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.
--
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