Medienphilosophie

Die prominent und polemisch geäusserte Ansicht, bei der Medienphilosophie handele es sich um eine vorübergehende Angelegenheit, ist vermutlich sehr zutreffend. Medienphilosophie selbst hat nie etwas anderes behauptet. Und genau aus diesem Grund, also eben wegen ihrer Vorläufigkeit, ist Medienphilosophie so wichtig.

Lena Horne was the first African-American woman to be signed to a contract to a major Hollywood studio, who did however not know what to do with her. Her ›colour‹ – in her voice as well as her looks – meant that she did not fit into the racial hierarchies of the day and she was largely confined oppressively to the margins. However, she was also able to some degree, and in collaboration with other African-American figures in Hollywood, to use this to give a glimpse of African-American modernism in Hollywood cinema. This is thus a case study of cultural production as struggle.

The text is looking for a political explanation of the turn in Western attitude to pornography which has taken place since the sixties and even more so since the seventies. More surprising than the liberalization of pornography itself appears the massive pornographic self-exposure even by minors since the turn of the millennium. In addition to the reasons for this extraordinary permissiveness, the paper questions the role of technical and audiovisual media in this social development.

Jean Paul’s novel The Life of Fibel, Author of the Bienrodische Fibel places itself in a specific relation to literacy by identifying the alphabet and the spelling-book as a matrix of its own production. Thus, the text refers itself and its sense-effects back to the arbitrariness of its elements and their combinatorics. Moreover, at the margins of the book, it feigns to be abandoned to the contingency of its pre-literal physis which is suppressed by sense, authority, authorship and control of the work.

Ende der 1920er Jahre verwandelt sich Paris in ein Laboratorium der Zeitlichkeit; künstlerische, fi lmische und philosophische Experimente mit diversen Zeitlichkeiten waren die ordre du jour, was dazu führte, dass die historische Zeit nur noch als eine unter anderen erschien. Als das Erbe der Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts fragwürdig und die lineare Zeit der Geschichtsphilosophie zu einem geschwungenen Fragezeichen umgebogen wurde, räumte man auch die sichtbare Erbschaft dieser Zeit, wie Ernst Bloch 1928 titelte, ab: wie zum Beispiel die von Georges Bataille heraufbeschworene visuelle Kultur des 19. Jahrhunderts, die mit Hohn, Spott und allerlei Fiesheiten bedacht wird. …

What is the relationship between transport and creativity in media? This paper suggests that transport is to be understood as transfiguration. This hypothesis is discussed on the basis of the line as medium, which is at the same time the image and trace of a gesture as well as a sketch and free creation. The line leads
a double-life: it is empirical occurrence and ›ideal thing‹; it transforms a plane into an experimental space, in which abstract objects are rendered visible and thus operable. The main epistemic function of the line is to transfigure the intuitive into the rational and vice versa.

With the early reception of the computer in Europe by Max Bense, it here is argued that the anthropological condition changes fundamentally with a technology that is only accessible indirectly for human senses. Following the line of argument from organ projection to cybernation, media are interpreted as technologies of explicitness, which establish a trans-anthropological realm of sorts. With information as the tertium datur to subjects and objects, and the emerging algorithmic artefacts, a manifold challenge for media philosophy is set.

The social media of the Web can be understood as tools for the personal and social management of knowledge. In this framework, the creative exchange provides an active interface which transforms the empirical and local stocks of knowledge into explicit and globally shared knowledge. In a further step, it allows to transport the memory, once being made explicit, into personal and practically applicable knowledge. This paper presents the vision of a new symbolic medium which would increase the efficiency of creative online-exchange.

The paper presents Jean-Luc Nancy’s outline of a history of sense and especially his thinking of exteriorization as an expression and working-through of the technological condition which characterizes the cybernetic culture of machines and objects. Furthermore, the paper suggests to ground the enthusiasm for the open and external (which is dominant in philosophical politics since 1950 and culminates in Nancy’s work) in the supplementary, prothetic and transcategorical logic of the technical world.

Philosophy and comedy are parallel enterprises of self-detachment. But while philosophy consistently carries out the detachment, comedy underlines its contradictions and undermines it. Thus, comedy gains an ad- vantage especially where it reflects upon the material body which underlies every reflection, namely, its medium. My paper observes this process by studying Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Thus, the media-philosophy of the lm can be contrasted against a philosopher’s philosophy of the very same film.

The paper sees itself as a plea for an irreducibly relationalistic approach to anthropomedial relations in which man and media are always already dynamically linked. Based on the characteristics of the man-cinema- relation, the mode of affection comes to the fore that regulates both the form of existence and the accessibility of anthropomedial relations. In contrast to the common negligence of a ects in media studies and philosophy, the investigation of practices and logics of a ecffective meta-mediality could open a new eld of study for media philosophy.

In media philosophy since Benjamin, the concept of medium is conceived in terms of »translation« or »transport«. In a similar vein, Christoph Tholen has brought the literal sense of »metaphor« as »meta-pherein« into focus. In my paper I argue that Tholen’s approach misses the »meta« (»in the middle« or »beyond«) of »metaphor«, corresponding to the Latin »trans«. This is contrasted with the greek »dia« that allows the development of a performative notion of medium, which orients itself at material practices of transition.