Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Understanding Media Theory. Language, Image, Sound, Behavior |
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Author: Rudi Laermans Review of Arjen Mulder, Understanding Media Theory. Language, Image, Sound, Behavior. |
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Uderstanding Media , published in 1964, brought the Canadian literary theorist Marshall McLuhan immediate fame and turned him into an intellectual celebrity [1]. Yet, in 1980, the year McLuhan passed away, the kind of media theory he had advocated had already become a quaint curiosity of the 1960's. Within Academia, McLuhan's dream of a 'new science' was only met with indifference, if not with sheer hostility. On the one hand, McLuhan's definition of media in terms of 'extensions of man' seemed too encompassing and did not fit the existing disciplinary allotment. Indeed, Understanding Media not only deals with the various linguistic media and the modern mass media, but also contains often surprising considerations on money, architecture, clothing and fashion… They are all artificial extensions of human faculties and therefore media, McLuhan argued, but often without success. On the other hand, like the other writings of McLuhan, Understanding Media all too visibly lacked the empirical backing and careful argumentation which most academics consider to be the hallmark of intellectual seriousness. McLuhan excelled in sweeping statements, visionary images and catchy expressions, many of which survived their author, such as 'the global village', 'hot and cool media', 'the Age of Information', or 'the medium is the message' (and the later variant, 'the medium is the massage'). His was clearly not the kind of prose one finds in dissertations and scientific magazines, which during the 1970's did not further the cause of media theory within the academic world. Things started to change from the mid-1980's onwards, particularly in the German speaking countries. Authors such as Vilèm Flusser and Friedrich Kittler again started to speculate in an at once adventurous and stimulating way on the possible relationships between the material characteristics of specific media and broader cultural, social or political developments [2]. In Germany , the new wave in media theory became rapidly institutionalized and helped to redirect the field of literary studies, thus playing a role comparable with the one cultural theory had taken up during the 1980's in the Anglo-American world. Of course, a more general trend stimulated this rediscovery of McLuhan's work, not only in Western Europe but worldwide. With his typical bravura, McLuhan announces in the opening page of Understanding Media that 'we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological stimulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media'. In 1964 this was indeed a bold assertion, but after the democratization of the internet it testified to McLuhan's foresight. Indeed, what McLuhan termed 'the electric age' is our digital age - and only the future can tell us about the further effects of the intertwinement between technology, culture and society on la condition humaine . Meanwhile, the breakthrough of the computer as the new super-medium that re-mediates text, image and sound, has recently elicited within the humanities a still ongoing shift from a primarily discourse and text-oriented approach to broader media theoretical questions. In contradistinction with the German speaking world, not that many overviews of, or introductions to, media theory are available in English [3]. One may therefore welcome Understanding Media Theory (hereafter abridged as UMT) by Amsterdam-based media theorist Arjen Mulder. It is also the second volume in the promising 't-series' launched by V2_, the 'institute for instable media' located in Rotterdam that is within the Dutch speaking world undoubtedly a leading centre in the realm of new media and the electronic arts [4].
Hard-boiled media theory - or not?
Arjen Mulder asserts, when speaking of media effects, that: 'The effect of photography is not what you see in your vacation snapshots, but the certainty that only the present truly exists, for only the present can be photographically recorded. The rest of time, the past and the future, exists only in the imagination. Old pictures show an old present. We live in a "permanent now", a "continuous present" - this was the dominant attitude in the twentieth century', (UMT, 37). It is indeed a daring affirmation, of the kind that reminds one quasi-spontaneously of the prose of Understanding Media . Not that Mulder deliberately tries to imitate McLuhan. Those who are acquainted with his earlier books on 'the twentieth-century century body' and 'the photographic enjoyment' (both only published in Dutch) or with his 'book for the electronic arts' (co-written with Maaike Post) will know that Mulder is an essayist in the best sense of the word [5]. For that matter, most of the authors who endorse McLuhan's program of a hard-boiled media theory lean towards a provocative style in thinking and writing. (Witness, for example, the publications of the already mentioned Flusser and Kittler.) Evidently, this regularly results in gross overstatements, particularly when media developments are causally related to other social-cultural or political phenomena. UMT also contains several assertions that meanwhile typify hard-boiled media theory. If one becomes rapidly irritated by the following kind of statements, one clearly has not 'the right mind' for what Mulder himself prefers to call 'pure media theory': 'The United States lost the Vietnam War because of the introduction of color television, which showed the American public in a luridly realistic manner what "our boys" were doing and experiencing over there. Conversely, color television became a commercial success because it portrayed the war so grippingly' (UMT, p. 46). The expression 'hard-boiled media theory' is used here in direct reference to McLuhan's famous statement 'the medium is the message'. Actually, this slogan points to a quasi-Kantian research program in which every medium is regarded as a condition of possibility of a specific way of knowing and experiencing. This is not a far-fetched axiom. Media per definition mediate between us and the world; it seems therefore quite plausible that they frame in an often unobserved manner consciousness and perception. To give just one example from Understanding Media : we read printed text from left to right, but we do not notice that we are thus conditioned to a more general linear-analytical consciousness that also results in the treatment of images as quasi-texts. More generally, media function as all too evident environments (dixit again McLuhan) and are therefore not analyzed as quasi-transcendental frames of human knowing and experiencing. Hard-boiled media theory wants to uncover these direct effects of material media features, an aim that the author of UMT wholeheartedly embraces in the book's opening pages. Mulder even gives an Enlightenment twist to it: 'This book describes how media make us who we are. It seeks to understand the media of the last hundred thousand years and learn to play with them instead of being played by them. It seeks to create distance from what we become through our ongoing interaction with media' (UMT, p. 7). UMT is at once an introduction, a text book and a book-length essay, but this threefold identity is realized differently within the three main parts of the book. The opening section on 'general media theory' contains quite a number of definitions and therefore reminds one the most of the traditional text book (although Mulder's fluent writing style again an again distances UMT from this scholarly genre). According to Mulder, general media theory builds on the pioneering work of Marshall McLuhan, on Claude Shannon's and Warren Weaver's mathematical information and communication theory, and on Susanne K. Langer's hermeneutical thinking, particularly Philosophy in a New Key (1942) and Feeling and Form (1953). The latter reference will surely come as a surprise for anyone who has some knowledge of media theory. On the first sight of it, there indeed exists a certain affinity between the neo-Kantian approach of Langer, who was a student of Ernst Cassirer, and the analysis of media from the point of view of their constitutive role within human knowing and experiencing as opened up by McLuhan. Yet, Langer's exclusive interest in symbolic forms and cultural genres (myth, art, religion…) as the structuring frameworks of thinking and perception does greatly differ from the more inclusive approach of McLuhan. Since Understanding Media , hard-boiled media theory smoothly switches between language-related 'extensions of men' and technological artifacts, whereas Langer's neo-Kantianism implicitly sticks to a 'culturalist' medium notion. Mulder neither clarifies the differences nor highlights the eventual relationships between both medium concepts. This omission is all the more striking in the light of his explicit definition of a medium as 'a technological or artificial extension of a body faculty' (UMT, p. 15). There is yet another conspicuous omission. For if one includes Langer's philosophy of symbolic forms as one of the cornerstones of general media theory, it is far from evident why he remains so completely silent on postwar semiotics and the deconstruction of the traditional approaches of signification or symbolization in the work of Jacques Derrida. Moreover, Derrida's approach of writing as the at once supplementary and 'essential' medium that 'de-essentializes' language on the one hand, as the model for all forms of contemporary 'tele-writing' on the other hand, seems highly pertinent for media theory (as, for instance, Friedrich Kittler acknowledges). These striking omissions may indicate a personal lack of interest in 'French Theory' from the side of the author of UMT. Yet, in a book with a title that announces a broad overview of contemporary media theory, the neglect of Derrida & C° should at least be mentioned and argued. There is nothing wrong with idiosyncrasies of tastes and interests, but it is probably better to confess them right from the start.
Media as 'bodily experience machines'
Mulder is at his best when he appropriates in an individual way the overall intuitions of McLuhan. Thus, he rightly questions the rigidity of the famous distinction between hot and cool media. A hot medium, such as writing, addresses only one of the senses and goes therefore hand in hand with a high degree of involvement (no meaningful reading without a minimum of individual concentration). On the contrary, a cool medium - McLuhan's favorite example was the black and white television - simultaneously appeals to several senses and stimulates the imagination of the user. Mulder gives a semantic twist to the distinction and relates it to the difference between media that (wants to) transport clear messages or unambiguous meanings, and their counterparts that are primarily suggestive, even enigmatic from the point of view of signification. This is not a matter of essential or ontological differences between media, he rightly argues, but rather depends on the way a specific medium is used. Thus, analog photography is usually called a hot medium because of its picturing or portrayal and therefore captivating qualities. Or as Roland Barthes once suggested: the punctuating quality of an analog photo has everything to do with its referential character. Yet, it is far from difficult to cool down this seemingly hot medium since one can easily make complex photographs with an analog camera. In the chapter on remediation, which closes the first section on general media theory, Mulder follows a similar strategy. He first subscribes to McLuhan's bold views but subsequently brackets them quite drastically in the light of David J. Bolter's and Richard Grusin's well-known study of the subject [6]. In Understanding Media , McLuhan gives an historical twist to the saying 'the medium is the message': 'The content of a medium is always a previous medium'. A literal interpretation of this assertion logically results in the thesis that painting is the message of photography, that the latter is the content of film, and that video re-mediates film. Mulder correctly argues that such a linear view is difficult to sustain. Thus, the realism within 19 th century painting is simply unthinkable without photography. Or to give a contemporary example: email re-mediates the medium of the letter, but the nowadays reduced written correspondence between people is also 'infected' by the routines of email interaction. In a word, new media not only remediate older media, the inverse relation also holds. Mulder's creative debt vis-à-vis McLuhan is probably at his highest when he discusses the direct sensual or bodily impact of technological media. That theme was already central in his previous writings. Thus, in his book on 'the photographic enjoyment', he tries to highlight via an intensive reading of various examples the experiential differences between analog and digital photography. In UMT, Mulder first stresses the non-physical nature of technical media. Telephones and cd's represent voices without bodies, and photos or film- and video-images transform bodies into pure images which we enjoy. Precisely because technically mediated representations are disembodied, Mulder argues, we look for a strong physical address, a high degree of affective involvement. Photos, therefore, have to shock or at least to seduce our bodies; and film- or TV-images must fascinate, penetrate the flesh that we like to call the mind. These credos not only dominate the commercial use of technological media, but also direct the contemporary artistic appropriation of photo or film. Witness, for example, the importance of so-called relational or experiential art. All this brings Mulder to a much more positive valuation of the often criticized 'power of the (mass) media'. In his view, the latter is not primarily a question of content but has everything to do with the capability of media to bring the receiving human body, thanks to a barrage of sensual stimuli, into a state of physical distraction, if not of sheer trance. 'The seductive power of media lies in their suggestion that it is possible for us to become pure intensities of feeling', Mulder claims (UMT, p. 66). Medium - bodily senses - experiences of self-loss: this dialectic is indeed at the heart of Mulder's media theory (and also of his approach of art, which I will briefly discuss in the next paragraph). Or in the author's own words: 'The media user, book reader, TV viewer, game-boy, techno dancer, photography fan, museumgoer, radio listener, web-surfer or chatter becomes fixated on what his or her own body is doing when an influx of external energy puts it into a state which it could never have achieved or maintained on its own. (…) We do not use media out of a desire for direct contact with reality, or even a need for information. We seek surrender: we connect to media out of a desire for a direct experience of something that is not ourselves. We wish to experience ourselves as we are not. Again and again, in different ways, with different media' (UMT, pp. 67-68). In a word, Mulder primarily regards media as experience machines that time and again become coupled to human bodies, thus transforming the body into a medium of media, into a prosthesis for the used medial prostheses. Much can be said for the simultaneously hard-boiled and experience-oriented media approach that Mulder develops in the tracks of McLuhan. It disputes the dominant fixation on content within communication sciences and also challenges the ongoing discourse on the mass media, which takes a primarily cognitive stance and therefore focuses on the truth- or information-value of media-messages. Mulder's personal view is indeed a welcome correction of the overall blindness for the direct material effectiveness and affectivity of TV-images, guitar sounds, digital photos. Yet, the net outcome is also a highly individualized or de-socialized perspective on contemporary media and their uses. UMT implicitly situates media-use predominantly within the sphere of leisure: Mulder really only discusses the individual experiencing of media within the arts and popular entertainment. This results in a sometimes striking neglect of media-use in other societal domains, such as the economy or political administration. Yet, even if one goes along with Mulder's selective view, it remains to be seen if the various media are indeed experience machines as such. For are not they just used in such a way within the sphere of leisure? The question is far from unimportant, for a users- or reception-oriented perspective bring society and culture back in, thus questioning the pureness of hard-boiled media theory and its stress on the material qualities of media.
From the digital to the extra-medial
The second part of UMT, devoted to historical media theory, offers a useful overview of the most important findings in the research of, among others, Eric A. Havelock, Elisabeth Eisenstein and Walter Ong on the effects of the evolutionary leaps within the realm of language as medium for thinking and communication. By means of an always specific 'meta-linguistic rule', Mulder analyzes in a highlighting way the four most important evolutionary transitions within this medium: from spoken to written to printed to typed language. In the second part of UMT, the many meanderings in the genesis of alphabetical writing and the decisive role this new medium played for the institutionalization of individual self-consciousness and abstract-rational thinking; the undeniable influence of printing on the transformations that shaped the early-modern period and the coterminous generalization of the doubt about the possibility of stable meanings are all described with great gusto. Mulder combines his historical vignettes with personal remarks and regularly reminds the reader of the soundness of McLuhan's brush-stroking speculations in Understanding Media . He thus avoids the dryness of the introductory manual. Yet, because of the exclusive focus on language, the middle section of UMT is also remarkably biased: nearly nothing is said on the evolutions in the medium of sound or image. Mulder does not himself make this claim, but the one-sidedness of the part on historical media theory has probably everything to do with the available literature. The latter is either language- or technology-oriented. Thus, there exist no detailed historical overviews of, for instance, the use of the human voice. And the literature on the medium of the image is dominated by the art-historian approach, which does not link up much with media-theoretical questions. Mulder also does not really go into the present digital era. Indeed, UMT is quite silent on computers, the internet, and cyberspace. Only in the third section does Mulder indirectly discuss our contemporary media environment at some length when he distinguishes the analog consciousness from its digital counterpart. People with an analog consciousness constantly take positions, are looking for truth, and stress the weight of the past on the present. On the contrary, people with a digital consciousness think in terms of possible positions, of conditions of possibility, and of possible futures. The distinction updates the difference that was made during the 1980's between a modern (or modernist) and a postmodern (or postmodernist) attitude. Yet, probably of more importance is the observation that the succinct chapter on 'Analog Bodies, Digital Consciousness' is the only section in which Mulder hints at the recent, still ongoing, digitalization of previous media. Only in the closing paragraphs of UMT does he legitimate his overall reticence: 'Looking around in the computers' digital universe, one sees hardware, software, networks, objects, environments, situations, and spaces, but no media - for everything there communicates, and when everything is a means of communication, the word "medium" loses its explanatory power. In the digital sphere, everything ultimately is or can be converted into software. History, too, is software - a network of databases along with a series of search engines. What the computer age needs is a unified software theory. That is beyond the reach of media theory' (UMT, p. 202). Mulder's final words are quite amazing. Indeed, what is at stake is not the digital universe as such but the remediation, and the effects of this operation, of existing media such as image and sound in the language of ones and zeros. Undoubtedly, the various forms of software play a crucial role here. Yet, a digital computer-image is also a new medium that differs in its materiality from a painted image or a classical video-image. In the same way, digital sound clearly differs from music that is made by means of analog techniques. Precisely from the point of view of hard-boiled media theory, it is therefore of great importance to study the specific effects of, for instance, digital computer- or video-images on sensory perception. For that matter, this very same theme dominates Mulder's comparison between analog and digital photography in his book on 'the photographic enjoyment'. Why, then, Mulder's sudden exclusion of 'the digital universe' from media theory and its removal to the domain of software theory? Although the closing part of UMT is titled 'Practical Media Theory', this section does not contain advices for a more subversive or enlightened media-use. It is by far the most essayistic part of the book and unfolds a highly particular view on art on the basis of the notion of the extra-medial. With the latter concept, Mulder wants to grasp the paradox that a medium gives per definition no direct access to reality, yet can, nonetheless, produce in an always specific way traces of the excluded Real. The extra-medial is indeed a trace of the unmediated Real within a medium: the photogenic of a landscape- or portrait-photo, the blues of a microphone-voice… It is always singular and can never be grasped or fixed unambiguously. Roland Barthes called it 'the grain of the voice' and, in La Chambre claire , 'the punctum' that perforates the overall readability or 'studium' of an analog photo. And before Barthes, Walter Benjamin already spoke, also in connection with photography, of the aura of an image: very close, and simultaneously distant. Yet, if the extra-media is a medium-effect, Benjamin was wrong with his well-known thesis that technically (re)produced works of art lack aura. Quite the contrary: every new technical medium also produces a new kind of aura. According to Mulder, art has a privileged relationship with the extra-medial: every interesting artwork excels in it. 'All art arises from extramedial [Mulder's way of spelling - RL] experiences', thus he claims. 'An extramedial experience, or the experience of the extramedial, presents itself as a feeling about which one cannot say where it comes from or what one should do with it. Or perhaps it is more of an intensity of feeling' (UMT, pp. 160-161). In Mulder's view, successful artworks - there also exist uncountable unsuccessful artistic objects - succeed in using a medium, or a combination of different media, in such a way that the artifact is charged with a minimum portion of the extra-medial. The net outcome is the production of an experience of authenticity in the eye, ear, and/or body of the beholder. That experience or feeling was already contained within the artwork, waiting there for the receiver. Mulder, therefore, also calls artworks "virtual objects," a notion which he borrows from Suzanne Langer. They are artifacts that condense and fix the experience of the extra-medial in material forms, according to the always particular features of the used medium. 'Every art object contains a virtual feeling, a feeling given form, which through being given form is virtualized and can thereby be actualized again - if not as experience, then as something it is possible to experience', Mulder concludes (UMT, p. 191). Mulder's implicit philosophy of art - but 'philosophy' may be too grandiose a term for his scattered remarks on the relationships between art and the extra-medial - is clearly in line with his more general approach of media as experience machines. It is also a view that goes against the grain. Conceptual smartness and theoretical irony, the continuous deconstruction of the difference between the fake and the authentic, not to say anything of political correctness: Mulder clearly does not have much affinity with the dominant discourse on art. He just loves art, believes in authentic experiences, and has few problems with a certain naiveté. All of this is quite refreshing, even if it does not construct a fully developed genuine theory of art. Of course, the latter is also one of those typical academic dreams - or nightmares- that an essayist is not necessarily interested in.
Notes
[1] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man . Cambridge (Mass.) and London: MIT Press, 1996. [2] See, for instance, Vilém Flusser, Ins Universum der technischen Bilder . Göttingen: European Photography, 1999 and, from the same author, Kommunikologie . Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2000; and Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon Film Typerwriter . Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose, 1986 and Draculas Vermächtnis. Technische Schriften . Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1993. [3] Interesting German overviews of media theory are Frank Hartman, Medienphilosophie . Wien: WUV-Universitätsverlag, 2000 and Daniela Kloock & Angela Spahr, Medientheorien. Eine Einführung . München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000. [4] The first volume was written by Mulder's one-time companion Geert Lovink, My First Recession. Critical Internet Culture in Transition . Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAi Publishers, 2003. [5] See Arjen Mulder, Het twintigste-eeuwse lichaam [The Twentieth-century Body] . Amsterdam: Uitgeverij 1001, 1996; Arjen Mulder, Het fotografisch genoegen [The Photographical Enjoyment] . Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 2000; and Arjen Mulder & Maaike Post, Book for the Electronic Arts . Rotterdam: V2_Publishing, 2000. [6] David J. Bolter en Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media . Cambridge (Mass.) and London, 1999. |
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