Norbert Bolz – Philosopher as Media Partisan
"The mainstream is determined precisely by those who want to be other than the mainstream", writes the well-known media scholar Norbert Bolz, who is a master of disseminating provocative theses in the media.
Prof. Dr. Norbert Bolz (born 1953) wrote his doctoral dissertation on Adorno's aesthetics and his habilitation on Philosophical Extremism between the World Wars. From 1987 to 1992, he was a lecturer at the Free University of Berlin, and then until 2002 Professor for Communication Theory at the University of Essen. Now he has the Chair for Media Studies and Consultation at the Technical University of Berlin. He lives with his wife and four children in Berlin and has in the last two decades published about 20 books.
Quota or public?
Norbert Bolz is a well-known face in the world of the mass media. His subjects are widely fanned out and can only be summarised: they range from the critical settling of accounts with the Frankfurt School and the protest generation of the "1968ers", through the systems theory-inspired analysis of new media and forms of communication, to social and political questions of the day. Bolz became known through his book on the new conditions of communication Am Ende der Gutenberg-Galaxis (i.e., At the End of the Gutenberg Galaxy; 1993). He not only studies the new media; he also uses them – he appears on talkshows, may be heard on radio interviews and writes for the feature pages of newspapers ranging from FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) to taz (Tageszeitung). Oriented towards Niklas Luhmann's systems theory, he runs his own school of rhetoric which is provocatively opposed to the thought of Critical Theory. It is thanks to this opposition that the media actor enjoys his quotas – and the attention of the public. Bolz invariably gets a quota; he is therefore so well-known; yet there is no "public" according to his theory.The medium is the message
What the Frankfurt School calls "communicative action" may be understood in Bolz, following his conservative authorities Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt, as the practice of the media partisan. The media partisan Bolz provokes the leftist Establishment in the cultural scene and in politics, stirs things up and is in discussion. On Bolz's argumentative and theoretical direction, a book chapter with the characteristic title "The Ornaments of Criticism" (In Die Konformisten des Andersseins, i.e., The Conformists of Being Different, 1999) is informative. Here Bolz attempts to detach himself from "Critical Theory" through the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. An example will show roughly how this is supposed to work: "That is the whole secret of the 1968ers. McLuhan's law is proven precisely by the revolt: The medium is the message. The protest itself was and is the message". Typical of systems theory is the following claim: "Social movements generate social problems". With such quotable quotations, Bolz turns Critical Theory upside down, and if his remarks are not always provable, they are always scandalous and therefore interesting.The quotation is the medium
Quotation and quoting are for Bolz important means of argument. Considering the "rhetoric of cyberspace", the new methods of hypermedia and procedures with hypertexts, he writes: "Those who write in a traditional manner also no longer write books at bottom, but rather mosaics of quotations and thought fragments". The author Bolz practices this to excess; it sometimes makes the identification of his own original thoughts difficult. Perhaps this is the reason that the scholar Bolz is not himself so often quoted in the humanities. There the quotation is also an effective weapon; for instance when, as it has been maintained, the mutual citations of the notorious "quotation mafia" make sure that the careers of the quoted names flourish in the humanities' index of quotations – witness Habermas and Chomsky. The media theorist Bolz is famous instead in the media themselves, but his comportment there is so self-assured that he can invariably bring to bear against his rivals a short-term advantage of location.Caught at ideology?
Bolz's media game works because it can be recognised in the end as a publicly conducted cat-and-mouse game between Critical Theory and purportedly non-ideological systems theory. The June issue of the journal Literaturen (i.e., Literatures) provides an example. The science journalist Reiner Klingholz, the literary scholar Barbara Vinken, the sociologist Hans Bertram and Bolz discussed family politics and role images. Bolz treats this subject in his new controversial and provocative book Die Helden der Familie (i.e., The Heroes of the Family). For Vinken, the issue was clear: "What you demand, Mr Bolz, is Protestant education, ur-German mother politics". In conversation with Bolz, the father of four children and married to, as he pertinently emphasises in his book, a "housewife", Betram discerned even the ideologue: "Now we've caught you, Mr Bolz, at your ideology". But Bolz does not let himself be so easily caught: "My point is not a return to the classical family; I observe only that our discussion is so set up that these questions are taboo". This is it then: the tactic of the media partisan, who not without reason makes reference to Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt. But whoever in his broadly ranging publications invests taboos with these ideological elements will not in the end escape the suspicion that he is not only making "observations" in accordance with systems theory, but also communicating ideologically.
|
Books by Norbert Bolz (a selection):
|
Martin Zähringer
The author is a freelance journalist in Berlin.
The author is a freelance journalist in Berlin.
Translation: Jonathan Uhlaner
Copyright: Goethe-Institut, Online-Redaktion
Any questions about this article? Please write!
online-redaktion@goethe.de
July 2006
