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 ([log in to unmask])

Correspondence address:
Prof. Dr. Dieter Mersch
Universität Potsdam
Institut für Künste und Medien
Am Neuen Palais 10
14469 Potsdam
Tel: 0331 977 4160
mailto: [log in to unmask]
 
 
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? In systematic
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 world 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”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


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