Media Pedagogics as Social Engineering in the Digital-Cybernetic Age? Cybernetics, System Theory, and Social Criticism in Dieter Baacke's Kommunikation und Kompetenz (Communication and Competence)

Abstract

Starting from Dieter Baacke's habilitation treatise «communication and competence» (1972/1973), the research results of a close reading of Baacke's founding of media education are presented in this article, which analyses his theory in the context of its contemporary historical origin in the framework of a discourse analysis as a sociology of knowledge. Particular attention is paid to the role and function of cybernetics, systems theory and social criticism as a historical condition of Baackes founding of media education. In this context, especially the specific role of the term «homeostasis» is worked out, which marks in cybernetics and systems theory the presumption, that any system tends «autopoietic» to an equilibrium. On the contrary Baacke himself refers to the Marxist assumption, that the capitalist system is not headed towards a balance, but is highly vulnerable to crises. This is of paramount importance, if we can show, that the debates of the early 1970s, following May 1968, raise the political question even today of whether media education is a system-stabilizing «social technology» (Luhmann) or a system-conquering «Critical theory of society» (Habermas). It is also shown that the current debates on «media literacy» go back to Baacke, who is archaeologically associated with the Marxian philosophy of praxis. The paper proposes to connect Baacke's theory with Habermas and Bourdieu in the terms of a «praxeological» and «action-oriented media education», which should theoretically and practically set in their right the «practices» of the «Actors» in opposition to systems and structures.