(N.B. I am treating this blog post chiefly as an opportunity to think aloud through this week’s readings, and plan on completely exploiting the colloquialism privileged by the format, so bear with me here if I sound meandering or dumb.)
The texts at hand — or at least the three more recent pieces of scholarship — seem to be grappling with variations on two linked dilemmas: (i.) the exact ontological nature of media and (ii.) the role of humans in relation to it. It could be argued that this is a redundancy. The three authors here share the assumption that, broadly speaking, media is humanity: that it is the interstitial conduit of socialization, and that accordingly it exists and evolves dialectically with its human participants/constituents. [302-4] (To underscore the universality of this conception, Peters is quick to note in his introduction that the limited vision of media as mere “message-bearing institutions” — television, the internet, et al. — is “relatively recent in intellectual history.” [2])
The more appropriate phrasing of these joined dilemmas might be, then: What does media — and thus our relation to it — look like, if we are to give form to a concept, and how should it be thought about? Though they differ in how they reach this conclusion, Hansen, Peters, and Mitchell broadly concur that the cold, material conception of media as a static system alone — one in which humans are exterior actors clinically engaging technical tools — is grossly insufficient if not altogether wrong. Media, Mitchell writes, is “not just a set of materials” but “a complex social institution that contains individuals within it.” (213) The individuals in question are as crucial a component as any. This is not to say that the authors disparage consideration of material. Hansen, for instance, claims that any study of media that neglects its technical conditions fails to note, as Mitchell does, that “mental life… embodied in the whole range of material media,” that “our relationship to media is one of mutual and reciprocal constitution.” In — in other words, that media emulates the systems in we think, and vice-versa. Media are “our infrastructures of being, the habits and materials through which we act and are.” (Peters, 15) The emphasis at the end of the quote is mine, because I think it is the operative point. As Hansen notes, elegantly in an otherwise cumbersome argument: “All media mediates is life.” (301)
In visualizing this blueprint, I found myself thinking of Laurence Tribe. Before he was one of the more hysterical celebrities within the neoliberal anti-Trump #resistance, Tribe was a celebrated constitutional theorist, and some of his finest thinking appears in his 1989 Harvard Law Review essay, “The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn From Modern Physics.” In it, he invites us to conceptually reimagine the constitution as a physical realm whose boundaries are molded and reshaped by the forces of legal decisions — an event that has physical ramifications for not only the adjacent boundaries but for the space within them and the actors refurbishing their shape. “Each legal decision restructures the law itself, as well as the social setting in which law operates, because, like all human activity, the law is inevitably embroiled in the dialectical process whereby society is constantly recreating itself.” (8) This, I think, is the dialectical framework by which the authors at hand want us to consider media. Hansen illustrates it nicely in his description of the Son-O-House; as he writes, “no matter how cognitively sophisticated these technologies [of media] become, they operate only through their couplings with the human,” describing a “positive feedback system that creates two kinds of emergence: of new bodily movements and of new frequency inferences.” (301-304).
The theme unifying the three pieces of scholarship might be optimism. (Mitchell, Hansen, and Peters unite in their caution against any sort of eschatological Luddite panic; as Mitchell writes, “the shock of new media is as old as the hills.” [212]) For Hansen in particular, the unique position of contemporary media at the nexus of “the living and technics” (305) offers us a dazzling opportunity to “displace definitively… the empirical-transcendental divide that has structured western meditation on thinking.” (298) He calls for us to bridging this gap, and to reconcile technics with man — which is to say: to accept the fact that the symbiosis between the two “constitutes the being of the human.” (305)
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