Summary
"Literary Studies from Hermeneutics to Media Culture Studies" - Siegfried J. Schmidt
Central issue: media culture studies as a research program
“How do we construe our realities via cognition and communication by media use? How do the technical and institutional conditions of a specific system of media or of networks of media systems shape our thinking, feeling, remembering, and value orientation? Is there an a priori set of media techniques?” (SJS, p.7)
A history of literary studies:
Hermeneutic position: “They favored exclusively text-immanent analysis (…) which excluded the contexts in which literary texts are produced, distributed, received, and post-processed.” (SJS, p.2)
> Literary texts = “(…) ontological self-contained entities whose interpretation could only be achieved by specially gifted scholars, since (…) interpretation cannot be learned.” (Ibid.) > Remark: Signifies that the process of attributing position, value or worth is obscured in a institutionalized environment.
Pragmatic position: “The more or less homogeneous hermeneutic mainstream was replaced gradually by a number of rivaling approaches (…) characterized by a strict disbelief in masters, authorities, and intuition, and a strict belief in rationality, explicitness and precise terminology as a solid bases for teaching and learning literary scholarship in a scientific way[1] (…).” (SJS, p.3)
> Literature = social phenomenon/phenomena
Communicative position: (Schmidt & ELS) “(…) move from literary texts to the literary system.” (Ibid.)
> Literary system = “(…) the mutual interaction of four domains of activities: 1) the production, 2) the distribution, 3) the reception, and 4) the post-processing of literary texts.” (Ibid.) > Social literary system = “(…) defined by the self-organizing interaction of four types of processes (…) [related to] matters deemed literary by the agents in these processes.” (SJS, p.4) > Semiotic literary system = “(…) the complete set of phenomena deemed literary texts by a social community in a specific period.” (Ibid.) >> Remark: “Regarding the semiotic system, two interrelations have to be taken into account: the interrelations between the items in the semiotic system (intertextuality) (…) and the interrelation between semiotic items and value systems which single out these items as literary texts.” (Ibid.) > Literary texts = “(…) result of highly conditioned social processes[2].” (SJS, pp.3-4)
Observations:
“(…) literature is but one medium among and competing with other media and that is the whole media system of a society which establishes the difference of management in every usage of media offers. In other words, the literary system is embedded in the media system of a society.” (SJS, p.6) + “Literary texts as special media offers produced and treated by a special social system, namely the literary system, play a specific role compared to all other media offers with regard to all relevant perspectives. Their production, distribution, reception, and post-processing on the one hand differs from that of other media offers, on the other hand it has to be redefined with the advent to any new media system.” (SJS, p.7)
> “Above all, new media tend to transform traditional concepts of author, recipient, meaning, distribution, information, creativity, fiction, etc.” (SJS, p.6) >> “The introduction of private broadcasting (1980s) and the rapid growth of the internet (since 1994) gradually transformed industrial societies into media societies. (…) Media systems served as instruments by which societies observed themselves and by which media systems observed one another.” (Ibid.) >>> Concequence:“People learnt the lesson that most of what they knew they knew via media.” (Ibid.) + “Since all and everything can be observed, everyone learns to know that everything could be seen and done in another way, i.e., the experience of contingency becomes omnipresent.” (Ibid.) > These observations are similar to the observations of the New London Group.
“There is enough empirical evidence to show that students nearly never read in their leisure time what they are forced to read and to interpret in school.” (SJS, p.5)
> Guideline questions for education: “What is the function of literary instruction, what are the long term effects, and how do students understand this part of their education?” (Ibid.)
[1] Remark: “We underlined again and again that empiricity should not be misread as search for objectivity or truth. Instead, the claim for empiricity signaled the intention to concentrate on social processes which resulted in literary phenomena through the activities of literary agents and to realize this concentration in an empirically intersubjective way.” (SJS, p.5)
[2] On collective knowledge: Collective knowledge as canonical scripts (cf. Bruner) “Collective knowledge is not to be understood as an entity but as the result of the processes of reflexivity, thus encompassing the cognitive ‘content’ of the expectation(s) agents attribute to each other as collective knowledge in the sense of an operative function.” (SJS, p.7) > Scripts and Imagined Communities (cf. Anderson) “A model of reality is established by the social-reflexive references of agents enacted through actions and communications and it is solidified as a symbolic-semantic order by /of language.” (Ibid.) + “Collective knowledge is ‘passed on’ to new members of a society via processes of socialization. It becomes collectively effective by virtue of the operative fiction that everyone expects everyone else to dispose of basically the same kind of knowledge.” (Ibid.) >> Wittgensteinian philosophy: “The model of reality must necessarily be presupposed as valid for all members of a society so that agents may, in situation-specific operations of distinction, ‘make sense’ by reference of this model and communication such sense socially by means of linguistic references.” (Ibid.) > Humans as symbol-users (cf. Burke) “Language permits the schematized designation and the designative constancy of categories and semantic differentiations for all the members of a society, in that it stabilizes collectively the possibilities of concrete references by means of semiotic materialities (signs).” (Ibid.)
>>> Culture as a program: “(…) ‘culture’ as I understand it does not feature as an observable entity ‘existing as an object’. Culture as a program realizes itself in concrete actions, as performed by agents in the form of offers of options and schematizations of options for purposes of reference to the model of reality valid for all the agents of a society who make use of precisely these functions and expect all other agents to proceed grosso modo likewise.” (SJS, p.8) > “Models of reality and cultural programs (…) do not only co-emerge, they form a mutually constitutive framework of interactive dependencies in the sense of general system theory.” (Ibid.)