Discourses, Schemata, Technology, Monuments: Outline for a Theory of Cultural Continuity
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Hartmut Winkler is Professor of Media Theory and Media Culture at the University of Paderborn. He is the author of books on TV-reception, Switching/Zapping (1991); film theory, Der filmische Raum und der Zuschauer (1992); and computers and media theory, Docuverse (1997).
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young teaches in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Culture at the University of British Columbia. He has published extensively on theories of media, the materialities of communication, and culture and technology in such journals as Critical Inquiry, Diacritics, Yale Journal of Criticism, Seminar, RSSI: Recherches Semiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry, among others. He is the coeditor (with Joseph Donatelli) of a Mosaic special issue on Media Matters: Technologies of Literary Production (1995) and, with Michael Wutz, the translator of Friedrich Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, 1999).
Michael Wutz teaches in the English Department at Weber State University. He is the coeditor (with Joseph Tabbi) of Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology (Cornell, 1997) and, together with Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, the translator of Friedrich Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, 1999). His essays on modern British and American fiction have appeared in Style, modern fiction studies, Mosaic, Amerikastudien/American Studies, and others. He continues to work on a study on the location of literary narrative within the (post)modern media ecology.
Footnotes
1. Translators' note: In consultation with the author, we are using deposit/depositing to translate Niederlegung (derived from the verb niederlegen, which, depending on the context, can mean "to lay down," "to put down," "to deposit," or "to record").
2. The desire to give myself such methodological self-clarification was the occasion for writing the present essay. My book Docuverse contains most of the observations articulated here; there, they are located within the project of the book, which attempts to formulate (an, as far as possible, immanent) critique of the present computer discourse: Hartmut Winkler, Docuverse: Zur Medientheorie der Computer (Munich: Boer, 1997). See http://www.uni-paderborn.de/~winkler.html for an outline of the book and the full text of the first chapter in German.
3. In regard to TV, for example, Raymond Williams discusses the question in terms of a general theory of technology in "The Technology and the Society," in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 9-31.
4. See, for example, Claus Pias et al., eds., Kursbuch Medienkultur: Die maßgeblichen Theorien von Brecht bis Baudrillard (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999), p. 8.
5. In the following I use various terms of discourse: (1) The common conception of discourse as the totality of all acts of utterance, both oral and written: "Discourse is [all of] a person's realized linguistic utterances based on his or her language competency in the process of linguistic communication" (adapted from Duden Fremdwörterbuch [Mannheim: Dudenverlag, 1974], p. 182). (2) More generally, "discourse" frequently designates the totality of symbolic practices, as when visual discourse is juxtaposed to linguistic discourse. (3) In the work of Foucault, the term "discourse" encompasses utterances as well as practices—for example, the construction of prisons and the formation of the body through torture or drill. At the same time, Foucault's "discourse" designates a specific epistemological process; this epistemological process is claimed by the discourse-analytical approaches.
6. See Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 36.
7. Horkheimer and Adorno have notably drawn attention to this inertia. Rather shocked by their exposure to American mass culture, they spoke of the "constant sameness [that] governs the relationship to the past" (Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming [New York: Herder and Herder, 1972], p. 134).
8. Within the current media debate, this term has gained considerable currency.
9. Jan Assmann, "Stein und Zeit: Das "monumentale" Gedächtnis der altägyptischen Kultur," in Kultur und Gedächtnis, ed. Tonio Hölscher (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), pp. 87-114. See also Jan Assmann...
