There's a Planet in my TV

Siegfried Zielinski: Lecture 6: Flusser

Vilhem Flusser "To Think Further Communicology".

A midget genealogy of "media theory".

"Medium" defined as the space between above and below, between the rising and the setting sun, and also referred to as a public meeting place. Since early modern times, it is customary to understand a medium also as an incorporeal context in which something may take place..."

Theoretically, it began after the Second World War.

What is Media Theory? Media as a term begins as a neologism--An interdiscursive praxis. As such it is oscillating and processing between the discourses of sciences, arts and technologies.

Methods of Media Theory are permanently in a stage of transit--without a home and without discipline. It doesn't exist because its completely imaginary.

[A bunch of junk that can fit in micro-physical space--> a gesture and attempt to eternity. Media starts with a lack resources.]

(Kulleshov-->developed concept of montage. Time-based. Spoken poetry.)

Benjamin's
1. "Das Telephone"
2. "On The Minute, Just In Time"--> on the dictatorship of time.

-Harold A. Innis 1894-1952 (McLuhan's intellectual father). "The Bias of Cummunication", "Empire & Communication".

-Ernst Kapp "Philosophie Der Technik", 1877.--> "organ projection": every technology is a projection of organisms by the human being.

[Look into Rob Spence's camera prosthetic eye: http://www.finesttech.com/techonology/filmmaker-places-camera-in-his-prosthetic-eye.html]

Adorno & Horkheimer's "Dialectics of Enlightenment": nature vs. technological constraints. Culture Industry-->pornographic-->fun without reason.

Laswell Formula 1948
Who--> Says What--> In Which Channel--> To Whom--> With That Effect
Information Source (message)--> Transmitters-->(signal) Noise Source (received signal)--> Receiver--> Destination

-DeFleur's development of the Shannon & Weaver model, allowing for feedback.
-Gerhard Maletzke 1972. Feedback. (the drawn formula is representative of video-tapes.)
-Norman Wiener, "Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine".
-Martin Heidegger "The End of Philosophy & The Task of Thinking".
-Tiqqun Group, "Cybernetics & Revolt". Paris, 2001

[To trace the poem, you have to study the objects that surround it.]

"Apocalyptic writers are writing their own problems". -Zielinski

-Formulative Evaluation process of "Children's Television Workshop". February, 1979. Hence, "Sesame Street". Funding for this project: $8,180,000.


Founders of Cultural Studies:
Richard Hoggart
E.P. Thompson
Raymond Williams

Protagonists in a Media Context:
Stewart Hall
Stephen Heath
John Ellis

Hoggart- The Uses of Literacy (1957)
Williams- Culture & Society (1958)
Williams' "Television: Technology or Cultural Form (1974)/The Long Revolution (1961)
Christian Metz- The Imaginary Signifier

[In effect, the individual-body becomes a televised-body. Both bodies are reciprocal. The third-body is fleeting within the reciprocation; there exists a media induced poetics of this reciprocation taking pleasure in not being articulated. ]


Paranoia (attitude of fleeting time) and Melancholy (too attached to time) are pathologies of time.