Mark B.N. Hansen
To the extent that each new medium of communication operates through a technology for exteriorizing some function of human cognition and memory, it involves both gain and loss. This fundamental duality of media innovation has often taken the form of myth. In the Protagoras, Plato himself deploys the Hesiodic myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus as a means of characterizing the singularity of the human, but also of grasping our fundamental dependence on technology. Let us recall the salient details of Plato’s account: charged with the task of equipping mortal creatures with suitable powers, Epimetheus makes his distribution following the principle of compensation, giving to each creature those capacities that will insure their survival. Not being particularly clever, Epimetheus used all of his available powers on the brute beasts, leaving the human race unprovided for, and so compelling the theft of fire by his more famous brother, Prometheus. Because of our Promethean legacy, so Plato’s myth recounts, we humans have had a share in the portion of the gods and have distinguished ourselves from all other animals through our use of the arts of fire, which is to say, of technologies. This use has resulted in the development of articulate speech and names, the invention of houses and clothes and shoes and bedding, and the introduction of agriculture.
By changing the conditions for the production of experience, all media technologies, when they are new, destabilize existing patterns of biological, psychical, and collective life at the same time as they furnish new facilities. This convergence of privation and supplementation already informs what many critics hold to be the primal scene of media innovation in Western thought: Plato’s meditation in the Phaedrus on the new medium of writing. There the issue is developed metaphorically through writing’s status as a pharmakon, at once a poison and its antidote, a threat to memory and its extension. The profound ambivalence of writing is clearly expressed in the myth that Socrates recounts to Phaedrus of Theuth, the Egyptian God who invented writing:
But when it came to writing Theuth said [to the Egyptian king, Thamus], “Here, O king, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories; my discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom.” But the king answered and said, “O man full of arts, to one it is given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them. And so it is that you, by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance.”
(Plato 1995)
Thamus’s well-reasoned reservations notwithstanding, this myth recaptures the fundamental duality that will drive media innovation onward. In this case, even if writing results in a waning of memory, it furnishes an external supplement to internal memory that will become ever more necessary as information proliferates and social life complexifies.
That Prometheus suffered unending punishment for his theft from the gods should not be forgotten. Indeed, it is this aspect of the myth that reappears throughout our history, at moments of large-scale technological change. To cite one particularly forceful example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus casts Victor Frankenstein in the role of a latter-day Prometheus, whose theft of the spark of life leads to disastrous consequences all too familiar to us. What Shelley’s deployment of the figure of Prometheus exemplifies is the cultural anxiety that surrounds moments of technological newness: any Promethean step forward is, so it seems, necessarily accompanied by fears that we have overstepped, that we have introduced something detrimental to our “natural” life. One need only recall the anxieties that welled up around cinema at its origin (and that ranged from the physiological, namely that it would hurt our eyesight, to the moral, that it would cater to the lowest impulses). Or, still more unequivocally, think of the myriad anxieties that today surround genetic engineering and stem-cell research. What the longevity of this mythic kernel would seem to point toward is the dialectic that surrounds adaptation to the new: to the extent that new media introduce modes of experience that challenge the familiar, they are bound to occasion anxiety, resistance, even hostility, as they make their way toward cultural acceptance or “naturalization.” The Promethean dimension in this dialectic underscores the fact that such anxiety is not trivial or misguided, but is a constitutive dimension of the human experience of cultural change.
“Media determine our situation.” With this opening to Gramophone Film Typewriter (1999), German “media scientist” Friedrich Kittler issued a challenge that has profoundly impacted research in literary and cultural studies, including work in science and technology studies. Put succinctly, Kittler’s challenge runs something like this: pursue a form of analysis that, while methodologically prohibited from accounting for its material conditions, nevertheless acknowledges such conditions and brings these to bear on the outcome of analysis.
Kittler’s work, more than anyone else’s, serves to set out the stakes of what we might call the “medial turn” in research in the humanities. Specifically, his work is attuned both to the constraints that media places on hermeneutics, that is, on the claims we can make in the name of meaning and the signified, and also to the new potentialities for exploration that media makes possible, as, for example, when informatic noise in a given domain of material inscription becomes generative of meanings, new effects of sense. Kittler’s paradigmatic status as the inaugurator of the “medial turn” lies at the heart of David Wellbery’s characterization of the contribution made by his seminal text, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Kittler 1990). In his helpful introduction to the 1990 translation of that text (originally published in 1985), Wellbery compellingly demonstrates how Kittler’s particular remix of the poststructuralism of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault managed to transform what, in the Anglo-American context, had become a predominately negative-critical methodology into a “positive research program for a post-hermeneutic criticism” (Wellbery 1990: xii). Wellbery enumerates three components of this program – the presuppositions of “exteriority,”“mediality,” and “corporeality”–which together displace the question of subjective agency in favor of the cultural inscription (“training”) of bodies.
At the very core of the medial turn exemplified by Kittler’s Discourse Networks project is a more general positive research program that would open the post-hermeneutic focus on materiality to effects far distant from the kinds of meaning effects most commonly associated with literary study and analysis (whether traditional or deconstructive). What characterizes this general program is the interference of the materiality of media not simply with hermeneutics and meaning effects, but also with the functioning of media systems themselves. That is, in the wake of the generalized medial turn, the cultural critic knows that the basis of her knowledge – a given, concretely material media system – is beyond the grasp of that knowledge. In this sense, the generalized medial turn marks a certain critical inversion of what might well be taken as its proximate source – namely Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, and its notion that what can be said at any moment in history (the “sayable”) is relative to an archived set of potential statements (Foucault 1972).
In supplementing Foucault’s historical archive with a concrete exploration of mediatic materiality, Kittler radicalizes the pre-hermeneutic dimensions of Foucault’s work in a way that bears decisive significance for contemporary media theory. In effect, Kittler’s intervention institutes a fundamental division between two types of approach to media: one that explores the experiential dimension of media, which remains keyed to the ratios of human perception and sensation, and another that excavates the technical logics of media, logics which – for Kittler at least – are only contingently and impermanently synchronized with those subjective ratios. What results from this division is a permanent oscillation between the materiality and the phenomenality of media. While the poles of this oscillation are not necessarily incompatible, the recognition of that constitutive difference does seem to impose the necessity for a perspectival shift, such that the media critic must choose whether to foreground the infrastructure conditioning experience (media materiality) or the experience thereby realized.
This oscillation comprises the fundamental theoretical challenge that media poses to the cultural theorist. The challenge is more than simply an updating for our media age of literary deconstruction – which, with its many oscillations, troubled the possibility for any simple meaning claims and identity formations. This mediatic oscillation comprises something of a new transcendental structure of experience, although one that – anchored as it is in concrete technologies – disturbs the traditional division between transcendental and empirical. On this score it resembles both Foucault’s historical a priori and Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism” (Foucault 1972; Deleuze 1995). Like them, it proffers the conditions for real experience without exceeding the domain of experience, without being, properly speaking, transcendental at all (in the Kantian sense of being rooted in pure reason rather than in phenomenal perception). As the accomplishment of the generalized medial turn, media theory marks the chance for us to overcome the empirical–transcendental divide that has structured Western thought about technics.
It is precisely because media contaminates thinking at the same time as it makes thinking possible that we can affirm (with, but also perhaps against, Kittler) that media determines our situation: by giving the empirical–technical infrastructure for thought, by specifying a certain technical materiality for the possibility of thinking, media remains an ineliminable, if unthematizable, aspect of the experience that gives rise to thought. This revelation of media’s fundamental irreducibility underscores the insufficiency of any theoretical stance that fails to interrogate the oscillation itself, that remains content to treat it solely and simply as a radical challenge to hermeneutics and not as the very configuration of the admittedly complex condition for whatever hermeneutics might be in our world today. In seeking to interrogate this oscillation here, I shall make an effort to address both the theoretical and the historical dimensions of media, even though, in the end, these will prove inseparable, if not in fact indistinguishable, from one another. For if, in one sense, the particular opportunity just outlined for contemporary theory stems from the specific state of media today, it also marks an “originary” correlation of technics and thought, one that comes “before” history and that is, for this very reason, necessarily expressed by history, by the history of technics as much as that of thinking.
Media studies emerges as a distinct academic and cultural enterprise at or around the moment when it becomes possible to speak of media in the collective singular, which is equally to say, as something other and indeed more than a simple accumulation of individual mediums, of divergent media contents. If we rely on the Oxford English Dictionary, this moment can be pinpointed to the mid-1960s and is exemplified by writer Kingsley Amis’s observation that “the treatment of media as a singular noun … is spreading into the upper cultural strata” (Amis 1966). Amis’s observation serves perfectly to invoke Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan. For at the very heart of McLuhan’s project – arguably the first and still most influential effort to articulate a comprehensive theory of media – is a displacement of media-in-the-plural with a concept of media as a singular collective: the passage from content to medium, from a plurality of media contents to a quasi-autonomous concept of media. In his Understanding Media (1964), McLuhan famously equated the medium and the message; he defined the message (or “meaning”) as the medium itself. In this way, McLuhan meant to catalyze a conceptual shift from the content of a message to its technical form.
From McLuhan’s standpoint, a medium impacts on human experience and society not primarily through the content that it mediates, but rather through its formal, i.e., technical, properties as a medium. McLuhan’s preferred example, in a central section of Understanding Media, is the light bulb, which, despite having no content of its own aside from the light it sheds, profoundly impacts on social life by literally bringing light to the darkness and so extending the time of human social interaction. With his phrase “understanding media,” then, McLuhan does not mean just (or primarily) understanding different individual mediums, like electricity, the automobile, the typewriter, or clothing; rather, he means something like understanding from the perspective of media, where media forms an abstraction (a collective singular) denoting an attentiveness to the agency of the medium in the analysis of social change.
Though some practitioners of media studies find McLuhan’s marginalization of content problematic, his redirection of the study of media was foundational for media studies. McLuhan urges us to focus on media independently of any ties with content and in the process redefines media itself as content, and not just a vehicle or channel for the transmission of content. For this reason, McLuhan’s approach to media has a capaciousness that can encompass the multiple and historically disjunctive origins of the term “media” as well as related terms like “medium” and “mediation.”
Not surprisingly, this generalized sense of media is very much at the heart of McLuhan’s conceptualization of media as “extensions of man.” Indeed, by linking media – and the operation of mediation as such – to the historically changing, sensory, and perceptual “ratios” of human experience, McLuhan underscored the fundamental correlation of the human and the technical. McLuhan is the recognized source for Friedrich Kittler’s media science, which, as its author suggests, can be understood as a working out of the impossibility of understanding media, where media (as we noted above) form the infrastructural condition of possibility for understanding itself. Indeed, for McLuhan it is the coupling of the human and the technological that holds primacy; while imbricated in myriad, complex ways, embodied human enaction and technological materiality remain two distinct forms of informatic embodiment, two distinct processes of materialization that, no matter how much they may converge, retain their respective autonomy. For McLuhan, the human body simply cannot be understood as a first or primary medium, as some posthumanist critics and artists currently propose to understand it (for example, the Australian body artist Stelarc [2010]); nor can it be relegated to the status of merely optional receiver of technically mediated information, as Kittler proposes. Rather, the body for McLuhan comprises the non-self-sufficient “ground” for all acts of mediation, including those (that is to say, the vast majority of mediations) which expand its agency beyond the “skin”; the body, in sum, is a capacity for relationality that literally requires mediation, and that, in a sense, cannot be conceptualized without it.
Prior to the invention of writing, what media scholar Walter Ong calls “primary orality” comprised the media system of culture (Ong 1982). Central to this media system was the technology of the word itself. Expressing inner thoughts and feelings in words allowed for the exteriorization of symbolic knowledge and social obligations and, as evolutionary anthropologist Terrence Deacon (1998) has convincingly demonstrated, made possible the practices of hunting and marriage. In his understanding of orality, Ong drew on the work of classicist Milman Parry, who had demonstrated how the poetic schemas of the Iliad and the Odyssey were constructed to manage the informational needs of oral Greek society: oral epic foregrounded poetic patterns in ways that made recall easier and the memorization of long passages possible (Parry 1971).
The invention of writing did not eliminate orality in one blow, however, and the history of literacy in Western culture is an object lesson in how technical innovation depends upon complex social factors. In his study of writing in the Greek period, classicist Eric Havelock (1982) showed how the passage from an oral to a literate culture was mediated by a scribal culture in which only an elite subgroup of society either considered it necessary or had the opportunity to learn to read and write. And the persistence of scribal cultures beyond the Greek period – one finds such cultures in medieval Europe as well as in ancient Egypt – attests to the ubiquity of this social logic and its predominance over simple technological change. In order to conceptualize the complex social logic that characterizes the passage from oral to literate society, Ong invents the category of “residual orality” for the persistence of an “oral residue” in cultures that have been exposed to writing but that have not fully interiorized its use. Both Ong and McLuhan theorize the re-emergence of a form of orality in the electronic age – what Ong calls “secondary orality”–that by displacing the predominance of the written word partially return us to conditions of immediacy and presence that are characteristic of oral communication.
In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), his study immediately preceding Understanding Media, McLuhan focused on the transformational impact of the invention of moveable type and the print revolution it catalyzed. While McLuhan analyzed the expansion of knowledge afforded by the printed book, his central focus was on the altered form of consciousness that emerged in the wake of the printing press. According to McLuhan, the shift from manuscript culture to print culture witnessed the dissolution of sensorily distributed and integrated experience in favor of the tyranny of the visual. Other scholars, however, have eschewed McLuhan’s subjective emphasis on the alienation of individual experience in order to concentrate on the profound material effects of the new medium of print. Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979) analyzed the social and political impact of the printing press as a form of standardization that afforded unprecedented capacities for storage and dissemination of information. Moving beyond McLuhan’s focus on individual experience, Eisenstein convincingly demonstrated the important role that the invention of moveable type and the print revolution played in the Renaissance, the Protestant revolution, and the rise of modern science.
Eisenstein’s stress on the standardization of linguistic marks that lies at the heart of the printing press anticipates the media revolution of the nineteenth century as analyzed by Kittler. For Kittler (1999), the triad of gramophone, film, and typewriter differentiated the inscription, storage, and dissemination of the various sensory fluxes – aural, visual, and linguistic – in a way that expands the standardization of print to other experiential registers. Interestingly enough, for all of these scholars, who are otherwise so different in their methodologies and commitments, the advent of digital technology promises some form of experiential reunification ranging from the utopian (McLuhan) to the dystopian (Kittler).
In Technics and Time, 1: the fault of Epimetheus (1998), French philosopher Bernard Stiegler transforms McLuhan’s vision of media into a full-fledged philosophy of technical evolution. At the heart of Stiegler’s thought is the understanding that human beings, from the very proto-origin of the human as a distinct species, have always been technically mediated. Stiegler’seffort to overturn the repression of technics in Western philosophy follows in the wake of the efforts of his teacher and mentor, Jacques Derrida, to deconstruct the metaphysics of presence by way of the essential technicity of writing and other technologies of différance. As he has shown in a range of studies spanning the Platonic myth of writing discussed above (Derrida 1983) to his seminal discussion of the grammatological logic of the supplement in Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Derrida 1976), the antecedence of writing (here understood as the iterability of the mark or grammé)in relation to speech and concrete writing systems means that the origin of meaning is always given through différance, which is to say, given as a meaning effect both differing and deferred from its origin.
In his own take on Derrida’s crucial concept of arche-writing, Stiegler insists on the necessity of thinking a history of the (technical) supplement, such that the operation of différance is put into a functional relation with concrete technologies of storage and transmission (see Stiegler 2002). With this move, Stiegler relativizes what he calls the “quasi-transcendental” field of différance or arche-writing in relation to the material infrastructure of its appearance and efficacy in the world at any given moment in time. Thus the paradoxical anteriority or withdrawal of any moment of origin (presence) becomes tightly bound up with the technical conditions of its belated appearance.
As the sub-title of Technics and Time, 1 indicates, Stiegler routes his own negotiation with the figure of paradoxical origin through the crucial but neglected figure of Epimetheus in the Hesiodic myth and its legacy. In a compelling argument, he insists that the figure of Prometheus, and the dialectic of technological change it expresses, would have no meaning without the “fault” of Epimetheus, without the originary act of forgetting that left the “natural” human being naked and unprotected, in need of technical supplementation. In Stiegler’s reading, what the myth expresses is the “originary technicity” of the human, the fact that human beings have always depended on and co-evolved with technologies. Drawing on paleontological studies of early flint tools, Stiegler foregrounds the fundamental correlation of the cortex with the silex (flint) as the basic characteristic of the human: from their very onset, human beings have evolved not simply genetically but culturally, which is to say, by exteriorizing their know-how and collective memory in the form of cultural artifacts and objective memory supports. This would mean, of course, that the evolution of the human can be characterized in terms of a long series of “new media revolutions”: what our material history teaches us is that human beings co-evolve in correlation with the evolution of technics; the long line of once-new “new media” would simply be the index of this coevolution. In light of the complex form of human evolution ensuing from our coupling to technics (a form Stiegler dubs “epiphylogenesis,” meaning evolution by other than biological means), it follows – and this is Stiegler’s thesis – that human beings, in their developmental and genetic evolution, are “essentially” correlated with technical media.
Lest this account sound overly anthropocentric, as if media existed exclusively to support human evolutionary and developmental processes, it should be pointed out that media have increasingly come to converge with technical forms of inscription of experience and, ultimately, of time. As a result, they now participate in processes of technological evolution and development that, at least since the Industrial Revolution, can lay claim to some sort of qualified autonomy. More than any other critical corpus, the work of Kittler (1990, 1999) has drawn attention to this sobering reality. Kittler has articulated a history of media that moves from the monopoly on information storage long exercised by alphabetical coding to the media differentiations of the nineteenth century (photography, phonography, typewriting, cinema) and finally to the contemporary convergence of media in the form of digital code and computer processing. At the core of Kittler’s media history is an appreciation for technics as a material production (a production of the real) that is not pre-adapted to or constrained by the sensory and perceptual thresholds of human experience.
A glimpse of this qualified autonomy of technics can be found in techniques for sound analysis that developed out of the phonographical revolution, which is to say, in the wake of the new medium of the gramophone. While the dominant uses of the gramophone from its invention until its recent obsolescence (and now, of course, in its afterlife) invest almost wholly in the synchrony of technical recording and human sense perception (meaning that they involve the recording and replaying of sound for human consumption), the capacity of technical sound recording to inscribe frequencies outside the range of human hearing allows for an inscription (or “symbolization”) of the flux of the real that is not narrowly bound to human modes of experience. Sound inscription thus instances the break with natural language and alphabetic writing that characterizes technical recording as such: whereas the inscription of natural language operates on the discrete ordering of the alphabet, the inscription of sound operates on a far more fine-grained discretization of the sonic flux.
One technique for such discretization, Fourier analysis, symbolizes the raw flux of sound by means of intervals (so-called Fourier intervals) which periodize or code for non-periodic, innumerable frequency series. According to Kittler, what is most important about Fourier intervals – and what makes them exemplary of digital signal processing per se – is the recourse to real-number analysis (a mathematical technique encompassing the continua between whole numbers) they make necessary. Generalizing from the technicalities of Kittler’s discussion, we can say that high-frequency analysis “symbolizes” the flux of the real (in the Lacanian sense) on the matrix of real numbers (whereas the alphabet does it on the matrix of natural language). To say this is to suggest that the technical inscription of sound symbolizes the real for systems other than human sense perception, and indeed this is what, for Kittler, makes it exemplary of the operation of the computer as such.
As the generalization of an operation (machinic symbolization) that could (and did) remain marginal until its widespread social proliferation, the computer marks a certain dissociation of media from technics. Arguably for the first time in history, the technical infrastructure of media is no longer homologous with its surface appearance. As distinct from phonography, where the grooves of a record graphically reproduce the frequency ranges of humanly perceivable sound, and from film, where the inscription of light on a sensitive surface reproduces what is visible to the human eye, properly computational media involve no direct correlation between technical storage and human sense perception. What we see on the computer screen (or any other interface) and what we hear on the digital player (or other interface) is not related by visible or sonic analogy to the data that is processed in the computer or digital device. Indeed, as the work of some digital media artists has shown, the very same digital data can be output in different registers, thus yielding very different media experiences. Pioneering new media theorist Lev Manovich (2001) has described this unique situation in terms of a divide between the media surface and the underlying code:
New media in general can be thought of as consisting of two distinct layers – the “cultural layer” and the “computer layer.”…Because new media is created on computers, distributed via computers, and stored and archived on computers, the logic of a computer can be expected to significantly influence the traditional cultural logic of media; that is, we may expect that the computer layer will affect the cultural layer. The ways in which the computer models the world, represents data, and allows us to operate on it; the key operations behind all computer programs (such as search, match, sort, and filter); the conventions of HCI – in short, what can be called the computer’s ontology, epistemology, and pragmatics – influence the cultural layer of new media, its organization, its emerging genres, its contents.
(Manovich 2001: 46)
Manovich situates the conjunction in computational media of surface and code as the legacy of two converging, yet hitherto distinct cultural traditions, of media and of computation. According to Manovich, these two traditions are held together by the cultural dominance of the cinematic metaphor, which has largely dictated how digital data has been transposed into readily consumable media forms.
While this may be (or may have been) an appropriate analysis of the empirical deployment of computational media, it doesn’t begin to tap the potential that the computer holds for fundamentally remapping our experience of space and time (see Hansen 2004). Taking stock of the massive role played by computational processes in creating the infrastructure for experience today, it becomes difficult to ignore the reality that we depend on regimes of technical mediation, what geographer Nigel Thrift (2004) has called the “technological unconscious,” that not only exceed our attention but that remain fundamentally unfathomable by us. Put another way, the forms of media – visual, aural, tactile – through which we construct information about our universe are no longer homologous with the actual materialities, the temporal fluxes, that they mediate. While these media forms may still adequately capture the flux of our experience (although recent studies in the fine-scale temporal processes of cognition suggest that in fact this may not be the case), they – like the experiences they inscribe – are only indirectly coupled to the underlying computational processes supporting them. In light of this computational disjunction of technics and media, we must differentiate and hold separate two distinct functions of media: on the one hand, to exteriorize human experience in durable, repeatable, and hence transmissible form (the traditional function of media); and on the other, to mediate for human experience the non- (or proto-)phenomenological, fine-scale temporal computational processes that increasingly make up the infrastructure conditioning all experience in our world today. What is mediated in both cases is, to be sure, human experience, but according to two distinct programs: for whereas media in the first, traditional sense mediates human experience itself (its content is that experience), media in the second sense mediates the technical conditions that make possible such experience – the “transcendental technicity” underlying real experience in our world today.
With this observation, we return to our point of theoretical departure, namely the certain radicalization that I located in Kittler’s work once it is generalized as the basis for a “medial turn” in cultural studies. In concluding this brief overview, let me propose that media studies rehabilitates understanding from Kittler’s anti-hermeneutical critique precisely by resituating it: what is to be understood is not media in the plural, but media in the singular; and it is by understanding media in the singular – which is to say, by reconceptualizing understanding from the perspective of media – that we will discover ways to characterize the impact of media in the plural. Whether they can be considered to be modes of understanding in themselves, such characterizations will involve much more than a unidimensional account of the technics of a given medium. Indeed, precisely by pursuing a generalization of technics along the lines suggested by Stiegler (as the correlate of human life), such characterizations necessarily involve mediations among domains that are all too often and all too artificially dissociated. That these mediations themselves require yet another kind of mediation – critical mediation – is the very burden of McLuhan’s abiding injunction to understand from the perspective of media. From this perspective, media do not so much determine our situation: they are our situation.
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