Zielinski 2013
Zielinski, Siegfried. [... After he Media]: News from the Slow-Fading Twentieth Century. Trans. Gloria Custance. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013.
"What would a praxis of research, artistic experimentation, and refleciton on and with technological apparatuses and devices be like that amounts to more than just providing services for the media?" (1)
"Is it possible for grammatically organized systems of ordering and anarchic complexes of the imagination to work together? Or are they irresolvable antagonisms? Should they perhaps be conceived of as a non-trivial relation within interactions, including with the sciences?" (2)
"we would have to excavate deeper than the 19c if we wanted to reach the sources and complex developments of modern media" (4)
neologism variantology -- "we seek to develop in new ways what really interests us about media -- as rich variants of relations between arts, technologies, and sciences" (4)
The Media Have Become Superfluous
1st 10 years of 21c "largely confronted uas the consequential fulfillment of processes that can be regarded as characteristic of 20c": techno-scientism, standardization, expansion of electronic control of technological conditions
yet the beginning of 2nd decade "was marked by an enormous discharge of the extreme tensions between nature and technology, which had been systematically cultivated in the 20c" (9)
"The Internet, in its ambivalence as a techno-political tool for integrating the heterogeneous democracies and marketplaces and as adventure playground for delirious communications of extremely diverse kinds, is very hard to control and has established itself as the youngest mastermedium in history." (11)
disappearance of nation-state power, internet as state
"We do not live in an INternet society, nor has the communicative action, which Jurgen Habermas once outlined as his utopia of an imaginary regency of enlightened actos, secretly taken over power. The advanced level, the basic opennness, and the existing wealth in the communication situation stand in diametrical opposition to the conditions of everyday life for the majority, in which there is a huge lack of basic necessities and any surplus that makes life worth living, and in which the murderous terrorizing of others is a daily ritual. In this sense, too, the communicative Nirvana of some is entirely detached from the real hell of many." (12-13)
media as "a heterogeneous, interdiscursive field.": "As a multifarious phenomenon, media process a variety of concrete, resistant artifacts, programs, and issues located between the arts, sciences, and technologies. These three meta-discourses form tension-fraught relationships with each other as well as with other discourses such as economics, law, and politics. These relationships are embedded in overarching dispositifs, to which so far mainly truth, knowledge, and sexuality belong." (14) -- may even "be necessary to expand the above set of dispositifs; namely, by adding the concept of unconditional connectivity as a result of the idolization of technologically mediated dialogue." (14)
deep-time view: "understanding the past not as a collection of retrievable facts but as a collection of possibilities" (14)
over last 1200 years, "interesting and also quite regular fluctuations int he temperature of the relations between arts, sciences, and technologies can be observed" (15) -- see Serres 1995; Zielinski glosses this history in the next few pages
now, no lack of media; they've become superfluous, turned into property; "An update of the promise that the media could create a different, even better world seems laughable from the perspective of our experience with the technologically based democracies of markets." (18) -- "Now that it is possible to create a state with media, media are no longer any good for a revolution." (19) -- they've taken on a "systemic character," enabling not dismantling hierarchies
"Something that operates as an intricate, dynamic, and edgy complex between the disourses -- that is, something which can only operate interdiscursively -- has acquired a firm and fixed place in the academic landscape." (19)
"The position from which I believe it is still or is again possible to formulate criticism is located on the periphery, not in th center. This position can be found everywhere new ideas have been developed. before they are celebrated as fashions and trends in the metropolises and centers, before they have matured as products and are marketed as commodities or services. Let's taken a chance and try to reactivate a profoundly dislocated point of view again." (21)