The Participatory Media Paradigm

Armin Medosch — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:50:23 +0000

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.

1. Ibid, p. 44, my translation.

Concepts of Media History

Armin Medosch — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 13:05:29 +0000

As the political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis pointed out, the concepts of history that exist are amazingly poor 1. There are those historians who focus on big events, big personalities, tyrants, revolutions and intermediate periods of peace. In their accounts there is no logic, no structure. History consists of a series of more or less random events in which identifiable individuals play an important role. This is illustrated best by Bertolt Brecht's short poem where he wrote: "Caesar beat the Gauls.

1. Castoriadis C.
1997. Gesellschaft als imaginäre Institution. Gesellschaft als imaginäre Institution. :285-363.

The Next Layer - Brecht

The Participatory Media Paradigm

Concepts of Media History