[rohrpost] German Media Theory: Too shy to admit its own greatness

[geert lovink]

http://netzmedium.de/2009/04/10/german-media-theory-too-shy-to-admit-its-own-greatness/

German Media Theory: Too shy to admit its own greatness

Published by Theo Röhle on April 10, 2009 in Academia and Theorie

First thought: „Wow, what a great line-up.“ Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht,  
Friedrich Kittler, Geert Lovink, Irmela Schneider, Erhard Schüttpelz  
and Hartmut Winkler – they will all be at the University of Siegen on  
April 22.

Second thought: „Wow, what a great nonsense.“ All these brilliant  
people are actually coming together in order to discuss whether German  
media studies are on a „Sonderweg“ – a way that somehow sets it apart  
from media studies in other countries. The most pressing problem  
German media studies are faced with according to the announcement:  
Although „scholars all over the world measure themselves against  
German publications […] German media scholars have troubles  
acknowledging their own supremacy.“

Ever since I moved back from Sweden to Germany, the peculiarities of  
German academia have never ceased to amaze me. Especially the fact  
that Germany seems to voluntarily shut itself off a lot of the  
international discussions. Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK, the US,  
even Austria – they all appear to be engaged in a productive common  
discourse, but Germany proceeds on largely independent trajectories.  
Only sometimes, someone decides to translate some text and the  
discourses are joined for a moment, only to drift off into different  
directions again.

A good example is Ganaele Langlois’ excellent dissertation “The  
Technocultural Dimensions of Meaning”, where she develops a „mixed  
semiotics“ framework inspired by Guattari in order to analyse Amazon  
and the MediaWiki software. In her argument, she covers a lot of  
theoretical ground by referring to Kittler and Gumbrecht (and  
Heidegger), but for the more concrete and up-to-date discussions, she  
moves on towards Latour, Galloway, Lessig and Manovich – as one would  
expect in the international discourse.

Obviously, there are plenty of potential points of connection between  
her argument and current debates in German media studies. It would  
certainly be interesting to see the fruitful discussions evolving out  
of such encounters. But what stands in the way for them is simply the  
lack of English translations of current German texts. Talk about  
German “supremacy” hardly seems like the right kind of attitude to  
make these encounters happen. It appears to me that it is not so much  
the false modesty of German scholars that is at the root of this gap  
but rather the self-induced isolationism of German academia.

The announcement in its entirety (as my own limping attempt at  
translating the entwined German academic language):

Without exaggeration the research areas ‘Mediengeschichte’ [media  
history] and ‘Medientheorie’ [media theory] can be described as  
idiosyncratic developments of the German  
‘Kulturwissenschaften’ [cultural studies]. Therefore, scholars with  
related interests all over the world measure themselves against German  
publications. Despite this, there is a persistent belief at German  
universities that media theory’s ‘Mecca’ just has to be somewhere  
abroad. For Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University) this  
inadequate modesty is a display of the effects of, among others,  
intercultural provincialism. For if German media scholars are already  
having troubles acknowledging their own supremacy, they would probably  
consider it outright unthinkable that a research direction that  
fascinates them does not even exist in many other national academic  
cultures.