[spectre] cfp: media programs and the program of media

[Geert Lovink]

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 (Jopaech at 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: dmersch at 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"