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Issue 6. Medium Theory

Review "Medium Cool" South Atlantic Quarterly  101: 3, Summer 2002

Author: Anneleen Masschelein
Published: April 2003

Abstract (E): The thematic issue of South Atlantic Quarterly "Medium Cool" considers the topic of medium from the perspective of modernist art and art theory, examining notions like aura and opacity on the one hand, and it introduces some important new German work on "media-metaphorology" on the other hand. Uniting figure for the various essays in the issue is Samuel Weber, whose work serves as common frame of reference and who contributes two important reflections on September 11 and terrorism.

Abstract (F): Un récent numéro spécial de "South Atlantic Quarterly" analyse la question des médias du double point de vue de l'art contemporain et de la théorie esthétique. Insistant très fortement sur des notions telles que "aura" et "opacité", il introduit dans le domaine anglosaxon les nouvelles recherches allemandes sur la "média-métaphorologie". Le numéro est construit essentiellement autour de l'oeuvre de Samuel Weber, dont le travail fournit un cadre de référence global à diverses contributions importantes sur le 11 septembre et la question du terrorisme.

The issue of SAQ devoted to medium theory/theories is the result of a largely Australian and German collaboration, incited by the conference "Medium Cool", held in Brisbane in 1998, at the end of the past century, long before the shock of the events of September 11. Yet, as a reminder of the relevance and topicality of the academic and cultural debate on medium, this issue opens and closes with these events which shocked the West out of its illusion of safety and complacency. As Samuel Weber remarks, the events of September 11 constituted the beginning of a "scenario" that continues to unfold by instalments, witness the present situation of war, determined by a strange mixture of a inevitable causal logic and of simplistic forms of ideology, national egoism and irrationalism. Both the traumatic reality of the events of September 11 and the symbolic value of the spectacular attack on the pillars of the ideology of Globalisation, in which capitalism (the World Trade Centre) and militarism (the Pentagon) are intertwined, were for a large part imposed on us through the mediation of a screen. At the same time, this paradoxically confirms our alienation as spectators to the traumatic events that determine the course of our lives as well as our deep, global involvement with these familiar images of destruction as a kind of nightmarish version of McLuhan's global village. September 11 is the main topic of the two contributions by Samuel Weber and, marked by extreme proximity and by the detachment of reflection, they are important testimonies of Weber's perception of the period just before and after the fall of the two towers. The sequence is typically reversed: the first essay, "War, terrorism and spectacle" started as a lecture presented in December 2001 and developed into an analysis of the rhetoric of the American government and media, whereas the last piece of the issue is the transcript of a long interview with Weber that took place in the weeks of the attack and the onset of the "war against terrorism". In this remarkable document, questions about the key notions of Weber's thought - theatricality, repetition, iterability and iteration, and the uncanny - are intertwined with and direct his immediate response to the events of September 11. Samuel Weber is the uniting figure in this collection of essays, which is quite heterogeneous and varied in scope. Ranging from criticism (art, film and architecture) to theory, the topic is addressed from the perspectives of art history and a variety of more or less new areas of study (literary, cultural and media studies).

The coherence of the issue is constituted through a largely shared frame of theoretical texts, which have shaped Weber's thought (Benjamin, Derrida, Adorno, Lacan, Freud). The most recurring reference is to Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and to Weber's rereading of that text in Mass Mediauras. Most notably, Benjamin's notion of "aura" is examined in relation to modernist art and theory in (inter alia) the contributions of Keith Broadfoot, Andrew McNamara and Catherine Liu. A brief survey of this art-historical cluster demonstrates not only the diversity of styles and approaches of the contributions, it also reveals one of the stakes of this issue: to show that the topic of medium is not exclusively related to (mass) media studies, but that it is also rooted in modernist art theory.

Both Broadfoot and McNamara enter into dialogue with Greenberg's work on medium in terms of transparency and opacity, linked to Benjamin's notion of aura in terms of distance and proximity. Broadfoot discusses the paradoxical quality of aura in modernist art, which reappears at the exact moment when it seems most drastically destroyed by the overemphasising of art's exhibition value, when abstraction is radicalised to such an extent that it becomes pure materiality, "it is a dematerializing that is at one with an assertion of materiality" (473).  This paradox between extreme materiality or substance and immateriality, or a certain quasi-religious insubstantiality is linked with Benjamin's notion of aura in the age of modernism. Broadfoot's discussion is admirably palpable in his subtle discussions of works of art: Veronica's veil with the face of Christ and the use of aluminium in the work of Pollock.

McNamara's approach is more theoretical, but no less thought-provoking. He confronts the issue of opacity of the medium in Greenberg's theory and examines how we can relate to that in aesthetic judgement. The opacity of the medium in avant-garde and modernist art is opposed to the transparency of kitsch, which allows for immediate gratification through identification (borrowing Weber's notion of "identificatory simplification"). Modernist art sets out to exclude identification, while allowing for a higher form of direct sensuous contact: "the modernist avant-garde strips away identifications to the point where one engages with "immediately sensuous art"." According to McNamara, Greenberg's distinction between art and kitsch is problematic because it rests on the positivist belief in the ability to judge what is art and what is not. He therefore attempts to offer a different perspective through de Duve's reading of Greenberg. With recourse to de Duve, McNamara tries to reconcile two seemingly opposite positions towards theory and criticism in art history. Acknowledging the sometimes "kitsch-like" quality of theory, which may be "mechanical and formulaic" on the one hand and the absolute singularity of aesthetic judgement, which is a matter beyond concepts and representation on the other hand, McNamara is aware that turning back from theory is not really an alternative. In the confrontation with art, the inherently inadequate vocabulary of theory does not succeed in naming the unnameable of the aesthetic (the aura or the contemporary sublime?), but the gap between theoretical language and aesthetic experience does reveal the desire of the person judging. In this passionate, loving confrontation with the artwork through the medium of theory, the subject experiences his own eclipse in the failure of language and is able to somehow reach the other, to approximate the artwork in its distance: "For the desire elicited by the aesthetic idea proves evocative in disappointing self-possession - rather it is all the more desirable for being both elusive and touching. Lacking as it does in adequate presentation to align with, it still confronts one in proximity." (496)

Whereas McNamara tries to reach the heart of a modern aesthetic experience as a confrontation of radically distant otherness in art throughout his readings of Greenberg, de Duve, Weber and Kant, Catherine Liu adopts a somewhat different approach in her "Getting to the photo finish", an astute discursive reading of the aesthetics of the family snap shot as a way of creating a pictorial, idealized narrative of life. Liu's account of the interrelation between photography and autobiography fluctuates between the history of photography, theory and her own family's photographic autobiography. Starting from Stieglitz's own account of how he took his photograph "The Steering", Liu suggests that the image of artistic creation in Stieglitz's writings is "narrative rather than pictorial" (522). His formalist aesthetic stance, which entails an abstraction of his family life and strives for "the endurance of aesthetic value" (524), is contrasted with views of the family photo as commemoration of the dead and of the snapshot as a reminder of how things "really" were. The essay takes a surprising turn when Liu sharply analyses her own father's family snapshots and the compulsion to photograph as a means of constructing an idealized family narrative. Liu suggests that the meaning of photography is forever uncomfortably balancing between art and archive, in both cases aspiring to the aesthetic representation of an ideal. The sheer vastness of the family's photographic archive does not render an accurate visual account of family life as it is or was, but looking at it does open up a place for self-detachment of the subject and for reflection of our modernity. The very failure of the family photograph to represent the family reveals something about the ideology of the family that has shaped our identity. One way of allegorising this capacity of reflection and self-detachment, Liu suggests, is through the blur. Being out of focus, the blurred photograph or Richter's paintings offer a mise-en-abyme for our own near-sightedness, our inability to grasp our own situation in our confrontation with the medium of photography. Richter's blur is further examined by Rosemary Hawker in "The Idiom in Photography As the Truth in Painting".

In these essays on modernist art and the opacity of the medium, it is striking that the medium is not so much the message as the material, the substance of art. This experience cannot be captured by communication or medium theory in the sense of popular media theory, but calls for the immediate complexity of the aesthetic encounter. A striking example of the manipulation of the medium as material substance rather than content is found in the appropriate picture on the issue's cover, Nam June Paik's "TV Cello" from the collection of the Queensland art gallery foundation in Brisbane. The work performs a striking synaesthesia of media, by making a cello out of what seem to be plexiglass cubes. These cubes can be recognised as transparent video monitors with screens on the front, which expose the wiring inside. These elements have been stapled in the shape of a cello, as is indicated by the neck and snares, a musical instrument that can only perform its substance, i.e., visual media. To this one can add the renewed mediation of the artwork through photographic montage, as an invitation to read about medium and the intricate "rhizome" of meaning unfolds. The title of the issue reverses McLuhan's distinction between "hot" and "cool" media (hot involving an extreme concentration on one sense and less implication of the receiver, whereas cool media are less concentrated and therefore require a more active effort on the part of the receiver), perhaps as a double reference to the "coolness" of the theme itself in the McLuhanesque sense of the word - medium as an opaque topic that demands active effort on the part of the critic - and as a pun on the facile, magazine-like "cool" of the topic of medium, or even urging the current fad to "cool"?

Gradually, the focus of the essays changes from visual art and photography (Jeff Wall) to more popular cultural phenomena: film, television, the "new media" (video games and internet) and architecture. This also entails a slight shift in the theoretical frame of references (Zizek, Lacan, Heidegger), with the oeuvre of Samuel Weber as the common denominator. A somewhat different background informs the three German contributions (two of them in very good translations by Peter Krapp): Georg Stanitzek's "Two Classical Problems of Literary Studies with "the Media"", Wolfgang Ernst's "Between Real Time and Memory on Demand: Reflections on/of Television" and Georg Tholen's "Media Metaphorology: Irritations in the Epistemic Field of Media Studies". Especially the last contribution is an important essay to appear in English, for it deals with a topical debate in contemporary German media studies and offers an interesting blend of systems theory and discourse analysis, for which Tholen coined the term "metaphorology". Focussing on the history of the discipline of media studies, Tholen, a longstanding collaborator of Friedrich Kittler, suggests that an "investigation into the place of media also affects the question regarding the relation of concept and metaphor" (660). With this line of thought, he encounters the issues that frequently return in Weber's thought, for instance in his work on the uncanny (a topic which is also familiar to Tholen). Examining various paradigms of metaphors about media (anthropomorphic and instrumental, transparency and opacity, imitation and implementation), Tholen concludes that they are all "founded on a fundamental difference, namely the difference between concept and metaphor, which in turn is based on the metaphoric opposition of authentic and inauthentic meaning." (667) These hierarchies must be questioned in media studies, for the encoding of computer language is already a metaphor in itself, invariably turning all metaphors about the computer as medium into "metametaphors": "Metaphoricity in the determination of the computer as medium shows itself as transferability of (neither authentic nor inauthentic) metaphors without which multimedia representation would be mere apparition." (669) The project of media metaphorology helps us to understand this new condition of the media "as partial framing and skewing of the perceptible and the communicable" (669), it aims at displacing or deconstructing the underlying assumptions of media metaphors, traditional notions like identity and social communication. In this way, the ideologies of the subject and of a globalised homogeneous culture are decentred and make way for a more open, heterogeneous view of difference.

This brings us home to the socio-political relevance of medium theory as a debunking of the pervasiveness of the media. While it is clear that the images that constantly bombard us from all sides reveal more about ideology (in the crudest, most unsophisticated sense) than about reality, they have, like ideology, very real and disastrous effects as the present war again clearly demonstrates. The filmic image of the destruction of the twin towers, which has been put in an endless loop on television all over the world, offers, as Weber brilliantly points out, a classic case for the problem of repetition and iterability of the event: the destruction was unique as a trauma (even if immediately already doubled), but it foreshadowed and set in motion a spiral of war and destruction, that again takes the form of an endless stream of images, all equally spectacular - bombings like fireworks above the Baghdad skyline - numbing the spectator through repetition to the real damage and suffering. But even if all bombings look pretty much the same, the target is always displaced and more and more people are hurt. The repetition of these images (the fall of the towers and the bombings) make the aftertaste of McLuhan's notions of television as cool medium and the global village very bitter. Yes, the images deeply involve and implicate all of us, they keep the wound open and the fear alive, inciting, allowing and forcing nations and individuals to take action and to take sides. But they also show what our mediated imagery of the world tries to repress: the continual presence of a threatening, ungraspable and uncontrollable other, beyond simplistic antagonisms, which uses the force of images to the effect of chaos and destruction, while we seem paralysed behind our screens watching the scenario unfold.

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