the cow palace -- the dominator blues

The Cow Palace -- The Dominator Blues
guitar, bass, korg monotribe, voice, percussion, programming, samples

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Robyn Moody at Hamilton Artists Inc

Books under light surrounded by darkness, their pages opening and closing like butterflies at rest. Ideas have a flight unto themselves, and the truth of ideas can keep the darkness at bay, certainly. And yet, the exhibition Butterflies: Species at Risk at the Edge of Reason, Robyn Moody’s recent installation at Hamilton Artists, Inc., complicates this simplistic philosophy in a very interesting manner. Suspended and isolated by light, the pages of Moody’s books—chosen from among those works of human understanding which have threatened the legitimacy of religious and secular authorities—flutter like mechanical butterflies at rest, animated by a mechanical process which invokes the paradox of print literacy. An ecosystem of human ideas, with the implication of Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’.

The realization of an authentic self is the principle challenge for the subject within contemporary (post)modernity. As the critic Paul Virilio notes, contemporary mass technologies articulate a means of controlling and defining subjects by imposing a globalized sense of time and environment informed by a simultaneity which makes obsolete any local analogues. Unlike the monolithic rigidity of prior systems of control, the proliferation of information production technologies allows subjects to be interpellated as individuals, their differences rationalized as ‘personal profiles’ that stimulate modes of consumption. And yet, the Western philosophical tradition has prided itself on liberating the individual from hierarchical circumscriptions dictated by social protocols, into a realm where the modern subject is expected to realize and satisfy their own needs in society. From this humanistic foundation came the scientific tradition, in which the authority and legitimacy of ideas derived not from the place within the social hierarchy from which the idea emerged, but rather, from empirical data which was freely analysed and experimented upon by any individual who had the expertise to do so. Scientific progress proved both threatening and beneficial to the hierarchies of power, as those religious and secular aristocracies which did not adapt to new ideas found themselves rapidly displaced by the new merchant and industrial classes whose power came from exploiting the ideas of the scientific revolution.

While industrial and economic growth have brought wealth to an increasing number of people, the liberation and comfort which defines their individuality obscures the collective predictability of individual action as well as the apocalyptic consequences of collective action. Nietzsche’s übermensch are not liberated individuals whose enlightenment encourages an enlightened civilisation, but rather liberated corporations-as-people whose will is reshaping the entirety of the ‘natural’ world. Certainly, we say to ourselves to retain our frayed confidence in the aesthetics and philosophy by which humanity has defined itself as the pinnacle of reason and the irrational alike, a pinnacle which has brought onto the Earth a global technocratic industrial civilisation fuelled by consumption and which, for better or, much more likely it seems, for worse, alters the entirety of the global ecosystem in its image, the fact of design is and must be a human fact. Welcome to the era of the anthropocene. And so we come back to social conventions and the power of ideas.

Following Frederic Jameson’s reclamation of Adorno’s critique of the capacity for self-agency within mass culture, Robin Moody’s installations often re-articulate the ideas and objects of popular culture into new processes of expression which critique the dynamics of power and control as fundamental to contemporary society. In past work, Moody has incorporated gramophones and player pianos with automated control interfaces of his own design. Many of these control systems alter spectator conceptions of time and ‘access’ to the information encoded within commercial recordings. Much of Moody’s work also interrogates the potential of light to realise the manner in which spectator (audience) processes interact with and alter the piece. Indeed, this participatory aspect of Moody’s work directly invokes the control society theorised by Virilio. The audience feels liberated through their participation, while ignoring the fact that the piece controls audience behaviour by means of its demand for interaction. This interplay between conscription and agency guides Moody’s work.

Butterflies: Species at Risk at the Edge of Reason examines the ways in which ideas float in and out of popular consciousness, as well as the means by which they are controlled. For the print culture invoked in Moody’s piece, the objectification of ideas into mechanically-reproducible objects was precisely the source of their power. It was as consumable, tradable objects that the brave new ideas of the enlightenment and the scientific revolution were disseminated among a new reading public oriented around, and created by, print culture. And it was as objects that such ideas came to be censored from public consumption by religious or secular authorities whose power was suddenly under threat—not from armies of soldiers but from freshly-minted armies of readers.

The artist explores those ideas which have come to define the modern consciousness as also those which most threaten traditional notions of power, suggesting that the horror of displacement is foundational to the beauty of mechanization. And yet, Moody’s fascination with machine processes interestingly serves to occlude the readability of the texts presented. The books open, and the books close. Indeed, the use of the book enables the installation at two levels: language as a centralising agency of power which amplifies the sovereignty of individuals, and machine automation as an externalisation of human memory. The occlusion of readability in Moody’s work implies the paradox of modern reason, which hides and destroys as much as it reveals and creates. As artificial life forms, these moving books gracefully trace both human achievement and human blindness. Indeed, like real butterflies, they dare the audience to chase after them in search of adventure or quietly admire them in restful contemplation.

Butterflies: Species at Risk at the Edge of Reason opens April 10, 2014 and will be viewable until May 16, 2014.

A digital copy of this printed brochure is available here.

Butterflies (Studio shot) from Robyn Moody on Vimeo.

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The Hunger Games, or wither poverty not sports

i'm going to invent a new sports team, but instead of running around a field chasing a ball, we're going to run around capitalism chasing poverty and hunger. locally, you're going to give us $150 million for a new building so we can do our work. you're going to give us 100% of the revenues generated by the building, even when other people are working there and we're not. and no, we won't let you use the building for free for any reason. and even though you paid for the building, we get to name it as we see fit by selling naming rights to a corporate partner. and year after year, our tax subsidies will let us keep doing what we do in that expensive building you paid for

every two years, you're going to give me tens of billions of dollars for my summer and winter games projects to end hunger and poverty internationally, and you're going to watch. you're going to interrupt work at your job to watch organized debates in which the important issues of today's economy are solved, focusing on the twilight of labour. televised anti-poverty campaigns are integrated into the 'normal' shows on television, and everybody talks about how good it is to end poverty and hunger. you're going to convince your governments to spend billions to improve the effectiveness of their anti-poverty activists and encourage more children to eat, and so that we can all do better next time

then i woke up and realised that we aren't doing a thing for poverty or hunger because there isn't enough money for that, but we'll do whatever it takes to make damn sure that some dudes (and sometimes a lady) get to chase a ball around a field and we get to watch

Technology In Practice -- comprehensive exam -- 24-hour essay 3

TECHNOLOGY IN PRACTICE

Question Answered: #2 Do what are described as ‘new media’ technologies entail ‘new theory’ to account for their possible effects? Describe the extent to which ideas of the ‘posthuman’ inform this debate.

Early studies into communications systems centred upon the transmission models developed by Lasswell (1948) and Shannon and Weaver (1949), which positioned message senders and recipients in relation to a medium enabling communication. Messages, consisting of signs operating within a language of connotation, are encoded onto a medium by a sender to provoke specific ‘meaning’ when successfully decoded by the recipient. Encoding is informed not only by the intention of the sender, but also by the nature of the medium. In a manner akin to Norbert Weiner’s (1948) conception of cybernetic machines, the unsuccessful receipt of messages, manifesting as noise, is accommodated by the system in order to improve the chances of successful communication. Existing as both a linguistic (semantic) process and a material instantiation, media of transmission thus involves both the technological and the institutional within themselves. Robert Babe (2000) recognizes this duality as reflecting a distinction between the arts (cultural studies) and the social sciences (political economy) (18-19). Conceptions of media originating with Stuart Hall begin to displace these earlier models. Hall’s concern was to expand the potential for agency on the part of message recipients (audiences). Audiences were not passive vessels into which the content of communications processes was poured. Hall argues that the traditional conception of the communication process as a loop is limited due to the linear simplicity of its constituent feedback systems. Instead, he offers a model, based in Marx’s Grundrisse and in Capital, which conceives of communication as a “process in terms of a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments – production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction.” (1980 128). Hierarchies of meaning relative to what Hall calls the “dominant cultural order” may be invoked at each stage in this process, and are neither “univocal nor uncontested” (134). Thus, the process of communication between sender and audience involves a discursive relationship in which the decoding or reception of an encoded message is a spectrum of consensus which provokes “social practices if the circuit is to be both completed and effective.” Reception of a message, therefore, involves performative rules “which seek actively to enforce or pre-fer one semantic domain over another” (134). Hall’s examination of television in “Encoding/Decoding” (1980) illustrates this idea. While institutional structures inform the production of television shows, the system of audience ratings foundational to commercial television serves to position the audience within a hierarchy of relational strategies which both enable and disable the degree of agency they can express within this system.

Fundamentally, ‘new media’ challenge older conceptions of media due to the technologies which enable them. Old media can be understood to adhere to older understandings (i.e., theory) of their operation for the simple reason that such understandings reflected the technologies which enabled them. Print and broadcast media are both defined by the systems which create and distribute their ‘content’. Printing is a physical configuration of equipment for (re)production whose demands – for example, capital to purchase printers and the space necessary for their operation, the size and weight of the machinery itself – orient the medium around a hegemony of interests which can be understood as ‘sender’. Likewise, the cost of ‘content’ creation for broadcast media such as radio and television orients these media around sites of production and reception, whose “crucial ratio between them” will foster, according to Richard Dienst, “intense competition between interests, sometimes of outright class struggle” (1994 7). The printing (or broadcasting) house can be controlled, manipulated, and censored by means of the discretion and the interaction of these interests. The technical nature of these media (specifically, the exact manner in which electromagnetic frequency modulation is exploited to produce a signal which may be received) further substantiates the transmission model for communications media. New media, on the other hand, can be seen to fundamentally alter the manner in which sites of (re)production come to alter and inform the significations produced through communication (i.e., the ‘meaning’ of the message). Social media – as well as redeployments of ‘old’ media such as television and film – as enabled by digital mobile telephony signals a relocation of the printing house, as it were, into the site of media reception. The relocation alters the ontology of any notion of subjectivity, itself admittedly undermined by post-structural theories which do not figure ‘subjects’ to be either unified or coherent entities.

Video and computer games signal the most obvious need to develop the critical tradition in a manner not fully anticipated by older models of communication theory. Most importantly, the relationship between game designers, players, and games does not fully accord with models centred upon sender, receiver, and medium. Despite this fact, it is possible to trace a continuation of the distinction in the study of media into humanistic and empirical methodological approaches in contemporary criticism of videogames. The ontology of digital gaming centres on a player’s performance of a role as represented by their screen avatar (Waggoner 2009), regardless of whether or not this performance is explicitly rendered into a narrative (Galloway 2006, Aarseth 1997), within behavioural rules imposed by the game designers (Barr et al 2007). This process of player anticipation of the roles expected with the game is described as ritualistic by Gazzard and Peacock (2011) and others (Harviainen 2012, Harviainen & Lieberoth 2012). Depending on the nature of a particular game, this role can be as simple as staying “alive” or performing some other task abstracting the will of the player into the procedural confines of the game mechanics, or it can involve participating within a broad fictional narrative. In this latter instance, a good game can be defined as one in which both the game mechanics and the story are loved more or less equally. This relationship is inherent to every game, whether the avatar signifies an individual agent (a character or vehicle) or a function or process wherein the avatar is the game interface itself (strategy, puzzle games). As a hybrid between the interface for interaction with the medium and the principle site for the generation of player affect, the avatar is the means for instrumentalising the player’s will at the same time as it is itself often an object for the player’s affections (Wolfendale 2007). Simultaneously illusion, instrument, and interface, the avatar conflates the various conceptions of representation in digital media as defined by Lev Manovich (2001). It is in the capacity of information to be figured as an embodied virtuality that videogames and other ‘new media’ can be rationalized. Videogames are thus ultimately defined by player agency, which is itself determined by the spectrum of possible player activities allowed by the set of rules governing the activities made possible by a game world and the procedural interactions thus allowed and provoked. Indeed, the very nature of videogames as an interactive, computationally-bound medium ensures that players contribute to the significations generated by a game. However, this agency must be understood with the proper perspective. While the capacity for agency differs between games as player activity is restricted relative to the game rules, the affect which players feel toward the game world reflects their capacity to inflict their will upon it in a manner contingent with the procedural logic established by the game’s fiction and understood within the technological limitations which enable a game. Arguably, the ‘message’ of a game play event is not the ‘meaning’ of the event, but rather the affect produced in and among players.

In this capacity, it is easy for critics schooled in the close reading strategies typical of ‘old media’ to be misled by the superficial content depicted in videogames. ‘Violent’ videogames such as the Grand Theft Auto and Doom franchises, for example, are often condemned for the nature of the actions available to players.[i] While such criticism often implicates ‘violent’ games in the social problems they depict by desensitising audiences to actions contingent with those problems, this line of thinking ignores what Manovich describes as the variable, iterative, and transcodable nature of digital media (2001 27). The process of transcoding is illustrated by the adaptation of the shooting/killing mechanic from ‘violent’ videogames into other functions. Such games use the affect produced by game mechanics commonly associated with ‘violence’ – firing a weapon at an enemy in order to remove it from play – to provoke different significations relative to the affective relationship. For example, the Christian game Catechumen (2000) utilizes game mechanics consistent with the ‘first-person shooter’ genre, but alters the representational result of firing a gun from ‘killing an enemy’ to ‘saving a soul’. Similar substitutions manifest in Team Fortress 2 (2007) which, in certain instances, replaces all representations of violence with ‘cute’ versions (instead of blood and gore, exploding bodies are full of candy and ballons, for example), as well as Portal (2007), in which the player’s ‘gun’ transubstantiates (re-embodies) the player him- or herself into the role of the bullet in order not to ‘witness’ killing, as it were, but rather to solve problems involving spatial geometry and Newtonian physics, and the ‘dubstep gun’ in Saints Row IV (2013),which causes enemies to dance uncontrollably in time with music positioned as simultaneously diegetic and non-diegetic. In each instance, the affect produced by player activity is substantively the same despite antithetical representational differences between games. Communication theories which model ‘messages’ sent and received do not properly account for these differences.

Ian Bogost forwards a model in which video games can be rationalized in terms of the forms of the procedural rhetoric which they present to players. In Unit Operations (2006) and Persuasive Games (2007), Bogost presents a model for understanding videogames which merges the material and the symbolic. Grounding his thought in the mathematical philosophy of Alain Badiou, Bogost figures ‘the message’ of digital media to consist of a fundamental multiplicity centred upon processes of quantification and calculation. Unlike traditional communication models, this conception seeks to understand digital interactive media not in terms of broad systemic relationships but rather by means of the small procedural interventions which, viewed as an aggregate and in relation to each other, come to govern larger systems. Rather than being a relatively stable object whose meaning is causally informed by the recipient’s relation to the sender, digital media such as videogames operationalize this relationship in a dynamic manner. Audiences may respond in a capacity fully expected and thus invoked by the designer – ostensibly signalling the successful uptake of a message. However, as Michael Nitsche (2008) and Jesper Juul (2005) have elaborated, players may engage in actions not at all anticipated by game designers. Indeed, the very nature of digital media as interactive and iterative renders them as “systems open for transgressive, emergent gameplay” (Nitsche 28).The multiplicity of possible responses to a given digital ‘text’ suggests to Bogost that absolute meanings cannot be encoded into digital communication processes in the manner suggested by earlier communication models. Instead of invoking encoded meanings, “procedural rhetoric is particularly devoted to representing, communicating, or persuading the player toward a particular biased point of view” (Bogost, Persuasive Games 135) within the framework of a spectrum of possible player responses, the meaning of each response being conditioned by the relation of that response to the overall pattern of responses enabled by a particular operation.

Thus, it might seem natural to view the programming code produced by videogame designers as a quite literal manifestation of Hall’s communications model: a sender encoding a message which is received in a multitude of ways by an audience negotiating a hierarchy of dominant meanings. However, this interpretation does not allow for the reciprocal creation of videogame ‘messages’ among game producers and players. Many games, either formally or not, allow players to modify and create game elements which can, in turn, be objects for consumption by other players or cooption by the game’s ‘official’ designers. This activity can effect changes at both the ‘textual’ level (an object produced in a game may alter symbolic relations structured in/by the game) and the meta-textual level  in which the player operates (an object produced in a game can be sold for material value, i.e., money, in the ‘real’ world). Also, there are numerous instances where audience ‘misreadings’ – player activity which transgresses the manifest intention of game rules or willfully creates new gameplay activities unintended by game designers – have been subsequently incorporated as ‘official’ elements of the game. Espen Aarseth (2003), for example, outlines the manner in which the “rocket jump” – using the negative damage feedback produced by an exploding weapon to positively assist player mobility and enable access to areas within the game otherwise unavailable to players – was adopted by game designers as an ‘official’ characteristic of the ‘first-person shooter’ game genre after emerging from unanticipated player activity. Mia Consalvo (2007) examines the manner in which instances of purposefully-transgressive player activity indicate patterns of agency within a virtual space of value generation which she describes as “gaming capital” (4). In this capacity, cheating serves to reorient the relationships between games, game designers, and players. An incident often cited (Aarseth 2007) in this respect occurred when a programming bug in the multiplayer online game Ultima Online resulted in a player being able to murder the ruler of the game’s fictional world, a character who was controlled by the game’s principle designer and who served as an interface mechanic by which players were motivated toward specific goals and forms of gameplay; rather than punish the player for transgressing the established rules, the game designer chose to integrate this event into the game itself. Furthermore, some games are structurally enabled by player participation, or even the polyvalent interactions among numerous players in relation to each other, and do not present signification, as such, as distinct from this activity. As Castronova (2005) notes in relation to the economic effects of virtual economies, procedural rules highlighting the player generation of activity are especially prevalent in online games which involve thousands of players simultaneously. Not only do such games allow for player-generated sources of value generation, but the economies which have emerged in parallel with such games can be seen to structure and inform both gameplay and games themselves. Finally, game designers modify their output relative to feedback in terms not only of commercial market forces and players expressing their opinions, but also through the quantification of game play through the capturing of player activity from within the game itself, data which Normoyle et al (2012) refer to as player metrics. Indeed, despite the liberatory potential inherent to interactivity, videogames – and digital media, more broadly – enable a level of user surveillance only dreamed of by the hegemonic interests, such as television advertisers, foundational to the production of ‘old media’. This capacity for surveillance, coterminous with the processes of digital mediation, betrays the altered subjectivities which ‘new media’ present in challenge to theories of communication which predate their emergence.    

A degree of accord can be seen to exist between the medium of videogames, and ‘new media’ more generally, and conceptions of post- or transhumanism. Arguing in How We Became Posthuman (1999) that “the erasure of embodiment is a feature common to both the liberal humanist subject and the cybernetic posthuman” (4), Katherine Hayles postulates that computer simulation best instantiates the “embodied virtuality” which she presents in contradiction to the de-materialization of information fundamental to transmission theories of communication. Grounding her thought in Friedrich Kittler’s notion that “technologies of inscription are media when they are perceived as mediating” (26) and Donna Haraway’s conception of informatics as “technologies of information as well as the biological, social, linguistic, and cultural changes that initiate, accompany, and complicate their development” (29), Hayles adheres to the technological determinism of transmission theories while rejecting their linear and rigid structure. She presents a McLuhanesque argument in which the dematerialization of information – indeed, of all matter into information – is a partial illusion invoked by “an epistemological shift toward pattern/randomness and away from presence/absence”. The illusory nature of such processes of dematerialization obscures the impossibility of material reconstruction from disembodied information and minimizes the dynamic relationship between agents within a communication process. In other words, theories of communication which dematerialize information deploy incomplete models of the totality of relations between entities positioned within and acting upon an event of communication. This notion of pattern and randomness, echoing theories from quantum physics concerning the fields of probability which determine the material existence of the world, “fundamentally alter[s] the relation of signified to signifier” (30). Unlike the ‘message’ of the transmission model, informatics construct the signifier as a multitude, a “chain of markers bound together by the arbitrary relations specified by the relevant codes” in which “[a] signifier on one level becomes a signified on the next-higher level” (31). Access to the codes of signification, which Hayles describes as “pattern recognition” (39) whose literacy is enabled by “credentialing practices” (40; see also Stiegler 130), conditions and is conditioned by the technologies constituting the media environment. The development and interplay of these technologies mutually structures all entities within what Kittler’s (extrapolating from McLuhan) terminology could be described as a “media ecology”, including those individuals or agents which participate in the creation and consumption of media.

Hayles’s conception resonates with other invocations of posthuman subjectivity. By positioning the human subject in a determinate relation to the technological means by which phenomena exterior to unassisted perception are brought forth (in a Heideggerian manner) into human understanding, Don Ihde (2002) expands the realm of visuality to include all phenomenological events mediated by technological processes (43). In a manner similar to the interactive user participation foundational to ‘new media’ such as software and videogames, Ihde’s model for mediation inserts the observer into the syntax of the observed (60). Invoking Bruno Latour’s examination of instrumental subjectivity as stated in “On Technical Mediation” (1994), Ihde thus involves the interplay between technological determination and human agency in terms of a third space generated by the cohabitation of the two agencies (2002 93-95). This third space can be further described by Haraway’s conception of cyborgs as “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (1991 149). Like Ihde and Latour, Haraway seeks to avoid understanding identities in essentialist terms. Identity can be understood, in a sense, as itself a cyborg hybridising agency and determination by exterior forces (161ff). ‘New media’ centred upon computational procedures also invoke an examination of the posthuman subject inaugurated by McLuhan’s (1994) conception of the media functioning as extensions of the human nervous system. Stiegler (2009) argues that such processes of exteriorization “constitute the industrialization of memory at all of its levels” (99). This externalized memory functions in thrall to developments related to speed. By eliminating delays and inefficiencies, the boundaries which interface processes of technological mediation from that which is mediated are dissolved as information becomes “inseparable from its organization” (107). Valuation of information in this context is informed by systems of access, which in turn constitute as subject those individuals or agents which create a ‘circuit of access’ with the information in question.

Paul Virilio’s (2000, 1997, 1989) notion of the contraction of the modern subject into patterns of communication quantised and defined by a society which increasingly internalises and normalises military functions traces the manner in which quantification serves as the vehicle for the realization and production of truth. While Virilio’s reliance on phenomenology disavows for him the authenticity of virtual worlds, other scholars (Hansen 2006, Fors & Jakobsson 2002, Murray & Sixsmith 1999) have successfully adapted phenomenological methodology to the study of virtual worlds and ‘new media’. Numbers are the principle tools by which subjects come to understand and love their own bodies and those of others. Bodies are measured and rationalised in order to improve weaknesses and maximise strengths, and to define subjects within a social and political hierarchy. For Virilio, quantification is a means of visibility which reveals the truth of an object or event to be nothing more than the tautological result of a logistical apparatus (the processes and technologies of rational humanism) which instrumentalises such information into functions allowing possession and control. Predictions about the future can then be made based on a linear extension from these numerically-constituted entities, a process which Virilio equates to a gun sight targeting the destruction of an enemy in the future (1989; see also Crogan 2008, 158-9). In this capacity, processes of quantification and calculation can be understood to extend a haptic character to vision and visibility. Calculation grants visibility to the invisible as unknown data – future events, probable outcomes, ‘hidden’ truths – is extrapolated from what is known for the purposes of administration and control. This conception of visibility originating as a military technology enabled by calculation has direct parallel with digital gaming, which often fetishises and quantifies representations of violence and often deploys military conquest as a gameplay mechanic. For Virilio, synthetic optics enabled by computerization and calculation permit “the relative fusion/confusion of the factual (or operational, if you prefer) and the virtual” signaled by “the ascendancy of the ‘reality effect’ over a reality principle already largely contested elsewhere” (1994 60).

As a conclusion to this present brief examination, the example of computer role-playing games (CRPGs) will serve to tersely illustrate the manifest synergy between human and interface for the creation and reception of media which have come to define the ‘posthuman’ as described above. CRGPs require the player to process and manage a significant amount of information, as the representation of nearly everything in the game – objects, the abilities and descriptive statistics of non-player characters and enemies, behavioural patterns – is quantified not only to allow the computer to execute game rules, but for that numerical representation to be presented to players who interpret this information to “numerically optimise” their avatar’s progression through whatever goals the game presents to the player. Extending Jenkins and Fuller’s (1995) suggestion that game avatars function akin to cursors in conventional computer interfaces, merging the will of the participatory user with the disembodiment of materiality into its virtual form as information, numerical representation can be understood as not only embodying the virtualized agents which it replaces but as mirroring the development of subjectivity within technological society. The conception of an embodied camera/interface, described as an apparatus by Morris (2002) and defined largely in terms of its virtuality rather than by the hardware components which allow player interaction (Jørgensen 2012), is best exemplified by games which use a first-person perspective and thus combine control of the representational output presented by the system with the means of interaction in a manner embodying an otherwise absent avatar. In this regard, the game interface of CRPGs is itself a self-referential component of play, acting somewhat like Manovich’s embodied virtual cameras in digital games, in which “cinematic perception functions as the subject [of games] in its own right” (2001, 85) by placing viewing and perspective functions under the player’s control. Avatars in CRPGs embody the player in a dual manner: visually onscreen, and through a numerical matrix which operates in a manner made explicit to the player and enframes in procedural terms the reified instantiation of the will of the player into the fabric of the medium in both material and immaterial terms. This conception of virtual embodiment, readily applicable to the theories of ‘new media’ informed by the posthuman subjectivities as outlined above, ably illustrates the manner in which the technologies which enable ‘new media’ serve to challenge traditional conceptions of communication processes.

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Weiner, Norbert. Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
     Cambridge, USA: The MIT Press, 1948.

Wolfendale, Jessica. “My Avatar, my self: Virtual harm and attachment”. Ethics and Information
     Technology 9 (2007): 111-119.

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[i] See, for example, Cassie Rodenberg, “Grant Theft Auto V makes it cool to pick up – even kill – prostitutes” published 27 December, 2013 in The Guardian.

Cinema, Television, and New Media -- comprehensive exam -- 24-hour essay 2

CINEMA, TELEVISION, AND NEW MEDIA
Question answered: #2. Are the essential distinctions (if they indeed exist) between media eroded by recent transformations in production and exhibition practice, and do specific media respond to these transformations in particular ways?

The twenty-first century has witnessed profound developments in the production and consumption of media. As Marshall McLuhan (1994), Harold Innis (1951), and Friedrich Kittler (1999) argue, the most profound transformation has been the introduction and development of electrical technologies to communications practices. With electricity came the possibility to reproduce perceptual experiences in order to enable such experiences as new media, distinct from the media associated with the reproduction of speech in written language. The most obvious examples in this regard involve the recording and distribution of sound and motion images. The development of technologies related to these perceptual activities quickly crystallized into media relative to fundamental technological differences; for example, radio and consumer recording formats distributed recorded sound (music, conversation, audio dramas), while film and television distributed recorded motion images along with accompanying sound (films, television shows). A further technological distinction centred upon speed and ease of accessibility can be made between distribution systems and consumption practices relative to such recordings. While this paper will illustrate a few arguments in favour of such essentialist determinations for the differences between media, ultimately a more flexible understanding of the ontology of media will be presented. Indeed, as this paper will demonstrate, it is computer technologies – and specifically home computer technologies – which signal the true transformation in media (and, by extension, mediation), largely due to the new forms of media which have emerged along with the technology.

Cinema demonstrates how definitions of media can be grounded in both essentialist and non-essentialist claims. Critical activity has focused on the manner in which the materiality of film production and reception practices defines the medium. Jean-Louis Baudry, for example, outlines an “apparatus” in which the production and reception of film takes place: the photographic process of inscription onto film by means of lenses and photochemistry, the optical projection of film onto a white screen, the spectator in the cinema (1986 288). For Baudry, grounded as he is in historical materialism, such an apparatus is an ideological one at each stage of production and reception. Consequently, any change in the orientation or constitution of this apparatus will alter the ideological effects which can be determined as a result. Christian Metz (1982) argues that the technological configuration of cinema is analogous to the processes of the human unconscious. Metz’s connection of psychoanalysis to a technological apparatus condemns his theory to obsolescence as the technologies which form that apparatus develop and new ones are introduced while old ones are subtracted (Manovich 294), as well as by developments in psychoanalytic theory which may subvert or emphasise the Freudian theoretical apparatus foundational to Metz’s work. The work of other scholars such as Laura Mulvey (1975) and Žižek (2004), who have deployed psychoanalytic readings to define cinema in less essentialist terms, has proven more adaptive to technological change. By means of a reading of Bergson’s conception of durée, and a reflexive negation of psychoanalytic theory (fully expressed in Anti-Oedipus), Deleuze (1989) argues that the gap between static images which enables the illusion of motion for cinema to occur temporalises the spectator, interpellating them into subjectivity by means of an affective involvement with the image (47), and anticipates montage, itself commonly understood (Metz 1985; Bordwell 1986; Elsaesser 2012) to be the grammar of cinema. Scholars such as Schatz (1989) and Elsaesser have extended the definition of this apparatus to include the hegemonic forces at play within the market. Both scholars define Hollywood as the articulation of a material and symbolic hegemony positioned to institutionalise and standardise its narrative forms, production processes, and distribution and consumption practices. Elsaesser argues that by means of their dominant position in the production and consumption of film, Hollywood can be seen to determine and define the medium of film as a whole into an experience between particular types of films and particular types of spectators, going so far as to state that the function of narrative in Hollywood films “lay in the resources and organizational assets which could be accumulated around it” (2012 152) and order audiences accordingly. These institutionalised forms actively displace certain forms and definitions for the medium while enabling others. As Bordwell, Doane (1989), and Adorno (1991) argue, film has come to be defined as a medium primarily by the market forces which affect its production, distribution, and consumption. Indeed, the same forces which integrate media companies into multinational conglomerates force the various media created and distributed by the newly integrated subsidiaries to interact, cross-pollinate, and subsume each other (Mattelart 2000). Indeed, Grossberg (1992) argues that popular culture, as the result of such processes of media hegemony, is a significant agent in the dilution of the boundaries between media.

Viewed as a whole, then, many of these definitions for cinema do not maintain their coherence in the wake of new technologies for the production and reception of film. One wonders, for example, how Deleuze’s elevation of the ‘ontological’ gap at the heart of the cinematic process if cameras recorded at much higher speeds than the twenty-four frames per second adopted as the standard for cinema by the 1920s. If Hollywood can be seen to adapt and incorporate elements of the avant garde and international and marginalised cinemas — which may themselves be empowered by being influenced by Hollywood – then what does it mean to define a medium around the dominant forces within it? In a similar manner, notions of spectatorship dependent on the public exhibition of films have been challenged by the private consumption of cinema by means of television and home video.

Indeed, as a medium for the reception of broadcasting as well as the device enabling other media such as home video and videogames, television considerably problematises essentialist boundaries between media.  Arguing in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1990) that the serial and segmented nature of television programming is shaped to a considerable extent by television’s existence as a commercial entity, Raymond Williams identifies the concept of “flow” to define the medium (86). It is precisely this ephemeral and amorphous conception of television which has allowed the medium to adapt to technological change and the development of competing media such as film and the internet. Television, according to Williams, has the “technological capacity to absorb and circulate every kind of cultural energy” (Dienst 13). Furthermore, broadcast media such as television and radio, unlike other media, exist within what may be described as the perpetual present of their exhibition. While there is no technological reason for any broadcast medium to broadcast perpetually (twenty-four hours per day), an extension of Innis’s (1951) notion of the space bias of ephemeral media such as radio and television may explain the reasons behind this perpetual present, as the ease by which broadcast signals are ‘transported’ into the homes of consumers, as well as the fact that such media are consumed for ‘free’ in exchange for advertising (Browne 175), destines broadcast media to an existence of continuity. Furthermore, while film, ostensibly the closest analogue to television, can be understood as having incorporated aspects of theatrical and musical performance, painting, photography, dance, and literature, Williams argues that television can be understood as having further incorporated aspects of radio, journalism, advertising, and live spectatorship (1990 44ff). Television incorporates the many discreet aspects of itself – advertisements, announcements, news, “introductory and interstitial materials” – into what Nick Browne (1984) describes as a “supertext” whose essence is “one of flow, banality, distraction, and transience” (176), as spectators order their own viewing experience among a multiplicity of constitutive elements.

It is this multiplicity of function and form which differentiates broadcast media from non-broadcast media. According to Williams, unlike a book, a play, a song, or even a film, which constitute discreet objects and experiences, in broadcast media “the real programme that is offered is a sequence or set of alternative sequences” (1990 87). It should not then be surprising that as new technologies related to the distribution of television have developed, the notion of flow as foundational to television has been challenged. William Uricchio (2004) argues that “the present day’s convergent technologies, economies, and textual networks have ... subverted ... the logics of television [and] have also transformed the medium’s content and cultural place” (165). If, as Lynn Spigel suggests in Make Room for TV (1992), the introduction of television served to order spaces within the household and define television spectatorship along lines contingent with the consumption of consumer products, then it is possible to extend this interpretation to contemporary changes in forms and patterns of television spectatorship as contingent with changes to the home inaugurated by home computer technologies which are in the process of subsuming television into the internet. Disrupted first by technologies of home video recording and storage, the capacity for broadcasting to order the reception practices of spectators has been undermined by the digital distribution of television. Home video, on-demand and time-shifted video services, and internet streaming (as well as ‘illegal’ downloading) of television programming has further altered spectator relations to the television “supertext”. A recent example of a television show broadcast under two different configurations of television serves to illustrate this point. The British show House of Cards, broadcast as a mini-series in 1990, used a ‘cliff-hanger’ ending centred upon the murder of a prominent character by the show’s protagonist. The narrative significance of dramatic events such as this often provoked their deployment as ‘cliff-hangers’ at the end of television shows or seasons to provoke viewer anticipation of the next episode and encourage them to schedule future instances of viewership.[i] For the 2013 American remake, distributed (‘broadcast’) as an entire season without delay between episodes on the digital streaming subscription service Netflix, a similarly dramatic killing by the show’s protagonist is located in the middle of the first episode of the season, indicating that the event is structured in a manner suggesting the ‘binge watching’ habits typical of Netflix (and, by extension, digital streaming and home video) viewers.

Spigel argues that television served to “reassemble the splintered lives of families [and] .... reinforce the new suburban family unit” (1992 39) centred upon the new postwar consumer society. Ultimately, such changes were inaugurated by technologies of mobility and communication which extended ideations of inclusion and privacy from the home to a virtual space bounded by the reach of transportation and communications technology, which in turn orders the real space in which patterns of mobility and communication occur. Williams subsumes the social relations inaugurated by such technologies and living conditions under the concept of mobile privatisation, the social product of which is “[b]roadcasting in its applied form” (1990 20). Spigel thus traces the incorporation of the machine elements of industrial activity (dishwashers, sewing machines, etc.) into the home as contingent with “the spatial condensation of work and viewing” (1992 89), while Anna McCarthy (2001) outlines the incorporation of television into public spaces such as workplaces, transportation hubs, and shopping centres. By means of the surveillance and production of consumer activity, broadcast media such as television realise what Mark Andrejevic (2002) names “consumer labor” (230). Jhally and Livant (1986, quoted in Andrejevic) characterise the value exchange between viewers who watch ‘free’ programs and advertisers who pay for television programming as the “work of watching” (235). Such labor relations form the initial gesture of spectatorial participation which, as outlined below, will come to define the ontology of media.

As suggested by Spigel’s illustration of the extent to which daytime programming was informed by the daily chores performed by the women who were the primary audience, television was itself ordered by spectators as much as it ordered their patterns of viewership and stimulated the consumption of consumer goods. In other words, as television presented and ordered itself as a consumer product, audiences responded by altering television to meet their needs as consumers. As Matt Carlson (2006) illustrates, consumer products related to the consumption of television have altered not only patterns of viewership, but also the content of television programs. In this capacity, television can be seen to order time as well as space. First, home video recording freed television audiences from the broadcast schedule and, by means of the archival nature of video cassettes, allowed television programming to be reified as an object of secondary relation to television as a broadcast medium. The digitisation of television broadcasting as well as the development of digital video recorders capable of time-shifting and altering programming nearly in real-time has further transformed viewer interactions with television from a process of scheduling (viewers watching shows at specific times not under their control) to one of surveillance. For Carlson, surveillance indicates the manner in which digital broadcast technologies allow broadcasters to precisely monitor viewer activity and accordingly alter the products offered for viewing (102-103). In this capacity, it is possible to extend conceptions of ‘liveness’ related to the television “supertext” to the real-time surveillance of the audience itself. Arguably, the surveillance of digital television media merely extends to television producers the feedback processes between audience and performer which informed not only live studio television but also the live forms of performance (theatre, Vaudeville) which provided the content for television in its earliest years (Williams 64-65).

In a somewhat abstract manner, it is possible to locate ‘liveness’ as both reifying and enabling the structures of life described by mobile privatisation. In addition to Williams, other critics have also focused upon television’s ‘liveness’ as a distinguishing element of the medium. Jerome Bourdon (2000) argues that while ‘liveness’ was inherent to television before the advent of video storage technologies, live broadcasting has since been institutionalised as a means of affirming the hegemonic position of television broadcasters by providing a closure of space and time between event and spectator (534) and as a means to confer a degree of “‘authenticity’ and ‘truth’” (533) to the programs being broadcasted. Indeed, ‘liveness’, which incorporates the viewer into media exhibition, can be understood as the precursor to spectator participation. As Bourdon notes, “liveness should be interpreted as a development within media history as a whole” (551). He likens viewers switching to the news from other programs – multitasking between shows and other media – as a new form of liveness (553). Indeed, ultimately the ostensibly minimal amount of spectator participation demonstrated by television viewers using their remote control to order the sequence of television programming belongs on a continuum of interactivity and media control which leads to computational technologies which demand ‘spectatorial’ participation. In this context, Richard Dienst (1994) notes that the apparatus of television as constructed by Williams ignores “the possibility that the very notions of transmission and reception ... belong to the apparatus itself” (16). Accordingly, Williams’s conception of ‘flow’ in Television, whose publication predates the development of home video and home computer technologies, does not account for the capacity for audiences to construct and modify the programs they are watching. Notably, the capacity for commercial television to structure the ideological responses of viewers is undermined by the ability of viewers to ignore or remove advertising from shows and structure patterns of viewing around their personal schedules due to home recording and digital distribution, and ultimately use consumer digital video technologies to produce their own televisual content and distribute it on the internet. Indeed, the digitization of media undermines the ‘integrity of the medium’ not only for television and for television studies, but also for all media which undergo processes of digitization.

In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999), Friedrich Kittler notes that the digitization of optical, acoustic, and writing media allows their “distinct data flows” to be reunited (170), and concludes his examination by identifying the computer as the logical conflagration of other media technologies and real-time computation, in the guise of “machine subjects”, as the contemporary terminus of the development of technologies of inscription (259). He rather boldly states his lack of respect for the distinction between media, noting that the traditional differentiations of media based on recording technology and human perceptual apparatus (seeing and hearing, for example) are fundamentally undermined by electric communications and recording technology. With the advent of digitisation, the variety of information forms “are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface” (1). Indeed, it is by means of interface that consumers come to understand and differentiate digital media. Under the aegis of digitization, digital video, for example, is not an experience of ‘television’ or ‘cinema’; rather, it is enabled by the interface which exhibits it. The use of computers to consume audio, visual, and textual materials indicates that the screen-as-interface is more informative to understanding a mediated process than are traditional conceptions of media distinction grounded in differences in perceptual or recording technology. Television programming is easily adapted to distribution and ‘exhibition’ on the internet due to the fact that, in reductive terms, high-resolution computer screens make great high-resolution digital televisions.

More importantly than simply providing another platform for the distribution and consumption of audio-visual material incorporated from other media distribution apparatuses, home computer technologies signal the extent to which spectator participation has been incorporated into systems of media production and consumption. As Lev Manovich (2001) argues, the “meta-medium of the digital computer” (6) instantiates new media not dependent on perceptual or aesthetic characteristics but rather as “subject to algorithmic manipulation” (27). The algorithmic nature of digital media has two effects, the first of which serves to explain the transformational nature of digitisation. Manovich argues that digital media are modular, variable, and iterative, and in this capacity recent transformations in television broadcasting can be rationalised. The second effect of digital media is more philosophical in nature. In addition to signalling the increasing involvement of audiences into the ‘text’ of media on account of developments in the technologies of broadcasting, the above examination of television demonstrates McLuhan’s principle that all media contain within them previous forms of media. Of course, the incorporation of one medium within another is not a one-directional process of ‘new’ media incorporating ‘old’ media, as demonstrated by the incorporation of photography into newsprint. Rather, the response of cinema and television to the advent of computing technologies illustrates that media often deploy whichever other popular or useful media can be reasonably incorporated into them. From such a position, it is possible to extrapolate from Rick Altman’s suggestion regarding film that “[g]enres must be understood discursively” (1999 121) and conclude that media themselves function similarly as discursive practices.

One vector of such a discursive practice is indicated by the notable sense of determination present in McLuhan’s thought. The incorporation of media into new forms enabled by the development of technology implies what Walter Benjamin (1968) describes within history as the “weak Messianic power” (254) in which the past involves the present. Indeed, it is thus possible to read McLuhan’s belief that media subsume within them previous forms of media through a Heideggerian lens, as such a process describes what for Heidegger was the essence of all technology to gather into itself all forms of potential energies as “standing-reserve” (1977 24). In such terms, the destining of all media is toward a totalising sense perception and recording which reveals all possible information to the user. In order to fully understand the implications of computerisation on the media examined in this essay, we must turn to Dienst’s rather Platonic suggestion that “all actually existing television systems are in some sense a failed totalization of an ideal visuality” (1994 11). If the contemporary configuration of television has incorporated (or is being incorporated into) forms of digital content and distribution (i.e., the internet), then it is possible to position television, as Meyrowitz (1995) does, as a “widening of sensory experience” (40-41). Accordingly, contemporary forms of television incorporate aspects of visuality and ‘liveness’ from other media: news programming which, like the internet, structures textual information as visual elements; social media (message boards, Facebook, Twitter) interaction between viewers and show producers or fictional characters of dramatic programs, such as The Hills and General Hospital; and webcasts and podcasts which supplement or augment the broadcasting of shows. However, the digitization of media has had a more profound transformative effect on media than is represented by the increasing interaction between audiences and media content. It is possible to further extend Dienst’s notion of “ideal visuality” by means of Paul Virilio’s equation of processes and technologies of visibility with calculation, as elaborated in War and Cinema (1989) and The Information Bomb (2000). Arguing that technologies of visibility emerged as tools for war and the colonial organization of space, Virilio describes modes of visibility aided by computation as active optics (2000 14). Such optics exponentially increase the capacity for individuals to generate and process information, with the consequence that individuals will experience “a speed change in the order of time as it is lived” (1989 45), and thus “leave intact neither the old aesthetics ... nor the ethics” which came to define traditional media and the societies in which they circulate (2000 121).

As outlined above, the polyvalent nature of digital media, as algorithmic processes, fulfils the Heideggerian ‘gathering’ of the possibilities for vision into a singular technical apparatus enabling the successful realisation of “ideal visuality”. Home computer technologies involve media in a computational process which interpellates spectators as users. While videogames, software, and the internet represent the most obvious insertion of interaction and participation as an essential component defining the medium, these forms of media are merely the most contemporary articulations of long-extant trends in media. Consequently, it is difficult to determine contemporary communications media with the essentialist formulations which often served to inaugurate the critical apparatuses which arose in response to them.

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[i] It should be here noted that the ‘cliff-hanger’ serves a slightly modified purpose for the British House of Cards. By using such a narrative device at the end of a four-episode mini-series which was not intended for development into a broadcast series, the cliff-hanger ending serves (much like its use as a genre convention in horror films) to confer a mark of reality to the show by invoking in viewers a projection of the character from the temporality of the show ‘offscreen’ into the imagined temporal space ‘after’ the show ends.  

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     Video 11.1 (1989): 23-33.

Elsaesser, Thomas. The Persistence of Hollywood. New York: Routledge 2012.

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Media and Materiality -- comprehensive examination -- 24-hour essay #1

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.

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[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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