International Network "Media Philosophy"

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Christoph Ernst, since 4/2018
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: from 2017 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 394241729

While the discussion of philosophy of media since the 1990s focused on openings of media research to philosophical questions and of philosophy to thinking through media, it is essential today, to newly contour the established concepts in the context of successivley closer entanglements between philosophy of media and technics on the one hand and the foucs on media reflexion of aesthetic practices on the other hand. Cultural technics and medial practices can be described, as common point of origin, in their respective historical and aesthetic contexts. The question what a medium is or what can be considered as ‚medial‘ is answered in the respective case – with the ‚material‘ or during the execution of a practice. The media philosophical discussion of this assumption begins with the juxtaposition of these antagonistic viewpoints. The ‚negative‘ definition of the media concept, which does not set limits to a discourse, but enables a specific approach to different subject matters, practices or structures (how or when something becomes a medium), is confronted with the thesis that media are the technical-material apriori, which generate constitutive differences of culture, differences like material/symbolic, nature/culture, interior/exterior, which can be described as effects of media and cultural techniques. The possibility to recognize the medium of creating differences as such, to consider scripture in its symbolic and material dimensions, for example, is solely made accessible ‚negatively‘: with approaches that make possible changings between the symbolic and the matieral, the discursive and the non-discursive, which only put forward the media of recording, remembering, organizing.It is planned to integrate the specific development of German media philosophy in the context of international media research in a stronger way, especially in Czech and US-American discourses. The engagement with philosophical traditions of Phenomenology and Structuralism is broadened by perspectives of Hermeneutics and Philosophy of Science, in order to allow the precise formulation of ‚positive‘ and ‚negative‘ approaches. This detailed definition will be based on critical work with principle texts of German media theory and philosophy that offer an internationally accessible basis of discussion. In three workshops, the texts of the participants of the network will be in focus, suggesting solution statements on: (1) the reflexivity of the medial between recursive (technical) operations and blind spots of a ‚participating‘ observation, (2) the performativity of the medial between the execution of concrete cultural practices and resistances to what cannot be mediated, and (3) the responsivity of the medial between doing and making, ‚becoming‘ and ‚letting‘, being affected and responding.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Ehemalige Antragstellerin: Dr. Katerina Krtilova, until 3/2018