6. 2013/14 Historization—the Production of the Past

It is obvious that from the perspective of a theory of operational chains, interconnection and dispersed agency, the question has to be asked anew of how, where and by whom history is made under such circumstances; even more so, if historization is one of the operations which integrate different actors in a net of actions and therefore in a cultural system of meaning. As one possible research desideratum one might think here of the role of historization in patent specifications and more general in the history of patent law practices and their agonal strategy. In this case the relation of history and memory has to be reconsidered.

If agencies become capable of acting on the basis of the production of simultaneity, they can become capable of (self) reflection and hence in a more narrow sense intelligent on the basis of temporal recourse, i.e. by the production of the past. Harold Innis tried to ground the historical stability of big transnational hegemonic cultures in the equilibrium of space and time dominating cultural techniques. This is an approach current research into cultural technologies follows, although in a critically reflected manner. Agencies have to develop memories, if they want to remain stable in time but also flexible and capable of evolution, i.e. if they want to remain capable of acting (handlungsmächtig) as a whole. In mixed ensembles, the two central operations to achieve this are storage and repetition. Additionally, both operations are, first, immensely relevant for the media and, second, prime examples for the externalization of objects through technical equipment, which was traditionally reserved to the human subject and its assumed internal consciousness. Also and especially in this field, a reorientation can be expected, if one leaves the opposition between subject and object, between materiality and immateriality, behind and assumes their mutual integration, the interconnection of intelligence across heterogeneous actors.

It could here also be decisive—for instance, with regard to the works of Assmann but also of Gell and recently Giesecke—that studies of early and non-European cultures and practices expand the horizon. By formulating the concept of “dispersed memories”, the large number of existing studies about the history of the image and writing can be integrated. In general media studies, studies about the storage and recording function of technical media are anyway of high importance. Here a close relation between the approach of acting thinking fields and the arguments of French “Médiologie” (Regis Débray, Daniel Bougnoux, Louise Merzeau) can be drawn. In the assumption of a technical-social-semiotic complex—comparable to the paradigm of “agency”—established by the media, the “Médiologie” distinguishes between the spatial dissemination of information (“communication”) and its transmission in time (“transmission”; “broadcast”, “transfer”). The dialogue between these approaches should also include Deleuze’s application of Bergson’s philosophy of memory to cinema and the qualification of film as image memory. This account also departs significantly from the notion of a (technical, material) storage by adopting an operational perspective. The cutbacks of classical cinema and modern “memory images” (Erinnerungsbilder) can, for instance, not be explained by the storage function but with recourse to operational and procedural notions; the film image itself works as agent of the memory.

An indispensable partner in dialogue is also the theory of the procedural memories of social systems, as developed by Niklas Luhmann and especially by Elena Esposito. As in theories of cultural and collective memories and in the media theory of the memory, a supra-individual functioning of memory is assumed. Following the assertions of the philosophy of repetition, from the perspective of systems theory we are confronted with an operational memory, which functions without the preconditions of any storage or recording. In its core, it is based on the fundamental distinction between redundancy and information, according to which the system qualifies each occurring event. In the dialogue of approaches, this very elaborate theory would however need extension by including non-human collectives and the interplay between social and technical (as well as semiotic) systems. Additionally, the philosophy of repetition (Deleuze; Derrida) has to be considered in this context as well.

Such a discussion can find a phenomenological impulse in the analysis of rebroadcasts in television and here especially of structures of seriality. Also the self-historizing function of television should be considered, which puts its own images into images through never-ending rebroadcast and retrospection cycles thereby interconnecting its images with the self-images of the audience. The inquiry of other memory practices should also be included. In this context, photography could be of particular interest, as it is more and more operationalized from the traditional storage and externalization function (the photo album) by the process of digitalization: it is fostered by the enormously increased number of available photographs, but also their capability to be edited and distributed. In this way, digital images undermine the distinction of storage and process memory; they integrate both into one agency.