note 88

Alexandert Kluge is a filmmaker and one of the founders of the avant-garde intellectual Neuen Deutschen Film of the 1970-80s. Oscar Negt is a sociologist who worked closely with Adorno and Habermas in the Frankfurter Shule. In the Frankfurter Shule, academics like Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Habermas were concerned with how people, the masses, could become viable against totalitarian systems like the Nazis in Germany in the Second World War. Amongst other things they focused on how media and the orchestration of the public domain could influence this. The work of Negt and Kluge was remarkable and very inspirational for me, since both the theory and practice of media informed their collaboration, which resulted in texts as well as films. The implications of their work particularly came to life in a special workshop that Frans Berkers, sociologist, gave for several years.