MEDIA AND MATERIALITY
Question answered: #2. The content of communications media are often described and analysed as
‘texts’. Does this characterisation, unlike theories of the ontology of media
proposed by Friedrich Kittler and Harold Innis, adequately describe media
artifacts or are other models more appropriate to the investigation of media in
general or with respect to specific media?
As
communications media proliferate and emerge under new forms and configurations,
it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the content of such communication
as coherent and autonomous objects of study. While it is relatively clear that a book, a
play, or a speech can be conceptualised as a singular entity which can be
understood as ‘text’, the discreet, objective coherence of electronic media
such as radio, television, and videogames strain and even breach traditional
conceptions of media texts as objects of study. Fundamentally, such debates
involve the extent to which ‘texts’ include the means of their recording – the
trace of their physical existence – as well as the social relations which
enable or disable reception of ‘texts’, within the framework of meaning
produced in the communicative process. Can ‘texts’ be rationalised as unique,
autonomous entities which generate meaning, or, as Kitler (2012) and Innis (1951)
suggest, is meaning produced by a system of relations between individuals,
institutions, and processes of communication? In order to begin such an
inquiry, it is perhaps best to understand the origins of ‘text’ within the
tradition of literary studies, from which the term derives.
The text emerged as an object of study in the nineteenth century with the
proliferation of literature departments in universities in Europe and North
America. Importantly, with the emergence of the text comes the emergence of the
reader. In Orality and Literacy
(1982), Walter Ong argues that as writing emerged out of oral cultural
traditions, cognitive processes altered their sense of orientation from gestures
of exteriority to gestures of interiority. This distinction between interior
and exterior serves to initiate the constitution of literate individual
subjects – what came to be understood as the Cartesian subject, the “I” at the
centre of cogito ergo sum – as
differentiated from pre-literate individuals who lacked subjectivity, who
weren’t subjects. For Ong, individuals within oral cultures seek understanding
within consensus, and ritualistic communicative practices form the basis for
memory (22-23; 34). In this context, expertise (of interpretation, etc.)
derives from the skill of an individual to manipulate and determine the group
dynamic (35). Accordingly, meaning which derives from any particular
communication process is an aggregation which accumulates (and, to later
historical research, indexes) the expertise of a society into a unified
communicative entity. Social power derives from a performative expression of
the history of such aggregations (“I am king because I derive from these kings
before me...”). Memory, as performance, is thus inherently non-historical and
non-reflexive. Writing, on the other hand, fixes memory into a material
process. Messages therefore are given a history and an individuality as
objects, which thus allows individual readers to compare similar or divergent
ideas. Literate societies promote the generation of multiple points of meaning
centered upon the expertise of the individual making the claim to criticism. This
process ultimately “free[s] the mind for more original, more abstract thought”
(24).
It is thus possible to locate textuality, for Ong, within this same
distinction: in oral societies, the ‘text’ is precisely the consensus of the
group centred upon a given communicative process or message, enforced through
ritual and a hierarchy of social power, in accord with a real-time experience
of the world (1982 42-46); in literate societies, the ‘text’ is both a material
and a discursive object which is to be reflected upon and interpreted by an
individual subject (the reader). It is perhaps best to illustrate this notion
of textuality with reference to religion. In the oral tradition, the consensus
between priests and the community which elevated an individual to priesthood
allows the successful continuation of a message (religious tradition) over
time, despite the variabilities inherent to oral communicative processes,
described by Ong as “dynamic” (32) and informed by interactions with an audience
(65; 141). With literacy, however, individual reading subjects are able to
interpret a given message with reference to their own experience and expertise,
as well as to other written materials produced by other reflective individual
subjects. It is this theoretical objectivity of the written word which enables
and informs the autonomy of the text, offered as an object of study. This
process accelerated with the development of print technologies, which, in
addition to multiplying the scale and extent of available literary works,
“embedded the word in space more definitively” and initiated new forms of written
works such as indexes and lists (120-1) as well as the “quantification of
knowledge” (127). Furthermore, by objectifying communication as written word,
print encouraged the conception of privacy, both in terms of the private
individual reading to him- or herself, and also in terms of the commercial
operations in which such literacy functioned (128).
In this context, it is possible to understand the conception of ‘text’ as
produced by literary studies: a discreet and autonomous object distributed as
an object to a reading public and which, by means of an Althusserian interpellative
gesture which creates the reader (in other words, the message recipient) as
subject able to privately judge both the value of the object (text) itself as
well as engage in a public discursive process of critical inquiry and
comparison. The text is itself therefore a historical subject, both influencing
and being influenced by the processes by which it is interpreted and given
meaning. The index of these changes in processes of interpretation can be understood
to constitute the field of study in which the object is discussed (Literature,
Music, Cinema, etc.). We can therefore presently conclude this line of
reasoning with the following generalisations, which the remainder of this essay
will complicate: a text is a communicative practice-made-object which
constitutes the reading subject which interprets it; a text is a body of words
seeking interpretation by a reader; a text has meaning. On one end of a
continuum of sorts lies the text; on the other is located the reading subject.
However, there are several problems, or indeed contradictions, even, with
this conception of textuality. The principal issue involves the separation of
the text as discreet from the reading subject or the context in which the text
is experienced. As Marshall McLuhan argues in Understanding Media (1994), the meaning of a message cannot be
separated from the context in which the message is sent and received. This conception
of meaning (and, by extension, textuality) is informed by the transformations
to communication processes inaugurated by their electrification. McLuhan argues
that the electrification of communication alters the temporality of both
message and receiving subject, and by this alteration fundamentally transforms
both the message and its audience (12) by “overthrow[ing] the privileged
position of the “contents” of the media, substituting a new sign language of rhetorical
and symbolic effects” (Kroker 54). Electricity changes the speed of access to
information, with spatial and temporal consequences to the positions taken by sender,
message (‘text’), and recipient, a transformation conceptualised by McLuhan as
an implosion between texts and individuals. In this capacity, McLuhan’s
ideation of media as the extensions of human nervous system (sense and
cognitive organs) can be understood to undermine the conception of textuality
as defined by the literary studies from which he as a scholar emerged. If
writing exteriorises and instrumentalises memory and print extends the reach of
such memories in both space and time by means of mechanical reproducibility, electrical
communications interiorises the infrastructure by which text and reading
subject are brought into an instantaneous whole. McLuhan here identifies two
instantiations: ‘hot’ media, in which participation of experiencing subject
with the text is minimal, and ‘cool’ media, in which a more engaged
participation of the experiencing subject is demanded (1994 23). In this
capacity, any sense of meaning as derived from a communication process must account
not only for what literary studies understands as constituting the text, but
also for the means by which the interpreting subject experiences the text. As
the meaning of an electrified communication process is altered by the
instantaneity of its reception, it is therefore possible to understand
textuality for McLuhan as precisely the implosive circuit by which text and
reading subject are made instantaneous and co-terminal.
Gary Genosko (1999) identifies within McLuhan’s work a Platonic ideation
of speech as the medium most capable of the pure expression of the will of the
individual, which “place[s] McLuhan firmly in the Western metaphysical
tradition” (41). For McLuhan, speech (oral culture) functions as a
transcendental signifier contained at the heart of all media (Jhally 167). As
all subsequent media involve within their ontology the individuals who
experience them as dependent on the technologies which enable this experience, the
textual artifacts of mediated communication processes (i.e., messages) are
ideologically determined by the technologies which enable them as media. Consequently,
the autonomy of the individual interpreting subject (i.e., the reader) is
called into question alongside the autonomy of the text. As McLuhan illustrates
by means of his discussion of electric light – the only medium in which there
is no ‘content’ (1994 8-9) – all media contain within them the other forms of
media which they supplement and replace. As such, within McLuhan’s terms it is possible
therefore to conceptualise the ‘text’ within any given process of communication
not as a singular object of study, but rather as a constellation or circuit of
media artifacts tracing their origination in speech as informed by the configuration
of technologies which enable and constitute them as representational media.
McLuhan derived his theories from the work of Harold Innis. For Innis,
any concession to textuality must be tempered by his understanding of
communications as occurring within a social matrix of institutions – abstracted
entities such as religion and the law, which are obviously grounded in their
material function within society – and communicative processes between
institutions and individuals. Meaning, as such, is itself governed by the
particular configuration of communicative patterns. Like McLuhan, Innis
conceives of texts as being relational entities which are informative (and
transformative) on social structures as a whole. As Sut Jhally (1993) notes,
“[f]or Innis, the most critical factor in society is the way in which means of
communication provide a framework of possibilities and parameters ... within
which social power (as well as modes of cognition) operate” (165). Texts can be
broadly defined as artifacts produced from monopolies of knowledge. However, according
to Innis the web of social relations which produce such monopolies of knowledge
are informed by the material conditions under which the possibilities for
communication are structured. In Empire
and Communications (2007), Innis traces the development of cultural
production from the oral tradition to the development of electronic broadcast
media. He argues that media organize power along two continua: time and space.
In order to extend through time, media need to exist in a materially-durable
form, which, as a consequence, limits transportation and thus curtails the
extension of the message (and the power contingent with its expression) in
space (1951 33). Alternately, media which are easily transported and thus allow
for a wide spatial dispersion do not enjoy a material existence which favours
temporal durability. It is this bias within processes of communication which
confers social power to the agent who produces and/or receives it. If
communication processes are understood as texts contingent with the literary
tradition, then they could not possibly inform social relations as Innis
suggests, as meaning produced by a text would precipitate from social relations
and not vice versa. However, as Innis’s illustration of the influence of
writing on the development of the Roman empire in Empire and Communications suggests, communication processes are as
informative of the society which produced them as they are in turn informed by
that society. In effect, the production of meaning is complicated by the
incorporation of the network of social relations in which the text is produced,
received, and evaluated into what literary studies would regard as the ‘text’. Ultimately,
therefore, it is not possible to locate textuality within Innis’s theoretical
framework; texts do not self-regulate meaning by some internal cohesion, but
instead exist as relational nodes within what William Kuhns describes as an “ecology
of information” (as quoted in Jhally, 165).
In this sense, McLuhan’s and Innis’s arguments about media are as
grounded in material existence as are the historical materialists who followed
in the wake of Marx. However, as Genosko notes, McLuhan’s work can be faulted
for ignoring the political economy of both communication practice and the
discursive communities in which communication takes place (1999 29). For Raymond
Williams (1958), a “Marxist theory of culture
... will take the facts of the economic structure and the consequent
social relations as the guiding string on which a culture is woven” (269). A
‘leap of faith’, in a sense, is then required in order to bridge the
ontological gap between materiality and cognition. Namely, there are competing,
but not necessarily exclusive, theories concerning the grounds by which a given
ideology or cognitive process could emerge from material conditions to affect a
subject, constituted in terms of either (both) the individual who thinks as
well as the social body in which a multitude of individuals communicate and
operate by means of a common ideological currency. Theodor Adorno (1991) argues
that cultural artifacts produced for and under the influence of the commercial
market are debased and rendered banal by their transformation into commodities,
while simultaneously noting that the negative effects of what he terms the
“culture industry” have not been empirically demonstrated (105). In this
context, Grossberg (1984) indicates that the “politics of textuality signals
the changing meaning and function of the category “text” ” (392). In “The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin (1968) argues
that the mechanical reproduction of an artwork has a more significant
“wither[ing]” (221) effect on it than does its commercialization, although the
two may indeed be highly related. For Benjamin, the mechanical duplication of
an artwork “substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence”, thus
eliminating the “presence of the original [as] the prerequisite to the concept
of authenticity” (220).
In such theoretical figurations, not only are texts understood within the
material conditions of their existence, but so too are interpreting subjects. As
Jürgen Habermas argues in The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), the seeming cognitive freedom
of the individual reading subject is bound up in the constitution of that
subject within a discursive public sphere founded in a tradition of
aristocratic and bourgeois privilege. Habermas argues that the culture which
developed (around) writing was a process in which private individuals, using
the material resources granted them through ownership of capital accumulated
through finance and trade capitalism (14-15), are able to engage in debate and
exchange of information within a newly-constituted bourgeois public sphere. Habermas
argues that it was this change, rather than print per se, which allowed for the development of an autonomous
individual subject, able to judge and act upon their interpretation of the
world of communication in which they were equal members (18). Accordingly,
those communications practices which were elevated to the status of ‘text’ were
precisely those written works which reflected the interests and social
authority of those “private people come together as a public” in order to study
them (27).
One may infer in Habermas’s thought that since private individuals tend
to erase or be ignorant of the marks of their privilege, as do the institutions
which serve to perpetuate these privileges, textuality incorporates the
processes of social censure which include certain communication practices as
‘texts’ while excluding others as unworthy of study. This social censure
constitutes the political economy of textuality. Habermas’s examination of
music in this context is particularly informative. When the notion of the
public was grounded upon aristocratic privilege and function, music was defined
(as text) by the importance of the occasion of its presentation; music was
written for specific courtly functions and events, and conferred to the
listening subject the meaning of the event for which the music was composed.
However, by the eighteenth century music had been “[r]eleased from its
functions in the service of social representation [and] became an object of
free choice and of changing preference” (39-40). The bourgeois public sphere authorised
not only any given communication process as an autonomous text, but also the
recipient of communication as a human individual able to discuss the meaning
that was interpreted in those textual objects determined to be worthy of study.
Meaning generated by textuality was therefore dependent on “mutual
relationships between privatized individuals who were psychologically
interested in what was “human” in self-knowledge” (50). Of course, Habermas is
quick to note that such self-knowledge does not include knowledges exterior to
the bourgeois public sphere; in other words, such knowledge of the self was
limited to the ‘selves’ gifted with male, European, bourgeois privilege (or the
derivation of this privilege in North America), and not their servants (which
may, by extension, include the totality of individuals who are not economically
enfranchised), spouses, or children (56). To return to literary and cultural
studies for a brief moment, it is thus possible to understand the accommodation
of the voices and literatures of such marginalised ‘selves’ as the identity
politics which characterise the contemporary condition of those academic
disciplines which have as their object of study a ‘text’, in one capacity or
another (postcolonial and feminist reclamations of ‘forgotten’, ‘lost’, or
marginal literary works within the framework of Literature, for example).
Also emerging from the Marxist critical tradition, the work of Pierre
Bourdieu further problematises the notion that a text is an autonomous entity. In
The Field of Cultural Production
(1994), Bourdieu argues that “works of art exist as symbolic objects only if
they are ... socially instituted as works of art and received by spectators
capable of knowing and recognizing them as such” (37). In other words, texts
are communication structures which are fixed in place by means of a field of social
and institutional relations, themselves consisting of a variety of
socio-economic hierarchies (40-43), in which they are produced and received and
which ultimately inform the text as an object for consumption within a
marketplace. The relation of these hierarchies Bourdieu identifies with the
term dispositions, which conjoins a
subject’s performance of a social role with the degree of status conferred on
the subject by that role (63). While these dispositions are informed by the
material conditions under which the individual operates, their interiorization into
consciousness is the ground upon which subjectivity (the will of the
individual) and objectivity (the determination of consciousness by the
structures in which an individual operates) resolve into a unified entity.
Relations between individuals come to form a system which Bourdieu names habitus (1984 6), and which comes to
describe the manner in which meaning (and thus textuality) is reproduced within
society. Bourdieu thus reads a political economy into each instance of
communication and reception in which education and social class come to inform
cultural practices (1994 13). By means of a mapped (and quantified) matrix of
relations, it is possible to quantify and predict patterns of cultural
production and reception. In this manner, Bourdieu’s work can be understood to
determine textuality as existing within a field of relationships. In other
words, texts cannot be defined as objects which produce or contain meaning
autonomous from their reception. Texts are not discreet entities, but rather
are produced in conjunction with the individuals which receive them. Extrapolating
from Bourdieu’s work, it is possible to locate ‘texts’ as instantiations of
social relations which are informed by the structures of their dissemination
and reception. Much like McLuhan and Innis, then, Bourdieu incorporates and
involves the network of reception and production into the positions taken by
both text and individual experiencing the text.
In opposition to McLuhan’s belief in media as the extension of the human
body, with the consequent ideation of the various media serving to augment the
multitude of human sense organs, in Gramophone,
Film, Typewriter (1999) Friedrich Kitler proposes a kind of technological
determinism for mediated expression in which all forms of media (and their
contingent technologies) develop along a continuum of inscription. Contemporary
electronic media incorporate the time of their inscription into themselves “as
a mixture of audio frequencies in the acoustic realm and as the movement of
single-image sequences in the optical” (3). Kittler’s position further
undermines the literary conception of the ‘text’, as well as the individual
human subject who ‘reads’ it. For Kittler, the individual human recipient of
communication process “escapes into apparatuses” as “the technological
differentiation of optics, acoustics, and writing exploded Gutenberg’s writing
monopoly” (16). And yet Kittler is dubious that the liberation of technological
recording capacities serves to liberate the human subject; indeed, humans are
incorporated along with ‘texts’ into a continuum of inscription. Once media
incorporate perceptual (i.e., optical and auditory) information as the inscribed
content of communication processes, those media functionally include the procedural
and perceptual elements of their interaction along with ‘reading’ subjects into
the inscription (‘text’) itself. Kittler illustrates this idea with reference
to the recording of music. The ‘text’ of a live musical performance is the
performance itself; this performance may also refer to a printed musical text
upon which the performance was structured. However, when manipulating a tape
recording of a musical performance, “what is manipulated is the real rather
than the symbolic” (35). In other words, this communication process
incorporates the ‘reality’ of an individual experiencing the temporal process
of the inscription of sound as itself a referent for the constitution of that
reality; meaning derived from the manipulated recorded sound has more to do
with the temporality of the original being altered in toto by the manipulation, rather than solely by the sounds
generated as a result of this manipulation.[i]
This process of inscription of optical and auditory information, of
course, causes any notion of textual meaning to be dependent on technological
processes. Kittler further complicates the conception of media as ‘texts’ by implicating
the scriptural traces of Norbert Wiener’s (1967) notion of cybernetic control,
with particular reference to the processes of feedback inherent to cybernetic
systems (Kittler 110). In the cybernetic framework provided by Wiener, it is
possible to understand the relation of the commercial marketplace to both
inscription (text) and audience as mutually informative. Ultimately, for
Kittler the social transformations contingent with electronic media render
“indistinguishable what is human and what is machine” (146), as ‘text’ and
process of interpretation fold into each other. It is consequently difficult to
conclude that notions of textuality are sufficient to accommodate Kittler’s
concerns.
The examination of textuality here embarked upon challenges the notion that
the content of communication media can be legitimately characterised as a
‘text’. Originating in literary studies
as a singular and coherent object of study, the proliferation of electric media
demonstrates the continued use of this concept to be increasingly strained, as the
content of communications processes includes the network or circuit connecting
the message, producer, and recipient.
[i]
Although it is outside the scope of this present essay, I would like to note
that in this context can be understood the ontology of musique concrète and sampling as structural forms and musical
elements.
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