Call for Papers: DFG Symposion in Media Studies
Date: 21.-24.September 2009
Location: 'Kutschstall im Haus der Brandenburgisch-Preußischen
Geschichte'
14467 Potsdam, Schlossstrasse 12, Germany
Topic: Media programs and the program of media
In 2009, the first in an open-ended series of Symposia in Media
Studies organized at the behest of the DFG, the Deutsche
Forschungsgesellschaft (German national society for scientific
research), will be held in Potsdam. In the coming years, Symposia in
Media Studies will be held every second year. The idea of the Symposia
is to foster the develompent of Media Studies (Medienwissenschaft) in
Germany as part of the humanities through a debate about key issues in
current and future research.
Participants are required to:
- hand in an abstract for a contribution to one of the four thematic
sections listed below (1 page) by March 31, 2009.
- submit the written manuscript of their contribution (no more than 30
pages) by June 30, 2009.
- act as respondents to one of the other contributions to the Symposion
- participate in discussions for the duration of the Symposion
- Further questions, as well as paper proposals, should be addressed
to: Prof. Dr. Joachim Paech (jopa...@aol.com)
Correspondence address:
Prof. Dr. Dieter Mersch
Universität Potsdam
Institut für Künste und Medien
Am Neuen Palais 10
14469 Potsdam
Tel: 0331 977 4160
mailto: dmer...@uni-potsdam.de
The first Symposion in Media Studies will addresss the topic of Media
Programs. The concept of program opens up a variety of productive
avenues for approaches to the concept of media itself. Traditionally,
programs have been understood as structures, patterns or forms of
temporal and discursive ordering in the arts and the mass media.
Programming situates media devices between symbolic and technical
registers. Anything that can be organized and articulated in a force
field of medium and form may be called programmable. We have now
reached a point where even live forms seem programmable, requiring an
approach to questions of program and programming that addresses issues
of gender and power along with issues of medium, form and technology.
Accordingly, the concept of program may be seen as programmatic for
media studies in general, a platform for a continuous reassessment of
the discipline in its relationship to the arts as well as other
disciplines in- and outside of the humanities.
Dividing the rich and field of connections between program and medium
into four major areas of inquiry, the Symposion proposes a two-day
schedule of four panels with four contributions per panel. The opening
night will be dedicated to a commented musical performance. In
addition, the Symposion will be accompanied by a thematic exhibition
of programs and artefacts relating to questions of programming in the
domain of music, curated by Elena Ungeheuer.
Section 1: Programs (Reponsible: Joachim Paech, Konstanz)
Section 1 focuses on programs as devices for announcing and
structuring religious, political, artistic and mass-mediated events.
Time and again, chiliastic expectations and political promises have
been laid down in the form of programs. Programs articulate claims to
power. Mechanically programmed production processes provide a model
for marketing programs such as catalogs and other forms of inventory.
Artists use programs to differentiate their work, museums present art
in the form of programs and programmatic catalogs. Transitory art
forms such as theater, film and music vitally depend on programs for
their presentation. Mass media distribute content through programs
that identify genres and formats and create patterns that help
audiences identify their content of coice. In fact, mass media depend
on programs so much that it is hard to imagine such media without
programs. Thus, radio and television appear in temporal sequences of
various forms of output, while printe programs make broadcast programs
accessible by transferring the temporal sequence into the spatial
layout of the printed schedule. The task of program schedules is to
reduce the improbability for a specific program to find ist audience
and to increase the probability that the reception and consumption of
a program at a given place and a given time actually takes place. In
that persepctive, programs are transformations or, to borrow Luhmann's
definition of the term, media" with specific operational tasks in the
process of mediated communication. The history of programs is largely
written by and with an eye to specific institutions (churches,
politicl parties, coroporations, groups of artists, etc.). Programs
thus raise a complex set of questions: How do programs organize socio-
cultural processes that in turn produce new programs? How do -
religious, political, artistic and mass media - programs structure
events that only become readable and perceptible as events through
programs? How have programs evolved over time in specific artistic and
mass media contexts? Is the program of Modernity a media program, and
how does the program in modernity affect, and inform, isues of gender?
Insystematic perspective this section focuses on approaches that study
the relationship between program and medium with an eye to the
question of how media program" the forms in which they appear, i.e.
whether through an articulation of independent elements in the sense
of Luhmann, or otherwise.
Section 2: What is programming? (responsible: Hartmut Winkler,
Paderborn)
Programming, understood as an activity, first brings to mind the
computer. People tell computers what to do. Computing presupposes
programming. But do programs necessarily have to be written by humans?
Programming always already involves programs, and some programs act on
their own. It is no coincidence that some types of computer programs
are called software agents". But if programs are symbolic constructs,
how can we analyzes them in terms of their performance"?
But it is not jus the software, but the technological basis, the
hardware, that raises some fundamenal issues. Taking the Berlin key"
as his example, Bruno Latour showed that material objects presuppose
and induce specific patterns of actions. Should technology best be
understood as a form of programming, then? Do material objects
determine patterns of use? If so, technological hardware would
actually be proramming the user rather than the other way around. And
how do we account for the unforeseen consequences of technology and
its uses? How does programming relate to intention and factual outome?
More generally, the question of programming raises the question of
agency and of the validity of theoretical models of social action and
competence. How can we discuss programming in terms of power? How
powerful is the programmer? It is no coincidence that computer
programs always take the form of imperatives. Program and execution
are separate areas. Cybernetics as a discipline or a field makes
claims of control" and steering" even through its title. Does the
question of programming imply a return of the old logic of maser and
servant, of intellectual and physical labor? But then again, agency
appears to be distributed and even dispersed between humans and
technology.
And finally, expanding the view to include other media: Are programs
in media other than the computer necessarily related to specific roles
and assignments in terms of agency? Are there counter-programs that
question and undermine the power claims related to, and implied in,
programs?
And finally it seems as if programming did not necessarily require
consciousness and planning. Are there unconscious forms of
programming", such as convention and habit? Are genes a form of
programming? Are humans programmed by their instincts? If so, how? Is
programming a metaphor for biological processes, or is there a
litteral sense to the application of programming" to nature"? And
how do the semiotic and technical devices of programming feed back
into the unconscious registers of programming?
Section 3: What can be programmed? (responsible: Lorenz Engell, Weimar)
Only worlds that we can foresee can be programmed. Only worlds that
can be programmed can be construed and inhabited in a humane
fashion." (Max Bense, 1969)
Today, we can probably no longer wholeheartedly subscirbe to Max
Benses decisive statement, and the wording of the phrase certainly
raises questions. Despite all the current talk about the programm of
life", any direct identification of the humane" with the
programmable" would raise significant objections. But the
idenditifaction of programmable" and foreseeable" seems equally
questionable, if not out of date. We have long reach a state where
computer programs systematically generate unforseen outcomes that
transcend the framework of structured necessity. And finally we should
not neglect the fact that constructing and programming are two
substantially different ways of world-making, as different as ruse is
from knowledge. Rather than being identical, they intersect and,
perhaps, complement each other. But the deeper meaning of Bense's
statement lies in its value as a polemical document. Bense's statement
reminds us that, at one point in history, programming was a heroic
mode of defense against a wild, unforeseeable, uncontrollable and
inhumane world, a world that needed to be brought under control, much
as, or so Bense continues, the metaphorical needed to be brought under
the control of mathematics and the problematic under the control of
the systematic.
But whatever became of this wild world and Bense's heroic gesture of
defense in the last fourty-plus years? We can no longer easily
determine the boundaries of the programmable. For some time now, for
instance, the systematic, the inhabitable world, and the program of
intelligence have themselves become the problem, and metaphors now
emerge from mathematics rather than being reigned in by mathematics.
The unforeseeable and the inhumane have long become programmable.
Experiments in programmed creativity make it to museums as easily as
artefacts that keep on insisting on the resilience and the very
materiality of the material. Even in politics and the economy, in
pleasure and love, we tend to carefully delineate and preserve, as if
we did not know better, residual spheres of non-programmable emergence
and contingency. The concept of the game has become the very essence
of the program. But if that is true what, then, is the specific
status, technologically, ontologically, and aesthetically, of the
programmable? What does the programmable diverge from, how and in
relation to what does it unfold?
Or have we reached a stage where we can no longer define the
programmable by delineating its outer reaches? If so, the world of the
programmable could only be analyzed in terms of its internal
structures and elements, as a juxataposition and opposition of
different competing programs whose interaction and mutual production
would form a kind of immanent outside of the programmable within the
world of the program itself. What kind of a world would this be?
But then again, we can try to understand programming as a form of
ordering in a double sense. What we need to study, then, are orderings
of orderings, or rather of orders that have to be followed, that
generate consequences and thus create linear time and feedback. The
key to an understanding of the programmable, then, would be
temporality and temporalization, and the programmable would find its
boundary in that which resists temporalization, the fleeting instant
and the eternal. Accordingly, we would need to contrast program and
project and study their relationship. Spatial orderings could appear
to be forms of programs, of programming behavior and movement, but
they would still function as supplements, or complements, to the
programmable.
But then, the reverse is possible, too: Only programs are
programmable. Only that which already has the form of a program before
being programmed can be programmed. If programs function as forms,
i.e. as articulations of independent events, then programs depend on
media in and through which they articulate a chain of events. But
then, media have always already pre-structured these events, however
loosely. Accordingly, media and programs may be differenciated, but
they can still be seamlessly converted into each other. If so, the
perparatory production of programmability would constitute the key
function of media. The programmable would be nothing less than
mediality itself, and vice versa.
Section 4: The Research Program of Media Studies [Medienwissenschaft]
(responsible: John Durham Peters (Department of Communication
Studies), University of Iowa, USA)
Media Studies has a long past but a short history, as Ebbinghaus
supposedly once said of psychology. Precipitously coming together in
the late twentieth century, the academic field of media studies has
been fiercely interdisciplinary in its ambitions and voracious in its
interdisciplinary borrowings. For some of its practitioners, media
studies is not just one among many competing fields: it is a new meta-
field that promises to engulf and govern several older fields by
bringing together the natural and the social sciences, the humanities
and the fine arts, mathematics and philosophy. On some campuses
around the world, departments of media studies recreate the
intellectual and disciplinary diversity once found across several
faculties. If media are indeed fundamental to political and cognitive
order, then media studies endorses a vision of history, culture, and
society that promises to rewrite our understanding of the past,
present, and future.
The last thing to be secured in a science is its foundation, quipped
Alfred North Whitehead, and media studies has reached a point in which
it needs to shore up and secure its intellectual resources and
disciplinary identity. This section proposes to make a critical
inventory of the traditions and opportunities as well as pitfalls
found in the new blossoming of media studies. To what extent is there
a canon of media studies? What are its central methods and
questions? What is the legitimacy of the practice of rereading older
authors and texts, retroactively baptizing them as media scholars? To
what degree are different traditions of scholarship ripe for
interdisciplinary dialogue with media studies? To what degree can
media studies in the German language exist apart from its strong
philological method and philosophical inheritance? To what degree may
we incorporate diverse intellectual traditions into the ambit of media
studies-such as German idealism, psychoanalysis, American pragmatism,
the Frankfurter Schule, Canadian political economy, art history, the
sociology of media and Publizistik, Foucaultian archaeology, feminist
and critical race analysis, etc.? To what degree is the intellectual
heritage of media studies a wish-list or fantasy of noble ancestors?
What principles can help produce a useable past for media studies that
is equal to the ambition and intellectual excitement of the field?
Some specific areas for consideration:
Classics: orality and literacy, the Homer problem,
Comparative religion: ritual practice as cosmological media
History: the record and its transmission as a media problem
Literature: the seedbed of modern media studies
Law: inscription, filing, and documentation practices
Mathematics: paper-machines as the context of mathematical production
Medicine: the body as fundamental datum of media studies
Music: performance, notation, and reproduction
Theology: "media salutis"
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