ZMK Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung. Schalten und Walten

(:Unkn) Unknown, Mediarep.Org, Lorenz Engell, Bernhard Siegert
2022
ZMK 11 | 2020 into space. If complex semiconductor circuits can finally take over thought processes such as arithmetic or even speech, then they are still bodies of thought. So Schalten on its turn brings with it Walten like its own shadow, and, of course, media theory is interested in this remaining ontological shadow of digitization and of mediatization in general. But there is even more than the necessary pertinence of Walten even under digital conditions. Walten is not only the unavoidable
more » ... ubstrate of Schalten, it can also emerge from it. One striking example can be seen in what Raymond Williams called the flow. The flux of images on TV is, due to the switchability of the screen picture, continuously and constantly interrupted in a most abrupt way by switching over to other images, most heterogenuous image types, TV genres, broadcast formats. They interfere with each other in a way to only leave caleidoscopic meaningless fragments, tiny bits and pieces of what used to be for instance, news, advertising, wheater forecasts, sports, shows, episodes, fictions, live transmissions, announcements, wrap ups, and so forth. There is no coherence of whatsoever quality, especially if it comes to semantics, to meaning or to any form of Gestalt. The term of coherence (or of interruption) loses any significance. Switching operates, as Hartmut Winkler once put it, an operation directed against any kind of context and hence of text. But, Williams observes, a strange kind of rhythm, or of surfing on the surface of the fragmented sequence of distinctions and of switching operations that comes into being. Based on highly frequent interruptions, a flow of plasticity and viscosity arises, a state of experience or even existence, a mode of being, which integrates viewers, images, switchable pictures, sounds, and the world beyond. Flow is a bodily and hence physical, material phenomenon, not just a structure or a sequence of otherwise disembodied distinctions. It hence brings physis back into the game. Flow emerges from switching, Schalten, but it rules in the sense of Walten. What can be found in the switchable picture may also emerge elsewhere. The Maltese Cross in the movie camera (and projector) could also be adressed here, or, even more general, language. In what André Martinet called la double articulation du langage, the articulation or segmentation of what has already been articulated or fragmented, the coherent dominion of sense emerges as both an artifact, and hence on the side of switching, and an unavoidably and unquestionably ruling condition of existence. Signals, discernable and switchable entities, as they emerge from ruling noise may on their turn, if sequenced, generate a kind of second order flow-like noise and as such turn into given conditions of existence. The cloud, or looped CCTV Systems, or the pervasion of the habitat with computers, and hence switches, may be regarded in a comparable way as modes of turning Schalten into Walten. In this sense, with the topic of Schalten und Walten, the last issue of the ZMK endeavors to investigate the entry or implementation of the mathematical, switch-
doi:10.25969/mediarep/18779 fatcat:kpmpaqtrqjdxfctg3x5ijn4xmm