Blind spots and prescriptive innocence. On the morphology of types of adjudgement in media education

Abstract

The implicit normativity of the own approach belongs, as is generally known, to the best kept secrets of the most research projects in cultural studies. This may still be acceptable in the field of general cultural studies – considered as an inattentively deficiency – whereas in the field of pedagogy, such an implicit premise is almost fatal. Biographies are charged with ideas, which they cannot get rid of that easily – if at all possible. This is why these implicit overall concepts of media education are not only preforming education programmes and thereby straining collective resources – they rather equip biographies with cultural guardrails and travel programmes which are actually covered by nothing, at least not by reflection. Now and again, at the normative bottom of media education dominates a systematic deficit of reflection and obviously it does not happen accidentally, that this deficit of reflection is about to be tackled now. For at least this might currently be consensus: The increasing atony of the normative force as well as the obligingness of concepts of subjectivity, knowledge and education, which are considered to be more or less eternal. Due to the increasing loss of legitimacy and acknowledgment of this implicit normativity, media education is put under a vast stress of justification. As a consequence, it is creating that tenseness which is locating any effort in media education between a callous and blind «keep it up!» on the on hand and a tentative disorientation on the other hand, which is clutching at straws while attributing a new concept of man to any new feature of media technology. Thereby, the image of humanity – by the way an image and with that a medial category – is either maintained in a conservative way, which is why media education from a normative point of view inevitably possesses a «bewahrpädagogisch» core, – or alternatively outsourced and hence committed to the technological resourcefulness of media industry. Both reaction patterns seem to be equally helpless and do urgently require reflection, particularly since it is a matter of survival of media education which systematically necessitates a normative background and thus cannot escape to meta-theoretical realms.