Journal: AugenBlick. ISSN 0179–2555.
Félix Guattari follows a clear agenda with his notion of post-mass-media: his entire project of the three ecologies aims at «human relations with the socius, the psyche and ‹nature›» (Guattari, 2000, p. 41; see also 2013, p. 26–27). Those deteriorating relations, ignored by «[s]tructuralism and subsequently postmodernism» in all their passivity, will have to be thought in new and different ways (ibid.). In order «to ‹kick the habit› of sedative discourse, particularly ‹the fix› of television» Guattari suggests to view the world «through the interchangeable lenses» of the three ecologies: social ecology, mental ecology and environmental ecology (p. 41–42). Post-mass-media, as an «essential programmatic point for social ecology», is a goal of working both with and on the three ecologies (p. 61). This goal would be reached when «the media will be reappropriated by a multitude of subject-groups capable of directing its resingularization» (ibid.). Guattari’s intention is for the term to be programmatic and understood as a concept for political action. The focus of the term – that is, the ‹post-› of post-mass-media – lies in the active appropriation of the spaces of mass-media through subject-groups. To Guattari, this seems to become possible on the basis of «sudden mass consciousness-raising», a changed role of class struggle after the end of Stalinism, the «technological evolution of the media» itself as well as on a «reconstitution of labour processes on the rubble of early twentieth-century systems of industrial production» (p. 62). The notion of post-mass-media, abbreviated to post-media, emerged precisely at a time which had to emphasise the problems of global developments. Guattari aimed at the early 1990s, without having any concrete idea about the transformation that the media would undergo. The term, as Hörl and Hansen remark in their summary, has been developed «on the basis of new media from video to computer» (Hörl/Hansen, 2013, p. 10). Back then, the appropriation of a new mass-media through subject-groups still seemed possible and desirable to Guattari.
Read the complete call here here.
This call for papers is aimed at early career researchers, whose work draws on the notion of post-media after Guattari. The aim of the issue, which surveys the relevance of an originally programmatic term for scholarly projects developed 30 years after Guattari, is also to uncover sociological, political and economic expansions of the term. In doing so, we want to address – amongst others – the following questions:
- Which problems can the term still address today?
- Which strategies of re-formulation or resignification are necessary to productively adopt the term in a description of the media-technological formation of our present? What is its use for the description and appropriation of current social, medial, artistic, political and economic assemblages?
- How can a contemporary technical and technological formation no longer placed between video and computer be addressed in this way?
Please send us your 500-word proposal as well as a short biographical note to stuermer [at] leuphana [.] de by September 30, 2019.