Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube

14 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics15some media theorists, these initial moments – ‘Urszenen’ – do not reveal much about thefuture. Therefore, one might rather need to ask: What are the lies early YouTube is tryingto tell us about the coming of online video? One fact seems certain: in the decades ahead,our contemporary online video culture and its gadgets will look as clumsy as early cinemaappeared in comparison to what followed. In hindsight, all early films look like predecessorsand incomplete exercises. If this is what we can learn from the comparison of early cinemaand early YouTube, the main task consists of anticipating possible perspectives from whichto look back to our present situation.MethodAfter InterpretationWhen investigating culture, one is accustomed to engaging in a process of interpretation.When researchers write about works of art, literature, theatre, music, or cinema they addlayers of comments. They try to understand. But understanding is a strange activity. Itrequires something to be understood, and so it seems naturally to direct attention towardsthe past. Rituals of understanding seem to be tied to history. But historicization itself, as justone of many models of organizing an archive, spread to all kinds of disciplines only around1800. 2 Throughout the 19th century, the memory and historicization of cultural heritageconstitutes one of the crucial steps in establishing a legitimate national identity.This shift is accompanied by another crucial turn concerning the invention of the subjectin the modern sense. Institutional rituals of understanding were always grounded on theassumption of a divide between the figure of the creator and the passive believer. Thisdivide reappeared under different names: artist vs. beholder, author vs. reader, god vs.believer. However, the divide has not been as wide at all times, and in relation to all institutions.Before 1750, the disciplines later to be replaced by the humanities taught rhetoric,dialectics, and grammar, which meant teaching to read and to write at the same time.When the humanities in the modern sense were established around 1800 they followedthe exegetic model of theology. Ever since, it has been taken for granted that artists donot understand, whilst academics don’t know how to write or paint or make music. And toreturn to the question of the subject, a term which had meant a person sub-jected to thestate’s power, now entered the scene of illumination and had to be educated in the newlydevised read-only-mode.The split between writing and reading eventually came to be viewed as an achievement ofthe academic reforms in the 18th century. From then on, academic education had to servethe institutional needs of the newly built nation states, shaping their cultural identity andproviding for apt bureaucrats. The aesthetic education so emphatically favored by Schillerturned into a governmental effort. However, the discursive control enforcing the separationof practice and theory has weakened significantly in the last decade. With the decliningpower of the states one has to ask why we continue to have a cultural theory that follows the2. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London:Routledge, 2002, pp. 235-240.restrictive mode of understanding only, and separates itself from practice. In fact, the presentsituation almost obliges the humanities to overcome the division between interpretation andproduction. 3Media TheoryIn the mid-1980s, most likely at the peak of technological diversity amongst analogue, halfdigitaland fully digital new media, the traditional humanities in Germany were disrupted bya new focus on technology. Regrettably, what had the potential to lead us out of the trap of abackwards-looking orientation and the split between theory and production soon fell prey tothe usual course of academic trends. Less than ten years after Friedrich Kittler introducedthe new approach to German literature studies, he was forced to acknowledge the ubiquitouspresence of the term ‘media’. 4 Subsequently, the initial impulse was lost in the operationalprocedures of academic administration. The term media turned into a discretionary keywordwithout theoretical specificity, but with the powerful promise of generating money for research.And most of the books considering media theory fell back onto an intellectual terrainfrom which Kittler had initially tried to depart. 5 The philological method of interpretation andthe self-restriction to history prevailed. That is the main reason why media theory rarely hadmuch to say about media after 1950, let alone the internet. 6Yet, Kittler’s initial impulse would have allowed for something more. The backbone of thisapproach was Kittler’s newly established cross-breeding of Foucault’s discourse analysis witha media theory as envisioned by Marshall McLuhan. Foucault focuses on epistemologicaland institutional settings and investigates figures or phenomena such as the author, thegaze, or the archive, according to their rules and practices. Technology remained a fieldwhich Foucault almost entirely excluded from his considerations. But the general approachof discourse analysis allows media and materiality to re-enter the picture. This is the use thatKittler makes of McLuhan’s theory of technology. By stating that ‘the medium is the message’,McLuhan claims that any content may primarily fulfill the conditions of a specific technologicalsetup. In that sense, McLuhan’s approach resembles the perspective of Foucault, withthe only difference being that the Canadian sociologist speaks of technology whereas theFrench philosopher speaks about discourse. Both meet in questioning the conditions for theexistence of a statement, or of information.One of the most striking failures of the theoretical approach of subsequent media theory wasits inability to recognize the upcoming importance of the internet in the 1990s. Instead, mostof the disciples of media theory bothered merely with technical considerations concerningthe progress of computing powers. This led to the delusion that simulation would lead the3. The recent cuts in the funding of U.K. universities speak a clear language here. How to react tothat, remains in question.4. Friedrich Kittler, Aufschreibsysteme 1800/1900, München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1995, p. 523.5. See Friedrich Kittler, Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenchaften, Paderborn: UTBEinleitung, 1980, pp. 7-13.6. Geert Lovink develops this point in Zero Comments: Elemente einer kritischen Internetkultur,trans. Andreas Kallfelz, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2008, p.145.