Fama/Chain of Muses: Two Classical Problems of Literary Studies with "the Media"

It might seem self-evident that literary studies and philology provide the experts when it comes to questions of media; when it comes to the questions of communication—who else? Where else is relevant historical knowledge collected and assembled in an appropriately compact form? So we might think; so one might expect. Yet it is not exactly obvious. In fact both the concept of media and the concept of communication seem to constitute foreign bodies in the arsenal of philological knowledge. Indeed, one can observe very elaborate forms of resentment in the philologies: instead of talking about "poetic communication," poetry is still comprehended as the opposite of communication; instead of observing literary forms as forms of media, one prefers to describe literature in contrast to "the media." As Heinz Schlaffer concisely sums up, the media and "media culture" are "the enemy." ¹

One could get angry about statements like this, dismiss them as anachronistic, fearful, culturally conservative, or whatever—but this does not counter them efficiently. Especially if, in literary studies, one is interested in media and in communication, one ought to entertain the question why the philologies have such difficulty with these matters. Why do approaches working toward a concept of media and communications find themselves marginalized by the philologies? ² What causes such resentment and prejudice? Which mechanisms of selection determine the reception of media and communication phenomena?

In this article I refer to an (often merely) implicit concept of media in the philologies, from which one should distance oneself—and which one therefore has to consider first. To this end, I introduce two models that are of decisive importance for our (philological) way of operating. ³ Both models are borrowed from older semantics and yet applicable, without further complications, to timely issues in discussions of media. The first model concerns problems with the "media communication" in general (and paradigmatic for it stands television). And in the light of the second model, we will address problems of "digital" media, and especially problems with communications media that have a binary code. We will be switching the TV on and off with Ovid and Plato.

Model 1:
Television, Fama

I begin with television for a simple reason: whatever one may think about the current state of media evolution, common cultural critique within literary studies still pivots around television. (Note that I address this discourse, and that such discourses do not simply mirror a reality, be it badly and incompletely—they generate their own reality.) ⁴ But let us be more precise—for actually in this discourse we do not look into the distance (no reception, need to improvise)—what we see instead is the screen. The discourse on and against media is directed at the screen, and its arguments revolve around it. We observe several layers of representation: "the media" are represented in the audiovisual media, especially in television, and in turn, television on the screen. This screen-image functions as the central metaphor; it symbolizes "the media," and the discourse on them largely constitutes itself in reference to this symbol. What does one "see" when one sees it this way? We already know: the irrelevant, redundant, hype, ephemera, stuff rushing past in bulk without order, unaccountable and yet demanding attention, the bad taste of the masses, and so on—to sum it up: the decline of literature in the image, "the enemy."

Trailer 1: "As can happen when people get tired, I found myself sitting there alone one time after eleven o'clock. Some horrible story came on about a plane flying over a ship, then both blowing up, and finally the plane crash-landing on the ship, or something like that. Anyway, there I was sitting by myself and faced with an insoluble task: How do you turn off a thing like that? How do you get the box...