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The Participatory Media Paradigm

Submitted by Armin Medosch on Mon, 10/08/2007 - 15:50
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With an accute sense of urgency the leftwing playwright Bertolt Brecht and the media theorist Walter Benjamin tried to formulate an emancipatory and anti-fascist artistic theory and practice. When fascism, according to Benjamin, amounted to an aestheticisation of politics, revolutionary communism was engaged in the politicisation of the arts.1 Brecht and Benjamin (and also some of the Russian Futurists) mark the starting point of a participative paradigm in art which aims at using technical media in an emancipatory way. It has taken a long time, many technical innovations and social change up till today for this paradigm to come into full bloom (see later in this text). In a few short texts, summarized under the term Brecht's Radio Theory, Brecht stated that radio had been crippled by leaving only the receiver for the general public. Brecht demanded that every receiver should potentially also be a transmitter. Radio should not isolate people but set them into relation to each other.2

In 1934 in exile in Paris Walter Benjamin gave a speech at the Institute For the Study of Fascism, published under the title The Author as Producer.3 Here, Benjamin looked at the position of leftist writers vis-a-vis society. In anticipation of the critique of the culture industry by the Frankfurt School, he reminded of the capacity of the culture industry dominated by the bourgeois to assimilate and coopt progressive or even revolutionary content. He stated that it was wrong to ask how progressive the work itself was or how it related to the power structures of society -- Marx' relationship of the means of production. It was more important, according to Benjamin, to ask how a work functions within the relationship of the means of literary production.4

Benjamin demanded that the author shouldn't just produce for the literary system, and that he needed to actively seek to change it, to introduce new forms of production and new instruments. Therefore the poet needed to use the 'lowly' medium of the press to seek engagement and further participation of the many in the process of writing and reading. The author as producer was expected to work towards removing the barriers between writers and readers. Benjamin also stated that a constant 'remelting' of cultural and literary forms happened, whereby 'class struggle dictated the temperature' of this process.5 Benjamin was convinced that technique facilitated the invention of new cultural formats and that yet unimaginable new cultural forms would emerge from the combination of social change triggered by class struggle and new technologies being applied creatively by progressive artists. The same artistic programme or behavioural guideline is also embodied in the following quote by Brecht:

"It is not our job," Brecht wrote, "to renew the ideological Basis of the existing social order through innovations, but to make it give up its basis through our innovations. [...] Through continuous, never ending proprosals how to better use the apparatuses in the interest of the general public we have to shake up the social Basis of those apparatuses, and to discredit their use in the interest of the few."6

  • 1. Ibid, p. 44, my translation.
  • 2. cf. Brecht 1932
  • 3. cf. Benjamin 1934/2002.
  • 4. According to Benjamin, by focussing on the 'technique' used by an artist, 'literary production was opened up to a straight social and materialistic analysis.' The term technique (in German Technik - I think it would be inappropriate to translate this as 'technology') 'offers the opportunity to dialectically overcome the unproductive contradiction between form and content,' Benjamin claims; and, he continues, it also contains 'the right direction how to negotiate the relationship between (political) tendency of a work and its quality.' (all passages Benjamin 1934/2002, p. 233) The 'quality argument' is still used today by aesthetically progressive but politically conservative art experts to chastise progressive artists and movements.
  • 5. Ibid, p. 235
  • 6. Aber es ist keineswegs unsere Aufgabe, die ideologischen Institute auf der Basis der gegebenen Gesellschaftsordnung, durch Neuerungen zu erneuern, sondern durch unsere Neuerungen haben wir sie zur Aufgabe ihrer Basis zu bewegen. Also für Neuerungen, gegen Erneuerung! Durch immer fortgesetzte, nie aufhörende Vorschläge zur besseren Verwendung der Apparate im Interesse der Allgemeinheit haben wir die gesellschaftliche Basis dieser Apparate zu erschüttern, ihre Verwendung im Interesse der wenigen zu diskreditieren. cf. Brecht 1932 (see Medienkunstnetz: Brecht's Radio Theory).