Claus Pias: On the History and Epistemology of Regulated Eco-systems

Speakers): Claus Pias (Professor of Media History and Media Theory at Leuphana University, Lueneburg)

From its very beginning limnology, the science of stagnant waters, was linked to political and economic metaphors. It describes forms of organization that can ensure change in “stability” – which is also the definition of the nature of the State in its pre-modern political definition (seen from the angle of a specific philosophy of history). Due to the emergence of cybernetics as a science of “machines à gouverner” and of governance through an intended loss of human control, the knowledge of limnology was fundamentally reformulated in the 1950s. To a certain extent, standing waters became a model for a cybernetic knowledge of government that operated analytically as well as synthetically in the creation of artificial, self-regulating worlds. On this techno-epistemological level of governmental knowledge various ideologies and projects now converged – although they had first appeared to be incompatible: from science to pop, from studies of the spread of radioactive contamination in atolls to the projections of the "Club of Rome," from dreams of self-sufficient communities of counter culture to the drafts of NASA for space colonization. The lecture tries to re-assign different concepts of ecological equilibrium to their primary techno-historical ground and to trace their historical and philosophical utopia.
 
Claus Pias is Professor for Media History and Media Theory at Leuphana University, Lueneburg (Germany), and one of the leading European Media researchers. The national and international resonance to his work has given him the well-deserved aura and reputation of being “the Friedrich Kittler of the present generation.” If Friedrich Kittler’s intellectual energy and genius, since the early 1980s, were the driving force behind the emergence of “Media Science/Media Studies” as a new academic discipline in Germany and later on internationally, Claus Pias, who was Kittler’s student at the University of Bochum, has taken this first impulse and its centrifugal effects to a new intellectual level. One of the main reasons for the singular quality of his work certainly lies in the unusual profile of his academic education: in addition to Philosophy, German Studies, and Art History, Pias studied Electrical Engineering at the highly renowned Technical University of Aachen. This combination of a first-hand engineering competence with a complex and historically differentiated philosophical view seems to be unmatched in the world of Media Studies today – at least within their European context. Besides having thus occupied, for more than a decade now, the place of a central figure of reference in the development of “Media Studies,” Pias is also the editor and co-editor of about twenty collective volumes charting this field, and the author of two seminal monographs: “Die Epoche der Kybernetik” (Stuttgart 2003) and “ComputerSpielWelten” (München 2002, with translations into English and Italian).