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

[tilman baumgärtel]

No offense to the writer of this, but maybe translating 
"Vorrangstellung" with "supremacy" (with all its unpleasant connotations 
of Third Reich etc) is part of the problem?

T.

geert lovink schrieb:
> 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.
>
>