The Revolt of the Media Ecologists The innocence of the media is no more. A period of stagnation will follow the rampant growth of the 1980's. This is foreshadowed by the propagation of a mentality of moderation. It is made clear to us from all sides that we must stop handling information and images carelessly. Henceforth, the media and data traffic, like other sectors of Western society, must submit their presentation to the diktat of ecology. The environment is more than endangered plants and animals. It is a mentality which, with abstract concepts like "conservation" and "recycling," sees the constructed media sphere as a third or fourth nature. Watchfulness prevails against all possible needless pollution and senseless waste. Aware media users find a natural equilibrium between receiving and transmitting information. After the euphoria of getting acquainted with the new technologies, they seek a balance between the immaterial environment which evokes imaginary worlds and the biographical one where their own flesh lives. This balance is considered necessary to protect the pioneers in data land (who are working at the "electronic frontier") from cold turkey. After the ecstacy of the emancipation phase we see a dissatisfaction in technoculture, and it may be seeking a destructive way out. High expectations all too easily end in great disappointment, which inspires hate for the machinery. Deleuze and Guattari would simply call it "antiproduction"; the sudden disgust that arises in those who have allowed themselves to be swept away in the flows of signs. Could this be the "drama of communication" (freely adapted from Alice Miller) - that at the moment we only receive and are sending no signals back? Or vice versa: that we are putting too much data into the world, without getting anything back for it? Among data workers a feeling of emptiness and senselessness is arising, which can only temporarily be compensated for by the introduction of yet more hard- and software. Perhaps an ecological therapy can help; in any case that is what the media ecologists G. Steiner and H.J. Syberberg suggest in their publications. The body seems likely to evaporate from a long stay in the medial milieu. Along with the boundaries of the personal environment, the definition of one's own body is growing vague as well. But before the critical limit of virtual reality is transgressed, the ecosophers want to protect us. They look wistfully back to the long-ago era when authenticity and real presence so flourished, in an attempt to salvage what they can. The establisment of permanent media has produced a new longing for direct contact without all those mediating bodies and elaborate prostheses. The unbridled colonization of personal life must be temporarily halted. At the end of the eighties people suddenly expressed annoyance at the tapestry of media we all had to eat through in order to keep up on things. Not more magazines, TV series and computer software! Not more world-shocking media events! The media diet people automatically imposed on themselves lest they got swamped was becoming the done thing. Boredom and indifference mingled with active forms of refusal to keep consciously consuming. Bestsellers could be left unread, TV could be watched zapping, sleeping or not at all. Unconscious registration of the headlines proved enough for keeping up in conversation. The French theories from the 1970s, which turned against concepts like unity, truth and meaning and practised unrestrained deconstruction and difference, were no match for the supersonic world of simulation. Endless text production turned out to offer no solution, but rather to cause the problem. Moaning and groaning about the excess of interpretations turned into a public lament that appealed to many. According to the media dietitians' diagnosis, we are currently in a media vacuum caused by the drivel of journalists and the endless academic discourse of the specialists. We live, they say, in a corrupt world where the parasites of the secondary call the shots. These second-rate writers and filmmakers who populate editorial centers make sure every original experience is nipped in the bud. According to this media criticism, a real present no longer exists, just imaginary zones, indirect discourses and staged events. Above all, access to the work of art is being closed off to us by a garbage heap of exegesis, commentaries and criticisms. If anything can recapture meaning, it is real art, which strikes you dumb and requires no futher explanation. George Steiner's "Real Presences" (1989) articulates the antipathy for emptiness which accompanies the flood. In his essay he seeks alliance with the modern struggle with media overkill and arouses the reader's interest in a "society of the primary," in which "all talk about the arts, music and literature is prohibited." In this society all discourse is held to be illicit verbiage. Criticism can be put on the shelf, since "all serious art, music and literature is a critical act" anyway. We don't have to worry about "a blank and passive silence" prevailing in this counterpart of Plato's republic. After all, all presentations of the great works are to be considered as interpretations and are "understanding in action." Steiner is without doubt playing with a full deck. He is well aware of how difficult it is to draw a dividing line between primary and secondary texts. We must see his call for the dismantling of the culture industry as, above all, a sign of dispair at the fleeting character of modern products. "The great bulk is totally ephemeral"; it will be "soon out of print" and "sepulchred in the decent dust of deposit libraries." These works come and go "like querulous shadows," at best providing some "transient pleasure" and the necessary job opportunities for the "secondary souls." Indeed, today's works do not dedicate themselves to an imaginary eternity as once existed. They are manufactured to be recorded and reproduced - more precisely, copied. Their manufacture is entirely dominated by possible media connections. The fleetingness Steiner so deplores is nothing more than the speed of modern registration techniques. The media alliance into which the "eternal" works of art have been incorporated is a dynamic multimedia archive where technological connections between word, image and sound are created. Without calling this development by name, Steiner sees a loss of authenticity here. The modern media alliance, in which culture moves forward as information, in no way resembles Steiner's model of secondary layers with an authentic, primary core at the center. In information science there is no difference between first- and second-rate data; at best there are processed and raw data. In principle, they are all subject to static and erosion and at the mercy of the state of technology. For Steiner, media are synonymous with the immanent fall of the subject, which would express itself in its own way, but cannot because it is bowled over by an avalanche of information. "Literate humanity is solicited daily by millions of words, printed, broadcast, screened, about books which it will never open, music it will not hear, works of art it will never set eyes on." Not even the computer and electronic databanks can process this mass. Steiner is mainly looking to arouse self-pity. It's all simply become too much for the scholars. Even worse: the media are impairing their intellectual capability and are becoming superior. "A mandarin madness of secondary discourse infects thought and sensibility." He tacitly hopes that history will pass devastating judgment on our "imperialism of the second- and third-hand." "Perhaps our age will come to be known as that of the marginalists, of the clerics of the market." Media ruin the mind, and pointing out the culprits is sufficient. They are the press hounds: "Journalistic presentation generates a temporality of equivalent instantaneity. All things are more or less of equal import: all are only daily." (All data are equal, but some are more equal than others.) Poets, composers and painters, according to Steiner, should not be satisfied with their five-minute fame. They are, after all, "wagers on lastingness." That the media are concerned these days with the incorporation of art into the mythological universe (think of Van Gogh, Mozart, or The Doors) has not yet occurred to Steiner. Meanwhile, the media have produced their own immortal heroes and myths, which can compete with the traditional ones and moreover happily embroider on them. "Journalism bids us invest in the bourse of momentary sensation." Whole masses of people who practise "serious art" are caving in to this seductive offer. Actually they should display a radical disinterest in topicality, since according to Steiner "meaningful art" is by definition not new, and just as timely 30 years later. "Originality is antithetical to novelty." But creativity has become fatally entangled in the academic-journalistic discourse which twines around it. In placing such emphasis on the compulsion to present oneself as shocking, new or modern and succumbing to the patterns of fashion, Steiner cannot get involved with the current use of media in art. In his view, the media still maintain themselves outside the creative process. They attach themselves like parasites onto the work of art and nibble on it from the outside. When this gnawing reaches the threshold of pain, we can indeed expect artists to become frustrated with the "paper Leviathan of secondary talk" of which they unwillingly comprise a part. At that moment, the ecological appeal can strike a chord and give restraint a moral fundament. If, on the other hand, we see the media as platforms, and start with the assumption that the arts must seek contact with other data currents if they are to survive, finding an interpretation-free work space outside the media does become quite difficult. The longing for this kind of extramediality is nostalgic and timeless. Leaving things as they are and applying yourself to new work in your media-free surroundings has a touristic quality. If we see the media as more raw material, they and all their secondary replays are freely at the artist's disposal. Then the wastefulness is back on track and we can calmly let babble ("the busy vacancy") continue to grow rampant over media excess and mental moderation. Criticism is applause in the form of static. The same unholy alliance between media and art bemoaned by Steiner is also the bone of contention in the controversial book written by the West German film director Hans Jürgen Syberberg in the turbulent transitional period of '89/'90. "Vom Unglück und Glück der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem Kriege" ("On the Misfortunes and Fortunes of Art in Postwar Germany") immediately drew attention to itself when published because of the author's unrestrained use of Nazi terminology. The scandal prevented people from looking more closely at his line of reasoning. The "secondary talk" indeed had the effect here that primary theory remained out of range. What is remarkable about "Kunst in Deutschland" is that it articulates popular prejudices about postwar art and then connects them to a theory of art. Syberberg sees an era coming to an end with the fall of the Berlin wall, and is there in no time to fill the need for new paradigms. Finally he can say aloud what everyone was already thinking, namely that contemporary art is second-rate garbage. Like Steiner he thinks back nostalgically to an art that radiates purity, durability and beauty: authentic monuments for eternity. In order to be included in the media, art has had to defer to them. That is the reason for postwar superficiality and pollution. This "art without a people," according to Syberberg, results in "disposable commodities like punk, pop and junk." "Everything mutates boundlessly, everything degenerates into unhealthy decay, with wholehearted approval." In the boom period an anti-art triumphed which was pounced on by the media: "All doors opened for this anti-world of beauty, grinning, dominating the market, shameless." Syberberg sees the preference with "the small, the inferior, the deformed, the sick, and the filthy" over brilliance as the hallmark of this art form. "The command of ugliness dominates life and art and the rat becomes the symbol of what is interesting, as does the swine." Hans Jürgen is livid with annoyance at Hamlet in undershorts, Don Giovanni in the whorehouse of the fast-food chain, the poet Kleist with a steel helmet, William Tell in a Jeep, and Richard Wagner's "Twilight of the Gods" cut up into "a fast food porno videoclip." The reader has to laugh involuntarily at the bombastic drunken language in which Syberberg spews out his frustrations about poor Germany. He rants about all those filthy artists and their hollow products that culminate in self-destruction ("the rocker who smashes his violin"). A neurotic mannerism typifies the contemporary art sector. "A subsidized and organized apocalyptic mood abounds; culture without identity, crippled by inauthenticity." Although Syberberg achieved succes with his monster films after WW II, he nevertheless considers this period a kind of hell "which unfestively celebrated its triumph and was nauseated by its own vomit." His hallucinations betray a tremendous fear of the chaos of hybridization, in which everything is connected to everything, everyone sleeps with everyone: "nations, races, food, plants, animals, populations." The media in particular have become too much for him. He cannot distinguish between the many images, and sees only the masses of media that engulf him. To him, the "international arbitrariness" of "multicultural media charisma" is a mess emptied over the "bloodless soil" from above. This he frankly admits: "So here we are, in the land of plenty of realities, on 5 to 40 channels from all over the world, our lives lonely, sated, and incapable of art." The media officials who call themselves the mouthpieces of protest speak with a forked tongue: "life-lies arise from the media markets as a result of the dialectic of minorities." The "wars from behind the desk of the opinion industry," according to Syberberg's masochistic cultural philosophy, result in a gigantic "environmental pollution of the soul." Art has degenerated into the "show business of the leisure industry." It has been reduced to "charismatic electronic art." Even his own medium turns out guilty of "dissolution into the international electronic multimedia marketing show," when he writes that film has reduced art to pure industry. The aesthetic situation seems so hopeless that he himself is no longer embarrassed to come out with such rubbish. Steiner and Syberberg fill a temporary need. For the time being, experiments with electronic art are unresolved and offer no certainty in the unstable art world. As long as the electronic media are still in their phase of introduction, the call for a return of authentic art can count on public approval. Fascination and boredom constantly alternate. The importance people attach to the media is just as great as the disbelief they are overcome with moments later. This zigzag motion causes confusion which cannot be resolved, except by switching off all the media. The media-ecological laments are a waste of time because they appeal to a sense of responsibility that is not of this age. The media dietitians demand responsible behavior from tele-civilians. If all of us would collectively persist in doing the same, our impending destruction by digital multiplicity might be averted by ecological simplicity. But the assumed will to consistent behavior has long been replaced by a range of more or less interesting options that are constantly changing (or not). The user is no longer overcome with apathy, indecision or indifference, but examines miscellaneous paradoxes quite apart from the complex of responsibility. Superabundance is a natural background factor, as a set of possibilities that are open to all. The conscious on/off choice has been replaced by a vagueness-coefficient: today, one works in several menus at once. The option of a media diet may be one such temporary menu - until information regains its old fascination. ??