Geert Lovink
pdf (148 Kb)
Lately, in German speaking countries a “media philosophy” debate
has unfolded. If you fear you missed something, don’t worry.
Unfortunately, there is not much at stake. At least, the antagonists
have so far failed to make clear what the controversy over this
concept is all about - presuming there is one. From the outside
it looks a failed cockfight over non-existing institutional arrangements,
in a time of rising student numbers and shrinking education budgets.
Like all academic disciplines, philosophy is also confronted
with the rise of the computer. This has been the case for half
a century, but it is only now that the knowledge itself is being
produced and stored in networks and databases. Technology is
no longer an object of study for some, but alters studying in
general.
Some of you might be familiar with the work of the Vienna-based
philosopher Frank Hartmann. In 2000 I posted an online interview
to nettime with Frank (reprinted in Uncanny Networks), in which
he talked about media philosophy and how this emerging discipline
relates to Kittler’s media theory and the dirty little practice
of “net criticism”. Recently Frank Hartmann published
Mediologie (also in German). Like his previous Medienphilosophie,
it is written as a general introduction to current topics. Unlike
most of his continental colleagues, Frank Hartmann’s style
is free of hermeneutic exercises. In the following email dialogue
Frank summarizes his latest work and contextualizes the debate.
For some, media and networks are the latest fads that will fade,
thereby not affecting the “eternal” philosophical questions,
whereas others believe that the philosophical practice will indeed
be fundamentally transformed after the introduction of new media
is well and truly over.
In the Anglo-Saxon world the term “media philosophy” has
been compromised from the start - Imagologies, the cyber-hype
book from Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen, contributed substantially
to the derogation of the term. The tragic superficiality of Imagologies
proved once and for all that it is not enough to link up students
and scholars via email and satellite. As the Canadian communications
theorist and political economist Harold Innis realized, one’s
technics of practice - or “appraisal” of technology
- is peculiar to the medium of communication, and will change
according to the type of medium adopted. Human action, after
all, is an extension of media forms; for a critical, reflexive
practice to emerge, it is essential to go beyond the excitement
and hubris of being early adaptors. Praise of Technology is not
enough: readers expect philosophers to negate, to circumvent
society and its PR phrases, and not just to celebrate the latest.
Only radical futurism, such as the transhumanism, has been worth
debating. Speculative philosophies need to transcend the present
and explore unlikely futures and reject the temptation to extrapolate
the cool present. It is also not sufficient either to retreat
to the safe Gutenberg galaxies of critical theory. Media philosophy
has to take risks and cut across disciplinary borders. The “iconic
turn” debate as summarized by Hartmann can only be one of
many beginnings and proves just how difficult - and immature
- “pictorial thinking” is.
Hartmann’s new media analysis is free of fear and disdain.
Without becoming affirmative, he is keen to avoid “totalising” concepts
that try to explain all and exclude next to everything that doesn’t
fit into the newly carved-out discursive cave. One neither has
to be subjected to the Empire of Images, nor does one has to
flee it. Every day there are fresh challenges, from blogs, games
and wireless to ip-telephony, all set within Big Brother, SARS
and the Iraqi War. New media do not stop to surprise us researchers.
Tired critics are free to leave the stage and pursue other interests,
but that doesn’t mean the Media Question has been resolved.
It is all too human to take a break, switch profession and take
up parallel passions. Hartmann’s way is to stick around
and describe the media reality on its own merits. Philosophy
can provide us with outside references, but the outcome is little
more than the reproduction of the same. And even that is about
to come to an end, as we discuss below with reference to the
current situation of the university in Germany and the EU’s
efforts to enter the game of higher education as a transnational
commodity of interchange.
Deep incursions of real-time global media into everyday life
continue. There seems to be no end to the technology boom, despite
the latest bust. Media enter the realms of imagination and “reality” from
all sides, as Big Brother and similar reality TV programs demonstrate.
Infotainment has elements of both war and game, contributing
to what Paul Virilio termed the “militarization of civil
society”. In this fluid, transient world, people long for “ethics” and “values” and
dream back to the future of a society in which the individual
knows his or her place. Philosophy can be one of those pseudo
religions. In Infinite Thought, Alain Badiou calls for a return
to philosophy. He no longer wants philosophy to be subordinated
to a “multiplicity of language games”. Language is
not the absolute horizon of thought, so claims Badiou. He calls
for the return of an unconditional principle. How could we translate
this into media philosophy terms? Or should we rather dismiss
Badiou’s call because he looks down on the mediasphere -
as one would expect from a French 68 philosopher. According to
Badiou, “the world is submitted to the profoundly illogical
regime of communication” that “transmits a universe
made up of disconnected images, remarks, statements”. This
is the dilemma media philosophy faces. Should it return to something
stable or jump into the unknown and risk losing all ties with
the institutionalised knowledge? Nietzsche would certainly have
opted for the latter - but then Nietzsche himself has become
captured, framed and institutionalised like no other philosopher.
GL: You’re just back from a media philosophy conference
in Germany. What happened there? Why has it been so crucial to
draw up a new discipline? Can this drive solely be understood
by institutional politics or is there something more at stake?
FH: This was a small conference in Stuttgart. Concerning
media philosophy, it is significant that the discipline of design
is now entering a new stage. Media and computers are becoming
part of mainstream debates and teaching methodologies. There
are some anthologies published, there are new teaching positions.
It is quite interesting to observe that nowadays the discussion
is not so much about entitling this new discipline but how to
actually shape it. This is what is so crucial. Media philosophy
started as a frustration of sorts, which means that as far as
the topic of new media goes, one cannot simply address the tradition
of philosophy in order to obtain answers. Certainly there is
much valuable material in that tradition, but we will not necessarily
find answers for our situation, since whether we like it or not,
what we now have to address are completely new and different
questions. With new technologies, the “episteme” changes,
a new kind of thinking is under way. This should really be quite
a simple matter - as you noted in your introduction, the Canadian
media theorist Harold Innis was well aware of this over half
a century ago. But we must remember that the problem of media
philosophy is not only a theoretical or methodological one -
institutional reputations and academic careers are also at stake!
What we can state for now without any hesitation is that since
media technology changes our perception of the world, and therefore
the way we think and act, it is generally a good thing that philosophers
are picking up the topic of communications media. But similar
to your critique of Hubert Dreyfus” account on the Internet
- we need to question not only the fact that communications media
play a dominant role in the organization of social relations,
but more importantly, we need to critique the way this is done,
which is so often completely detached from the actual “net
condition”. Discussing the concept and the definition of
the term “media” and how it relates to some canonical
writings is not something I would not grant as very exiting at
the level of insight, primarily because it is about the philosophical
discipline or some school or another ascertaining itself. This
is what is happening nowadays, and whether you’ve asked
for it or not, like some Poltergeist Heidegger is back. Welcome
to the desert of repetition without difference!
GL: Perhaps the current lack of complexity within media
philosophy could also be the result of the effect decades of
a welfare state has had on philosophers. They can only start
thinking when there is a properly defined discipline that fits
neatly into the academic structures, including all its institutional
arrangements. There is not much “thinking on the fence” going
on. Apart from the question of whether a person needs to have
actual programming skills, there seems to be a complete lack
of “dangerous thinking” outside of the institutions.
It is only when media philosophy has been properly defined, and
its existence is authorized and hence legitimized, that people
will enter this field. Prior to that the central concept needs
to be loaded up with hermeneutic speculations while at the same
time it is sheltered against attacks from neighbouring tribes
that envy philosophy’s millennial history.
FH: I agree with your diagnosis that there is a certain
saturation, if you will, in the discourse on media philosophy,
but I also see a vast field emerging of a new kind of philosophical
investigation. On the one hand, there are these self-sustained
questions of the traditional approach, with all the institutional
power and the assumptions of what really matters in the discipline.
What are the incentives for someone in a tenured position to
change this and go for new topics? Really, why bother when by
the time you’ve reached your job as professor you’re
so inculcated into a largely corrupt feudalistic system of patronage?
What else can you be but exhausted and demoralized? I’m
more of an optimist than that, and there are significant institutional
changes afoot in any case.
On the other hand, there are new premises in our culture that
have been made possible by new technologies, and that matters
to philosophy. One cannot retreat into a world of classic texts
and negate the new mediasphere, as Debray calls it. There are
problems with our concept of knowledge, with semantics and information, “intelligent” machines
and the processing of data, and so forth. Dealing with these
new questions, one is closer to engagement and intervention than
to interpretation and hermeneutics. But you also have to cooperate
with other disciplines like the sociological field of technology
assessment, or go to a computer science lab and listen to what
programmers have to say about software agents, rdf-code and information
ontologies, or join a discussion on the effects of open source
in our culture - these are all contemporary issues which should
be placed at the centre of what is called media philosophy. Italian/Oxford
philosopher Luciano Floridi, who has recognized this new arrangement
that underpins media philosophy, said that there should be an
end to cloning academics, and a start toward preparing the critical
media literacy of citizens for our reflexive, informational society,
as Plato wanted.
Alas, German media philosophy has little more to offer than
yet another program for cloning academics. It seems that this
whole debate on media philosophy reveals little more than the
complete lack of philosophical analysis concerning media products
and media events, old and new. Most of the participants in this
debate have not even reached the state of their own presence
on the Web, not to speak of new publishing forms - they hold
hardly any internet skills beyond consuming Web content (with
the exception of two colleagues I would like to mention: Herbert
Hrachovec, who among other things installed a wiki-web at the
Vienna Institute of Philosophy: http://timaios.philo.at:8080/ph_wiki/FrontPage - and Joachim Koch, who published a Web-register of contemporary
philosophers: http://www.philosophers-today.com/index.html).
GL: What strikes me after having read the anthology on
German Media Philosophy is the absence of research programs or
even basic questions. The whole debate, if you may call it one,
revolves around the occupation of a term that antagonists guess
may have some importance in the near future. It’s dotcom
for philosophers. Besides such speculations, where do you see
research being done in this area? In her contribution, Barbara
Becker pointed at a dialogue between philosophers and media scholars
over the post-humanism issue. But that itself is an outcome of
conceptual speculation. What will the empiricists and pragmatists
do, once the concept wars are over? Is the Gutenberg background
of many philosophers a handicap in that respect? And would you
agree that media philosophy could be a hybrid and study both
old and new media?
FH: I suspect that the recent excitement with media philosophy
still relates to the struggle with metaphysics. What is meaning?
Who is speaking? Are media just neutral agents in the production
of sense? Do they just transport a message or also transform
it? Do they actually produce a semantic dimension? Thus the fascination
for the hardware aspects - traditional German philosophy focussed
on idealism and hermeneutics. And there is a trend in the recent
debate to correct the Kittler approach, which pointed out the
materialistic dimension of media, ignoring questions of signification
and issues of power within a socio-technical system. There is
also a claim for the dignity of discourse, and again, the attitude
towards McLuhan is mostly polemic, at least this is true for
the Habermas School. This kind of new debate anxiously leaves
out material aspects and media archaeology.
One problem is that the German language allows you to use the
term “medium” in a much more substantial way than it
is used in the French or English language. This is why German
media philosophy bears the connotation of being much more essentialist
than a philosophy of the media. So this makes it possible to
pursue questions like what is a medium?, how is it defined?,
how does it impact on the formation of our thoughts?, etc. Further
to this, European philosophers are trained to produce texts relating
to texts. The classical attitude is to “defend” the
thesis you have formulated in your text, and to “destroy” any
opposing argument. There is no dialogue, no lively thought -
even at workshops people do nothing else but read their prefabricated
texts to each other. The inbred discourse produced in this manner
is only of interest for the philosophers themselves.
It is a privilege of philosophers to discharge empirical research
and indulge into what you call conceptual speculations. When
it comes to a topic like the media, of course we have to address
the economical and political power of technologies that transform
our culture, and not just a concept. Drawing on the work of Innis,
Marshall McLuhan, whom I consider the first media philosopher,
first introduced reflections on this ontological shift. He pointed
out that writing texts is but one form of processing ideas, and
that new media culture points beyond this singular form, and
even beyond the medium of language itself. This certainly is
something a German philosopher does not want to hear. And yes,
it is the typographic cultural bias that also forms a barrier
to the transdisciplinary discourse that media philosophy should
be.
We can find a very good example of such a transdisciplinary
approach in the recent books of Régis Debray, who simultaneously
talks about the history of art and religion when he addresses
questions of transmission and mediation. To understand media
we have to go into the history of cultures, and what we find
there is not a better definition of “media” but instead
a better understanding of the “milieu”, the ambience
or the setting which in more than one way determines a culture
and its use of different media. To do research on this basis
does not stop once you’ve pointed at the hardware of communication.
One needs to investigate the intermediary functions of technology
and examine how these mental tools shape user’s visions
and cognitive capacities. This is an exciting heritage from McLuhan,
who saw media as “active metaphors in their power to translate
experience into new forms”. Because without such instances
of media translations of everyday experience and sensory perception,
technical media would never find their acceptance. Increasingly,
the challenge for businesses involved in marketing media technologies
is a challenge of media translation. Just take a look at the
squadrons of “cool hunters” swarming about the place,
desperate to report back on user uptakes of palm pilots, new
generation mobiles, fridges with inbuilt browsers that allow
you to restock your food, and the like.
GL: Are you suggesting that the metaphysical clouds that
surround the “media” concept in German-speaking circles
need to be blasted? It’s in a sense such a luxury to indulge
yourself in that ontological jargon, because the alternative
- the transient world of pop culture - seems so empty, so wary
of reflection and conceptualisation. The world outside of German
academia is pretty tough and cold, so detached from all these
micro differences between dead authors. Of course the world of
new media is exciting, because it’s changing at such a fast
pace. As you’ve suggested with your reference to “cool
hunters”, there is a lot at stake in that field. But it’s
not necessarily open to intellectual engagement.
FH: The point of any intellectual engagement is to never
stop questioning, no matter what agenda there is. Following the
approach of mediology, I certainly favour a materialistic model
over the metaphysical cloud. Mediology means to come up with
concrete research questions that could indeed be the needle to
pop this bubble called “media philosophy”. Rather than
having a precise definition of the term “medium”, I
imagine a raw mix of sociological, philosophical and semiotic
questions that deal with the problems of our technologically
advanced culture.
It is true that there is a clear antagonism between business
orientation and intellectual life. Perhaps nowadays the difference
between criticism and engagement derives more from this antagonism
than one might believe, because “thinking” the difference
does not make any difference. Neither does the cultural theorist’s
interpretation of difference. No, we should go beyond texts and
interpretations to come up with new ideas. Since I do not like
to take on the role of an expert, I should return the question:
how can we do this? A possible answer lies in the reflexive modalities
towards the way we teach, do research and the forms in which
we publish. These all consist of enlisting media technologies
in an array of situations whose problems are peculiar to the
instance of communication. So, to go beyond the impasse of media
philosophy involves addressing the contingencies of the media
situation.
GL: For all this bashing of media philosophy, it was
you who, in the year 2000, published a book called Media Philosophy.
You also own the www.medienphilosophie.net domain. Is it just
a bit ironic that you are rebelling against the very term that
you helped to promote? Why are you now more in favour of the
term mediology?
FH: Mainstream philosophy was and still is oblivious
to the topic of media, while media changed the world we live
in. I did not plan to establish a new discipline, I just wrote
a reconstruction of certain philosophical positions in relation
to this topic. And I share this interest with a group of philosophical
scholars, like Mike Sandbothe, Sybille Krämer and others from
the anthology you mentioned before.
With the expected tardiness of institutionalised thought, a
lot of academic colleagues have now discovered their way to media
philosophy. To be honest, I am not very interested in their discussions.
It is also not an alternative to lurk around and quote Deleuze.
The only intellectually stimulating approach I am able to recognize
is Peter Sloterdijk’s “spherology”, and he is
not really a mainstream philosopher or even close to those discussions
on media philosophy. But with his work in progress, Sloterdijk
sure makes the most profound attempt to philosophically approach
the topic of globalized communications.
Because I see “media philosophy” as a narrowing discourse
and because I am interested in the opposite, I adopted Régis
Debray’s term “mediology” for my latest publication.
Mediology fits quite well as an umbrella term for epistemological
questions (media philosophy), the use and the perception of media
(media aesthetics) and the technological and historical questions
in a wider sense (media archaeology).
GL: What do we gain there, compared to, for instance,
media theory? How does Régis Debray, who first came up with
the term mediology, see shortcomings within media studies?
FH: When in the 19th century new questions arose on a
new phenomenon named “society”, Auguste Comte coined
a new discipline and named it “sociology”. The 20th
century discovered “media” as a core topic, so why
should there not be a discipline like “mediology’?
But there is more to this concept than the issue of media. Debray
established mediology as a general science of the transmission
of cultural forms. It clearly relates to the theoretical tradition
of the Toronto School, namely Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan,
and tries to correct the shortcomings of a text-centred structuralist
tradition as well as those of mass communication studies, with
its roots in American “psychological warfare” think-tanks
and post-war sociology. Media and communication studies did not
produce much insight into what is going on with our culture,
since the research done in previous years clearly followed commercial
interests. Any critical counterpoint is totally missing. And
it is a sad fact that the European Commission, which became the
main sponsor of research done on the Information Society, forces
the rationalization of research within the limits of economic
interests. As for the national promotion of research, nowadays
it seems to be better to have a business plan than an intellectual
ambition. This sad state of affairs is hardly peculiar to Germany
or Europe, I know.
GL: Could the latest “media philosophy” fad
perhaps be explained by a growing sense of unease amongst philosophers
that the text, or the spoken word, delivered either in the form
of a dialogue or monologue, is about to lose its hegemony? In
Mediologie you wrote about the “iconic turn”, which
has been fiercely debated lately, in Germany and elsewhere.
FH: Your question points to what is there, beyond dealing
with words and texts, and could it still be called “philosophy’?
We have touched on this earlier, but let me make a few additional
points. It was Vilém Flusser who, in the age of video, first
speculated about new forms of philosophical expression. These
should not only be seen as the antagonism of images versus texts.
We now have software routines and synthetic images, as well as
sounds, that derive from handling data with certain algorithms.
First, this media revolution does not make language extinct:
but it will change it, like the printing press changed it before.
Second, we are in need for a meta-medium in order to comment
and reflect upon what is going on in another medium. The art
critic will do better to write about an exhibition or a concert,
and not create a new set of images or sounds. A philosophy of
computing will be written, not programmed. But then, third, we
live in a culture of “remediation”, as Jay Bolter and
Richard Grusin called it. We see images composed of other images
and texts, we hear sounds that are sampled and remixed. Visual
design, DJ-ing or programming are most certainly also a form
of philosophical reflection.
Obviously there is a post-linguistic quality in the new medial
forms of reflecting culture. It has already come to the attention
of pessimistic cultural critics like George Steiner (in Real
Presence), who acknowledges that the role of language and text
are no longer crucial for social reproduction. I think the problem
is not so much that philosophical reflection still exists in
the form of textuality. It is rather how to accept non-typographical
forms of transmission. When cultural theory started to put images
on the same level as texts, this was labelled as an “iconic
turn”. Ten years ago W.J.T. Mitchell (in Picture Theory)
came up with this methodological question of a second-order discourse
about pictures “without” recourse to language, and
he called it the concept of a “metapicture”, an interpretation
within the same medium. Now I would not say that medial hybridisation
never works, but as a picture will never be a text, texts and
meta-texts should not pretend to be anything else than texts.
It should be clear what their function is, and the context within
which they work. This again points to the “milieu” that
makes texts into what they are, a medium of intellectuality.
The early 90’s excitement about hypertext soon faded away.
What followed was the debate on the “iconic turn”.
Actually this topic has got quite a history. Take for example
the work of socialist reformer Otto Neurath, who in the 1920/30’s
was very well aware of the iconic turn in western culture and
tried to adopt it scientifically in a new form of picture language.
I published a book on this last year (http://www.neurath.at).
Information aesthetics will gain more importance in the future.
GL: With the acceptance of references to a few contemporary
French thinkers, media philosophy, as it appears out of this
anthology, seems to be quite inward looking, very “German” somehow.
There seems to be only a limited number of players. We all know
that today’s German theorists all read English, so it’s
not a matter of language skills. Aren’t people interested
in what’s going on elsewhere? Do people perhaps have the
idea that a philosophical program can be build up within the
safe borders of the nation state and its educational institutions?
Right now there are university strikes happening all over Germany.
Simultaneously, the BA-MA-PhD system is being introduced, which
will give students much more international mobility. And of course
the German universities also have their eye on the much sought
after market of students in Asia. Shouldn’t we involve such
big changes in the education system in the debate of how new
media should be taught and what foundations a possible media
philosophy should have?
FH: What makes this approach specific is the different
concept of the term “medium”. In defence of European
discourse, I have to stress the fact that we are confronted with
a very narrow-minded reception of cyberculture and the net as
an exclusively American thing. And sometimes we are perhaps just
fed up with the affirmative prophecies of MIT professors. Anglo-American
analytical philosophy also is a quite self-contained matter.
Besides this, English and French authors are widely read of course.
As you note, German and Austrian Universities are undergoing
profound changes at the moment - organizational and educational
ones. It seems we are about to overcome the disciplinary structures,
which are a heritage of the 19th century. Mobility of research
in all aspects is a prime topic. The European ministers of Education
adopted the so-called “Bologna process”, a reform of
higher education with the aim to establish a homogenous European
Higher Education Area by 2010 and to sponsor cultural and scientific
cooperation. At least this is the political rhetoric, and we
have to see what will come out of it.
While in the ‘68 revolt students wanted to change conservative
systems, their situation now is being changed by the system itself.
While access to higher education was largely free and open to
everybody, recently tuition fees were introduced. Cities close
to bankruptcy like Berlin have to make enormous cuts in their
university budgets. The university strikes are quite lame and
will not change much about this predicament.
The organizational changes in the education system certainly
hold chances for innovative approaches which do not fit into
the disciplinary framework. Likely contenders include gender
studies, cultural theory and maybe mediology. New forms of transdisciplinary
teachings are evolving, and new forms of studying, including
E-learning procedures. What about media philosophy? With the
growing economic pressure, resulting in shorter terms of studying,
the interest in a reflective approach is decreasing. To be attractive
and exiting, media philosophy should develop its own approach
to questions concerning postmodern culture. It should not only
function as a fig leaf covering the bareness of philosophy as
an old and partly outdated discipline. The question of how it
fits into the old knowledge structures really might be not as
forceful as it seems for careerist academics.
GL: In your book you’ve got an interesting chapter
about the “knowledge society”. Who are going to be
the future’s gate keepers and decide what is, and what is
not knowledge? In these times of rapid expansion of ICTs worldwide
(see: WSIS), the term is used in a rather friendly, inclusive
and somewhat blurry way. Knowledge is a term that philosophers
have dealt with for centuries. Can we perhaps expect a contribution
there? Everything can be stored as data and processed so that
it becomes information. But not every bit contains knowledge.
What socio-technical configuration do you see emerging to clarify
this issue? You indicate that images can also contain knowledge.
FH: Knowledge became a commodity ever since antecedents
of the dotcom business, like Diderot and his publisher, created
the business of enlightenment by selling the Encyclopédie
in 1752 on a subscription basis. Knowledge, and the access to
it, means business, it is tied to economic factors. To gain knowledge
has a price: books, computers, tuition fees, software, an Internet
account...and knowledge is a key factor for economic success.
But we live in knowledge capitalism, not in a knowledge society.
According to Jeremy Rifkin (The Age of Access), only 4 percent
of the employed people in the US are knowledge workers, but this
small group makes 51 percent of the income of all working people.
What is knowledge? Maybe the sociological approach to this question
will do better than the philosophical one. The philosopher would
fathom the meaning of the term, while the sociologist would relate
this term to the effects it has in culture and society. The term “knowledge
society” was also set against the technocratic vision of
an “information society”, and it holds the connotation
of autonomy, which is of philosophical relevance. Because while
within two or three decades the technology of our digital culture
might be history, the way we organize our technology and the
way we are programmed by it is not. The quality of our present
and future culture will depend on our capabilities to see what
is at stake. This is the philosophical challenge: how to deal
with the freedom of choices, with uncertainties, with ambivalence,
with errors, including the antagonists of knowledge-like religious
fanatics.
Especially because 2004 is the 200th anniversary of Kant’s
year of death, we will be flooded with journalistic crap on what
philosophy can and cannot do. Seriously, it could be very helpful
to work on a redefinition of enlightenment under conditions of
new media. To technically collect and store data does not mean
we gain knowledge. Purified data means information in a non-technical
sense, but only for a given purpose, and it still is not knowledge.
The outline for an alternative definition could be: knowledge
is the mastering of meta-code. If code defines how data gets
handled on a technical level, then meta-code (like belief systems,
ideologies, organizing principles) is the philosophically relevant
level.
This is how Otto Neurath saw the problem in 1946: “The
ordinary citizen ought to be able to get information freely about
all subjects in which he is interested, just as he can get geographical
knowledge from maps and atlases. There is no field where humanization
of knowledge through the eye would not be possible”. His
project was to visualize data for easier access, so he and his
team worked on the development of new tools.
GL: What could a “philosophy with images” look
like, after the iconic turn? Do you know about inspiring examples?
Will there still be a need for narrative structure? I know you’re
interested in web design and icons. One of the trends many have
speculated about is the disappearance of grand narratives (such
as the Hollywood feature film) and the rise of rhizomatic, hypertext
types of environments one can browse through. To some extent
we’re already facing a crisis of the book as the main storage
medium of knowledge, but I wouldn’t say that about film
and television. Formats in the pictorial industries remain rather
conservative. Perhaps navigating through the mediasphere itself
is what constitutes knowledge these days, the links between data
fragments - the “pattern recognition” not the works
themselves and their monumental shapes.
FH: There is this old thread on the Language of Thought
hypothesis and the debate on language acquisition and the evolution
of cognition (Michael Tomasello). It was given a new twist by
the rise of new media. Any post-typographic order does not necessarily
mean to bypass language in a “Pentecostal condition of universal
understanding and unity” (McLuhan), but a certain form of
typographic order and thereby old school literacy. What we have
to overcome methodologically is the shortcomings of Saussurean
semiology - the idea that all cultural expression is somehow
structured like a language. Mediology is more in the tradition
of Ernst Cassirer, who in the 1920’s defined man as an “animal
symbolicum”, by which he means that in using symbolic systems,
humans relate to each other, not to things in the world. This
was an important step in order to go beyond the philosophy of
representation. The meaning of a new mediasphere is a kind of
disposition which is not linear, but dynamic and relational.
It is best expressed within the network metaphor, as opposed
to the multimedia metaphor, because it is all about new forms
of organization within the symbolic systems. It would be shortsighted
to stop with the question about interfaces or the “language” of
new media.
You ask about the possibility of a new cultural poiesis. Well,
what kind of experiences is expressed in the old one? Clearly
those of the literate man of Western culture. This is the model
to think of the human “subject” in philosophy, a model
generated by the typographic era. We lack the imagination of
a poiesis because - all new media technologies included - we
still express ourselves using letters and numbers, i.e. symbols
of typographic reason (the alphanumerical code, as Flusser called
it. His vision, two decades ago, was to philosophise with video...).
In his exciting new study on the “myths of book culture” (http://www.mythen-der-buchkultur.de),
German media theorist Michael Giesecke votes for a cultural vision
of a new media ecology to integrate verbal, nonverbal, natural
and technical media.
Flusser pointed out that iconic culture actually is not a return
to imagination (the making of images) but a move forward into
calculation and computation - from graphosphere to videosphere
and now to the numerosphere of digital culture, to put it in
Debray’s terminology. In this sense Giesecke asks if the
new poiesis could be put in a “dialogue vision”, not
as a kind of return to face to face communication, but as an
integrative culture of information processing under conditions
of intensified transmission and feedback processes, including
data-flows within incompatible orders, as can be found in and
between plants, machines, and humans.
(edited by Ned Rossiter)
My previous interview with Frank Hartmann, posted on nettime,
June 16, 2000
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0006/msg00093.html
Frank Hartmann’s homepage: http://www.medienphilosophie.net/
Mediologie, Ansätze einer Medientheorie der Kulturwissenschaften,
Wien: Facultas Verlag/WUV, 2003.
Stefan Münker, Alexander Roesler, Mike Sandbothe (Hg.), Medienphilosophie,
Beiträge zur Klärung eines Begriffs, Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer Verlag, 2003.
http://mailbox.univie.ac.at/Frank.Hartmann/Medienphilosophie.gif
Review
links: http://www.sandbothe.net/124.html
Media philosophy program at the Bauhaus University, Weimar (Germany)
http://xyz.scc.uni-weimar.de/medien/philosophie/
Mike Sandbothe: “Was ist Medienphilosophie?” (lecture,
July 2003) http://www.sandbothe.net/346.html
Database of related online texts, compiled by Herbert Hrachovec
http://sammelpunkt.philo.at:8080/view/subjects/medcyberphil.html
