From Building Blocks to Radical Construction: West German Media Theory since 1984

Abstract

1. Here I am bracketing (at least) three major theoretical constructions with implications: Oskar Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniels, and Assenka Oksilof, fwd. Miriam Hansen (Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1993), originally published in 1972; the updated systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr. with Dirk Baecker, fwd. Eva M Knodt (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995) originally published in German in 1984; and, of course, Jtirgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984-1987), originally published in German in 1981. All three are ultimately concerned not primarily with media, but with larger social constructions that implicate media. Kluge's concept of an oppositional public sphere focused less on television than on film, and, as such, has been analyzed in detail by Miriam Hansen, Alexander Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere: The Construction Site of Counter-History, Discourse 6 (Fall 1983). Luhmann's systems theory presents a terminological problem: to Luhmann, the technological manifestations we commonly refer to as are epiphenomena compared to his analysis of media discourse through such concepts as love, money, religion, etc. Finally, Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action while striking a slightly less pessimistic note vis-&-vis the mass than the traditional Frankfurt School had done, nevertheless sees technological mass as at best a derivative, commercialized, corrupted version of the enlightenment-based ideal of unrestrained discourse articulated in the print media. Cf. Norbert Bolz, Am Ende der Gutenberg-Galaxis (Munich: Fink, 1993) 78. More importantly, all three of these works are not primarily concerned with theories of electronic media, and a discussion of the (limited) role of within their overall theoretical parameters is not feasible within this more narrowly defined context.