Abstract
Thinking cooperation through materiality addresses questions of production and impact of both media and social order, and, most importantly, their interconnections. It also points, and this is the central claim of this book, towards the situation as an important methodological concept for social order and its spatio-temporal organisation—a concept which needs updating if we want to deal with the relation between media and sociality adequately. For us, both materiality and cooperation can only be grasped through their situated temporalisations and can only be historicised on this basis. This allows us to include media in this picture: materiality of cooperation deals with the socio-material and cultural-technical reciprocal fabrication and production of media and social order beyond communication and semiotic practices. As we will establish in this introduction, methodologically, in order to access the materiality of cooperation through situations it is necessary to update the influential micro-sociological concept of the situation: a ‘methodological situationalism’ (Knorr Cetina, 1981) based on the centrality of the local situation created in situ by physically co-present actors (Goffman, 1964, 1981). We suggest the notion of a post-situationalism: by starting off from situated practices—rather than an individual situation formed by practices—and by including media practices. The present volume—like the Siegen Collaborative Research Centre ‘Media of Cooperation’ in which it originated—takes these questions on the situated, cooperative and material constitution of media practices as its starting point for different theoretical, historical and empirical endeavours presented in the chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
According to the rules of transatlantic post-war discourses on ‘media’ and ‘communication’, this definition addresses not so much an everyday understanding of communication as the question of what constitutes media in general (Schüttpelz, 2005).
- 2.
- 3.
In contrast to cultural studies research on the materiality of communication (Gumbrecht & Pfeiffer, 1994) which focused primarily on semiotic practices and the symbolic potential of media.
- 4.
On the concept of the condition of cooperation following Alfred Schütz and Harold Garfinkel, see Schüttpelz (2015).
- 5.
This already addresses (implicit) possibilities of connecting to media theories (see Thielmann, 2012; Schüttpelz, 2013). Accountability points to the fundamental representational dimension of practices, i.e. their mediality. Doing something means to make it accountable to others by making it visible, hearable, witnessable, etc.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
Comparable turns of phrase can still be found today, especially in German-language media theory, as if it were still necessary to emphasise what is common sense anyway.
- 9.
This points to a pragmatic understanding of stability and instability (Strauss, 1993, pp. 285 ff.). Even apparently stable things can—with sufficient effort or simply after sufficient time has passed—become unstable. And vice versa, unstable things are situationally hardened and appear in the next moment as stable unquestioned conditions of a subsequent situation.
- 10.
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Acknowledgements
Collaborative volumes are not obsolete if they use their format sensibly. With this in mind, we have deliberately given the contributors room for longer texts that would go beyond the scope of common journal publications. The intensive readings and collaborative criticism, both during and after the Siegen conference ‘Media Practices in Cooperative Situations’ in December 2016, can be considered a separate, collaborative form of peer review. The editors would like to thank all authors, who have responded to our constant questions and enquiries. The contributions of Thomas Scheffer and Petra Löffler were made possible by evening lectures and workshops of the Siegen Lecture and Workshop Series on Practice Theory.
We would like to thank Anja Höse, Thomas Blum, Jenny Berkholz, Sina Bär, Christiane Böker, Damaris Lehmann and Esra Otto for organising the conference, guest lectures and workshops.
We would like to thank Thomas Blum, Christiane Böker, Esra Otto, Simon Czech, Nina Selbach and Eva Müller for their help in proofreading the texts. For their work on the English translation of this volume, we thank Mark Schreiber and Julene Knox. We would like to thank Carolin Gerlitz, Bina Mohn, Erhard Schüttpelz and Nadine Taha for critical questions and further comments during a panel discussion at the German Society of Media Studies’ (GfM) annual conference ‘Industry’ in September 2018.
Springer Publishing House reliably looked after this book thanks to Vivek Gopal and Dagmar Kern. The financial and contractual matters were excellently handled by Susanne Kokel of the Collaborative Research Center Media of Cooperation.
The volume was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project-ID 262513311 – CRC 1187 Media of Cooperation. The CRC’s subprojects A01 (Digital Network Technologies Between Specialisation and Universalisation), A04 (Normal Operating Failures: Structure and Change of Public Service Infrastructures), B04 (Digital Publics and Social Transformation in the Maghreb) as well as the CRC’s Lecture and Workshop Series on Practice Theory contributed to its production.
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Gießmann, S., Röhl, T., Trischler, R. (2023). Materiality of Cooperation—An Introduction. In: Gießmann, S., Röhl, T., Trischler, R., Zillinger, M. (eds) Materiality of Cooperation. Medien der Kooperation – Media of Cooperation. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4_1
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