Broadcasting today – receiver in the transmitter

Niklas Luhmann’s 1996 book “The Reality of the Mass Media” begins with a sentence that has achieved a certain level of prominence: “What we know about our society, indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media.” With fair permission one might object: And what about living work? With materially bound experience? With the specific locations where we meet physical beings with whom we maintain a speaking and acting relationship?

The almost dogmatic abstraction of the sociologist Luhmann popularized systems theory, which to this day has no insignificant influence on media studies. It was aimed at the core of the mass media, which Luhmann explicitly included radio alongside newspapers and television; on the internal logic of those apparatuses whose specific feature, in addition to self-stabilization and self-preservation, is the creation of an operationally sealed world view, the validity of which is based on hearsay and the faith of the recipient, so that “the knowledge taken from the mass media turns into a self-reinforcing structure as if by itself joins together.”

The constructivist Luhmann, who had no normative claims whatsoever, described these functionally closed, i.e. self-referential and autopoietic, structures as radically immanent producers of reality, whose products (Luhmann called them “constructions”) – news, comments, reports, features, interviews – were exclusively based on the idea of Obey control over your own unchanged continued existence. There cannot be a diversity of views, standpoints, perspectives, communication of reality and demands for truth. That may sound cynical, but it reflects the unanimous judgments of not a few fee payers who have preferred to vent their displeasure in internet forums for a long time.

Luhmann soberly stated two things. On the one hand: One must “speak about the reality of the mass media in the sense of what for her or through them for others as reality appears«. And this appearance, whose reality-destroying effect was already addressed in Plato’s allegory of the cave, almost inevitably attracts – secondly – manipulation and censorship by power authorities external to the subsystem: “Especially when one has to assume that it is in any case a constructed reality , this peculiarity of the production of external influences is particularly helpful. This was clearly demonstrated by the successful military censorship of reports on the Gulf War.«

The point of Luhmann’s cool analysis is: “What’s crucial in any case is: that no interaction between the sender and the receiver can take place between those present.” – thus the exclusion of actual communication as constitutive of the mass media. It was precisely this – the immunization of radio against real language relationships – that Bertolt Brecht had already criticized in his radio theory in 1932. Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s famous essay “Building Kit for a Theory of Media” from 1970 followed on from this. “In their current form,” Enzensberger explained, public apparatuses “serve not to communicate, but rather to prevent it. They do not allow any interaction between sender and receiver: technically speaking, they reduce the feedback to the minimum possible in system theory.«

Instead of initiating substantial correlations in the social field of “spontaneity,” “decentralization,” and “anti-authoritarian disintegration,” according to Enzensberger, the “manipulators” used the world simulation machines to fulfill the “management and control functions” they were ordered to do. The dialectic is obvious: “Electronic technology knows no fundamental opposition between transmitter and receiver. Due to its construction principle, every transistor radio is also a potential transmitter. It is a tool for emancipation from paternalism and consciousness control, to which Enzensberger explicitly attested “utopian” potential, namely that of a Habermasian “domination-free discourse”.

In view of the fundamental crisis of public radio, which is in serious doubt due to constant austerity dictates and formatting constraints, not only organizationally but also in terms of content and the impoverishment of the formal language, there would be serious consideration of at least a partial, grassroots democratic restructuring of the broadcasting agglomerate to think (of course without sacrificing polyphonic professionalism, seriousness and artistry); about an opening to the deviant, the unexpected, the untamed, to the plurality of the world, a world that Hannah Arendt outlined as one that suits man in his infinite stubbornness.

In 1997, the radio maniac Eckhard Henscheid praised the radio’s “friendliness for minorities” – “despite all the shorter-shorter appeals” – in an article for the Deutschlandfunk program booklet. Nevertheless, at that time he already wished for “more idiosyncrasy in the forms, cheekiness of the radio-media transmission, minority nature of the topics” – and: “The minorities themselves should” – beyond the listener participation programs – “become even more active” and “in even more bizarre forms “track down” and “essentially realize these yourself”, “with as little time limit as possible”.

Henscheid had a happy mess in mind, a folk radio on an anarchist basis, freed from hierarchies and bureaucratic madness and with unregulated, autonomous producers. “Why,” he asked, “don’t you actually hear (…) more listeners singing on the radio? Men like you and me, who have everything but voices. But only women. But they, for their part, should not sing; but rather coo. Develop new forms of erotic cooing and cooing on the radio. While some children and young people then explain to us what Einstein, the cosmic Big Bang theory and Kasparov’s Scheveningen variant of socialism or at least the Sicilian opening are all about. (…) In general, I would like people to speak and riot on the radio much more (…) more uninhibitedly, (…) more delighted and enthralling than shortly before midnight at the Oktoberfest.«

It would be a start. We might come to the prose of the circumstances later.