TPM and Enzensberger
The Balkanized Monolith
Understanding Enzensberger in the Internet Age
Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s landmark essay, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” was originally published in the New Left Review in 1970, during the waning years of the Vietnam War and the Nixon Administration. In it, he critiqued the current use of radio and television, arguing that their effectiveness as an inherently socialist media were not fully realized under the current “repressive” structure of monopoly capitalism (Enzensberger 51). Radio, in particular, had lost the mobilizing potential of its inception, when amateurs with transistor radios had the same productive capabilities as larger stations. Since then, according to Enzensberger, the potential of a many-to-many method of communication had given way to a one-to-many framework, and within this transformation, the mobilizing possibilities of the format have fallen to the stultifying effects of the producer/consumer relationship. Yet within this pessimism Enzensberger allows a ray of sunlight: he sees in the advent of electronic media a revolutionary potential, wherein those on the Left can effectively employ the manipulative aspects of the format rather than run from them – where workers with tape recorders and video cameras can “turn up in factories, in schools, in the offices of the bureaucracy, in short, wherever there is social conflict” (61). In chastising those who have led us to succumb to the passivity of radio and television, Enzensberger acknowledges that subverting this capitalist relationship is fraught with complications and difficulties; yet, as he so deftly puts it, the “fear of handling shit is a luxury a sewerman cannot necessarily afford” (56).
