They are incompatible with the notions about genre that exist in television. The ‘culture journals’ of Alexander Kluge define themselves deliberately as counterproductions, as draft projects aimed against the dumbing-down tendencies of the medium and the attention deficits that go with it. Instead of reporting on grand cultural events in the same old standardised forms, as is usual in other journals, Kluge opts for variety and interconnectivity (Zusammenhang). In a programmatic statement, he says that the point is ‘[to] develop forms that can survive inside this impossible situation which destroys expression. These will probably be short forms, but ones that produce so many sequences among themselves and rely so much on the technique of variation - which is also a technique of difference - that in this way very simple and extensive things can be retold'.

What Kluge is describing here is nothing less than a far-reaching experimental disposition to which, with each programme, a further building block, a further perspective, can be added. To describe, without wanting to pin it down, this spinning out of threads - in principle an unfinished process - this rampant flowering that is rhizoid and undirected, one could speak of an audiovisual essay, particularly since the style of the essay has long ceased to be identical with a genre of its own, but is rather articulated ubiquitously in all sorts of other forms and media. Of course, this concept would only apply to Kluge's films (beginning perhaps with DEUTSCHLAND IM HERBST/GERMANY IN AUTUMN) and television journals, although the theoretical works written jointly with Oskar Negt (I am thinking, for example, of the monumental montage Geschichte und Eigensinn) are also essays on the ‘political economy of the labour force'. And Kluge's narrative prose works, now collected in Chronik der Gefühle, also display numerous essayistic features, above all the repeated overlapping of narration and reflection (and clear references to Montaigne, Musil, Benjamin and Adorno). So we are talking about parts of an overall project that is rooted in the identity of the author. And it is precisely this notion of the author with which Kluge laconically characterises his own praxis: an author is someone who does something autonomous.

There are doubtless authors who use their status as writers or film-makers to mark a separation from their readers and viewers.