo in much of the Western world as evidence emerged that hidden messages were indeed being tucked into TV and radio messages and flashed on to motion picture screens. […] A public uproar developed and this book, happily for me, was caught up in the uproar. The New Yorker magazine deplored the fact that minds were being ‘broken and entered’. Newsday called it the most alarming invention since the atomic bomb. Bills to outlaw it were introduced in Congress, but nothing came of them. Broadcasters, however, did become nervous enough about the charge that they were up to Orwellian tricks to agree to a backing off. The National Association of Television and Radio Broadcasters, which includes most but not all stations, announced a ban” (Packard, “Epilogue” 232f).

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Rembert Hüser Horndasch’s versteckte cathrine19 begins at another point. She represents the entire history of the China Girls with a collection of examples of different China Girls—a China Girl database, if you will.20 The color-spectrum is all of a sudden supplemented by the spectrum of the coordinative images. A type-catalogue. The photographs are cut, presented like slides as if for a home presentation—an audio track of incomprehensible street conversation seemingly belonging to a different film begins later—in such a way that the “Girls” at the moment of their replays (and slight variations thereof) seem to communicate with each other in their frames. Small dialogues commence. In the succession of different China Girl realizations, the ideological construction of the China Girl models becomes evident: It is not only the gender representation (lab technicians wanna have fun) that is reduced to absurdity⎯suddenly a man appears among the series of girls (and he seems to feel uncomfortable and oddly enough, we notice it with him) and later, a heterosexual pair comes into view (the ‘film happy-end’ of the China Girl; she is not alone any more)⎯it is also the orientalism of the representation relating China and skin color and finally letting a China Girl dummy appear (because a color scale is not enough for color calibration) that finalizes the absurdity. Previously, the black-and-white China Girl had already appeared that was responsible for the grey-scale of Cukor’s The Women, and also a subtitled China Girl exists in the film. versteckte cathrine closes with a bitter image of three women with bare shoulders next to each other, ordered by their specific color-value tones. Horndasch’s film would also be excellently suited for the opening credits of a film. (Only, the film belonging to it would still have to be shot….)

19 The name results from the film’s inversing the relationship between hidden and exhibited portraits and then on its part hiding portraits from a filmic diegesis—shots of Catherine Deneuve and Pam Grier—in a series of China Girls. Hidden little friends. This makes the actresses into China Girls and the China Girls into beautiful women. 20 The films by Conner, Landow and Horndasch are examples for a self-reflexive Database-Cinema that offensively tackles the question “how to merge database and narrative into a new form” (Manovich 243).

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Rembert Hüser In the history of the opening credits of a film, there is one that itself is dealing with the history of opening credits. The individual titles belonging to an MGM-anniversary compilation film (That's Entertainment) are staged in it as fake-found-opening-credits footage.

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It looks as if Bass had dismantled the title into its individual components: “That’s [it],” “Entertainment,” and “Part 2.” He is only concentrated on the star-credits, on the variations of an example. 16 individual images for the superstars. Problems such as in Towering Inferno21 are thereby avoided. The technical department is not mentioned.

21 “When the suspenseful film, ‘The Towering Inferno,’ was being produced last year, the real suspense on the set was whether Paul Newman or Steve McQueen would get top billing. After all, neither Mr. Newman nor Mr. McQueen had taken second billing in over a decade. Following months of negotiations that extended well into the filming, representatives of the two stars reached a compromise: On the screen and in ads for the film, Mr. McQueen’s name would appear to the left, in the normal spot for the firstbilled star. But Mr. Newman’s name, to the right, would appear a half-line higher. In ads where likeness of the stars were to be used, Mr. McQueen’s would also be to the left, but Mr. Newman’s likeness would be slightly higher. Which star really came out on top? Well, if you sat through the entire three-hour movie and saw the final credits on the screen, you saw that the cast of characters listed Mr. McQueen’s name first—the only clear indication of who apparently won the Hollywood game of one-upmanship. Who cares? The stars, that’s who, and not just for reasons of ego inflation. Billings accorded by one studio are watched by other studios as an indication, for example, of a star’s box-office value. […] Mr. Allen [Twentieth CenturyFox Film Corp.] made use of a formula worked out by Mr. Lederer [vice president of Warner Bros. Inc.] the year before for the Warner Bros. film ‘Freebie and the Bean,’ starring Alan Arkin and James Caan. In that instance, Mr. Lederer drew a horizontal line through a vertical line, putting Mr. Arkin’s name in the lower-left quadrant and Mr. Caan’s in the upper right. While Mr. Caan technically got second billing, industry insiders say the studio obviously attached great value to the Caan name by its position on the screen and in ads developed for the picture. The ‘quadrant’ formula developed by Mr. Lederer has been used lately in a number of other films, including Columbia Pictures’ ‘The Fortune,’ where Warren Beatty’s name

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Rembert Hüser “When I began doing titles, I started by re-inventing and translating the idea of openings into contemporary terms. On this picture I wound up re-creating our mythic memory of early titles. […] I wanted to evoke the tone and feeling of the period from which the excerpts in the film came. At first I toyed with the idea of doing the whole title in one genre. In the end that seemed to me to be dull, because as much as we have loving memories of these things, they are memories that we have in flashes. […] The object in this case was to take a deliberately fragmented approach to the title. After all, the film itself is composed of fragments. It’s appropriate.” (“Compleat” 290f)

It sketches what I would like to do myself one day. What did I do here now? Opening credits for another form of writing film history? No, unfortunately not yet. Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis, 1997. Print. Allen, Robert C., and Douglas Gomery. Film History: Theory and Practice. New York, 1985. Print. Beauvais, Yann. “Found Footage: Vom Wandel der Bilder:” Blimp. Zeitschrift für Film 16 (Feb. 1991): 4-11. Print. Bernink, Mieke. “Introduction to the Second Edition.” Cook and Bernink vii-viii. Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 1979. New York, 1997. Print. —. “Preface: New to This Edition.” Bordwell and Thompson, Film xixiii. Brunel, Adrian. Filmcraft. London, 1933. Print. Carroll, Noël. “Causation, the Amplification of Movement and the Avant-Garde Film.” Millenium Film Journal 10/11 (Fall/Winter 1981/82): 61-82. Print. “The ‘Compleat Film-Maker’—From Titles to Features.” American Cinematographer LVIII.3 (Mar. 1977): 288-291, 315, 325-327. Print.

comes first, but Jack Nicholson’s is higher. […] ‘Very often, a star will give up money for billing, it’s that important to him,’ says Renee Valente, vice president in charge of talent for Columbia Pictures Industries. ‘Unless he gets the billing prominence thought due him, he’s afraid that other studios will think the less of him’” (Grover).

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Finding Openings with Opening Credits Cook, Pam. “Introduction to the First Edition.” Cook and Bernink viii. Cook, Pam, and Mieke Bernink, eds. The Cinema Book. 1985. 2nd ed. London, 1999. Print. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980): 55-81. Print. Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc. Dir. George Landow. 10 min. USA, 1965/66. Film. Fitzgerald, Wayne. Interview. 20 Apr. 2001. Flynn, Charles, and Todd McCarthy. “The Economic Imperative: Why Was The B Movie Necessary?” Kings of the Bs. Working within the Hollywood System: An Anthology of Film History and Criticism. Ed. Flynn and McCarthy. New York, 1975. 13-43. Print. Godard, Jean-Luc. Introduction à une véritable Histoire du Cinéma. Paris, 1980. Print. Gregor, Ulrich. “Der Experimentalfilm und die Filmgeschichte.” Das Experimentalfilm-Handbuch. Ed. Ingo Petzke. Frankfurt a.M., 1989. 9-17. Print. Grover, Stephen. “Hollywood Stars Play The Top-Billing Game With Bitter Intensity: More Than Ego Is Involved, As Status With Studios Often Hangs on Outcome.” Wall Street Journal 18 Sept. 1975: n. pag. Print. Heller, Joseph L. Catch-22. New York, 1996. Print. Horndasch, Gabi. Interview. 18 Mar. 2002. Jenkins, Bruce. “Explosion in a Film Factory: The Cinema of Bruce Conner.” 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II. By Jenkins. Minneapolis, 2000. 184-223. Print. Knippel, E. “Arbeitsanleitung für die Anwendung von Labor-ArbeitsDichten” [“LAD/Laboratory Aim Densities”]. Berlin, 1981. MS. MacDonald, Scott. “I only own the splices: Bruce Conner.” A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. Ed. MacDonald. Berkeley, 1988. 244-256. Print. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, 2001. Print. Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington, 1982. Print. —. “The Impersonal Enunciation, or the Site of Film (In the Margin of Recent Works on Enunciation in Cinema).” Trans. Béatrice Durand-Sendrail and Kristen Brookes. New Literary History 22.3 (Summer 1991): 747-772. Print. —. “Pour servir de Préface.” Le Générique de Film. Ed. Nicole de Mourgues. Paris, 1994. 7-9. Print. A Movie. Dir. Bruce Conner. 12 min. USA, 1958. Film.

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Rembert Hüser Odin, Roger. “Film documentaire, lecture documentarisante.” Cinémas et réalités. Ed. Jean Lyant and Odin. Saint-Étienne, 1984. 263-278. Print. Packard, Vance. “Epilogue: A Revisit to the Hidden Persuaders in the 1980s.” Packard, Hidden 217-239. —. The Hidden Persuaders. 1957. Harmondsworth, 1981. Print. Peterson, James. “Bruce Conner and the Compilation Narrative.” Wide Angle 8.3-4 (1986): 53-62. Print. —. “Found Footage verstehen.” Found Footage Film. Ed. Cecilia Hausheer and Christoph Settele. Luzern, 1992. 54-75. Print. Rancière, Jacques, and Charles Tesson. “Jean-Luc Godard: Une longue histoire.” Cahiers du Cinéma 557 (May 2001): 28-36. Print. Röwer, Karl. Die Technik für Filmvorführer. Halle/Saale, 1953. Print. Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham, 1999. Print. Siegel, Dmitri. “Mysterious Disappearance of Carol Hersee.” The Design Observer Group: Observatory. Observer Omnimedia LLc, 1 Mar. 2005. Web. 30 Dec. 2009. Stanitzek, Georg. “Reading the Title Sequence (Vorspann, Générique).” Trans. Noelle Aplevich. Cinema Journal 48.4 (Summer 2009): 44-58. Print. That’s Entertainment, Part 2. Dir. Gene Kelly. USA, 1974. Film. versteckte cathrine. Dir. Gabi Horndasch. 5:50 min. Ger., 1999/ 2000. Film. Wilcha, Chris, and Matt Owens. “China Girl: Film Color Calibration.” Focus on Sight & Sound: A Two Minute Study. Sundance Channel. 2004. Television.

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The Reflexivity of Voice ERIKA LINZ We hear ourselves speak but we do not read ourselves write. Thus, everyday usage is making us aware of a difference between voice and script concerning the dissimilar links of the productive and the perceptive aspects of the two media. Although we can see ourselves write, in the concrete act of the movements of writing we do not simultaneously read what we are writing. Only when talking does hearing at the same time include a semanticizing listening. It seems to be only in speech that we simultaneously tie together speech production generating meaning and speech perception withdrawing meaning. In the tradition of the philosophy of language, it has been this uniqueness of the “perceptive-productive double-sidedness” (Waldenfels 492)1 of speech that has substantiated the long-term emphasized status of voice over script. Apart from the materiality of the temporal negativity of sound, i.e., its volatility and its linear successivity, it has been specifically the processual characteristic of coupling speech and hearing in the act of voicing through which the voice was awarded a special epistemological function since the advent of Idealism at the latest. Against the backdrop of this tradition and its deconstruction by Derrida, I will ask the question to what extent, after phonocentric criticism, we can continue attaching epistemological relevance to voice regarding its processual reflexivity. Specifically from the perspective of theories of cognition and media, it might have been somewhat premature to put aside the discussion about possible epistemic effects. For many, within the discourse of philosophy and cultural theory, it has lost its legitimizing evidence with Derrida’s critique, while in the discourse of theories of cognition and commu1

This article was written in the context of the section “Mediality and Speechsigns” of the Research Center in Cultural Studies (SFB/FK 427) “Media and Cultural Communication” and in many ways refers back to joint discussions in the project with Ludwig Jäger, Gisela Fehrmann, Luise Springer, Meike Adam and Wiebke Iversen. I would like to thank them as I am also thanking Cornelia Epping-Jäger for her suggestions, criticism and support.

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Erika Linz nication it has hardly played any role yet. In the cognitive sciences ⎯psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics as well as in major areas of linguistics and communication theory⎯the concept of voice as a medium of transmission has persistently continued to live on: voice is understood as an instrument that belatedly communicates internally formulated contents of speech. This means that possible cognitive retroactive effects of speech and its reflexive processuality are to a large extent left out of the model. Speech production and speech perception continue to be two mostly separated realms of research that in their reciprocity are not systematically focused upon. In the context of media theory, the attempts to rehabilitate voice start primarily on a prediscursive level and mostly discuss the nonsemiotic aspects of voice. What, however, is the semiotic relevance of voice in speech? In the philosophical tradition, the epistemological dimensions of the materiality of voice have been discussed primarily with respect to the hierarchies of dissimilar symbol systems and the aesthetic forms of expression connected to them. But in detaching from this context the discussion about the semiotic qualities of voice and its phonocentric implications, an argument can also be made for rehabilitating the voice and its epistemic function. Looking specifically at the reflexive processualization of voice can contribute to pointing out the impact of mediality on cognitive structures and semantic processing. I would like to illustrate this with the help of two theses: firstly, by assuming that speech can be seen as a metaleptic procedure because it combines productive and perceptive processes; secondly, by arguing that the mediality of voice inscribes itself into the cognitive system despite its volatility, thereby also manifesting itself on the level of mental processes that seemingly lie outside of mediality.

Hearing Oneself Speak as Metaleptic Procedure Derrida has characterized the phenomenological “power of the voice” (Speech 75) to the effect that it “offers a protective roof” to self-presence. “The subject does not have to pass forth beyond himself to be immediately affected by his expressive activity. My words are ‘alive’ because they seem not to leave me: […] not to cease to belong to me, to be at my disposition ‘without further props’” (76). Attempts to oppose this idea of an “absolute proximity” and “immediate presence” (76f) of signifier and subject in speech did not only begin with Derrida. In a reduction of Derrida’s criticism of phonocentrism, it has often been forgotten that Hegel⎯and Humboldt along with him⎯had previously stressed the importance of mediated acts of voicing for the genesis of cognitive contents and of a

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The Reflexivity of Voice subjective consciousness referring to them. Hegel especially does not present voice as a medium of immediate self-presence from the aspect that we always simultaneously hear ourselves when we speak; rather, it becomes a medium that separates the subject from itself.2 Voicing and the sensual perception of the utterance generated by it initiates a process of concretizing that first of all permits “differentiating the thinker from the thought” (Humboldt VII: 581). “We only know our thoughts, only have definite, actual thoughts, when we give them the form of objectivity, of a being distinct from our inwardness, and therefore the shape of externality” (Hegel III: 221).3 This idea of the necessity of objectivizing mental processes through their voicing is developed even more decisively by Humboldt: “Intellectual activity remains temporary and without a trace if it does not become externally and sensually audible” (VI: 152; VII: 53; V: 174). Only by making the detour of voicing through a sensually perceptible medium do mental processes lose their transitory character and become discernible as distinct units for a perception that at the same time is constituted through its acts of voicing. Humboldt has described this movement inherent in every speech act more closely as “silently always transferring” subjective ideas “into objectivity returning to the subject,” without which “conceptual formation and therefore all true thought is impossible” (VII: 55).4 In the same way, Hegel also believed that the medialization through voice is the prerequisite for cognitive contents to become ‘tangible’ objects of understanding for a discerning perception, i.e., objects of understanding that are separated from the cognitive process: “The vocal note which receives further articulation to express specific ideas⎯ speech and its system, language⎯gives to sensations, intuitions, conceptions, a second and higher existence than they naturally possess⎯ invests them with the right of existence in the ideational realm.” (214)

Unlike for Kant, for Hegel and Humboldt the formation of distinct terms is not only linked to the necessity of sensualization; it needs additionally a manifestation within an “external medium” (Hegel

2

3

4

In pointing out Hegel as the “thinker of irreducible difference” and the “first thinker of writing,” Derrida has already recognized the essential features of this in his Of Grammatology (26). Additions in Boumann’s Text. 1845. Trans. A. V. Miller: “Man […] creates articulate speech by which his internal sensations are turned into words, are expressed in their entire determinateness, are objective to him as subject, and at the same time become external and extraneous to him” (Hegel III: 87). For more details see Jäger, “Über”.

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Erika Linz 214). Only through the sensorial perception of one’s own notions as external objects, the specific act that generates differentiations is implemented without which “thought could not become lucid, idea could not become a concept” (Humboldt V: 375). “As the spiritual striving is making headway through the lips, its own creation is returning to the ear; the subjective inner activity is picked up again as an external object. […] For no conceptual category can be conceived of as a pure act of the contemplation of an object already present. The activity of the senses has to be synthetically connected to the inner activity of the spirit and from this connection ideas break free becoming objects of the subjective force; perceived as such anew, they return back into the former. Therefore, completely disregarding the exchange of information between human beings, speech is a necessary condition of individual thought in solitariness.” (377)

Thus, for Humboldt as well as for Hegel, the double movement of a mediated voicing of cognitive processes united with the parallel selfreading of the voiced becomes the prerequisite for the constitution of all contents of awareness. To hear oneself while speaking is then for Hegel not an experience of immediate self-presence, but one of an already interceded, i.e., mediated process. Mental processes lose their immediacy only in the process of a medially induced distancing of the subject from itself while speaking, thereby becoming able to attain, according to Hegel, a distinctive ‘existence in the realm of imagination.’ Quoting Jäger, this dependency of “intellectual work” on processes of mediation can be emphasized more generally as a “theorem of traces.” “Only where thought can address the traces of its own activity can semantically distinctive meaning emerge and therewith also the difference of self-reference and reference to the other. […] The merely seemingly ‘internal’ mental system can only constitute itself with the help of its ‘external’ traces […] as a mental system.” (Jäger, “Zeichen” 20)

I will still have to clarify to what extent for this process of medially generating traces it is important that ‘voicing’ generally leaves only quite fleeting traces. For the moment, within a theory of traces, one can make a note of the fact that on the background of this requirement of externalizing, speaking has an essential epistemic function: it is here that without doubt one of the central forms of processing is taking place within which an externalization and a parallel rereading of the external traces occurs. Moreover, it should be asked to what extent the function of constituting meaning in processes of self-reading is not only relevant regarding epistemological logics but also in that it marks a general principle of linguistic performance that has effects every time the

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The Reflexivity of Voice act of speaking is taking place. It is interesting to note that the importance of self-perceptive processes in speech-production is now increasingly attracting attention even in psycholinguistics, where for decades speech perception and production have been treated as completely separate areas. As the leading psycholinguist Willem Levelt formulated the newly discovered understanding of the link between productive and perceptive moments during the speech act: “The person to whom we listen most is ourself” (Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer 6). However, in the recent models of speech production, the role of the perceptive feedback processes is in essence limited to a controlling function of the correct accomplishment of premeditated communicative intentions. It is true that the psycholinguistic models more and more often take their point of departure from an incremental processing, i.e., from a formation of discourse during the process of speaking. However, the content of speech in these models is still seen as completed and premeditated before the statement. Therefore, the so-called “self-monitoring” of speech refers above all to the safeguarding against possible mistakes while speaking.5 Kleist, it seems, had already pointed out the dubious nature of such a two-phased concept of speech production in his essay “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking.” If, as I have argued so far, semantically distinct meaning is generated only by the detour of reading one’s own material traces, then the individual speech act can no longer be thought of as encoding prefabricated propositions. Thought does not precede speech but⎯as Kleist said in a parody of the saying “L’appétit vient en mangeant”⎯ “L’idée vient en parlant” (535). Speaking and the re-reading connected to it then not only serves the retroactive communication of propositions formed pre-linguistically; we have to regard it also as a form of processing that in the first place contributes to the constitution of propositional contents as contents of perception through voicing and the rereading connected to it. Based on the thesis proposed here, voice then functions less as a medium of auto-affection; it functions rather as a medium of self-transcription. Speaking functions transcriptively in that the speaker, during the perception of his own speech, transfers his seemingly prior intent even for himself into a readable semantics.6 Resorting to rhetorical traditions, the structure of the deferred creation of a previous speech-intention can be characterized as a metaleptic procedure. The rhetorical figure of speech called metalepsis refers to a reversal of the metonymical relationship of cause and effect. As Bettine Menke has phrased it, “it presents something 5 6

For this see for example the survey by Indefrey and Levelt 848 and 862f; Levelt and Indefrey 83 and illus. 89. On the transcriptive logic of speech see also Jäger, “Transcriptivity.”

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Erika Linz as an effect in order to imply a cause, introducing it retroactively as antecedent and precedingly motivational, i.e., it generates the cause as a ‘rhetorical effect’” (115; see also de Man). Moreover, for metalepsis its processual character is essential, since it refers less to a relationship between two linguistic signs and more to a “semantic process.”7 As a “figure of speech that step by step arrives at what it is presenting,”8 metalepsis truly seems to point out the processual form of speaking postulated here. Findings in the field of the neurology of consciousness and cognitive neuroscience also support the assumption of a metaleptic structure of speech. In a variety of experiments in perception, it could be shown that the subjective sequence of conscious experiences is not necessarily correlated to the objective succession of the brain processes responsible for these subjective experiences (see e.g., Dennett 84). Rather, an increasing number of findings seem to indicate that consciousness is a subordinate phenomenon, i.e., that the contents of consciousness are created by chronologically preceding neuronal processes. Regarding the initiation of actions as well, the experiences perceived as impulses setting off an action seem to be metaleptic effects that are retroactively predated in subjective perception. The effect can be illustrated with an example by Benjamin Libet, one of the leading neurophysiologists in the realm of temporal processing. A trained sprinter starts 100 ms or less after the starting signal. This means he starts running before the starting shot enters his perception (after roughly 200-250 ms). Nevertheless, he will later report having heard the starting shot before starting to move (Neurophysiology 389).9 In a variety of experiments in which, among others, a method of electrically stimulating the brain was used, Libet et al. were able to show on the one hand that the subjective perception of time does not coincide with the clear neuronal delay of the moment in which a sensorial impulse on conscious perception occurs, but rather that it is retroactively adapted to the moment of stimulus. On the other hand, the experiments gave empirical evidence for the hypothesis that on the cerebral level

7 8 9

Armin Burkhardt has clarified this referring to Susenbrot’s categorization of metalepsis in his lexicon article “Metalepsis” (1093). “Metalepsis est dictio gradatim pergens ad id quod ostendit” (Donatus, qtd. in Burkhardt 1090). See also Velmans 215: “[W]hether we consider conscious forms of input analysis (speech perception and reading), information transformation (verbal thinking) or output (speech production), the conscious experience that we normally associate with such processing follows the processing to which it relates.”

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The Reflexivity of Voice the beginning of an arbitrary activity clearly lies prior to the perception of the activity’s intention.10 Concerning the act of speech that is of interest here, the neuropsychologists Halligan and Oakley have, for example, assumed from this mechanism of a subjective re-interpretation of the effect of a neuronal process into its initiating impulse that “almost certainly you’ll have to wait until you hear your words spoken before you know what they are” (36).11 On the background of my argument we could then make their assumptions more pointed by arguing that the retroactive conclusion of one’s own communicative intention not only relates to the linguistic process of encoding but also to the formation of the propositional content of the utterance. The propositional content as well is differentiated only in the process of communicative acts. “Think first, talk later”⎯this established view that the planning of the content precedes the process of verbalization could then be regarded as a metaleptic effect that establishes the result of a communicative act in a retrospective interpretation as its initiator. If, as I have suggested here, speaking can be determined as a transcriptive procedure, then connected to it is the thesis that the communicative intention does not precede speaking, but that it is a product of a subsequently mediated transcription. Only in the reading of the self-generated traces is the pre-predicative communicative intention transcribed into a distinct semantics.12 The self-produced effect of speech might fundamentally lie in continuing limiting the 10 See in more detail Libet, Neurophysiology and “Neural.” The temporal deferral to a large extent can be explained from the fragmented and distributive ways of brain-processing that call for temporal synchronization in order to generate coherent units of the distributed neuronal activities (regarding this see Linz 154ff). The information regarding the time of the neuronal delay varies between 100 and 1000 ms; according to Libet, however, we can assume a supra-individual and stimulus-independent approximate value of c. 500 ms (see Libet, Neurophysiology 378). Even though Libet’s choice of method is also partially questioned in the neurosciences, the general assumption of the deferral of conscious processes and their subjective predating is generally accepted by now and is empirically supported. Regarding this see the commentaries to his “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action” and the continuation of the debate in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (1987): 781-786 and 12 (1989): 181-187. 11 See also Velmans 215: “[T]here is a sense in which one is only conscious of what one wants to say after one has said it!” According to Velmans the same is true also for conscious “inner speech.” 12 Here Jäger talks about the fact that every speech “already on the side of the producer contains an auto-hermeneutical transcriptive moment” so that we must understand speech as a form of “self-transcription” (see “Transkriptivität” 40).

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Erika Linz realm of possibilities for the development of what is said, thereby forcing the speaker to focus more and more onto certain vanishing points in a sort of radial structure.13 The fluid mediality of voice increases the determining compulsion in so far as it strongly limits the option to pause and to correct; instead it creates a spurring effect. However, the epistemic function of speech outlined so far is not limited to oral speech only, since neither the linkage of productive and perceptive processes nor the metaleptic form of generating meaning connected to it can be attributed to the privilege of voice alone. Nevertheless, especially with regard to this aspect of processing, some marked divergences between different symbolic practices can be established. A significant difference, for example, between oral speech and writing or painting seems to be based on the fact that the recursive linkage of sense-generating production and sensegathering perception is carried out much more narrowly and more continuously during speech. Although for writing both motoric feedback and visual perception of the written are indispensable, it is not so for the ability of a re-semanticizing reading. Learning to read is not directly connected to learning to write⎯neither ontogenetically nor with regard to cultural history. This is similar for other media practices like painting or music, where productive and receptive competence, i.e., the ability to produce or to interpret signs, is often acquired altogether separately. However, clear differences also become visible on the performative level of each individual processing. For example, when writing, phases of reading and writing are not executed simultaneously; as a rule, they alternate. In contrast, speech from the beginning is characterized by a recursive parallelization of the processes of production and reading. In this close coupling of sign production and sense-generating sign reading could reside one of the differentiating characteristics of speech versus other symbolic practices of a linguistic and non-linguistic nature⎯both in the process of learning and in the concrete processing act.

Perception of Difference: Hearing Oneself Speak It is exactly this linkage of the two aspects in hearing oneself speak that, according to Derrida, tempts us to let an experience of closeness to oneself lead into “the absolute reduction of space in general” during the act of speaking. Quoting Derrida, “as pure auto-affection, the operation of hearing oneself speak seems to reduce even the in-

13 Peter Auer has formulated a similar principle regarding grammatical planning of sentences.

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The Reflexivity of Voice ward surface of one’s own body” (Speech 79). Therefore, what about the specific disposition to be self-affected and the immediate presence that is repeatedly attributed to voice in order to prove its exceptional quality and its primacy among other forms of expression? In what way does the act of hearing oneself speak already carry the aspect of an exterior, of difference within itself despite its seeming introspection and inwardness? If one attempts to approach this question from the perspective of processing, then at least three aspects can be differentiated out of which an epistemically relevant perception of difference for the speaking subject is taking place.

TEMPORAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE PRODUCTION AND THE PERCEPTION OF SPEECH The production and perception of speech first of all do not take place simultaneously but shifted in time. Sound reaches the inner ear with a delay of 2 ms. In order to recognize a temporal sequence of two different acoustic impulses⎯the so-called temporal order threshold that is an indispensable requirement for the perception of spoken language⎯already 30 to 50 ms are needed. Before an acoustic signal becomes consciously audible, 200 to 500 ms may pass (see Pöppel; Rosen). To speak and to hear oneself speak then are always separated from each other by a temporal delay.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KINESTHETIC PERCEPTION OF SPEECH ACTS WITHIN THE EAR AND ITS EXTERNAL AUDITORY PERCEPTION The coupling between two different feedback-loops is more important with regard to cognition, however. The “operation of hearing oneself speak” therefore is not reduced to the “inward surface of one’s own body” (Derrida, Speech 79) because the awareness that it is I who is speaking implies the coupling of an internal kinesthesia with an external sensorial feedback. Every motoric activity is being accompanied by a variety of proprioceptive and kinesthetic perceptions that are a necessary condition for motoric coordination; they are also the foundation for developing and storing motoric programs. When we speak, this feedback is supplemented by a second perception loop furnishing the acoustic stimuli provided by the external ear.14 The specificity of this auditory external loop consists in giving

14 How important this auditory feedback continues to be not only for ontogenetic development but also for the conservation of the highly complex motoric programs of speech is substantiated by the cases of people gone deaf

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Erika Linz permission, as Mead puts it, “to respond also to its own stimulus as it responds to the stimulus of other forms” (64). When linking the two qualitatively different processes of perception, it only then becomes possible to create a correlation between the speech act and the experience of hearing, thereby identifying the heard as something spoken by one’s own self. The coupling of motoric and auditory feedback is the precondition for referring the auditory perception back to one’s own articulatory movement, i.e., for the development of what Mead has called the “vocal gesture.” When Derrida is pointing out that “auto-affection is not a modality of experience that characterizes a being that would already be itself (autos),” then from the perspective of processing we can state more precisely in what way vocal auto-affection “produces sameness as self-relation within self-difference; it produces sameness as the non-identical” (Speech 83). The auto-affection of voice consists precisely in the fact that in the act of voicing we ourselves generate those responses within ourselves that we also arouse in other persons “so that we are transferring the attitudes of the other into our own conduct” (Mead 69). It is this difference between the interior and the exterior perception of one’s own speech act that allows the speaker to recognize what he has heard as something produced by himself, thereby acknowledging otherness as one’s own.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SELF- AND OTHER-PERCEPTION Humboldt has insisted early on that the exterior perception of one’s own utterance is a necessary but not yet sufficient experience of difference. Rather, one’s own thoughts acquire “certainty and clarity” only “when they are radiated back from a different thought-authority” (V: 380 and 455). To hear oneself speak from the outset is not a monological act but a process that always includes the receiver of the speech into the perception of one’s own speech. According to Mead (68ff), this second loop of voicing via the other listener also marks the necessary movement through which alone the transfer from the vocal gesture to the significant symbol can take place. A further coupling is necessary; namely, the coupling of self-perception with the reaction of others in order to learn interpreting external reactions as reactions to one’s own speech act, thereby recognizing oneself as a subject creating meaning in differentiation from others. The seeming proximity of the subject to itself during speech is then already ruptured on several levels. But what this means re-

late in life where speech articulation is strongly diminished already after a short time.

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The Reflexivity of Voice garding the idea that speech can demand a specific form of interiority and directness for itself due to its specific fluid, transient materiality nevertheless must remain unanswered.

The Mediality of Remembering Hegel in particular stresses the absolute temporality of voice and the resulting “ideal, […] so to speak, […] incorporeal corporeity.” Voice generates “a material in which the internality of the subject retains throughout the character of internality […] since the propagation of sound is just as much the vanishing of it” (87). Regarding semiology, “the word as sounded” (220) on the one hand allows “for manifesting its ideas in an external medium” (214),15 while on the other hand “to be an abstract, that is to say, merely destructive, negativity” (220) of sound permits that “[i]n the name [i.e., in the linguistic sign, E. L.], [r]eproductive memory has and recognizes the thing, and with the thing, it has the name, apart from intuition and image” (219). Although for Hegel the ‘content in the intelligence’ is referred back to the linguistic sign as a material sign, his idealistic concern is however still directed to a search for a format of mediality that should have as few sensory qualities as possible, and especially no iconic references (see esp. Derrida, “Pit”). As Humboldt formulates it, voice, with its “seemingly incorporeal quality corresponds to the spirit also sensually” (V: 377), therefore seems to fulfill this demand in an outstanding way because “in the ideal sensual presence of sound […] the visible corporeal matter is being negated” (Jäger, “Linearität” 193).16 This idealistic characterization of phonic substance as an ideal and abstract negativity substantiating the epistemological primacy of voice can be responded to now not only by referring to the nondiscursive dimension of voice as we can observe it in the present media-theoretical discourse. Voice not only involves the trace of the body; it also leaves its trace of mediality in the body and especially in its semiological state. The mediated productive-perceptive loop of voicing is also manifested on the level of the seemingly ‘internal’ cognitive systems in the perceptuo-motoric format of the cognitively stored sign. As has been already stressed by de Saussure, both the motoric and the perceptive dimensions of the articulated sign are embedded in the cognitive dispositive of signs. Namely, only for the “langage intérieur”⎯and I would like to stress this⎯is the synthetic

15 For the semiological relevance of the materiality of sound see especially Jäger, “Linearität”. 16 See more specifically Fehrmann and Linz 94ff.

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Erika Linz combination of “image acoustique” and “concept” constitutive.17 Even here, on the cognitive level, we are not therefore dealing with signifieds that are free of mediation; rather, the semantic dimension is inextricably linked to the mediated dimension of the “image acoustique.” This “image acoustique” in turn is not an exclusively perceptual form; it is already a synthetic combination of “méchanème,” the figure of movement, and “acoustème,” the figure of sound.18 Such a perceptuo-motoric coupling of productive and perceptive dimensions in the cognitive dispositive of signs is also supported by neuro-anatomical findings regarding motoric-auditory interfaces that are equally active in both speech production and perception (e.g., Hickock and Poeppel). We might summarize my present thesis in the following way: therefore, regarding the cognitive system as well, there are neither ‘amedial’ ‘types’ nor semantic units that exist outside of the mediated attributes of their processing. But the fact that seemingly mental elements are linked to media not only shows on a structural level but also on a processual level, for example in the activity of “inner speech” (see esp. Semjonowitsch Vygotski), i.e., within the linguistic acts of thought. Inner speech is not only characterized by the same metaleptic structure as voiced speech⎯also the same areas of the brain are activated (see Velmans 215). And furthermore⎯even when no muscular activity can be detected⎯the same motoric and sensoric areas are activated in inner speech as when we speak loudly. The only recognizable difference lies in the non-activation of the processing entity responsible for the concrete carrying out of the motoric articulation (see Dogil et al.). Therefore, the epistemic brisance of hearing oneself speak is not only to be found in the fact that “the subject can hear or speak to himself and be affected by the signifier he produces, without passing through an external detour, the world, the sphere of what is not ‘his own’” (Derrida, Speech 78). Conversely, the brisance lies precisely in the fact that the subject is forced to take this detour and that it also cannot banish the traces of this exterior authority from its interiority. The fleetingness of voice does not allow for the possibility of the “effacement of the sensible body and its exteriority” (Derrida, Speech 77) for an interior; rather, it acquires above all its epistemic meaning by generating traces of mediality. By examining the medium voice⎯or more precisely by looking at the mediated process of speaking⎯the inadequacy of assuming (since this continues to remain untouched in theories of cognition or media) an inner mental system and a material exterior world that alone shelters 17 Saussure, Tome 2 149, 1100f, III C 279. See also Jäger, “Neurosemiologie” 318f and 315, FN 149. 18 Saussure, Tome 2 32, N 14c [3305.8]; see more specifically also Jäger, “Neurosemiologie” 319ff and Fehrmann and Linz 87ff.

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The Reflexivity of Voice the realm of mediality separated from it exemplarily becomes apparent. Interiority is not constituted only through exteriority; in its conservation and in its different forms of performatively generating meaning, it is also dependent on mediated acts of voicing and their self-reading and reading by others. Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

Works Cited Auer, Peter. “On line-Syntax—Oder was es bedeuten könnte, die Zeitlichkeit der mündlichen Sprache ernst zu nehmen.” Sprache und Literatur 85 (2000): 43-56. Print. Burkhardt, Armin. “Metalepsis.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Ed. Gerd Ueding. Vol. 5. Tübingen, 2001. 1087-1099. Print. De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading. New Haven, 1979. Print. Dennett, Daniel C. “Bewusstsein hat mehr mit Ruhm als mit Fernsehen zu tun.” Die Technik auf dem Weg zur Seele: Forschungen an der Schnittstelle Gehirn/Computer. Ed. Christa Maar, Ernst Pöppel, and Thomas Christaller. Reinbek, 1996. 60-89. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore, 1976. Print. —. “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology.” Margins of Philosophy. By Derrida. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, 1982. 69-108. Print. —. Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. with an introd. by David B. Allison. Evanston, 1973. Print. Dogil, Gregorsz, et al. “The Speaking Brain: A Tutorial Introduction to fMRI Experiments in the Production of Speech, Prosody and Syntax.” Journal of Neurolinguistics 15 (2002): 59-90. Print. Fehrmann, Gisela, and Erika Linz. “Resistenz und Transparenz der Zeichen: Der verdeckte Mentalismus in der Sprach- und Medientheorie.” Die Kommunikation der Medien. Ed. Jürgen Fohrmann and Erhard Schüttpelz. Tübingen, 2003. 79-102. Print. Halligan, Peter, and David Oakley. “The Greatest Myth of All: What Do You Mean When You Talk About ‘Yourself’?” New Scientist 11 (Nov. 2000): 35-39. Print. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Philosophy of Mind. 1830. Ed. A. V. Miller and J. N. Findlay. Trans. William Wallace. Oxford, 1971. Print. Vol. 3 of Encyc. of the Philos. Sciences. Hickock, Gregory, and David Poeppel. “Towards a Functional Neuroanatomy of Speech Perception.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4 (2000): 131-138. Print.

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Erika Linz Humboldt, Wilhelm von. Gesammelte Werke. Ed. A. Leitzmann. 17 vols. Berlin, 1903-36. Print. Indefrey, Peter, and Willem J. M. Levelt. “The Neural Correlates of Language Production.” The New Cognitive Neurosciences. Ed. Michael S. Gazzaniga. 2nd ed. Cambridge, 2002. 845-865. Print. Jäger, Ludwig. “Linearität und Zeichensynthesis: Saussures Entfaltung des semiologischen Form-Substanz-Problems in der Tradition Hegels und Humboldts.” Fugen: Deutsch-Französisches Jahrbuch für Text-Analytik 1980. Olten, 1981. 187-212. Print. —. “Neurosemiologie: Das transdisziplinäre Fundament der saussureschen Sprachidee.” Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 54 (2001): 289-337. Print. —. “Transcriptivity Matters: On the Logic of Intra- and Intermedial References in Aesthetic Discourse.” In this volume. —. “Transkriptivität: Zur medialen Logik der kulturellen Semantik.” Transkribieren: Medien/Lektüre. Ed. Jäger and Georg Stanitzek. Munich, 2002. 19-41. Print. —. “Über die Individualität von Rede und Verstehen: Aspekte einer hermeneutischen Semiologie bei Wilhelm von Humboldt.” Poetik und Hermeneutik XIII: Individualität. Ed. Manfred Frank. Munich, 1988. 76-94. Print. —. “Zeichen/Spuren: Skizze zum Problem der Sprachzeichenmedialität.” Schnittstelle: Medien und kulturelle Kommunikation. Ed. Georg Stanitzek and Wilhelm Voßkamp. Cologne, 2001. 17-31. Print. Kleist, Heinrich von. Erzählungen, Anekdoten, Gedichte, Schriften. Ed. Klaus Müller-Salget. Frankfurt a.M., 1990. Print. Vol. 3 of Sämtliche Werke und Briefe in vier Bänden. Levelt, Willem J. M., and Peter Indefrey. “The Speaking Mind/Brain: Where Do Spoken Words Come From?” Image, Language, Brain: Papers from the First Mind Articulation Project Symposium. Ed. C. Alec Marantz, Yasushi Miyashita, and Wayne O’Neil. Cambridge, 2000. 77-93. Print. Levelt, Willem J. M., Ardi Roelofs and Antje Meyer. “A Theory of Lexical Access in Speech Production.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (1999): 1-38. Print. Libet, Benjamin. “Neural Processes in the Production of Conscious Experience.” The Science of Consciousness: Psychological, Neuropsychological, and Clinical Reviews. Ed. Max Velmans. London, 1996. 96-117. Print. —. Neurophysiology of Consciousness: Selected Papers and New Essays. Boston, 1993. Print. —. “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action.” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8 (1985): 529-566. Print.

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The Reflexivity of Voice Linz, Erika. Indiskrete Semantik: Kognitive Linguistik und neurowissenschaftliche Theoriebildung. Munich, 2002. Print. Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Ed. Charles W. Morris. Vol. 1. Chicago, 1967. Print. Menke, Bettine. “Adressiert in der Abwesenheit: Zur romantischen Poetik und Akustik der Töne.” Die Adresse des Mediums. Ed. Stefan Andriopoulos, Gabriele Schabacher, and Eckhard Schumacher. Cologne, 2001. 100-120. Print. Pöppel, Ernst. “Zeitlose Zeiten: Das Gehirn als paradoxe Zeitmaschine.” Der Mensch und sein Gehirn: Die Folgen der Evolution. Ed. Heinrich Meier and Detlef Ploog. Munich, 1997. 67-97. Print. Rosen, Stuart. “Temporal Information in Speech: Acoustic, Auditory and Linguistic Aspects.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London ser. B 336 (1992): 367-373. Print. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique générale, édition critique par Rudolf Engler, Tome 1. Wiesbaden, 1968. Print. —. Cours de linguistique générale, édition critique par Rudolf Engler, Tome 2, Appendice, Notes de Ferdinand de Saussure sur la linguistique générale. Wiesbaden, 1974. Print. Semjonowitsch Vygotski, Lew. Thought and Language. Ed. and trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar. Cambridge, 1962. Print. Velmans, Max. Understanding Consciousness. London, 2000. Print. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Antwortregister. Frankfurt a.M., 1994. Print.

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A Handout on the Subject of ‘Talking Hands’ HEDWIG POMPE “Contracting your eyelids on purpose when there exists a public code in which so doing counts as a conspiratorial signal is winking. That’s all there is to it: a speck of behaviour, a fleck of culture, and—voilà!—a gesture.” (Geertz 6)

Anthropology (and a Promise) Speaking and writing about the human hand is also speaking and writing about anthropology; even more so if one focuses on the ‘speaking hand,’ because, for one, the ability to speak is seen as specific to human beings in comparison to other species. Then again, human development is closely connected to the use of hands, which, once freed via the evolution to the upright gait, led to a history of signification. This means that the human body is not only an object of analysis for modern research of evolution and cognition; it is also the archive of the history of humanity. To continue a scientific approach to human beings and the history of the use of signs connected to it is in itself bound to the historicity of scholarly means of representation and its media (see Knorr-Cetina). Therefore, also the findings of the natural sciences can tell us something about the reshaping of the ‘natural’ body by means of varying cultural techniques. For a long time this realization in itself has become a topos of the research done in the history of cultures regarding the discourse on human beings and their sensory organs. Thus, any discussion concerning the hand contains hints underlining a continuous mix of natural history and science with the cultural history of human beings, thereby allowing for a variety of interdisciplinary intrusions with regard to the subject of ‘talking hands.’ Most distinctly, the hand as a representative for the human body and its parts is pointing out the body as a zone of transition for the techniques acquired during evolutionary processes (see Leroi-Gourhan; Wilson). The hand is not only one of the primary tools through which the natural has always been connected to the artificial―no matter at what point one begins with the currently available histo349

Hedwig Pompe ries of the hand. Rather, with the use of the hand, the human body also simultaneously points beyond itself, communicating via a historical series of apparatuses of its own creation with what so often has been defined as its ‘other’: with work using animals, with divine pneuma, and with technical prostheses. With its ability to signify things, the hand is quoting itself as a human tool: the hand can ‘speak’, as well as write, paint, dance, take photographs; simply said, it can work. In all its activities, the hand exhibits itself and the body as entangled media, entering into a special relationship of competition to the speech organs of the face and not only where it is acting with the signs of the so-called ‘nonverbal’ gestures. The ‘talking’ hand in its own way is transcribing what it is communicating: human activity with all its possibilities.1 When it is acting, it is also quoting the human faculty of speech. All functions and techniques of the operations of the hand and its ability to create semantically or expressively relevant gestures are therefore pointing to the cultural history of humans not only incidentally; on the contrary, the talking hand is leaving a conspicuous number of traces in current discourses that constitute new areas of the ‘in-between’ as well: between sign, speech and communication, between semantics and functionality, between different media. This topic could be widely discussed historically and from the perspective of the philosophy of science, and not only because physical communication is one of the subjects of the last 30 years.2 The attraction of this subject is based not least of all on the fact that the relationship between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ signs can be discussed especially well with the example of body language.3 Addressing the ‘talking hand’ as a tool for setting signs and simultaneously as a medium of communication focuses on the promise of its ability to speak but at the same time is its critique: how and whether the hand is communicatively interacting with other media in different scenarios is being explored. To pursue the performance of the speaking hand regarding media-specific conditions then proves to be a subject that is able to again separate the joining of speech and act in speech act theory. Namely, assuming that speech ‘speaks’ and acts specifically within language alone, then the question nev1 2 3

Regarding the concept of media transcriptions see Stanitzek; Jäger, “Transkriptivität.” See Egidi et al.; Bergermann; Bergermann, Sick, and Klier; Müller. With the difference between the two meanings of body: as a social and historical product on the one hand [i.e., having a body, in German “Körper,” BP/DR], and on the other hand as the only ‘blindly’ understanding point of radical constructivism [i.e., being a body, in German “Leib,” BP/DR]. Regarding this see the anthology edited by Egidi et al.; see also Funk and Brück; Braungart; Belting.

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A Handout on the Subject of ‘Talking Hands’ ertheless remains asking how the hand is acting—for example, in painting, in photography or in film—in order to convey meaning through signs. One can therefore definitely be tempted by and respond to the metaphor of the ‘talking hand’ this side of language. And this semiotic temptation is not only taking place when we establish that the gestures of the hand are communicating ‘nonverbally.’ On the other hand, we seem to resist the complete temptation of awarding the hand the ability to speak where it is seen as the medium of a readable/unreadable message; a message that in this case should be: the acting of the hand does not function like ‘language.’ The grammar of the language of hands, communicating itself as a medium of communication through gestures, still seems to raise hitherto quite open questions. Below, I will follow some historical points of initiation showing to what extent the linguisticality of the hand and its communication skills are persuasive.

Nomos and the Difference of the Arts (Gesture and Gesticulation) In the German language tradition, which has differentiated between sign/gesticulation and gesture, the symbolicality of gestures can be found in the tradition of theories of expression. These rely (since Aristotle) on an analogical relationship between inner sensation and outer body language. This means that the outer expression by signs is supposed to signify the inner state of the soul of the communicator. Karl Bühler, located on the threshold between the theories of expression in the psychology of language and modern linguistics, differentiated between representation and expression in his historical reconstruction of Ausdruckstheorie (1933), following Johann Jakob Engel. Engel himself, in his Ideen zu einer Mimik of 1785, a classic text for the education of actors, is referring back to a differentiation introduced for nonverbal signification by Cicero between demonstrare and significare.4 According to Cicero the gestures of the speaker should not be “this stagy gesture reproducing the words but one conveying the general situation and idea not by mimicry but by hints” (“non demonstratione, sed significatione declarans”) (see also Košenina). In his treatise, Engel equates the term “demonstrate” (demonstrare) with “painting;” he is concerned with the mimetic-

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Cicero 220: “omnis autem hos motus subsequi debet gestus, non hic verba exprimens scaenicus, sed universam rem et sententiam noch demonstratione sed significatione declarans.” See Maier-Eichhorn.

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Hedwig Pompe iconic parts of the repertoire of gestures from which the professional movements of the actor can be differentiated from the rhetorical use of gestures of an orator. The internal differentiation between the use of sound and other physical gestures by actors and/or orators since Greek-Roman Antiquity through contemporary theories of acting and rhetorics is taking into account the reciprocal relationship of iconic and non-iconic signs in communicative acts. In contrasting the various arts, one attempts to define the specific repertoire of gestures in accordance with the particular conventions of the various artes. But the infringement of the limits of what is permitted or not is already determined by the holistically defined medium of the body and its mimetic repertoire of signs. Regarding the differences between the representational arts and oratory, Cicero’s differentiations had already been spelled out more closely by Quintilian. Quintilian translates the Greek term Chironomie with “lex gestus” (law of gesture). These laws of gesture not only refer to the movement of the hands, but in the fifth part of his Art of Rhetorics, Actio, they comprehensively take into account the complex cooperation of visually intelligible body language and its vocal execution. Cicero’s point of departure is the addressing of all the senses of the listeners by the orator; thus, a good speaker should be in command of all sorts of physical uses of signs. Quintilian, apart from the semantically organized functions of physical gestures to signify by implication, to express pathetically or to represent mimetically, in his Actio-lecture is specifically stressing the aspect of the gestures of the hands accompanying a speech: “88 The gestures of which I have thus far spoken are such as naturally proceed from us simultaneously with our words (cum ipsis vocibus naturaliter exeunt gestus). But there are others which indicate things by means of mimicry (qui res imitatione significant). For example, you may suggest a sick man by mimicking the gesture of a doctor feeling the pulse, or a harpist by a movement of the hands as though they were plucking the strings. But this is a type of gesture which should be rigorously avoided in pleading. 89 For the orator should be as unlike a dancer as possible, and his gesture should be adapted rather to his thought than to his actual words (ut sit gestus ad sensus magis quam ad verba accommodatus), a practice which was indeed once upon a time even adopted by the more dignified performers on the stage. I should, therefore, permit him to direct his hand towards his body to indicate that he is speaking of himself, or to point it at some one else to whom he is alluding, together with other similar gestures which I need not mention. But, on the other hand, I would not allow him to use his hands to imitate attitudes or to illustrate anything he may chance to say. 90 And this rule applies not merely to the hands, but to all gesture and to the voice as well.” (bk. XI, ch. 3, pars. 88ff)

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A Handout on the Subject of ‘Talking Hands’ In the “lex gestus” of Quintilians Actio-lecture, the rules for the talking hands represent in fact the most comprehensive part.5 Hand gestures are given this kind of prominence by Quintilian by their implied multidimensional similarity to language: “85 As for the hands, without which all action would be crippled and enfeebled, it is scarcely possible to describe the variety of their motions, since they are almost as expressive as words. For other portions of the body may help the speaker, whereas the hands may almost be said to speak. 86 Do we not use them to demand, promise, summon, dismiss, threaten, supplicate, express aversion or fear, question or deny? Do we not employ them to indicate joy, sorrow, hesitation, confession, penitence, measure, quantity, number and time? 87 Have they not power to excite and prohibit, to express approval, wonder or shame? Do they not take the place of adverbs and pronouns when we point at places and things? In fact, though the peoples and nations of the earth speak a multitude of tongues, they share in common the universal language of the hands (ut in tanta per omnes gentes nationesque linguae diversitate hic mihi omnium hominum communis sermo videatur).” (bk. XI, ch. 3, pars. 85-87)

The teachers of rhetoric who are interested in the specifics of vox (voice), habitus corporis (the whole carriage of the body), vultus (look), gestus (gesture) and their interaction as body language (see Quintilian, bk. XI, ch. 3, pars. 2 and 14), are also always theoreticians of media who take note of the materialities of the body and its signification as well as of the specific modalities of meaning in sign production and reception. Since antiquity, the assumption that physical gestures are a universal and therefore easily understandable human language in a natural form has at the same time become a tradition.6 However, Quintilian is already quite succinctly countering the thought of universalism connected to the visibility of body language by asserting above all that the gestures of the hands accompanying speech not only underline the expressive parts of vocalization but that this also refers simultaneously to the rhythm, the grammar or deixis of the functions of language during the flow of words. Thus, the hands that ‘speak along’ do not in fact possess a language of their own in the strict linguistic sense and are not supposed to take over this role in the rhetorical system either, but from this point onward the 5

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As a side element of Actio the rules for the use of the hands are also resumed under the latinized term Chironomia. See Varwig; Košenina; Steinbrink. This thought of a universal language in early modernism is connected to the observation of sign language, for example in the works of John Bulwer (Chirologia; Philosophus; Pathomyotomia); regarding John Bulwers works see Košenina; Knox.

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Hedwig Pompe concepts of a versatile communicative applicability of the ‘talking hands’ are inscribed. The semantic ambivalence of gestures can be emphasized compared with the ideas of a universal language, implying that the natural signs of the body are universally understandable. For this very reason, the gestures of hands are also subsumed by rhetorics under the laws similar to those of language. On the other hand, the rhetorical observation of the ‘language’ of gestures realizes that the individual use of gestures departing from this ‘lex’ is also possible. According to Johann Jakob Engel, who in the late 18th century applies parts of the rhetorical tradition to his theories of acting, the elements present in the actions of the speaker as well as of the actor do not have to be represented mimetically (demonstrare); here the use of gestures with deictic function is sufficient (significare) (see Bühler, Ausdruckstheorie 41). Furthermore, Engel is contrasting the merely intimating and indicating gestures with the conciseness that is characteristic of an uncontrollable physical signification arising from the involuntary stirrings of the affections.7 “Painting,” according to Engel, “is for me […] every sensual representation of the thing itself that the soul contemplates; expression of every sensual representation of the form, the attitude with which it is contemplating; the whole state of mind into which it is transferred by its contemplation” (pt. I, letter no. 8, p. 79). In the 18th century the significance of the value of physiognomic expressions become paradigmatic for the non-contingent connection between signs and their meaning (see Campe; Geitner). Apart from rhetorics, physiognomy is the second line of tradition characterizing the conceptions of the ‘semiotics’ of gestures; here, out of the analogous relationships between the psyche and the expressive body, can be read not least of all the character of a person. This means that since the late 18th century a further differentiation occurs in the ‘signifying realm’ within the semiotics of the body; it gives rise to paradoxical constellations not only in the theories of acting. Natural aptitudes of signification are the prerequisites of an art of representation (as in rhetorics) that binds artificial signification to bodily means as well. It is the body as the natural medium from which the techniques of professional—and therefore codified—acquisition of gestures (of the speaker or actor) are established.8 At the same time, however, the ability of the body to signify is seen as an expressive and intangible archive of an involuntary production of signs. Thus, in the signifying body, natural and artificial abilities are intricately linked; immediate and mediated signification is simultaneously established there. Thus, in the dis-

7 8

For a connection between actio-lectures and physiognomy see Kapp, “Lehre”. On the theories of acting in the 18th century see Fischer-Lichte.

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A Handout on the Subject of ‘Talking Hands’ cussions of the theories of expression and signs, the confrontation of the mediated with the immediate is leading to the mediality of the body as signifier: those elements that are immediately present and active—the psychic dispositions, the affects, the signs of the character—can only be observed and interpreted through the media and materialities of their representation and therefore are often suspected of ‘artificiality.’

The Phantasma of Deixis, Pointing Beyond Itself Insofar as they are part of the entirety of the body and the significatory abilities attributed to it, far-reaching systematic aspects of the language of hands are created by the theories of language and cognition; from the perspective of evolutionary theories, the one cannot be separated from the other (see Jäger, “Sprache”). The history of language acquisition of homo sapiens recounts the prominent role that, apart from the face and its speech organs, is assigned to the hand. According to a scenario of evolutionary theory, the development of vocalization on the one hand presumes the existence of a gestural-visual language but on the other hand it leads to the replacement of the “‘manual’ language by the language of the face” (Jäger, “Sprache” 33). The liberation of the hand by means of the evolution to the upright gait for its part results in grave consequences for cultural techniques: to manufacture and to use tools is an accomplishment that is a prerequisite for writing. The visual mode survives within the speaking abilities of physical gestures, even though the development of vocalization overtakes the functionality of this language. Thus, oral vocalization is not simply outstripped by literacy; rather, human language, the “archimedium” (Ludwig Jäger), once again amplifies its enduring complexity through literacy. Seen from the aspect of evolutionary theory, the prehistory of the relationship of language and cognition already shows that in human communication the modalities of the visual and the auditive have always been linked. Thus, the history of the hand is connected to the claim that it can give us genuine guidelines for the developmental history of humanity, which is coupled to the ability to speak and to create signs. This means that the disambiguating gestures of the hand, to which the deictic sign belongs, acquire a specific cultural authority. And it is the codified gestures of the index finger that emblematically concentrates this authority. Quintilians Actio-lectures also declare the functionality of an intentional gesture as represented in the display of indication. To in-

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Hedwig Pompe dicate (indicare) and to incriminate (exprobare) for him belong together. “But when three fingers are doubled under the thumb, the finger, which Cicero says9 that Crassus used to such effect, is extended. It is used in denunciation and in indication (whence its name of index finger), while if it be slightly dropped after the hand has been raised toward the shoulder, it signifies affirmation, and if pointed as it were face downwards toward the ground, it expresses insistence. […]; it sometimes also serves for counting.” (bk. XI, ch. 3, par. 94; the last part of the sentence is missing in this translation; it was added by DR/BP)

In the techniques of not only the index finger but of all fingers (the “digiti”) that also allow for the gestures of counting, the future authority of the “digital” codification of communication is already delineated, insofar as cultural meaning can be produced in the differentiation of yes and no, one and two, guilt and innocence. Thus, it seems that already the techniques of signification of the human hand can control the analogue and digital possibilities of encoding (see Schröter and Böhnke). The authority of the index finger that disambiguates by pointing out is mirrored in the glance following the direction of reading and interpretation that has been pointed out. The formal confirmation as well as the destabilization of the communicative relationship between the gesture of pointing out and the corresponding glance results from analytically taking apart the communicative situation: for example, on the part of the synthetic gesture by observing the participating segment of the body like an arm, a hand, or a finger, and its relation to the whole body and its positioning in the space at which the finger is pointing and which frames it with the help of other signs. Thus, on both sides of the interface between body and space created by a gesture of the hand, complex forms of communication are always waiting; they join in the place of the hand gesture as a crossroads of communication, and at the same time they also separate again. Karl Bühler, the psychologist of language, analyzes the pointing with the index finger to oneself and to another as the basic mode of human self-reference and reference to the other.10 Regarding this, he invokes the image of a collective memory containing directions how to deal with the deictic function of certain words: “There is more than one way to point with gestures; but let us dwell on the signpost: where the pathway branches, or in countryside lacking pathways an

9 Cicero, bk. II, 45, 188. 10 Regarding the Greek-Roman forms of language and the tradition of the imagery of deictic self-testimony see Sittl 53f.

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A Handout on the Subject of ‘Talking Hands’ ‘arm’ or an ‘arrow’ is erected so that it can be seen from far off; an arm or arrow that normally bears a place-name. If all goes well it does good service to the traveller; and the first requirement is that it must be correctly positioned in its deictic field. Not much more than this trivial insight need be retained, and the question posed as to whether spoken language contains signs that function as signposts. The answer is yes, deictic words such as here and there have a similar function. But the concrete speech event differs from the wooden arm standing there motionless in one important point: it is an event. Moreover, it is a complex human act. Within the act the sender does not just have a certain position in the countryside as does the signpost; he also plays a role, the role of the sender as a distinct from the role of the receiver. For not only does it take two to tango, two are needed for every social undertaking, and the concrete speech event must first be described in terms of the full model of verbal communication. If a speaker ‘wishes to indicate’ the sender of the present word, he says I, and if he wishes to indicate the receiver, he says thou. ‘I’ and ‘thou’ also rank among the deictic words and are primarily nothing else. If their usual name, personalia, is translated back into Greek, prosopon, that is, ‘countenance, mask or role’, some of the initial astonishment about our thesis is dispelled; […].” (Theory 93f)

It is the utopia of the subject, placed ‘correctly’ at the moment of transition from sign to language, which is—here at the crossroads between psychology and linguistics—still answered with “yes.” If one wanted to conceptualize an ethics of the ‘talking’ hand, it could start here with this pointing out of the index finger—which is as authoritative as it is trivial (because it is practically self-evident)—and at its affirmation of the deictic function of language. The arbitrariness of an intentional gesture of the physical activities of language, however, would not only be a communicative event that has to be attributed to the subject (and its philosophy); this intentionality could also be ascribed to the referential function of all linguistic signs and therefore could be read from all semiotically accessible combinations of signs. In this way also the directed messages of media are introduced authoritatively by the theories that discursively deal with them as their very own gestural instructions of how to deal with them. In this way we cannot escape the unironic gesture of ones own signification; this needs particular attention insofar as the signification of the text as well is still the privileged medium of theories in cultural studies. And also the many counter-histories of negations, of an apotropaic conjunction of oral vocalization and hand gestures initially could be basally conceptualized in the idea of Bühler’s deictic field of both a gestural language and a language of gestures.11 11 See one of the many examples, which Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt had made into the thesis of their title Geschichte und Eigensinn (History and Onstinacy): Here it is the fairy tale by the brothers Grimm telling of the ob-

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Hedwig Pompe To remain with a psychologist of language who is also interested in theories of expression, Karl Bühler derives his own concept of the ‘imaginative’ deixis (“deixis am phantasma”; Ausdruckstheorie 44) from this, applying it to language theory. Something that is only hinted at but that is nevertheless signified by the indicative pointing out of the body—like the inner psychological state—is at the moment of its external signification completely present and perceptible for others. The signifying body thereby is relying, as it were, on a phantasmatic referential function of its own mediality.12 The explicit indication of the bodily gestures to an interior, an interior that is at the same time represented in the exterior, is therefore based on a double break of modality characterizing the language of expressivity. Regarding the state of the psyche, its prelinguistic condition with its visible gestures is nevertheless simultaneously correlated with non-verbal gestures ‘before language.’ The same visual sign ‘speaks’ of what is not ‘spoken,’ because it shows what otherwise could not be shown. Such expressive signals, when they are accompanying oral statements, linguistically are only assigned in a makeshift way to the field of ‘paralinguistic’ moments (a term that by far cannot cover what in pantomime, in acting or in film is presented via ‘silent,’ visual bodily gestures). The inherent break between signifier and signified in the mode of visuality is producing a relation of similarity between the signs of writing and gestures bypassing vocalization. Their ‘silent’ visuality makes both of them phenomenologically distinguishable from oral signs. Furthermore, we could then ask more generally whether the emblematically invoked referential function by the gestures of the index finger does not figuratively signify the imagination-oriented deixis, therefore containing an iconic theory of signs bound to visuality. Above all, the gestures of the hand would then also indicate a metaphysicality of signification by visible signs. Michelangelo’s fresco of Adam’s creation from the cycle of the Sistine Chapel would then be a paradigmatic and authoritative image-quote that links the ‘silent’ relationship of similarity between writing and image by testifying visually and in gestures to the never ‘heard’ word of god and his action: it demonstrates the supernatural faculty of an almost completed touch between the human and the divine index finger and the enfeoffment by way of the repetition of the quote of divine directedness beyond all separating elements in the hand gesture of Adam. The painting thus would exhibit the referential function of deixis, the break and the metaphysical tendency of indicating: the overstinate child whose arm and hand keep growing out of its grave until the mother one last time chastises the disobedient hand, whereupon the hand disappears forever (765ff). 12 Bühler is explaining this concept more closely in his Theory of Language.

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A Handout on the Subject of ‘Talking Hands’ coming of the break between indicating signs and the readability and visibility of its meaning. Here as well the gesture of the hand enters into the self-referential discourse with its linguistic faculty. In this semiotic sense, the referential function of every materialized sign would have to challenge one or more breaks of modality, which —concerning their inter- and intramedial references of signification —can be looked into media-theoretically. Thus, it is specifically the history of natural and artificial devices of communication that is told by way of an evolutionary widening of possible references of the human body to non-present elements. The concrete addressing of absent elements here is continued in a phantasma of technical feasibility with the respective media euphoria.

Further Promises: Readability, Figurativity, Habitualizing (Similarities) The ambiguity of the many promises of the ‘talking hand’ thus is unfolding between the rhetorics of understandability and visibility as well as the unreadability of its semantically questionable gestures; it is unfolding between the possibility to referentialize its actions that replace iconic and non-iconic relationships of signs and between connectable informativity and incidental, easily disregardable messages in communicative interactions. As the visible signs of writing as a system of language that generates meaning depend on orality as their foundation (see Jäger, “Sprache” 20), also the readability of nonverbal bodily gestures seem to be dependent on being used in the context of intermedial and intermodal relationships. Linguistics again begins at another point on this horizon of questions how to write about the ‘talking hand’ and its visual ‘muteness’ when it is describing the relative autonomy of nonverbal gestures in comparison to sign languages. The realization that in the nationally different sign languages one is dealing with natural languages coincides with a political leaning within the project of their analysis. Thus, in wide sections of society, the functional equality of the nonliteral, gestural sign languages with verbalized languages and its systems of writing is not yet acknowledged. In sign language, ‘nonverbal’ gestures that communicate without fulfilling in a strict sense their own, systems-relevant linguistic aspect, within the area of the same modality, namely, in their visuality have to be differentiated from the linguistic signs of sign language. This differentiates the description of non-systems-related gestures in sign language from an analysis of those gestures accompanying verbalized statements. The schizophrenic double-bind of procedures of signification that Gregory Bateson has been able to observe on the

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Hedwig Pompe grounds of different modalities in the relationship of verbalized statements with parallel nonverbal gestures would then have to be observed in a different way in the visual modality of sign languages (Bateson et al.; see also Kendon 612). In literary studies Paul de Man has outlined the double-bind that ironically configures the parallel signification of vocal and body language, making it fruitful for a general theory of the unreadability of sense-producing signs.13 The semantic crisis of the representative linguistic sign here is mediated by writing, narrating the break that divides spoken language and the language of gestures. But how does spoken language in writing now quote the modality of body language, namely its visuality that has no sound? Is there in writing a visual relationship of similarity to body gestures? Or do we look in writing at body signs that cannot be seen? And where would be the mediated position of figurativity for which the different languages of the body compete?14

In-Between: Archives of the Talking Hand Those elements used among people using sign language for semantic disambiguation, namely, to give the signs of the hand a systematically assigned relational position that is composed of the parameters form of the hand, position of the hand, place of execution (relative to the body), and movement,15 in no way clarifies the semantic value and functionality of the gestures of non-verbal communication. Here, it would be necessary to be prepared for an interpretation going back even to the individual level and situation that— within the spectrum of many possible social relationships and forms of communication—determines the ‘position of the hand’ in each

13 Paul de Man is reading Heinrich von Kleist’s text On the Marionette Theater as tension between the spoken and the habitualized creation of signs. On the theorem of “non-readability” see for example the “Introduction” by Hamacher to the German edition of this book, Allegorien des Lesens (7-26). 14 See for example Barthes 3f: “These fragments of discourse can be called figures. The word is to be understood, not in its rhetorical sense, but rather in its gymnastic or choreographic acceptation; in short, in the Greek meaning: σχηµα is not the ‘schema’ but, in a much livelier way, the body’s gesture caught in action and not contemplated in repose: the body of athletes, orators, statues: what in the straining body can be immobilized. So it is with the lover at grips with his figures: he struggles in a kind of lunatic sport, he spends himself like an athlete; he ‘phrases’ like an orator; he is caught, stuffed into a role, like a statue. The figure is the lover at work.” 15 See for this Louis-Nouvertné; regarding binding parameters see also Stokoe, Casterline, and Croneberg.

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A Handout on the Subject of ‘Talking Hands’ case situatively; this would mean determining it historically and according to the specificity of a mediated situation. But one cannot escape ‘linguistic’ teachings all that fast, as soon as we assume that it matters which smallest units of meaning differentiate, carry and thus create meaning. The semantic indeterminacy of gestures used in context creating situations of ambivalence thus always finds (apart from the special case of the linguistics of sign language) its counterpart in the field of the historical-cultural codification of gestures. Gestures codified by social consensus represent the possibility of connecting gestures of the hand with concrete meanings and functions, thereby facing their indeterminacy—through representation and discursively—with a complementary plurality of meaning and interpretation. This can be seen, for example, in the history of motifs or in registers that have been set up for the language of hands with regard to rhetorical, scientific, ethnological, sociological, linguistic and other purposes, as well as in codified positions of the hand having found their place within juridical and magical professions. Attempting to historicize possible localizations of the hand in the net of communicative activities in no way contradicts the performative mobility of the hand that both semantically and functionally locates itself within its own activities. It is the evidence of gestures: here one speaks, one has spoken and acted, and here, for the moment, as an effect of its visibility, the talking hand wins in comparison with the auditive spoken language. This means that due to the dependence of the gestural-visual form on modalities and because of its stationary or moving state, the question of using the recording media on hand gestures has always played a role. While systemically interested theoreticians since early modernism regret that Quintilians rhetorics never included any systemic pictorial notations for the positions of the hand described by him and have closed that gap with their own static material of images (see for example Austin), Karl Bühler, for whom Johann Jakob Engel is already a “theoretician of action” (Ausdruckstheorie 50), celebrates the modern recording media of the hand like film and sound carriers that supply new possibilities to observe moving gestural and auditive activities. The following quote relates the stationary positioning in the archive of meaningful units and the wish to retain dynamic processes which seem most represented by the technical possibilities of film and radio. Here, technically and metaphorically pursued sequences of movement and the momentaneous assessment supplement each other, since the human apparatus of perception can only follow the recording movements of film and radio analytically, if it is able to stop them.

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Hedwig Pompe “What I have in my mind’s eye are the scissors in the hands of LERSCH.16 It cuts from filmstrips (that were recorded in certain, experimentally induced situations) pregnant individual pictures that are reproduced in the book. Nothing yet is said of the fact that the same scissors are put to action a second time and separates the area around the eyes from the area around mouth and nose […]. But prior to this, the first cut of the scissors already suggests that the one who performs it is convinced that he can illustrate complete expressions through skillfully selected individual pictures. It is simple enough what we have to say about this: The cutting done with the scissors is a selection that is (certainly not as crudely, but on the whole conformly) predefined in the experience of a temporal process of the perceiving interpreter. One needs to have been an observer and participant in one of our Viennese studies only one time in order to confirm from personal experience what I mean; namely, that in order to interpret the activity of expression, one hunts for fruitful moments (for the most part trivial). No matter, whether the continually progressing element is a talking voice of a moving image.” (Bühler, Ausdruckstheorie 80)

Contrary to Bühler, one could also have in mind the hand holding the scissors which by handling other tools functions as a self-referential medium of work and communication. To the theory of the thereby-created fruitful, sense-producing moment could be connected a whole series of classic referential texts of modern theories of art and media, starting from Lessing’s interpretation of gesture in the Laokoon group, contrasting the differentiating abilities of the simultaneous and the processual arts, to theories of acting that attempt like those by Engel to find a grammar for the involuntary and voluntary signs of the body, to texts of theories of images and film of the early 20th century that wanted to recognize the work of the hand in montage, or also to the phenomenological mediation of the experiences prefigured “in the experience of the perceiving interpreter” with the media of representation, as Aby Warburg and Fritz Saxl have sought out in the iconography of pathos formulas (see Saxl). In all these respects, we are dealing with a memory of gestures of the hand and the body connected to its media that in many different ways has been haunting human communication. Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

16 Here Bühler is talking of Philipp Lersch and his work Gesicht und Seele (1932) in which he finds a “new lexicon of fertile moments of mimical action” (Bühler, Ausdruckstheorie 207).

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A Handout on the Subject of ‘Talking Hands’

Works Cited Austin, Gilbert. Chironomia; or a Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery: comprehending many precepts, both ancient and modern, for the proper regulation of the Voice, the countenance, and Gesture. Together with an Investigation of the Elements of Gesture, and a New Method for the Notation thereof; illustrated by many figures. London, 1806. Print. Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. London, 1990. Print. Bateson, Gregory, et al. “Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia.” Behavioral Science 1 (1955): 251-264. Print. Belting, Hans. Bild-Anthropologie: Körper—Bild—Medium. Munich, 2001. Print. Bergermann, Ulrike. Ein Bild von einer Sprache: Konzepte von Bild und Schrift und das Hamburger Notationssystem für Gebärdensprache. Munich, 2001. Print. Bergermann, Ulrike, Andrea Sick, and Andrea Klier, eds. Hand: Medium—Körper—Technik. Bremen, 2001. Print. Braungart, Georg. Leibhafter Sinn: Der andere Diskurs der Moderne. Tübingen, 1995. Print. Bühler, Karl. Ausdruckstheorie: Das System an der Geschichte aufgezeigt. Jena, 1933. Print. —. Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language. Ed. Achim Eschbach. Trans. Donald Fraser Goodwin. Amsterdam, 1990. Print. Bulwer, John. Chirologia, or the Natural Language of the Hand […] Whereunto is Added Chironomia: or the Art of Manuall Rhetoric. London, 1644. Print. —. Pathomyotomia or a Dissection of the Signicative Muscles of the Affections of the Minde. London, 1649. Print. —. Philosophus, or the Deaf and Dumb Man’s Friend […]. London, 1648. Print. Campe, Rüdiger. Affekt und Ausdruck: Zur Umwandlung der literarischen Rede im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen, 1990. Print. Cicero. De Oratore. Bks. 1-3 with De Fato, Paradoxa Stoicorum, De Partitione Oratoria. 1942. Ed. G. P. Goold. Trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham. Cambridge, 1982. Print. Vols. III and IV of Cicero in twenty-eight vols. De Man, Paul. Allegorien des Lesens. Trans. Werner Hamacher and Peter Krumme. Frankfurt a.M., 1988. Print. Egidi, Margreth, et al., eds. Gestik: Figuren des Körpers in Text und Bild. Tübingen, 2000. Print. Engel, Johann Jacob. Ideen zu einer Mimik. 2 parts. Berlin, 17851786. Print.

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Hedwig Pompe Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “Entwicklung einer neuen Schauspielkunst.” Schauspielkunst im 18. Jahrhundert: Grundlagen, Praxis, Autoren. Ed. Wolfgang F. Bender. Stuttgart, 1992. 51-70. Print. Funk, Julika, and Cornelia Brück. “Fremd-Körper: Körper-Konzepte. Ein Vorwort.” Foreword. Körper-Konzepte. Ed. Funk and Brück. Tübingen, 1999. 7-17. Print. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. 1973. London, 1993. Print. Geitner, Ursula. Die Sprache der Verstellung: Studien zum rhetorischen und anthropologischen Wissen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen, 1992. Print. Jäger, Ludwig. “Sprache als Medium: Über die Sprache als audiovisuelles Dispositiv des Medialen.” Audiovisualität vor und nach Gutenberg. Ed. Horst Wenzel, Wilfried Seipel, and Gotthart Wunberg. Vienna, 2001. 19-42. Print. —. “Transkriptivität: Zur medialen Logik der kulturellen Semantik.” Jäger and Stanitzek 19-42. Jäger, Ludwig, and Georg Stanitzek, eds. Trankribieren: Medien/ Lektüre. Munich, 2002. Print. Kapp, Volker. “Die Lehre von der actio als Schlüssel zum Verständnis der Kultur der frühen Neuzeit.” Kapp, Sprache 40-64. —, ed. Die Sprache der Zeichen und Bilder: Rhetorik und nonverbale Kommunikation in der frühen Neuzeit. Marburg, 1990. Print. Kendon, A. “Nonverbal Communication.” Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics. Vol. 2. Berlin, 1986. 609-622. Print. Knorr-Cetina, Karin. Die Fabrikation von Erkenntnis: Zur Anthropologie der Wissenschaft. Frankfurt a.M., 1984. Print. Knox, Dilwyn. “Late Medieval and Renaissance Ideas of Gesture.” Kapp, Sprache 11-39. Košenina, Alexander. “Gebärde.” Ueding 3: col. 564-579. Leroi-Gourhan, André. Gesture and Speech. Cambridge, 1993. Print. Trans. of Le geste et la parole. 2 vols. Paris, 1964/65. Louis-Nouvertné, Ulla. “Was sind Gebärdensprachen?—Eine Einführung in die wichtigsten Ergebnisse der linguistischen Gebärdensprachenforschung.” Gebärdensprache. Spec. issue of Sprache und Literatur 87 (2001): 3-20. Print. Maier-Eichhorn, Ursula. Die Gestikulation in Quintilians Rhetorik. Frankfurt a.M., 1989. Print. Müller, Cornelia. “Eine kleine Kulturgeschichte der Gestenbetrachtung.” Sprechen vom Körper—Sprechen mit dem Körper. Vol. 2. Spec. issue of Psychotherapie und Sozialwissenschaft. Zeitschrift für Qualitative Forschung 4.1 (2002): 3-29. Print. Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. Geschichte und Eigensinn. Frankfurt a.M., 1981. Print.

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A Handout on the Subject of ‘Talking Hands’ Quintiliani, Marcus Fabii. Institutionis Oratoriae Libri XII. Trans. H. E. Butler. Chicago, 1920-1922. Print (Web: Bill Thayer, ed. Website. 2006. 21 Dec. 2009). Saxl, Fritz. “Die Ausdrucksgebärden der bildenden Kunst.” 1932. Aby M. Warburg: Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen. Ed. Dieter Wuttke with Carl Georg Heise. 2nd amended and bibliog. supplemented ed. Baden-Baden, 1980. 419-432. Print. Schröter, Jens, and Alexander Böhnke, eds. Analog/Digital—Opposition oder Kontinuum? Zur Theorie und Geschichte einer Unterscheidung. Bielefeld, 2004. Print. Sittl, Carl. Die Gebärden der Griechen und Römer. 1890. Reinheim/ Odw., 1970. Print. Stanitzek, Georg. “Transkribieren: Medien/Lektüre: Einführung.” Introduction. Jäger and Stanitzek 7-18. Steinbrink, Bernd. “Actio.” Ueding 1: col. 43-74. Stokoe, William C., Dorothy Casterline, and Carl G. Croneberg. A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles. Washington, 1965. Print. Ueding, Gert, ed. Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. 9 vols. to date. Tübingen 1992- . Print. Varwig, F. Roland. “Chironomie.” Ueding 2: col. 175-190. Wilson, Frank R. The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. New York, 1999. Print.

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What Hands Can Tell Us: From the ‘Speaking’ to the ‘Expressive’ Hand PETRA LÖFFLER “There is a history of hands; they have their own culture, their particular beauty; one concedes to them the right of their own development, their own wishes, feelings, caprices and pleasures […]” Rainer Maria Rilke (45)

The practices of sense making made possible by visual media have been and continue to be reflected by these media over and over again. By doing this, they invoke already existent organizations of knowledge and their cultural formations, simultaneously also modifying them. Thus, ways of communication with gestures represent an almost inexhaustible reservoir for pictorial inventions within the visual arts. The long history of gestures as a system of expressive movements1—mainly executed with the hand—therefore cannot be separated from its mediated representations. Below, I will present a history of transitions and superimpositions that repeatedly circle around the question: which signs did the hand make visible in the historically different constellations and how were these recognized and interpreted?2 It is with good reason that I will be frequently referring to photographs: Photographs of hands represent, so to speak, the gravitational center of an episteme in which that which was called ‘language,’ ‘writing,’ or ‘image’ (of the hand) not only becomes an event but is also at the same time commented upon within this very same medium. Moreover, in this kind of “dramaturgy” a shift is 1

2

“Gesture” goes back to the Latin word “gestus,” generally denoting a bodily movement or posture and especially a movement of a bodily part, particularly the hand. The derivative “gestire” is used with the meaning ‘to express a feeling.’ Jacques Derrida has analyzed the topos of the sign character of the hand, referring back to the philosopher Heidegger for whom the hand is “the proper characteristic of man as sign, monstre (Zeichen),” pointing out that he considers the hand a singular; see Derrida 35.

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Petra Löffler being marked that is connected to the ennobling of the hand as a distinctive object of epistemology. It finds its archeological point of culmination in Rilke’s term of the “history of hands” that have their “own culture,” which he coined on the occasion of Rodin’s sculptures.

The ‘Speaking’ Hand Already in the antique rhetorical teachings of Cicero and Quintilian the gestural repertoire of signs was part of the basic stock of linguistic activity. In its practical use, it was codified, classified, and regulated in the rhetorical actio-doctrine. Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria attributes a status of signs analogous to spoken language to the movements of the hand—and even more: gesticulation impresses by its general comprehensibility and is therefore defined as a universal language of considerable complexity that can not only denote mental but also deictic contents: “As to the hands, without the aid of which all delivery would be deficient and weak, it can scarcely be told of what a variety of motions they are susceptible, since they almost equal in expression the powers of language itself, for other parts of the body assist the speaker, but these, I may almost say, speak themselves. With our hands we ask, promise, call persons to us and send them away, threaten, supplicate, intimate dislike or fear; with our hands we signify joy, grief, doubt, acknowledgment, penitence, and indicate measure, quantity, number, and time. Have not our hands the power of inciting, of restraining, of beseeching, of testifying approbation, admiration, and shame? Do they not, in pointing out places and persons, discharge the duty of adverbs and pronouns? Amidst the great diversity of tongues pervading all nations and people, the language of the hands appears to be a language common to all men.” (bk. XI, ch. 3, pars. 85-87)

This “language common to all men” is further developed in the Middle Ages mainly by monks attempting to classify mimic and gestures while developing a language for deaf-mutes (see Saftien). In it, individual movements of the hand are named according to affects, characteristics or actions and are thus culturally codified as gestures (see Gebauer and Wulf 83f). Their communicative function is also pointed out by John Bulwer in 1644 in his famous Chirologia: Or the Natural Language of the Hand drawing on the instructions of rhetorical teachings from antiquity and the classifications of the clerical systems and rules. Apart from that, he adds to his lessons a “manual rhetoric” entitled Chiromania in which the hand’s gestural forms of expression are introduced as instruments of eloquence. In the classifications of gesticulation, the hand functions as an execut-

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What Hands Can Tell Us ing and performing instrument of either symbolic systems like the alphabet and the numerical system, or of codified positions from which one was supposed to read emotions or characteristics. The gestures of counting and spelling into the 18th century follow the alphanumerical code; those of emotions or characteristics are assigned to the terminological analogies. Jacob Leupold’s Theatrum Arithmetico-Geometricum published in 1727 gives an outline of these two schemata of classification. Barbara Maria Stafford, in her turn, then also considers this parallelizing of gestures and language as expressions of a “visual culture” in which expressive gestures were “making elusive ideas physical and visible” (195). Illustration 1: Jacob Leupold, Counting with Fingers and Speaking with Hands (1727)

Source: Leupold, pl. II

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Petra Löffler Rhetorical knowledge of a universal ‘language’ of the hands thus with this accolade entered the iconic sign systems in which it was quasi conserved.3 Their formal parameters reach from the ritual gestures of medieval painting to the mobile gestural and mimical “primeval vocabulary of passionate gesticulation (‘Urworte leidenschaftlicher Gebärdensprache’)” (Gombrich 263) in Warburg’s pathos formulas that have found their way from antiquity via Renaissance to modern painting. In the imagery of painting, as in the figural works of sculpture, the gesticulating hands are permanently included in a compositional context. There they are signs among others—important signs of humanity as well, like the facial expression or the physical posture. The entire human being could be represented in the visual arts both by the portrait and by the bust, and countenances could be valued in physiognomy as pars pro toto, but no other parts of the body could do this—with one significant exception: for Johann Caspar Lavater, for example, the hand alone was equal to the face and even surpassed it in its “undisguisablity” and its “agility” (Physiognomische 199). The movements of the hands for him mainly tell about “human passions and performances” (201). ‘Physiognomizing’—i.e., reading faces—as a “social reading guide” satisfied a “need for physiognomic orientation” that had increased with the functional differentiation of modern society and the ensuing commitment to the individuality of its citizens (Lavater, Von/ Hundert 116 [Afterword]). Part of their (concealed) traditions, however, also included mantic methods that had from the earliest times pretended to be able to interpret individual lines of the hand. Physiognomics share in the idea of mantic methods that the individual character or fate shows on the human body in signs, thereby becoming visible and readable.4 Chiromancy introduced lessons of signs into cultural knowledge that was able to subsist next to the “universal language” of gesticulation. Thus the signs of the hand were read either as inscriptions of the character or fate of a person, or as signs of his actions and emotions. The hand thereby becomes a crossing point of two different types of signs and practices of interpretation: the lines that point out a permanent marking and the gestures that reveal the current state of the person. However, both claim an absolute power of codification and readability. In 1785, Johann Jakob Engel also developed a parallel between the thought process and bodily movement according to the rhetorical concept of eloquentia corporis in his Ideen zu einer Mimik that in the first place was meant for actors. He especially underlines the 3 4

On the influence of rhetorical gestures on the painting of the early modern period see Baxandall. A short survey of the history of chiromancy is presented by SchrenckNotzing 3f.

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What Hands Can Tell Us dexterity of the hand that he equates with the flexibility of thought. However, he additionally makes a momentous differentiation within his systematic presentation of the gestural and mimical way of acting; he contrasts “painting,” i.e., indicative gestures that generally accompany speech, with “expressive” gestures as the genuine ones. Only these expressive gestures disclose the inner condition of their originator, either on purpose by “sensually” imitating an idea or by involuntarily divulging emotions with unguarded movements of the hand (126f). With this contrast, Engel frees gestures from their servile relationship towards rhetorics, defining gestures as an independent expressive sign system. Instead of simply accompanying speech, for him the “expressive” gestures as ‘silent’ speech represent additional human emotions not visible through spoken speech (see also Gumbrecht). The expression of emotions at the same time lies in the individual responsibility, distinguishable from other individuals by the ability to conquer his or her passions. Engel as well sees expressive gestures as a universal language whose differentiation into “nations, classes, genders, or characters” can be disregarded (34). Since, according to him, the “real substance” of expressive gestures lies in their “sensual representation of the state of the soul” (Pollnow 164) that has its “natural and essential” representation in the signs of these gestures, for Engel they also represent the principium individuationis of human beings. Codifying gestures as an alphanumerical symbol system or as analogous to the logic of spoken language becomes obsolete as soon as the movements of the hand are burdened with the articulation of expressivity and individuality. This discursive movement has its start at the end of the 18th century and lasts until the 20th. It is connected with a shift within the discourse with which the readability of the hand is negotiated and of the media in which it is represented. Already ennobled with its special position in mantics and physiognomics, the hand is treated more and more often as a separate object of knowledge. Thus, in the first half of the 19th century, both physiology and anatomy, but also chirognomony, begin to look at the (bone) structure of the hand and its forms independently of the organic entity of the body. The anatomist and physician Charles Bell, for example, who had already called attention to himself in 1806 with his Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expressions, published a study entitled The Hand in 1833. As a result of such an ennobling, hands were also valued in art history as genuine objects. Thus, for Adolf Koelsch, who in 1929 presented a popular treatise entitled Hände und was sie sagen (Hands and what they are saying), “countless individual representations of hands show that the hand by itself alone has its language

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Petra Löffler as well and is often able to perfectly express the most touching feelings” (9). The hand claims our interest here as well as a genuinely ‘speaking’ one that moreover—quite in the meaning of Johann Jakob Engels—is especially able to create exceptionally expressive gestures. In this talk of the ‘speaking’ hand that can express even “the most touching feelings,” a topos is named that has not been lacking in any theory of physical expression since the Enlightenment. For example, in cultural-historical ethno-psychology and in the history of languages, this topos becomes a scholarly argument. Here, gestures are attributed to the human “mimetic ability” (Walter Benjamin) and are considered a form of language preexistent to speech. Particularly the hands are accorded expressive qualities in comparison to which speech seems impoverished.5 Consequently, also the evolutionary history of the program of awareness formation starts with thinking about the free use of the hand. Thus Carl Gustav Carus considers the markedly agile and sensitive hand “as the basis of all other” organs of perception because it is through it alone “that perception is introduced properly into spatial being” (372f). Aby Warburg’s cultural historical formula “between gripping and being gripped” (Gombrich 303) puts this idea in a nutshell. The genesis of expressivity in this point of view is dependent on the free use of the hands whose isolated representation was of specific interest to Koelsch. Thus he finds a plethora of visual representations in past art that exclusively show hands. This focus on the ‘image’ of the hand can be described as an epistemological caesura in the relationship of knowing and seeing that is connected to a change of discourse. The archeological reconstruction of this change leads us to an episteme in which the hand as an object of sign-practices was connected to a technique of visualization that gave it a thus far unequalled visibility. This constellation is owed to a newly awakened interest in the forms and lines of the hand that in the first half of the 19th century initiated an abundance of publications on this subject, as well as a media innovation—the invention of photography that was announced by Jacques Louis Mané Daguerre in 1839. This technical medium changes the ‘image’ of the hand and the conditions of its generation. Accordingly, Adolf Koelsch adds a compendium of photographs that only show hands to his treatise, with the help of which he explains the respective forms of the hand and their individual characteristics. The photographs, integrated into a series of images, expose their object by consciously using the pictorial effects of photogra5

That sign language supposedly preceded speech, as Wilhelm Wundt has asserted in the first volume of his Völkerpsychologie, and thus was a human “Ursprache” (proto-language), is a quite influential argument around 1900 in theories of language. See Braungart, esp. 230-235.

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What Hands Can Tell Us phy. The hands are focused and brightly illuminated while the other parts of the body disappear in a black background. With this photographic direction of lighting, the pictorial object obtains an aura, thus justifying its scientific analysis by way of its pictorial rhetorics. Illustration 2: H. Linck, “A Motoric Type, somewhat elementary and with a Touch of Sensitivity”

Source: Koelsch, pl. 10

The hand, photographically guided by the gaze of the camera, is discovered as a special pictorial object: “Much more impressively than in painting, we recognize the hand in the artistic images of persons created with photographic technology. Here, there is no shaping or even idealizing like in painting” (Reuter 263). But photography does not only direct our view to the hand; it also assures the viewer of the ‘truth’ of the ‘pristinely’ represented object. The photograph certifies once again the physiognomic truth of the hand that Lavater had already noted: the photographed hand thus becomes the real document of the individuality of its bearer. The hand becoming an image and its nobilitation into an object of epistemology is owed to photography because it actuated its isolation into a special pictorial object. The photographic ‘pictorialization’ of the hand points out the break by which the ‘language’ of the hands has freed itself from the hegemony of an episteme that was oriented on the model of spoken language and the alphabet. But this increase in visual evidence is bought with an automatism that forces it into immobilizing its own much-vaunted agility; now it is assigned to the requirements of a photographic generation of images. For the focusing on the hand, its separation from the entity of the body is at first a result of the 373

Petra Löffler technical process of photographing: it is taken into the field of vision of the camera as an object; it is lit up and at first arrested in a pose for the moment of taking the picture before its image can be fixed on the photographic carrier. This is done with the proviso that “in the hands [lies] almost the ultimate possibility of expressing the represented person, and a precious enhancement for the representation of his or her character” (Reuter 264). Thanks to its photographically generated visibility, the hand has become more than equal to the face as a physiognomic ‘expression’ of the individual because in view of the times, it augments the conciseness of the character’s image.

Hand-Writing The photograph has a special relationship to the hand as its object; one, however, that allows the aporias in the field of visibility to emerge. The attention granted to the hand both in scholarly and aesthetic discourse provokes considering the “specific life of the hand” (Canetti 254) as a photographic image: “The palm of the hand as a manifestation of the natural impulse to create and leave a trace has intensely engaged photography and has occupied the field of the photographic image; thereby, it became marked not merely with the transitoriness of the merely visual image but also with the permanence of being labeled as script.” (Krauss, “Wenn” 208)

According to this statement by Rosalind Krauss, it is mostly photography that provides for a form of mediated securing of evidence in the realm of visual signs that is adequate to script. Photography already seems related to writing by its very name, which makes the self-inscription of light onto a sensitive carrier into its program: photography. At the same time, photographs of hands are specifically appropriate to reflect the photographic generation of signs; by storing the signs of the hand on a material carrier and thereby providing it with a trace that mirrors these inscriptions on the skin, the photograph simultaneously makes the process of signification visible. In the analogy of photograph and script the hand as a pictorial symbol makes its appearance, an image that metaphorically confirms the truth of that which is represented and metonymically refers to the process of signification. Contrary to the ‘speaking’ hand of rhetorics that only accompanies speech, it is seen as an organ that primarily generates writing. In this signifying constellation, writing always means the handwriting in the double sense—as a

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What Hands Can Tell Us readable lineament on the palm and as something written by the hand. An early evidence of this ‘elective affinity’ can be found in Felix Nadar’s photograph The Hand of the Banker D. of 1861 that presents one of the first surviving representations of a hand. It was described at the first exhibition of the Société Française de Photographie as “étude chirographique” (chirographic study) “tirée en une heure à la lumière électrique” (printed in one hour with electric lighting) (qtd. in Morris Hambourg, Heilbrun, and Neágu 247). Nadar’s experiments with electric light were explicitly connected with his intermittent interest in chiromancy: “Cette photo nous reseigne sur l’intérêt de Nadar pour les prises de vue à la lumière électrique et sa curiosité, à une certaine époque, pour l’étude des lignes de la main.”6 Where does this simultaneous interest in chiromancy and experiments in artificial light come from? What do these extremely different areas of study let us see simultaneously? Illustration 3: Nadar, Banker’s Hand (1861)

Source: Maria Morris Hambourg, Françoise Heilbrun, and Philippe Neágu, eds. Nadar. New York, 1995. pl. 89. Print. Nadar’s albumin copy shows the palm of a hand that according to its title is the hand of a banker, brightly illuminated on a dark background. It lies sideways on a repository that is covered with a 6

Nadar 63: “This photograph demonstrates Nadar’s interest in photographs with electric light and his temporary interest in the study of the lines of the hand.”

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Petra Löffler dark cloth, kept upright by an object behind it, so that the palm is directed frontally towards the lens. The photograph represents the hand up to the beginning of the arm joining with the sleeve of a jacket. The narrow, well-proportioned hand with slender, long fingers and a splayed out thumb clearly contrasts with the dark environment. The lines on the palm are easily distinguished because they stand out clearly in the artificial light. If one follows the whiteshimmering lines, one recognizes a scar that runs from the end of the thenar to the index knuckle—much more distinctive than the other marks. In using chiromantic vocabulary, one could say that it quite accurately covers the so-called “life-line.”7 This coincidence brings forth a double marking, since here a line that for chiromancy shows the length of an individual life is superimposed by a trace left by a real injury of the hand. The partial coincidence of chiromantically significant lifelines with this scar entwines two contrary practices of signification and the knowledge contained in it: while the lifeline signifies a predestined fate in a world order given by god, the scar belongs to a modern episteme of subjectivity in which knowledge rests on painful individual experience and likewise on contingent incidents.8 The two incompatible terms—fate (providence) and chance (contingency)—merge together in this identification. Nadar’s photograph shows a decided interest in the signs of the hand; it points out the scar as a sign that in the modern conception of a self-determined individual is turned into a signifier for individuality under the beams of the artificial light. For this kind of perception, it is not the lines of the hand that show a predestined ‘fate’ but the scar that points out the distinctiveness of a person as his specific mark. Also the so-called “line of fate” that reaches from the thenar to the middle finger is noticeable in the photograph of this hand. It is remarkably short. In chiromancy this signifies an early death or an “accident towards the end of life” (Schrenck-Notzing 16). Burdened with this sign that becomes visible in Nadar’s photograph, the representation of The Hand of the Banker D. becomes a memento mori. The possibility of an unexpected death quasi doubles the photographic image by mortifying the hand once more at a point in time at which the death-prophecy is hovering above the life of an unknown person who is only made visible in the photograph through his hand. Moreover, the identity of the banker is not entirely made public and thus the photograph becomes an allegorical image that 7 8

A model of the chiromantically relevant lines of the hand can be found in Schrenck-Notzing 14. For Nietzsche, physical pain is the catalyst of pasting processes of memory in which the subject becomes aware of itself and the scar is its trace, because “only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory […]” (61).

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What Hands Can Tell Us directly furnishes its own interpretation. It is an allegory of the photographic practice of signifying mortification. Nadar’s interest in chiromancy needs to be placed in a discursive field whose contours—like his experiments with artificial light— begin to show the epistemological conditions of this interest. Significantly, contemporary authors attempted on the one hand to collect and systematize chiromantic knowledge and to adapt it to the scientific standard of their time on the other. Stanislas d’Arpentignys work La Science de la main, ou l’Art de reconnaître les tendances de l’intelligence d’après les formes de la main (The science of the hand or the art of recognizing the tendencies of intelligence according to the forms of the hand) was published in a second edition already in 1856, i.e., only a few years before Nadar’s photograph of The Hand of the Banker D. was taken. In 1843, the same author had already published his Chirognomonie, ou l’Art de reconnaître les tendances de l’intelligence d’après les formes de la main (Chirognomony, or the art of recognizing the tendencies of intelligence according to the forms of the hand) dealing with the structure of the hand. This treatise is criticized by Carl Gustav Carus only three years later in his morphological study Über Grund und Bedeutung der verschiedenen Formen der Hand in verschiedenen Personen (On the reason and meaning of the different forms of the hand for different people). Adolphe Desbarolle’s publication Les mystères de la main (The mysteries of the hand) of 1859 which was followed in 1884 by Les mystères de l’ècriture (The mysteries of writing) has been edited, expanded and translated until the 20th century so that we can also attribute a high level of popularity to this work. Within this discursive realm, photography—because of its semiotic characterization as a trace “that is causally connected with the things in the world to which it refers, like fingerprints, footprints or water rings left by cold glasses on a table” (Krauss, “Die photographischen” 116)—takes on a distinctive position. Relating photographs with fingerprints is only peculiar on a first glance. Rather, Rosalind Krauss’ comparison has a method. It goes back to Charles Sanders Peirce’s classification of signs that he established in 1893 in order to answer the question What is a Sign? At that moment photography had already become part of a lasting semiotic inventory of culture. It therefore is not astonishing that Peirce used it as an example for the illustration of his three classes of signs. For him, photographs are indices in contrast to other pictorial forms like drawings or paintings which can represent similes but also symbols. Peirce, however, is pointing out the heteronymous semiotic status of photography at the same time. He assigns the technical medium functional-logically both to the indices and to the similes:

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Petra Löffler “Photographs, especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to the second class of signs, those by physical connection.” (5f)

Peirce semiotically allocates the technically generated similarity that the photographs have to the objects which they represent to the mechanical-chemical process of the generation of signs—i.e., to the process of taking and developing the photograph. Thus, it is signified primarily as the trace of a real contact. In this way it seems to be related to fingerprints and footprints. Semiotically, Peirce establishes an elective affinity between the signs of the hand and the signs of the photograph that Nadar had made visible in his Hand of the Banker D. His simultaneous interest in experiments with electric light and chiromancy is fed by the epistemological impulse to let the signs on the hand photographically appear and to make them readable as inscriptions of the real. In the practice of chiromancy this logic of signs is doubled once more. By reading the lines on the palm as signs of future events and not as past ones—as traces that point to something that invariably will happen and which they quasi attest to “before its time”—chiromancy attributes to the hand the role of a material carrier of signs and simultaneously correlates it to writing as a foundational mode of an interpreting “reading.” But from now on the form and size of the hand will also become scientifically relevant signs that can be read and classified as types. Thus, Nadar’s photograph The Hand of the Banker D. with its chiromantic or chirognomonic pattern of interpretation already confronts two contrary ones within one hand. In the transition from a ‘language’ of hands to the logic of signs of hand-writing, an epistemological break emerges: the gestures of the hand are not codified or grammatized any longer according to the logic of (analog) language; rather, the hand is signified in the model of script as a heteronymous field of signs. This means that the signs of the hand are, like script, subject to spatialization and can be read in a similar way as the succession of letters on the page of a book. The photograph, “as a paradoxical stage for the hand and its relationship to writing” (Krauss, “Wenn” 208) displays this reading of the signs of the hand and its effects of meaning. In the ‘older’ medium of script, the photograph is reflecting the mediated form of its generation of signs. It addresses writing as a practice of signification that precedes it. The hand in this case distinguishes itself as a photographic object par excellence. Like the scar on Nadar’s photograph of the banker’s hand is an allegory of photographic mortification, photographs of writing hands can thus 378

What Hands Can Tell Us be considered as allegorical unfoldings of this logic of signification. Handwriting indeed discloses its originator just as distinctively as does that scar or the fingerprint. Thus, the Latin stylus does not only signify the writing implement but also the individual style of writing. It is therefore hardly astonishing that Adolf Koelsch has incorporated a great number of representations of writing hands in his photographic pictorial atlas. Illustration 4a and 4b: Willot and Gret Widman, “Two Expressive, Elaborated Representations of the Sensitive Type, Arranges by Stages of Life”

Source: Koelsch, pl. 22 and 23

Hand-Work It becomes clear from Koelsch’s photographic tableau that visually isolating the hand, thereby making it more ‘scientific,’ allows it to become more classifiable. The observed object thus becomes more differentiated. D’Arpentigny and Desbarolles had distinguished seven basic forms of the hand in their chirognomony, “in which a spe379

Petra Löffler cific occupation, character traits or certain types of employment, i.e., psychic characteristics corresponded to certain physical attributes and forms of the hand” (Schrenck-Notzing 5; all following quotations 6f). The basic form is represented by the so-called “elemental hand” that is attributed to people with limited intelligence who do physical work. The “working hand” usually characterizes businessmen “in whose occupation numbers play an important role.” The characteristics of the “artistic hand” are its shapely build. In comparison, the “useful hand” of the “good citizen and civil servant” is less well proportioned. The “philosophical hand” possesses gnarled hands that indicate “abstract logical thought and the solution of difficult mental problems.” The form of the “mental” hand is pointed and it is “the most beautiful and exceptional form.” “This type indicates persons who rise far beyond their milieu by way of their intelligence, their lofty nature and their idealism.” The seventh and last class of hands represents “a mix without any specific type” that is “characteristic for individuals that know something of everything and also of nothing, thus for example Journalists, and middlemen.” This classification, as arbitrary as their logic may be, should make one thing clear: the hand is now no longer a mediator of a rhetorical body language or of a visual symbol system; it substitutes as pars pro toto a very current social body. Also the lines of the hand are no longer interesting, nor the interpretation of the character or the future of a certain individual. Nadar’s The Hand of the Banker D. in this context seems to be evidence for a certain professional typology. ‘Modern’ chirologists like Hans Reuter assume that the social conditions of life like the occupations are represented in the forms of the hand. “It is interesting that the comparison of the hands of a carpenter and of a wood carver show quite important differences in their structure, even though both have to use the mallet, the plane, etc., with the same strength. The exterior form of the hand is influenced to that extent by physical and intellectual occupation.” (Reuter 266f)

This morphology concedes the merit of the structures of the hand— i.e., chirognomony—in comparison to chiromancy, the reading of fate from the lines of the hand. This is the scientific turn that all “readings of the hand” in the 19th century take. This turn can be also concluded from Koelsch’s study Hände und was sie sagen (Hands and what they say). Initially he rejects any aesthetic or physiognomic approach to his object—there is “almost nothing to figure out” (5). It is hardly any different with chiromancy whose interpretations he also criticizes. Rather, he bases his analysis on the contemporary theories of constitution and classifies culturally, ethnically and socially different types of hands, like 380

What Hands Can Tell Us D’Arpentigny and Desbarolles before him, and varies them again by gender and age. Finally, Koelsch defines three basic types that can be combined with each other so that a variety of mixed forms can be deduced from them. The admission of “mixed forms without a specific type” that make D’Arpentigny, Desbarolles, and Koelsch alike also indicates the limits of the normative impulse of their typologies. However, in their classification we can observe a fundamental differentiation of the hand into a working instrument and into an expressive organ. This differentiation at the beginning of the 20th century characterizes the discourse on the cultural meaning of the hand. It permits describing a renewed change in discourse in which the hand is released from any functional logic and is stylized as the symbol of an increased individuality.

The Working Hand The typologies of the hand that had been developed since the middle of the 19th century had drawn a picture of a functionally differentiated society whose citizens could be classified by their professional categories and their predominant manual occupation. Towards the end of the century, occupational physiology and ergonomics became interested in human motion sequences in order to optimize their efficiency from the point of view of labor economics. The aim was specifically to discipline and standardize the movements of the hand in order to prepare it for the use in industrial mass production. The analysis of motion sequences, however, needed a specific recording technique—chronophotography that makes it possible to take a temporally shifted succession of individual photographs. In order to study motion in its temporal succession, for example Eadweard Muybridge constructed mobile batteries of up to 24 cameras connected to a clock mechanism that triggered pictures one shortly after the other. The individual photographs were composed into series and these pictorial sequences then copied onto a negative in order to illustrate the recorded motion-sequence. Muybridge’s chronophotographic series Movements of the Hand that was part of his encyclopedic presentation Animal Locomotion shows pictorial series of different movements of the hand consisting of four rows with six individual pictures each: clapping hands, hands holding a ball or holding a pencil. In these sequences, individual steps making up the movements of such purposeful gestures can be studied for the first time. It is remarkable that Muybridge chose exclusively everyday activities that can occur in different situations. His photographic series spatialize the movements of the

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Petra Löffler hand so that the temporal and the spatial extension of a gesture simultaneously become visible. Illustration 5: Eadweard Muybridge, Movements of the Hand (1887)

Source: Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge’s Complete Human and Animal Locomotion. Vol. II. Mineola, n.d. pl. 532. Print. Moreover, Muybridge used chronophotography in order to schematize motion sequences. For the background for his pictures, he often used a light grid. Thus, movements of the body are transferred onto a system of coordinates that allows spatially defining each position of every part of the body involved in the movement and by the serialization of the individual pictures, also temporally. By way of chronophotography, Muybridge resignifies a limited repertoire of physical techniques that are easily comprehensible by their concrete practical orientation. Thus, freeing the hand from its quasi static gestural system of rhetorics and its codification analogous to language leads to a geometrical-mathematical formalization of the movements of the hand, which thus can be described as an effect of the media-change to chronophotography. The motion-curves that can be abstracted from Muybridge’s chronophotographic pictorial sequences signified manual activities that could be incorporated into work-processes. The photographs of working hands, as deictic instruments also point to the work carried out by the hands—this means that they exhibit what they are doing as activity. However, equally fascinated with the representation of objects, photography stages the expressive positions and movements of the hand in such a way that they cannot be associated with any specific function. Here, in these various functionaliza-

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What Hands Can Tell Us tions of the hand, the difference between the working and the expressive hand that had already come to the foreground in the typologies of D’Arpentigny and Desbarolles was taken up again and also expanded upon. El Lissitzky’s photo collage The Constructor of 1924 comments on this difference by superimposing the eye and the hand of the artist. It shows a hand lying on a sheet of graph paper holding dividers as an iconographic symbol for the constructor of the world. Its positioning showing the palm can be compared to Nadar’s banker. With this positioning of a hand in action, El Lissitzky reveals himself as a mental worker. He simultaneously stages his artistic self-portrait in this picture of a hand in action because it metonymically presents his creative individuality as a typographer. Thus, the hand differs from working hands that perform monotonous movements in optimized operational sequences. El Lissitzky’s Constructor initiates the transition from the general physical techniques of the hand to its individual expressive techniques in which the mobility and sensitivity of the hand are signified again. Illustration 6: El Lissitzky, The Draftsman (1924)

Source: Foto-Auge: 76 Fotos der Zeit, zusammengestellt von Franz Roh und Jan Tschichold. Tübingen, 1973. Cover. Print.

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Petra Löffler

The Expressive Hand In the beginning of the 20th century, experimental psychology developed an interest in the study of gestural movements based on the information from the earlier chronophotographic studies of movement. Auguste Flach, student of the psychologist Karl Bühler, in her treatise Die Psychologie der Ausdrucksbewegung (The psychology of expressive movement), using the example of the conventional gesture of appeal, maintains that “… the mere gesture as a static posture is dead, empty, and ambiguous. Only when the pleading behavior is added does the gesture truly unambiguously express an emotion” (461). Experimental psychology has recognized that gestures have to be studied in their situational connection and in their process of motion. Thus, it distances itself from a static inventory of gestures as it was passed on by rhetorics and maintains the fundamental openness of meaning of every seemingly quite conventional gesture like that of the hand raised for an appeal. Only in connection with the process of motion and the behavior accompanying the gesture does it divulge a specific meaning. However, in order to observe this openness of meaning, we need a technical medium that can practically analyze the parameters of movement, like the rhythm and field of tension within a gesture. Already Muybridge’s chronophotographic studies of movement had shown that the gesticulating hand is never still and that it indeed establishes the gesture by way of coordinated individual movements. But only with film does scientific research and popular entertainment have at its disposal a technical medium that re-invents the hand as the Proteus of gestures. In 1888, Étienne-Jules Marey had demonstrated the filmic illusion of the movement of a hand and had already recorded its opening and closing on a filmstrip (see also Braun 151). And his assistant, George Demenÿ, recorded the movements of the hand of a magician in 1893. In these early documents of gestures recorded by film, the hand is already both an object of physiological research as well as a suggestive carrier of expression, and thus the hand also owes its emancipation from its function as a “motor” (Leroi-Gourhan) of operational sequences to the increase of its expressivity through film. The industrial psychologist Fritz Giese therefore calls the “working hand” a precursor of the “expressive hand” that “wants to be a mirror of the spiritual dispositions of the self and thus stays away from useful expressive behavior” (55). Only in the realm of aesthetics does the hand acquire the dignity that puts it on par with the eye as a mirror of the soul. There it is assigned to the hermeneutical basic differentiation of surface versus depth and is interpreted as a

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What Hands Can Tell Us shaped form pointing out a hidden meaning. Giese simultaneously relates the question of a “formal language” of the expressive hand to its cultural shaping. Moreover, he distinguishes static from dynamic, intuitive from learned forms of expression. Thus, the autonomous formation of motion sequences distinguishes the expressive hand that “can be unreserved, spontaneous and ‘productive’ in a more narrow sense” (56) from the working hand, leading to Stefan Rieger’s reasoning: “In this way, the expressive hand is contrasted with the working hand. This contrast is an effect of the complexity of movements and therefore, if nothing else, an effect of whether and to what extent which systems in their motor skills have which degrees of freedom at their disposal.” (434)

For Giese, the formation of the individual expressive hand takes place according to a pedagogical program. He names four stages of emancipation from the working hand: starting with the “denoting, representing expressive hand,” the “‘suggestive’ expressive hand” represents its highest development which only becomes effective in relation to the environment and its audience (57). For its description, Giese invokes the motion picture as a model of reception: “One could add that it is something that needs an environment, it is aimed inside out like cinematic drama: it needs an audience and participants. It is never meant to be strictly self-referring. This expressive hand lures, threatens, commands, drives ahead, wards off, etc., others who are situated around the self.” (58)

Only the cinema, therefore, offers the ideal media stage on which the hand can be formed into an expressive hand. By depicting the expressive hand perfected in the “cinematic drama,” he repeats what film theories arguing from a psychological point of view like Hugo Münsterberg’s “psychological study” The Photoplay of 1916 have already described about the meaning of the hand for calling attention, for suspense, and for narration in filmic close-ups (see Münsterberg 31-39). Lew Kuleschow’s plan for a study entitled Expressive Hände (Expressive hands) from 1923 therefore can be seen as a filmic blueprint for Giese’s “suggestive expressive hand.” Kuleschow’s film project was supposed to represent the expressivity of hands only, irrevocably freeing the signs of the hand from the rhetoric inventory of gestures, from their labeling as scripture and their functionalizing as the working hand. With this, the hand’s function becomes the expression of emotions. In the visual field, new forms of meaning are opened up for it by film; however, it also transfers the hand’s expressions to their controlling mechanisms:

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Petra Löffler “Thus, from the perspective of construction, the chopping up of movements in cinematography corresponds to the partitioning of the body […], its permeation with time, meticulously controlling rhythm, etc. In film then from the perspective of diachrony, the latency of encoding whose medium was script becomes visible—if it was perceived at all.” (Rieger 80)

Film projects like Kuleschow’s attempted to leave this latent encoding behind. By fragmenting the body in photography, increased again by the “atomization of the visible” (Starl 95) in chronophotography, the resistance against the codifying of the body was also created. This resistance formed against the typological schemata of classification and its photographic pictorial atlases, the ennobling of the expressive hand, and the individual gesture. While photography had discovered and at the same time arrested a congenial pictorial object that could on the one hand be staged and auraticized while on the other remain open for scientific productions of meaning, film awakened the interest in the mobility and the freedom of gesticulation of the hand instead; one began to analyze movement as such. While Muybridge synchronized the motion sequence of a gesture with his representative range of individual photographs—thereby seeming to extinguish retrospectively the fragmentation of the motion processes—cinema intensified the perception of the rhythm and choreography of a gesture. Thus, the film takes back the schematization of movement again, which chronophotography had used in order to test the individual shape of gestures with the help of the technical possibilities of random repetition and variation. But this liberation from the logic of speech, from the codification of script, and from the functionalizing in operational processes is itself only an effect of a cultural-historical caesura. Many activities of the hand in the work process have become obsolete in industrial, profoundly industrialized mass-production. By transferring more and more functions of the hand to machines that are able to accomplish complex manufacturing processes, the once trained and practiced motion sequences of handling tools or material and the storing of “operational sequences” (Leroi-Gourhan 253) in the ontogenetic memory are losing their meaning. This seems to mean that also the fate of the hand is sealed. Its “regression” (Leroi-Gourhan 255) caused by automatization is the other side of the seeming autonomy as expressive hand. It is not for nothing that Fritz Giese speaks of a “double culture of the working and the expressive hand” that has to be overcome “in order to better substantiate the final goal, the development of solidly self-contained personalities.” He sees a future with mankind at peace with itself within the “possibility of a culture of the hand” and therefore he recommends the “education of the hand” as a proven 386

What Hands Can Tell Us therapeutic means (59). The culturalization of the hand as an expressive one reaches its high point with Fritz Giese’s pedagogical project of a “hand culture.” In the autonomous expressive hand, a process of individualizing the gesture is accomplished that had been envisioned in Engel’s theory of expression and that—with the representational practice of photography by way of which the hand had risen to become a distinctive object of epistemology—has reached the level of visibility. This process becomes collectively effective in the suggestiveness of an increase of the “cinematic drama” of the expressive hand. Giese’s project of the “education of the hand,” however, remains utopian. With view to an incommensurable individuality, resisting codification is only possible against the backdrop of the inevitability of encoding. Such a radical renunciation of gestural codification finds its home in photographic and filmic representations of hands that fetishize the object as such or that peremptorily demand expressivity. By photographing hands “that are individuals of unmistakable uniqueness,” the photographer—according to Arthur Gläser—is “granted epiphanies that have revelatory effects in the ultimate sense,” because “these hands emerge almost ghostlike from some nothingness,” revealing “a new form of observing, a new form of presenting, a new truth and beauty” (717). Rilke saw the hands’ “own culture” in their history. It is the history of their varied generation of meaning about which their images inform us. Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

Works Cited Baxandall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. Oxford, 1972. Print. Bell, Sir Charles. The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, as Evincing Design. London, 1833. Print. Braun, Marta. Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904). Chicago, 1992. Print. Braungart, Georg. Leibhafter Sinn: Der andere Diskurs der Moderne. Tübingen, 1995. Print. Bulwer, John. Chirologia: or the Natural Language of the Hand. Composed of the Speaking Motions, and Discoursing Gestures thereof. Whereunto is added Chironomia: Or, the Art of Manual Rhetoricke. Consisting of the Naturall Expressions, degested by Art in the Hand, as the chiefest Instrument of Eloquence, by Historicall

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Petra Löffler Manifesto’s, Exemplified Out of the Authentique Registers of Common Life, and Civill Conversation. London, 1644. Print. Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. Trans. Carol Stewart. Harmondsworth, 1973. Print. Carus, Carl Gustav. Symbolik der menschlichen Gestalt: Ein Handbuch zur Menschenkenntnis. 1853. Ed. and expanded by Theodor Lessing. Celle, 1925. Print. Derrida, Jacques. “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II).” Psyche: Inventions of the Other. Ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Trans. the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Vol. 2. Stanford, 2008. Print. Engel, Johann Jakob. Ideen zu einer Mimik. Vol. 1. Berlin, 1785. Print. Flach, Auguste. “Die Psychologie der Ausdrucksbewegung.” Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie 65 (1928): 435-534. Print. Gebauer, Gunter, and Christoph Wulf. Spiel—Ritual—Geste: Mimetisches Handeln in der sozialen Welt. Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1999. Print. Giese, Fritz. “Arbeitshand und Ausdruckshand.” Die Arbeitsschule: Monatsschrift des Deutschen Vereins für werktätige Erziehung 38 (1924): 54-60. Print. Gläser, Artur. “Bildnisse von Händen (Fotografien von Helmar Lerski).” Sport im Bild 10 (20 May 1930): 717-719. Print. Gombrich, Ernst H. Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. 1970. 2nd ed. Oxford, 1986. Print. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. “Ausdruck.” Lexikon ästhetischer Grundbegriffe. Ed. Karlheinz Barck. Vol. 1. Stuttgart, 2000. 416-417. Print. Koelsch, Adolf. Hände und was sie sagen: 64 Bilder, eingeleitet und erläutert von Adolf Koelsch. Zürich, 1929. Print. Krauss, Rosalind. Das Photographische: Eine Theorie der Abstände. Munich, 1998. Print. —. “Die photographischen Bedingungen des Surrealismus.” Krauss, Das Photographische 100-123. —. “Wenn Worte fehlen.” Krauss, Das Photographische 199-209. Lavater, Johann Caspar. Physiognomische Fragmente: Eine Auswahl. Ed. Christoph Siegrist. Stuttgart, 1984. Print. —. Von der Physiognomik (1772) and Hundert physiognomische Regeln. Ed. Karl Riha and Carsten Zelle. Frankfurt a.M., 1991. Print. Leroi-Gourhan, André. Gesture and Speech. Trans. Anna Bostock Berger. Cambridge, 1993. Print. Leupold, Jacob. Theatrum Arithmetico-Geometricum, das ist: SchauPlatz d. Rechen- u. Meß-Kunst, darinnen enthalten dieser beyden Wissenschafften nöthige Grund-Regeln u. Handgriffe so wohl, als

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What Hands Can Tell Us auch d. unterschiedene Instrumente u. Maschinen, welche theils in d. Ausübung auf d. Papier, theils auch im Felde besonderen Vortheil geben können, insonderheit wird hierinnen erkläret d. Nutzen u. Gebrauch d. nicht gnugsam zu preisenden ProportionalZirckels. Leipzig, 1727. Print. Morris Hambourg, Maria, Françoise Heilbrun, and Philippe Neágu, ed. Nadar: With Contributions by Sylvie Aubenas, André Jammes, Ulrich Keller, Sophie Rochard, and André Rouillé. New York, 1995. Print. Münsterberg, Hugo. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. New York, 1916. Print. Nadar. Spec. issue of Connaissance des Arts (1994). Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. 1967. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. Trans. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York, 1989. 3-167. Print. Peirce, Charles S. “What is a Sign?” Selected Philosophical Writings. Ed. The Peirce Edition Project. Vol. 2 (1893-1913). Bloomington, 1998. 4-11. Print. Pollnow, Hans. “Historisch-kritische Beiträge zur Physiognomik.” Jahrbuch der Charakterologie 5 (1928): 157-206. Print. Reuter, Hans. “Die Psychologie der menschlichen Hand in der Photographie.” Agfa-Photoblätter V (1930): 261-268. Print. Rieger, Stefan. Die Individualität der Medien: Eine Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom Menschen. Frankfurt a.M., 2001. Print. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Auguste Rodin. Trans. Daniel Slager. New York, 2004. Print. Quintilian. Institutes of Oratory. Trans. John Selby Watson. Home page. Ed. Lee Honeycutt. Iowa State U. 2006. Web. 16 Dec. 2009. Trans. of Institutio oratoria. Saftien, Volker. “Rhetorische Mimik und Gestik: Konturen epochespezifischen Verhaltens.” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 77 (1995): 197-216. Print. Schrenck-Notzing, Albert Freiherr von. Handlesekunst und Wissenschaft. Berlin, 1920. Print. Vol. 20 of Die okkulte Welt. Stafford, Barbara Maria. Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment, and the Eclipse of Visual Education. Cambridge, 1994. Print. Starl, Timm. “Geschoß und Unfall: Bewegung und Moment in der Fotografie um 1900.” Im Prisma des Fortschritts: Zur Fotografie des 19. Jahrhunderts. By Starl. Marburg, 1991. 95. Print.

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Semiotics of the Human: Physiognomy of Images and Literary Transcription in Johann Caspar Lavater and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg WILHELM VOSSKAMP In the tradition of emblematic techniques in the second half of the 18th century, physiognomics with its bi-medial exchange between text and image create a central gateway for visual and verbal culture.1 One can see this in connection with the ‘anthropological turn’ whose interest lies in the individual as a just as inexhaustible as incalculable and at the same time viable subject. The border between the definiteness and indefiniteness of the individual subject is aiming at this “Individuum est ineffabile” (Boehm 7n15)2 that will become the leitmotif of the discussion on physiognomics. How can the basic illegibility of the human exterior be read? Below, in a comparison between the two physiognomicians, I will characterize the shift from the medium ‘image’ preferred by Lavater to the medium ‘language’ that Lichtenberg used. The change in dominance of the two media will shed a light on the (il)legibility of the body that should become one of the central questions of modernism.

I. Johann Caspar Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (Physiognomic fragments for the promotion of the knowledge and love of mankind) with 1

2

On the term “gateway” see Stanitzek and Voßkamp; on “emblematic conditions” see Voßkamp. This article is based on my lecture held in 2001 at the Sorbonne. I am grateful to Jean-Marie Valentin for a research visit of four weeks in Paris. On the problem of individuality at the end of the 18th century see also Fohrmann.

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Wilhelm Voßkamp their far reaching and lasting impact, belong to the canonical works in physiognomics.3 Published from 1775 in five big illustrated volumes, it is a sort of work in progress, a large-scale project planned for continuation. Therefore, Lavater consciously talks of “fragments that should be perfected.” Containing 342 illustrations and countless vignettes, the volumes were among the most expensive book productions of their time in Germany. Despite their high cost, 55 editions were published until 1810 (16 of them in German and 15 in French). An additional 22,000 pages exist in Lavater’s comprehensive legacy in Zurich and Vienna that have not yet been edited. Lavater believed that with his unfinished work he was making a divinely ordained contribution to human anthropology (to “knowledge and love of mankind”). It was all about presenting a basic scientific discipline of observation: “The most important and noteworthy being that can be observed on earth is the human being. I want to say this on every page: Those, to whom the human being, to whom humanity is not the most important stop being human. Nature holds nothing more perfect, nothing higher.—The most worthy object of observation—and the only observer—is the human being.” (25)

Initially, his interest is directed towards the exterior: “All features, all contours, all passive and active movements, all conditions and positions of the human body, everything through which the suffering or acting human being can be noticed directly, through which he shows himself as a person is a subject for physiognomics. In the widest sense human physiognomy— the exterior, the surface of the human being at rest or in movement, whether in the original or in some reproduction […]. In the more narrow sense, physiognomy concerns the facial shape, and physiognomics the knowledge of the facial features and their meaning.” (21f)

“Original” and “reproduction”—i.e., the study of the individual human being or the drawn or painted image of a person—point, like the accentuation of the “facial shape” (see the often reproduced portraits by Lavater) to that image-orientation characteristic for Lavater. Observation as “physiognomics” intended as a science—and this is decisive—aims at the correspondence of human surface and interior. “He consists of surface and content. Something in him is exterior and something interior. This exterior and interior obviously are immediately and accu-

3

On physiognomics in general see Schmölders, Vorurteil; Campe and Schneider; Gray. See as well Neumann; Käuser; v. Matt; Geitner, Sprache; Braungart; Schmitz-Emans; Breitenfellner.

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Semiotics of the Human rately connected. The exterior is nothing but the end, the boundary of the interior—and the interior is an immediate continuation of the exterior.” (25f)

The assumption of an immediate analogy of the exterior and the interior demanded a substantial and expanded observational material that Lavater saw mainly in portraits and silhouettes. Taking our point of departure from an analogy of signifiers (the exterior) and signifieds (the interior) of the respective person, an extremely precise perception and description of each image (as “original” or “reproduction”) is required in order to make an inference of the interior. Therefore, Lavater underlines in his preface to his Physiognomic Fragments that “the main copperplates and vignettes very rarely served as mere decoration, but that they were chiefly the main element, the basis, the document” (12). The question what exactly Lavater considered to be the “exterior” was already discussed by his contemporaries in the 18th century. For him the question can be answered because he starts from the idea of “solid parts” of the body. These are the bone structure, Illustration 1: J. W. v. Goethe

Source: Lavater

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Wilhelm Voßkamp the cranium (the brain as the seat of intellectual and moral dispositions), and the respective human face (chin, nose, ears, lip contours, eyes, and eyebrows). The study of the portraits and the silhouettes therefore provided Lavater with the decisive information and unquestionable evidence for human beings who are the “most perfectible and most corruptible of all of God’s creatures. One can elevate ones stature into an angel with virtue and debase it with vice into the devil!”4 All that is humanly possible, both in his abysmal and his godlike state, was observed by Lavater in his contemporaries as well as in scientists and artists alike, especially since early modernism. Lavater’s commentary to a portrait of Goethe—“a male profile with long hair”—can serve as a very prominent example: “Stonily worked in stone—but quite characteristic for the physiognomician. Always the mask of a great man who carries on his face the credibility of his mandate to affect humanity—even on the hard mask of his face. Even without the sparkling eye; even without the lips animated by the spirit, even without the pale yellow complexion—even without the aspect of the slight, decisive and allencountering, all-attracting, and gently-pushing-aside movement—without all this […] what simplicity and greatness in this face.” (235)

Later, the individual parts and sections of the face are commented upon: “The eye here has only traces of the powerful genius in the upper lid […] the nose—strongly expresses productivity—taste and love—it expresses poetry. The passage from nose to mouth—especially the upper lip, borders on grandeur and once more a strong expression of a poet’s sensitivity and power. […] All in all firmness and the knowledge of his own, non-adopted true capacities.” (235)

Even in a “horrible caricature,” “traces of the great man” are discovered (236) and all of them—the exterior attributes in correspondence with the interior faculties—lead to an effusive praise of the genius. In the corresponding commentaries on the exterior and the interior—particularly in the observation of the face—a norm can be recognized whose model is clearly based on the figure of Christ. For Lavater, that “harmony of the moral and physical beauty” is specifically expressed in a portrait of Christ by Holbein. After an introductory commentary on the “ideals of Christ,” despite all misgivings regarding Holbein’s representation, a model becomes visible that in contrast to the portrait of Judas visualizes the exceptionality of

4

See in the original edition (Zürich, 1775) I: 122f.

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Semiotics of the Human Illustration 2: Christus by Holbein

Source: Lavater Christ: “[…] albeit all this how much more beautiful than that of Judas! And of how much more noble a disposition! How can one bear it that he was kissed by that one?” (79). The portrait of Judas—also by Holbein—then is chosen accordingly: “If Judas had looked like Holbein painted him then Christ would certainly not have chosen him as one of his apostles.—Such a face can not persevere for a week in Christ’s company” (74). Ulrich Stadler and Karl Pestalozzi have rightfully pointed out that contained in Lavater’s pictorial obsessions is a salvation-historical attitude which expresses—according to the biblical “God created man in his own image” (Gen. 1,27)—the longing for the “repossession of the figure of Christ” (Stadler 81; see also Pestalozzi). By reason of the “postulated harmony of interior and exterior perfection,” Christ also should be “the most beautiful of all human beings by face and body” (Stadler 82). From that point of view, the physiognomician Lavater is concerned with more than just a scientific method of identifying the relationships between exterior and interior; he is concerned with that divinatory gift of “seeing like God”

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Wilhelm Voßkamp Illustration 3: Judas by Holbein

Source: Lavater

(Stadler 82), exemplifying the evidence of recognition in viewing an image contrasted with linguistic, discursive knowledge. Here it is always the physical features that cannot be manipulated which are the point of departure for observation. In developing the “physiognomic fragments,” it is true that Lavater later takes up the distinction suggested by Lichtenberg between “physiognomics” (for the firm, ‘fixed’ parts of the body) and “pathonomics” (for the ‘mobile character’), but all in all Lavater stays true to his concept that physiognomics are an affair of the scientists and savants of the future, while pathonomics should be located in the realm of “people of the court and of the world” who had to fight with the “art of dissimulation.” Thus, he remains with his “semiotics of the firm parts [of the body] beyond rhetorics” (Geitner, “Klartext” 360ff). If—as in the teaching of a succession of medieval and early modern theories of signatures—the divine alphabet can be deciphered from the faces of people and in the image the imprint of nature, Lavater’s constitutive evidence of the image is consistent. The ambiguities of linguistic signs would hinder the immediate readability of the body which is 396

Semiotics of the Human so important for Lavater. Readability and making readable can (and have to) neglect the linguistic medium. His “hermeneutical practice to read the sensuous body as a sign of an original being of the individual” (Gray 316) can only be achieved by privileging the image.

II. Lavater’s physiognomics, grounded in salvation-history and assuming god’s own likeness in humanity, has not found a more differentiated critic than Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: “If physiognomics ever becomes what Lavater hopes it will be, then we will begin to hang children before they commit the crimes that deserve the gallows; a new kind of confirmation will take place every year. A physiognomic auto-da-fé” (Schriften I: 532).5 This does not mean, however, that Lichtenberg was not interested in physiognomic studies—quite on the contrary—he changed the conditions of physiognomic observation fundamentally when he replaced Lavater’s pictorial physiognomics by paying attention to language. The images from the beginning are seen “under linguistic conditions.” Lichtenberg “does not copy them, he makes them speak. Sometimes he downright immerses himself into them” (Althaus 231f). In other words, Lichtenberg no longer assumes any objective legibility of the body or its parts, like, for example, the face; he rather observes body language in the context of its respective socio-cultural situation. Lichtenberg is stimulated by ambiguity and the riddle of (bodily) signs in situational contexts, always considering the possibility of error in his physiognomic observations as well: “We hourly judge from the face and hourly err” (Lichtenberg, “Über”; see also Meyer-Kalkus). With these ‘physiognomics of style’ constantly perceived with misgivings, the relationship corresponding image and text in general and the media constellation in particular changes. Lichtenberg, on the one hand, continues the emblematic tradition by widening the linguistic subscriptiones; on the other hand, he dispenses with Lavater’s technique of commenting on image and text. He recognizes the legibility of the world as an illusion; therefore, the interpretation of the images has to change with the medium of the text.6 Lichtenberg relies on a transcriptive process of translating images into language, the preciseness of which he sets his confidence in because it

5 6

See also Wieckenberg. For more information on Lichtenberg’s Physiognomics and his commentaries on Hogarth see v. Arburg 383-404. Thomas Althaus correctly speaks of a “hermeneutic behavior” directed “with all concentration on language as the realm of interpretation itself” (249).

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Wilhelm Voßkamp can use subjunctive and metaphor—a preciseness that Lavater imputes to the immediate evidence of images. Lichtenberg considers the subjunctive as the signature of a critical proviso, as a permanent (second) speech about that which was said, as a “continued commentary that reflects the task-oriented statements directed at objects of the sentences and limits their validity” (see Schöne 127ff). The metaphor can be regarded as the place “at which language criticism with its reservations and the principle of linguistic creativity that it includes change into each other” (Stingelin 50). This becomes especially visible in Lichtenberg’s Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche (1794-1799; translated in parts as The World of Hogarth: Lichtenberg’s Commentaries on Hogarth’s Engravings).7 The process of transcription from image to writing in the medium of language can be observed here very well, as can the relationship between the two media. His subject is the intersection between the two where the effectiveness of the two different media image and text can be compared to each other. Thus, not only can the transmedial process be identified but also the observation of this process itself. Lichtenberg’s writings on Hogarth were published during the late 1780s in individual editions in the Taschenkalender from Göttingen; they were not completed during his lifetime. His last commentaries were published only after his death. William Hogarth’s copper engravings, famous in the 18th century, satirically depict scenes from the everyday life of English society, first and foremost from the ‘lives of bourgeois heroes:’ “The Harlot’s Progress,” “The Rake’s Progress,” “Marriage à-la-Mode,” “Industry and Idleness,” present those iconic tableaus that represented the intermedial potential for Lichtenberg’s suggestions. He is neither concerned with ekphrasis nor with a written commentary in Lavater’s sense; rather, he is interested in a fundamentally open analysis that makes the process of ‘linguistic’ thinking and thought-experimentation visible and that maintains a strict separation between the observing subject and the observed object. The subjunctive and metaphoric writing avoiding an indicative perspective (like biographical details of a life) and replacing it with thinking in possibilities that center around the potentials of the individual are characterized by rhetorical devices (like antithesis, proportion, chiasm and paradox). From this perspective alone the human body (or its represented image) cannot be an external expression or the manifestation of an interior essence. Human nature can never be represented directly.

7

In the following quotations, the italics are Lichtenberg’s. Regarding research see the bibliography in v. Arburg.

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Semiotics of the Human Lichtenberg’s subjunctive way of talking in his commentaries on Hogarth therefore is consistent: “What the artist has drawn must now be said in the way in which the artist, had he been able to manipulate the pen as he did the burin, would likely have said it” (Lichtenberg, Hogarth 4). Lichtenberg calls his method “poetic”—in contrast to “prosaic” which only comments on images—because he attributes to the reader those capacities of imagination and fancy on which he relies: “However, I will not sway the reader’s judgment in anything. Part of the pleasure afforded by the contemplation of our artist’s immortal work depends, just as with the works of Nature, upon the exercise of one’s own ingenuity. I at least have been fascinated for many years, not so much by the wholly unmistakeable in the artist’s wit and mood, but by the easily mistakable and the actually mistaken. He who seeks will always find something. Perhaps it was precisely the attraction, so much to the artist’s advantage, which prevented him from writing a commentary to his work himself, although he had often been asked to do so by his friends, and had often promised to as well. It certainly would not have been to his advantage. In order that something should be thought very deep, it should never be known exactly how deep it is.” (The World 167)

The imaginative margin that thus is opened to the reader now not only refers to the observation of individuals, “[…] always upon class” (Hogarth 4). This means that in the sense of ‘social’ physiognomics the subject area of the physiognomician is widened in a far-reaching way; the physiognomician becomes a “painter of history.” I would like to illustrate this with an example that connects the individual physiognomic ‘profiles’ with the social physiognomic component, namely his commentary for the Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn (669-688). Hogarth’s copper engraving (Ill. 4) depicts the world of the theater: a touring group (with their various stage-props and scenery) in a barn, before or after a performance. Thus a scene ‘behind the scenes’ emerges documenting the illusory world of the theater and the grotesque contrasts between the ‘lofty’ mythological characters and the ‘low’ mundane world of the actresses. As a representative of the mythological level, the main character Diana is placed at the center of the engraving, capturing Lichtenberg’s special attention: “In the centre of the picture shines Diana, velut inter ignes Luna minores. Her attire is not exactly what is understood by hunting dress. Of all the insignia with which antiquity has invested her, nothing is left but the half-moon. Even the moral ones seem to have vanished. Looking at that figure, one cannot help thinking: Hogarth intended her as a topsy-turvy Diana just as this is here a topsy-turvy world. She who among the ancients was the chaste and unapproachable one stands here almost without fortification. The outer bastions are

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Wilhelm Voßkamp all falling, and even the inner wall, which in any case was rather lightly built, has a terrific breach on one side, which will give the Goddess of Night something to mend. From her head too there flutters the white flag of capitulation, as some wag once called those white ostrich feathers. Further, the twice-girded (bis cincta) is here a nowhere-girded one. All her girdles are discarded: a sad circumstance for a goddess of chastity. And, finally, as it is well known, the Diana of antiquity is always represented with legs bare to above the knee, but otherwise carefully covered. Ours, on the other hand, appears almost completely naked except the legs to above the knee, which are even more carefully covered than is usual with the chaste sex. That is very bad. […] Now a few words in defence of that poor creature. It is true Hogarth has dressed her rather badly for a Goddess of Chastity, at least rather un-Diana like. But has Nature done any better for her? Diana was tall and slender; she stood a head higher than everyone else. Ours here is short and plump, and to this constellation of affairs is due a very important circumstance. Head and heart are here a whole span nearer to one another. What the poor warm heart fondly hatches comes here, still poor and warm as it is, to the head, and the geometrical span becomes a moral mile. Oh! how fortunate are those tall, lean damsels in whom the warm machinations of the heart have sufficient time to cool upon the mile-long journey to the head! That is why tall bony frames are said to be more conducive if not to all, at least to some of the virtues, than the more compressed and better covered ones.” (The World 159f)

Illustration 4: Hogarth: Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn, Copper Engraving and Etching, 1738

The actress representing the goddess of the hunt is chosen by Lichtenberg as a model for his perfectly detailed ironic retelling. It is a novel-like subscriptio to an emblematic image that permits satirical400

Semiotics of the Human ly inverting the mythology. Lichtenberg invents the subscriptio to the pictura and at the same time gives it a title as an inscriptio (Strolling Actresses). The lofty, mythological world is transformed into an inverted world with the help of precise antitheses. The “topsyturvy Diana” corresponds to a “topsy-turvy world.” The “twice-girded” becomes a “nowhere-girded” (The World 159), the goddess of chastity an actress with “legs bare to above the knee”—the august world of mythology appears as a frivolous one of the life of actresses. Lichtenberg, moreover, parodies Christoph Martin Wieland’s central anthropological postulate by contrasting “head and heart;” in the “geometrical span” he is alluding to the geometrizing of ethics in Spinoza, and the reference to the “bony frames” (The World 160) of the haggard people could be a satire of the idea of the “firm parts” of the body in Lavater’s texts. With view to the conversion of the divine mythology, Lichtenberg speaks of the “opera about the gods” (The World 38). For the writer Lichtenberg, Hogarth’s copper engravings create a catalyzing effect with their love for details and the complexity of sign-structures that can be read ironically and subjunctively. Thus, Lichtenberg can dismiss Lavater’s ideal images that were oriented on Winckelmann’s ideas of harmony and on models of Christ and replace them with scenarios of caricature in which he is especially interested. Characteristic to this text is the criticism of the tradition of the Enlightenment ideas of ‘Ut pictura poesis,’ principally by constructing a peculiar equivalence of copper engraving and written commentary. By comparing the two media, it also becomes clear that Lichtenberg attentively perceives the media-in-media constellation (when Hogarth represents pictures and includes texts in his copper engravings) that can be observed in the works. The imageimage-commentaries or the text-image-commentaries in Hogarth’s copper engravings show the complex intermedial constellation that stimulated Lichtenberg’s texts. Hogarth’s pictures prompt Lichtenberg to make hermeneutical experiments that also illustrate the limitation of the textual medium (see esp. v. Arburg 229ff). Not until we compare the pictorial with the written medium can their reciprocal effectiveness be tested. Only a future history of an (autonomous) literature will show whether the text in this case can take over the role of a dominant or even a “super medium” (cf. Pethes). Thus, it is obvious to compare Lichtenberg’s written commentaries of the pictures with novels; also, because they are inspired by Fielding’s and Sterne’s novels. It additionally underlines their fictive character as against Lavater’s claim to ‘the science of physiognomics.’ Literary fictions in the 18th century novel, like Lichtenberg’s texts, are media of intense linguistic- and self-reflexivity that are

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Wilhelm Voßkamp unable to do without the subjunctive and metaphoric character of writing. Lichtenberg thus is possessed with the hope of “being able to reflexively outbid and disrupt the rigidity of grammatical thought structures by establishing mobile conditions of object and meta-language” (Stingelin 46). In a remark at a seminar, Lichtenberg is hoping “that there would be a language in which falsehood could not be uttered or in which at least every slip against truth would show up as a grammatical mistake” (Schöne 121). That this language does not exist, that grammar is rather a type of corset constraining our thoughts, for Lichtenberg was the real challenge in commenting on pictures. The (self-)critical reservation demands subjunctive speech and thus limits the validity of the observation of people in situations (and their pictorial representation). Luca Giuliani’s statement that a narrative image, like Hogarth’s, “does not tell its story by itself: it rather needs a story that it cannot tell itself, because the image is silent” (9) therefore remains the stimulus and the challenge for Lichtenberg.

III. Lavater and Lichtenberg, in discussing the relationship image-text/ text-image, are concerned with the central question of the readability of the world. Both discuss questions of media transfer in the tradition of emblematic conditions; Lichtenberg, in doing this, widens the subscriptiones into a novel-project that is topical for the literature of his time. He himself is talking of a “future theory of Hogarth’s novels” (“Über Physiognomik” 321) that moreover have to be read in the context of the Shakespeare reception of the 18th century. In contrast to Lavater’s quasi-scientific texts that take their starting point from the evidence of the image, Hogarth’s copper engravings furnish a model for that transcriptive process that puts the text at the center for Lichtenberg. The text, however, always lives under the provision of linguistic ambiguity and of that aporia referring all (physiognomic) talk back to the limitation of satisfying the demands of the object. All intermedial operations of reading demand of the reader the ability to think for him- or herself and to follow the train of thought; it thus demands an activity of transcription of one’s own that itself first of all makes the relationship of (even the physiognomic) image-text/text-image possible. Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

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Works Cited Althaus, Thomas. Das Uneigentliche ist das Eigentliche: Metaphorische Darstellung in der Prosa bei Lessing und Lichtenberg. Diss. Münster, 1991. Print. Arburg, Hans-Georg v. Kunst-Wissenschaft um 1800: Studien zu Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs Hogarth-Kommentaren. Göttingen, 1998. Print. Lichtenberg-Studien XI. Boehm, Gottfried. “Prägnanz: Zur Frage bildnerischer Individualität.” Individuum: Probleme der Individualität in Kunst, Philosophie und Wissenschaft. Ed. Boehm and Enno Rudolph. Stuttgart, 1994. 1-24. Print. Braungart, Georg. Leibhafter Sinn: Der andere Diskurs der Moderne. Tübingen, 1995. Print. Breitenfellner, Kirstin. Lavaters Schatten: Physiognomie und Charakter bei Ganghofer, Fontane und Döblin. Dresden, 1999. Print. Campe, Rüdiger, and Manfred Schneider, eds. Geschichten der Physiognomik: Text, Bild, Wissen. Freiburg, 1996. Print. Fohrmann, Jürgen, ed. Lebensläufe um 1800. Tübingen, 1998. Print. Geitner, Ursula. “Klartext: Zur Physiognomik Johann Caspar Lavaters.” Campe and Schneider 357-85. —. Die Sprache der Verstellung: Studien zum rhetorischen und anthropologischen Wissen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen, 1992. Print. Giuliani, Luca. Bilder nach Homer: Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Lektüre für die Malerei. Freiburg i.Br., 1998. Print. Gray, Richard T. “Sign and ‘Sein.’ The ‘Physiognomikstreit’ and Dispute over the Semiotic Constitution of Bourgeois Individuality.” DVjs 66 (1992): 300-32. Print. Käuser, Andreas. Physiognomik und Roman im 18. Jahrhundert. Bern, 1989. Print. Lavater, J. C. Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe: Eine Auswahl mit 101 Abbildungen. Ed. Christoph Siegrist. Stuttgart, 1984. Print. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche. 1794-1799. Lichtenberg. Schriften III: 6571060. —. Hogarth on High Life: The Marriage à la Mode Series, from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s Commentaries. Ed. and trans. Arthur S. Wensinger and W. B. Coley. Middletown, 1970. Print. —. Schriften und Briefe. Ed. Wolfgang Promies. 6th ed. 6 vols. Munich, 1967-1992. Print. —. “Über Physiognomik.” Lichtenberg, Schriften III: 283.

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Wilhelm Voßkamp —. The World of Hogarth: Lichtenberg’s Commentaries on Hogarth’s Engravings. Trans. Innes and Gustav Herdan. Boston, 1966. Print. Trans. of Lichtenberg, Ausführliche Erklärung. Matt, Peter v. … fertig ist das Angesicht: Zur Literaturgeschichte des menschlichen Gesichts. Frankfurt a.M., 1989. Print. Meyer-Kalkus, Reinhart. “Lichtenberg über die Physiognomik der Stimme.” Schmölders, Der exzentrische Blick 111-32. Neumann, Gerhard. “‘Rede, damit ich Dich sehe.’ Das neuzeitliche Ich und der physiognomische Blick.” Das neuzeitliche Ich in der Literatur des 18. und 20. Jahrhunderts: Zur Dialektik der Moderne. Ed. Ulrich Fülleborn and Manfred Engel. Munich, 1988. 73108. Print. Pestalozzi, Karl. “Lavaters Utopie.” Literaturwissenschaft und Geschichtsphilosophie: Festschrift für Wilhelm Emrich. Ed. Helmut Arntzen et al. Berlin, 1975. 283-301. Print. Pethes, Nicolas. “Intermedialitätsphilologie? Der implizite Mediendiskurs der Literatur.” DvjS 76 (2002): 86-104. Print. Schmitz-Emans, Monika. Die Literatur, die Bilder und das Unsichtbare: Spielformen literarischer Bildinterpretation vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Würzburg, 1999. Print. Schmölders, Claudia, ed. Der exzentrische Blick: Gespräch über Physiognomik. Berlin, 1996. Print. —. Das Vorurteil im Leibe: Eine Einführung in die Physiognomik. 2nd ed. Berlin, 1997. Print. Schöne, Albrecht. Aufklärung aus dem Geist der Experimentalphysik: Lichtenbergs Konjunktive. Munich, 1982. Print. Stadler, Ulrich. “Der gedoppelte Blick und die Ambivalenz des Bildes in Lavaters ‘Physiognomischen Fragmenten zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniß und Menschenliebe’.” Schmölders, Der exzentrische Blick 77-92. Stanitzek, Georg, and Wilhelm Voßkamp, eds. Schnittstelle: Medien und Kulturelle Kommunikation. Cologne, 2001. Print. Stingelin, Martin. “Unsere ganze Philosophie ist Berichtigung des Sprachgebrauchs.” Friedrich Nietzsches Lichtenberg-Rezeption im Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Sprachkritik (Rhetorik) und historischer Kritik (Genealogie). Munich, 1996. Print. Voßkamp, Wilhelm. “Medien-Kultur-Kommunikation: Zur Geschichte emblematischer Verhältnisse.” Nach der Sozialgeschichte: Konzepte für eine Literaturwissenschaft zwischen Historischer Anthropologie, Kulturgeschichte und Medientheorie. Ed. Martin Huber and Gerhard Lauer. Tübingen, 2000. 317-34. Print. Wieckenberg, Peter. “Lichtenbergs ‘Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche’—ein Anti-Lavater?” Text und Kritik 114 (1992): 3956. Print.

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Ultraparadoxical: On the Gravity of the Human Experiment in Pavlov and Pynchon MARCUS KRAUSE If there is a protagonist at all among the more than two hundred characters in Thomas Pynchon’s encyclopedic novel Gravity’s Rainbow—and with him the promise of a coherent plot—then it is the American lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop. In 1944, Tyrone Slothrop is stationed in the London headquarters of an insignificant allied secret service whose undertakings are rather meaningless; he hardly distinguishes himself by anything other than an unpleasant habit of marking with colored stars on a London map hanging in his office the many places in which he has had intimate contact with English ladies. So far, so trivial. Only it is peculiar that in another department of the allied secret service—called “White Visitation”—also hangs a London map on which exactly the same points are marked as on the map of the American lieutenant. On this second plan, however, the marks do not recall amorous adventures but mark the spots on which German V2-rockets have gone down. Even though the fact that the love experiences of Tyrone Slothrop correspond to the impacts of the German secret weapon is peculiar, it is neither chance nor fate but a scientific result, namely, the outcome of a human experiment. “Back around 1920, Dr. Laszlo Jamf opined that if Watson and Rayner could successfully condition their ‘Infant Albert’ into a reflex horror of everything furry, even of his own Mother in a fur boa, then Jamf could certainly do the same thing for his Infant Tyrone, and the baby’s sexual reflex. […] Shoestring funding may have been why Jamf, for his target reflex, chose an infant hardon. Measuring secretions, as Pavlov did, would have meant surgery. Measuring ‘fear,’ the reflex Watson chose, would have brought in too much subjectivity (what’s fear? How much is ‘a lot’? Who decides, when it’s on-the-spot-in-the-field, and there isn’t time to go through the long slow process of referring it up to the Fear Board?) […] But a hardon, that’s either there, or it isn’t. Binary, elegant. The job of observing it can even be done by a student. Unconditioned stimulus = stroking penis with antiseptic cotton swab. Unconditioned response = hardon Conditioned stimulus = x.

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Marcus Krause Conditioned response = hardon whenever x is present, stroking is no longer necessary, all you need is that x.” (84)

The extra-literary references to which the text refers are unequivocal. The experiment with the “infant Tyrone” is inscribed into the tradition of Pavlov’s mechanistic-deterministic physiology or rather into his theory of the conditioned reflex and the scientific-experimental dispositive of behaviorist psychology. The procedure with which the quoted passage and the whole novel refers to scientific discourses and practices is, however, less unequivocal. I want to call this method an archeological pastiche. The method is a pastiche1 because it does not parody or satirize2 the hypotexts3 to which it refers—as the hard-on in the quote suggests—but because it precisely imitates its thought style4 and its diction. The procedure is an archeological one5 because it traces a certain epistemic con1

2

3

4

5

In Palimpsests, Gerard Genette defines ‘pastiche’ as a “playful imitation” of a hypotext. This definition is based on a pattern he established in which he distinguishes six different hypertextual methods (“Parody, travesty, transformation, pastiche, caricature, forgery,” 28) on the grounds of the two criteria “Relation” and type of “mood” (28). Parody can be distinguished from pastiche regarding its reference to the hypotext (transformation vs. imitation), the persiflage regarding its relation (satirical vs. playful). Genette’s first, clearly tentative definition of hypertextuality is: with hypertext “I mean any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary” (5). One could counter this by saying that every hypertext is inevitably also a commentary of the hypotext because as a pastiche it is already stressing certain qualities of the hypotext and neglecting others. The difference to a commentary as metatextual procedure (i.e., in literary criticism) lies in the fact that hypertextual procedures like the pastiche comment the hypotext implicitly and on the same linguistic level, while metatextual procedures treat the hypotext explicitly as an object attempting to create a (metalinguistic) distance to it by using other (i.e., more scholarly) modalities of expression. See on the term “thought-style” Fleck: “We can therefore define thought style as [the readiness for] directed perception, with corresponding mental and objective assimilation of what has been so perceived. It is characterized by common features in the problems of interest to a thought collective, by the judgment which the thought collective considers evident, and by the methods which it applies as a means of cognition. The thought style may also be accompanied by a technical and literary style characteristic of the given system of knowledge” (99). See the definition of archeology in distinction to the history of ideas in Foucault: “Archaeology […] is concerned with discourse in its own volume, as a monument. It is not an interpretative discipline: it does not seek another, better-hidden discourse. […] it is not a ‘doxology;’ but a differential

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Ultraparadoxical figuration, indicates its historical situation as well as the regularities through which this epistemic configuration forms and reveals its statements and objects. If one wants to show that the genealogy of the human experiments that Gravity’s Rainbow attempts to reproduce does not vanish in metaphors and literary symbolism,6 we have to follow the traces that Pynchon’s novel outlines into the archives of the History of Science.7 I will follow a few of these traces asking in what way Pavlov is dealing with the individuality of his test objects in his experiments, or—reformulated—what kind of subjects are produced by the scientific dispositive represented by Pavlov that is then carried on in behaviorism. Such a search for traces for all intents and purposes is no more than a doubling of the search that Tyrone Slothrop begins in the novel.8 However, it would be a

6

7

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analysis of the modalities of discourse. […] It defines types of rules for discursive practices that run through individual œuvres […]. The authority of the creative subject, as the raison d’être of an œuvre and the principle of its unity, is quite alien to it. […] It is nothing more than a rewriting: that is, in the preserved form of exteriority, a regulated transformation of what has already been written. It is not a return to the innermost secret of the origin; it is the systematic description of a discourse-object” (138-140). In this way we can also understand the suggestion to literary studies in the Preface to Siegert and Krajewski: “The medium book then in the discourse of literature had fulfilled a historical-transcendental function that has been replaced by the cybernetic circuits of the technology of military engineering. Cybernetics has replaced hermeneutics, rockets have replaced individuals. Literary critics who think that this is irony or cynicism close both eyes when confronted with the recognition that Pynchon’s work aligns Foucault’s analysis of an archeology of knowledge with an epistemic analysis of an archeology of media” (9). I would merely like to add that archeology of media and archeology of knowledge do not exclude each other, but that they rather point to each other: Gravity’s Rainbow is just as much interested in knowledge and human individuals as media of the sciences as it is in rocket technology and mathematics. Gravity’s Rainbow calls such a search for traces “data retrieval” (582). See Kittler: “Gravity’s Rainbow is data retrieval from a world war whose classified files are made accessible to this degree only when their strategic goals become reality and no longer require what is called secrecy. Already for that reason, paranoia is knowledge itself—or, like all psychoses according to Freud or Morris, only a confusion of words and things, of designatum and denotatum. When the symbolic of signs, numbers and letters determine so-called reality, then gathering the traces becomes the paranoid’s primary duty” (106). Tyrone Slothrop himself is following his predecessors Herbert Stencil from V and Oedipa Maas from The Crying of Lot 49 with his search for traces. While the search in The Crying of Lot 49 still can be described text-immanently as a play with signifiers and as an allegory of the conditio humana— apart from the shortness of the text probably one of the reasons that it is

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Marcus Krause doubling by which one could explain why Slothrop’s libidinous reaction precedes the stimulus of the rocket and why the subject of Slothrop himself dissolves more and more during his search for the origins of his conditioning and the mysterious Dr. Laszlo Jamf until it finally literally vanishes and disappears from the story.9

Pavlov’s Experimental System However, when asking which subjects are produced by an experiment—and especially by a human experiment—one has to consider another doubling. An experiment does not only produce a subject on the side of the test object or person but also on the side of the experimenter. Jacques Lacan in his known charming manner has pointed to this in his essay “Science and Truth:” “Need it be said that in science, as opposed to magic and religion, knowledge is communicated? It must be stressed that this is not merely because it is usually done, but because the logical form given this knowledge includes a mode of communication which sutures the subject it implies.” (744)

If we take it seriously that the sciences have to be described as a form of communication producing not only epistemic objects but also an epistemic subject, then we have to ask how a scientific experiment can be described within this background. I suggest that we understand the experiment as an attempt of the scientist at selfunderstanding, as a communication of the scientist not with nature or the object studied, but with him- or herself. According to this suggestion, the experimental system on which Pavlov’s experiments

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the most read and most criticized of Pynchon’s texts—the references in Gravity’s Rainbow coming to the fore in Tyrone Slothrop’s search are too concrete, too correct, too factual to be resolved in such an interpretation. See for example the famous mattress-metaphor in The Crying of Lot 49 87f: “What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper’s stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder, viciously tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost?” To be exact: Tyrone Slothrop disappears as a person, as a subject, as a position that can be addressed. See Pynchon, Gravity’s 625: “At last, lying one afternoon spread-eagled at his ease in the sun, at the edge of one of the ancient Plague towns he becomes a cross himself, a crossroads, a living intersection where the judges have come to set up a gibbet for a common criminal who is to be hanged at noon.”

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Ultraparadoxical in conditioning were based should also be illustratable in a model of communication. If we choose a basic model10 like the one by Shannon/Weaver, we get the following image: Illustration 1: Pavlov’s Experimental System as Communication Diagram

Based on the “Schematic Diagram of a General Communication System” in Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, 1998. 34. Print.

10 On the development of the different historical forms of the model see Schüttpelz.

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Marcus Krause The terms ‘technical objects,’ ‘epistemic things,’11 and ‘space of representation’ are taken from Hans Jörg Rheinberger’s book Toward a History of Epistemic Things. I will come back later on to the ‘technical objects,’ the instruments, the apparatuses and the place, i.e., the things that create the environment for Pavlov’s experiments, as well as to the ‘space of representation,’ i.e., the traces, the graphematic constellations with which the results of these experiments are represented. But first I would like to point out the possibly peculiar fact that the brain of the dog in the diagram is called a source of interference. Actually we should be able to assume that Pavlov as a physiologist is especially interested in the brain and its functions.12 In principle, I also do not want to deny that he is. However, his concrete handling of the brain tells another story. In his speech on the occasion of his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his research on the function of the gastric and salivary glands, he formulates the following concern: “When an object attracting the dog’s attention at a distance brings about secretion of saliva, it is fully justified, of course, to assume that this is a psychical phenomenon and not a physiological one.” If the dog’s secretion of saliva could be really explained as a pure psychical phenomenon, then this would challenge the materialist convictions of the physiologist Pavlov. Pavlov would go to any lengths to prove the fact that not only the spirit but also materiality can be made responsible for the dog’s secretion of saliva. After cutting all sensitive nerves in the tongue without success (because the dog continues to salivate when he sees food in spite of the cutting), Pavlov infers the following in order to rehabilitate physiology: “One would have to go further, resort to more radical measures such as poisoning the animal or taking away higher parts of the central nervous system, in order to become convinced that between objects stimulating the oral cavity and the salivary glands not only a psychical but also a physiological connection exists.” (“Physiology”)

It is obvious that with such radical means nothing more can be proven than that the psyche can exist only on the basis of matter and that it can by no means be proven that the saliva of the dog flows independently from a psyche of whatever form, i.e., ‘purely physiologically’ in the sense that it could be formalized in the terminology of a mechanical determinism. The fact that Pavlov finds the psyche 11 See Rheinberger 28: Epistemic things “are material entities or processes— physical structures, chemical reactions, biological functions—that constitute the objects of inquiry.” 12 For an introduction into Pavlov’s reflexology and the relationship between psychology and physiology in his theory see Adamaszek et al.

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Ultraparadoxical of the dog so threatening that he allowed himself such a logical short-circuiting can only be understood with view to Pavlov’s experiments on the digestive functions of dogs. The goal of these experiments was the analysis of the composition of the saliva and the gastric juices while the dog sees or eats different foods. Illustration 2: Experimental Setup (from a Russian Journal of 1907)

Source: Todes, Ivan Pavlov 40 The individual characteristics of the dogs always created great difficulties in these experiments. On the one hand, these difficulties resulted from the simple fact that some of the dogs were greedier than others and that the preferences for certain foods were different for each dog. On the other hand, every dog reacted differently to the surgical changes performed on them. Some of the dogs developed ulcers in their mouths or in their stomachs and rejected all food intakes; thus, it was essential for the success of the experiments that these individual variants were taken into consideration. Accordingly, one of Pavlov’s collaborators remarked: “Professor Pavlov has many times told those working in his laboratory that knowledge of the individual qualities of the experimental dogs has important significance for a correct understanding of many phenomena elicited by the experiment” (qtd. in Todes, Pavlov’s 114f). Especially the fact that many dogs already secreted saliva when they saw food led to false results in the measurements. Pavlov called this phenomenon “psychical secretion” (see “Psychical”) and undertook considerable efforts in order to hinder just this psychical secretion before it became the focus of his tests under the designation

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Marcus Krause “conditioned reflex.”13 The individuality, the psyche of the dog then was not only omnipresent—long before it became the object of Pavlov’s research—in the form of ‘psychical secretion;’ it created the reason for this research in the first place. Therefore, it is a paradox when Pavlov all of a sudden decides that the psyche has to disappear in the very moment in which it becomes the object of research because he sees it as a hindrance for the purity of the physiological connection between stimulus and reflex. In 1906, the Russian physiologist Tarkhanov, a colleague of Pavlov, had already commented accordingly: “You know, this very same I. P. Pavlov used to talk all the time about ‘psychic juice’ in the dog. And now I. P. Pavlov denies that the dog has a psyche” (qtd. in Todes, Pavlov’s 217).

TECHNICAL OBJECTS The collective singular ‘Pavlov’s Dog’—and therefore also the possibility for Pavlov to talk in his publication of the dog—had to be created again and again; the dogs had to be ‘normalized’ into the dog. Pavlov did this by attempting to gain absolute control up to the smallest detail over the elements called technical objects shown in the diagram above.14 The technical objects, however, consist in no way only of the apparatuses into which the dogs were clamped and the necessary medical instruments for the surgical procedures and for the measuring of the secretion, but also of the premises of his laboratories, the employees, and the dogs themselves. Pavlov was able to build exactly the laboratory that he had imagined through a donation by Alfred Nobel and in this respect he proved to be the Henry Ford of the physiologists. Pavlov assigned a room to every stage of the experimental production process: a room for the cleaning of the dogs, a room for their preparation for the operation, an operation room, and further rooms in which the dogs were supposed to recover from the operation. To deal with the problem of individual deviance from the norm, Pavlov thus reacted with the industrialization of his laboratories and he directed his institute like a

13 On the definition of the conditioned reflex see Pavlov, “Brief”: “[C]onditioned reflex, i.e., the organism responds with a definite complex activity to an external excitation to which it did not respond previously” (47). 14 See Rheinberger 29: “In contrast to epistemic objects, these experimental conditions [i.e., technical objects] tend to be characteristically determined within in the given standards of purity and precision. The experimental conditions ‘contain’ the scientific objects in the double sense of this expression: they embed them, and through that very embracement, they restrict and constrain them.”

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Ultraparadoxical factory.15 On the one hand, the description of Pavlov’s laboratory as a factory points to the number of dogs (several hundred) that passed through the experimental facilities and their treatment as machines for the production of saliva and gastric juices; on the other hand, however, it also points to the treatment of the interns in Pavlov’s institutes as factory workers whose activities had to follow automatized processes so that they could not falsify the experiments.16 Illustration 3: Dogs with Interns

Source: Todes, Ivan Pavlov 52 On the one hand, managing his laboratories like a factory allowed Pavlov to serialize his experiments, thereby reaching the necessary average values from the individual results, while on the other hand 15 The labeling of Pavlov’s laboratories as a factory follows Todes’ Pavlov’s Physiology Factory. Here also extensive descriptions of the rooms, the experimental processes as well as of the biographical and historical conditions of the experiments and of their protagonists (also of the dogs) can be found. Regarding the term “physiology factory,” Todes remarks: “Factories may produce things efficiently, but they lack the contemplative, cooperative, egalitarian image that scholars and scientists commonly associate with the nature of their work. […] I do not, however, use this word pejoratively. My intention, rather, is to emphasize the differences between the production process in a small enterprise and in a large one, to describe the system by which Pavlov directed the labours of his co-workers to his own investigative ends, and to explore […] the structure and functioning of his laboratory.” The same author has presented a short overview of Pavlov’s biography; see Ivan. 16 On the disciplining of the factory workers and especially also on the connections of Pavlov’s scientific praxis with the ideology of Soviet Russia see Rüting.

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Marcus Krause he could choose from the mass of the available dog material those dogs that excelled due to their extraordinary individual constitution and resistance. The—in some cases massive—surgical interventions in normal dogs not only led to abnormal, pathological behavior, but likewise to pathological changes in physiological respects so that most of the dogs, even if they survived, had no more normal life functions.17 Thus, for example, Druzhok (Russian for “little friend”), a mix of Setter and Collie, advanced to becoming the dog star of the institute because he was the first to survive the complicated operation that was necessary to partition off an isolated smaller stomach from the normal stomach.18 Only the success of this operation made it possible to measure the production of the gastric juices correctly. Individuality as abnormality19 then does not only prove to be an enemy but just as much a friend of the physiologist. On the one hand, it is just this individuality that falsifies the representational ability of the results; on the other hand, an exceptional individual constitution of the dog is the prerequisite for any experimentation with him in the first place. On the one hand, the individuality of the dogs makes it difficult to compare them with each other; on the other, the contradictory data can be explained by individual deviance and can be brought in line with the underlying theory and Pavlov

17 As a basic theoretical problem Canguilhem formulates this relationship of experiment and normality in the following way: “[T]he laboratory’s conditions for examination place the living being in a pathological situation from which, paradoxically, one claims to draw conclusions having the weight of a norm” (Normal 146). 18 See Canguilhem, Normal 148f: “If we may define the normal state of a living being in terms of a normal relationship of adjustment to environments, we must not forget that the laboratory itself constitutes a new environment in which life establishes norms whose extrapolation does not work without risk when removed from the conditions to which the norms relate. [… F]or the living being apparatus and products are the objects among which he moves as in an unusual world. It is not possible that the ways of life in the laboratory fail to retain any specificity in their relationship to the place and moment of the experiment.” If we refer the last sentence to Pavlov’s dogs, it does not say anything else but that they only were able to survive in Pavlov’s laboratories and not outside, in a ‘normal’ environment. This is even truer if not only the environment, but—like with Druzhok—also the body of the being is changed experimentally. On the ‘normality’ of the laboratory dogs see also Todes, Pavlov’s 86f. 19 See for the term ‘anomaly’ (and its delimitation to ‘abnormal’) Todes, Pavlov’s 133: “In anatomy the term ‘anomaly’ must strictly maintain its meaning of unusual, unaccustomed; to be anomalous is to be removed, in terms of one’s organization, from the vast majority of beings to which one must be compared.”

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Ultraparadoxical used this possibility extensively.20 The individuality of the dog, however, did not only make the experiment possible and was not only used as the intermediary between the particular and the general, but also takes over, as I have said before, the function of a hinge for the transition from the physiology of digestion to the behavioral science of the dog, because individuality is not only the resistance that Pavlov’s mechanistic credo had to overcome; it also leads to the discovery of the psychic moment in the arrangement of the experiment, thereby initiating the research in conditioning. The place of the order that Pavlov gave to all interns doing experiments “to carefully avoid everything that could elicit in the dog thoughts about food” (Todes, Pavlov’s 100), is now superseded by a study of precisely these stimuli, i.e., of all that which “could elicit in the dog thoughts about food.” Only now these thoughts are not allowed to be thoughts any more, but only a certain, measurable amount of saliva. Pavlov reoriented his research with the utmost consequence: he disciplined any collaborator who after the reorientation still spoke of thoughts or feelings regarding dogs by having him pay a monetary fine. This transition of the accidental discovery of the ‘psychic secretion’ into the necessity of experimental arrangement depends on two simple principles: first, the motivated signal of seeing food or of the steps of the intern bringing food is changed into the arbitrary signal of the ringing of a bell or of a metronome; second, this newly created connection is called the mechanism of the conditional reflex. Introducing arbitrariness allows establishing extensive and optionally variable experimental series. The conditional reflex now can be changed and manipulated at will because the connection of the unconditional reflex, i.e., of the food, with the conditional reflex, i.e., the metronome (or any other arbitrary X), is only of a temporal nature and does not demand any causal connection. However, the practical implementation of such an experimental series is bound to the ability of isolating a certain stimulus from all others. Not only does the white noise in the brain of the dog theoretically have to be shut off, also all other background noises have to be shut off as well so that the experiments can run without interference. For this, the laboratories used by Pavlov up to that point proved to be unsuit20 For example, during his studies on the compostion of the gastric juices, Pavlov insisted on a direct correlation between the type of food and the amount of gastric juices, even though this correlation was in no way showing in the measured amount of gastric juices of the different dogs. In order to rescue this theory, Pavlov used all available individual qualities of the dogs. He explained the measured differences by the size of the stomach, the higher or lower content of bodily fluids, or—as the biggest of the uncontrolled variables—by different preferences for certain foods, i.e., as an expression of the individual psyche of the dog. See for this Todes, Ivan.

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Marcus Krause able. Pavlov set up new laboratories that were to become known as “towers of silence.” Illustration 4: ‘Towers of Silence’

Source: Todes, Ivan Pavlov 78 The towers of silence looked like a stronghold. They had strong concrete walls and were surrounded by a moat. In order to prevent any kind of alien influence, the tower-rooms in which experiments were conducted rested on water so that the vibrations, for example of coaches, were muted. But also the scholars themselves were not to tarnish the purity of the applied stimulus. So that nobody had to enter the room during the experiments, complicated apparatuses were developed with the help of which the dog would get his food, or electric shocks could be administered, or the metronome could be started from the exterior. Only the absolute control of the experimental process allowed for the control of the secretion of saliva.

SPACE OF REPRESENTATION The question of the results of these conditioning experiments undertaken with such extraordinary efforts, which I will address in the next paragraphs, cannot be asked without considering the space of representation in which these results were presented (see Rheinberger 109-121). At first, the experimenter only gets a certain amount of saliva that can be related to a certain sound. But the saliva has the advantage that it is not only visible but also quantifiable. It can 416

Ultraparadoxical Illustration 5: Experimental Setup

Source: Ivan P. Pavlov. Twenty-Five Years of Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activity (Behaviour) of Animals. London, 1928. 271. Print. Vol. 1 of Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes. be illustrated in numbers and can be related to the moment and intensity of a stimulus in form of tables. But what does the saliva represent? As Pavlov believes to have shown by removing the higher layers of the central nervous system, between these and the saliva exists a “purely physiological” connection. Within this logic, any change regarding the quantity of saliva produced by the dog indicates a change in the higher levels of the central nervous system. According to Pavlov, the higher central nervous system is responsible for the regulation of the relationship of an organism to its environment, or rather—rephrased—for the behavior of a being. This chain of replacements makes a materialistic-deterministic21 psychology of the dog possible, a psychology in which the psyche does not play a role any longer as it has been replaced by a physiological mechanism that can be observed from the exterior. Pavlov triumphs: “What is the behaviour of the human or of the animal? It is the most delicate correlation of the organism with the surrounding medium […] Thus the two ex-

21 Pavlov is formulating his deterministic credo in the following way: “The true mechanical explanation always remains the ideal of natural sciences […] The whole of the exact sciences of today make only a long chain of progressive approximations of mechanical interpretation, approximations all the steps of which are united by the supreme principle of determinism: no effect without cause” (“Sentiments” 149).

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Marcus Krause pressions, behaviour and the higher nervous activity, correspond. Behaviour, understood as the higher nervous activity, can now be subjected to a purely natural scientific analysis.” (“Contributions” 60)

The behavior corresponds to the higher central nervous system. The higher central nervous system corresponds to the flow of saliva. The flow of saliva corresponds to the behavior. Thus, the behavior of the dog can be mathematized,22 i.e., it can be analyzed scientifically. All one has to do is to note the point in time and the amount of saliva secreted and relate it to the stimulus applied before. In this way it is possible to observe behavior that can be formalized in numbers: Illustration 6: The Mathematics of Saliva

Source: Ivan P. Pavlov. Twenty-Five Years of Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activity (Behaviour) of Animals. London, 1928. 68. Print. Vol. 1 of Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes. The numbers obtained in this manner can be formalized in quasimathematical laws.23 The behavior of the dog becomes a symbol and

22 It becomes evident from Pavlov’s compulsion to mathematize his research that physiology around 1900 was changing from a science shaped by the practical problems arising with vivisections to a more and more formalistic science. See also Canguilhem, “On the History” 123: “Physiologists, so far vivisectionists, now became mathematicians. What could not be seen with the eye or grasped with the hand was revealed by new technologies. Biology now depends on technology and even computers. Knowledge of life relies on modern automata, which serve as its models, its instruments, its surrogates. […] Never has it been more apparent how hard man must work to make familiar objects strange in order to make his most vital questions worthy of science, and thus to answer them.” 23 As quintessence of his research, Pavlov formulates the following seven laws: 1. law of the closing of nervous paths—association; 2. law of the relationship between the magnitude of the effect and the strength of the stimulation; 3. law of the summation of conditioned stimuli; 4. law of tran-

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Ultraparadoxical can therefore be manipulated at random.24 Thus, the changes that are created in the course of the experiments through the different intensities and repetitions of the stimuli in the cerebral cortex of the dog emerge in a twofold manner from the hidden realms of neuronal paths into the realm of visibility: on the one hand by the changes of behavior or production of saliva visible for any observer, and on the other hand by supplying the scientist with utilizable numbers of the amount of saliva. It is this doubling that makes Pavlov’s dogs so usable for popular communication and for the phantasma of a total control of behavior. The conspicuity25 of the experiment and the claimed scientific-physiological foundations reciprocally strengthen their evidence.26

Pavlov’s Pathologies—Pynchon’s Paradoxes The elements that create conspicuity and consistency in the realm of the sciences, in the dog mainly produce pathologies. It is these pathologies that create for Pavlov’s mechanics of the brain the transition from the physiology of the dog to the psychology of humans, and it is these pathologies as well that in Gravity’s Rainbow connect the history of science with the narrative of the novel. In a parallel montage to the episodes in which Tyrone Slothrop discovers that his conditioning is part of a conspiracy encompassing the industry and the military of all war nations, time and again scenes from the laboratories of the allied secret service can be found, like the following: “Now that he has moved into ‘equivalent’ phase, the first of the transmarginal phases, a membrane, hardly noticeable, stretches between Dog Vanya and the outside. Inside and outside remain just as they were, but the interface—the cortex of Dog Vanya’s brain—is changing, in any number of ways, and that is the really peculiar thing about these transmarginal events. It no longer matters now how loudly the metronome ticks. A stronger stimulus no longer gets a

sition of the cortical cells into a state of inhibition; 5. law of irradiation and concentration of nervous processes; 6. law of reciprocal induction of nervous processes; 7. law of the limit of intensity of stimulation (see Pavlov, “Brief” 47-51). 24 In this context, to be “manipulated” in no way should be understood valueneutrally. Thus, Pavlov forced his interns for example to repeat experiments until their results concurred with his expectations. See Todes, Pavlov’s 110f. Pavlov controlled and ‘edited’ all reports and articles of his collaborators before they were published. 25 For the working out of Pavlov’s experiments in Soviet movies see Hagner and Vöhringer. 26 On the problem of evidence see Cuntz et al.

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Marcus Krause stronger response. The same number of drops flow or fall. The man comes and removes the metronome to the farthest corner of this muffled room. It is placed inside a box, beneath a pillow with the machine-sewn legend Memories of Brighton, but the drops do not fall off … then played into a microphone and amplifier so that each tick fills the room up like a shout, but the drops do not increase. Every time, the clear saliva pushes the red line over only the same mark, the same number of drops…” (Pynchon, Gravity’s 178f)

The source for this passage is the already quoted Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes from 1941 that made Pavlov’s theories accessible to an English speaking public for the first time. The edition is divided into two volumes of which the first—with the subtitle Twenty-five Years of Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activity (Behaviour) of Animals—introduces the readers to Pavlov’s experiments in conditioning dogs, and the second—with the subtitle Conditioned Reflexes and Psychiatry—presents a collection of lectures in which Pavlov is attempting to transfer the results experimentally gathered from dogs to the psychopathology of humans. The second volume is mentioned several times in Gravity’s Rainbow under the label The Book, and for some of the scientists assembled in the novel it figures as an arcane text in which the secrets of the world are recorded.27 In this book, Pavlov develops the model of transmarginal phases to which the quoted passage refers. This phase-model on the one hand is based on the idea that neural activities can be completely described with the digital formula of stimulus and inhibition.28 On the other hand, it refers to Pynchon’s observation described by means of the dog Vanya that the intensity of the conditional stimulus rises proportionally to the intensity of the stimulus applied—up to a certain limit beyond which the dog’s brain cannot be stimulated any more. Here, in this place, where the normal behavior reverts to a pathological one, Pavlov suddenly and unexpectedly discovers something that in the development of his theory up to this point he had fought against with all his available means:29 the individuality of the dog. 27 Steven Weisenburger remarks on this in A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: “[T]here is no particular purpose to the secrecy of Pointsman, Spectro, and others who ‘rotate’ their lone copy. A bit of melodrama from the narrator” (37). On the website thomaspynchon.com, however, we can find the note: “Most supplies of Pavlov’s book were destroyed in a bombing raid, so it was a real rarity and circulated much as described in Gravity’s Rainbow.” 28 A classical idea: at the beginning of the 19th century, Johann Friedrich Herbart had already attempted to describe mental activities as an interplay of stimulus and restraint in differential equations. 29 In his writings and lectures on the physiology of the dog beyond the transmarginal phases, i.e., on the experimental results that were determined by applying stimuli below the maximal stimulus threshold, Pavlov always only speaks of the dog. Also regarding the data and tables cited he never men-

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Ultraparadoxical “For every one of our animals (dogs) there is a maximum stimulus, a limit of harmless functional strain, beyond which begins the intervention of inhibition […] a strong stimulus may produce an equal and even a smaller effect than a weak one (the so-called equivocal and paradoxical phases).” (“Brief” 51)

Pavlov cannot specify any general laws for the limit that signifies the leaving of the normal range.30 Only the individuality of the dog can be mathematically formalized with a threshold value. In the realm of pathology, every dog is singular. Beyond this individual threshold value the tension is too great; the neurons enter the phase of restraint leading Pavlov to formulate the next phase: the paradoxical phase. In the paradoxical phase, strong stimuli elicit weak responses and weak stimuli strong responses. The third and last of the three transmarginal phases is the ultraparadoxical phase. Dr. Pointsman, the Pavlovian in Pynchon’s novel, explains the three phases in the following way: “We’re working right now with a dog … he’s been through the ‘equivalent’ phase, where any stimulus, strong or weak, calls up exactly the same number of saliva drops … and on through the ‘paradoxical’ phase—strong stimuli getting weak responses and vice versa. Yesterday we got him ultraparadoxical. Beyond. When we turn on the metronome that used to stand for food—that once made Dog Vanya drool like a fountain—now he turns away. When we shut off the metronome, oh then he’ll turn to it, sniff, try to lick it, bite it—seek, in the silence, for the stimulus that is not there. Pavlov thought that all the diseases of the mind could be explained, eventually, by the ultraparadoxical phase, the pathologically inert points on the cortex, the confusion of ideas of the opposite. He died at the very threshold of putting these things on an experimental basis. But I live.” (Gravity’s 90)

With the ultraparadoxical phase, Pavlov’s theoretical mechanics have come to an end. Now the 25 years of objective studies of the higher nervous activities of animals can be applied to human beings. By way of the “confusion of ideas of the opposite” or, in other words, by way of the “mechanism of contradiction”—as Pavlov also calls the confusion in his writings—anything can be explained. Whether it is an explanation of hysteria, paranoia, psychosis, neurosis, or schizotions from which dog of what breed and age, etc., he has obtained his results. 30 At least Pavlov cannot supply any mathematical laws. Formulating the quintessence of his studies therefore appears peculiarly antique. After thirty years of physiological studies, Pavlov discovers the theory of temperaments: “From our thirty years of work we find our dogs fall generally into the four classical types or temperaments of Hippocrates: the extreme excitatory and inhibitory and the two central types of quiet and lively. These are our chief physiological results” (“Contributions” 64).

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Marcus Krause phrenia, Pavlov proceeds in the same way in all of his texts: he describes a case from psychological literature, its analogy to the behavior of the dog,31 and then explains it by the physiological mechanism.32 Pavlov, in his discussions of psychic disorders, can be compared to the dog searching in the silence for the stimulus that is not there. It is as if the dogs with whom Pavlov did his experiments had always been the more ‘elementary’ human beings: “The reduction of the more complex to the more elemental is a simple thing. Consequently, the human neuroses should be explained, understood, i.e., analyzed, by the help of the animal neuroses, as naturally the more simple, and not by the reverse procedure” (“Concerning” 83).33 On this background the experiment with “little Albert” (see Krause), i.e., the testing of the mechanism of the conditioned reflex on human beings⎯with which John B. Watson, the initiator of be31 To name only one example: In the “Contributions to the Physiology and Pathology” Pavlov mentions a “case of war neurosis.” Pavlov claims that “[t]he case is similar to what happens in the dog” and after describing the paradoxical phase in the dog he concludes: “You see a complete analogy with the clinical case; in both a strong past experience, in both the traces of these strong experiences are manifested during hypnosis” (68). One asks oneself, how far the “analogies between the neurotic state of our dogs and the various neuroses of man” (Pavlov, “Experimental”) reach if Pavlov sees the following reasons for the neuroses in dogs: “The factors which have produced neuroses in our animals are: first, stimuli too strong or too complex; second, a strain of the inhibitory process; third, collision (direct consequential) of the two opposing nervous processes; fourth and finally, castration” (73). 32 Such a (mechanistic) explanation as a rule proceeds in the following way: “Let us admit that a certain frequency of the metronome acts like a positive conditional alimentary stimulus, its applications having been accompanied by food and provoking an alimentary reaction; that another frequency acts like a negative stimulus, its application not having been accompanied by food and causing a negative reaction (the animal turns aside when one applies it). These two frequencies present a pair of opposites, but the opposites are united by association and at the same time subdued by reciprocal induction, i.e., one frequency stimulates and reinforces the other. Here is an exact physiological fact. Let us go further—If the positive frequency activates a weak cell or occurs in a hypnotic state, it causes (following the law of delimitation, which also is an exact physiological fact) the state of inhibition; in its turn, this state of inhibition, according to the law of reciprocal induction, causes in the other half a state of excitation instead of a state of inhibition, for this reason the stimulant with which it is associated does not now cause inhibition, but on the contrary excitation. This is the mechanism of negativism or of contradiction” (Pavlov, “Sentiments” 148). 33 See also Pavlov, “Contributions” 66: “[T]he basic principles underlying the higher nervous activity is the same for both the human being and the higher animals.”

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Ultraparadoxical haviorism has entered the history of psychology⎯would have been unnecessary. And indeed, Watson felt impelled to experiment on human beings only by the fact that his psychological theory had not been recognized adequately. This theory had already been completely formulated three years before Watson initially heard of Pavlov’s experiments. In the first manifesto of behaviorism, Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It, we can read: “Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.”

But since Watson’s colleagues insisted on maintaining this dividing line because they doubted that the results that Watson had obtained from his experiments with rats could be transferred to the psychology of humans, the former at the end of his manifesto is threatening: “Should human psychologists fail to look with favor upon our overtures and refuse to modify their position, the behaviorists will be driven to using human beings as subjects and to employ methods of investigation which are exactly comparable to those now employed in the animal work.”

For Watson, the difference between experiments on animals and those on humans is one of the performative powers of persuasion only. Watson understands experimenting as a pure demonstration, as a simple affirmation of the theoretical claims he has established beforehand. It is not the intention of the projected experiments with humans to bring about different results than Watson’s experiments with rats. Seen in this light, the conditioning undertaken four years later on the nine months old Albert B. is no more than an instrument of propaganda, a propaganda that indicates that the same mechanisms regulate the behavior of rat, dog and human, and that the human consciousness is no more than a mental representation of the stimulus/reaction scheme that can be neglected. Gravity’s Rainbow, however, is still leading the “confusion of ideas of the opposite” beyond the distinction between human beings and animals. With Pavlov’s “mechanism of contradiction” and the model of transmarginal phases, one can not only mediate between the pathology of humans and the salivating reflex of the dog,34 one

34 If one looks at the development in Pavlov’s writings from the reflex of the dog’s saliva to the psychopathology of humans, one is able to describe a

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Marcus Krause can also explain the connection between a human being and a machine that is expressed in the linking of Tyrone Slothrop’s sexuality with the impact of the V2 rockets. At least Dr. Pointsman is attempting to interpret the “truly classical case of … some pathology,” the “perfect mechanism” (Pynchon, Gravity’s 48) that Tyrone Slothrop represents for him in this way: “Often in our experiments … […] the act merely of bringing the dog into the laboratory—especially in our experimental neurosis work … the first sight of the test stand, of the technician, a stray shadow, the touch of a draft of air, some cue we might never pin down would be enough to send him over, send him transmarginal. So, Slothrop. Conceivably. Out in the city, the ambience alone—suppose we considered the war itself as a laboratory? When the V-2 hits, you see, first the blast, then the sound of its falling … the normal order of the stimuli reversed that way …” (49)

Hitler’s Vergeltungswaffe 2 [weapon of retaliation, DR/BP] was the first weapon in war history that travelled to its goal with supersonic speed so that for the human sense of hearing it actually exploded before it fell.35 And it only seems consistent if the paradoxes forged in the laboratories of war, with which the human perception has to deal because of modern war technology, are explained with the paradoxes of a science that explains the human psyche with mechanisms that were created in the factory halls of physiological laboratories.36 If we follow the paradoxical logic of Dr. Pointsman,37 the

curious chiasma from which it becomes clear that the paradoxes into which Pavlov’s experiments lead the distinction between normal and pathological are developed differently during the study of intestinal functions than during the study of the psyche of the dog. Whereas in the analyses of the gastric juices the physiology of the intestinal mechanisms were perceived and described as normal and the individual taste impulses of the dog as pathological, the individual characteristics and demonstrations during the conditioning experiments were seen as expressions of the psychical normality of the dog and the physiological pathologic becomes the psychological normal. In this context it is no longer the individuality that is pathological but the physiological mechanism. See Pavlov, “Trial” 42: “[C]hronic hypnosis, representing inhibition in various degrees of extension and tension […] is, on the one hand, pathological, as it deprives the patient of his normal activity; on the other hand it is in its mechanism physiological, a physiological measure because it conserves the cortical cells against a threatening destruction consequent to an overwhelming task.” 35 On the history of the V2 see Neufeld. 36 On the background of such paradoxes and confusions of contradictions (like between animal and human, mechanism and psyche, human and machine), it is hardly astonishing that neither traditional concepts of subjec-

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Ultraparadoxical war as a laboratory leads to the reversal of the stimuli, and these on their part to the reversal of the sequence of reactions. Thus, it could be explained that Slothrop desires and fornicates before the rocket strikes, i.e., that the reaction precedes the stimulus. However, the simple fact that neither V2 nor V1 were developed at the point of Slothrop’s conditioning escapes this logic. It is quite impossible that the rocket can be the X of the conditioned stimulus, and the determinism of cause and effect could only be maintained if we were to assume that it is not the rocket that controls the sexual activities of Slothrop, but conversely that Slothrop’s sexual drives control the rocket. Such an assumption can be made quite plausible by dissolving it metaphorically, viewing the rocket as a “simple steel erection” (Pynchon, Gravity’s 324), as “the male embodiment of a technologique that embraced power not for its social uses but for just those chances of surrender, personal and dark surrender, to the Void, to delicious and screaming collapse” (578). But one can also react to the paradox by closing with a short report on a research project from one of the laboratories of war. It is a research project which actually aimed at having weapons controlled by living beings; tivity in contemporary European philosophy nor the spectacular offers of identification of American pop culture are able to offer enough stability to the subject Slothrop so that it dissolves into pure potentiality, namely into a crossroads or intersection (see FN 9). 37 Dr. Pointsman’s logic that in the course of the novel gets more and more entangled in paradoxes and perversions of course cannot be equated with the logic of the sciences. Pynchon’s novel stages a mathematician—maybe surprisingly the most formalistic of all possible scientists—as the antagonist to Pointsman and his mechanistic determinism. See Gravity’s 55: “If ever the Antipointsman existed, Roger Mexico is the man. Not so much, the doctor admits, for the psychical research. The young statistician is devoted to number and to method, not table-rapping or wishful thinking. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in between. Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, he imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements. Some are always in bright excitation, others darkly inhibited. The contours, bright and dark, keep changing. But each point is allowed only the two states: waking or sleep. One or zero. ‘Summation,’ ‘transition,’ ‘irradiation,’ ‘concentration,’ ‘reciprocal induction’—all Pavlovian brain-mechanics—assumes the presence of these bi-stable points. But to Mexico belongs the domain between zero and one—the middle Pointsman has excluded from his persuasion— the probabilities.” Here, I can only allude to the fact that Gravity’s Rainbow knows and describes not only a domain of ‘zero to one’ but also one of a ‘beyond the zero’ (and therefore also beyond Kansas); it is a domain which Roger Mexico and the calculations of probability theory are helplessly facing.

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Marcus Krause in which, however, the connection between conditioning and rocket technology is perhaps expressed too emblematically for it to be integrated in the paradoxes developed in Gravity’s Rainbow. In June 1943, Dr. B. F. Skinner, who was to become extremely famous after the war as a neo-behaviorist, received $25,000 from the National Defense Research Committee for the execution of a research project named “Project Pigeon.”38 The goal of this project was to optimize the target acquisition of guided bombs and rockets. For this, at the tip of a rocket, a camera was to be installed whose images could be observed on monitors inside the rocket. Before these monitors, pigeons were to be placed who would have been conditioned by Skinner to incessantly pick at the goal of the bomb visible on the monitor. The monitors were fastened at the center and were moveable into all directions so that the picking of a pigeon for example on the left half of the monitor led to its bending towards the left while the picking at the center did not lead to a changed position. The monitors were connected to the control of the missile with a servomechanism so that the rocket corresponding to the slant of the monitor would change its direction. The project was cancelled in 1944 even though preliminarily promising results existed. In 1948, it was reinstated under the acronym ORCON (for Organic Control), but it was finally discontinued in 1953 since at that point the first electronic guidance-systems made further experiments with pigeons superfluous. Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

Works Cited Adamaszek, Rainer, et al. Kontroverse um Pawlow: Arbeitsseminar am 24./25.1.1981. Frankfurt a.M., 1981. Print. Canguilhem, Georges. The Normal and the Pathological. 1966. New York, 1991. Print. —. “On the History of the Life Sciences since Darwin.” Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences. By Canguilhem. Cambridge, 1988. 103-123. Print. Capshew, James H. “Engineering Behavior: World War II, Project Pigeon, and the Conditioning of B. F. Skinner.” Technology & Culture 34 (1993): 835-857. Print. Cuntz, Michael, et al. Die Listen der Evidenz. Cologne, 2006. Print.

38 See Capshew. A short description of the project can be found in Glines. Skinner’s own description of the project can be found under the title “Pigeons in a Pelican.”

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Ultraparadoxical Fleck, Ludwik. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Ed. Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton. Trans. Fred Bradley and Trenn. Chicago, 1979. Print. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York, 1972. Print. Genette, Gerard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln, 1997. Print. Glines, C. V. “Top Secret WWII Bat and Bird Bomber Program.” HistoryNet.com. Weider History Group, n.d. Web. 15 Dec. 2005. Hagner, Michael, and Margarete Vöhringer. “Vsevolod Pudovkins Mechanik des Gehirns: Film als psychophysiologisches Experiment.” Bildwelten des Wissens. Kunsthistorisches Jahrbuch für Bildkritik 2.1 (2004): 82-92. Print. Kittler, Friedrich. “Medien und Drogen in Pynchons Zweitem Weltkrieg.” Die unvollendete Vernunft: Moderne versus Postmoderne. Ed. Dietmar Kamper and Willem von Reijen. Frankfurt a.M., 1987. 240-259. Print. Krause, Marcus. “‘Going Beyond the Facts.’ John B. Watson, der kleine Albert und die Propaganda des Behaviorismus.” Medizinische Schreibweisen: Ausdifferenzierung und Transfer zwischen Medizin und Literatur (1600-1900). Ed. Nicolas Pethes and Sandra Richter. Tübingen, 2008. 301-320. Print. Lacan, Jacques. “Science and Truth.” Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. By Lacan. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York, 2006. 726-45. Print. Neufeld, Michael J. The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era. New York, 1995. Print. Pavlov, Ivan Petrovitch. “A Brief Outline of the Higher Nervous System.” Pavlov, Conditioned 44-59. —. “Concerning Human and Animal Neuroses.” Pavlov, Conditioned 83-85. —. Conditioned Reflexes and Psychiatry. London, 1928. Print. Vol. 2 of Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes. 2 vols. 1928. —. “Contributions to the Physiology and Pathology of the Higher Nervous Activity.” Pavlov, Conditioned 60-70. —. “Experimental Neuroses.” Pavlov, Conditioned 73f. —. “Physiology of Digestion.” Nobel Lecture, 12 Dec. 1904. Nobel Lectures: Physiology or Medicine 1901-1921. Amsterdam, 1967. N. pag. Nobelprize.org. Web. 28 Dec. 2009. —. “The Psychical Secretion of the Salivary Glands (Complex Nervous Phenomena in the Work of the Salivary Glands).” Twentyfive Years of Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activity (Behaviour) of Animals. By Pavlov. London, 1928. 61-75. Print. Vol. 1 of Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes. 2 vols. 1928.

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Marcus Krause —. “Les Sentiments d’Emprise and the Ultraparadoxical Phase.” Pavlov, Conditioned 146-149. —. “Trial Excursion of a Physiologist in the Field of Psychiatry.” Pavlov, Conditioned 39-43. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. London, 1979. Print. —. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. London, 1995. Print. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, 1997. Print. Rüting, Torsten. Pavlov und der neue Mensch: Diskurse über Disziplinierung in Sowjetrußland. Munich, 2002. Print. Schüttpelz, Erhard. “Eine Ikonographie der Störung: Shannons Flussdiagramm der Kommunikation in ihrem kybernetischen Verlauf.” Transkribieren: Medien/Lektüre. Ed. Ludwig Jäger and Georg Stanitzek. Munich, 2002. 233-280. Print. Siegert, Bernhard, and Markus Krajewski. Thomas Pynchon: Archiv —Verschwörung—Geschichte. Weimar, 2003. Print. Skinner, B. F. “Pigeons in a Pelican.” Cumulative Record: A Selection of Papers. By Skinner. New York, 1972. 574-592. Print. ThomasPynchon.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Oct. 2006. Todes, Daniel P. Ivan Pavlov: Exploring the Animal Machine. Oxford, 2000. Print. —. Pavlov’s Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise. Baltimore, 2002. Print. Watson, John B. “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.” Psychological Review 20 (1913): 158-177. Classics in the History of Psychology. Christopher D. Green, n.d. Web. 28 Dec. 2009. Weisenburger, Steven. A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion. Georgia, 1988. Print.

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Bastards: Text/Image Hybrids in Pop Writing by Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Others BRIGITTE WEINGART

“Hybrids”/Bastards 1 Both critics and fans of what since the sixties is called “Pop” agree that these cultural practices share a tendency to cross boundaries. Since that time, pop is considered to be a cultural stage on which the permeability of the high/low-dichotomy (and thereby the limits of ‘good taste’) can be observed; moreover, at least within the Western part of the world, geographic, ethnic as well as media boundaries are also at stake. It is part of the self-image of the relevant authors, artists, and musicians that they explicitly do not regard the so-called mass media as being alien to literature and art—a perspective which of course also sets them apart from many of their modernist predecessors. Pop texts do not adhere to the requirements of either cultural or media purity: competition between media is not ignored, but rather integrated. Marshall McLuhan—who himself was often disparaged as a “pop thinker”2—has called the result of such a media mix ‘hybrids;’ in the German translation this has turned into ‘bastards’ (Magischen 84ff). This translation is symptomatic, since even the occasional romanticizations and appropriations of the bastard as an ambiguous being cannot hide the fact that biologically and legally we are dealing here with a ‘problem child.’ Etymologically ‘bastard’ comes from the old French, where the word represented the legitimately acknowledged, extramarital son of a nobleman. The term has lost its specificity since its assimilation into German in the 13th century; ‘bastard’ now refers both to the illegitimate child and to the crossbreed.

1

2

For this English translation, the present text has been considerably abridged; if nothing else, I have left out existing studies on the present subject. See for these the original version in Voßkamp and Weingart 216-252. “Popthink”—the diagnosis of Dudley Young. Somewhat more baroque in title is a Playboy interview (McLuhan, “Candid”).

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Brigitte Weingart The fact that the ‘bastardization’ of text (or script) and image— which is my subject here—leads to unclear familial affiliations can already be seen in the problem of disciplinary competence that, in the case of text-image hybrids, is almost always decided on the grounds of the primary socialization of the author or artist. This means that the transgression of boundaries represented by these experiments is very often not only re-domesticated, but its originators are also inappropriately assumed to be purists (not to say, ‘pure bred’). For example, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, whose text-image experiments I will use below to reveal some structural characteristics of pop texts, thus becomes categorized in the first place as a writer, while Andy Warhol is classified as an artist (creating paintings and films). In both cases, this results in certain parts of their work remaining relatively underexposed—this is true for the use of image-citations and photographs in Brinkmann’s books as much as it is for “Literary Warhol.”3 And in the case of Ferdinand Kriwet, an artist working with different media and in different institutions without a clear provenance in the fine arts, literature or music, one can see how bastards risk falling through the cracks of the disciplines. Even though his text-image books like Apollo Amerika (on the moon landing in 1969), the three volume image lexicon Stars (1971), his pictograms or his books of drawings (ComMix, 1970) had been just as successful and influential as his experimental sound collages in the sixties and seventies, until only recently almost no academic attention was paid to Kriwet’s visual and aural texts (cf. Schulze 264-276; Weingart). The omnipresence of multimedial artifacts in the 20th and 21st century, however, magnifies the features of a much older situation. In an essay on the “interdisciplinary inside-out effect,” W. J. T. Mitchell underlines the fact that literary studies have “always had to address” questions of visibility produced by media: “Literary history has always been necessarily more than a history of works of literary art. It has always had to address the whole field of language and verbal expression as a place in which the entire sensorium, most notably the visual, is engaged. […] There is no way, in short, to keep visuality and visual images out

3

This is the title of one of the few essays explicitly dealing with Andy Warhol’s literary texts (mostly edited transcriptions of recordings and telephone conversations) such as a. A Novel (1968), The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975) or POPism. The Warhol 60s (1980) by Phyllis Rose. See also Wolf.—Although Brinkmann-philology has also dealt with the image material (e.g., Strauch), it has mostly concentrated on the posthumously published works of Brinkmann’s late phase (i.e., after his pop phase), as works by Karsten Herrmann, Andreas Moll or Nils Plath show.

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Bastards of the study of language and literature. Visual culture is both an outer boundary and an inner ‘black hole’ in the heart of verbal culture.” (“Interdisciplinarity” 542f)4

However, the catchword ‘bastard’ for ‘mixed media’ fits another facet of the inside-out problem. Its etymological echo is hardly in keeping with a celebration of hybridization that masks the power constellations and legal proceedings not only within the scholarly disciplines but also within the contexts of media themselves. Thus, with a view to the text-image experiments that have been created in the context of pop since the sixties, the discursive-visual field is more complex than the emphasis on ‘boundary crossing’ and catchwords like ‘mixed media,’ ‘intermedia,’ or ‘crossover’ suggests. The example of Brinkmann’s text-image techniques shows that hybridization on the one hand encourages the viewing of the texts as images and of the images as text, thereby inducing the emergence of that ambiguous effect that is also sometimes attributed to biological bastards. On the other hand, these experiments often imply strong assumptions about the specificity of each medium, or confirm commonplace attributions by way of using each medium in a stereotypical way (for example, when the written text represents intellectuality while the image is a guarantor for suitability for the masses—to mention just one of the most prevalent examples). Many of Brinkmann’s texts are explicitly presented as elements of visual culture. It can however also be shown—and especially with the examples to which he owes his reputation as co-founder of a German pop literature5—that the quotations of found images encoded as ‘low’ in the context of literature appear to comply with the literary Bilderverbot (ban on images), even though they were intended as counterstrategies. The inclusion of the excluded that wants to point at itself (it is ‘original,’ after all) presupposes the specific modi-

4 5

For the observation that “all media are mixed media” see Mitchell, Picture Theory 5. My comments concentrate on some of Brinkmann’s works from his ‘pop phase,’ from the middle to the end of the sixties. I will not deal with the (posthumously published) publications Schnitte und Erkundungen für die Präzisierung des Gefühls für einen Aufstand and the travel diary Rom, Blicke [1972-73], which were created after his almost disgusted abandonment of his own and other pop productions. Nevertheless, the hard break in the continuity of his works, for whose observation the commentators are following—with quite good reason—the information by the author, is, I hope, somewhat attenuated. With regard to Brinkmann’s pop inspired image experiments, I would claim that his glorification of pop turns out to be, at least in part, a dialectical counterpart to his later rejection of it as “gay mumbo-jumbo, […] pop hocus pocus” (Rom 325).

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Brigitte Weingart fication of the image so that it can fulfill this role. The question, therefore, has to be asked in what way such procedures of additional trivializing and stereotyping involuntarily contribute to the literary ‘othering’ of the image. This is demonstrated, for example, by the use of pin-ups and the topos of the ‘woman as image.’ Moreover, we have to take into consideration how these suband counter-cultural text-image strategies react to their own success, i.e., the follow-up problems of an accelerated canonization (seen negatively: appropriation, non-originality). In order to solve these problems, the schemata of inclusion/exclusion are to some extent re-applied. The differentiation “in/out” does not only refer to the inor exclusion at work in the usage of images in pop texts. Its processing (or its re-entrance) can also be observed within the field that is constituted by this very dichotomy; a field in which canonization is temporalized, for example as trend. This shows not only in the programmatic contemporaneity of pop practices,6 but also in the gestures of exclusivity through which they differentiate themselves from the (‘merely’) popular, from which pop as a dynamic culture of communication concurrently ‘lives’—a term not chosen by accident since the emphasis on ‘life’ is often invoked in contrast to the bogeyman of the ‘dead’ (high) culture.

Text vs. Image Why then in the 1960s does the interface between pop and literature become the venue of cultural negotiations in which the difference in media between text and image is at stake? Neither the reflection on media differences nor competition between them was a literary novelty—think of Horace’s dictum Ut pictura poiesis, its critique in the influential Laocoon debate, or the theory and practice of ekphrasis, and poetological reflections on verbal imagery. But considering the rapid multiplication and global distribution of (mainly visual) media like film, television, and print, this competition could no longer be ignored. While one pattern of reaction consisted in abstinence or in phobic resistance—tried and tested in modernism— this exclusion is exactly what set off most pop strategies.7 By using

6 7

Cf. Schumacher, Gerade, and complementarily Baßler, who considers the results of these obsessions with topicality as literary archives. My qualification (“most”) refers to the fact that those artifacts canonized as ‘pop’ are not always the result of a countermovement. Regarding the productivity of the pure joy of found objects from mass and everyday culture see Linck. Moreover, the appropriation of the ubiquitous signifiers of a consumerism in art and literature can serve a realist representation—it is

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Bastards found images from film and television, advertisement, comics, magazines and porn magazines, texts pointed out their origin in a mass culture characterized by image media. They thereby signaled not only their contemporaneity, but also their refusal to endorse attributes such as uniqueness, individual authorship or timeless significance, considering them as relics of a cultural elite, and thus as dated distinctions. This means that procedures which used images as pop signals could rely on the traditionally reliable distinction between the ‘mass-mediated’ image that can be intuitively experienced and is directly plausible vs. the ‘intellectual’ text that has to be worked out rationally. Umberto Eco, who as the author of bestsellers and scholar of pop culture can hardly be accused of a cultural-pessimistic denunciation of mass culture, gives an example in a current variation of this linkage between the differentiation of text and image and the high-low attribution. In an interview he at first talks negatively about the “Manichaean attitude of the false intellectuals … for whom the text is the good and the image the bad; the earlier is culture, the latter is the great emptiness.” It is characteristic that Eco, in his defense of the image, reminds us “that the image was or is Leonardo da Vinci or Raphael” (140). It is true that with this reference to the canon of painting Eco is resisting the lure of a naive apocalyptic discourse invoking the decline of the book, but he is nevertheless pitting the ‘good painting’ against the ‘bad’ one. However, looking at his examples—Leonardo, Raphael—also opens up a ‘strong’ reading of Eco’s statement regarding pop: according to it, a ‘good image’ is most of all one that is quotable. What serves here as ‘high’ has long ago crossed the border to the ‘low’ realms of mass culture and serial production: It is Leonardo, after all, who is the creator of the endlessly reproduced pop icon Mona Lisa. And in 1963 Warhol gave us a telling slogan on the low value of ‘singularity’ in the age of technical reproduction by labeling his six-times-five reproductions of her “Thirty are better than one.” Even when applying methods of serialization, pop practices do not necessarily aim at the depletion of images, as is clearly exemplified in Warhol’s silk-screens serials—even though critical discourse has often been limited to this assertion. Rather, the reproductive difference is celebrated as a productive variation that actually contributes to the re-auratization of the reproduction.8 In fact, pop practices insist on the possibility of acquiring such elements of the

8

not by accident that German pop art tendencies of the sixties were called “capitalist realism.” In the terminology of deconstruction, this procedure is based on the logic of iteration (etymologically: “iter,” again, from Sanskrit ‘itara,’ other), i.e., it

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Brigitte Weingart Illustration 1: Andy Warhol, Thirty Are Better Than One (1963)

Source: David Bourdon. Warhol. New York, n.d. 162. Print. cultural archive and their fundamental quotability that—no matter to what extent they may be present—so far have hardly been recognized as such. This does not only apply to the proverbial pop classics, the Campbell’s Soup Cans and Brillo Boxes, but also via a detour to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa—long ago canonized, in fact the very epitome of the canonical. Warhol’s work makes it visible not in its singularity but rather as an already countlessly reproduced icon; as a postcard Mona Lisa. Or even a pin-up Mona Lisa, since, in the context of Warhol’s other works on the ‘image of the woman,’ it is placed on the same visual level as, for example, Marilyn Monroe. The description of pop art as an import from everyday visual culture is inadequate, since it ignores its predominant use. The point is rather to present this inclusion as a constitutive process of the art system which, rather than producing something (absolutely) new, recycles the cultural archive so that previously dormant or latent inventories resurface. The success of pop art—its own anchorage

is based on the structure of quotation “that ties repetition to alterity” (Derrida 7).

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Bastards within the art system and its canonization—in no way speaks against it; it is part of the coup that it was able to bring off. To a large extent this is also true for pop literature—and in fact at this point regardless of whether it is working with image citations or whether it participates on a purely textual level in the transformation and recycling of (sub)cultural inventories. It would therefore be premature to claim that Warhol’s Mona Lisa invalidates Eco’s differentiation of “good” or “bad” images, or that he is countering it by merely ‘democratizing’ high art painting. In the case of the Mona Lisa, this democratization has already taken place thanks to means of reproduction, and this is what creates the specific context for new appropriations that in their turn continue to write this history of reception in the form of (“good”) pictures. It is the change in perspective which these appropriations impose on their familiar subjects that allows for a narrowing of the ‘field of the popular’ in favor of a more specific ‘pop look.’ This is why shifting of the frame (for example, in favor of the inflated detail), paratexts (sloganlike titles) and re-contextualizations (be it in the form of collages or of a transfer of objects from everyday culture into the world of art, for which Marcel Duchamp’s Ready-mades provide the matrix) are all part of pop art’s vocabulary. This approach of recycling the cultural archive meant that pop never lost contact with tradition—one more reason why the term ‘anti-art’ is now so obviously inappropriate.9 When Marcel Duchamp, who is himself often designated as the ‘father of pop,’ presents Leonardo’s Mona Lisa with a Daliesque mustache in his “L.H.O.O.Q.,” echoes of a schoolyard attitude to the classics are indeed quite apparent.10 So the Mona Lisa is indeed ‘bastardized,’ and even her ‘meaningful’ smile is perspectivized in a different way: the subtitle “L.H.O.O.Q.,” which is at the same time the title, in French homophonously reads “Elle a chaud au cul.” This not only offers an alternative reading of the enigmatic expression; the caption also ironizes the standard confrontation of picture as a site of polysemy vs. language as the medium of explanation.

9 For more on this art/anti-art dialectics see Barthes, “Cette”. 10 The fact that classic authors too have no claim to any control over their (‘intended’) meaning, or rather that they specifically do not have it, was precisely stated by Rainald Goetz, himself a writer affiliated with pop: “Therefore, classic authors are pop phenomena. They can be used for the most contradictory aims; they are a pool to be pillaged for quotations and the open affirmation that they enjoy are in reality subversive” (24).

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Brigitte Weingart Illustration 2: Macel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)

Source: Janis Mink. Duchamp. Cologne, 2001. 64. Print. The function of captions can be described (with Roland Barthes) as an anchoring (ancrage) that limits the polysemy of the picture, determining how exactly it should be read and which meanings should be suppressed (cf. “Rhétorique”). This schema was already established in the emblematics of early modernism as a triad of pictura, subscriptio, and an overarching inscriptio; nowadays, apart from press photographs, it is mainly used in advertisement. It is so stable that it continues to control the reception of text-image combinations even when one clearly deviates from it. To reformulate, only after testing the possibility of either reading the text as information about the image, or the image as an illustration of the text, can other possible bimedial interactions be seen (albeit as deviance). Duchamp is working with this convention, ‘solving’ the mystery of Mona Lisa’s smile in his own way. With the help of his title, he not only parodies the attribution of the picture’s semantic surplus (that is supposedly

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Bastards worth a thousand words and that already appears quite banalized by the pubertarian transgendering); he also opposes this kind of understanding of the picture with the enigma of a text that can only be understood by way of a media change—i.e., reading it aloud—and that even then rewards the viewer only with a burlesque variation of anchoring. However, if we read the hint regarding the temperature of her—saying it politely—abdominal region as a symptom of her sexualized state, then the emotional projections arising from seeing the Mona Lisa as the ‘image of the woman’ come into view. As such, she incarnates—like so many images of women—on the one hand the topos of the woman as image (enigmatic, inscrutable, sphinxlike), and on the other also the connotation of images as ‘female’ (more on this later). The mustache, however, vitiates both levels of projection.

The Book … Is an Extension of the Eye That the dichotomy of ‘mass-image’ vs. ‘intellectual written text’ was still quite intact in the sixties—and that any attempt to dissolve or complicate this dichotomy was still seen as a provocation—is made clear in a pop text in which Marshall McLuhan was involved. In conjunction with the graphic designer Quentin Fiore, McLuhan himself created several ‘bastards,’ one of which, published in 1967, is named The Medium is the Massage, a variation of the slogan “the medium is the message” for which McLuhan is still famous. In fact both formulations apply to the book’s programmatics: as a hybrid of text and image it consolidates McLuhan’s thesis that electronic media lead to a re-programming of the senses whereby the visual is replaced by the tactile. With regard to this change of perception, the domains of the verbal and the visible are at stake: McLuhan, in his somewhat idiosyncratic way, on the one hand uses ‘visual’ to refer to the reception of text, and to linear phonetic writing in particular. On the other hand, what he calls ‘tactile’ not only refers to the sense of touch but to a multisensorial experience that also encompasses the ‘scanning’ of the image—including pictography (ideo- or pictograms; for example, hieroglyphs). Thus, the combination of text and image produces an interaction of the senses that involves the reader/viewer ‘holistically’—an effect that McLuhan for instance attributes to his view of television as a “tactile” medium.

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Brigitte Weingart Illustration 3 and 4: Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (1967)

Source: McLuhan and Fiore 34-37

The “medium is the message:” one message of this book then would be the book itself; as an “extension of the eye” it emphatically points out its optical quality—not least of all by its ‘looking back.’ However, the book also becomes a tautological user manual for itself, referring to its characteristics as an object or as corpus, namely by forcing the reader to rotate it occasionally while reading. The message then is not only a ‘message’ of content, but also a sensorial massage. Even if one doubts the abilities of a book to create this effect, The Medium is the Massage can hardly be accused of a performative contradiction.11 According to Fiore’s retrospective account, the two collaborators were accused of other mistakes, however, even though (or maybe specifically because) the book sold very well. For the “industry of the word,” it did not contain enough text to be taken seriously, while for “designers with a highly developed moralistic sense,” it came across as “manipulative.” Fans of the book particularly appreciated its sensory aspect, “the feel of the book:” “The images, the feel of the book, summed up their time. It became a graphic expression and an approbation of their feelings and thoughts. Along with the

11 On the whole this is also true for the other “bastardizations:” In War and Peace in the Global Village (1968), the relationship of script and image is, however, much more conventional, and it can be compared to Fiore’s graphic depiction of the revolutionary scenarios of Yippie leader Jerry Rubin: DO IT! Scenarios of the Revolution (1970). In collaboration with the global thinker Buckminster Fuller with the descriptive title I Seem To Be a Verb (1970) Fiore, on the other hand, is pulling out all the stops regarding the hybridization of text and image.

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Bastards general acceptance of the book, however, there was some hostility: it promoted illiteracy, encouraged drug use, it corrupted the morals of American youth, it was anti-intellectual, and so on.” (Fiore, qtd. in Lupton and Miller 95)

Altogether, the positive and negative reactions add up to a spectrum of characteristics that was at the time considered essential by the German cultural revolutionaries for their own texts and activities: sensual, anti-intellectual, inappropriate for minors. For the pop faction that formed around 1968 against the “literary retirees”12 who as a rule were decidedly critical of mass media and distributed “quotes by Marx,” the bastardizations practiced and propagated by McLuhan provided an essential source of inspiration.13 They also confirmed the perception of the USA as a culture of the image, thus providing visual arguments in the “taste war” (Hebdige 120) between old Europe and America in which, among others, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann actively participated—and not only after his stay in Texas. With the help of his friend and collaborator Ralf-Rainer Rygulla, he found an ideal forum in the publishing company März Verlag, founded in 1968 by Jörg Schröder, for the import of US-American pop experiments, as well as for his own.14

12 “…was verteilen literarische Rentner? Marx-Zitate? Gemeinplätze?” (What do literary retirees distribute? Quotes from Marx? Platitudes?)—as Brinkmann said, referring to Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s “Gemeinplätze, die neueste Literatur betreffend” (Platitudes concerning the latest literature) published in 1968 in Kursbuch. (Brinkmann, “Der Film” 384). 13 In the course of the lively production of such hybrids around 1968, there were also fusions between pop and politics in the GDR, although we should not underestimate the factionizing that was already evident in criticisms of McLuhan as “ventriloquist and prophet” of the “apolitical avant-garde” by prominent exponents of the critical left (see Enzensberger 177). Let me at least mention the attempt to counter “governmental power” with parody by a “fun guerilla,” Klau mich (“steal me,” 1968)—the book of actions of the protagonists of “commune 1,” Rainer Langhans and Fritz Teufel. On the parallels with the procedures of the historical avant-gardes as well as with situationism see also Bohrer; Briegleb. 14 On the relationship of pop, politics and the creation of ‘sensory’ books, see März Verlag’s first press announcement declaring the “expansion of existing literary and political forms of consciousness.” “Literature and politics cannot be divided from each other; they entail and complement each other. The one is the expansion of the other,” qtd. from the manuscript which can be found in the “MÄRZ-Archiv” at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. In the meantime the März logo, the red script on yellow background (visible on all book covers and in all paratexts) is established as a signal for pop texts and is quotable as such as well. See the cover of the book by Johannes Ullmaier.

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Brigitte Weingart Now, the use of images is not exactly a novelty, neither in didactic texts (which might also include political pamphlets) nor in the more elaborate genre of artists’ books. For literature in the more narrow sense—no matter how difficult it is to delimit it from other productions (especially in this cultural constellation of fluid transitions)—the situation is quite different. With the pop wave, concrete, ‘material’ images find their way into the text⎯implying that literary imagery is no longer confined to text-based metaphor, description and illustration. The explicit connection of textuality with visuality (or tactility in McLuhan’s sense) is part of pop’s emphasis on perception. Despite the obsession with media, this emphasis aims to invalidate mediation in its ‘own’ medium, in favor of a ‘direct’ transfer of the material into the book (cf. the contributions in Linck and Mattenklott). The concern with transferring this perception—which is in fact aware of how it is being shaped by media—as ‘directly’ as possible into the book leads to attempts to create the text as an intermedial interface, to stage it as a surface onto which visual and acoustic experiences (film, television, advertisement, music, traffic, etc.) are ‘immediately’ inscribed. This approach is matched by the frequent self-stylization of the authors as nothing but effects of an urban, technologized environment, mere receptors of circulating signifiers which, to their sensitized perception, are enlarged into mythologems.

Snapshot No wonder that for this idea of writer as receptor a metaphor from the world of photography is used—but is it a metaphor? Photography—as “writing with light”—has been traditionally defined by its indexical qualities rather than by the aspects of codification that are also implied by the suffix graphein (and which retrospectively, with the possibilities of digital reproduction, have also shifted into focus regarding analog photography). In 1968, Brinkmann’s collection of poems Die Piloten, published in 1968, marked—together with his poetic cycle Godzilla (also published in 1968)—his pop-literary breakthrough. He created the collage for the cover of Die Piloten himself, translating the deliberately pop nature of the texts into a visual gesture by creating a multitude of cutout body parts and figures; among them one notices stars, pin ups and freaks, together with members of his family and friends. Along with psychedelic and comic elements they add up to an all-encompassing kaleidoscope (that was colored in the original). Apart from the poems, the volume also contains some comics taken from the collection C-Comics by the New York artist Joe Brainard. Brinkmann does not yet use quotations of found

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Bastards images in the poetry of this volume; however, most of them are “structural adaptations” or “simulations” of visual media, especially from photography.15 Illustration 5: Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Die Piloten (1968)

Source: Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. Die Piloten. Cologne, 1968. Cover. Print.

In his introductory “note” to the volume, Brinkmann describes poetry as the “most suitable form […] to grasp spontaneously perceived events and movements, an only momentarily displayed sensitivity as snap-shot” (“Notiz” 6, English in the original).16 A few sentences 15 Differentiating them from merely quotations, Jörgen Schäfer (179f, referring to Aage A. Hansen-Löve) calls the results of Brinkmann’s attempts at imitating other media in his own medium “simulations.” 16 On the implications of ‘presence’ in Brinkmann’s snapshot concept see Schumacher, Gerade 84f.

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Brigitte Weingart after this poetological commitment to a specific form, questions of style and of managing the material are delegated as a mere formality to the “professional aesthetes and poet-pros … who sublimate their personal scruples regarding the mass of material in finely engraved hocus-pocus” (7). The formal task of the poet as photographer, then, is to resolve this paradox of passive ‘recording’ and active ‘forming.’ One solution of this problem of mediation between visual experience and its verbalization turns out to be the fusion of material and artwork—a possibility that visual artists (such as Daniel Spoerri) have implemented by placing, for example, the objects themselves onto the canvas instead of their images. This possibility, however, rather figures as an unattainable ideal in the intermedial transfer between the visible and the verbal. But what Brinkmann’s approach shares with its pop-artistic models is that in both cases—by way of the concept of material—the differentiation between the visible things themselves and their mediated reproductions is bracketed: “There is no other material than that which is accessible to all and that everyone handles every day, that which one experiences looking out of the window, standing in the street, passing by a shop window, buttons, buttons, what one needs, what one thinks of and remembers, everything quite everything, images from films or advertisements, sentences from something read or from past talks, opinions, ramblings, ramblings, ketchup, the melody of a pop song, that brings out new impressions, for example how somebody swings his cane and then hits, lines, images, events, the thick soup dripping onto somebody’s shirt. One sniffs it up through the nose and then spits it out again. The old recipe and the new concept, before the lights go out, the opening credits in the movies—here I am.” (Brinkmann, “Notiz” 8)

In this list, what is immediately visible (looking out of the window) appears next to mediated visible elements (images from film or advertisement)—and both become an input for direct, instantaneous use. If we can say that pop processes affirm the artificiality of our mediated environment as second nature, then this holds true only with the addendum that this ‘neo-Rousseauism’ invalidates the difference between things and signs, in favor of an equivalence of everything that is perceptible (or, rephrased, that it subsumes signs as things under the common denominator of perception). Brinkmann staged the blurring of this difference in a series of poems whose titles represent “image” in a variety of ways (“Image in Short Lines”/“Kurzzeiliges Bild,” “Closed Image”/“Geschlossenes Bild,” “Image”/“Bild,” “Sad Image 2.”/“Trauriges Bild 2.,” “Simple Image”/“Einfaches Bild,” “Image of a hotel”/“Bild von einem Hotel,” “A Certain Image of Something”/“Ein bestimmtes Bild von irgendwas,” “An Oversized Photograph of Liz Taylor”/“Eine übergroße Pho442

Bastards tographie von Liz Taylor;” all in Standphotos). All these snapshots rely on the effect that the text could be referring to an ‘external’ image, for example a photograph, but also to an internal image or an actual scene. Of course, this holds true specifically when a poem is entitled “Photograph” (Standphotos 52). Unlike the designation as a mere “image” (which can also be either a linguistic or an imagined image as well), this title explicitly brings into play a material picture. Photographie

Photograph/y

Mitten

In the middle

auf der Straße

of the street

die Frau

the woman

in dem

in the

blauen

blue

Mantel.

coat.

It becomes more than clear in the example of “Photograph/y” that poetry is probably the “most suitable form” for creating snapshots because the genre allows for a combination of the temporal dimension of the text—its reading—with the spatial—its layout on the page. As an image staged in written form, “Photograph” lays claim to the simultaneity that Lessing (76-78) ascribed to the visual arts, contrasting it with the necessarily successive reception of literature. With these superimpositions of language—more specifically, writing—and image Brinkmann certainly inherits the tradition of visual poetry. However, his inspiration for the use of material images, and for a multimedia approach to literature that surpasses a scriptbased imitation of visual media, was the US underground. But comparing it with pop art (Warhol’s in particular) and with McLuhan’s theory and practice of the transgression of media borders, one notices to what extent Brinkmann’s project evolves from an assumed antagonism with purist ideals of culture. In what follows, I am less concerned with the opposition between ‘German sullenness’ and the relaxed attitude of, e.g., Warhol describing a pop approach to the world of things and signs as “liking things,” or McLuhan/Fiore’s recoding of a book into a site of multisensory experience. But as we shall see, Brinkmann’s text-image experiments lag behind the achievements of the above examples at precisely the moment that they are dedicated to a cultural transgression and the crossing of high-low borders becomes their actual program. In fact, they sometimes even strengthen the media differences they are pretending to erode. The deliberate trivialization of images in particular actually contributes to a renewal of the high-low hierarchy. The problems

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Brigitte Weingart which arise from this process become particularly obvious in the overlapping of media- and gender-differences, as is expressed in the quotations from pornography and pin-ups.

What Can Be Found in the Street: Trivialities “1. Slip trivial images (the most trivial of the trivial, e.g., bulk mail) very sparingly in between”—this is the first of nine rules that Rolf Dieter Brinkmann noted for the publication of FRANK XEROX’ WÜSTER TRAUM und andere Kollaborationen (“Notizen” 56).17 Brinkmann planned this volume with Ralf-Rainer Rygulla, together with whom he had already published the (also heavily illustrated) anthology ACID. Neue Amerikanische Szene with the März-Verlag in 1969. The fact that FRANK XEROX was never published does not detract from the value of the information gained from these instructions on how to deal with pictures for our reading of those of Brinkmann’s works which were labeled ‘pop literature,’ since in these works pictures are often used as actual signifiers of the ‘trivial.’ The idea of the found is already etymologically inscribed in the term ‘trivial:’ the Latin word trivium combines tri- (three) with via (road or street) and thus literally refers to ‘where three roads meet.’ Accordingly, the trivial is that which may be found on the street; it is commonplace, trite. This idea is used programmatically in Brinkmann’s pop experiments, using imagery as part of an encompassing practice of quotation that in Frank Xerox (note the illustrative title) would not have been limited to images: “8. sometimes also slip in thoroughly dull news items on separate pages as if they were texts of my own/of their own (wie eigene Texte) (sparingly, like the bulk mail—images!)” (Brinkmann, “Notizen”). So, if it is characteristic of Brinkmann’s work with pictures and texts that he chooses images as signals for ‘lowness,’ it must be stressed that in order to find the ‘lowest of the low,’ he himself reapplies a high/low distinction to his trivia. As Brinkmann’s correspondence with Schröder and Rygulla regarding the conception of ACID documents, the effect of the ‘sophisticatedly trivial’ was quite calculated.18 Following Andy Warhol, he planned to combine intellectuality with an underground sensibility; Brinkmann’s precise instructions on the form of the production were aimed at meticulously presenting the media specificities of the

17 Maleen Brinkmann writes in an editorial note that the publication of “Frank Xerox” was planned for 1970; so the notes are probably from that time. 18 These unpublished letters are part of the “MÄRZ-Archiv,” Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.

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Bastards images. For example, he insisted that the photographs be printed with their perforated edges, yellow on a black background; that titles be added in the style of technical captions. With these suggestions for the book’s graphic design (that were not implemented), Brinkmann is indeed quoting a feature of the contemporaneous “Warhol look.” In 1967, in the publication Screen Tests/A Diary, Warhol and the Factory photographer and poet Gerard Malanga had been using stills from the so-called Screen Tests to which everyone who visited the Factory between 1964 and 1966 was subjected.19 Illustration 6: Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga, Screen Tests/A Diary (1967)

Source: Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga. Sreen Tests/A Diary. New York, 1967. Print.

ACID quickly became a cult object, no doubt to a large extent thanks to its visual presentation which, despite its apparent casualness, was in fact highly ambitious. Between the literary imports 19 According to Malanga, the idea for these tests was based on the fact that he needed illustrations for a book and had had good experiences with film stills that still contained the perforated rim. See Malanga 117.

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Brigitte Weingart from the American underground—among them texts by William Burroughs, Ted Berrigan, Michael McClure or Ed Sanders, essays by pop thinkers like the literary and media scholars Leslie Fiedler and McLuhan, an interview with Andy Warhol by Gerard Malanga— one could find, for example, comics by Frank O’Hara & Joe Brainard and Robert Crumb, stills from Warhol films, fashion photographs, pornographic pictures and advertisements, as well as collages created from these pictures. The relationship of text and image here is in no way just one of ‘illustration,’ in which the pictures only ‘illuminate’ the text.20 Even though they are sometimes thematically connected, the combination of pictorial quotations and texts add up to a diffused cohesion, an atmosphere. They reproduce and produce a certain ‘feel,’ a vitality—a text-image effect that can be compared to what can be found in lifestyle magazines, even though the glamour of the fashion photographs in ACID was countered by the use of ‘dirty pictures’ as well as decidedly homemade ones. Brinkmann’s layout principle for the book was to leave a minimum of free space; the text and images should be as dense as possible.21 Thereby he is clearly aiming for the look of a magazine or fanzine, rather than for the conservative book design that contributes to the auratization of text by, for example, generously framing it within white pages. Among book designers, the margins are a means of distancing from the optical environment of the page, i.e., of constructing borders to the outside (cf. Willberg 52). No wonder that contrary to this the illustrated pages in pop texts often bleed into the edges. It can hardly be overlooked that ACID is located in the context of sexual liberation movements, thanks not only to its content but also to its visual presentation. The obscenity of the pictures, material that—despite its mass distribution—had until then been excluded not only from ‘high’ literature, but also from the historical canon of paintings and even photographs, proves to be a feisty gesture. The term ‘obscene’ already contains this exclusion: ob-scenus denotes the invisible location ‘in front of, opposite to or outside of the scene’ (from the Latin scaena, stage). With pin-up and pornographic pictures, ACID openly displays what was ‘off scene,’ i.e., banned, and until then had only circulated ‘under the counter’—but had already taken center stage in the US literary underground, itself an ‘off scene’ subculture. The visual strategy behind the illustrations in ACID is a reminder of the provocations of the simultaneously active Dirty Speech Movement (which is visibly represented in the texts of 20 On the effects of the etymology of illustration (from Latin illustrare “to illuminate,” “to glorify”) see Miller 61. 21 This can be read in an unpublished letter by Brinkmann to Jörg Schröder, to be found in the “MÄRZ-Archiv.”

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Bastards the publication as well), and can therefore be seen as a manifestation of a ‘Dirty Picture Movement.’ These are both cases of transgressive practices that through their transgression not only underline the existence of the borders they set out to transgress (most notably, the borders of good taste), but also claim that there is something beyond them. A look at its cover makes it clear that ACID is focused on “Sex!” However, its aim was never just a breach of taboos—at least not in the reissued version currently available which contains the same imagery as the original edition. The fragmentation of at least one female body displays as much as it hides. The mode of reproduction clearly makes us realize that what we see is mediated: The halftone dots (which decompose a photograph into individual color elements that in a ‘successful’ reproduction are recomposed into a uniform picture) clearly mark the pictorial quotations as quotations, as reproductions of reproductions. This is an effect that Sigmar Polke emphatically made into his trademark in roughly the same period. Illustration 7: Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Ralf-Rainer Rygulla, ACID (1969)

Source: Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Ralf-Rainer Rygulla, eds. ACID: Neue amerikanische Szene. Reinbek, 1983. Cover. Print.

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Brigitte Weingart Illustration 8: Sigmar Polke, Bunnies (1966)

Source: Sigmar Polke. Die drei Lügen der Malerei. Exhibition Catalogue. Ed. Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der BRD GmbH. Ostfildern-Ruit, 1997. 102. Print.

In both cases—the cover of ACID and Polke’s Bunnies—the dots have the effect that the image of the woman is superimposed with the woman as image. The latter competes with the former, complicating any fetishistic pleasure since its structure is staged too obviously. Even though the fetishistic gaze functions according to the paradoxical rule “Je sais bien … mais quand même” (Mannoni), perhaps the viewer does not want to know this quite so explicitly at the moment of his indulgence. In the original publication of ACID, the grid is a separate layer that lies on top of the collage, thereby creating a mock sense of depth. This double cover then stages the picture-elements as a disorderly mosaic, suggesting that the whole arrangement be read as a puzzle (like a plastic slide puzzle), or as an asynchronous arrangement of TV screens reminiscent of Nam June Paik. Not least of all, this arrangement alludes to the keyhole perspective that we know from pornography (although the pseudo-intimacy is countered with the simultaneous reading possibility of ‘sex on all channels’).

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Bastards If the cover-collage of ACID, Polke’s Bunnies and the earlier works by Warhol and Duchamp can be dignified with the interpretation that they reflect (and not just affirm) the topos of ‘woman as image’ (and of course we are talking about male authors/artists here), then this demands further comment, especially when it comes to pornographic pictures. After all, it is (not exclusively, but mainly) feminist scholarship that has demonstrated the connection between visual representations of women and a phallocentric scopic regime, particularly in the case of pornography, in which women are turned into objects of male pleasure. Thus, according to psychoanalytical theory woman, or her image, functions as man’s “symptom” (Lacan), since women relieve the male counterpart of having to confront his lack, thereby providing the illusion of completeness. Due to this function—as a symbolic gap onto which the fundamental deficiency can be projected—the transformation of woman as image into fetish is structurally inherent. The dichotomy of looking and being looked at, which opposes the male subject on the one hand with the female object on the other—as revealed by feminist media theory22—has, however, also contributed to a hardening of the idea of the seductiveness of especially realist or illusionist images.23 From this perspective, the pornographic picture—and particularly with the increased verisimilitude of photography (as a ‘trace of the real’)—seems to be a perfect incarnation of the fetishizable, and the indexical (photographic, filmic) image seems “inherently pornographic.”24 Pornography expert Linda Williams convincingly argues for an ongoing critical analysis of this conception of visual pleasure which finds its culmination in the description of the gaze as “the erection of the eye” (Jean Clair). However, she also comes up with an alternative conception, an “erotics of spectator-observer,” which repudiates the active-passive distribution and the assumption that visual pleasure is always (pseudo-) satisfied by way of an “ocular substitute” for the inherently elusive object. She insists on the “very tangible sensation” created by pornographic images, namely that of “physical touch” (14). This new conception also accounts for the fact that pornography produced for heterosexual men can also be viewed by women (and as has been historically proven, that is what women did, when not inhibited by social constraints—over which images clearly have no power). Now, the above examples of works that deal with the topos of woman as image can hardly be interpreted as illustrative of Williams’ 22 Cf. the classic essay by Laura Mulvey; with regard to (pornographic) photography see Solomon-Godeau. The publication on this subject, not only in the arts, is Sylvia Eiblmayr’s Die Frau als Bild. 23 On the media history of the view on seductive images cf. Wetzel. 24 Cf. Linda Williams’ critique of this view in “Corporealized Observers” (3).

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Brigitte Weingart conception, although Brinkmann’s insistence on sensory (and sensual) involvement suggests that he is moving in a similar direction. They are clearly based in the former conception and its endless variations on the voyeuristic male and the eye-catching female. However, if playing with the terms of this conception can be seen as a masquerade and therefore an escape route, then at least these examples provide the fetishized pictures with a kind of mask, either by turning them into serial products (Warhol), or by mockingly transgendering them (Duchamp), or by distorting and therefore disturbing the image (Polke and the cover of ACID).

Intermediality and ‘Inter-Sex’ The preponderance of body imagery in ACID corresponds to the pornographic bent of the texts. Although many of the images and texts in ACID can not be described as having a particularly complex relationship to the pornography and pin-ups they are quoting,25 others are symptomatic—in the best sense of the term—for yet another 60’s transgression of boundaries, namely that of gender. Parker Tyler, for example, in his contribution “What Sex Really Is or, Name It and You Can Have It” sings “a paean to the new sexual emulsion” (19), thereby echoing the documentary The Queen (a film about a transvestite beauty contest) and films by Jack Smith or Andy Warhol, stills of which also appear in the book. Reading Tyler’s text today, one can better understand why Judith Butler has at times been reproached for her reading of gender parodies and drag as “performative subversion” (175), since it merely reformulated for an academic audience what had been obvious within the scene for a long time. Tyler, for example, regarding the viewers’ perspective on The Queen, observes a shift from the attitude of camp, which revels in staged gender ambiguity, to a diffusion of the male/female divide altogether: “Today, the serious point about it is that those young men were simply formally exaggerating inherent feminine traits. […] Being a ‘queen,’ in the sense in which the above-named film reveals it in boys, is to be a sex of a specific kind, a sex that eludes the coarse and banal trinity of categories: heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality. This old-hat trio of textbook ghouls, I predict, is on its way out. It is ridiculously senile and a scandal in the eyes of genuine scientific inquiry.” (20)

25 For example, in terms of a “porno”-criticism in the context of the Dirty Speech Movement (cf. Fiedler, “The New Mutants”, passim). For Judith Butler’s more recent perspective on strategic misrepresentations of gender see her Gender Trouble.

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Bastards Illustration 9: “The Queen” (1969)

Source: Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Ralf-Rainer Rygulla, eds. ACID: Neue amerikanische Szene. Reinbek, 1983. 264. Print. While Tyler can be seen as a true representative of Queer Theory avant la lettre, other contributors affirm sexual difference in a somewhat traditional way, despite their best intentions. Even though Leslie Fiedler, whose call for literary boundary crossing prompted a debate in Germany shortly before the publication of ACID (cf. Cross),26 promotes the androgynous and sees the “anti-male antihero” of postmodern literature as the representative of a “post-humanist, post-male, post-white and post-heroic world” (“The New Mutants” 517), he nonetheless resorts to the traditional imagery of femininity to illustrate his visions of transgression. McLuhan meanwhile speculates together with George B. Leonard on the “Future of Sex” by linking it to the history of media. While book printing and industrialization have created “highly specialized and standardized men and women” (103)—aggressive, ambitious, logically and abstractly gifted men and emotional, intuitive, practically gifted women—in the 26 See also Wittstock 14-39; the volume documents almost the complete “Fiedler-Debate” ignited by this text and in which Brinkmann participated, defending Fiedler.

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Brigitte Weingart electric era these borders will blur in favor of a “common humanity” (105): “In an unspecialized world of computers and all-enveloping communications, sensitive intuition and openness will win more prizes, if you will, than unfeeling simplistic logic” (108). There is much that speaks against these diagnoses, not least the fact that they rely on ancient clichés and an essentialized gender identity based on the “unalterable essentials of maleness and femaleness” that pits unchangeable “biology” against “mores, mannerisms and dress”—“Vive la différence,” as the French are quoted as saying (McLuhan and Leonard 108). Thus, the superficial blurring of borders, McLuhan and Leonard claim, just makes the deeper differences more visible—a logic of argumentation which is somewhat plausible within McLuhan’s utopian idea that a second order natural state could be reached through electronic media. However, this diagnosis is substantiated with tendentially homophobic remarks and an all-too-insistent attempt to save the family model (111). Nonetheless, these speculations draw attention to the connection between media history and gender roles and thus also towards those hybridizations of genres and media that we can conceive of, along with McLuhan, as ‘bastards.’ In his programmatic afterword “Film in Words” [“Der Film in Worten”] in which he discusses images, this time without actually using any, Brinkmann also discusses the connection between gender and genre, noting that the demolition of genre boundaries also has effects on the dissolution of gender roles, and vice versa: “In any case, we have to ask to what excess the specifically ‘poematic’ structure of a poem or the specifically ‘novelistic’ structure in a novel has to be decomposed and recomposed so that the cliché of sexual role behavior that is trying to keep hold of the individual can no longer have an effect within the structure of the poem, the novel, etc.—and it is just that, namely the degree of decomposition and recomposition that also changes the old, nice question of the ‘meaning’ of a poem, a novel, etc., since its premise resides in a secure selfconfidence regarding the ‘specific’ gender of the person doing the asking, which, however, in today’s doings (behavior) has long ago ceased to be unequivocal.” (395)

As structuralist as this convoluted set of instructions may sound, the inspiration for these ideas was in all probability the cut-up methods of William Burroughs and Brian Gysin, which were themselves intended as a means for critiquing ideology. Burroughs saw cutting and rearranging as a strategy through which the smooth transfer of ‘infectious’ messages is broken and disturbed. One of the prerequisites of this interventionist method is that language, images and media in general are conceptualized as ‘viruses’ that can be 452

Bastards counteracted with the anti-viral procedures of cut-up and accidental recombination. It is questionable, however, whether the influence of these ideas on Brinkmann extends as far as the gender-theoretical, especially when we consider the fact that Burroughs’ homosexuality—real or ‘literary’—did not prevent him from a misogyny that brings to mind the obstinate “clichés of sexual role behavior.”27 “We have entered the zone of ‘inter-sex,’” says Brinkmann in “Film in Worten” (396). And truly, when we leaf through the ‘bastard book’ ACID, this impression is more than just ‘illustrated’ by the many pictures of androgynous teenagers and drag queens; it is also created by the hybrid, or: ‘hermaphrodite,’ character of the book that is not limited to established bimedial genres such as comics. It is apparent as well in the blurring of the text/image dichotomy in the typeface, or in the use of pictures as background to the text. This method of ‘text-on-picture’ in Brinkmann’s cycle Godzilla— printed on pictures taken from advertisement for bras and bathing suits28—is directly connected with the subject of gender hybridity. While the pictures are enlarged to focus on certain parts of the body, thus emphasizing the implicit sexualization in advertising, the texts quite explicitly focus on sex; more precisely, they focus on the relationship of sex, media, violence and death. The radical nature of the text distinguishes Brinkmann’s from the similar photo-poems that Paul Éluard and Man Ray created in 1935 for their poetry collection Facile, in which the romantic glorification of ‘woman as image’ is unquestioningly perpetuated. In Godzilla, the text’s and the image’s separate messages form various alliances; some texts are grossly obscene, but in most (the better) cases a grotesque contradiction emerges because the texts shamelessly spell out the sexual fantasies that are invoked but not fulfilled by the chaste images. One of the poems is entitled “Andy Harlot Andy,” alluding to Andy Warhol’s film Harlot (1964) in which the transvestite Mario Montez, masquerading as Jean Harlow, eats one banana after another for seventy minutes. “The meanings constantly change back and forth. (Sometimes it is a banana, sometimes not!)” (Brinkmann, Standphotos 165). Just as Warhol’s Harlot parodies the subtextual sexual rhetorics of Hollywood film, the conventional interplay of text and image in advertising is to a certain extent misquoted in Godzilla, i.e., it is used against its intention without being totally discarded: that, indeed, is the point of parody.

27 Cf. Russell on the attempt to read Burroughs as a queer writer without suppressing the various phobias and paranoid constructions in his texts. 28 Cf. Späth 47-52; Schäfer 180-216. An earlier, colored edition of the Godzilla poems was printed on the “cover pages of the illustrated magazine Der Stern with photographed sex motives” (Brinkmann, Briefe 109).

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Brigitte Weingart Illustration 10 and 11: Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Godzilla (1968)

Source: Brinkmann, Standphotos 179 and 165

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Bastards Illustration 12: Paul Eluard and Man Ray, Facile (1935)

Source: The New Gallery of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Ohio, ed. Photographic Surrealism. Exhibition Catalogue. Cleveland, 1979. 37. Print.

Flicker Machine It cannot be said that all of Brinkmann’s works combining texts with pin-up or pornography quotations in some way complicate the topos of ‘woman as image,’ or undermine it by means of misplaced quotation, or are in other ways subversive. This is made evident for example in “Flicker Machine,” his contribution to the anthology Supergarde (1969), a publication that was comparable to ACID, although focusing on the German underground. The text is interrupted by strips of three images each, most of them photographic details of breasts or faces (laughing or having sex, glancing lasciviously and/or yearningly at the viewer), clearly cut out from pornographic or other magazines. Among these anonymous manifestations of sexual fantasy can be seen stars like Elvis or Marilyn Monroe (who is also mentioned in the text) as well as a transvestite, probably a film still. As ‘material’ images they relate to the “consciousness film” (Brinkmann, Briefe 137) evoked by the text, a notion that is also central in Burroughs’ writings. This “flicker machine” apparently projects the interior and exterior images of a subject—“He carried the whole town center in his head” (Brinkmann, “Flickermaschine” 85)29—who uses pills and

29 According to Sibylle Späth (66) also “an unpublished variation [exists] as a script for screen with the same title.”

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Brigitte Weingart lack of sleep for self-experimentation; a subject that in the text is associated with the life and especially the death of Marilyn Monroe. Brinkmann presents this ‘film in words’ as a loop—one minute, constantly repeated. This attempt to warp linear text into something that resembles the subject’s distorted perception, the flickering film, is assisted by the pictures. And yet the images in this text tend to remain ‘unreadable’ specifically because they do not function as illustrations but rather as a visual analogy. The deliberate confusion of the text refuses to anchor the meaning of the images (which, according to Barthes, would be the role of the caption). Ultimately, the images function as signifiers for the sexual and the trivial; to understand them as an implicit commentary on the connection between imagery and fetishization (like the fragmented body images on the cover of ACID) requires a reading that contextualizes the text within the wider framework of Brinkmann’s sexual poetics. Such a reading, however, is counteracted by the pathos of the text’s rhetorical and visual immediacy. Illustration 13: Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Flickermaschine (1969)

Source: Brinkmann, “Flickermaschine” 85

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Bastards It is quite possible that Brinkmann knew the experimental film Flicker (1965-66) by the American avant-garde artist Tony Conrad while working on his Flicker Machine—at least by hearsay. This work, canonized today as a key work of structural film, earned its reputation not least of all because of the strong physical reactions it had caused in some of the viewers during its first screening. In a rhythmic succession of black and white screenshots, Flicker created a stroboscopic effect that directly addressed the viewers’ physiological perception without making a detour via content or narration—The medium is the massage indeed. “Vanille,” Brinkmann’s contribution to März publishers’ almanac März-Texte 1 (1969), also talks of “massaging” (122). McLuhan claimed that the medium is the ‘massage’ because of its physical effect on the recipient independent of content or ‘message;’ in “Vanille,” it reappears in the context of a performative plea for an aesthetics that mediates between surface and depth. “Everybody knows⎯only surfaces are ‘deep’!” says Brinkmann in the notes to “Vanille” (a poem not only inspired by a package of vanilla pudding, but also furnished with self-reflexive annotations) (142; cf. also Gemünden)—a clear allusion to the methods of Warhol and of pop art. Another example of ‘bastardization’ and hybrid genre,30 the text not only says a lot about imagery, but also about modern art history. Even though Brinkmann explicitly distances himself from some aspects of avant-garde strategy, his textimage arrangements demand an erratic, disruptive reading which contributes to the avant-garde goal of a ‘de-automatized’ reception. In tracing the poetological commentary that is widely dispersed throughout Brinkmann’s works it becomes clear that he is interested in a specific mode of address when using found material: the creation of a compelling surface rather than the mere implementation of a concept. Nevertheless, his methods risk making the obvious crossing of the high-low border into the dominant message, thereby obscuring the potentially more subtle text-image considerations—a problem that his methods share with predecessors like found poetry, objects trouvés, and readymades. Duchamp is indeed expressly recognized in “Vanille,” specifically for his notion that only the viewer “creates” the image (144, 143).31 Brinkmann seems to be aware of this risk since in “Vanille” he once again—referring to

30 Newspaper and magazine clippings—again, quotes of pin-ups literally create a ‘cheap’ sexualization effect—are combined with passages from poems which often merge into each other, with quotations from letters, diary entries and repeated dialogues from movies, with the respective clips at times fraying with and overlapping each other. 31 The poem itself talks about the objet trouvé—as it does about Campbell’s Soup (143, 122).

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Warhol—advocates the use of garbage (144),32 but not as a statement per se: garbage yes, but it has to be attractive. “Attractiveness” can be seen here as a category that Brinkmann picked up from pop art and its objects of everyday culture, since, contrary to simplistic characterizations, pop art did not ennoble absolutely everything that ‘can be found in the street’ but maintained a highly selective perspective. Underestimating pop texts as counter-discourses to cultural purity and grandiloquent literature misses out on the fact that their use of trivialities is in fact precisely calculated. Text-image relationships in pop turn out to be “flicker machines:” once set in motion, they highlight cultural boundaries and differing values, contributing to their mobility—without operating from an Archimedean point that is external to these relations (or off scene). Translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. “Cette vieille chose, l’art …” 1980. L’Obvie et l’Obtus: Essais critiques III. By Barthes. Paris, 1980. 181-8. Print. —. “Rhétorique de l’image.” Communications 4 (1964): 40-51. Print. Baßler, Moritz. Der deutsche Pop-Roman: Die neuen Archivisten. Munich, 2002. Print. Bohrer, Karl Heinz. Die gefährdete Phantasie, oder Surrealismus und Terror. Munich, 1970. Print. Briegleb, Klaus. 1968: Literatur in der antiautoritären Bewegung. Frankfurt a.M., 1993. Print. Brinkmann, Rolf Dieter. Briefe an Hartmut. 1974-75. Reinbek, 1999. Print. —. “Der Film in Worten.” ACID: Neue amerikanische Szene. 1969. Ed. Brinkmann and Ralf Rainer Rygulla. Reinbek, 1983. 38199. Print. —. “Flickermaschine.” Rpt. in Der Film in Worten: Prosa—Erzählungen—Essays—Hörspiele—Fotos—Collagen 1965-1974. By Brinkmann. Reinbek, 1982. 84-93. Print. —. “Godzilla.” Rpt. in Brinkmann, Standphotos 159-82. —. “Notiz.” Piloten: Neue Gedichte von Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. By Brinkmann. Cologne, 1968. 6-9. Print. —. “Notizen zu Frank Xerox.” Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. Ed. Maleen Brinkmann. Spec. issue of RowohltLiteraturMagazin 36 (1995): 56. Print.

32 For garbage in pop, see Schumacher, “From the garbage.”

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Bastards —. Rom, Blicke. Reinbek, 1979. Print. —. Standphotos: Gedichte 1962-1970. Reinbek, 1980. Print. —. “Vanille.” Mammut: März Texte 1969-1984. Ed. Jörg Schröder. Vol. 1. Herbstein, 1969. 106-44. Print. Burroughs, William S. “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin.” Re/ Search 4/5 (1982): 36. Print. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1990. New York, 2007. Print. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Limited Inc. By Derrida. Ed. Gerald Graff. Trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston, 1988. 1-24. Print. Eco, Umberto. “Kulturmutation. Über den Konflikt zwischen Schrift und Bild.” Interview by Elisabeth Schemla. Neue Rundschau 103.2 (1992): 139-47. Print. Eiblmayr, Sylvia. Die Frau als Bild: Der weibliche Körper in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Berlin, 1993. Print. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. “Baukasten zu einer Theorie der Medien.” Kursbuch 20 (Mar. 1970): 159-86. Print. Fiedler, Leslie A. Cross the Border—Close the Gap. New York, 1972. Print. —. “The New Mutants.” Partisan Review XXXII.4 (Fall 1965): 50525. Print. Gemünden, Gerd. “The Depth of the Surface, or, What Rolf Dieter Brinkmann Learned from Andy Warhol.” The German Quarterly 68.3 (Summer 1995): 235-50. Print. Goetz, Rainald. “Was ist ein Klassiker.” Hirn. By Goetz. Frankfurt a.M., 1986. 22-5. Print. Hebdige, Dick. “In Poor Taste: Notes on Pop.” Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. By Hebdige. New York, 1988. 120. Print. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. 1766. Trans. Edward Allen McCormick. Baltimore, 1984. Print. Linck, Dirck. “‘Liking things:’ Über ein Motiv des Pop.” Linck and Mattenklott 125-60. Linck, Dirck, and Gert Mattenklott, eds. Abfälle: Stoff- und Materialpräsentation in der deutschen Pop-Literatur der 60er Jahre. Hannover, 2006. Print. Lupton, Ellen, and J. Abbott Miller. “McLuhan/Fiore: Massaging the Message.” Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design. Ed. Lupton and Miller. London, 1999. 91-101. Print. Malanga, Gerard. “Bewegte Bilder einfrieren.” Interview by Christoph Heinrich. Andy Warhol Photography. Ed. Hamburger Kunsthalle and The Andy Warhol Museum Pittsburg. Thalwil-Zürich, 1999. 115-22. Print.

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Brigitte Weingart Mannoni, Octave. “‘Je sais bien … mais quand même.’ La croyance.” Les Temps Modernes 19.212 (1964): 1262-86. Print. McLuhan, Marshall. “A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media.” Interview by Eric Norden. Playboy (Mar. 1969): 53+. Print. —. Die magischen Kanäle—Understanding Media. 1964. Dresden, 1995. Print. McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. 1967. Prod. Jerome Agel. San Francisco, 1996. Print. McLuhan, Marshall, and George B. Leonard. “The Future of Sex.” Sexing the Maple: A Canadian Sourcebook. Ed. Richard Cavell and Peter Dickinson. Mississauga, 2006. 103-12. Print. Miller, J. Hillis. Illustration. London, 1992. Print. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture.” Inter/disciplinarity: Art Bulletin 77.4 (Dec. 1995): 540-4. Print. —. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago, 1994. Print. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18. Print. Rose, Phyllis. “Literary Warhol.” Yale Review 79.1 (Autumn 1989): 21-33. Print. Russell, Jamie. Queer Burroughs. New York, 2001. Print. Schäfer, Jörgen. Pop-Literatur: Rolf Dieter Brinkmann und das Verhältnis zur Populärkultur in der Literatur der sechziger Jahre. Stuttgart, 1998. Print. Schulze, Holger. Das aleatorische Spiel. Munich, 2001. Print. Schumacher, Eckhard. “From the garbage, into The Book: Medien, Abfall, Literatur.” Sound Signatures: Pop-Splitter. Ed. Joachim Bonz. Frankfurt a.M., 2001. 190-213. Print. —. Gerade eben jetzt: Schreibweisen der Gegenwart. Frankfurt a.M., 2003. Print. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. “Reconsidering Erotic Photography: Notes for a Project of Historic Salvage.” Photography at the Dock, Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices. By Solomon-Godeau. 3rd ed. Minneapolis, 1997. 220-37. Print. Späth, Sibylle. Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. Stuttgart, 1989. Print. Strauch, Michael. Rolf Dieter Brinkmann: Studien zur Text-Bild-Montagetechnik. Tübingen, 1998. Print. Tyler, Parker. “What Sex Really Is or, Name It and You Can Have It.” Evergreen Review 12.58 (1968): 18-21. Print. Trans. as “Männer, Frauen und die übrigen Geschlechter oder: Wie es euch gefällt, so könnt ihr es haben.” Trans. Herbert Graf. ACID: Neue amerikanische Szene. Ed. Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Ralf Rainer Rygulla. Darmstadt, 1969. 250-65.

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Bastards Ullmaier, Johannes. Von ACID nach ADLON: Eine Reise durch die deutschsprachige Popliteratur. Mainz, 2001. Print. Voßkamp, Wilhelm, and Brigitte Weingart, eds. Sichtbares und Sagbares: Text-Bild-Verhältnisse. Cologne, 2005. Print. Weingart, Brigitte. “Sehtextkommentar: Zu den Bilderschriften und Schriftbildern Ferdinand Kriwets.” Textbild—Bildtext: Aspekte der Rede über Hybride. Ed. Dirck Linck and Stefanie Rentsch. Freiburg, 2007. 85-116. Print. Wetzel, Michael. “Verführerische Bilder: Zur Intermedialität von Gender, Fetischismus und Feminismus.” Der Entzug der Bilder: Visuelle Realitäten. Ed. Wetzel and Herta Wolf. Munich, 1994. 333-54. Print. Willberg, Hans Peter. Buchkunst im Wandel: Die Entwicklung der Buchgestaltung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Frankfurt a.M., 1984. Print. Williams, Linda. “Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornography and the ‘Carnal Density of Vision.’” Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video. Ed. Patrice Petro. Bloomington, 1995. 3-41. Print. Wittstock, Uwe, ed. Roman oder Leben: Postmoderne in der deutschen Literatur. Leipzig, 1994. Print. Wolf, Reva. Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s. Chicago, 1997. Print. Young, Dudley. “Are the Days of McLuhanacy Numbered?” New York Times 8 Sept. 1968: n. pag. Print.

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AUTHORS Balke, Friedrich, Prof. Dr., History and Theory of Artificial Worlds, Faculty of Media, University of Weimar, Germany Bartz, Christina, Prof. Dr., Television and Digital Media, Institute for Media Studies, University of Paderborn, Germany Behrend, Heike, Prof. Dr., Institute for African Studies, University of Cologne, Germany Beilenhoff, Wolfgang, Prof. Dr., International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy, University of Weimar, Germany Ellrich, Lutz, Prof. Dr., Media Studies, Institute for Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of Cologne, Germany Epping-Jäger, Cornelia, Dr., Institute for German Language and Literature, Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany Fehrmann, Gisela, Dr., General Linguistics, Institute of Communication Studies, University of Bonn, Germany Fohrmann, Jürgen, Prof. Dr., German Literature and Literary Studies and Rector of the University of Bonn, Germany Hüser, Rembert, Prof. Dr., Center for German and European Studies, University of Minnesota, U.S.A. Jäger, Ludwig, Prof. Dr., German Philology, Institute for Language and Communication Studies, RWTH Aachen University, Germany Krause, Marcus, M.A., Institute for German Language and Literature, Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany Linz, Erika, Dr., German Linguistics, Faculty of Language, Literature and Media Studies, University of Siegen, Germany

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Authors

Löffler, Petra, Dr., Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies, University of Vienna, Austria Otto, Isabell, Prof. Dr., Media Studies, Department of Literature, University of Konstanz, Germany Pichon, Brigitte, Dr., Literary Theory, Cultural Studies and American Studies, Faculty of Language, Literature and Media Studies, University of Siegen, Germany Pompe, Hedwig, PD Dr., Institute for German Literature, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Bonn, Germany Rudnytsky, Dorian, Freelance Translator (Art, Music, Cultural Studies), Germany Schneider, Irmela, Prof. Dr., Media Studies, Institute for Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of Cologne, Germany Scholz, Leander, Dr., International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy, University of Weimar, Germany Schumacher, Eckhard, Prof. Dr., German Literature and Literary Theory, Institute for German Philology, University of Greifswald, Germany Schüttpelz, Erhard, Prof. Dr., Media Theory, Faculty of Language, Literature and Media Studies, University of Siegen, Germany Stauff, Markus, Dr., Media and Culture, Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Voßkamp, Wilhelm, Prof. em. Dr., German Literature and Literary Studies, University of Cologne, Germany Weingart, Brigitte, Dr., Institute for German Literature, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Bonn, Germany Wetzel, Michael, Prof. Dr., Institute for German Literature, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Bonn, Germany

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