Walking the Corridors of Mass Media: Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s 1973-1974 Cologne Tape Recordings and the Poetics of Disruption
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Ich gehe durch lange Massenmedienkorridore,” confesses the German avant-garde poet Rolf Dieter Brinkmann on tape as he walks through Cologne in the winter of 1973–74 (O7). The audibly breathless Brinkmann felt trapped in the city in which he lived, a city chock full of media signals. From 1970 onward, he exposed himself to West Germany’s encroaching “mass-media corridors,” building up his extensive material collections in which he catalogued urban landscapes. Erkundungen fur die Prazisierung des Gefuhls fur einen Aufstand, Rom, Blicke, and Schnitte were published posthumously and are usually referred to as his Materialbande. These literary experiments were supplemented by various other works, among them Brinkmann’s lesser known and only marginally researched Cologne tape recordings. While this sound experiment is an intervention into post-1968 Germany, a time when Brinkmann could no longer overlook “das Scheitern der Studentenbewegung,” he is less interested in political change than a radical rethinking of literature in highly mediated environments (Spath 103). I argue that Brinkmann employs television, a “Medium, alles gleichmachend” and “mittelmasig,” as a counter-example to his own poetics in which the single media channel – be it visual, aural, or textual – carries disruptive potential (O1). Analysing the recordings in great detail, my study focuses on three interrelated key concepts of Brinkmann’s aesthetics: the notion that West Germany’s cities are artificial places, the idea that language is in crisis, and the assumption that mass media play an important role in the policing of everyday life but are at the same time instrumental in the production of a disruptive counter-poetics. In
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".