Hans Enzensberger: Constituents of a theory of the MediaWith the development of the electronic media, the industry that shapes consciousness has become the pace-setter for the social and economic development of societies in the late industrial age. It infiltrates all other sectors of production, takes over more and more directional and control functions, and determines the standard of the prevailing technology. In lieu of normative definitions, here is an incomplete list of new developments that have emerged in the last twenty years: news satellites, color television, cablerelay television, cassettes, videotape, videotape recorders, videophones, stereophony, laser techniques, electrostatic reproduction processes, electronic highspeed printing, composing and learning machines, microfiches with electronic access, printing by radio, time-sharing computers, data banks. All these new forms of media are constantly forming new connections both with each other and with older media such as printing, radio, film, television, telephone, teletype, radar, and so on. They are clearly coming together to form a universal system. (p. 62)
The Freedom of Media So far there is no Marxist theory of the media. There is therefore no strategy one can apply in this area. Uncertainty, alternations between fear and surrender, marks the attitude of the socialist left to the new productive forces of the media industry. The ambivalence of this attitude merely mirrors the ambivalence of the media themselves without mastering it. It could only be overcome by releasing the emancipatory potential that is inherent in the new productive forcesÑa potential that capitalism must sabotage just as surely as Soviet revisionism, because it would endanger the rule of both systems.... The open secret of the electronic media, the decisive political factor, which has been waiting, suppressed or crippled, for its moment to come, is their mobilizing power. When I say mobilize I mean mobilize. In a country that has had direct experience of fascism (and Stalinism) it is perhaps still necessary to explain, or to explain again, what that meansÑnamely, to make men more mobile than they are. As free as dancers, as aware as football players, as surprising as guerrillas. (p. 63)
For the first time in history, the media are making possible mass participation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves. Such a use of them would bring the communications media, which up to now have not deserved the name, into their own. In its present form, equipment like television or film does not serve communication but prevents it. It allows no reciprocal action between transmitter and receiver; technically speaking, it reduces feedback to the lowest point compatible with the system. This state of affairs, however, cannot be justified technically. On the contrary. Electronic techniques recognize no contradiction in principle between transmitter and receiver. Every transistor radio is, by the nature of its construction, at the same time a potential transmitter; it can interact with other receivers by circuit reversal. The development from a mere distribution medium to a communications medium is technically not a problem. It is consciously prevented for understandable political reasons. The technical distinction between receivers and transmitters reflects the social division of labor into producers and consumers, which in the consciousness industry becomes of particular political importance. (pp. 63-64)
"Radio must be changed from a means of distribution to a means of communication. Radio would be the most wonderful means of communication imaginable in public life, a huge linked systemÑthat is to say, it would be such if it were capable not only of transmitting but of receiving, of allowing the listener not only to hear but to speak, and did not isolate him but brought him into contact. Unrealizable in this social system, realizable in another, these proposals, which are, after all, only the natural consequences of technical development, help towards the propagation and shaping of that other system." [Berthold Brecht, Theory of Radio (1932)]
George Orwell's bogey of a monolithic consciousness industry derives from a view of the media that is undialectical and obsolete. The possibility of total control of such a system at a central point belongs not to the future but to the past. With the aid of systems theory, a discipline that is part of bourgeois scienceÑusing, that is to say, categories that are immanent in the systemÑit can be demonstrated that a linked series of communications or, to use the technical term, a switchable network, to the degree that it exceeds a certain critical size, can no longer be centrally controlled but only dealt with statistically. This basic "leakiness" of stochastic systems admittedly allows the calculation of probabilities based on sampling and extrapolations; but blanket supervision would demand a monitor bigger than the system itself. But supervision on the basis of approximation can only offer inadequate instruments for the self-regulation of the whole system in accordance with the concepts of those who govern it. It postulates a high degree of internal stability. If this precarious balance is upset, then crisis measures based on statistical methods of control are useless. Interference can penetrate the leaky nexus of media, spreading and multiplying there with the utmost speed resonance. The regime so threatened will in such cases, insofar as it is still capable of action, use force and adopt police or military methods. (pp. 64-65)
The liberal superstition that in political and social questions there is such a thing as pure, unmanipulated truth seems to enjoy remarkable currency within the socialist left. It is the unspoken basic premise of the manipulation thesis. (p. 66)
The electronic media do away with cleanliness; they are by their nature "dirty." That is part of their productive power. In terms of structure, they are antisectarianÑa further reason why the left, insofar as it is not prepared to reexamine its traditions, has little idea what to do with them. The desire for a cleanly defined "line" and for the suppression of "deviations" is anachronistic and now serves only one's own need for security. It weakens one's own position by irrational purges, exclusions, and fragmentation, instead of strengthening it by rational discussion. (p. 67)
The obverse of this fear of contact with the media is the fascination they exert on left-wing movements in the great cities. On the one hand, the comrades take refuge in outdated forms of communication and esoteric arts and crafts instead of occupying themselves with the contradiction between the present constitution of the media and their revolutionary potential; on the other hand, they cannot escape from the consciousness industry's program or from its esthetic. This leads, subjectively, to a split between a puritanical view of political action and the area of private "leisure"; objectively, it leads to a split between politically active groups and subcultural groups. If the socialist movement writes off the new productive forces of the consciousness industry and relegates work on the media to a subculture, then we have a vicious circle. For the underground may be increasingly aware of the technical and esthetic possibilities of the disk, of videotape, of the electronic camera, and so on, and systematically exploring the terrain; but it has no political viewpoint of its own and therefore mostly falls a helpless victim to commercialism. (pp. 67-68)
Thus, every use of the media presupposes manipulation. The most elementary processes in media production, from the choice of the medium itself to shooting, cutting, synchronization, dubbing, right up to distribution, are all operations carried out on the raw material. There is no such thing as unmanipulated writing, filming, broadcasting. The question is therefore not whether the media are manipulated, but who manipulates them. A revolutionary plan should not require the manipulators to disappear; on the contrary, it must make everyone a manipulator. All technical manipulations are potentially dangerous; the manipulation of the media cannot be countered, however, by old or new forms of censorship, but only by direct social control, that is to say, by the mass of the people, who will have become productive. (pp. 68-69)
The new media are egalitarian in structure. Anyone can take part in them by a simple switching process. The programs themselves are not material things and can be reproduced at will. In this sense the electronic media are entirely different from the older media like the book or easel painting, the exclusive class character of which is obvious. Television programs for privileged groups are certainly technically conceivableÑclosed-circuit televisionÑbut run counter to the structure. Potentially, the new media do away with all educational privileges and thereby with the cultural monopoly of the bourgeois intelligentsia. This is one of the reasons for the intelligentsia's resentment against the new industry. As for the "spirit" that they are endeavoring to defend against "depersonalization" and "mass culture," the sooner they abandon it the better. (p. 69)
ÊA further characteristic of the most advanced mediaÑprobably the decisive oneÑconfirms this thesis: their collective structure. For the prospect that in the future, with the aid of the media, anyone can become a producer, would remain apolitical and limited were this productive effort to find an outlet in individual tinkering. Work on the media is possible for an individual only insofar as it remains socially and therefore esthetically irrelevant. The collection of transparencies from the last holiday trip provides a model of this. (p. 70)
Any socialist strategy for the media must, on the contrary, strive to end the isolation of the individual participants from the social learning and production process. This is impossible unless those concerned organize themselves. This is the political core of the question of the media. It is over this point that socialist concepts part company with the neoliberal and technocratic ones. Anyone who expects to be emancipated by technological hardware, or by a system of hardware however structured, is the victim of an obscure belief in progress. Anyone who imagines that freedom for the media will be established if only everyone is busy, transmitting and receiving, is the dupe of a liberalism that, decked out in contemporary colors, merely peddles the faded concepts of a preordained harmony of social interests. In the face of such illusions, what must be firmly held onto is that the proper use of the media demands organization and makes it possible. Every production that deals with the interests of the producers postulates a collective method of production. It is itself already a form of self-organization of social needs. Tape recorders, ordinary cameras, and movie cameras are already extensively owned by wage earners. The question is why these means of production do not turn up at factories, in schools, in the offices of the bureaucracy, in short, everywhere where there is social conflict. By producing aggressive forms of publicity that were their own, the masses could secure evidence of their daily experiences and draw effective lessons from them. Communication networks that are constructed for such purposes can, over and above their primary function, provide politically interesting organizational models. In the socialist movements the dialectic of discipline and spontaneity, centralism and decentralization, authoritarian leadership and antiauthoritarian disintegration has long ago reached deadlock. Network-like communications models built on the principle of reversibility of circuits might give indications of how to overcome this situation a mass newspaper, written and distributed by its readers, a video network of politically active groups. (pp. 71-72)
The attactive power of mass consumption is based not on the dictates of false needs, but on the falsification and exploitation of quite real and legitimate ones without which the parasitic process of advertising would be ineffective. A socialist movement ought not to denounce these needs, but take them seriously, investigate them, and make them politically productive. That is also valid for the consciousness industry. The electronic media do not owe their irresistible power to any sleight-of-hand but to the elemental power of deep social needs that come through even in the present depraved form of these media. This needÑit is a utopian oneÑis there. It is the desire for a new ecology, for a breaking down of environmental barriers, for an esthetic not limited to the sphere of "the artistic." These desires are notÑor are not primarilyÑinternalized rules of the game as played by the capitalist system. They have physiological roots and can no longer be suppressed. Consumption as spectacle isÑin parody formÑthe anticipation of a utopian situation. (pp. 72-73)
The inadequate understanding Marxists have shown of the media and the questionable use they have made of them has produced a vacuum in Western industrialized countries into which a stream of non-Marxist hypotheses and practices has consequently flowed. From the Cabaret Voltaire of the Dadaists to Andy Warhol's Factory, from the silent film, comedians to the Beatles, from the first comic-strip artists to the present managers of the underground, the apolitical have made much more radical progress in dealing with the media than any grouping of the left (exception: MŸnzenberg). Innocents have put themselves in the forefront of the new productive forces on the basis of mere intuitions with which communismÑto its detrimentÑhas not wished to concern itself. Today this apolitical avant-garde has found its ventriloquist and prophet in Marshall McLuhan, an author who admittedly lacks any analytical categories for the understanding of social processes, but whose confused books serve as a quarry of undigested observations for the media industry. (pp. 77-78)
What used to be called art has now, in the strict Hegelian sense, been dialectically surpassed by and in the media. The quarrel about the end of art is otiose so long as this end is not understood dialectically. Artistic productivity reveals itself to be the extreme marginal case of a much more widespread productivity, and it is socially important only insofar as it surrenders all pretensions to autonomy and recognizes itself to be a marginal case. Wherever the professional producers make a virtue out of the necessity of their specialist skills and even derive a privileged status from them, their experience and knowledge have become useless. This means that as far as an esthetic theory is concerned, a radical change in perspectives is needed. Instead of looking at the productions of the new media from the point of view of the older modes of production we must, on the contrary, analyze the products of the traditional "artistic" media from the standpoint of modern conditions of production. (p. 80)
The formalization of written language permits and encourages the repression of opposition. In speech, unresolved contradictions betray themselves by pauses, hesitations, slips of the tongue, repetitions, anacoluthons, quite apart from phrasing, mimicry gesticulation, pace, and volume. The esthetic of written literature scorns such involuntary factors as "mistakes." It demands, explicitly or implicitly, the smoothing out of contradictions, rationalization, regularization of the spoken form irrespective of content. Even as a child, the writer is urged to hide his unsolved problems behind a protective screen of correctness. (p. 81)
None of the characteristics that distinguish written and printed literature apply to the electronic media. Microphone and camera abolish the class character of the mode of production (not of the production itself). The normative rules become unimportant. Oral interviews, arguments, demonstrations, neither demand nor allow orthography or "good writing." The television screen exposes the esthetic smoothing out of contradictions as camouflage. Admittedly, swarms of liars appear on it; but anyone can see from a long way off that they are peddling something. As presently constituted, radio, film, and television are burdened to excess with authoritarian characteristics, the characteristics of the monologue, which they have inherited from older methods of productionÑand that is no accident. These outworn elements in today's media esthetics are demanded by the social relations. They do not follow from the structure of the media. On the contrary, they go against it, for the structure demands interaction. (p. 82)
The ineffectiveness of literary criticism when faced with so-called documentary literature is an indication of how far the critics' thinking has lagged behind the stage of the productive forces. It stems from the fact that the media have eliminated one of the most fundamental categories of esthetics up to nowÑfiction. The fiction/nonfiction argument has been laid to rest just as was the nineteenth century's favorite dialectic of "art" and "life." In his day, Benjamin demonstrated that the "apparatus" (the concept of the medium was not yet available to him) abolishes authenticity. In the productions of the consciousness industry, the difference between the "genuine" original and the reproduction disappearsÑ"that aspect of reality which is not dependent on the apparatus has now become its most artificial aspect." The process of reproduction reacts on the object reproduced and alters it fundamentally. The effects of this have not yet been adequately explained epistemologically. The categorical uncertainties to which it gives rise also affect the concept of the documentary. Strictly speaking, it has shrunk to its legal dimensions. A document is something the "forging"Ñi.e., the reproductionÑof which is punishable by imprisonment. This definition naturally has no theoretical meaning. The reason is that a reproduction, to the extent that its technical quality is good enough, cannot be distinguished any way from the original, irrespective of whether it is a painting, a passport, or a bank note. The legal concept of the documentary record is only pragmatically useful; it serves only to protect economic interests. The productions of the electronic media, by their nature, evade such distinctions as those between documentary and feature films. They are in every case explicitly determined by the given situation. The producer can never pretend, like the traditional novelist, "to stand above things." He is therefore partisan from the start. This fact finds formal expression in his techniques. Cutting, dubbingÑthese are techniques for conscious manipulation without which the use of the new media is inconceivable. It is precisely in these work processes that their productive power reveals itselfÑand here it is completely immaterial whether one is dealing with the production of a reportage or a play. The material, whether "documentary" or "fiction," is in each case only a prototype, a half-finished article, and the more closely one examines its origins, the more blurred the difference becomes. (Develop more precisely. The reality in which a camera turns up is always "posed," e.g., the moon landing.) (p. 83)
Above excerpts gathered from the web
Following find Ed Keller notes and comments on text excerpts. The page numbers indicated herein refer to this edition: Video Culture, ed.Hanhardt, John, Peregrine Smith books, Visual Studies Workshop, 1986The questions are directed at my seminar students. I leave them here as they are usefully provocative.
on p 97 Enzensberger says 'Uncertainty, alternations between fear and surrender, mark the attitude of the socialist left to the new productive forces of the media industry. The ambivalence of this attitude merely mirrors the ambivalence of the media themselves without mastering it. It could only be overcome by releasing the emancipatory potential which is inherent in the new productive forces...'
What do you think this emancipatory potential could be, given the prior readings (Heidegger, deCerteau, Foucault , et al) ...? Is Enzensberger suggesting a specific technology?
Enzensberger is highly critical of Marshall Mcluhan and others who see a universal enabling force in 'new media'. He says 'Any socialist strategy for the media must... strive to end the isolation of the individual participants from the social learning and production process. This is impossible unless those concerned organize themselves. ... It is over this point that the socialist parts company with the neo-liberal and technocratic ones. Anyone who expects to be emancipated by technological hardware, or by a system of hardware however structured, is the victim of an obscure belief in progress. Anyone who imagines that freedom for the media will be established if only everyone is bust transmitting and receiving is the dupe of a liberalism which, decked out in contemporary colors, merely peddles the faded concepts of a preordained harmony of social interests.
In the face of such illusions, what must be firmly held on to is that the proper use of the media demands organization and makes it possible. Every production that deals with the interests of the producers postulates a collective method of production. It is itself already a form of self organization of social needs. ' cf p 107
Do you agree with his critical view of the transforming instrumental capacity of certain technologies? If so, how can the last sentences apply to media you are familiar with today. And most importantly, how does the internet fit into this critical view? Enzensberger unpacks briefly Lefebvre's early definition of spectacular culture, then goes on to find an utopian capacity in it: ' ...Lefebvre has proposed the concept of the spectacle, the exhibition, the show, to fit the present form of mass consumption. Goods and shop windows, traffic and advertisements, stores and the world of communications, news and packaging, architecture and media production come together to form a totality, a permanent theatre, which dominates not only the public city centers but also private interiors. The expression beautiful living makes the most commonplace objects of general use into props for this universal festival, in which the fetishistic nature of the commodities triumphs completely over their use value. The swindle these festivals perpetrate is, and remains, a swindle within the present social structure. But it is the harbinger of something else. Consumption as spectacle contains the promise that want will disappear. The deceptive, brutal and obscene forces of this festival derive from the fact that there can be no question of a real fulfillment of its promise. But so long as scarcity holds sway, use-value remains a decisive category which can only be abolished by trickery. Yet trickery on such a scale is only conceivable if it is based on mass need. This need- it is a utopian one- is there. It is the desire for a new ecology, for a breaking down of environmental barriers, for an aesthetic which is not limited to the sphere of the artistic. These desires are not- or are not primarily- internalized rules of the game as played by the capitalist system.... Consumption as spectacle is- in parody form- the anticipation of a utopian situation.' CF p 109
This statement supposes the proclivity of spectacular culture to move towards a utopian scenario. Do you agree? There is an organization of intersecting instrumentalities which Enzensberger uses to define spectacular culture and the potential for the system to organize behaviors outside the purview of the system itself. Can you think of ways this liminoid condition ( cf Victor Turner re liminal/liminoid) is fostered by subset cultures intersecting?
Enzensberger breaks the repressive and emancipatory natures of media use down into very clear categories cf p 110. One of the main schisms with which he distinguishes between a repressive media and an enabling one is the
broadcast vs. communicative distinction.
How are these distinctions articulated at different speeds within different metier? such as the print world, radio,. television architecture, electronic media , the internet?
Enzensberger devotes some time to a rereading of W. Benjamin's 'work of Art ...' essay. He suggests, in this context, that 'In the electronic media, a radically altered relationship between subject and object emerges with which the old critical concepts cannot deal. '
cf p 116
What does he mean by this?
He then goes on to develop the idea of an alignment between certain modes of representation , such as 'writing' and a kind of segmentation of individual power and liberty. cf p 117-8
He in fact aligns writing and its rules with a ruling class, and suggests that the camera and the microphone '... abolish the class character of the mode of production ....The normative rule become unimportant. Oral interviews, arguments, demonstrations, neither demand nor allow orthography or good writing. The television screen exposes the aesthetic smoothing out of contradictions as camouflage.'
Do you agree with his analysis, for instance of 'good writing'? and his association of it with a class? There is a very convoluted argument he makes abut the relation between certain techniques of representation and techniques of control which posits an alternative to be found in electronic media. However we know that he refuses an uncritical use of media. How does he then locate the emancipatory capacity of the electronic media?
In speaking of the 'old fashioned ' artist, Enzensberger says ' Meanwhile, his social usefulness can be measured by the degree to which he is capable of using the liberating factors in the media and bringing them to fruition. The tactical contradictions in which he must become involved in the process can neither be denied nor covered up in any way. But strategically his role is clear. The author has to work as the agent of the masses. He can lose himself in them only when they themselves become authors, the authors of history.'
This utopian vision insists on a dialogic formation of a culture, a society ( cf Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination). How do you imagine Enzensberger envisions this dialogic condition emerging from media? What are the 'apparent' limitations of his suggestion that everyone must become an author? Is he advocating the elimination of individual authors? How does this apparent contradiction resolve itself?