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      The Speed of Beauty: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Interviewed by Ulrik Ekman

      *Ulrik Ekman *
      / University of Copenhagen/
      ekman@hum.ku.dk 

      (c) 2006 Ulrik Ekman.
      All rights reserved.

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      /Professor Gumbrecht was interviewed after his visit in November
      2005 at the Department for Cultural Studies and the Arts,
      Copenhagen University, Denmark, arranged by the Research Forum for
      Intermedial Digital Aesthetics directed by Ulrik Ekman. On that
      occasion, Gumbrecht gave a seminar titled "Benjamin in the Digital
      Age," which focused on his editorial work with Professor Michael
      Marrinan (Stanford) on the essay anthology, /Mapping Benjamin: The
      Work of Art in the Digital Age.//

      /This interview originated in conversations during Gumbrecht's
      visit and continued to develop further ideas raised in the
      seminar. The interview took place mainly by email during the first
      three months following Gumbrecht's Denmark seminar./

      /This interview stretches the conventional limits of the genre in
      more ways than one. The initial agreement was that questions and
      answers would be exchanged several times, undergoing cuts or
      further articulation as each party found necessary, until a format
      and body of work acceptable to both was reached. The length of the
      interview as well as the scope and complexity of the questions and
      answers thus often exceed what one would normally expect. It has
      from the outset been a conscious decision to articulate and even
      to emphasize the participants' differences of position or of
      approach. /

   1. *UE*: The Dubrovnick seminar on the materialities of communication
      not only resulted in the publication of a very rich body of
      work,[1 <#foot1>] it also seems to have been of lasting importance
      for you. You refer frequently to this event as the high point of
      the seminar series,[2 <#foot2>] and one can see how it prefigures,
      among other things, your later work on post-hermeneutics, the
      production of presence, and meaning-effects. What was the
      motivation, at that time, for bringing specific attention to
      "materialities of communication," and how do you work with that
      notion today?

   2. *HUG*: "Materialities of Communication" (back in the spring of
      1987, if I remember correctly), in a still almost "Socialist"
      Yugoslavia, was indeed only one (the fourth) of four meetings that
      my friends and I organized on the Eastern Adriatic coast between
      1981 and 1989. Our main motivation was, typically enough, as I
      might say today, to "keep alive" the theoretical and philosophical
      impulses in the humanities that came from the "earthshaking years"
      around 1970, but that we felt had been slowly ebbing since the
      early 1980s. I am saying "typically enough" because today, in a
      first and not yet totalizing retrospective, it is my impression
      that it has always been my task (at least my main ambition) to
      keep alive, and even to accelerate, intellectual movement. In
      those Dubrovnik years, I once said that I wanted to be a "catalyst
      of intellectual complexity"--and this certainly still holds true.
      Now, such a self-description implies that I care much less about
      "where" such intellectual movement will lead us. I care less about
      the "vectors" of our thinking than about its actual happening--and
      this works well with a general conception that I have of the
      humanities as being a (small) social system, which, rather than
      reducing complexity (which of course is necessary in general),
      adds to the intrinsic complexity of our societies. We should be
      less about solutions and more about producing new questions, i.e.,
      more complexity. But back to your question, and my Dubrovnik
      decade--the 1980s. As I am implying, it was not very clear at the
      beginning of our colloquium series in which direction we could be
      successful with our intention to keep intellectual movement alive.
      What we first tried was a "revitalization" of the then-present
      moment through a study of the history of our disciplines. But this
      turned out to be too "antiquarian." Then we tried two universally
      totalizing concepts, i.e., that of "historical periods" (in
      German: /Epochen/) and "style." But in general, our experience
      pointed out the misery of any type of constructivism; that is,
      that there are certain concepts that one can endlessly expand so
      that, in the end, they don't distinguish anything any longer. This
      was, in the mid-1980s, the moment--a moment quite loaded with
      frustration--when we were looking for a topic and a
      self-assignment that would offer us more conceptual and
      intellectual resistance. "Materialities of communication" seemed
      to be the solution--and I assure you that, while the actual
      invention of the topic caused great euphoria (I can still remember
      it: it happened on a Sunday morning on the beautiful marble-stoned
      main street of Dubrovnik), we didn't quite know where it would
      lead us. It was in the most complete sense of the phrase: a
      "search concept." Let me add, anecdotally, that the strongest
      reason for choosing this concept back in the mid-1980s, was the
      hope that it might contribute to a revitalization of a small
      materialist Marxism. This clearly remained an ambition--almost
      unbelievably, from my present-day perspective. Indeed, we
      organized those colloquia in Yugoslavia because Yugoslavia was the
      only country in that world that would let Westerners run academic
      colloquia and that offered, at the same time, the possibility of
      inviting colleagues from "behind the Iron Curtain" to participate.

   3. *UE*: It seemed obvious that both the concern with the
      materialities of communication and the ensuing inquiry into the
      limits of the hermeneutic tradition of either assuming or
      attributing meaning opened a host of difficult epistemological
      questions, not just as regards any stability for (socially)
      constructed meaning-effects but also respecting the centered, or
      at least consensual unity versus a fragmentary multiplicity of
      epistemological positions. You reflect upon this several times in
      your work, and I wonder how you see this problematic today. In
      addition, would there be a way to sketch out how the form and
      style of your writing were influenced by this? I am thinking here
      of the inventive and complex kinds of intermediary constellations
      or configurations that you elaborate in both In 1926 and Mapping
      Benjamin--in the first case via notions of arrays, codes,
      collapsed codes, and frames--and in the second case via the notion
      of mapping, the use of 16 critical terms, eight stations, and
      various nodes or knots between these...

   4. *HUG*: You know, you may have discovered something here that I
      have neither seen nor intended myself--which of course does not
      imply that what you are seeing is "wrong." The subjective truth
      is, however, that, firstly, I have never cared all that much about
      those "epistemological" motifs that came with the threatening
      authority of prescriptions. While I do think it matters to care
      about the "cutting-edge," in the sense of knowing "where it is,"
      and in the sense of having the ambition to really "be"
      "cutting-edge," it is not in my temperament to follow certain
      fashions (I am too ambitious for that--it is rather my way to try
      and "found" my own fashion by departing from existing ones).
      Anyway, I have never thought that "epistemological fragmentation"
      was the order of the day, or the order of the year. What you are
      observing (correctly, no doubt) are "local" solutions to "local"
      problems. My main personal desire for the project that led to the
      1926 book was to find a way (and, later on, a discursive form)
      that would allow me to produce this illusion of "full immersion
      into the past." In the end, a "fragmentation" of my material into
      fifty-three "entries" seemed to be an appropriate discursive
      solution because it gave me the impression that I could "surround"
      myself (full immersion!) with those "fragmented" entries. In the
      Benjamin reader that I edited with Michael Marrinan, the question
      between the two editors (two editors, by the way, who never
      happened to agree easily--which is why I have such good memories
      of my collaboration with Marrinan)--anyway, the question was how
      we could "work through" and present "editorial discourse" on the
      work presented by the multiple (and very short) contributions to
      our volume. After long discussion, we constructed / "extracted" a
      certain (perhaps I would tend to say: all too complicated)
      conceptual grid along which Marrinan and I wrote our editorial
      commentaries. We felt that this was a way, if you will allow for
      this metaphor, to x-ray Benjamin's essay sixty years after its
      first publication, with intellectual tools (to continue with the
      metaphor)--with a "technology"--that was very different from the
      prevailing intellectual tools of his time. I fear that this answer
      may be disappointing, because it is so unprogrammatic--but at
      least I am trying to tell you the truth.

   5. *UE*: One of the intriguing aspects of your work on the
      materialities of communication is the careful and repeated
      traversal of the relation between epistemological and ontological
      concerns. Your work displays, especially in its reiterated
      encounters with "presence," an extremely intricate oscillation
      between a move, perhaps unavoidable, towards epistemological
      sense-making and conceptualization on the one hand, and, on the
      other, an at least formally opening move in the direction of
      ontological concerns, "ontology" here perhaps remaining altogether
      other, overwhelmingly complex, or socially and historically
      variable. Moreover, this oscillation seems informed by a
      problematization of ideality and the empirical both, just as it
      draws not only on modes of deconstructive differentiation from
      Heidegger through early Derrida but also, and perhaps especially,
      on the affirmative making of distinctions we find in the later
      Luhmann. How do you see this oscillation today, and how do you
      undertake the navigation between incessantly complicating
      deconstructive gestures towards "presence"--such as the early
      Derrida's concern with the "exteriority of writing" or Jean-Luc
      Nancy's notion of the "birth to presence"--and the frequent
      reduction of complexity in Luhmann's social systems theory, from
      its centering on semantics in the mid-80s through the later
      elaboration of autopoeisis and observation?

   6. *HUG*: Let me start by admitting that, in a not-so-remote past, I
      cherished the word "ontology" because it was such a "dirty word,"
      the word with the worst possible philosophical reputation--a word,
      therefore, that had an enormous potential for provocation. This
      "explosive" situation, unfortunately, has faded away--and at
      times, I accuse or pride myself on having made a certain
      contribution to this development. But, more seriously, my best way
      of saying what I am referring to by "ontology," is, surprisingly,
      I hope, to say that the word refers to an epistemological
      situation, an epistemological feeling that is no longer completely
      obedient to the premises and prejudices imposed by the so-called
      "linguistic turn." Yes, I refuse to accept what Foucault, Luhmann,
      and ultimately even Derrida almost joyfully accepted, i.e., that
      it is neither possible nor desirable to "speak," or even to think,
      about anything that is outside of language. Of language, or, in
      Luhmann's terms, outside of "communication," i.e., outside of
      those systems, all social systems and the psychic system, whose
      functioning is based on "meaning." It turns out that, quite
      simply, I am fascinated by things, i.e., by that which is "not
      language"--I have, for example, long felt that it is stupid and
      counterproductive to describe sex as a form of communication (I
      never forget to tell my undergraduate students that, if they want
      to communicate, they should rather use language than sex). A more
      academic way of perhaps expressing the same would be to say that
      there is nothing wrong with "post-linguistic turn" philosophy--the
      basic argument is of course quite convincing: that nothing outside
      of language can ever be grasped by our minds. But this leaves us
      with a relatively narrow range of possibilities for thinking. Now,
      if thinking in the humanities is genuinely "riskful thinking"
      (just another way of saying that the humanities should produce
      complexity), then we have a right and an obligation to rebel
      against such reductions in the range of thought-possibilities (as
      has been advocated for almost a century now by what we call
      "analytic philosophy"). This is a way of saying what, despite his
      quite repulsive biography, I cannot help but be fascinated by
      Heidegger's philosophy: it is a philosophy that does not care
      about the premises and prescriptions coming from the "linguistic
      turn." Derrida, unfortunately, as far as I am concerned, soon
      abandoned a motif that was strong in his earlier work, the motif
      of the "exteriority of the signifier" (as my Chicago colleague
      David Wellbery called it), a motif that could have made his
      philosophy a "non-linguistic turn" philosophy. But he ended up
      embracing linguistic absolutism and Hermeneutics, its Teutonic
      equivalent. Luhmann, in this sense, was a linguistic-turn
      philosopher right from the beginning, i.e., from his very first
      programmatic essay--which had the title "Meaning as Basic Concept
      of Sociology." But, after all, why should my heroes from the
      previous intellectual generation necessarily be those who have
      already thought everything that I myself might desire to think?

   7. *UE*: The editor of the first anthology to present in English a
      fuller range of your early texts was Wlad Godzich, who was also
      one of the contributors to The Materialities of Communication. You
      refer more than once to his essay in the latter, which delineates
      a very interesting history of the crisis of legitimation for
      language and literacy vis-à-vis the hegemony of images, especially
      in a contemporary culture of digital technology and media.[3
      <#foot3>] As regards image-culture today Godzich remarks towards
      the end of his essay that we are "living in the midst of a
      prelogical affirmation of the world, in the sense that it takes
      place before the fact of /logos/, and it threatens us with an
      alienation that modern thinkers could barely conceive" (368).
      According to him, this means that we are now "inhabited by images
      that we have not drawn from ourselves, images of external
      impressions that we do not master and that retain all their
      agential capability without being mediated by us" (369). It is not
      just that world, subject, and language thereby lose stability and
      fixation as was the case with the modern putting into motion of
      these concepts, something which still permitted constructive
      solutions in the sense that modes of control over velocities could
      be achieved, along with effects of stability and management of
      instabilities. Rather, what Godzich has in mind here, echoing
      Virilio's concern with such acceleration, is that today "the
      technology of images operates at the speed of light, as does the
      world" (370), something which at best allows one to ask whether
      language can indeed bring the speed of the image under control,
      turning images into some new kind of language. Godzich, of course,
      is not alone in pointing out the problematic vicissitudes of the
      digital image; in fact, there is still no consensus on an
      aesthetics of the digital image, in spite of the laudable efforts
      of Sean Cubitt, Edmond Couchot, W.J.T. Mitchell, Jonathan Crary,
      Bernard Stiegler, Mark B. Hansen, and quite a few others.[4
      <#foot4>] We still seem to be left with discussions about the very
      possibility or impossibility of framing the digital image, prior
      to any more elaborate or differentiated engagement that retains
      notions of /aesthesis/, whether more traditional or as regards
      relations to, or breaks from, the avant-garde. When you concur in
      your texts that we do, as Godzich has it, live in a world of
      floating images, how do you see the relation of images and
      language, and in what ways do digital images enter your work?

   8. *HUG*: I was just saying earlier that I am inclined (not to say
      eager) to find that my very impressive predecessors (although I
      have never seen them in a "Harold Bloomian" way, as all too
      threatening)--that my very impressive predecessors have left
      something for me to think. But now you have jumped--and you seem
      to confront me with a question that, from my perspective, seems to
      be a question/an assignment for the next generation (although you
      are referring to my friend Wlad Godzich, who is three years older
      than I). Anyway, to really think about what it means to be
      increasingly surrounded by and immersed in an environment of
      "floating images" is, from my point of view, a question for the
      next generation, because I, frankly, try to be as little
      surrounded by "floating images" as I possibly can. I have nothing
      on earth against TV, for example (on the contrary, my family may
      well hold the record for the most TV hours per week for an
      academic family). But I personally (and atypically, within my
      family) don't like TV. The truth is that I regularly fall asleep
      in front of the TV screen--even if I am not tired at all, even if
      I am watching the most exciting thing for me, i.e., sports and
      athletic events. So I am just not in a good position to analyze
      "floating images"--although I of course acknowledge that the
      question is important.

   9. But let me try to say something more general (from the wisdom of
      my age?) about the character of such tasks. It is my impression
      and my criticism that your generation, i.e., the "media
      theory-generation," is always trying to come up with the "genius
      formula," the "genius intuition," when it comes to describing and
      analyzing such phenomena. Patiently working on and developing a
      network of distinctions (I know I now sound like an analytic
      philosopher) does not seem to be your thing. Many protagonists of
      your generation (and of my own) do look strangely "Hegelian" to
      me--but Hegelian with the ridiculous ambition to be geniuses and
      /geistreich./ Like those late nineteenth-century naturalists who
      were "hunting butterflies" with nets, and never caught any.
      Virilio, for example, looks to me like the embodiment of such bad
      intellectual taste; I have never managed to read any of his texts
      all the way through. Very seldom, Friedrich Kittler participates
      in such lapses of bad taste--but his best pages are of course
      sublime--and the admirable phenomenon is that most of his pages
      are "best pages." Anyway, I am trying to make a pledge for patient
      and descriptive accuracy. Following this pledge, one will discover
      that we are of course not as exclusively surrounded by "floating
      images" as Godzich would have it. Not our entire world is MTV.
      Most of us are also surrounded, for many hours a day, by the
      environment of electronic mail and of the Internet, which is,
      after all, still a "verbal" environment. Now, the new thing, the
      thing yet to be analyzed by a good phenomenological description,
      is that, on the one hand, visual perception ("images") is less
      embodied and requires different reactions from our bodies than
      visual perception that is not produced by a screen. On the other
      hand, communication by email and by the Internet "feels"
      different, in this very bodily sense, from writing a text by hand
      or on the typewriter, and from receiving a "traditional" letter on
      either beautiful or cheap stationery. The simple proof is, for me
      (if this observation requires proof at all), that I miss that
      old-fashioned type of correspondence every day when I look into my
      (real space) mailbox in the mailroom of my building at the
      university--and see that it is empty; whereas the "mailbox" on my
      screen contains around five hundred new electronic messages every
      day. Now, I shouldn't fall back (or "fall ahead") onto that tone
      of cultural criticism; all I want to say is that not only do I not
      have a formula for describing our profoundly changed communicative
      environment, I feel that one should not even go for such a
      formula. In more critical terms: I think that media research and
      media theory would have made much more sense and much more
      progress if it had concentrated more insistently and more broadly
      on good descriptions.

  10. *UE*: One of the recurring debates about the digital image
      concerns the question whether the condition of "post-photography"
      and the variability or manipulability of the digital image entail
      a more or less complete departure from ontological and realistic
      representational dimensions. Currently, Mitchell is very much
      concerned to counter exactly such leave-takings of realism, and
      others try to point out how work in this area does not exclude
      notions of realism in the first place and, secondly, is not
      unidirectional but rather seems to be undergoing a more
      differentiated development. In particular, Lev Manovich points out
      that the almost unlimited digital simulation in cinematic
      post-production that we know from the Wachowski brothers' The
      Matrix, and from virtuality-oriented art more generally, now
      increasingly seems to be supplemented by new modes of work that
      focus on sampling rather than on pure simulation, or on
      documentary video realism rather than on the full-scale special
      effects of Hollywood cinema.[5 <#foot5>] If we keep in mind the
      rich set of focal interests for the study of the materialities of
      communication, how do you view such debates over the "real" status
      of (moving) digital images?

  11. *HUG*: Unfortunately I am not familiar with most of the
      works--artistic and academic--that you are invoking here. In this
      case, my ignorance has no excuse; it is sheer ignorance, and not a
      judgment, as in the case of Virilio, whose work I find grotesquely
      overrated. Sometimes, if you will allow me this remark, I am
      astonished to see--and grateful at the same time--that I have
      survived the challenges of an academic life, being the slow reader
      that I am. I read slowly, I spend a lot of time taking and making
      notes, and I write comparatively much. But that feeling of being
      "behind," of not reading enough, of not responding to so many
      questions, grows, the older I get--and unfortunately, this is not
      just secretly self-congratulatory rhetoric. This is the reason why
      my reaction to your question about the "reality-status" of
      "moving" and digital images has to be all too general and
      abstract. Whatever degree of "reality" you want to invest them
      with of course depends on the epistemological premises, the
      philosophical system, or the conceptual network within which you
      are asking this question. Each framework (think of analytic
      philosophy, systems theory, deconstruction--you name it) will
      produce a more or less predictable answer. What I find interesting
      (and not in the sense of a judgment) is that I, for example (and I
      believe: like many people of my age) have a hard time reacting to
      (and an even harder time connecting with) some of these digital
      effects and miracles. I do not deny their value and their
      potential merit; it does not astonish me to see that you, for
      example, really enjoy and appreciate them. But in my case, they
      have produced a paradoxical reaction. The more I see myself
      confronted and surrounded by a technologically mediated
      environment of stimuli, the more I enjoy that which, at least from
      a naïve standpoint, is not mediated. As I said before, there is a
      huge difference for me between watching a game of American
      football on TV /or/ in the stadium--and I am well aware that I see
      "less" in the stadium. As I am answering your questions, I am
      looking through the window of my library carrel, across the red
      roofs of the buildings of Stanford University, in their strangely
      nineteenth-century Spanish Colonial style--and in the background,
      I see a mountain range, and, faintly, the wings of a white bird. I
      find this moving; I wish I had learned earlier to be more a part,
      with my own body, of this natural and physical environment. Now, I
      am not talking (at least not mainly talking) about "ecological
      politics." What I am trying to point to is an aesthetics, perhaps
      an impossible aesthetics, of "immediate experience"--which no
      doubt, in my case, depends on being overfed and overstimulated by
      manmade technologies. Yes, this is very romantic; you may even
      call it /kitsch/. But I do not seem to be the only one, at least
      in my generation. Read, for example, the book of my good friend
      and closest colleague Robert Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead.
      This book is about rediscovering a feeling for the ground we walk
      on as the ground that contains the remnants of our predecessors.
      It is a feeling that we have largely lost, and I will admit that
      this (objective) loss has only become a (subjective) loss for me
      in the past few decades.

  12. *UE*: You open your co-edited essay anthology Mapping Benjamin:
      The Work of Art in the Digital Age, by introducing the coupling of
      two critical terms, aesthetics and perception, as part of the
      reactualization of Benjamin's work today. In the treatment of
      perception you point out that we might understand the intellectual
      background of "aura" as "Benjamin's last-ditch effort to save, in
      the face of a growing challenge from technology, the physical
      limits of our human bodies as the yardstick of perception itself"
      (7). More specifically, you see in Benjamin's polarization of
      "cult value" and "exhibition value" a certain reintroduction of
      the traditional philosophical dualism of what you call nativist
      and empiricist models of perception. On this view Benjamin seems
      unable or unwilling to consider perception in a technologically
      expanded field. Could one understand you as saying that he allows
      for an opening, at the very least, of the question respecting
      whether and how "the fundamental parameters of perception itself
      might escape the limits of our physical bodies" (6)? In that same
      passage regarding perception, and the missing link in Benjamin to
      seemingly inhuman models of perception, you describe today's
      dominant model of perception as based on the body qua "information
      processor"--one that "deploys a complex system of long-term and
      short-term memory storage, of hierarchical coding schemes, and a
      modular chain of cognitive operations very much like a computer"
      (6). In that case, embodied perception would be attuned to the
      production, dissemination, and reception of digital data. While
      the reception of Benjamin's mechanical production essay is
      famously multiplicitous, at least two recent efforts draw
      extensively on Benjamin as a source of inspiration for a
      materialist theory of digital media and a notion of the lived body
      as the framing capacity vis-à-vis digital art. I am thinking here
      of the reactualization of Benjamin and cinematic paradigms in
      Manovich's widely read study, The Language of New Media, and of
      Mark B. Hansen's more recent New Philosophy for New Media, which
      opens by citing Benjaminian perception as a source of hope for the
      survival of media today in spite of digital convergence and
      various posthuman positions. Hansen devotes his entire text to
      fleshing out the notion of the body as the framer of information
      artworks. In addition, at least two of the essays in Mapping
      Benjamin, by Bolz and Werber, go quite far, albeit differently,
      towards actualizing Benjamin's notion of the "training of
      perception" as something valuable today. I know that bodily
      being-there, the experience proper to the life world, as well as
      (mediated) spectatorship and/or participation figure very
      prominently in your work, including in the recent text on athletic
      beauty.[6 <#foot6>] How do you see Benjamin, the body, and the
      training of perception in our digital age?

  13. *HUG*: Of course I find Benjamin's essay (which someone told me is
      the most frequently cited essay in the academic humanities) very
      important--otherwise I would not have invested my time into a
      collective volume discussing it. But I find it important as a
      symptom of its own time, the late 1930s, of its specific
      sensitivities, hopes, and above all prognostics. For me (and I
      know how irreverent this may sound), Benjamin's prognostics were
      about as grotesquely wrong as Jules Vernes's imagination of the
      future world (although it is very interesting that, in both cases,
      intellectuals passionately insist on how miraculously right they
      both were). Look, for example, at how Benjamin predicts that aura
      will disappear--whereas our contemporary truth is that so many
      more artifacts than in the mid-twentieth-century have become
      "auratic." If, in Benjamin's time, a drawing by Paul Klee or a
      picture by Picasso had an aura, today we consider even the (very
      "selective") posters (I always find a touch of kitsch there) of
      Klee and Picasso exhibits auratic, and subsequently frame them. Or
      take the moving but completely erroneous idea that a
      multiplication of "cameramen" would entail some effect of
      "emancipation" (whatever this may mean). Technologically, this has
      happened. But I cannot imagine that anyone would seriously claim
      that running through the world with a camcorder, or being able to
      take photographs with a cell phone, has had any "emancipatory"
      effect. Now, I am not blaming Benjamin--I think his essay is a
      bundle of strong intellectual intuitions--whose incoherence (and I
      mean it in the sense of "glorious incoherence") has probably
      contributed to the unique breadth of its reception. But give me a
      break! Can people be serious when they claim that Benjamin's
      concepts will help us to analyze our present-day media
      environment? This would be even more hilarious than to claim that
      scientific labs of the late 1930s were superior in terms of the
      "truth value" that they produced, than contemporary labs. So I
      won't even begin to discuss the question of whether Benjamin's
      concepts or intuitions can be helpful in analyzing our present-day
      technological and media environment. They can definitely not. The
      interesting question is, once again, why so many of my colleagues,
      specifically younger colleagues (colleagues of your generation),
      are so obsessed with and so insistent in finding more than
      inspiration, in finding, indeed, "Truth," in the classics of our
      field. It is as if today, very different from those days around
      1980, when my friends and I (with the beginning of the Dubrovnik
      colloquia) tried "to keep intellectual movement alive" we have
      fallen under a paralysis or a prohibition of independent thinking.
      Why do those who are interested in digital art not use their own
      competence to describe and analyze it, to develop theories? Why do
      you read Benjamin with the hope of finding help for the analysis
      of contemporary technology, instead of thinking for yourselves?

  14. *UE*: I was quite intrigued when watching the opening ceremony of
      the most recent Olympic Games--for on that occasion bodily
      presence, perception, participation, and the spectacle of the
      sports event all seemed to be displaying in uncircumventable ways
      the changes our culture and our life world are currently
      undergoing due to digital augmentation and the pervasiveness of
      computing. I am not just talking about the real time or "live"
      televising with multiple cameras and the big screens on the
      stadium, but also about the fact that a most of the spectators
      present and the participants themselves were carrying and actively
      using cellular phones, digital cameras, as well as digital video
      cameras. "Presence," "being-there," and "participation" here
      rather obviously included the navigation through the augmented
      dimension, in the sense of engaging with quite complicated
      overlays of physical space and data spaces, place and
      tele-distance--just as the pervasiveness of computing made it
      difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish clearly between
      embodied and digital perception at the level of at least the
      audio-visual and the haptic or tactile. You have written
      extensively on sports events, spectatorship, participation, and
      the relation to the media,[7 <#foot7>] but today how is one to
      make sense of, and is one indeed to make sense of, so many
      athletes and spectators pointing and waving with one hand, while
      talking right there as well as via their wireless headsets, and
      video recording with the other hand?

  15. *HUG*: Yes, this time I am familiar with the (screen) images that
      you are referring to. I have seen those closing ceremonies of the
      Olympic Games, for example, where the athletes whom we see on the
      screen have nothing better to do than to shoot photographs or use
      their cell phones. Frankly (and after the first part of our
      conversation, you won't be surprised to hear this), I find these
      images depressing--I certainly cannot identify with this attitude.
      Had I ever had the privilege of participating in the Olympic
      Games, I would have tried to indulge, as best I could, in the
      immediacy (here is this /kitsch/ word again!) of every moment. It
      wouldn't have crossed my mind to become an amateur reporter--and
      why would I ever take photos or produce a video in order to enjoy
      the event retrospectively, /instead of enjoying the event in real
      time/? But this movement and practice have a long history,
      meanwhile. When my four children (today 27, 23, 16 and 14 years
      old) were born, I was of course present in the delivery room--and,
      quite honestly, I cannot remember any other moments or events that
      I have found more impressive or incisive for my life. But alreaady
      at that time (back in the spring of 1978), there were dads who
      filmed the "event" with their camcorders. I found that
      obscene--but even forgetting the criticism of "obscenity"--how can
      one possibly forego the immediacy of the event in order to prepare
      for a retrospective viewing? Now, let me become self-critical
      here: there is clearly something that I do not get. Of course
      these children, today, use their computers as photo albums; they
      edit pictures; they fast-forward through them; they enjoy them in
      a way that I cannot follow--I always want to tell them that I want
      to take more time with each picture (and I no longer dare to tell
      them that I would so like to have a print--and an album full of
      prints). It is as if the speed of beauty was not for me.

  16. *UE*: This problematic of sense-making, assumption or attribution
      of meaning, and of semantics generally has been a lasting concern,
      indeed one of the most indisputable and energized foci of your
      work. It is evident in your approaches to the everyday life world
      on psychological and socio-cultural planes both, and in your
      reconsideration of what the role of meaning can be in the
      encounter with art and the spectacle, but perhaps it is enjoying
      special foregrounding in your explicit reflections upon the
      difficult challenges posed by a new epistemology that does not
      grant that traditional kind of privilege to interpretation and
      hermeneutics which we find not least in Germany. What was the
      original motivation for your questioning of interpretation, and
      what do you consider to be the more or less unmet challenges today
      for post-hermeneutic epistemology, or epistemologies?

  17. *HUG*: Although I get the impression that this, the
      "non-hermeneutic" epistemology, is what colleagues and readers
      most associate with my work and with me, this is indeed a good
      question in many ways. The most banal way in which it is a good
      question (and the most interesting one for me personally) is that
      if I am such a verbally exuberant person, someone who always
      interprets, who always attributes meaning, why am I so radically
      against the "universality claim of hermeneutics"? Of course I will
      not venture any kind of self-reflexive psychoanalysis here. Let me
      admit, rather, that there is clearly some academico-Oedipal
      dynamic at play here--about which I have recently written for the
      first time (symptomatically enough, the essay was first published
      in Russian, but will soon come out in the American journal Telos[8
      <#foot8>]. My own /Doktorvater/ and first academic boss (whose
      name I had sworn I would not mention in the public sphere again)
      was a great admirer (rather than a student, as he claimed) of
      Hans-Georg Gadamer, who was himself a student of Heidegger--who
      was a student of Husserl; this is a heavy genealogy already,
      which, despite a remark I made earlier in our conversation,
      probably did incite some Oedipal energies. But while I have come
      to greatly admire Gadamer's work (and Heidegger's even more so), I
      have always hated the authoritarian way in which my academic
      advisor handled interpretation--even more so when he pretended
      that his method was "dialogic." Another, very German, way of
      answering your question would be to say that what separated that
      advisor of mine and myself was the (never to be underestimated)
      distinction between German Protestant culture and German Catholic
      culture. While my parents did not give me an orthodox Catholic
      upbringing, I was an altar boy, I enjoyed incense, sumptuous
      religious rituals, the "real presence" of God in the
      Eucharist--rather than the Lutheran insistence on the gospels, the
      Word, and their meaning. Some people have said that I am simply
      "sensual"--and of course I hope that this is also true.
      Nevertheless, I believe--or should I say: I fear?--that the
      Oedipal (self-)interpretation goes a long way in my case.

  18. *UE*: When reading through your texts on post-hermeneutic
      epistemology as an historical sequence, according to their date of
      publication, my impression is that a certain transformation is
      gradually taking place: the earlier texts appear quite a lot more
      radical, either in their call for a strict departure from
      hermeneutics and sense-making or in their emphasis on the severity
      of the difficulties that work on a new epistemology is facing, and
      the later texts sketch out a more balanced and consensus-seeking
      approach to meaning-production and interpretation. I am thinking
      of certain earlier passages in Making Sense in Life and Literature
      and in Materialities of Communication as read in dialogue with the
      more recent comments in The Production of Presence. Let me try to
      unfold this a bit.

  19. In the first of these texts you point out that: "the proposal to
      analyze sense making as an intrasystemic operation depending on
      each system's specific environment (without 'picturing' it)
      generates the new question of whether we have to count, according
      to the high variation in the frame conditions of sense making, on
      a multiplicity of different modalities in sense and meaning"
      (Making Sense 12). You remark that you are not taking any answer
      to this question for granted but rather consider its pursuit
      "important in an epistemological situation in which we have been
      aware for quite a long time of the fact that our concepts for the
      description and the analysis of sense making turn out to be
      insufficient whenever we apply them to contemporary culture (12).
      At that time your conclusion was first that we were facing the
      task of inventing "a new epistemology capable of theorizing and
      analyzing ways of sense making that perhaps no longer include
      effects of 'meaning' and 'reference,'" and, secondly, that so far
      we "simply /do not know/ what interfaces such as those between TV
      and psychic systems, or between computers and social systems, look
      like." Accordingly, the question of "sense making" might continue
      to be the issue at hand, but this would no longer hold for
      meaning, representation, and reference--which leads one to suspend
      the question whether "our dealing with new modes of sense making
      will make sense" (13).

  20. In your closing essay for the second volume you undertake a more
      detailed macro- and micro-mapping of the urgent tasks for projects
      working on materialities of communication, and your key hypothesis
      here is that quite a few emergent theory-positions could be seen
      to converge in a shared problematizing of conceptualizing the
      humanities as hermeneutics, i.e., "as a group of disciplines
      grounded on the act of interpretation as their core exercise"
      (Materialities 396). In the case of the inquiry into the
      materialities of communication, such problematizing of
      interpretation would cause, you remark, a shift in the main
      perspective of investigation. This shift would go "from
      interpretation as identification of given meaning-structures to
      the reconstruction of those processes through which structures of
      articulated meaning can at all emerge" (398). Rather than assuming
      given meaning or unproblematic attribution of such meaning, the
      projects gesturing towards the materialities of communication
      would thus be trying to take care of all the phenomena that
      somehow contribute to the constitution of meaning without being
      meaning themselves. Hence the difficult question whether and how
      it is at all possible for psychic and social systems to constitute
      meaning, a question that simultaneously pursues a replacement of
      "interpretation" with "meaning constitution" and seeks to pay much
      more attention to the human body and the physical qualities of
      signifiers.

  21. In contrast to such marked departures towards a rather decidedly
      post-hermeneutic condition, The Production of Presence emphasizes
      the various ways one should precisely /not/ take you to be
      opposing or abandoning meaning, signification, and interpretation.
      For example, when reflecting upon Derrida's early remark that "the
      age of the sign" will "perhaps never /end./ Its historical
      /closure/, however, is outlined," you point out that whatever else
      this kind of "beyond" might involve, putting an end to the age of
      the sign and the metaphysics of presence can "certainly not mean
      that we would abandon meaning, signification, and interpretation"
      (Derrida, Of Grammatology 14; Gumbrecht, Production of Presence
      52).[9 <#foot9>] Rather, if we are to talk of such a "beyond" and
      of what it would take to end metaphysics, this can, you emphasize,
      "only mean something in addition to interpretation--without, of
      course, abandoning interpretation as an elementary and probably
      inevitable intellectual practice" (52).

  22. Some of this perceived change in your work could, of course, just
      be due to a later, strategic response on your part, not least
      because you have been misread so often on this score, but if there
      is some truth to the impression of such a gradual change of your
      position, could you elaborate on the implications of this movement
      you now seem to be gesturing towards, a movement somehow between
      interpretative meaning and a "beyond" whose birth is otherwise?
      *HUG*: You are right, the insistence on the "non-hermeneutic"
      character of my work has certainly changed over the past decades
      (or over the past two decades)--my tone has become more
      conciliatory. I will not even try to deny that this is, partly at
      least, an effect of (incipient?) old age, and of becoming more
      established. I wouldn't go so far, as a Berlin newspaper recently
      did, as to say that I have now "joined the club of toothless old
      ex-intellectuals"--but, yes, it would be pathetic to try to
      maintain a full-fledged "Oedipal energy" at age 57. But the most
      important answer to your question--at least for me--lies
      elsewhere. As I mentioned before, when we organized the
      "Materialities of Communication" colloquium, when I was
      experimenting with a concept (if it was a concept at all) such as
      the "non-hermeneutic," it was not quite clear where this journey
      would take me--if it took me anywhere at all. This fact, that I
      had a vague feeling and intuition of wanting to find something
      like an "alternative" to hermeneutics and interpretation, made it
      more or less necessary to be very radical. Ever since I "found"
      (not the Promised Land, but) the dimension of "presence," since I
      have begun to develop, as best I could, a network of concepts
      regarding presence, I can afford to be less fanatical. Besides
      that, would it not be ridiculous to "deny" the existence of
      meaning and of interpretation? Of course we do interpret all of
      the time; it is (Heidegger was right) one of our more basic
      existential conditions--up to the point that I would confirm that
      we cannot /not/ interpret. But the point is (and here again, I
      turn against the "linguistic turn," that there is more to our
      lives than just interpretation; there is what I call
      "presence"--and there might well be other dimensions that, like
      presence, our Western philosophical tradition has abandoned and
      neglected for many centuries. So, to come back to your question,
      the answer is that I believe that I could begin to be more open to
      "meaning" again as soon as I had a clearer conception of what was
      the non-hermeneutic dimension on which I wanted to concentrate.

  23. *UE*: I was particularly intrigued by the possible convergences
      between your notion of an in-between movement for sense-making and
      a different production of presence on the one hand, and the
      situation facing one in the contemporary field of digital art and
      aesthetics. Perhaps the latter can be seen to be almost the
      obverse of the traditional privileging or taking for granted of
      meaning and interpretation in the humanities. That is, digital
      artworks more often than not present one with the difficulty or
      even impossibility of sense making, seeing that whatever we might
      take to be meaningful here implies and originates from digital
      media, communication, discrete code and programs, and
      technology--all of which most often operate well beyond human
      ratios of perception, or well beyond the speeds of either embodied
      interaction or conceptualization. This is most evident when purely
      technological and machinic agency drives the artwork, but it
      appears in video installations and hyperfictions depending on
      human interaction as well--for example, in Bill Viola's work with
      technological and media-specific slowness or acceleration as paths
      towards the delimitation and/or reactualization of affect in Anima
      (2000), or in Urs Schreiber's sometimes rather radical departures
      from printed text, literacy, literariness, and the tradition of
      the book in Das Epos der Maschine (2001). Would it be possible to
      see in your recent work the emergence of a more visible limit,
      border, skin, communicative membrane, or level of structural
      coupling between sense making and "presencing": constitutive of
      meaning in various ways and yet vanishing in the very birth to
      presence of sense, sensation, and the sensible? What would the
      prospects be, do you think, of approaching meaning-effects and
      presence in the area of digital art and aesthetics via your
      reflections on such an in-between, perhaps more specifically via
      your notions of rhythm, oscillation, and speed?

  24. *HUG*: No doubt you are right. I think my old "Oedipal" and
      radical denial of the hermeneutic dimension has morphed into an
      insistence on the difficult, tense, always complex and never
      "natural" cohabitation of "meaning" and "presence." When I talk
      about "oscillations" between meaning and presence, I mean
      "oscillation" in the sense of a /pluraletantum/--there is a
      variety of such oscillations--and given that the variety might be
      endless, I am simply not sure at this point whether it makes
      sense, as I used to think, to work towards a "typology" of such
      oscillations. Clearly, however, the proportion--the "weight," if
      you will--of "meaning" in relation to "presence" is different for
      different media. It would certainly be hilarious to say that, in
      reading a novel, the material "presence" effects of the book are
      as important as the meaning conveyed by the text. Instrumental
      music might be the opposite: we can certainly not help but produce
      associative meanings while we are listening to music--but I
      believe that these meanings are highly personal, futile, and that
      they ultimately draw our attention away from what only music can
      provide: the beautiful feeling of being wrapped in the light and
      soft touch of the materiality of sounds.

  25. *UE*: In your more recent engagements with art and aesthetics you
      explicitly reintroduce the distinction between the beautiful and
      the sublime, but now with the intent of foregrounding and granting
      a different privilege to beauty and the beautiful. Perhaps this
      move has an element of surprise to it and is not immediately part
      of the intuitive horizon of expectation for many
      readers--considering the import of the limits of the Kantian
      imagination for, say, Heidegger's relatively early work, the
      attention paid to the sublime in several strands of what often
      passes under the somewhat homogenizing rubric of
      poststructuralism, the role played by overwhelming complexity in a
      Luhmannian notion of art as a social system, or the emphasis in
      many other efforts towards a contemporary aesthetics that cares
      for the avant-garde or for the strict singularity of the
      experience of art. So, my question is triple, I think: What is at
      stake in this actualization and bringing into movement of the
      beautiful, under what conditions do digital works of art present
      beauty from your perspective, and do the experience of art as well
      as art as a social system retain a distinguishable or even
      privileged role in contemporary culture?

  26. *HUG*: Again, you have it right--and I am beginning to be scared
      by how familiar you are with my thought, far beyond what I make
      explicit and (sometimes at least) have come to understand myself.
      But there is nothing terribly programmatic or symptomatic about my
      "preference" for the beautiful (in comparison to "the sublime").
      As I said before, it seems to lie in my temperament that I want to
      speak about "the beautiful," but everyone else seems to
      concentrate on the sublime (about "the non-hermeneutic," when
      everyone else discusses interpretation), about literature
      "itself," when everybody feels that theory is the only thing, and
      so forth. In this very (ultimately banal) spirit, some of my
      colleagues and I, back in the early 1990s, had planned to work
      towards an issue of an academico-intellectual journal on
      "Beauty"--but, fortunately for us, the journal did not survive,
      and some of its projects shared this fate. A project from the same
      journal that did survive, by the way, is the volume on Benjamin
      that we have discussed. The one case where I have used the concept
      of "the beautiful" quite systematically (and to a certain extent:
      to my surprise), was my book In Praise of Athletic Beauty. While I
      am of course not saying that watching sports does not have any
      "sublime" moments, I am convinced that, in most cases of spectator
      sports, "beauty" (according to Kant: the impression of
      purposiveness without purpose) is the more feeling concept than
      the sublime. Not unexpectedly, several reviewers have taken issue
      with this opinion--but, interestingly enough, they never argued
      about it. It was as if they wanted to say that there was one and
      only one category to describe aesthetic experience, and that was
      "the sublime."

  27. *UE*: The field of digital art has focused from the late 1980s to
      the last half of the 1990s on virtuality and thus on immersion,
      simulation, and abstract or even transcendent self-reference as
      aesthetic paradigms--witness such works as Charlotte Davies's
      Osmose (1995) and Ephemere (1998)--the history and structures of
      which have been charted quite engagingly in Oliver Grau's book on
      virtual art. However, already with Jeffrey Shaw's Eve (1993) and
      ConFIGURING the CAVE (1996), the focus has shifted not only
      towards the use of physical and architectural structures to
      achieve immersion effects, but towards opening up embodiment and
      the relation between the body and space as altogether dominant
      issues. When one considers the subsequent developments in the
      field, one is tempted to diagnose symptoms of what one might call
      "the physical turn" of digital art. For instance, the works in
      tele-presence by Roy Ascott, Ken Goldberg, and Eduardo Kac, the
      broadening of interest in transgenic art and artificial life, the
      entry on stage of augmentation not only in everyday and commercial
      culture but also in more classical art forms such as in Christian
      Ziegler's dance performance scanned I-V (2000-01), and the very
      recent peaking of interest in pervasive computing--all of this
      bespeaks amarked change of aesthetic focus which seems to bring us
      far away from the Cartesianism evident in William Gibson's early
      exploration of the notion of "cyberspace" or in most earlier
      artistic and critical theoretical engagements with virtuality. But
      perhaps this change is most visible and tangible in the rather
      radical widening of the field of digital art and aesthetics
      concerned with the body--Stelarc is an obviously provocative
      example, but a visitor to /Medien Kunst Netz/ will confront around
      200 digital artworks that explore the body, embodiment, and social
      or psychic effects of framing and/or identity-formation. Or, as
      Manovich formulates this predicament more generally, the 1990s

          were about the virtual. We were fascinated by new virtual
          spaces made possible by computer technologies. The images of
          an escape into a virtual space that leaves the physical space
          useless and of cyberspace--a virtual world that exists in
          parallel to our world--dominated the decade . . . It is quite
          possible that this decade of the 2000s will turn out to be
          about the physical--that is, physical space filled with
          electronic and visual information.

      I was wondering how one would want to think about this physical
      turn in digital art, and, considering your inquiry into the
      materialities of communication as well as the beauty of bodies
      that matter, how you approach this emergence of digital body art.
      In particular, I was struck by the impression, when confronting
      the research in the field, that Cartesianism and more or less
      strict dualisms of body and mind are not so easily left behind. In
      the middle part of your Production of Presence you devote quite
      some energy and reflection to reconsidering Heidegger's thinking
      of "world" and "earth" in "The Origin of the Work of Art," and you
      rightly emphasize Heidegger's critique of Descartes in that
      context.[10 <#foot10>] In a recent essay, Katherine N.
      Hayles--whose study How We Became Posthuman was instrumental in
      provoking a more differentiated and qualified critical debate over
      the posthuman, which Friedrich Kittler has also enriched in so
      many ways--reconsiders her position and recognizes that she is
      still haunted by the incessant returns of such dualisms. That
      later essay sketches out a relational notion of emergence from a
      dynamic flux both of the body and of embodiment, a relationality
      that departs in a different way from Cartesianism than her earlier
      work does.[11 <#foot11>] How do you think of the emergence or
      presencing of embodiment and of the experience of beauty in a
      digital age--on the other side of Cartesian and posthuman
      temptations both? In particular, how would one want to consider
      the beauty of digital art and embodiment in their concretely
      specific differentiation and materiality--even on that level of
      gendered difference which Lyotard brought into his work on the
      inhuman, or on that level of "an erotics of art" which Susan
      Sontag was thinking of in Against Interpretation?

  28. *HUG*: Of course, "dualisms like body and mind are not so easily
      left behind." For my part, I do not believe that I have ever
      promised (!) to leave either "body" or "mind" behind (I may have
      said that there are other tasks for the mind to get engaged in
      than interpretation). In this spirit, I am convinced that the
      provocative power of the concept of the post-human has long since
      worn out. When Foucault (if it was Foucault) first used it, it was
      beautifully provocative because it made us aware that a certain
      concept of the "human" that we had thought to be metahistorical
      and transcultural was indeed both culturally and historically very
      specific (i.e., it was rooted in the eigtheenth century). So
      Foucault's provocation helped us to not feel forever obliged to
      live up to the eigtheenth-century concept of the "human." For
      example, we have become much less optimistic regarding the natural
      generosity of "humans" towards other humans--and we no longer even
      think that this is such a devastating insight. But will we ever
      become post-human, in the sense of not living through (in one way
      or the other), this dualism (or should I say oscillation) between
      "body" and "mind" (and again, what would be wrong with this)?

  29. *UE*: I know that Luhmann's work and his intellectual impact on
      the academy have been of extraordinary import to you and,
      naturally, the lasting fascination with his social systems theory
      has left many traces in your own production. On the one hand, I
      wonder how you see the fate of Luhmann's work today, in the face
      of a pervasively digital culture? Specifically, how do you
      evaluate and handle the absence in Luhmann's work of a refined and
      differentiated set of concepts and distinctions relating to new
      media, including the questions raised, and debated by many of
      Luhmann's readers, by the introduction of the notion of the "code"
      versus the eventual discreteness of information in The Reality of
      the Mass Media? On the other hand, you yourself on occasion
      gesture towards what you find to be relatively unelaborated
      aspects of Luhmann's work, his concepts of time and space in
      particular.[12 <#foot12>] How would you describe your own
      departure here towards different notions of form, event, position,
      distance, movement, and the widening of the present as a dimension
      of simultaneity?

  30. *HUG*: Two or three years ago, in Copenhagen (indeed), I was
      invited to give the closing lecture for the (at least then)
      "largest Luhmann Congress ever." I accepted--but I did feel
      slightly uneasy, because, by then, I had somehow ceased to be
      "Luhmannian." My solution to this (emotional, rather than
      cognitive) dilemma was to start the lecture by confessing (and
      this is still true) that "Niklas Luhmann's work was the
      intellectual love of my life." It had never before happened with
      the same intensity as in the case of Luhmann's work--and I
      anticipate that it will never happen again in my intellectual
      life: I absolutely had to read each new book, each new article by
      this author. It wasn't even a question of whether I agreed or not;
      I fear (but why am I saying "fear"?) that "rapture" would have
      been the adequate word here. I was in a true Luhmann-fever--it was
      something like a novel released in serial form, to see how he
      complicated his thought and his philosopy in a way that I found
      aesthetically fascinating. This is the one side. On the other
      side, however (and this is the simple reason why I am no longer a
      Luhmannian--a reason, of course, that doesn't say anything against
      Luhmann's work), what I have increasingly concentrated upon over
      the past decade, i.e., the dimension of "presence," does not have
      a place in Luhmann's work. Now, this fact is altogether
      undramatic. Each philosophy, programmatically or preconsciously,
      opts for certain problems and concepts that it can deal with--and
      thus automatically excludes others. What my friends and I used to
      call "materiality" (and what today I refer to as "presence") is
      something that Luhmann's philosophy could not capture from the
      (very foundational) moment Luhmann decided to make meaning
      (/Sinn/) the key-concept of his work. In this sense, it is perhaps
      more than a /bon mot/ to say--rather it is an ultimately laudatory
      description--that Luhmann's philosophy is the "hermeneutics of the
      digital age." I do not know whether his concept of "communication"
      was deliberately or unintentionally adapted to electronic
      communication--but I imagine that it would work beautifully and
      gloriously to describe and to analyze our technological and mainly
      electronic communication environment. Now, I insist: all of this
      is not a criticism of Luhmann; rather it explains why I don't have
      much use for the entire edifice of Luhmann's philosophy.
      Nevertheless, his name still plays an important role in my ongoing
      work--and it is not derogatory if I characterize this role by
      saying that Luhmann has become my "main provider of punch lines."
      Like many other stunning intellectual talents (he certainly
      belongs to the five or even three most intelligent persons I have
      ever seen), he was fantastic at coming up with sharp and always
      surprising (i.e., counterintuitive) definitions. Many of these
      definitions function as healthy thought-provocations even if you
      do not buy into the entire complexity of Luhmann's system. And
      this is how I use him today. Let me end with one further comment
      on your question--which indirectly also refers back to our
      Benjamin discussion. That author "X" (Niklas Luhmann, for example)
      does not provide a full-fledged theory of phenomenon "Y" (in which
      you happen to be interested), does not mean that author X is not
      interesting. Here it is again, for me: this feeling of a taboo
      imposed on independent thinking. Unlike your generation, I have to
      say that I am always (and not only secretly) happy when I see that
      my great intellectual heroes (/even/ my great intellectual heroes)
      have their limits.

  31. *UE*: You chose "Beyond Meaning: Positions and Concepts in Motion"
      as the title of the third, very important chapter of The
      Production of Presence. I was very taken by the possibility of
      inquiring further into the notion you develop there of presence in
      movement, for bodies in space as well as for the
      conceptualizations proper to more mindful bodies, so as to sense
      in it the delimitation of an aesthetics of movement for digital
      art. I was perhaps particularly piqued by the kind of approach you
      brought out here to such movement--since it not only encompassed
      the dimensions of "vertical" movement (emergence into being-there
      so as to occupy space) and "horizontal" movement (being /qua/
      appearance or something that moves towards or against an
      observer), but paid special attention to the more difficult
      dimension of negativity in movement, i.e., the dimension of
      "withdrawal" as in some (non-)sense prior to and (de)constitutive
      of both verticality and horizontality, emergence and appearance.
      You draw to good effect on the admirable work of Nancy and Bohrer
      here, as well as on Seel's ingenious ways of pointing out the
      limits of human control of "appearance" via his notion of
      /Unfervügbarkeit./[13 <#foot13>] In a way, then, my question is
      disturbingly simple: what would, for you, constitute a "composure"
      for /Dasein/ in relation to the happening or taking place in
      movement of the text, images, sound, and touch of contemporary
      digital artworks, a "composure" that cares for the ontology of the
      digital work of art so as not to forget either the
      /Unfervügbarkeit/ of its appearance or its "birth" to presence,
      nor simply denying its movement of withdrawal and dis-appearance
      into discreteness?

  32. *HUG*: Well, let me confess that, honestly (not the least thanks
      to /your/ influence), I am increasingly trying to expose myself to
      digital art whenever I have the chance to do so. Sometimes I find
      it terribly pretentious, and it triggers that horribly petit
      bourgeois question in me of whether the (aesthetic) effect was
      worth all of the financial and technological investment. Sometimes
      I find that there is too much self-reflexive ambition--as if
      self-reflexivity were, without any question, the best thing our
      life can offer. But sometimes I am impressed, I like what I see, I
      could and would stay forever--and then, at the moment that I have
      to go or decide to go, I find it consoling to know that this
      digital work of art will not only continue to exist, but will
      continue to "play," even in my absence. While there is nothing
      terribly surprising in this description, I think it is already the
      main effect of /Gelassenheit/. To be able to let go, to know that
      certain things are /unverfügbar/ (strange, by the way, that
      German, of all languages, has such a differentiated repertoire for
      describing this state of mind). So, yes, for once I am able to
      associate digital art with something that is dear to me, i.e.,
      /Gelassenheit/. Now this is an effect that has a strange, not to
      say decisive, existential impact for me. I hope (and would perhaps
      even dare to claim) that I am not a complete control freak. But if
      I am not a complete control freak, as I hope, my belief in the
      capacities of human agency, despite all theoretical and
      philosophical reservations, is unlimited. Yes, subconsciously and
      pre-philosophically, I seem to assume that you can achieve
      whatever you want enough to achieve. So it is good, it makes a
      huge difference for me to realize that I cannot "force" certain
      things--not even what matters most to me--my children's success,
      my wife's good humor (on a Friday night), and the success of my
      favorite sports team, the Stanford (American) Football Team. As I
      am trying to answer you, I realize that there is astonishingly
      little to say about /Gelassenheit/. Perhaps I should add, however,
      that /Gelassenheit/ could always be an anticipation, a blank
      cheque, so to speak, of that desire for (as I call it) "being in
      synch with the things of the world." It is true and embarrassing,
      at the same time, that, in this very sense, I find certain animals
      terribly attractive--and the way I describe this attraction is to
      say that, most likely, they don't have problems with their
      self-reflexivity. These days, I am specifically impressed by a
      population of sea elephants (I hear there are only a couple of
      hundred left on the planet) that happen to mate on a Pacific shore
      not too far from Stanford. When you first see them lying on the
      dunes, they look like stones, like things. From time to time, they
      move around, slowly. Yes, I tend to believe that it would be
      beautiful to be a sea elephant--if you only don't take me too
      seriously here. And let me add that, as a mating ritual, sea
      elephants seem to engage in the cruelest and most bloody fights.

  33. *UE*: In 2001 the media installation artist David Rokeby opened
      the work /n-Cha(n)t/ to the public at the Banff Centre for the
      Arts, a work that won prizes for interactive art the year after.
      Rokeby described the motivation for the work as "a strong and
      somewhat inexplicable desire to hear a community of computers
      speaking together: chattering amongst themselves, musing, intoning
      chants." The work is an advanced elaboration of the effort over
      ten years to make rather intelligent "Givers of Names," i.e.,
      linguistically intelligent IT-systems that can recognize objects
      on location and give them names. In n-Cha(n)t the human
      interactants encounter a community of networked "Givers of Names,"
      where these intercommunicate among themselves in order to
      synchronize their "states of mind." This communicative process of
      synchronization goes on semi-organically; left to their own
      devices, the "Givers of Names" will eventually arrive at a
      coherent and shared chanting. The human interactants, however,
      constitute a channel of disruption of this communication, a source
      of disturbance, distraction, perhaps fragmentation or at least
      slowing down of the speed of shared chanting of the "Givers of
      Names." This is how Rokeby describes that part of the work:

          When left uninterrupted to communicate among themselves, they
          eventually fall into chanting, a shared stream of verbal
          association. This consensus unfolds very organically. The
          systems feel their way towards each other, finding resonance
          in synonyms and similar sounding words, working through
          different formulations of similar statements until finally
          achieving unison. Each entity is equipped with a highly
          focused microphone and voice recognition software. When a
          gallery visitor speaks into one of the microphones, these
          words from the outside "distract" that system, stimulating a
          shift in that entity's "state of mind." As a result, that
          individual falls away from the chant. As it begins
          communicating this new input to its nearest neighbors, the
          community chanting loses its coherence, with the chanting
          veering towards a party-like chaos of voices. In the absence
          of further disruptions, the intercommunications reinforce the
          similarities and draw the community back to the chant.

      In one of the most recent of his works, SubTitled Public (2005),
      which is about pervasive computing (rather than forming a part of
      the ongoing series of works concerned with relational
      architecture), Raphael Lozano-Hemmer created an empty exhibition
      space where human visitors are tracked with a computerized
      infrared surveillance system and specific texts, or subtitles, are
      projected onto their bodies, following them everywhere they go.[14
      <#foot14>] No matter what kind of body-movements the visitors
      perform, these textual brandings of individuals are impossible to
      get rid of--except when you touch somebody else, in which case the
      words are exchanged with the other. Lozano-Hemmer's work makes
      obvious and ironic reference to the security-specific, juridical,
      and political problematics of pervasive computing, in this case
      the dimension of surveillance in particular.[15 <#foot15>] But
      again, as in Rokeby's work, it is noteworthy that a posthuman
      dimension informs the work: human bodies, interaction, and
      communication pose at best as minor modes of suspension or
      temporary interruption of informational speed.

  34. Even such an impressively humanistic artist as Bill Viola works on
      and with that sort of inhuman speed in his video installations, in
      this case very often by using analog and digital video-technology
      to achieve (almost) imperceptible effects of slowness rather than
      radical acceleration. In Viola's case, one notices an incessant
      effort towards crossing back and forth over the limits of human
      affect at the micro-physical or micro-perceptual level and always
      via digital speeding or slowing down. Witness the series of works
      in The Passions, for example.[16 <#foot16>]

  35. You deal with the problematic of speed in various places in your
      texts, at least one of them directly relating to the question of
      the materialities of communication.[17 <#foot17>] On that occasion
      you describe speed as yet another aspect of coupling and
      resonance. From this systems-theoretical perspective "rhythm"
      gains a new relevance, because "rhythm" can be understood as speed
      that facilitates coupling. You also note that such reflection upon
      coupling and its conditions might furnish interesting ways of
      rephrasing the contemporary philosophical tendency to problematize
      concepts such as "agency" and "subjectivity." I was struck by the
      ways in which this approach to speed seems so much cooler and
      formally dry than, say, Virilio's very important, but tendentially
      catastrophic diagnosis of an information society touching upon the
      absolute speed of light, on the other side of the modern
      transmission revolution, but also displaying much more interesting
      critical potential than such utopian-minded thinkers of the speed
      of posthuman robotics and intelligence as Moravec and Minsky. Not
      surprisingly, perhaps, I want to ask you how you would flesh out
      your notion of speed in relation to digital works of art whose
      tempi and rhythms touch upon the limits of human affectivity,
      interfaces, as well as modes of communication.

  36. I wondered whether one can get far enough here to meet an all too
      common reaction to the question concerning posthuman speed: "Yes,
      sure, digital technology, mediation, and communication introduce
      accelerations that go beyond the human in quite a few ways, but,
      then, what does it matter?" Particularly in the area of digital
      art and aesthetics people often shrug off this question of speed,
      typically with a remark to the effect that, if indeed we cannot
      perceive it nor place it in the sensible nor make sense of it, we
      are not talking about art anymore anyway. And to a certain extent
      I understand that response, at least if one can describe it as the
      urge to abandon the question when we are not even dealing with
      coding and hence with information--information in Luhmann's sense.
      That is, I can understand it as a response of this kind: "If this
      thing about speed is supposed to have to do with 'digital art,'
      then 'digital art' does not matter--what difference does it make?"
      The question becomes somewhat more pressing, however, once we are
      dealing with speeds of coding and information, for what to make of
      works that at least in part move too fast, or too slowly, for the
      human sensorium, language, or thought, but achieve artful or
      aesthetic effects nonetheless? Hence the title of this interview:
      how are the speeds that grant beauty to digital artworks, and how
      are we humans and our bodies, placed in relation to this?

  37. *HUG*: Again, this weird and /passé/ concept of the "post-human."
      What would be "human" speed--and why should any kind of speed, so
      to speak, bother to be "human"? Isn't this ridiculously
      anthropocentric, once you agree that the entire dimension and
      category of the "sublime" (which we discussed earlier) could not
      possibly exist if it were not for all of those (endless,
      innumerable) phenomena that exceed the different human capacities
      for decomplexification? Let me just suggest a very simple
      comparison: we know that each of the different human senses only
      covers or captures a limited range of what other living beings can
      capture, and therefore perceive and even experience. There are
      levels of speed (and slowness) that we may be able to calculate,
      but for which we will never have any mental or physical affinity.
      So what's the big deal? I suppose that any kind of speed or
      slowness that can ever become aesthetically relevant /cannot/ be
      post- or meta-human. In this sense, I believe that those phenomena
      and works of art that we like to call "sublime" are those that
      exceed the capacity of the human senses just by a bit. The extent
      of this universe may be "way too big to be sublime." The same is
      true for speed. If certain digital artists produce effects of
      speed that are appealing to some or many viewers (seemingly not to
      me), then these viewers must be capable of relating to this speed.
      What I call "rhythm," I assume, helps to relate to different
      speeds in the perceived transformation of phenomena, without of
      course being a necessary condition of such relating. Now I
      define/describe "rhythm" as a form given to (wrested from) a
      "time-object" in the proper sense, i.e., an object that exists in
      an ongoing self-transformation. So I assume that our possibility
      for capturing the speed of such transformation is greatly enhanced
      if these transformations take place in a rhythmic form. Of course
      there might be transformations that do have a form and that do
      take place at a rate of speed that simply exceeds our perceptive
      capacities.

  38. What I do not understand is why and how, for example, it would be
      a "catastrophy" to discover (if this were ever the case) that the
      speed of information comes close to the speed of light. Can
      channels of information that have to do with electricity ever have
      been much slower? And why would we want to perceive all of the
      screams and waves of technologically-produced electricity (for
      example) that surround us? Would it not only be to give us the
      right to complain about present-day culture?

      / Department for Cultural Studies and the Arts
      University of Copenhagen
      ekman@hum.ku.dk /

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          Notes

      1 <#ref1>. See Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, eds., Materialities of
      Communication.

      2 <#ref2>. See, for instance, Gumbrecht, "Epistemologie /
      Fragmente" in Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, eds., Paradoxien 837-50, 839.

      3 <#ref3>. For Gumbrecht's remarks on this text, see Making Sense 12.

      4 <#ref4>. See Cubitt, Couchot, Hansen, Stiegler, Mitchell, and
      Crary.

      5 <#ref5>. See Manovich, Image Future.

      6 <#ref6>. See Gumbrecht, Lob Des Sports, translated as In Praise
      of Athletic Beauty.

      7 <#ref7>. See, for example, "'Dabei Sein Ist Alles'," "It's Just
      a Game," "Epiphany of Form," and In Praise of Athletic Beauty.

      8 <#ref8>. In Russian, see Gumbrecht, "From Oedipal Hermeneutics";
      the original English version appeared in Telos.

      9 <#ref9>. Gumbrecht writes in more detail about Derrida's work
      and the institutional impact of deconstruction, in the U.S. in
      particular, in "Deconstruction Deconstructed," "Who Is Afraid of
      Deconstruction?" and "Martin Heidegger and His Interlocutors."

      10 <#ref10>. See Gumbrecht, Production of Presence 65-67.

      11 <#ref11>. See Hayles, "Flesh and Metal" 297-99. Hayles's text
      is also available at Medien Kunst Netz
      (<http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/search/?qt=hayles>
      <http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/search/?qt=hayles>. That site
      includes half a dozen rich critical articles that work towards
      rethinking "cyborg bodies" today; see
      <http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/cyborg_bodies>
      <http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/cyborg_bodies/>.

      12 <#ref12>. See Gumbrecht, "Form without Matter." Note also
      Gumbrecht's turn to Heidegger in The Production of Presence when
      engaging in a rethinking of space and bodily presence.

      13 <#ref13>. The latter translated as Aesthetics of Appearing
      (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005).

      14 <#ref14>. A four-minute video of the work is available at
      <http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/rlh/video/subpub.html>
      <http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/rlh/video/subpub.html>.

      15 <#ref15>. ZKM arranged an important exhibition on precisely
      this, and the resulting publication is of seminal importance in
      the field; see Frohne et al., eds.

      16 <#ref16>. See Hansen's interesting article on this aspect of
      Viola's work.

      17 <#ref17>. See Gumbrecht, "A Farewell to Interpretation" 400.


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