Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction 9781501337123, 9781501337116, 9781501337086, 9781501337093

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Materialist Media Theory

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Materialist Media Theory An Introduction Grant Bollmer

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Grant Bollmer, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 177 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bollmer, Grant, author. Title: Materialist media theory: an introduction / Grant Bollmer. Description: New York, NY, USA: Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019008312 (print) | LCCN 2019010768 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501337093 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501337109 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501337116 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501337123 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Mass media and culture. | Mass media–Social aspects. | Social interaction–Technological innovations. Classification: LCC P94.6 (ebook) | LCC P94.6 .B65 2019 (print) | DDC 302.23–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019008312 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3712-3 PB: 978-1-5013-3711-6  ePDF: 978-1-5013-3709-3   eBook: 978-1-5013-3710-9 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Introduction: Thinking About (and in) the Materiality of Media 1 1 Representations and Performances 21 2 Inscriptions and Techniques 51 3 Spaces and Times 79 4 Bodies and Brains 117 5 Objects and Affects 141 Conclusion: Ten Theses on the Materiality of Media 173 Acknowledgments  Works Cited Index

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Introduction: Thinking About (and in) the Materiality of Media

Medium theories Materialism designates a set of perspectives united by the claim that physical materiality—be it of a technology, practice, or body—matters in the shaping of reality. This book is an introduction to and intervention into materialist theories of media. I intend to convince you that physical materiality is essential for any study of media. At the same time, I argue that this materialist turn should be made without discarding the past traditions of media and cultural studies—especially the critique of representation and identity, a rejection of which is implied by some of the theorists we’ll review in the following pages. In short, we need to turn to an investigation of materiality in all its complexity; yet we can never forget that the study of media should be performed with specific political goals in mind, and to address the politics of media means that we must still address representations and images. This also means that we have to think about representations and images as material— and how they’re only one part of the story when it comes to understanding what media are and what they do. In writing this book I’ve assumed that you’re familiar with the general concepts of media and cultural studies. Yet I do not expect you to be an expert in any way, and some of the basic theories and approaches of media studies will be foregrounded at times. What I hope you take away from this book is a practical and theoretical program for media studies that looks to materiality as a site of political intervention. I wish for you to acknowledge how media and technology are not mere tools. Media are locations for the perpetuation of inequality and the management of social difference. Addressing inequality, discrimination, and power today requires us to look toward the materiality of technology, as it is through materiality that power is secured and maintained. Let’s begin by looking at why materiality is controversial, and how turning toward materiality opens up new possibilities for media studies. A focus on matter or materiality has been regularly neglected in mainstream humanistic research on media. Since the 1970s, at least, many of us working in media studies have been relatively content reading media. “Reading” refers to how media studies scholars would apply the tools often associated with literary

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theory—hermeneutics, structuralism, or post-structuralism, to name a few paradigms—to interpret, deconstruct, or critique meaning veiled or buried in the artifacts of popular culture. A television program, from this perspective, is a form of text. It can be analyzed with the same techniques one would apply to literature. Most likely, this is the kind of media studies you’re familiar with. You apply a form of textual or semiotic analysis to look at a text, such as a TV show, an advertisement, or song lyrics, and discuss the meanings encoded by producers or decoded by audience members. You think about what media represent. You analyze what an image signifies. You then relate these meanings to larger social structures, ideologies, and economies, discussing how representations construct specific ways of understanding identities and the world. Using textual or semiotic methods to read media is an essential skill for students and citizens today. But it cannot be thought to be the only method we use. Many of us working in media studies have realized that an overwhelming focus on the interpretation of meaning has limits. When we only examine meaning, what a medium is and does is limited to human perception and experience. This is a problem. Our media, from radio to television to the internet, have produced an ever-expanding infrastructure supported by physical wires, transmission relays, routers, server farms, hard drives, and storage media. We are not always aware of these technologies because they don’t represent much of anything to us in any direct way. Think about sending an email or text message. Where does it go when you click “send”? You may think it just vanishes into “cyberspace” or “the cloud,” though it only vanishes from your immediate view. The interface, in many ways, deceives you through images that are metaphors for material processes that remain unobserved (van den Boomen 2008). Your email moves through wires that cut across the globe, duplicated multiple times on multiple servers, transmitted across informational exchanges that are located in very specific places. Just because you do not see the material infrastructure needed to send an email does not mean that these material things are insignificant. And thinking about what an email signifies tells us very little about a great deal of what email is and does. Today, corporations and governments celebrate the potentials of “smart” cities and houses (Heckman 2008; Thrift 2014), in which our location is tracked, our energy use monitored, and our smartphones control our cars and air conditioning, all through sensors and routers designed to continuously circulate digital information. The “internet of things” presents us with a future in which our refrigerator communicates with our toaster, connecting over the internet for software updates and the accumulation of highly valuable data (van Kranenburg 2008). Our world has seen a proliferation of devices

Introduction  3 that reshape human interaction and experience, often completely beyond the conscious knowledge of most individuals. And yet the tools of media studies, if left to questions of representation alone, cannot acknowledge the ways these changes shape contemporary reality. Otherwise we think that an email is an immaterial blip because we cannot see its path when it moves from one computer to another. This is what the theorist of digital media and software Nick Montfort terms screen essentialism—the incorrect assumption that what we see on the screen of a computer is what we should focus on when we discuss digital media, as if what we see on the screen is all there is (see Kirschenbaum 2008). Media scholars, with few exceptions, are only now embracing a set of tools and concepts intended to help us come to terms with these changes. This book introduces you to these tools and concepts, outlining a way of thinking about media that foregrounds its materiality in shaping the possibilities for politics, space, time, and experience. The questions we now need to ask about media are not necessarily ones about content or meaning. Instead, we need to theorize how the transformations central to the very form of media relate to and partially determine politics, policy, and possibilities for the future. Materialist theories are found at the cutting edge of today’s theoretical humanities, as performed in fields like literature and film (Boscagli 2014; Bruno 2014; Hayles 2005), cultural and political theory (Bennett 2010; Bryant 2011, 2014; Coole and Frost 2010), the digital humanities (Berry 2011; Kirschenbaum 2010), the history of science and technology (Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer 1994), and art history (Grau 2007; Cubitt and Thomas 2013; Munster 2013). Within media studies this perspective is often identified by the wellworn name of medium theory, which has been around for some time, if as a marginal perspective often dismissed as “technological determinism.” Joshua Meyrowitz, one of the most notable advocates of medium theory, defines it through the following question: “What are the relatively fixed features of each means of communicating and how do these features make the medium physically, psychologically, and socially different from other media and from face-to-face interaction?” (1994, 50). Medium theory is a comparative study of the physical, communicative capacities of technologies. It examines how different forms of media differ in the possibilities built into the physicality of specific means for writing things down, recording them, storing them over time, and transmitting them across space. Medium theory questions how people relate through media and how different forms of communication produce different effects in how people think and interact with each other. Medium theory’s name derives from an aphorism of Marshall McLuhan, one of the major theorists attributed with its founding. The typical way we think of media or technology is simple: technologies are tools. No technology

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is, in itself, good or bad. They are neutral, and their significance is found in how they are used. But McLuhan had no tolerance for this kind of argument: Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as “content.” The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The “content” of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech. (1964, 18)

There are a few claims buried in this quote. First is a well-known argument McLuhan often made: the content of any medium is another medium. McLuhan goes back to the electric light as a kind of primordial medium, one that has no “content” because light is “pure information.” “For it is not till the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a medium. Then it is not the light but the ‘content’ (or what is really another medium) that is noticed” (9). We can see how this principle works today when we use the internet. The “content” of the internet happens to be video, text, and sound. We read, watch television, and listen to music over the internet. When we communicate over Skype, we’re using a combination of video and the telephone. All of these are other forms of media that have historical precedents. The “content” of the internet and World Wide Web is a diverse range of past forms of media combined into one. Media theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have popularly reimagined McLuhan’s argument through the idea of remediation, suggesting that “new technologies of representation proceed by reforming or remediating earlier ones, while earlier technologies are struggling to maintain their legitimacy by remediating newer ones” (1999, 61). So, newer media “remediate” older ones, and, in the process, subtly change what older media are and do. A Skype conversation, after all, is not precisely the same thing as a telephone call. This history does not merely move in one direction. It is not just new technologies that contain older forms of media. Older forms of media are remade and reinvented to seem “new” by emulating and incorporating elements of newer media. This is one explanation for the fact that television news increasingly features windows and information feeds, incorporating elements derived from computers and the internet. McLuhan also claims that a focus on content distracts us from the material reality of contemporary media. The “message” is not about content

Introduction  5 or information transmitted over airwaves and wired. Again, to invoke a wellknown phrase of McLuhan’s, the medium is the message: For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. . . . The airplane, on the other hand, by accelerating the rate of transportation, tends to dissolve the railway form of city, politics, and association, quite independently of what the airplane is used for. (1964, 8)

This expands what we think of as “media,” moving from television and the internet to, for instance, trains and cars. It also leads us to realize how one of the most general questions we can ask about a medium is how it changes space and time—a question we’ll return to later. The name of “medium theory” comes from this claim of McLuhan’s—if the medium is the message, then the task of theory should be to examine how a medium changes space, time, sensation, and relation. McLuhan has often been dismissed as a “technological determinist,” suggesting all historical change is caused by technology and little else. We should note that technology does not drive all history. But, at the same time, technologies do things, and they do things through their materiality. We must come to terms with this materiality if we want to even begin to understand contemporary culture. We need to embrace the concerns of medium theory, thinking about the physical capacities of media in a comparative and historical way. We should also understand that “materialism” today means something far different than it did in McLuhan’s time. This book sketches a renewed version of medium theory, following McLuhan while taking into account the many recent authors who have looked to materiality to comprehend the challenges of our technological reality. In so doing, we will move beyond dismissals of a reductive technological determinism in favor of a complex way of acknowledging the role the materiality of media plays in shaping the world. But this means that we have to address additional kinds of materiality beyond the boundaries of medium theory. We have to look toward the materiality of cognition, the materiality of bodies, the materiality of economic exchange, and the materiality of “life” itself. We must acknowledge that there are countless ways that media influence the world that cannot be reduced to “meaning.” At the same time, we don’t want to forget about the meaning,

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content, or practices involved with making media and acting through media. Our beliefs about what technologies are and do often frame them in terms that have little to do with their material reality (Bollmer 2016b; Golumbia 2009). But the materiality of the technological always has material effects, even when our ways of imagining materiality are wrong. We must always stress how meaning and materiality are inherently conjoined (Hayles 2004; Langlois 2014). In their materiality, media define the limits for meaning and communication. They shape what human bodies are and do. They transform experiences of space and time. They influence how we relate to each other, intervening in human relations since we first began to speak to one another. And they point to how humans are but one element participating in the making of our reality—a claim that has significant implications that move us away from some of the concerns of McLuhan and earlier medium theorists, who were interested in materiality to discuss its effect on human communication. This book will draw together different lines of thought to examine several forms of materialism. These materialisms are as follows: ●●

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Performative Materialism: What media are must be understood in terms of what they do materially—media make things happen. Spatiotemporal Materialism: Media transform the experience of space and time, along with relations in space and time. Neurocognitive Materialism: Media alter the neurological materiality of the brain, resulting in different conjunctions between the brain, body, and the world. Vital Materialism: “Life” is the material, affective capacity of an object or body to act and be acted upon by others.

This typology of materialisms relates to, but is a bit different than, other ways of defining materiality. These include, for instance, the “old materialism” of Marx, which stresses the means of production and how it structures other aspects of social life. There’s the materialism of the philosophy of mind which suggests that our understanding of consciousness and experience cannot be explained through metaphysical ideas about soul and spirit but must be linked with the biological and physical facticity of the brain and body. There’s the “new materialism” that has risen in popularity over the past decade or so, which examines bodies, relations, and affects as dynamic processes. The version of materiality in this book draws on the lessons of all of these materialisms, linking them to the particularities of media. The remainder of this introduction will discuss some of the philosophical issues that arise when thinking about media’s materiality, along with some

Introduction  7 practical examples that may help bring these ideas into your own everyday experience, focusing on the issues of language, reading, and meaning that we’ve been hinting at. We’ll also continue to explore associations (and differences) between human and technological agency. To grasp what media do in their materiality, we have to try to understand the human as just one actor participating in the construction of the world.

The materiality of the book you are currently reading Let’s introduce an example: you, reading this book. When we read a book (and discuss it), we often ask questions like the following: What do these words say to you? What do they mean? We think almost entirely about meaning and rarely about the medium through which we communicate. When I write this and when you read this, how we communicate depends on the physical qualities of the media we use. Yet we often forget about these technologies and think of communication as a form of human dialogue. In imagining our communication as a conversation, we forget the specific limits and possibilities shaped by the materiality of the media we use. Language, after all, is a technology. It is learned through an elaborate set of techniques and rules that are transmitted from the past through acts, rituals, and the physicality of objects like books (cf. Kittler 1990a). In learning how to speak and how to write, our bodies are transformed, often in quite literal ways. Some theories claim that the origins of speech and language completely altered embodied, physiological ways of moving and standing (e.g., LeroiGourhan 1993). Transformations in the neurobiology of the brain, produced by the physiological and cognitive requirements of speech, serve as a missing link in human evolution (Deacon 1997). And today, our communication technologies continue to transform bodies and their cognitive capacities in ways we may not notice (Rotman 2008). Even without direct references to cognition, different cultures have different ways of speaking and writing, which may involve training the mouth to produce specific sounds and training the ear to hear them—sounds that may be difficult for those who speak other languages to perform or hear. Think about learning a foreign language. For many people, it’s exceptionally difficult to master—or even differentiate between—sounds that do not occur in their native language. From glottal sounds common in German to the tonalities essential for Mandarin, different languages involve different practices that are learned and embodied from the very beginning of language acquisition. We don’t really think of speech as a form of writing. The difference between the two is assumed central to understanding just what speech is

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in juxtaposition to writing. Speech is ephemeral while writing has a kind of permanence. Nonetheless, language relies on inscriptions that exist in the everyday habits of speaking and listening. Language is inscribed in the body through practices that permit us to speak and understand the speech of others. And the significance of language in shaping bodies and experience extends far beyond these practices of saying and hearing. Different forms of language may encode and inscribe different ways of experiencing and understanding time, space, and relation through the presence or absence of, say, specific tenses or specific words for color.1 To ask about the meaning of words you read presumes a massive number of material facts. Language, writing, and books (like this one), all carry with them implicit ways of organizing knowledge—ways that we have internalized when we learn to read and understand the “meaning” contained within these pages. This in no way suggests that one form of writing or speaking is better than another. It does suggest that writing systems and language often carry with them material ways of being that are culturally specific—ways often threatened by the belief that different kinds of writing are better than others, or are “more real” or more “evolved.” There are forms of writing that Westerners have historically not recognized as writing, which has led to culturally imperialistic beliefs about literacy and education that value some cultural practices at the expense of others, potentially destroying (usually indigenous) cultural practices in the name of “civilization” (cf. Michaels 1994, 81–96). Thinking about our words in this way tells us that language, like any other technology, is something that shapes our bodies and our practices in subtle ways that may not be obvious to conscious knowledge—and there are political effects in recognizing and evaluating these practices. What I’m suggesting here is similar to how a strain of German media theory would think of language and writing as “cultural techniques.” For the theorists of cultural techniques, the symbolic distinctions that allow These ideas derive from an entire body of work in linguistics and philosophy. In linguistics, they are associated with the work of numerous anthropologists and linguists, commonly referenced as the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” named for Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, or as “linguistic relativism.” In philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein (2009) makes similar claims about the relationship between language and knowledge, though he ultimately defers to a biological understanding of language. These arguments are still intensely debated today, often between those who argue that a universal grammar exists biologically given in the brain and those who follow linguistic relativism to argue that language explicitly shapes experience. One should note that linguistic relativism becomes problematic when one language is privileged over another as more “advanced” or “civilized.”

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Introduction  9 us to make meaning are inevitably derived from physical practices. As Bernhard Siegert, one of the major theorists of cultural techniques, argues, we should think of language and meaning as a result of a “complex actor network that comprises technological objects as well as the operative chains there are part of and that configure or constitute them” (2015, 11). Or, meaning depends on the particular materiality of media, of practices (like gestures), which result in the symbolic differentiations that guide how we make sense of the world, differentiations like nature/culture, inside/ outside, human/animal, self/other, sense/nonsense, presence/absence, and so on. These distinctions are not imaginary or ideal. Rather, they derive from the physical, material practices and technologies that mediate between the human body and the natural world, practices like counting, painting, and making music, as well as, Siegert demonstrates, the drawing of maps or the building of houses. These practices precede the concepts we use to describe and theorize them, and generate concepts employed to understand the world more broadly. Today, the role of media in shaping our relations, experiences, and knowledge may be more obvious than it has in the past, especially in light of the numerous technologies of the internet, where the conversations we have through media appear to be changing rapidly. While you cannot directly respond to me as you read this book, were these ideas presented online you could answer my questions, debate my claims, and engage with me in real time—ideally, at least. And this conversation would not merely be between we two—others might join us. The tone we may take—be it sarcastic, angry, or amused—may be written out of our communication if our words do not convey our feelings well. Our gestures are not captured by text—and neither is our tone of voice. Though, the common use of emoji and emoticons online and in text messaging is a way of reintroducing different gestures and emotions into written language—in ways that may be difficult to understand, especially if you happen to have a conversation with someone who punctuates everything with smileys, winks, and LOLs. And there are countless other ways to interact online—ways that are quite different than through a book, which, I should note, is still an interactive medium. Even when a bound codex of paper, you are actively engaging with this book as you read it, participating in the meaning it creates—though you are engaging in a way that is very different than how you would interact online. What would these words say to you if they were encountered online? Would they mean something different than the words you are currently reading? Are these questions about meaning even good enough to describe historical changes in how we communicate?

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The fear of writing The internet is not the first medium to inspire these kinds of questions. We’ve long wondered about how new forms of media change communication, going all the way back to the invention of writing itself. While language is a technology, even in the form of speech, it’s often assumed that speech has a “fullness” or “presence” that is destroyed when converted into writing (cf. Derrida 1997). Speech is thought to be less mediated, and more authentic, because of the presence of the speaker. Similar fears exist today when we think of the internet as less than real. Online interactions are often thought to be imaginary or insignificant when compared to face-to-face communication. These fears go back to the ancient Greeks. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates decries writing because written words produce the same unvarying meaning, over and over again. And once they have been written down, they promiscuously knock about the world anywhere at all, among those who understand them, and equally among those for whom they are completely unsuitable . . . if they are mistreated or unjustly slandered, they always require the author of their being to rescue them; for the book cannot protect or defend itself. (2000, 275d-e)

With writing, Socrates claims, the vitality of those engaged in dialogue is captured and killed by the dead, inert matter of the page. Writing lacks the presence of the speaker and is therefore inferior to speech. In Phaedrus, writing causes both a loss of memory and corrupts meaning, all while promising to serve as a cure for memory (Derrida 1981). Socrates’s suspicion of writing is actually about incorrect interpretations that arise from the agency of those reading. It is not that written words “produce the same unvarying meaning, over and over again,” but that the interpretation of the reader permits different meanings to be produced than what the author (or orator) intends. When his words are written down and distributed, those with whom Socrates engages are rendered invisible. He fears they are uneducated, lacking intelligence, or simply unwilling to understand his words. Many of us in media studies have a different view than Socrates. Today, the “misreadings” of the audience are thought to demonstrate how meaning is in flux, dependent on the context in which a text is read. The author of a text has no singular authority and meaning does not arise from the word alone. The control over a text’s interpretation depends on its distribution. Meaning changes depending on the specific time and place in which a text is read (see, among others, Barthes 1977, 142–48; de Certeau 1984).

Introduction  11 While Socrates seems to be talking about meaning in Phaedrus, his fears demonstrate how he is actually talking about presence as transformed through the materiality of media. His reservations about writing do not emerge from meaning lost to interpretation but from how writing initiates a different set of relations between writer and reader than the relations produced by speech— relations that he understands as lesser than those of face-to-face discussion. Writing enables ideas to become detached from the body—which, at the same time, transforms the conditions of communication from the presence of physical bodies to their absence, signified by the book that takes the place of the speaker. Perhaps Socrates’s anxieties seem abstract or dated. We often think a recording is, after all, a way of making present one who is absent. We still experience real emotions even when we are mediated, far apart (Boellstorff 2008, 151–78), and the experience of presence is far more complicated than assumptions about the physical location of a body may indicate (Hillis 2009). Socrates unintentionally points to how meaning is bound together with the specific material conditions through which information circulates—and many of our “new” fears about digital media are almost identical to ones that the Greeks had about writing. With the internet, we still ask questions about the control of information and the democratization made possible by network media’s circulation of knowledge. We are uneasy with the use of mobile phones and how they result in a loss of being present toward other people who may be physically close. We assume we’re “distracted” by an informational world that is somehow less than real. We decry the falsehoods perpetuated by contemporary media and think we’re acting in the defense of truth. Comments calling out the lies of a news article or the political biases of a Facebook post implicitly lament the inability of images and language to embody the presence of “true” events through representation. Activists online—from Wikileaks to Anonymous—are often dedicated to the exposure of the truth veiled by the representations perpetuated (and distorted) by political power, public relations, and journalistic spin (cf. Andrejevic 2013). Over and again, we encounter laments that echo Socrates and his fear of writing: the inability to control meaning, perpetuated by the circulation of mediated knowledge, inevitably leads to the perpetuation of falsehoods because our media are not as present as the real thing. Understanding meaning is important, as it is only by making meaning together that we come to understand the world and our location within it. Yet, we may think we’re talking about meaning, but we’re often talking about something else. We’re talking about the materiality of media and its capacities to both bring people together and separate them; we’re lamenting how technologies produce the limits and possibilities of communication.

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When we refuse to engage with the materiality of media, we suggest that the reading of a book is no different than having a conversation, or having a class online with hundreds of participants is no different than a small seminar. Or, conversely, we make assumptions about presence and absence, as engendered through media’s (in)ability to fully represent reality, and believe that we’re merely talking about simple matters of truth and falsity. To actually understand what media do, and to understand how this is different from what they’ve done in the past, is exceptionally difficult. Much of what we believe and fear about our technologies are echoes of the past—and to grasp the divergences and continuities between the past and the present requires us to engage with a level of specificity that may not be particularly obvious or immediately relevant.

Not under conditions of our own making Turning to the materiality of media moves us away from assumptions about how the people communicating—people like you, the reader of this book, and me, its author—are the sole agents in producing the meaning of this dialogue. Instead of fetishizing the agency of human actors alone, we have to emphasize how technology participates in shaping the world in which we live and act. This is a foundational move for materialist theories of media. We do not dismiss questions of human agency, of meaning, or of interpretation. But we must stress that the physicality of media plays a part in defining the limits and possibilities in which all of these come to matter and make sense. As you read these pages, I am not merely “speaking” to you. The materiality of this book, along with the materiality of written language (and, explicitly, the written language of English), as expressed in your ability to read and write and make sense through reading and writing, shapes how you perceive the world, how you experience time and space, how you organize knowledge, how you imagine yourself and your relation to other people, how you participate in economic exchange, how you act in society, and how you come to understand yourself in culture. The assumptions we have about bodies and minds, derived in part from the materialities of the media we use, define what is normal for human experience—along with what is abnormal and disordered (cf. Peters 1999). We come to understand proper ways of experiencing and perceiving the world, along with proper ways of relating to each other, through the material possibilities enabled by our media, both through metaphors about how minds and brains work (Carey 1988; Malabou 2008) and through literal transformations in cognition as technologies transform how we see, hear, and

Introduction  13 touch (Hansen 2004; Rotman 2008). Additionally, this book is an agent that possesses its own will—a will that cannot be understood in the same terms we use to describe human desire and agency. This book is an additional part of the conversation we are supposedly having. The same goes for language itself, which, implicitly, prevents me from expressing specific sentiments or causes me to organize my thoughts in accordance with grammatical rules and categories that shape how I understand and imagine the world. Our relations are essentially mediated, and this mediation is material and real, embodied in ways of thinking, doing, and acting. Our technologies of representation and communication do not “lack presence” because they cannot encode the totality of our world. We can only encounter our world through forms of media that permit and prohibit specific forms of engaging and knowing—and this is not a bad thing or a problem to be solved. Admitting this leads us to a conclusion that many people in media studies do not always like to admit: human beings are not autonomous determinants of history. The material reality of our world, given over from history, stored and maintained in the present through rituals, techniques, and technology, shapes the limits and possibilities of what we can do and how we can do it. We do not communicate through language, or through media. Rather, we are spoken by language. We understand ourselves in media. Our knowledge of the world does not happen apart from the material forms that organize and shape the limits of relation, knowledge, perception, and memory.

About media versus in media This brings us to a major problem for media studies: we must realize that we can never think about the materiality of media. “About” is a preposition, and it refers to where a subject is located in relation to an object. To say “We think about media” means that we are outside of media, and our thinking is directed to the area around media, ever missing a direct encounter with our object. Instead of thinking “about media,” we have to stress that we can only think in media. We are always in the middle, mediated, unable to fully grasp the trajectory in which we are engaged because we can’t step outside of material reality and take a view detached from our daily lives. Our thinking about media only happens within a medium for expressing our thoughts. But this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to think about media—we just need to be specific and be modest. There are always limits of human understanding because everything we say and do is bound together with a specific form of mediation. Because different media have different

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material capacities, we open up different ways of thinking when we think with different kinds of media. Working to understand media is a process; it is never about finding the one, singular answer to a problem. There is always more to discover and more to try to understand. Attempts to think about media should be a way of experimenting, or, to use McLuhan’s terms, probing the capacities of media (McLuhan and Carson 2003). One way of doing this is using different kinds of media to do theory. Whenever you use a different medium to make a theoretical argument, you inevitably use the materiality of that medium in constructing what you say and do. I’m presenting these arguments as a book, but they could be made using a website or even a video. But shifting the medium of expression would do something to this book, because the specific affordances of the medium I would use would change how these ideas are expressed. Theorizing media is to engage in what Brian Massumi (2011) terms “activist philosophy”—the goal is not merely to understand but to act—to be creative and to invent new ways to communicate. Medium theory is something that acts through the materiality of communication, all with an intent to understand what media does to thought, to experience, and to the world itself, without reducing media merely to that which is for the human. McLuhan happened to take this problem seriously. His works include a record titled The Medium Is the Massage (1967), in which various audio recordings are combined in a sound collage, remixed with other voices and sound effects, McLuhan’s voice modulated throughout. More than an example of 1960s’ psychedelic weirdness, McLuhan’s LP is an attempt to use audio recording to examine the material possibilities of sound as a means of expression and experience. The message isn’t found in the meaning of the words McLuhan speaks, but the specific ways of listening and presenting information an audio recording makes possible—and how that differs from what a book makes possible. As McLuhan would state, the medium is the message—not merely the meaning of his words. We do more than simply express our ideas in media. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler (1998) has argued that humans are engaged in an historical process he terms “epiphylogenesis,” or evolution through technical means. The human changes over time through technics: the arts, practices, and processes often concretized as and through technology. This means that our ability to comprehend the world in which we live is conditioned by the technologies we use, as they shape the limits of what we know and experience. The abilities of our technologies are fashioned—often unconsciously—into what we mean by “human nature.” As Stiegler claims, “Technics is the unthought” (ix; cf. Hansen 2000). They provide the means humans have for thinking about technology. Discussing them is an inherently reductive process that conflates

Introduction  15 the materiality of technology with the possibility of humans to describe what technologies are and do. I can only describe to you the function of technology insofar as I do so through a technology. My thoughts, in this case, are organized as words in a book. I can use images, or perhaps even creative effects with the text to communicate just what I’m trying to say, but I am limited by the materiality of this medium. Different materialities and meanings intersect to reveal new insights about our technologies. Movies and artworks, for instance, can communicate feelings and relations in ways that words cannot (cf. Shaviro 1993). The cuts and juxtapositions of image and sound in a film make arguments through the material possibilities the medium of film makes possible. The technical limits of communication translate—and thus, transform—what can be said about the materiality of technology itself.

From meaning to performing We find the effects of media’s materiality in the most banal, mundane attributes of daily life—attributes that may seem to be small and insignificant. I noted earlier how we often ask of our representations, “What do these words say to you? What do they mean?” What if we change these questions, replacing verbs like saying and meaning to doing and performing? What do these words do to you? What do they perform? My use of “perform” here follows the philosopher of language J. L. Austin (1975). For Austin, words do not simply describe reality. Words do things, in that they perform relations and effect material changes in people and objects. Phrases that do things are performative utterances for Austin. This sense of “perform” is not the same as a kind of theatrical acting, or a sense of pretend. Perform, here, means to cause something to happen, to do. The theorist of media and design Johanna Drucker has expanded Austin’s theories of language by applying them to the materiality of media. She claims, with media technologies, “What something is has to be understood in terms of what it does, how it works within machinic, systemic, and cultural domains” (2013). For Drucker, materiality is performative. The answer to the question “what do these words do to you?” will be different depending on what you are physically doing as you read this. I’ve been writing with the assumption that you’re reading this as a print book. But the truth may be different. Here are some questions I could ask you about what you are literally doing as you read this book, along with what these words may be doing to you, and how this may be different from other ways of reading: Are you reading these words, as so many people have for so long, in a bound, codex book? Or as

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a .pdf file on a desktop computer? As a printed .pdf that’s a bundle of loose paper? On an iPad? On an iPhone? As an .epub file or a .mobi file? Where did you purchase your copy of this book? Did you purchase it from a store? From an online marketplace? Did you borrow it from a library? Did you download a file? Did you pay for the file? Is your copy of this book pirated? Is it a photocopy? How did you get the photocopy? What were the settings on the device that made the copy? Where did the technical standards for the photocopier you used come from? How do they shape the possibilities for distributing a document? Is your copy of this book a digital scan? Did it come through an email for a class? Was it posted on a university-based learning enterprise software platform, like Blackboard or Moodle? How do you physically engage with this text? Do you write in it? Did other people write in it? What do you know about them? Can you write in it? If it is a file, what metadata are there? Is there a form of copy protection embedded in the file? Did you remove it? Will your copy of this book ever stop working? Will it decompose over time? Will the chemicals and minerals in your copy of this book kill the plants and animals it comes in contact with as it breaks down? Where did the raw material for your book come from? Where did the minerals for the circuits in your iPad come from? Where will your book go if you throw it away? How are you holding this book? Do you have a pencil to make notes in the margins? A highlighter? Where will you put this book later, when you are done with it? What will happen if it gets wet? If it gets dropped? What happens when other people look at its cover? Can other people look at its cover? Will your eyes get fatigued after reading it a while? Will your arms get tired from holding it? Do these questions bore you? Confuse you? Intrigue you? How do you experience these emotions? Where do they occur? Are they in your brain? Are they hormones and chemicals that you have little conscious control over? Is this book literally controlling how you feel? Have you answered any of these questions, or just presumed that they’re rhetorical? How do you relate to me, the author of these words? Where am I? Where are you? What is our relationship? Is there one? What is your relationship to this book? Where does this book end and the rest of the world begin? What needed to happen to get this book to you? What is the meaning, not of these words but of the thing itself, the thing you are holding in your hands and reading? How can we think of meaning in terms of doing? We may have begun with one way of thinking about “meaning,” but we’ve ended with a very different one. We’re now concerned with the significance of what media do as actors in a much larger ecology of media—an ecology that includes human bodies, technologies, and the most basic elements of our world’s environment, such as minerals and the many other raw materials

Introduction  17 used to manufacture our devices. Our books are made of paper that come from trees that once existed somewhere in this world. Our computers and tablets contain chips made of silicon, and many are filled with precious metals. The trees in our books once converted carbon dioxide to oxygen that animals would then breathe. Our electronic readers and computers are powered by energy made elsewhere, that may pollute or use up some of our planet’s most precious resources. When we dispose of our electronics, the “e-waste” it turns into may end up in Asia or Africa, burned and disposed of in ways that generate toxic chemicals that harm the bodies of people who pick through rubbish to find the precious metals that exist inside our devices. To suggest that we live in an ecology of media means that all of these elements are in a necessary relationship with each other. They are never separable, strictly speaking. But, at the same time, neither are they completely conflated as if they are a singular, holistic totality (Murphie 2004, 120). Pulling apart the things that needed to happen to get this book to you is a necessary element in understanding what media are and do. If we began with a focus on the content of the message, we’ve ended with the brute materiality of the medium through which we communicate, along with the relations that these materialities mediate. Each question above points to an entire universe of problems with how media shape the practices and relations that humans have with each other and with their technologies— problems that point to issues of the environment, of waste, of capitalist consumption, of perception, of knowledge. This book is intended to provoke you into asking new questions about the media we use—not to ask questions like “what does it mean?” but to think about the material existence of our media and ask “how does it mean?” or “what does it do?”

Chapters: Key concepts for a renewed medium theory With this introduction, I introduced some of the larger questions that guide this book as a whole, along with providing a justification for why a renewed medium theory is essential for comprehending today’s media culture. The rest of this book is a basic outline for medium theory today, with five chapters, each examining two related concepts. Chapter 1, “Representations and Performances,” surveys the problems within media studies that have led to today’s turn to the material. Media and cultural studies have, for several decades now, been characterized by textual and interpretive methods that critique the role of representation in popular culture. Even if you are familiar with some of these methods, you may need some background on why many of us no longer feel the critique of

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representation works as a political and interventionist strategy. This chapter begins by reviewing the basics of representational critique. We’ll move through the stakes and limits to representational critique and its historical relation to the politics of identity. Instead of rejecting representational critique, this chapter argues for an emphasis on performative materiality that accounts for the ability of images to do things, underwritten by the physicality of the medium. This reframes the political concerns that have been central to our understanding of representation while refusing to understand representations as less than material. Chapter 2, “Inscriptions and Techniques,” extends the theorization of performative materiality to examine two conjoined issues. First is the use of media as a means for inscription. Media permit various sensory experiences to be written down or recorded. Not all processes of inscription are about storing information through technology, at least traditionally defined. There are countless techniques or practices of performing specific acts. Techniques materially inscribe onto and into the body different ways of knowing and relating through the mastery of particular actions and abilities. This chapter introduces the relationship between technologies and embodied practice, pointing to how materiality—both of media and of the body—shapes how we understand culture, identity, and history. Chapter 3, “Spaces and Times,” examines spatiotemporal materialism. Following Marshall McLuhan, we often talk of how network technologies produce a “global village” because of newfound abilities of seeing and communicating over vast distances. Technological means for accelerating the circulation of capital and information are reflected in everyday technologies that require us to move ever faster, with our network connections on at all times, producing, in the words of Marx, the “annihilation of space by time.” This chapter considers the theoretical basis for arguments about the technological transformation of space and time. It also questions these arguments by stressing the relational character of space and time. Technologies neither produce a uniform acceleration of daily life nor collapse space for everybody. These changes in space and time only exist relationally. The experience of space and time is an issue of political and social difference. Technologies shape and manage different ways of experiencing space and time, which can serve as locations for oppression and struggle. The impact media have on the experience of space and time leads to questions of sensation and the capacities of the human brain. Chapter 4, “Bodies and Brains,” provides an overview of neurocognitive materialism through a discussion of how technology’s materiality shapes, first, sensory perception and, second, the ability of a brain to process information. It relates materialism in media studies to materialism in the philosophy of mind—

Introduction  19 two things that are not the same, but do overlap. This chapter also begins to stress why media need to be taken less as supports for human agency than as independent agents that exist, at least partially, beyond the cognitive comprehension of the human, even while they shape the human body and mind in ways often unobserved. Chapter 5, “Objects and Affects,” reviews a number of new paradigms on objects and nonhuman agencies. This chapter draws on “object-oriented ontology,” which argues that objects are fundamentally separate from human experience, along with vital materialism, which redefines life as an affective capacity for relation inherent in all material forms, from human bodies to inanimate objects. The theoretical moves of vital materialism redefine traditional understandings of agency, removing the human from the center of how we theorize politics and culture. This chapter works to synthesize theories of withdrawn objects and theories of vital entanglement, avoiding some of the questionable political implications of these theories. In reading these chapters, you will leave with a theoretical framework for understanding the materiality of technology, which will be summarized in a brief conclusion at the end of the book. Many of our most pressing political concerns range from the material practices of social media to the role of technology in polluting and fundamentally reshaping our environment. We must think about the materiality of media if we desire to change our reality for the better, for it is only in the materiality of media that we come to understand who we are, how we relate to others, and how we relate to the world.

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Bodies in games If you were to tell me something about the video game heroine Lara Croft, what would you say? Croft, the star of the Tomb Raider series, has been a video game icon from her 1990s’ debut on the Sony PlayStation gaming console to the recent Shadow of the Tomb Raider in 2018, ubiquitous not only in the gaming world but elsewhere in popular culture as well. As a fictional character, you most likely wouldn’t mention something about her materiality, though if you did, you could talk about the mathematical coding that determines Croft’s actions in a video game to the mechanical and digital techniques that produce her image on a printed page. If you’re thinking about the more recent editions of the Tomb Raider franchise, you could discuss technologies of motion capture. If you’re more cinematically inclined, you could focus on Angelina Jolie’s performance as Croft in the 2001 film adaptation Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, or Alicia Vikander in the 2018 film Tomb Raider. You could examine techniques of makeup, costuming, lighting, editing, staging, props, set design, digital video effects, and so on, perhaps even extending your comments to the body of the actor and the techniques employed in her performance.1 But, if you’ve been through a media studies class before, when prompted with this question you’d probably talk about something else. In media studies, the usual treatment of figures like Croft is to examine what they signify. We tend to not think about the materiality of the medium when analyzing popular culture. Images produce—or perhaps even substitute for—reality. We ask, what does Lara Croft mean as a representation of women? Is she a symbol of feminine empowerment? She is, after all, still one of the few examples of a female video game character that appears to have any agency whatsoever, amazingly. At the same time, Croft has historically been rendered with bodily proportions that position her as a sexual object for (assumedly) heterosexual male gamers,

Alex Bevan’s Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV (2019) is a good example of thinking through the materiality of representation in popular television, paying attention to the role of props and production design in generating the “meaning” of a TV show.

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located as they are from a third-person perspective that directs one’s vision to the posterior of the gaming avatar—proportions noticeably changed in the more recent versions of the Tomb Raider franchise. But does this even matter? Does it make sense to critique a video game in terms of the bodies it represents? The video game scholar Espen Aarseth has notoriously claimed that “the dimensions of Lara Croft’s body, already analyzed to death by film theorists, are irrelevant to me as a player, because a different-looking body would not make me play differently. When I play, I don’t even see her body, but see through it and past it” (1997, 1). For Aarseth, what a game represents does not matter at all—what matters is the mechanics and design of the game itself. Is this true? Even if we do not follow Aarseth and, instead, claim that representations do matter, we still can’t really say if a particular representation is good or bad.2 Is Croft and Tomb Raider bad for women or good for women? Progressive or regressive? These questions—along with the example of Croft—have gotten to a point that many scholars who study representation in video games (along with other forms of media) are simply tired of these critiques. Both these questions, and this example, have been around for over decades now. Nobody seems to agree, and dwelling on these images may seem, to many, to just be exhausted and exhausting. No single reading of Croft is without its complications, but the undecidability of interpreting her points to perceived problems about how we judge and comment on media and popular culture. If we can’t claim, definitively, what something means, then how can we comment on it at all? A long-standing dismissal of media studies and other fields that rely on interpretive methods is that one can never find the single, true interpretation of a text, and therefore all interpretations are valid. Where philosophical investigations into art and culture were once intended to judge quality, defining the beautiful, the good, and the true, we have long realized how these matters of aesthetics are a result of subjective tastes that emerge from relations defined by class and identity (e.g., Bourdieu 1984). But without the ability to judge, then what is interpretive criticism supposed to do? Apparently, if the debate over what something means cannot be settled, then there is no real meaning and nothing is true. (If you ever hear someone dismiss something as “postmodern relativism,” this is what they are suggesting.) This is a gross misrepresentation of interpretive methods, but the appeal to truth, be it quantitative or material, is seductive as it appears to solve the problem of interpretation. And today, this turn has morphed into the justification for a rejection of attention toward representation as such, one that extends beyond media studies into larger issues of political representation. My claims about Tomb Raider and its interpretation throughout this chapter are heavily indebted to Kennedy (2002).

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If a renewed medium theory should be thought of as a paradigm for the future of media studies, as I am claiming, then I have to demonstrate why the rejection of representational critique has happened and if this rejection is even a necessary development. Often those discussing the turn to materiality act as if this massive reorientation of media studies has simple causes and simple results. Media are material, period. It’s amazing we didn’t notice this until now, this logic seems to follow, as if many of us were simply absorbed in irrelevant “immaterial” details for decades—such as the narrative logic of television programs, what audiences think or do with the media they consume, or how professional and economic factors shape how the news is made—when the real action happens elsewhere. This dismissal is disingenuous at best, and cynical or simply ignorant at worst—and comes with a limited understanding of what “materiality” is, to begin with. Rejecting the entire history of representational critique suggests that critical interventions about popular representation have had no significant impact in daily life. This perspective does not reflect the real history of making, critiquing, and consuming media, along with the central role the struggle over representation has had in the advancement of civil rights around issues of identity. Consequentially, I want to give a more nuanced understanding of the turn to the material by placing current methodological transformations in dialogue with larger feelings of exhaustion toward representational critique, all while arguing that the critique of representation is an essential part of what media studies does and should continue to do. This is why I’m using Lara Croft and Tomb Raider as an example—many people find this discussion exhausting and are tired of hearing about Croft and representation. Yet we should acknowledge that we must think critically about how female bodies are represented in games, and Croft still provides the most prominent example, in part because of how long she’s been around and how she’s changed over time. In fact, she’s an excellent—though not perfect—example of how the critique of representation leads to productive changes in the material forms and images that bodies take in popular culture, something that’s only visible today given the most recent examples of the Tomb Raider franchise. At the same time, I want to stress that representational critique must acknowledge the materiality of media. This results in a vastly different set of intents and goals in the transformation of representation. Beginning with Croft, who will reappear sporadically throughout this chapter, I’m going to first give an overview of how critical and cultural perspectives have traditionally examined media representations, along with general political claims that rely on the representational critique of media. I then extend these political concerns—which are often articulated

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to the politics of identity—to other larger shifts in academic knowledge, which include the rejection of incorrect claims about the immateriality of information and historical battles between realism and idealism in Western philosophy. This chapter reviews material you may already be very familiar with—this is especially the case for those who have a background in theoretical positions common throughout media and cultural studies. But I’m reviewing these potions to outline three intersecting reasons that inform the turn to the material in recent years. First, there is an overwhelming feeling (if one that is not correct) that the critique of representation (e.g., claiming Lara Croft represents women in an empowering or disempowering way) has little to no political effect in contemporary political reality. Second, the belief that media is immaterial and detached from physical devices—a popular belief in 1990s’ discussions of cyberspace that persists today— is simply false. And third, realist perspectives have achieved dominance over idealist or constructivist ones in many fields. In short, realism argues that there is an external world that depends little (or not at all) on human experience and perception, while idealism and constructivism argue, in numerous ways, that human consciousness or language plays a part in producing reality. Together, these three claims are taken to mean that representational critique is best left behind as a relic of a past age. If we wish to challenge this idea, then we have to begin by outlining why these claims happened. As this chapter attempts to work through the logic of why various turns to materiality have happened, it’s important to note that I’ll be summarizing positions that I do not completely agree with, especially when it comes to those that act as if a hard line between materiality and representation can be maintained. And to be clear, any suggestion that we should leave representation and identity behind is misguided. The idea that representation is irrelevant today should be thought of as a reactionary position which, intentionally or not, works to legitimate discrimination, prejudice, and hatred. It’s obvious from the political struggles ongoing as I write that questions of identitarian discrimination are not a thing of the past, and thinking that they are is a seriously limited and privileged way of understanding the world. We should not disregard the clear political stakes representational critique has long had in favor of a materiality that seems to demonstrate how the focus of media studies has been misled by identity, images, and language (cf. Sterne 2014). Doing this would be a mistake, perpetuating a conservatism that simply disregards the long history representational critique has played in understanding and intervening in political struggles. But, at the same time, we cannot act as if language and images are everything or are detached from the physical materiality of media.



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Thus, I conclude this chapter with an examination of some materialist feminist positions, derived from the work of Judith Butler and Karen Barad, to foreground a way of conceptualizing materiality that keeps in mind political claims often dismissed because of a knee-jerk rejection of all things that seem less than material because they are constructed or representational. Through Butler and Barad, I suggest that representations should be rethought as material, performative practices—images do not represent, as an ephemeral stand-in for something else, but they do things in and of themselves, with material effects in organizing bodies, objects, and relations in the real world. Images and representations should be rethought through their performative materiality. This chapter will thus orient you to ask political questions about technological materiality. These questions do not reject the concerns of representational critique, but conceptualize them in a way that acknowledges how representations (and their politics) must be articulated to physical reality and material practice.

The exhaustion of representational critique At the time of her appearance, Lara Croft was one of the few playable female characters in gaming—a fact that has remained only marginally unchanged in the more than twenty years that have passed since the original Tomb Raider was released. If one restricts their attention to mainstream, triple-A games, Croft’s exceptionalism is even more apparent. Initially, she was part of a marketing ploy designed to attract women to video games (Kennedy 2002). Croft was featured on the cover of popular magazines designed to engage women, but she was additionally depicted as an object for male desire. While the game market, then defined by Nintendo and Sony, was attempting to open spaces for female gamers, it was also clear to circumscribe what was supposedly its “real” audience: young men and boys, whose embrace of Tomb Raider emphasized the ability of Croft to be viewed, manipulated, and controlled by men. One could easily conclude Croft to be another tool of a misogynistic culture industry, a product of sexism that perpetuates specific images of women as desirable at the expense of narrowing the possibilities for identification presented to women in mainstream media. Traditional feminist understandings of representation—for instance, the critique that rightfully points out how women, especially in the history of art and film, are presented as passive objects for consumption by active males (Berger 1972, 47; Mulvey 1975)—have a difficult time grasping the contradictions presented by gaming media. Croft, after all, is active, not

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passive. One must play her to advance in the game. Nonetheless, the game could be said to reaffirm patriarchy as Croft acts as an extension of the agency of male players, not as a character that genuinely possesses active agency. But gamers are not only male, and many female gamers feel empowered by the mere existence of Croft as a heroine, even if she has been modeled in accordance with a specific version of a male fantasy about female bodies. Gamers—regardless of gender—can interpret Croft however they may like, subverting dominant understandings of patriarchy because of her role as the main character of the game. The meaning of Lara Croft is poised at the junction of empowerment and oppression, forever undecidable because of the varied cultural trajectories into which she could be placed (cf. Kennedy 2002; Deuber-Mankowsky 2005). To understand this undecidability requires us to review some of the most basic assumptions of media critique.

Identification and ideology Tomb Raider presents us with a problem that has only become more pronounced in recent years. Media studies traditionally exist at the intersection of a number of different critical and conceptual perspectives about how media represent things. Lara Croft is a representation, standing in for a general category of “women.” A representation is, among other things, a point of identification. When we see ourselves in what is represented on the screen, we accept a way of viewing the world as natural or normal. If the world we see appears realistic, it’s because we locate ourselves in images and recognize them as true. This understanding of the relations between people and mediated images is often presented in terms of ideology critique. Representations are ideological: they are imaginary forms that conceal what is going on beneath appearances, showing us a naturalized image of how specific kinds of bodies act and relate to other bodies. Representations perpetuate the interests of dominant classes so we accept various relations of power as natural—from capitalism and patriarchy to homophobia and ableism. In identifying with what is represented, we are coerced into believing and doing things we wouldn’t inherently believe or do. The point of critique is to unmask ideology, to demonstrate how Croft stands in for and legitimates larger, oppressive social processes (like patriarchy). The identifications we have with media representations, such as those that happen when we “relate” to someone on TV or “identify” with a video game character, are ultimately distortions that cover over the reality of domination and subjugation. Unmasking the effects of ideology stems from the critical tradition in media studies. In academic parlance, critique does not mean “to criticize something negatively.” To critique is not to point out flaws, but rather to



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closely investigate a text, artwork, game, or any other representational form and to disclose meanings and interpretations that are not inherently there on the surface. Critique is the evaluative process of uncovering deeper meanings that may not be obviously visible. In media studies, the model of critique we use tells us that representations conceal, and the task for critical academic work on media is to unmask that which is concealed by the surfaces of popular representations. This ideological process is even more evident given the interactivity of digital media. Video games seem to interpellate gamers in a new and powerful way. Interpellation is a concept developed by the French Marxist Louis Althusser (2001). According to Althusser, ideology works by hailing people into specific subject positions. He explains interpellation with the following example. When a police officer yells “Hey you!” we often assume that we are the one being yelled at, recognizing ourselves as the subject of the call. For Althusser, ideology works in the same way. Ideology calls or hails us, and in return we recognize ourselves as the subject of an ideology. Through school, church, or any of the other countless institutions that educate us in proper behavior, we come to recognize ourselves as “men” and “women,” as “capitalists” and “citizens,” as “students” and “teachers.” We are hailed into these categories, and we recognize ourselves in them, by way of what Althusser refers to as Ideological State Apparatuses: institutions that shape what we think of as proper behavior through the crafting of identity categories. While we obey many laws because of the threat of police violence and prison (which Althusser terms the Repressive State Apparatus), most of the time we follow specific ways of acting of our own volition, without any threat of the police coming to take us away. We embrace ideology not because we’re duped by images, but because we understand the foundations of our identities through a personal history of institutions that shape us in numerous, often contradictory ways. When we make positive statements about who we are, using categories like “parent” and “child,” or “professor” and “student,” or “jock” and “gamer,” we are repeating a history of interpellations, concatenated into a single word or image that comes to stand for who we are and how we imagine ourselves to be in relation to other people. Video games, because we interact with them, position us in the subject position of, say, “misogynist” exceptionally well. This is especially true of many games, like the Grand Theft Auto series, that include overtly sexist representations of women, including them in few roles beyond those explicitly for male consumption (such as stripper or prostitute, or love interest); it also occurs in games in which female characters appear to be more than mere objects for the male characters of the game. With Tomb Raider, we literally experience the game from the viewing position of one who manipulates the

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female character, controlling her how we wish, all while viewing her from behind. Games demand us to accept these ideological positions as natural, consequentially legitimating discriminatory, if not outright hateful ideologies that maintain boundaries between the dominant and the oppressed in the name of a “nature” produced by technologies, institutions, and discourses. One task of media critique is to disclose these relations concealed by identity categories, showing how identities do not have fixed meanings but are instead processes into which we have been indoctrinated through cultural and institutional forms. If we claim to be a “gamer,” we implicitly do so with a set of beliefs about what “real” gamers are that intersects with other identity categories and a range of acts defined as proper or improper—and in our current context, this subject position is implicitly male and heterosexual (Kirkpatrick 2013), which Tomb Raider perpetuates by literally locating us as a subject who looks, consumes, and controls the body of a female character.

Active interpretation and hegemony But, you may be objecting, what about those who do, in fact, feel empowered by Croft? What about female gamers who struggle against the narrow limits of how “gamer” is often understood? Or those who enjoy Tomb Raider even while aware of the problems with how it represents women? Another tradition for understanding media representation comes from cultural studies research on audiences, especially Stuart Hall’s famous essay “Encoding/Decoding” (1980). Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model stresses how the decoding of a message may not mirror its encoding. This is quite different from most theories in the history of media and communications research, where messages have been thought to obey transmission or hypodermic needle models of information (see Carey 1988, 13–36). When you hear news stories about how video games cause violence, or pornography triggers sexual deviance, you’re hearing a popular version of the transmission model of communication. Information moves from producer, through the channels of communication, and causes an effect in the mind of the viewer with little to no conscious input on behalf of the individual held rapt in the glowing light of the screen (or, for that matter, little input from the medium of communication, either). The content of a representation, like a drug in a hypodermic needle, is injected into the mind of the viewer, producing autonomous and autonomic responses in the viewer’s body through the movement of ideas. Some versions of ideology critique assume media’s power to operate in this way, like a hypodermic needle. Ideology and meaning move from a game or TV show into the mind of the viewer, as if injected like a drug, producing a false consciousness that distorts the reality going on beyond what one may



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experience as real and true. Ideology is assumed to move from producer into the heads of individual consumers as if there’s never any difficulty in transmission, as if there’s no problem with audience identification—or, for that matter, as if no films, television shows, or video games contain morally ambiguous, contradictory antiheroes as protagonists, which audience members aren’t supposed to identify with in unproblematic ways (even though many people still do, as can be seen with fan adoration of sociopathic characters like Breaking Bad’s Walter White, The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano, or Grand Theft Auto V’s Trevor Philips). Equating ideology with an injected false consciousness tends to ignore how individuals and communities often interpret the meaning of messages in ways completely opposed to the (conscious or nonconscious) intent of the creator. The Encoding/Decoding model presents us with an alternative. While texts are encoded with a specific meaning that usually perpetuates dominant ideologies, audiences are creative. Many decode popular culture in ways that may repeat the dominant ideologies encoded into texts, but they may also resist or negotiate these ideologies as well, interpreting a text in a way that is antithetical to the creator’s intent. The author is effectively “dead” (Barthes 1977, 142–48) because the true control of a text’s meaning for a reader comes not from the text itself, but from the context in which it is read. From soap operas (Ang 1985) to romance novels (Radway 1984), to news programming (Morley and Brundson 1999), to social media (Jenkins 2006), audiences “poach” meanings from the texts they consume and change them in accordance with the specific situations in which they live (de Certeau 1984). This returns us to the contradictions we’ve seen about Lara Croft—is Croft a symbol of patriarchy? Are women gamers who identify with Croft interpellated into identifying with a specific image of woman as desirable, an image that clearly perpetuates bodily norms derived from (a rather reductive) male fantasy? Or are they active “poachers” of the text, reveling in the abilities of Croft as an empowered agent in spite of any surrounding patriarchal norms that may shape Croft’s appearance? The answer to all of these questions is “yes.” Lara Croft is simultaneously a veil for the propagation of patriarchal ideology and a site for the investment of fans to find “empowerment” through the media they consume. She is a point in which different struggles over identity and representation are made manifest. This contradiction is central to how cultural studies scholars have long understood the concept of hegemony, as derived from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (1971). Gramsci was a politician and the onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy, imprisoned, in spite of his parliamentary immunity, by Benito Mussolini. In prison, Gramsci

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constructed an elaborate reading of Italian history using “hegemony,” a thenoverlooked term from Marx, to describe how those in power only maintain power through the active consent of the governed. Hegemonic power is secured through the interests of the state as negotiated with the will of the people. Power isn’t sustained by mental delusions perpetuated through the images of the mass media. Hegemony must be secured actively, and the grounds upon which it is negotiated constantly change. In cultural studies analyses of media, hegemony is taken to describe how representations change over time, often through the active negotiation of audiences who demand different meanings and representations from the media they consume. What is represented in popular culture changes radically, if slowly—and these changes happen through the active role audiences have in consuming, engaging with, and challenging the texts they consume. Many of those who stress hegemony tend to act as if the agency of the audience is an inherently positive thing, as it means that people aren’t duped by ideology in the way assumed by the transmission model-based versions of ideology critique. Yet the reality is far more frightening. Emphasizing hegemony means we consent to our own domination. We are not deceived by ideology. We often enjoy and deeply attach ourselves to the identities into which we have been interpellated, expressing outrage and anger when these identities are challenged. We actively desire our own oppression (cf. Žižek 1989). There are often positive political effects that come from claiming something as “natural,” or biologically given, identifying oneself as an individual with an identity that is stable and fixed. But to do so also means that one embraces a specific—and ideological—version of social order as static and unchangeable. If we are not demanding things to be different, including the possibilities and limits for our own identities, then we consent to that which we may vehemently disagree with. In her classic work Reading the Romance, Janice Radway (1984) discovered that a group of Midwestern romance novel readers were not mindlessly embracing patriarchal norms encoded into the books they read, as feminist critiques of romance novels have often suggested, assuming readers to be duped by patriarchy, accepting the relations depicted in the books (and on their covers) without question. Romance novels regularly feature narrative arcs in which women find satisfaction only through traditional heterosexual relationships, often with male characters clearly dominant and female characters subservient, sometimes with male characters even violently abusing female protagonists. But Radway found that the actual consumption of these novels was far more complex than their traditional critique would suggest. The women Radway studied were not mindlessly consuming the novels but instead using them to form a community in which the everyday



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disappointments of their daily lives were negotiated with a fantasy of sexual and romantic fulfillment unavailable to them otherwise. The romance novels enabled the women to cope with hardships produced by the patriarchal relationships that they had to live with. They were not embracing the messages in the novels uncritically—in fact, the tastes of the women Radway studied reflected a rejection of passive female characters or scenes of sexual violence. Yet, as Radway makes clear, this doesn’t mean that these readers were subverting the patriarchal message of the novels. Through the novels, readers would consent to patriarchy actively, both as a community and through scenarios where the failures of patriarchy are saved through fantasies of emotional satisfaction and “empowered” heroines in idealized heterosexual relationships. As Radway concludes, In summary, when the act of romance reading is viewed as it is by the readers themselves, from within a belief system that accepts as given the institutions of heterosexuality and monogamous marriage, it can be conceived as an activity of mild protest and longing for reform necessitated by those institutions’ failure to satisfy the emotional needs of women. . . . At the same time, however, when viewed from the vantage point of a feminism that would like to see the women’s oppositional impulse lead to real social change, romance reading can also be seen as an activity that could potentially disarm that impulse. It might do so because it supplies vicariously those very needs and requirements that might otherwise be formulated as demands in the real world and lead to the potential restructuring of sexual relations. (213)

Hegemony is the active consent that covers over and maintains these contradictions of daily life. Feelings of happiness or fulfillment, which will inevitably be fleeting for the vast majority of people (in part because capitalism requires you to be unhappy so you continue to purchase things that will supposedly make you happy), are used as temporary stopgaps that cover over the limits of a specific worldview. The ability of romance novels to act simultaneously as a form of minor empowerment and a means for inoculating against social protest suggests that there is an essentially negotiated relationship between popular culture, daily life, and political change. The contradictions in the reading of Lara Croft emerge because of how hegemony works. Her empowerment as an active character exists to open up a space for women to locate themselves, finding their own empowerment in a figure that nonetheless perpetuates bodily ideals that subjugate women to male desire. This is, in fact, why you should be suspicious of any

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argument that claims something to be benign because someone says they feel empowered by it. For sure, this feeling is real. It’s best to presume that one genuinely feels empowered when they say they are. But the experience of empowerment, and the consent that emerges from this feeling, is one of the major ways hegemony is secured. The transformation of Croft over time—her current incarnation is vastly different than her original one and does not appear to be as overtly sexist as she once was—develops out of negotiations between audiences and producers. In these negotiations, members of the latter often continue to be massively sexist and violently misogynistic in their portrayal of women in video games, while members of the former accept these representations as normal or natural ways for video games to depict women. The moments that these negotiations break down can result in controversies, conflicts, and debates that may have socially progressive outcomes (though, as Stuart Hall often reminded us, there is no guarantee to the outcome of any political struggle—these moments where hegemony breaks down could, in fact, lead to further oppression). Empowerment, in this case, actually prevents negotiations from happening, stalling political change because of the temporary satisfaction one may have with how hegemony has been secured at any one point in time. Unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and being a killjoy can actually be progressive, leading to a renegotiation of hegemony and an opening for political change (cf. Ahmed 2010).

Media representations and political representation There is something intrinsically political in the critique of representation, especially when it comes to the presence of marginalized or nonnormative identities in popular culture. Seeing yourself represented in an abstract way—if only as a female character in a video game that isn’t merely a princess to be saved—is essential for the politics of media. Understanding why this is requires us to move beyond popular culture. “To be public in the West means to have an iconicity,” claims the theorist Michael Warner (2002, 169). When Warner uses the word “public” he refers to the sphere of collaborative political discussion and engagement that emerges through the circulation of discourse in everyday life. To be public is to be acknowledged as a political actor, as a citizen of a state who is worthy of representation and who possesses state-granted rights and abilities as given under law. Locating oneself in public discourse means occupying a position in which bodily identity visibly conforms to norms negotiated in popular culture, legible to others as something that exists within the range of possible public identities—as seen on television, in newspapers, in film, or in any other



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form of media. The ability to enter into the political sphere (as one who has specific interests addressed by “politics”) rests on the ability to identify and locate oneself within a subject position that makes sense to the political order. To be represented in a democracy is directly articulated to media representation of identities, behaviors, and norms. This means that various marginal identities quite simply do not enter into the political sphere until they can be recognized as valid subject positions in popular culture. The struggle over representation—which happens over long, protracted periods of time—is central to the acknowledgment that certain kinds of people and certain identities can be acknowledged as subjects, period. (This is one of the reasons why, as I write this, there’s a major struggle to get transgender actors to portray transgender roles in film and television, along with narratives that depict the complexity of trans experience. Having these stories depicted, portrayed by trans actors, enables trans individuals to be “legible” in popular culture and able to enter into “public”—even though this entry into the public inherently comes with restrictive assumptions about proper and improper behaviors that are perpetually renegotiated.) We embrace the positions into which we are interpellated actively. If we didn’t, we would be unable to enter into public as one with any political agency whatsoever. We would effectively be illegible to political institutional bodies. Popular representations serve as preconditions for political representation. Versions of this model have been foundational for media studies over the past several decades. But the critique of representation seems to be, to many, exhausted as a form of political intervention. Critique appears to lack the same political potency it once had (Latour 2004; Andrejevic 2013), as if it merely tells the same story over and over again—not to mention a story that most people know, anyway. We can see through the ideology perpetuated by popular culture and still enjoy what we consume, even if its meaning is one we may find fundamentally offensive. Marx once suggested that the classical understanding of ideology as false consciousness is that we don’t know what we’re doing, but we do it anyway. Today we know very well what we’re doing, and yet we do it anyway—we have an “enlightened false consciousness” (Žižek 1989). Ideology does not dupe us into acting against our interests because we may be quite aware that our actions do not follow from our own self-interest or ideals. We have a “cynical” or pessimistic relation to ideology. This may indicate the ultimate victory of ideology—not that it “dupes” us, but that we’re aware of ideology and yet do not challenge it (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, 167). Our active consent is simply granted to the hegemonic order because it seems as if we do not care or do not feel like we can do anything, anyway. If ideology is visible and obvious to a large number of individuals and yet still structures social relations, then we live in a world

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in which we simply accept differential power relations in spite of beliefs that sexism, classism, homophobia, racism, ableism, and so on are wrong and should be challenged. The inability to settle on whether or not a figure like Lara Croft is empowering or oppressive is, today, not taken as evidence for popular culture as a continued site of hegemonic struggle in contemporary media critique—one that has been very successful! The fact that Croft looks very different today than in her earliest incarnations should be taken as evidence that the struggle over representation has led to more equitable images in games, acknowledging a broader range of game players than the young men and boys that were the assumed audience for Tomb Raider in the 1990s. Yet, this undecidability is instead thought to reflect an inability to make normative claims about what representations do. Rather than evidence for the contingencies of hegemony, this undecidability is troublingly used to dismiss representational critique as the pointless arguing over subjective interpretations, telling us little about the role of popular culture in shaping lived political reality. This is not simply a problem relegated to representation through media. In fact, the political exhaustion with the struggle over representation is perhaps more easily observed. Various anarchist projects, best seen in the numerous movements derived from Occupy Wall Street around 2011 and 2012, reject a political model based around representation, in part because the hegemonic machinations of power exclude political positions beyond the narrow limits of a few alternatives that, to many, seem to be variations on a nearly identical theme. One of the organizing principles of Occupy was an unwillingness to define a clear leader or list of demands. In refusing to define itself, Occupy (at least in theory, if not reality) attempted to provide a model for political action that resists figures that stand in for and represent other people. Consenting to political representation involves a necessary exclusion of political alternatives in the name of specific people who come to stand in as representatives of larger bodies. But, as it is for identity representation in the media, consenting to these political representatives—usually elected officials, as well as any individual who stands and speaks for larger groups of people, which Gramsci referred to as “organic intellectuals”—involves a level of self-abstraction. Our representatives never represent us fully but are sites for the negotiation of numerous conflicts and struggles. This process of representation is increasingly seen as something that inherently negates or distorts the will of the people. Representation, this argument goes, makes democracy fundamentally impossible because the will of the people is mediated out of existence in the name of preexisting political structures designed to make sure those in power stay in power. In short, contemporary



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politics is increasingly permeated with the belief that the only outcome of processes of representation is to guarantee that one is never represented. This development is not particularly new but is rather part of a long-term transformation in the relationship between representation and the political. In their landmark study Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall and his coauthors argued that the late 1970s pointed toward the “exhaustion of consent,” in which the negotiations of hegemony are replaced with a “managed dissensus” as a means for the political right to maintain permanent conservative dominance (1978, 238). Instead of the active negotiation of consent, moral panics and fears of Otherness (articulated to overblown, white, middle-class anxieties about race and mugging in Policing the Crisis) are employed to ensure that hegemony can never be secured in the way described by Gramsci, reorienting the field in which politics takes place through a renegotiation of how specific subjects are located within popular culture. Transformations in how individuals are represented in the media reframe how they are located in political discourse, either as “acceptable” citizens to be acknowledged by political representatives or as subjects who do not and cannot enter into the sphere of political representation—the exclusion of which serves to make the social seem like an organized, coherent, egalitarian body, even when born out of exclusion and inequality. The fact that Black Lives Matter even exists, for instance, demonstrates that, when it comes to the lived reality of race, political representation, and—in this case—policies that regulate police violence, black bodies (and their lives) have been positioned as things that effectively do not “matter” and are neither represented nor acknowledged by institutional politics. Media representations of race perpetuate and legitimate—or transform—how black lives do or do not matter in larger political discourse.3 This everyday experience is reproduced in contemporary political philosophy as well, in which a collective, inclusive articulation of “we” as a political force is assumed to be impossible (Holloway 2010, 5). Since the 1970s, there has been a gradual loss of faith in representational bodies as those on the margins point out how they have been excluded from the limits of hegemony throughout history. Seemingly transcendental subjects that have determined historical struggles throughout modern Western society (Man and Women, the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat) are themselves formed out of lines between the included and the excluded. “Man” never included all humans, “Women” never included all women, and the “Working Class” For an excellent and complex interpretation of Black Lives Matter and its relation to themes relevant to this book, one that acknowledges, but moves far beyond claims like the one I make here, see Towns (2018).

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did not include all laborers. The unity of these categories, in fact, was only formed out of negative exclusions that define what is only through what is not, again returning us to questions of representation that bleed between the sphere of the political and popular media. Since the 1970s, organizations that serve to advance the rights of women, for instance, have often been criticized because they overlook the specific struggles of women of color, of lesbians, of transgender women and men. The interests of labor organizations often appear at odds with other identity-based groups that would seem to have similar economic interests. Almost any political group has suffered the same fate. Our alliances have been built not on collaboration, but on opposition and difference—and the awareness of this fact has not resolved these issues. Rather, increasingly divided political bodies are fragmented to the point of meaninglessness. The inability of different interests to form alliances has been a perpetual weakness among the left for decades at this point. When someone speaks for a “we” there is inevitably the question, who does this “we” actually represent? Who is excluded? Whose interests are being spoken for? Whose are silenced? But instead of working for a more inclusive, more representative democracy that embraces a proliferation of different, often competing interests, the entire project of representation is presented as something that intrinsically distorts or excludes. The negotiation of consent is exhausted in favor of managed dissensus—if that. This seems to be quite a distance away from Lara Croft and Tomb Raider. Yet the problems highlighted by these two forms of representation are roughly analogous. Who’s to say what’s empowering or disempowering? The ability to make claims about what media representations do depends on larger assertions about the interests of groups being represented—and when individuals interpret images in radically different ways, then claiming authority about what an image does is implicitly assumed to silence the voice of those who have different readings. This position can be claimed both by those critiquing representations from a leftist, multiculturalist, pluralist position and one historically articulated to patriarchy, misogyny, and other dominant ideologies. The ability of individuals to creatively read texts in oppositional or subversive ways is taken to mean that we live in a “semiotic democracy” (Fiske 1987) because the authority to claim a representation as empowering or disempowering is undermined through processes analogous to the undermining of political representation. To say Lara Croft is anything means that one has to have in mind, in advance, a specific understanding of “woman” that can be represented in an empowering or disempowering way. Because identities effectively have no essence but are instead the result of historical struggles, contextually defining what is included and excluded in the name of a specific category, this line of thought suggests the meaning



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of a representation is merely in the mind of the individual. In the end, the only grounds we have left on which to evaluate the political effects of media representations are the feelings experienced by an individual. Is Croft empowering? Is she disempowering? Assumedly, these questions can only be answered through the weak affects experienced by individual gamers who either do or do not relate to the characters they see on the screen. Larger historical struggles are neglected in favor of individual emotional responses toward images and what they do, as if the response to interpellation can be understood through an individual finding a specific image relatable or accurate in what it represents.

The end of representational critique? This impasse is compounded through the internet and, interestingly, the historical success media studies educators have had with teaching the methods of representational critique. The critique of representation is everywhere online, and so is debate over what constitutes critique, who critiques, what assumptions are made in critique, and so on—often in ways that are politically regressive in outright violent ways. For instance, Anita Sarkeesian’s website Feminist Frequency, with its video series “Tropes vs. Women,” investigates the legacy of sexist representations that continue to proliferate in video games. For the apparent “sin” of pointing out this sexist heritage, Sarkeesian has been brutally harassed by “men’s rights” activists online as they defend the identity of the “gamer” as a specific version of masculinity that inherently excludes women—and inherently perpetuates sexist images of women (cf. Kirkpatrick 2013, 89–91; Sandifer 2017). One response to the “Tropes vs. Women” videos was a game titled “Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian,” in which players were directed to inflict violence against Sarkeesian, here reduced—in a way that should be familiar to us at this point—to an image in the service of the desires of (assumedly) male gamers. With every “Tropes vs. Women” video, Sarkeesian has been subjected to violent threats from those who, in a particularly odd argumentative turn, claim that, among other things, Sarkeesian is prejudiced against men, misogyny doesn’t actually exist, and the entire series of videos is intended to marginalize the already marginal “gamer” identity—a series of attacks that have exploded in larger controversies about misogyny in gaming and “Gamergate.” The violence against Sarkeesian and “Tropes vs. Women” demonstrates both why representational critique is necessary but, at the same time, how the intense debate fostered by the multiplicity of voices online—along with the investment in identity categories that are, in essence, ideological—has led to frustration because of the inability of critique to seemingly do anything other than producing disagreement, fragmentation,

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and conflict. Anyone is able to claim the status of victim, and the debate over the politics of representation mutates into a battle between dueling claims of marginality (cf. Brown 1995). So, if representational critique seems to be a dead end, what is to be done? Now, I’m not claiming representational critique is a dead end, just that many people seem to feel that it is exhausted as a political strategy. One of the answers given by some of today’s political movements is to resist representation. Political theorist John Holloway, for instance, claims that the “scream” of refusal heard around the world, found in the dispersed uprisings and conflicts around the globe that may not have anything to do with each other, is enough to engage positive political change. An affective utterance without any specific meaning or identity associated with it, a scream is enough to unite the various marginalized peoples throughout the world without any sense of representation. We do not need to make declarations about how the world ought to be—it is merely enough to claim, out of frustration and rage, that it needs to be different (2010, 2). The influential theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004) refer to something similar with their concept of “the multitude,” a unity that exists and comes together to act as a “people” without any normative form of representation. Anarchist social movements like those of Occupy follow—at least to some extent— these ideals. These movements are organized through the premise that true democracy can come into being without representation, without an image of the ideal political individual, without larger bodies that inevitably exclude, distort, and limit the grounds for political representation. Similar arguments underpin other movements for direct democracy, political self-organization, or anarchist direct action. But what happens to media representation? These ways of imagining politics without representation act as if media play little to no part in the reality of political action. Yet the ability to be acknowledged as a political actor happens not only in the sphere of politics but also in popular culture. And, more importantly, what happens to the concerns of representational critique? Too hastily the points that representational critique makes in the name of advancing justice and equality are neglected, as they are assumed to be mere issues of media representation and nothing more. Social divisions, forms of power and oppression, the delegitimation of specific subjectivities and ways of being—these are all ignored as somehow less than real. Moving beyond representation is thought to eliminate these struggles, as if the power of images is somehow less than material, as if getting rid of representation will eliminate historical injustices committed in its name. But even nonrepresentational political movements like Occupy perpetuate differential models of power in which some identities find representation and others



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are ignored and rendered voiceless, even when representation seems to be removed from the political field. Specific ways of acting and being, specific concerns articulated to kinds of identity and class, specific political interests that require representation: all these were often ignored by the General Assemblies at Occupy (implicitly privileging white, male, heterosexual bodies), even when collective representations were excluded from the outset of their democratic order (see Sharma 2014a). While we may never be able to say what Lara Croft represents, even after the supposed exhaustion of representational critique we cannot afford to ignore how representation is, in fact, a material practice with material effects.

From realism to idealism . . . The narrative told above is incomplete, as it only describes the role of representation as used in media studies for the past several decades, especially as articulated to the politics of identity. There’s more to representation than identity alone, though the concerns and questions of identity should neither be forgotten nor positioned as a distraction from real struggles. We’ll return to some of these questions later. But for now, to present you with a fuller picture of why representation has become a problem, we have to look at both the technological context of the past few decades and some larger historical trajectories in Western thought, neither of which may seem to have much to do with identity. The additional reasons for the current rejection of representation rehash a very old debate between realism and idealism in Western philosophy, combined with a reactionary response to hyperbolic fantasies of 1990s’ cyberculture which assumed computers and data to be essentially immaterial in their functioning (Munster 2014, 327–28). As with the exhaustion of representational critique, there has been an exhaustion with theoretical paradigms that discuss how lived reality is constructed through language and images, in part because this perspective overlooks the materiality of technology. But, also as with the case above, the move away from construction overlooks the nuanced political goals such arguments had in favor of a blunt assumption that politics will emerge from an engagement with “reality” (cf. Sterne 2014, 123). This repeats a very old debate in philosophy that dates back to the ancient Greeks, with problematic separations produced between real materiality and supposedly irreal representations, images, and words. The negative response media theorists have to utopian technological beliefs about immateriality is easy to explain. “Cyberspace” has often been depicted as another world that exists detached from physical reality, in

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which bodies and minds are unconstrained by their physical limitations. But computers and data do not lack a physical form, even though our metaphors for describing the internet direct us to think as if it is simply everywhere and nowhere at once. Our interactions with technology often involve experiences of “wirelessness” that incorporate physical waves and frequencies that are simply inaccessible to human perception, even though they are physically material (cf. Mackenzie 2010). Our social media data exist on server farms that are geographically dispersed in ways that are simply beyond human perception (Bollmer 2016b; Hogan 2015). The internet is, in a very physical sense, a limited series of wires, waves, and signals that has a specific geography—if one that is beyond the perception of most internet users. One of the best examples of digital media’s materiality comes from the United States Department of Defense’s 1991 document DoD 5220.22-M, the Operating Manual for the National Industrial Security Program. The manual lists DoD approved methods for data removal, including techniques that would delete and overwrite data, the use of magnetic fields to “degauss” hard drives, and Option M: “Destroy—Disintegrate, incinerate, pulverize, shred, or smelt.” In practice, Option M has included the use of a Naval research magnet to physically bend and destroy hard drive platters. As Matthew Kirschenbaum notes of this illustration (2008, 25–26), while we may never be able to read the informational traces that exist on a computer’s storage media as if they were written for general human consumption, techniques associated with computer forensics—the opening up of hard drives to rescue and repair damaged or deleted data—reveal how permanent much of our media can be, especially that which is assumed to be ephemeral and immaterial simply because it exists beyond human consciousness. The DoD has to physically destroy their storage media to ensure it remains classified. The materiality of national security reveals how computers and information are in no way immaterial. The stress on the material in media theory is, in many ways, simply a correction of gross inaccuracies in how technology was thought to operate. How this move relates to the historical split between realism and idealism is more difficult to explain. While philosophical categories should never be held as unchangeable, there are a number of general classifications that have permeated philosophy since the Greeks that continue to haunt it today, much like the divide between presence and absence discussed in the introduction. Another such opposition is this divide between idealist and realist philosophy. This concerns the distinction between the symbolic contents within one’s mind and the real, material existence of a world beyond of one’s thoughts. In media studies, this split characterizes differences between representational ways of understanding media (images produce or construct a reality through



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mental, ideological practices that do not inherently reflect reality as given beyond representation; cyberspace is a “consensual hallucination” that is mind-based rather than derived from the materiality of bodies in specific places) and materialist analyses (media are devices that shape reality through their physical components)—though I should note, many contemporary “realist” philosophers do not equate materiality with realism, which is a point we’ll return to in Chapter 5. While the move to the material may be intended to solve a very simple problem in present theories of information and technology, it nonetheless digs up and returns to a long-standing debate— one that often provides the basis for larger conflicts between the sciences and the humanities—and intervenes in a way that unintentionally removes language and representation from reality. Idealist philosophy argues that the world is shaped by ideas held in one’s mind. The most explicit version of idealism, ascribed (somewhat reductively and incorrectly) to the Irish-born philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, is that the world exists only within one’s conscious mind. The subjective perception of the world calls the external world into being. Some version of idealism is central for much of continental philosophy. Entire schools of thought, such as phenomenology or hermeneutics, begin by assuming the primacy of a perceiving and interpreting ego or self. Modern philosophers like Husserl and Hegel, along with a number of more recent postmodern theorists, position subjective consciousness and interpretation as that which gives form to the external world (though usually these perspectives are a bit more nuanced than accusations of “idealism” would suggest). One way of thinking of quantum physics, which holds that matter is undifferentiated until it is observed, could be considered to be an extension of idealist philosophy.4 There is no pure, unmediated external reality for us to experience. Consciousness is central to the production of what we know. At its most extreme, idealism can become solipsism. This is a philosophical argument that contends the only thing one can know is that one’s own consciousness or mind exists. We can think of solipsism through reference to the classic claim of René Descartes: cogito ergo sum, or “I think, therefore I am.” In Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes begins by doubting his ability to comprehend the reality of the external world, as if deceived by god or controlled by an evil demon. Even with this extreme level of doubt,

This is an incorrect interpretation of quantum theory perpetuated by its popularizers, a distortion that returns quantum physics to commonly held idealist beliefs about interpretation and reality derived from Western modernity. For an explanation of quantum theory from a materialist feminist perspective, see Barad (2007, 247–352, 457f38).

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Descartes concludes, because I think, then I exist—or, more accurately, my mind exists, though perhaps not my body (2006, 13–19). Descartes assumes that the existence of thought presumes an intentional being doing the thinking, even though the existence of thinking only demonstrates that thought exists. Descartes’s mistake is the essence of solipsism, through which he proposed the dualist belief that mind and body are fundamentally separate. This is what’s depicted in many popular cybercultural fantasies—human consciousness can be downloaded from the body and uploaded elsewhere (perhaps into a robot body or a computer simulation, or even into someone else’s body). We may be nothing more than a brain in a vat, or could even be a completely disembodied consciousness abstracted from materiality. We have no way of knowing since it is entirely possible that our mind (or an evil demon) has constructed the totality of experience we may have. Idealism—in its most extreme form—is foundational for many early beliefs about digital media, especially in what N. Katherine Hayles (1999) terms “posthumanism.” Posthumanism, perhaps more accurately termed “transhumanism” (Wolfe 2010), is a discourse derived from the history of cybernetics that, in the version popular among 1990s’ technophiles and those awaiting the “technological singularity,” suggests human consciousness is analogous to computer software. Mind can be extracted from the human body, able to run on any formally compatible system, just as a computer program can run on any computer system with a compatible architecture and operating system. Those who hold this belief maintain that, in the near future, we will leave our biological bodies and live as synthetic technological organisms. As weird as this future sounds, this perspective is common among numerous pioneers in the field of science and technology—and some everyday interfaces with technology, such as the virtual world Second Life, or some the uses of the Oculus Rift, were created with these future dreams in mind. In this posthumanist future, leaving the human body doesn’t leave the human behind. It achieves ideals of enlightenment humanism, as humanity is perfected through the use of technology. The mind, as a pure ideal substance completely detached from matter, becomes the sole agent that dictates the creation of the world only limited by imagination and mental rationality. Embodiment and materiality are things to be escaped and left behind, limits to the expression of the human essence that exists as a disembodied substance (Wolfe 2010, xv). The perpetuation of this posthuman idealism in discussions of the internet is frustrating for many of us who study the history of technology, in part because it does not seem to go away even after it has been disproven. (While a model of mind based on computer code was popular in the 1990s and persists in the development of artificial



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intelligence, many contemporary theories of mind and consciousness derived from neuroscience reject the belief that mind, brain, and body can be separated.) The belief that information is free from material constraints, or that human beings are essentially informational patterns, haunts the everyday imagination of mobile phones, social media, and tools designed to help produce a “quantified self.” Extreme forms of idealism are not particularly useful philosophies. In the end, one is inevitably trapped in their own mind. But many theorists today hold a weaker version of idealism as true. This version argues that the world cannot be known without some experience of interpretation, as filtered through language and images. We project some idea or form onto the world, consequentially making or constructing the world through language and thought. This construction does not inherently come from the mind of any one individual but is perpetuated through representations. As with our discussion of representation above, words and images shape how we understand our own identities and our relations to others. These identities are not natural but are socially constructed. Words, for instance, are not permanently anchored to the objects and experiences they describe. They instead perform an arbitrary system of differences that may not translate beyond any specific language system (cf. de Saussure 1972). Many of us have seen popular journalism on words in other languages to describe experiences or things that are missing from the English vocabulary. Even imported words (like the German word schadenfreude) can be used to reframe how we imagine what we experience and how we relate to others. Like the representations of identity discussed above, these words and images do not come from any one individual, but their circulation constructs reality in ways that do not inherently emerge from the material facticity of the world beyond human consciousness. Realism, on the other hand, argues that the world exists beyond human consciousness. Objects and things have a real existence outside of one’s subjective mind. Realism is, more often than not, what we assume about the world in our daily life. We assume that the people and things around us are real and not simply projections of our own consciousness. The people around us are neither animated flesh nor hallucinations called into being by our mind. We believe this even though we have no way of knowing what others are thinking—we cannot be certain that others are thinking at all, or even if they exist. Realism is foundational for how we act in this world. There are many different positions that can be called idealism or realism, few of which are fully reducible to each other. Yet idealism has become something of an insult to discredit positions that acknowledge the role of language and representation in the shaping of our reality. Few people believe

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in the strong version of idealism advanced by Bishop Berkeley. But lots of people who follow the critical traditions of continental philosophy believe in the weak version of idealism that suggests language, representations, and consciousness produce what we experience, usually by organizing external reality into the objects and categories through which we make sense of the external world. The philosopher Quentin Meillassoux (2008) has termed this perspective “correlationism,” since we assume that external reality, in some way, must “correlate” to the ordered, discursively produced contents within one’s mind. Consequentially, we never make it to the material reality of the world because we always reduce external materiality to representational categories that serve to order human consciousness. One cannot completely conflate materialism with realism—especially since there are numerous variations of these positions, not all of which I’m discussing here. But the turn to the materiality of technology coincides with a turn to realism, and since both reject the linguistic, constructivist concerns of representation then there is a point in articulating these two positions. If media studies has been concerned with representations and this perspective seems to have been exhausted in a number of different milieus, then where should media studies look today? This question is especially pertinent if we are to maintain the political attention to identity and difference that has long grounded our own attention to media. We should be able to reject the view that digital media somehow turn everything into immaterial images. But we should be careful to not reject constructionism in a reactionary way, else, once again, the political goals of representational critique simply get neglected in favor of a “reality” that somehow acts as if representations either do not exist or have no effect in shaping daily life (cf. Sterne 2014). And, as well, it’s fairly clear that many materialist or realist philosophies that precede the turn to realism today involve what philosopher Elizabeth Grosz terms “the incorporeal,” or “the subsistence of the ideal in the material or corporeal” which, she claims, is necessary to advance a materialism that is more expansive and less reductive (2017, 5). In some ways, the remainder of this book is an attempt to respond to these problems. I want to provide the tools for media studies to engage with the political questions that have historically been its concern, while simultaneously conceptualizing the world as irreducible to human limits of language and images alone. We must acknowledge that media are material, and, as will be developed in more detail in later chapters, a focus entirely on representation tends to overlook the role played by nonhuman agencies in the production of our reality. Because of these larger debates—and because of the context of digital media—focusing entirely on how things are represented



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will not intervene in the contemporary context particularly well. Yet the political concerns about representation, be they civic acknowledgment, the distribution of equality and difference, and the struggle for justice, cannot be ignored as if they are merely relics of a past time. Thus, I want to conclude this chapter by defining representation as a material, discursive practice—a practice that performs reality, not one that depicts or reflects reality. By emphasizing the performativity of representation, we can then begin to examine how the materiality of technology intersects with the concerns of representational critique, not to displace representation but to expand our understanding of what representation is and does. . . . To

representation as a performative practice

As mentioned in the introduction, when I use the word “perform” and its variants, I am following the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin’s theorization of performative utterances in language. In a series of lectures, published as How to Do Things with Words (1975), Austin begins by noting that philosophers in the Western tradition have always regarded a “statement” as that which merely “describes” or “states some fact” which can be judged as true or false (1). Words, in this sense, are there to reflect external reality, in ways that can be judged in accordance with how well they mirror what exists. Austin is suggesting that most philosophers, even when they may otherwise express idealist beliefs about the power of mind and representation in shaping reality, act as if words are nothing other than immaterial reflections of the materiality of the external world and can be judged based on how well a statement approaches a kind of realist objectivity. But, Austin contends, this perspective is objectively false, evidenced by the existence of a number of different statements at work in our daily lives that do not describe but serve to perform a material change. He gives the following examples: “‘I do (sc. Take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife)’—as uttered in the course of the marriage ceremony. . . . ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’—as uttered when smashing the bottle against the stem. .  .  . ‘I give and bequeath my watch to my brother’—as occurring in a will” (5). These are performative utterances, and with their identification Austin calls into question any attempt to define reality as something separate from the world of words and images. Now, you may object that these statements aren’t said out loud—they’re written down in official documents, and it is the documentation that performs any transformation. But the fact remains that in being written down, these words do things. A contract is not

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a description. Performative utterances do not reflect the external world but effect material changes that, in Austin’s examples, have legal, financial, and social implications. Philosopher Judith Butler, in her book Gender Trouble, extends Austin’s theories of language to describe gender as performative (1990). Instead of something one “is,” Butler argues that gender is something one “does.” Like the performative phrases Austin discusses, the rituals, symbols, and norms defined as “feminine” or “masculine” produce specific bodies as having specific genders. Many people have taken Butler’s theorization of gender as an extreme version of idealism or constructionism. Because of Butler’s examples, which mostly relate to practices of drag, where men dress and perform as women and women dress and perform as men, it seems like Butler argues that “real” bodies and the “real” biology of sex do not matter, or that gender is a “performance” in the sense of playing a role or acting. This is not what Butler is arguing at all, though it’s an easy misreading. With drag, Butler suggests, the assumed natural fact of gender is subverted, but only “to the extent that it reflects on the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender is itself produced and disputes heterosexuality’s claim on naturalness and originality” (1993, 125). To many of her readers, the act of gender subversion through drag, in displacing the naturalness of heterosexual gender performances that assume men to be essentially masculine and women to be feminine, is assumed to demonstrate how the body itself does not really play a role in shaping what men and women are. What matters, these readers assume, is the external symbolic display of gender as something interpreted and understood by others as culturally legible. Masculinity and femininity, in short, are idealist constructs rather than material facts, perpetuated by specific ways of appearing to others as masculine or feminine. Sex—the biological materiality of the body—seems to disappear in relation to the symbolic performances that represent gender to others. Do not be mistaken: this idealist interpretation of Butler is wrong, in part because of her emphasis on performativity. Like the philosophers Austin is criticizing, who assume words describe rather than intervene in material reality, some readers of Butler assume that the symbolic practices of gender she discusses efface the material reality of the human body. She makes her rejection of this view clear in her book Bodies that Matter (1993): The relation between culture and nature presupposed by some models of gender “construction” implies a culture or an agency of the social which acts upon a nature, which is itself presupposed as a passive surface, outside the social and yet its necessary counterpart. .  .  . If gender is the social construction of sex, and if there is no access to this “sex” except by means of



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its construction, then it appears not only that sex is absorbed by gender, but that “sex” becomes something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy, retroactively installed at a prelinguistic site to which there is no access. (4–5)

Butler has no interest in upholding an idealist perspective that positions matter as that which is completely determined by culture, and yet she does not want to deny the power of words and images to shape reality, either. Bodies matter in their materiality, but they do not escape processes of signification that shape how we come to understand what certain bodies are, what certain bodies do, and what relationships bodies have with other bodies. “What I would propose in place of these conceptions of construction,” Butler suggests, “is a return to the notion of matter not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (9).5 When Butler uses the term “materialization,” she is drawing our attention to a process in which specific forms of matter come to matter in their conjunction with symbols, practices, and representations. She does not deny the importance of materiality. But she demonstrates how our engagement with materiality is a process in which both physical reality and symbolic meanings shape what we experience and know. Butler here is suggesting that something like “sex” emerges from repetitive acts that “materialize” through their ability to be recognized and understood in accordance with regulatory norms of identification. We must always begin with the premise that bodies exist materially, and these bodies act in specific ways derived from the very materiality of the body. But we do not come to understand how these bodies matter except for within discursive processes of sorting bodies, making them legible to political, medical, and legal institutions, placing them in opposition to each other based on beliefs about the normal and the pathological that come to order and define what bodies are supposed to do, which bodies succeed, and which bodies fail and should be corrected. It is just as important to understand how bodies come to matter through processes of materialization that identify and sort as it is to understand which bodies are unmarked and remain beyond the limits of acknowledgment as bodies. While all bodies are material, not all bodies materialize. There is no strict opposition between matter and language. Rather, the articulation of the two serves to make visible and legible what counts as materialized, which is a category that does not include all matter. Butler’s arguments have been—and continue to be—misinterpreted by many in media and cultural studies. Her theories are quickly folded into a

Unless otherwise stated, all emphasis in quoted text is from the original.

5

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constructivist paradigm that neglects the complex definition of materiality at the center of her theory of performativity. A return to our discussion of Lara Croft may be helpful at this point. If, at the beginning of this chapter, we thought of Croft as an image that reflects or represents “women” in a way that is somewhat detached from material reality, we should now think of her as an image that performs a specific articulation of “women’s bodies,” the repetition of which overlaps countless other physical practices and actions. Croft appears as a character in pornography. Cosplayers perform as her at comic and video game conventions. At the height of her popularity, she appeared on magazine covers and in advertisements. Her avatar is a character through which players of Tomb Raider engage with a specific gaming world. Her image acts to direct desire and, in addition, to define norms for bodies that are then invested in affectively, sexually, and economically. In the process, differential articulations that separate bodies in accordance with hierarchies of value—that is, which bodies matter and which do not—are judged through practices that define, in this case, how “women” are supposed to act, how female gamers are supposed to act, and, in addition, how men and male gamers act toward them. These are not merely representations to be judged as accurate or inaccurate but locations for acts materially performed through attachments to images and the relations that they produce. If we return to the example of the game “Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian,” the performative dimension of these acts becomes even more explicit, in which the game allows for the player to enact violence against a woman. Often in the culture of video games the dismissal of representation as idealist enables the perpetuation of massively sexist imagery because the game “isn’t real.” As we’ve been arguing, these acts are nonetheless performative and serve to perpetuate relations that define how men act and how women act, and how they act toward each other, which works to define what “men” and “women” even are, in their materiality—all while implicitly defining the limits of proper behavior, dematerializing specific bodies because they cease to “matter.” When Sarkeesian becomes an image (rather than a person), it becomes easy for others to harass her to the point of her vacating her home and threatening a shooting at a talk she was scheduled to give (which happened after the release of one of her “Tropes vs. Women” videos). Her body ceases to matter, because she does not correctly fit into the system of differences that recognizes specific bodies and acts as proper and other bodies and acts as improper in their materiality. This “ceasing to matter” is, however, still material, as it involves real acts, real bodies, and real relations that cannot be dismissed as imaginary. The materiality of sex and gender emerge not purely from the biological fact of the human body but from the relational associations that



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determine what bodies are, what they do, and how they relate to each other. This does not drift into a world that is purely representational, but rather stresses how representations are material practices that perform and produce relationships. In some way, this may make it sound like we’re merely back to the beginning of this chapter, only we’ve now saved representation by redefining it through notions of performativity. To some extent, this is true. I’ve been reiterating throughout that I want to be sure we do not do away with the political significance of representational critique. But, at this point, the term “representation” may be poor for describing the power of words and images. As Karen Barad (2007, 46–47) has noted, when we use “representation” we are supposing an ontological separation between the material world and the world of symbols. By following Butler’s emphasis on performativity, we can avoid this false dualism. It isn’t simply enough to note that representations are material, but that, simultaneously, representations act in producing reality and are acted upon because of the material conditions in which they are made. According to Barad, Performative approaches call into question representationalism’s claim that there are representations, on one hand, and ontologically separate entities awaiting representation, on the other, and focus inquiry on the practices or performances of representing, as well as the productive effects of those practices and the conditions of their efficacy. A performative [approach] takes account of the fact that knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct material engagement with the world. (49)

Barad, who is a philosopher of science, brilliantly weaves together lines of thought from feminist theory and the history of physics to do away with the realist-idealist binary, conceptualizing representation as a form of performative practice. Representations are a result of material acts, and they have material effects in terms of shaping knowledge. Our ways of representing knowledge, which arise from the material possibilities technologies have in writing things down, recording them, and communicating them, produce differences and similarities that are then manifested in the bodies that result from processes of materialization. And, significantly for us, “humans” are not the only ones with the power to make these inscriptions. Rather, different articulations of human bodies and technological assemblages together produce what it means to be “human,” what a “body” is, what counts as a body, what can be represented, and how both are recorded and understood.

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Conclusion This chapter followed a lengthy narrative about the failures of representational critique and, at the same time, argued that representation is essential for the political concerns that have long characterized media and cultural studies. We began by discussing how media studies has traditionally understood and critiqued representation through concepts like ideology and hegemony. For numerous reasons, including the inability to interpret an image in any consistent way, the misguided understanding of digital media as less than real, and the turn to realism in contemporary theory, there is a feeling that the critique of representation is exhausted as a political and intellectual practice. Yet there have long been political reasons for the emphasis on representation in media studies, reasons that directly relate to practices of citizenship and the politics of identity. We cannot afford to neglect these political concerns as we turn to a more materialist understanding of media. Hence, the introduction of performative materialism reframes the concerns of representational critique by doing away with the constructivist or idealist detachment of images and words from the rest of material reality. Through the work of Judith Butler and Karen Barad, we can reframe representation as a material practice that performs how specific bodies come to exist materially, along with the relations between bodies that depend on the technical possibilities for inscription and the physical capacities bodies have for acting in the real world. By emphasizing performativity, we can conceptualize representation as something that emerges because of the material capacities of bodies and technologies to represent, along with the power of representations to shape and determine how bodies come to matter. In Chapter 2, we’ll expand on a key concept suggested by Barad’s theorization of performativity left underdeveloped here: that of inscription. Barad draws our attention to how the material attributes of technologies manage to record certain aspects while neglecting others. Emphasizing inscription, along with other repetitive techniques that are mnemonic in effect, accentuates the centrality of technology in shaping the experience of history, culture, and time itself. Representations are important and their content matters. Yet it is the material capacity of technology to inscribe—to record some things but not others—that is foundational for defining how bodies come to matter and how they matter to each other.

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Inscriptions and Techniques

Marginalia Most media are designed to store something for a period of time, with recordings limited to the particular physical form that characterizes that medium. A photograph can only store light reflected off a surface, fixed and made permanent through chemicals that react with light-sensitive paper. A record—a vinyl LP, that is—can only store sounds as grooves etched into its surface. Digital media store a wide range of things, but only as long as they can be converted to binary information, written onto hard drives as magnetic fields, or onto DVD and Blu-Ray discs as physical pits that reflect light. This act of recording is implicitly political, for reasons that will become clear as this chapter goes on. The physical capacity of a medium to store and record shapes the role a medium has in participating in and determining reality. Attending to these physical capacities radically remakes the very purpose of any analysis of media. “Texts” have long been a common term used by those in media studies for the things they study, as we’ve mentioned throughout this book so far. This is the case even if the thing examined is not, properly speaking, “textual,” but is a film, an artwork, a video game, a television show, or a song. We nonetheless approach these varied forms of media as if they are analogous to literature. This perpetuates the belief that the significance of any representation is found in the “meaning” of its content, which, like words on a page, can be “read” by the critic. Variations on a model developed for the study of literature is extended to all forms of media—and, ironically, this model doesn’t even address the material specificity of literature. Literature is bound to print, and unless we address the specificity of print (and, for instance, how words and their arrangement are remade with technologies other than print) we miss something about literature and how it creates meaning. This approach is partial, as it disregards the materiality of a medium and how that materiality is conjoined with the meaning we get from reading, watching, or otherwise consuming media. To demonstrate how this turn to materiality and recording might reimagine interpretation, let’s begin with an example—one linked

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to literature and one that reveals how a materialist approach is, perhaps surprisingly, very controversial. In her essay “Incloser” (1993), the poet and essayist Susan Howe criticizes the editors of the Autobiography of Puritan Minister Thomas Shepard for, among other things, cutting out eighty-six blank pages of Shepard’s original text in their editing. Her essay takes its name from the spelling Noah Webster gave in his dictionary for the word we render as “enclose,” where an “incloser” is the name Webster gave for the person or thing that “incloses.” Shepard’s Autobiography, a foundational historical document for understanding the culture of colonial New England, was written in the first half of a small notebook. If, in reading Shepard’s original notebook, you turned it upside down and flipped to the back, you would find additional writing—writing that didn’t seem to follow the Autobiography proper and which Shepard’s editors referred to as “notes.” In preparing Shepard’s writing for publication, the editors removed the blank pages, along with the fact that one would need to turn the notebook over and around to read the notes. Why include blank pages? What function do these have as part of the text? (Or, why print the notes upside down?) Why are these pages, or the spatial orientation of Shepard’s notebook, important for us understanding Shepard’s writings? Many of us would probably side with the editors—the blank pages aren’t part of the text itself and can be discarded without any significant impact on our reading or understanding of the Autobiography. Only the words matter, we might assume. Howe, however, claims that the text is a material object—it includes more than the words on a page. The shape of words themselves, the blank space on paper, the physicality of writing, these are all part of the text as a material thing and should be included in any reproduction. These spatial elements of writing, while linked to the history of poetry as an oral technique of song and memory, have been reimagined since the birth of print by poets like Howe, who experiment with the location of words on pages to explore the potentials and limits of writing as a means of expression. The materiality of media and the “meaning” written into poetry are linked. It would seem that, for Howe, as it is for the media theorist Friedrich Kittler (1990b), poetry is something that only exists in relation to specific technologies which transform what can be written and how “writing” can be expressed. Literary critic Walter Benn Michaels disagrees with Howe, to such an extent that he sees her argument for materiality to completely undermine the very idea of literature, meaning, sense, and “truth.” If we take materiality seriously, Michaels suggests, it follows that we cannot care if someone “was writing poems or making drawings” (2004, 5). When we foreground materiality, he argues, the idea of interpreting literature or poetry ceases to be about the



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“knowledge” revealed by the interpretation of meaning, which, for Michaels, is about judging an author’s intent. Materiality, Michaels claims, threatens to transform writing into something visual, not textual, and prevents the very existence of “truth” in literature and poetry, as all interpretations become little more than elaborations of subjective experience. If Michaels is to be believed, this is the choice we have with this debate— either authorial intent or subjective experience. But there is another option. Fortunately for us (and, given Michaels’s emphasis on authorial intent, ironically), Michaels neglects the point of Howe’s central thesis. One of the reasons that the actual document is important for Howe is that marginalia— asides, traces within and on the edges of a page, textual artifacts like doodles and scribbles, and other kinds of commentary that exist beyond the authoritative “text” of something—are often removed in editing. Yet margins are places we can find factual evidence about historical events. The reason for this is simple. With any medium, something was written, recorded, inscribed—something that may not be intentional, something that may not be clearly “textual” or “meaningful.” We can return to Howe’s discussion of Thomas Shepard’s Autobiography to explain why marginalia matters. Shepard is an important historical figure because of his role in the “Antinomian Controversy,” also termed the “Free Grace Controversy,” a period in Massachusetts history from 1636 to 1638 when a group of Puritans, most notably one named Anne Hutchinson, began to advocate religious beliefs that diverged from the orthodox teachings of Puritan ministers. Because of her beliefs and her willingness to challenge the authority of the church, Hutchinson, who had become an influential religious figure, was eventually tried and banished from Massachusetts. This event is important for the legacy of religious freedom in the United States and is a notable example of gender relations and conflicts in colonial America. With Hutchinson, we have a figure of a woman who fought authority in the name of religious belief—and, at least in the short term, lost. Typically, figures like Hutchinson are forgotten as history moves along. As Walter Benjamin famously remarked, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another” (1968, 256). Or, history is written by the victors, annihilating and forgetting the marginal and resistant who may have lost their historical battles. The telling of history repeats these conflicts, acting as if their outcome was given by the grace of god rather than by contingencies. History too often effaces those who did not “win,” which includes not only countless women but also the vast majority of individuals in their everyday lives. Histories of the working class, for instance, have to

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examine the past obliquely because workers and peasants simply do not appear in the authoritative documents of history, which tend to be written by the church or the ruling class (cf. Thompson 1963). Howe looks to Shepard’s writings to find traces of the other women in Massachusetts at the time, as men—like Shepard—were responsible for documenting the religious testimonies of the women in Massachusetts. Many of these testimonies were noted in Shepard’s journal. This means, as Benjamin implies, ways of knowing about the Antinomian Controversy are marked by the barbarism of the church—but, in looking at the margins, we can find traces of a history that this barbarism worked to exclude from existence, traces that nonetheless appear because of the materiality of a medium. Shepard, like others given the same task, did not do a particularly good job of recording testimonies given norms that defined who had the authority to speak and who had the authority to be heard. The time of Shepard and Hutchinson was one of deep social and religious oppression. Individuals found themselves unable or unwilling to speak in public about their own beliefs. The fact that women’s testimonies made up much of the history written down by Puritan authorities was notable in and of itself. These testimonies were written quickly and without care, using terms and symbols that both effaced speakers’ identities and retained oblique hints as to who they were. The physicality of writing inscribes into the text affect, motion, and other traces of the body of the writer, which are removed when the text becomes printed, edited words. It effaces the traces of the women, so central to this historical moment, only tentatively recorded given the authority figures tasked with writing. These women are, potentially, edited out of existence. The editors—along with Shepard himself—act as “inclosers,” drawing boundaries around what gets written and what gets remembered. In the process of moving from handwriting to printed word, the materiality of the text likewise serves to “inclose,” drawing boundaries between what is “in” the text and what is “outside” of it. In forgetting the materiality of the text, the women who were part of this history no longer materialize. As Howe states, “When we move through the positivism of literary canons and master narratives, we consign ourselves to the legitimation of power, chains of inertia, an apparatus of capture” (1993, 47). We can read otherwise by looking at the margins of pages, of incidental scrawls, of traces of another history written down, but forgotten. But if these traces are deleted, then they no longer materialize. These kinds of erasure happen today, too, often with the help of legal authorities that work to annihilate and destroy, often in the name of “privacy” and “personal information.” In her formally inventive novel I Love Dick,



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which combines fiction, memoir, art criticism, and theoretical speculation, Chris Kraus tells a story of the artists Claes Oldenburg and Hannah Wilke, who had a relationship, lived, and worked together from 1969 to 1977: In 1985 Claes Oldenburg threatened an injunction against the University of Missouri Press. They were preparing a book of Hannah Wilke’s work and writings to accompany her first major retrospective. In order to protect his “privacy,” Claes Oldenburg demanded that the following items be removed: 1) a photograph from Advertisements For Living that depicted Claes together with Hannah’s eight year old niece. 2) Any mention of his name in Hannah’s writings. 3) Reproduction of a collaborative poster, Artists Make Toys. 4) Quotations from a correspondence between him and Hannah that was a part of Hanna Wilke’s text, I Object. Claes’ fame and the University’s unwillingness to defend her made it possible for Oldenburg to erase a huge portion of Hannah Wilke’s life. Eraser, Erase-her—the title of one of Wilke’s later works. (1998, 217–18)

With this story, Kraus points us to how personal lives are intertwined. Living means losing control of one’s image and self—and yet, that control can be reasserted through legal regulation of documents, inscriptions, and artworks that, in combination with the power of a medium to record, either permit or prohibit something from existing as evidence in the future, which can allow (or refuse) specific individuals and relations to materialize. This is another example of how unequal gender relations are maintained through the management of a medium’s physical presence. Michaels, like so many literary critics threatened by materiality—as it seemingly transforms the study of poetics and literature into art history, archaeology, and media theory—believes that a turn to the physicality of an object is a turn away from “truth,” and that the only thing that we’d be able to acknowledge would be individuated, subjective experiences of specific objects. Materiality, for him, only matters when intended by the author. The women who have been edited out of existence, their traces canceled, the relations that have been legally destroyed, do not matter to him. The only thing that matters would be whether or not Shepard intended his scrawls to mean something, or whether Wilkie or Oldenberg intended for the existence of the other to be important for how their work is understood (in spite of the obvious fact that their relationship does matter in terms of how the work of both is understood). Michaels is incorrect in arguing that materiality merely leads to the subjective, or is otherwise insignificant, for reasons we have already seen.

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What materiality turns us to is not subjective feeling or authorial intent, but objective fact: a medium permits something to be written down and stored over time. It remains regardless of interpretation, regardless of intent. As Howe suggests, materiality provides the evidence for historical facts that have otherwise been forgotten. In the case of the Antinomian Controversy, it gives us evidence about women who mattered, but who otherwise fail to materialize in our present. In the case of Oldenberg and Wilke, it demonstrates how the legal regulation of inscription can make a relationship fail to materialize. This turns us away from meaning, and it turns us away from authorial intent. It instead turns us to the specific effects brought about through the use of a medium to record and recall. What exists over time? How do kinds of recording enable the organization of experience? How does this, in the end, shape what a body is and does? How does it transform memory? How does a medium permit something to happen? What does a medium perform? These questions have implications not only for how we understand sensation, experience, and creative expression but also for the practices that define what we call “culture” and the very possibilities of history and memory as such. And, since I argued in Chapter 1 that we can rethink representation in these terms, it moves issues of representation away from “interpretation” (so often dismissed as subjective) to concrete attributes of a medium and what it does— though, at the same time, it never completely does away with interpretation. We have to make sense of materiality for something to materialize. As the German media theorist Markus Krajewski demonstrates, in his excellent history of the “server” and the “servant,” understanding media requires an epistemology of the marginal. This means that we not only should pay attention to the margins on a page, like Howe suggests, but also must acknowledge how knowledge only comes into being through the actions and agencies of bodies and materialities that, often, remain unmarked or hidden. History is filled with “(supposedly) insignificant actions, routine operations, and local, gestural, and silent knowledge” (2018, 13). We must look for the actions and agencies of “subalterns” that do not speak, but nonetheless are necessary for any possible statement of knowledge. This includes actual people—be they the servants that Krajewski follows, hidden from sight in a bourgeois country house, or the women only tentatively written into Shepard’s notebook—and it also includes the “servants” of media and technology, who record what is written but are not acknowledged as the agents needed for “writing” to even exist. This chapter continues our task of theorizing the performativity of a medium, focusing on how a medium allows things to be written down—or, conversely, how a medium refuses to write something. A medium permits



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the generation of inscriptions. As theorist Vilem Flusser tells us, “Writing comes from the Latin scribere, meaning ‘to scratch.’ And the Greek graphein means ‘to dig.’ Accordingly, writing was originally a gesture of digging into an object with something, so making use of a wedge-shaped tool (a stylus)” (2011, 11). Inscription refers to the material specificity of each medium and how that materiality permits us to “dig into” it so something can be written, organized, manipulated, and retrieved later. We scratch into a medium in specific ways, determined by the materiality of that medium. Our understanding of “writing” in this chapter is broad—it includes everything from the scratches made on clay tablets to a pencil marking on paper, to light recorded on film, to the data points recorded by motion and performance capture. While these may not all be, properly speaking, scratches that come from physically digging into a medium, they are nonetheless forms of inscription, of writing something down, of enabling a kind of permanence that persists over time. Our concern here is not with the symbolic—at least not primarily. While these inscriptions may be symbols and may store “meaning” in some form or another, we are more interested in the fact that there are different physical qualities to different media, which have specific effects in producing relations, bodies, and knowledge itself. In Chapter 3, we’ll be using terms derived from the medium theorist Harold Innis to discuss the temporal differences between media. Inscription is central for the temporality of a medium, as different kinds of inscriptions persist over different durations. But for now, we’re going to focus on the material use of a medium to record, and we’ll be using a number of terms more or less interchangeably—writing, inscription, and documentation—though inscription is our master term. Writing is a specific kind of inscription, and documentation is a specific practice that comes from the ability of a medium to inscribe. We will sort out these terms as we go along, though, because they are not synonyms. Let’s frame things another way. Inscription refers to methods of recording data. “Data” is defined here through its roots as the plural of the Latin datum, something “given.”1 An inscription records something “given,” that, through its inscription, can be “given” again later on. This need not refer merely to human experience. Inscriptions can be read and sensed by computers, beyond the awareness of human beings. As well, and central to our key idea of materiality as performative, we’ll be linking these inscriptions to As Rob Kitchin (2014) has argued, most forms of data today are not “given” but “taken,” making capta a better term as it stresses how our data are extracted from us, often against our will, often without our knowledge. We’ll still be using the word “data,” as capta is not a common term.

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technique. Specific inscriptions exist at the level of the body through practices we internalize and perpetuate—techniques that we practice or techniques performed by a machine. As we learn how to move our bodies, use tools, and perform acts, we are “writing” into our bodies ways of experiencing and acting that perpetuate cultural differences, which are foundational for how we understand both who we are as individuals and our relations with others. To introduce what inscription does and what it performs in its materiality, I want to appeal to another set of examples, drawing out the implications of inscription for issues of music and sound—examples chosen to demonstrate both the difficulties with and importance of “writing” that which is seemingly ephemeral and nonlinguistic. Words on a page are experienced as words on a page (Kittler 1990a, 7; cf. Rotman 2008). Sounds and vibrations are not experienced as marks on paper. And yet, we have many ways of writing sound. From this set of examples, we’ll then move to discuss inscription and documentation in the works of Karen Barad, Friedrich Kittler, and another theorist of media and writing, Maurizio Ferraris, and how their discussions of inscription and documentation relate to Michel Foucault’s theorization of discourse. The chapter then extends inscription to a broader discussion of technique, and reframes how we’ve been discussing writing, documentation, and inscription by turning toward (political) questions of cultural difference.

Inscribing sound British composer Cornelius Cardew’s score for his Treatise (1967) is comprised entirely of abstract shapes, lines, and forms that do away with traditional musical notation. Treatise, which is referred to as a “graphic score,” looks almost nothing like a typical piece of music. Instead, it is a guide for organized improvisation, though it is a guide still “written,” and the many different interpretations performed of Cardew’s score are considered performances of the same piece of music (see Dennis 1991; Anderson 2006). What does it mean that we have a score for a piece of music that sounds completely different each time it is performed? If we listen to two performances of Treatise, are we listening to the same piece of music? What does it mean to have a form of musical notation that cannot be “read” in any traditional sense? Typically, a musician can “read” a musical score because they know what the different symbols on a score refer to. A score is a “language” of sorts, a set of formal rules agreed upon by all musicians who share the language of a score, which translates what is written on the page to what is performed by



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the musician or a group of musicians. A score is not literally an inscription of sound but an approximation designed to reproduce a specific arrangement of sounds over and over again. There are similar systems for dance and motion (though not as standardized and common as those for music), in which the movements of bodies are translated into marks on paper, which can be “read” if a performer understands what the marks are supposed to represent (see Salazar Sutil 2015). The basic forms of musical notation, be it the lines of the staff, a bass or treble clef, dynamics, sharps and flats, combine to tell performers just what to play and how they should play it. However, this “writing” isn’t really a “translation” of music in any direct sense. As Kittler notes, A medium is a medium is a medium. Therefore it cannot be translated. To transfer messages from one medium to another always involves reshaping them to conform to new standards and materials. .  .  . Transposition necessarily takes the place of translation. .  .  . Every transposition is to a degree arbitrary, a manipulation. It can appeal to nothing universal and must, therefore, leave gaps. (1990a, 265)

A score is, ideally, a kind of writing that permits the reproduction of sound. But writing is visual, not aural. There is a gap as (symbolic) writing moves to sound, and vice versa. The score for Treatise pushes this problem to its limits. The lines of a staff become circles and diagonals, notes are made into dots that appear almost randomly, and numbers—linked to time signatures in a typical score—seem to be littered randomly throughout. Performers are given no direct instructions, and the abstractions on the page are to be interpreted based on rules the performers have devised to “read” the score they have at hand. In creating Treatise, Cardew transforms the score into something that cannot reproduce the same—or nearly same—set of sounds again and again. Rather, he embraces the contingency that comes from refusing a standardized way of writing down music and expands the possibility for musical notation, linked to paper as it is, into something else. But, in doing so, the means for paper to store sound through symbolic reference is broken. The authority of the page in dictating sound is challenged as the symbolic link between the visual aspects of the written score and the aural elements of musical performance are reimagined. The same cannot be said for other kinds of musical recordings. In 1857, the French printer and bookseller Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented a “phonautograph,” which used a stylus to literally inscribe sound waves onto blackened paper or glass, following a model of the human ear and how it senses aural vibrations. The phonautograph’s etchings, called “phonautograms,”

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were never played back as sound until they were converted into digital files in 2008, using the etchings Scott’s device had made to reproduce the sounds it transformed into written lines. A phonautogram, unlike a musical score, does not look like anything a musician can “read.” Instead of a graphic approximation, Scott’s phonautograph transduces sound—it converts one form of energy into something else. It writes sound through a machine that “hears” and writes what it hears—it doesn’t approximate sound graphically through a set of symbols that a musician can interpret. But, at the same time, we cannot literally hear what has been written down by the phonautograph until it is converted back into an aural medium. Scott’s invention is central to the entire history of sound recording, preceding similar technologies invented by Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner along with technologies that would lead to the telephone, all of which rely on converting the energy of sound waves into something else, be it literal inscriptions made through the vibrations of a stylus, converted back into sound by way of a speaker (as is the case for the phonograph and the gramophone) or into electrical energy (as with the telephone). The early means to do this were somewhat gruesome. Human bodies were employed to technologically approximate the human sense of hearing. Alexander Graham Bell, in 1874, was one of the inventors of the “ear phonautograph,” which used “an excised human ear attached by thumbscrews to a wooden chassis,” writing sound vibrations onto smoked glass (Sterne 2003, 31). The ear phonautograph is a direct predecessor of many technologies we use today. When we pick up a telephone or listen to a record, we are using technologies that descend from a device that used the ear of a corpse to transform sound into writing. These examples introduce and extend different concepts that should be thought together, but not reduced to each other: inscription and transduction. As we’ve been suggesting, inscription refers to the specific capacities of a medium to write something down and store it. Transduction, as the historian of sound art Douglas Kahn notes, is the “movement from one energy state to another, either within or between larger classes of energy (mechanics or electromagnetism)” (2013, 7; cf. Mackenzie 2002).2 In these examples, we’ve only had mechanical energy. The vibration of a sound wave vibrates a stylus, which mechanically makes a mark. All sound recording works in similar The distinction between mechanical energy and electromagnetic energy refers to a physical distinction between kinds of waves. Mechanical waves (like sound) require a medium to move energy from one place to another. If there were no air molecules, there would be no sound. If there were no water, there would be no waves crashing onto the beach. Or, mechanical waves cannot exist in a vacuum. Electromagnetic waves, in contrast, are produced by the vibration of charged particles and can exist in a vacuum. Examples of electromagnetic waves include light, radio waves, and microwave radiation.

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ways, and often by transducing mechanical waves into electromagnetic energy, which can then be, say, transferred over the internet via a fiber-optic cables. Sound recording relies on the physical inscription of sound, which only happens through varied means of transducing sound into another state, from audible waves to the motion of a stylus that results in marks made in a medium. With Cardew’s Treatise, we have something documented in symbolic form. It’s an inscription but not of sound. Instead, it emphasizes the role of print and paper as a support for graphical, visual forms of notation. What Cardew gives us is, at best, a symbolic approximation of sounds, not a literal etching of them. It’s an inscription of the hand and eye—not the mouth and ear—as it moves on paper and is reproduced by a printing press. Treatise also questions some of the assumptions we make about traditional musical notation. Why do we assume there to be a direct link between the symbols on the page and the sounds we hear? Why not some other form of musical notation? What does writing sound in this way do? The phonautograph, on the other hand, is a transduction of sound energy. It converts the physical waves that our ears perceive as sound into a means for placing sound into a medium, which we can then approach as another form of writing, though one only “legible” or “readable” in a different way than musical notation in a score. We can inspect this writing in different ways as sound is converted to writing and back again. With sound recording (along with other kinds of media, like film), we can engage in what Kittler refers to as “time-axis manipulation,” meaning we can then slow down sonic and visual information, speed it up, or reverse it—something that is physically impossible with symbolic writing, reliant on the alphabet or musical notation, and also physically impossible with sound outside of its recorded form (2017; Krämer 2006). Writing sound permits us to transform the temporality of experience in different ways. This refers not just to what human beings can experience and sense, but an entire epistemological transformation that comes from how specific data can be inscribed, broken apart, reversed, recombined, and analyzed. I now want to expand on the implications of inscription and documentation as a capacity of media that is performative. There are three aspects of the performativity of materiality to which we’ll now turn. In doing so, we’ll conjoin claims of theorists Michel Foucault, Karen Barad, Friedrich Kittler, Maurizio Ferraris, and Bernhard Siegert to advance the model of performative materiality we’ve been elaborating thus far. The three aspects are (1) media as performing history, (2) media as performing social relation, and (3) media as performing bodies. These three aspects are linked and bleed into one other, but we’ll focus on each in turn.

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History: Discourse and the archive It is through the work of Michel Foucault, and how he defines discourse and the archive, that we begin to see a method for linking the materiality of media with how we experience the past in the present. In his Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), Foucault asks us to think of history not as a teleological unfolding of truth but as a series of relatively discontinuous moments that involve the creation and ordering of objects in discourse. It is this emphasis on discontinuity that begins to distinguish not only his method from traditional history but also his refusal to accept the existence of specific objects as “natural” or simply given. Rather, an object has to be produced, and it only persists over time because of work that maintains its existence. This includes kinds of bodies, kinds of mental disorders, kinds of medical practices, and so on. “Madness,” to use one of Foucault’s most well-known examples, is not an innate state, but comes from practices that specify and organize the human body and its capacities—and these practices of organization change radically over time (2006). “Madness” only exist as an object because of the tools, tests, and techniques used by psychologists and psychiatrists, the means they have for identifying and isolating specific bodily states, and the practices for confining specific bodies marked as “mad.” The diagnosis of mental pathology requires both a material means for examination—so, the tools used in a psychiatric or medical hospital, from photography to stethoscopes to an fMRI machine—and a set of categories through which bodies can be organized. Discourse would seem to refer to something linguistic or symbolic, but, following Foucault, it involves not just language, but the capacity to see something, to visualize it, or to make it sensible in other ways—a stethoscope, for instance, makes the body audible in ways previously impossible, and radically reframes how doctors sense the bodies of patients (see Sterne 2003, 99–136)—and to say something about what is seen. It requires techniques that incite speech—to make one say something that identifies who one is or what one does—and locate a body within larger structures through which it becomes an object of truth (Foucault 1978). Foucault’s various studies are united in how they examine the emergence of specific conditions of legibility, which refers to how various concepts come to be understood as “true” and how bodies come to be ordered in relation to that truth. Power, for Foucault, is an immanent force that is structured according to these various technologies for seeing and saying, which organize the social field and the bodies within it. To say that power is immanent means that no one possesses more power than someone else, and there is no “higher power” that exists outside of material reality. Power



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is “inside” all things. An assemblage of forces works together to direct and conduct bodies, forces that include technologies, inscriptions, practices, and so on. One of the functions of power is to produce, arrange, and group objects: The conditions necessary for the appearance of an object of discourse, the historical conditions required if one is to “say anything” about it, and if several people are to say different things about it, the conditions necessary if it is to exist in relation to other objects, if it is to establish with them relations of resemblance, proximity, distance, difference, transformation—as we can see, these conditions are many and imposing. Which means that one cannot speak of anything at any time; it is not easy to say something new; it is not enough for us to open our eyes, to pay attention, or to be aware, for new objects suddenly to light up and emerge out of the ground. (1972, 44–45)

Discourse is, for Foucault, the capacity to say something about an object— which, in its being said, produces the object as a specific thing, groups objects, notes regularities and differences between objects, and stabilizes objects. This is both material and exists to organize materiality. Foucault notes that a book can be recognized as a series of equivalent books, as, “however many copies or editions are made of it, however many different substances it may use,” discourse defines each copy as equivalent. Yet these discursive regularities can be questioned, or have boundaries: “We know for example that, for literary historians, the edition of a book published with the agreement of the author does not have the same status as posthumous editions . . . that they are not one of the manifestations of one and the same whole” (102). Foucault acknowledges the importance of materiality but does not place it prior to the discursive. Instead, the ordering of objects and things comes from a link between the material and the discursive, from the means for seeing or experiencing something and from the linguistic or symbolic means for saying something about it that makes sense and can be interpreted and understood by others. In terms derived from Karen Barad’s reading of Foucault, the material and the discursive are “intra-active” and the material is “always already materialdiscursive—that is what it means to matter” (2007, 153). For Barad, it is not so much that there are two things called “material” and “discourse.” They are not separate objects that “interact” and maintain their distinction, with one acting on the other. The two are distinct, but each fully interpenetrates the other while refusing to be reduced to the other. This is what Barad means by “intra-active.” Barad (and Foucault) complicates what we might

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mean by “inscription” as well, because, as Barad claims, “nature is neither a passive surface awaiting the mark of culture nor the end product of cultural performances” (183). Instead, we have to attend to the distinctions (or “cuts”) we make (be they between matter and language or between nature and culture) because they only happen from inside the material reality of our world, leaving “marks” on bodies that produce them as distinct. Specific cuts are not, properly speaking, ontological. (As in, just because we may mark a distinction at a particular moment does not mean that there is a clear, permanent distinction between, say, nature and culture.) But they do make our world materialize in specific ways, at specific conjunctures. Inscription is a mark that defines something as distinct, while nonetheless located within a larger intra-active whole that is constantly in flux: “Intra-actions cut ‘things’ together and apart. Cuts are not enacted from the outside, nor are they ever enacted once and for all” (178–79). The categories we use to organize matter are not divorced from or on top of matter. Rather, they “write” or “inscribe” into matter from within, which serve to produce oppositions and differences through the “cuts” that organize and make sense of the world, which, in turn, locate, distribute, and police the location of specific bodies based on how they “matter.” Media are one of the ways that this happens—not as an external determinant, but as a means that exists within and as a part of the world. One of the most important concepts in Foucault’s Archaeology is that of the historical a priori—the fact that anything said today must inherently rely on things said in the past to make sense or judged as true or false. History matters for Foucault because the way we have of organizing the present both relies on the past and is distinct from it. The material-discursive means for organizing the present are handed down from the past, but not as a simple, continuous form of development. It’s closer to a series of breaks, disjunctures, reversals, and reimaginings. This historical collection of statements is not literally a collection of all cultural texts that have been produced, but constitutes what Foucault terms an “archive”—a concept that emphasizes the contingency and partiality of the past in its material presence: The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events. But the archive is also that which determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity, nor do they disappear at the mercy of chance external accidents; but they are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities; that which determines that



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they do not withdraw at the same pace in time, but shine, as it were, like stars, some that seem close to us shining brightly from afar off, while others that are in fact close to us are already growing pale. The archive is not that which, despite its immediate escape, safeguards the event of the statement, and preserves, for future memories, its status as an escapee; it is that which, at the very root of the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines at the outset the system of its enunciability. (1972, 129)

The archive, then, is not a collection that stores, but a process for the selection of the past and a point for its erasure, a system that groups and orders the past in a way that materializes it in the present. The archive orders and maintains the very possibility of discourse—as what can be said requires a past that creates objects and things that we can speak of. This is why, to return to the beginning of this chapter, the existence of marginalia is so important for Susan Howe. What is written in the margin might be saved, or it might not. The practice of editing is about the archive, removing what may be thought insignificant from (and thus “inclosing”) the past. The ability to recognize marginalia as a “statement” (rather than a doodle or stray mark) is central to the performativity of the archive. But, Howe argues, marginalia are precisely where we find information inscribed about and by those who only materialize with difficulty, if at all. It is with these conjoint concepts—the historical a priori and the archive— that we can begin to focus on the performativity of media’s materiality and how it relates to history and memory. One of the most significant extensions of Foucault on this point is Friedrich Kittler’s understanding of the archive as a function of technological inscription. As Kittler notes, speaking of Foucault, “all power emanates from and returns to archives,” though, Kittler claims, Foucault neglected that “writing itself, before it ends up in libraries, is a communication medium” (1999, 5; Tuschling 2016). Kittler’s reframing of the archive as technological is furthered by the media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst: “The function of archives exceeds by far mere storage and conservation of data. Instead of just collecting passively, archives actively define what is at all achievable, insofar as they determine as well what is allowed to be forgotten” (2013, 139). The tools we use to write actively shape history, and, by extension, determine what can be said and remembered in the present through their selection of what can be stored or not. Media act by serving as the means for writing down and closing off “history” as it becomes stored. Media, through their inscriptive capacities, are archival in the sense of Foucault, in that they provide the means for writing statements and perpetuating their legibility.

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The practices of the archive are furthered by tools and techniques to organize information. Libraries, for instance, rely on an elaborate system of storage, reference, and recall, found in technologies like index cards, filing cabinets, and databases (see Krajewski 2011), which produce a range of specific practices for ordering information. Vertical filing cabinets, to use another, similar example, were a new technology in the first decades of the twentieth century. If you’re familiar with filing cabinets at all, you’re probably familiar with vertical files—as opposed to horizontal filing, where paper is laid flat in piles. Vertical files were a material technology that organized paper in specific ways, and also led to specific jobs for people that could expertly file and retrieve information within filing cabinets (along with the training for these jobs). As Craig Robertson, an historian of media and paperwork, argues, the fact that paper can be held, sorted, and ordered led to a specific way of managing information that stressed manual dexterity of particular hands and fingers—which were often women’s hands, as well: A file clerk’s hands became central to the representation and teaching of filing. The fact that these hands tended to belong to women is important to understanding how gender as an organizational category was used to articulate filing to the specialization and feminization of work that restructured the office in the early twentieth century. This mode of information work increased the importance of procedure in the modern office while also giving greater emphasis to manual dexterity—a “skill” which proponents believed women naturally possessed. (2017, 959)

I want to use Robertson’s arguments about vertical filing to draw out what we mean by inscription and the archive, along with the performative materiality of a filing cabinet. What matters here is not that a filing cabinet “determines,” in and of itself, specific forms of knowledge and specific practices. Rather, following Barad, it is “intra-active” as a discrete object embedded within a much larger ecology of relations linked with each other. It is this ecology that produces the world and how we exist within it. For the German media theorist Cornelia Vismann (2008), files provide the material basis for law and are the precondition for administration or judgment of truth, the grounds for the state to be that which determines and administers truth, and likewise produce a subject who exits as someone that possesses legal rights and abilities under the law. So, let’s open up the example of the filing cabinet—a technology that seems so banal, but is central to the majority of material practices that have produced the modern subject and the modern state. The filing cabinet is a material thing designed to store and organize paper. Paper is itself a technology with material qualities that enable



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kinds of inscription. (And, for that matter, paper has a relation to the “natural” ecology of the planet—meaning it’s made of pulped wood.) The material qualities of paper are seen with bureaucratic forms designed to document specific qualities. Paper forms are discursive objects. Checkboxes on forms delimit and force kinds of inscriptions that shape how bodies and practices are known to others and institutionally recognized; forms help define the archive. So, the fact that many forms only include boxes for “male” or “female” genders has long defined how gender is inscribed and determined in relation to, say, health care, voting, or other institutional practices. The organization of a census, for instance, determines how a population is known, and, as a result, how funds are allocated by governments, how political representation is distributed, and so on. These practices relate to what theorist Allucquère Rosanne Stone (1995, 41) refers to as the “legible body,” the “body” produced by legal, medical, and psychological practices of writing and documentation, and how these practices determine what a body is and does through what can be written about that body in institutional forms. The inclusion of other kinds of responses on a form can expand or reinvent the categories acknowledged, performed, and recognized institutionally. The fact that many forms now enable one to check “other” for their gender, or to select multiple races rather than one, changes how gender and race are acknowledged by institutional structures through how these categories are inscribed on paper. Practices of filing shape how these documents are then grouped, evaluated, and crossreferenced. A file has a specific spatiality and temporality and only includes that which can be filed (so, that which can be vertically filed, rather than, say, awkwardly shaped objects, liquid samples, or other things). That is, until a different kind of filing system is created. Various technological proposals that preceded the internet, shaping how it has been imagined, like Vannevar Bush’s “memex” or Ted Nelson’s “Project Xanadu,” were designed to enable researchers, scientists, and bureaucrats to cross-reference documents in ways that, today, precede the hypertext links that characterize the World Wide Web, marking a break between how filing cabinets and digital archives (best seen in the form of the relational database) organize data. Additionally, the physical form of a filing cabinet shapes practices and how practices are taught. People had to learn to use a filing cabinet to efficiently store and retrieve information, practices that, with enough rehearsal, would be performed without thought. As Robertson highlights, these practices were not evenly distributed—beliefs about gender and the abilities of specific bodies resulted in how these technologies were used and how their use was taught. The filing cabinet materialized gender in particular ways, which was a result of other beliefs about women’s bodies and their manual skill in using their hands.

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Social relation: Documentality Our discussion of filing cabinets and forms leads away from how inscriptions act historically and toward how inscriptions produce social relations. While things like forms demonstrate a relation to history—what gets written on a form is what gets remembered; what a medium can record is what endures— inscriptions likewise perform social relations in the present. Who acts? Whose bodies are recorded? How? Who is trained to use a technology? All of these things relate to how the Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris theorizes “social objects” as the product of inscription and documentation, providing a robust theoretical perspective that revises the concerns of Foucault, among others, in a range of ways. While a number of his books have been translated into English, Ferraris has been mostly ignored in Anglophone countries aside from his proposed turn to “new realism,” which occurred far earlier than many other theorists advocating for new kinds of realism today (see Ferraris 2014a, 2015). What I present here only examines a small part of Ferraris’s overall theory, and we’ll return to some of his arguments about realism later on in this book. For now, I want to review what Ferraris means by “documentality,” and how inscription and documentation are essential tasks for performing and maintaining social relation. Ferraris argues that there are three kinds of objects in the world. First, there are natural objects, which exist regardless of humans. Natural objects “occupy positions in space and time and do not depend on subjects” (2013, 33). We can think of natural objects as best represented by things like dirt, forests, minerals, and so on, as these things would exist even without the name we use to describe them. Second, there are ideal objects, which, while distinct and individual, exist outside of space and time, and are also distinct from a thinking subject that knows or identifies their existence. The final kind of object, and the one most important for us here, is the social object: “Object = Inscribed Act . . . unlike natural and ideal objects, social objects exist only insofar as at least two human beings are thinking about them” (43). These objects are not simply thoughts, though they may be documented nowhere but in the minds of two individuals. As Ferraris suggests, “Social objects are made of inscriptions, impressed on paper, on some magnetic medium, or even only (for instance, in the promises we make to each other every day) in people’s heads” (1). Let’s elaborate what Ferraris means by social objects using one of his own examples: mobile phones (2014b). Ferraris argues that phones are not devices for communication, but devices for inscription and documentation. They are not channels we use to talk with others, even though this is how media



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like phones are often imagined (and used). Rather, phones are technologies for writing and can only be understood by emphasizing how a phone is composed by and produces inscriptions. Inscriptions shape the corporate and economic structure of telecommunications companies, which are bound up with the ownership and management of material infrastructures. Various mobile phone conglomerates merge or get renamed regularly. While the name of these companies refers to who owns a particular set of infrastructures (i.e., phones themselves, wires, cables, relays, etc.), they cannot be reduced to their infrastructures. Infrastructures keep changing over time, and the companies themselves constantly mutate. Their “identity consists in signatures and documents, which is to say in inscribed acts” (171). Or, of one particular mobile company, Vodafone, he asks, So where is the being of Vodafone? The answer is easier than expected: in the SIM card, quite apart from its support; in acts deposited in court, quite apart from their support; and in shares, quite apart from their support. All these are so many kinds of inscription and signature: the code deposited on the SIM card is in essence a signature, which establishes a conceptual unity between a bit in a bank’s computer, a genetic code, and a trace of ink on paper. (172)

The phone, again, is not a medium for communication, but a medium for writing and documenting. It is less about the movement of spoken words from one place to another, but the creation of a mobile device with a particular “address,” linked with specific accounts and bodies, which are linked with a corporate body that exists thanks to legal and economic documents that constantly perform its existence. The device inscribes and creates an object through various means of documenting who one is and where one is located. But why would the phone itself be a medium of inscription, rather than a medium of communication? Given the popularity of true crime entertainment, many of us are aware of how mobile phones are used in trials to document where someone is at a particular time. The popular podcast Serial, for instance, spent a significant amount of time reconstructing the evidence used in a murder trial, much of it related to records that documented approximately where a call with a mobile phone was made. The mobile phone provides a means for documenting specific acts, along with their time and location. The methods a phone uses to document location means it is writing, which, for Ferraris, produces social objects. Now, we should not dismiss communication completely—we should just

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claim that any act of communication is likewise an act of documentation, of writing. In defining social objects, Ferraris revises Jacques Derrida’s famous aphorism, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” which is often incorrectly translated as “there is nothing outside of the text,” when it actually should be translated as “there is no outside-text” (Derrida 1997, 158). Derrida doesn’t mean that there’s nothing but language and that all reality is ultimately linguistic (or textual), even though that’s what this statement is often thought to mean. Derrida was quite fond of puns, and hors-texte, in French, refers to an unnumbered page in a book. At a strictly literal level, Derrida is claiming that unnumbered pages are never “outside” of a book, as they still exist “in” the book itself. Or, another variation of this claim would begin with the French word for “outlaw,” hors-la-loi. So, while an outlaw may be “outside the law,” if we take its translation literally, an outlaw is only defined by its relation to the law. Derrida’s famous phrase implies that an “outside” is only defined as outside by its relation to the “inside.” It does not exist alone— it can only exist in relation, which comes from how Western philosophy has often made its claims through binary oppositions and the dialectic (see Wood 2016). The distinction of “inside” and “outside” can only happen from the inside—which means that “outside” is always a relation produced by assuming the truth of the “inside.” (This claim is similar to Barad’s argument that cuts only happen from the inside.) Ferraris accepts, in a way, both Derrida’s actual argument and his critics’ misreading. He changes Derrida’s famous quip to “there is nothing social outside the text” (2013, 121). While there is a world outside of language and documentation, social relations are about the ways we document our world collectively. Ferraris wants to argue that there is a world outside of language and signification— it’s just that any form of social relation requires inscription to maintain its existence. I find many of Ferraris’s suggestions useful, yet there are a few issues that we should revise. While he acknowledges the importance of a medium, Ferraris positions it secondary to the act of inscription, which, he suggests, isn’t intrinsically linked to the materiality of a medium. Social objects, he argues, “consist of a medium and an inscription; but the predominant role is played by the inscription, given the way that (as we see with money or a document), for a given documental value, the medium can be metal, paper, plastic, or silicon” (2013, 33). The value of money can be inscribed through a wide range of media, and thus, for Ferraris, it is the inscription (of value, of number) that really matters. Of course, we can easily see how different monetary media (be it paper currency, credit, or Bitcoin) can radically reshape the social relations implicit in monetary exchange. Our discussion of



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inscription, thus, complicates Ferraris’s distinction, but it’s still worth noting that the medium and the inscription are separate, if inherently linked. This distinction leads us to how Ferraris defines the existence of a document, which also serves to distinguish the three terms we’ve used in this chapter in roughly interchangeable ways: inscription, writing, and document. I quote Ferraris here at some length: Language reveals the link between documents and inscriptions. Once upon a time, a degree was called a piece of paper, and in technical contexts, document and writing (or writ) are often equivalent, in such a way that “my papers” means “my documents,” which are the things that were once kept in the drawers of a desk. Thus, a document is of necessity a material res, even if the realm of documents is not restricted to paper, given that biometrical data and photographs can count as documents in the narrow sense [as legal evidence of identity], and sound recordings, films, and videos as well as DNA can count as documents in the broad sense [as evidence in general]. In the overwhelming majority of these realizations, we can pick out the structure of documentality; first, there is the physical medium; then there is the inscription, which is by its nature smaller than the medium and defines its social value; and last there is something idiomatic, such as a signature or one of its variants, such as a coded digital signature, an electronic signature, the code for the ATM, or a PIN for the cell phone, each of which, in descending order, guarantees authenticity. (250–51)

A document is, following its etymology, something that “shows or represents some fact” (249). It is evidentiary, and, in its material existence as evidence, performs a social relation and maintains that relation over time. It does this by virtue of having a physical presence in a medium, containing a specific inscription, which can be socially regarded as true or authentic. Again, while Ferraris notes that all inscriptions must be made in a medium, he is dismissive of the material specificity of a medium. My argument would be, following our discussion of the archive, that the medium matters insofar as it determines precisely what can be inscribed, and thus shapes how an inscription can become evidence, and the means by which is can be verified.3 The three levels identified by Ferraris are not hierarchical, as he claims. Rather, all three are co-constitutive—they are intra-active. The kinds of

This is similar to how Cornelia Vismann (2008) describes the relation between documents, files, and the law.

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inscriptions made depend on the medium in which they are inscribed. The verification of an inscription, again, depends on the medium and the kind of inscription. For digital media, we cannot rely on the existence of an image to assume its truth, but rely on metadata and other techniques that are part of how the medium inscribes. All three of these elements of a document are conjoined. It is the combination of these three levels that define what Ferraris means by “documentality,” a riff on a key term of Foucault’s: “governmentality.” Let’s explain what governmentality is, first. Governmentality consists of three intertwined elements. First, it refers to “the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics” that creates a specific thing called “government.” “Government” uses statistical measurements of population as a means to evaluate the bodies in a specific territory; it uses political economy to calculate the value of a population and its labor; it uses technologies of security to manage and regulate who enters and who leaves the boundaries of a territory. Second, governmentality refers to the rise of a specific mode of power, of “government,” as a means to control and manage citizens, which relies both on specific technologies and tools, as well as a set of knowledgeable practices designed to properly manage citizens. And third, governmentality refers to how the state and its administration of justice becomes less about sovereign power to make die or let live, but about the administration of bureaucracy that, as Foucault elsewhere argues, lets die and makes live (2007, 108–09). No longer confined to specific geographic boundaries, “government” is about a set of flexible and evolving techniques for managing a population. Governmentality makes most sense when contrasted with some of Foucault’s earlier ways of describing power and sovereign authority. “For a long time,” Foucault notes in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, “one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death” (1978, 135). Or, part of the authority of a king or queen was the ability to sentence to death those they ruled, killing without consequence. This kind of power wasn’t limited to royalty. It probably emerged, Foucault suggests, from the Roman law of patria potestas that granted a father the right to kill his children and slaves, “just as he had given them life, so he could take it away,” a power that was eventually limited and diminished in a number of ways (135). This kind of power, Foucault notes, is the power to take life or let live. This is no longer how power and authority function today. Rather, Foucault states, “One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (138). This is what Foucault refers to with the term “biopower.” Instead of killing



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specific people, authority—in the material form of governmental bodies and agencies, often through statistical analyses of population—cultivates forms of life and bodily practices, or, conversely, it lets them die. This “letting die” happens in prisons, where people are sentenced to life in jail, through mental hospitals, where those judged insane by psychiatry and psychology live out the remainder of their lives, or when the homeless are left to die on the streets. These individuals are either confined to “foster” the well-being of the rest of the population or are never integrated into the social in ways that permit their lives to flourish. Biopower is about the cultivation and calculation of the value of human life, in which a hierarchy is produced through this logic of who is allowed to live, and who is left to die. Jean Baudrillard, in his book Symbolic Exchange and Death, which was published in France the same year as the first volume of the History of Sexuality, argues that this relation is foundational for capitalism and labor. “Whoever works has not been put to death. . . . And labour is first of all the sign of being judged worthy only of life. . . . Power is therefore never, contrary to what we might imagine, the power of putting to death, but exactly the opposite, that of allowing to live” (2017, 61). It’s this relation that is central for biopolitical calculations that judge and order bodies. Whose bodies are most productive? Who is allowed to live, and therefore allowed to work? Ferraris argues that documentality is the basis of governmentality. The varied techniques Foucault mentions, be they calculations of population reliant on a census, or immigration controls that depend on passports, or economic calculation of GDP, are all forms of documentation, in which an inscription locates and identifies an individual based on how they are written by systems of power (2013, 271). We should take Ferraris and Foucault together. Power is about the management of the body, of fostering specific actions and behaviors, locating specific bodies in specific places, within larger populations. This only happens through means of documentation, which exist because of inscriptions into a specific medium, inscriptions that, thanks to new technologies and the invention of new means to document and inscribe, transform the potentials of government and the control over bodies in different ways. Now, while Foucault uses the word “government,” the specific “government” of governmentality should not be equated to the state. I’ve elsewhere argued (Bollmer 2016b) that social media should be considered to be a primary form of government today, one that manages and controls beyond the government proper. Many others have argued that, within the context of neoliberalism, the means of government have shifted to NGOs and corporations that exist beyond the level of the state (cf. Brown 2015; Ong 2006). Ferraris gives us one way to acknowledge how this happens. Who controls inscriptions? Who manages documents? Who uses them?

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How are they used? Foucault also draws our attention in another direction. Documentation and government are about the coordination, management, and conduct of bodies. Our last move here is to note that materiality is performative because its inscriptions document bodies. In their materiality, they teach bodies how to act, how to move, and how to live. They do this through the fostering of technique, which serves as a means for documenting and registering cultural difference in the most basic habits and practices performed daily.

Bodies: The performance of technique What I mean by technique and how it relates to the body (and how technique should be thought of as a kind of inscription) is influenced by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss and how he once defined various “body techniques.” In the course of his years of ethnographic research, Mauss became “well aware that walking or swimming, for example, and all sorts of things of the same type are specific to determinate societies; that the Polynesians do not swim as we [French citizens] do, that my generation did not swim as the present generation does” (1992, 455). Each society, Mauss tells us, has its own habits, seen in practices of walking, cooking, dancing, moving, and living. Mauss uses the term “habitus” to describe these many combined practices, stressing that this does not suggest these acts are merely ingrained habits, or acquired, learned abilities. These techniques are not merely ways we mirror and identify with the others around us. Rather, they mark the very ways that social differences are written into bodies and performed daily. They mark differences in age, differences in class, and differences in culture. They exist as “practical reason” (458) and become visible in movement (a kind of walking or running), in speech (an accent), or any other practice one might engage in. The body is, in a sense, a technology for inscription. We write into it specific practices that become the “habits” we perform daily, habits that perform our “habitus,” practices that we inhabit and enable us to become legible to others. But, at the same time, the body does not exist alone. In conjunction with the physical objects that exist around us, the body is trained to perform specific functions, to move in specific ways. The architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, in his monumental work Mechanization Takes Command (1948), examined how specific technologies gradually transformed and standardized the ways human bodies eat, move, and rest in America and Europe. Machines, in industrializing meat slaughter and the baking of bread, remade human bodies and the human senses—urban spaces



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smelled differently given the odor of meat slaughter in cities like Cincinnati and Chicago. Machines were developed to perform kneading of bread, creating loaves that were mass produced and standardized, sliced uniformly and bleached. Practices of sitting and bathing were reinvented with chairs designed to cultivate specific postures, and baths that were designed for speed and the movement of water. Different technologies, in their physical form, create vastly different practices that, as habitus, shape how bodies live and differentiate “cultures.” As we learn to use and navigate our world, our bodies are being made into a means through which we “know” and act (without thinking) a range of practices that are neither universal nor natural, practices that—with the mechanization of food, for instance—involve the most fundamental biological faculties of bodies in digestion. Or, practices— with hygiene and relaxation—that shape how bodies sit, lie down, and clean themselves, which mark specific differences with social norms of appearance, comfort, and scent. A loaf of bread may not seem particularly notable, but the ways that bread is made is very clearly related to cultural difference. Contrast the seemingly artificial, spongy, mass-produced “white” bread with roti, lavash, naan, baguettes, focaccia, bagels, cornbread, pita, or many other kinds of bread. Each of these breads are made according to specific practices and methods of baking that bring together flour, yeast, and other ingredients, reliant on techniques that are often difficult to learn and master, baked in accordance with environmental concerns like temperature and humidity. Some have very specific spiritual or cultural associations and different tastes and textures. The standardization of bread in the creation of white bread, for instance, is historically and culturally particular, and involves a complete reorganization of the daily life of those involved in bread making and bread consumption. The creation of bread involves many practices that aren’t merely about “doing,” but are about how a body is located in relation to other bodies. These practices are foundational for how “culture” matters. As Giedion tells us, The kneading of dough is a strenuous activity, consisting at once of pulling, pushing, and beating. It was performed by hand and, for large quantities of dough, with the feet as well. With the advent of industrialization, the end of the guilds, and the expansion of cities, there arose a demand for machine kneading. The mechanical kneader can produce more quickly and more hygienically. (1948, 169)

You may know how to knead and bake bread. But the vast majority of bread you consume you most likely did not make because baking bread is difficult and takes a lot of time. Even if you do make your own bread, you probably

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do not use the same techniques as people have done throughout much of history, instead using quick-rise yeast, or flour formulated for specific kinds of dough. Most likely, the bread you eat was made by a machine. These technologies have a long history, going back to the Romans, who used rotating kneaders, and experiments from the late Renaissance. One machine, the Castilian braga, which was a large roller that was attached to a ceiling, swung back and forth over large boards of bread. This machine created bread that was, as observed in a 1778 book Giedion cites, “whiter than that kneaded by hand; its crust is not crisp but extremely delicate and not too elastic” (170). Over time, these techniques changed in numerous ways, further changing the physical qualities of bread, in accordance with the various technologies that were used. In some places, because mechanized bread would not rise properly, gas was added to artificially inflate bread. Because the rising of bread from yeast was often volatile (or two slow for mass production), practices of inflating bread using gas (rather than the fermentation of yeast) caused bread to smell differently. Chemicals were added to bread that would cause it to rise differently. The point here is not that some bread is more natural than others. Rather, even something as mundane as a loaf of bread is the result of specific historical and technological changes that exist materially. A spongy loaf of white bread is the product of over a hundred years of experimenting with technology to mass produce food. A loaf of white bread is an inscription of a number of technical, scientific, and cultural practices that originate in specific places at specific times. The mechanization of bread, for instance, began in Europe, but is mostly a product of the United States. The existence of white bread globally requires the exportation of technologies and practices that emerged in the United States to create bread cheaply, so that one loaf of bread would be functionally identical to another. This is a way of thinking not only of how inscriptions exist in the most basic aspects of daily life but also of how the globalization of a specific kind of bread could even be thought to be “imperialist” since it requires an entire technological apparatus and the education of bodies to use and work with these technologies. Bernhard Siegert uses the term “cultural techniques” to refer to some of these practices (2015). For Siegert, any sense of a “human being,” or any sense of a specific culture, is produced through specific practices and techniques that differentiate a “human” or a culture from something else. Siegert notes five aspects that he uses to define cultural techniques: 1. Cultural techniques are practices that generate concepts. Singing, counting, painting, reading, baking, and so on, all originated as practices,



2.

3.

4. 5.

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and the concepts we use to discuss these practices followed the material ways these practices have been performed in the past. So, the ways we talk about bread only happen because of how we eventually describe the practices that have been devised to make bread. Language comes after practice—though the two, today, cannot be separated. There is no singular thing called “culture.” There are only plural cultures. There are many cultures that emerge from differences in specific practices and techniques. This is similar to Mauss and his discussion of how cultural difference is performed through different ways of walking, swimming, speaking, and so on. Cultural techniques perform symbolic work. This is one of the reasons I’m including these habits as a kind of inscription. Different techniques, while they may not be linguistic, nonetheless mark specific symbolic distinctions, be they between nature and culture (as, for instance, plowing can be understood, as “cultivating” or “culturing” the soil), or between inside and outside (a distinction a door performs, for instance). “Every culture begins with the introduction of distinctions” (14). The practices of cultural techniques are about difference and distinction. They mark oppositions that are found in specific practices. “Cultural techniques are not only media that sustain codes. . . . They also destabilize cultural codes, erase signs, and deterritorialize sounds and images” (15). Practices are subject to change, are performed incorrectly, or, given the fact that we all have different bodies, may be performed differently given the anatomical differences between different people. This means that they are subject to change, while they also sustain the practices of “culture.” New technologies invented to change practices (like machines for baking bread) likewise reorient our practices and remake the thing we call “culture.”

If not “writing,” these practices should be thought of as a way of “inscribing” culture in bodies. The practices we perform are essential for marking cultural difference in ways that are not about meaning at all, but about habits and movements that we often perform without thought.

Conclusion This chapter theorized inscription in a number of different ways. Attention to inscription, in its materiality, provides a different way of thinking about history that begins with the facticity of a technology making a mark in a

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medium. It provides a way of looking at the past differently, one that attends to marginalia in order to allow different histories to materialize. Beyond history, inscription provides a different way of thinking of social relations, and in turning to technique, we highlighted how inscription exists as the basis for the most banal daily practices we engage in. The body, after all, is a medium, and it too can store information. This also provides a different way of thinking about the politics of cultural difference—differences between cultures are not just about worldviews, but about material practices. To understand the politics of difference, then, is to think about how materiality is performative, and how different practices produce bodies in relation. It is to examine which bodies materialize and which are obliterated. The reason this remains important is because each medium has a different relation to space and time. Some inscriptions are fleeting, while others last for millennia. Some media move quickly but are fragile and are easily lost or destroyed. Some are heavy and endure over time but cannot move very easily. We now turn to questions of spatiotemporal materialism, and how these different relations to space and time shape the material politics of media.

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Textiles and paint tubes An inscription is innately related to duration. When we inscribe something into a medium we enable it to exist beyond the momentary now of its writing. But not all inscriptions are equally durable. What is inscribed into stone is more permanent than what’s written on paper merely for the fact that stone is more durable than paper. If I were building a monument, I wouldn’t want to make it out of paper. Not only do our inscriptions have a relation to time, they also have a relation to space. Stone is difficult to move, and paper relatively mobile. If I were to send a letter, I wouldn’t want to have it written on a rock. And, of course, an email moves even faster than a piece of paper, though it too is linked with a physical medium and only moves as quickly as is permitted by the wires, routers, and relays that make up the infrastructure of the internet. The physical qualities of paper, stone, and digital infrastructure, and the consequent physical relation these media have with space and time, determine the social, economic, and political function of specific inscriptions. At a foundational level, media transform spatial and temporal relations, to such an extent that the physical transformation of time and space is one way we can define how media act: a medium is that which transforms relations in space and time. Yet, as this chapter will demonstrate, how media transform time and space is not uniform; media do not shape all bodies equally. They don’t enable all bodies the same extension in space, to maintain the same presence over time, or to move at the same temporal pace. Media shape time and space unevenly, serving as a physical agent of social difference that sorts bodies, placing them into uneven relations that legitimate and perpetuate the power some have over others. Let’s begin with a few examples, subtly reorienting our discussion of performative materialism to a particular aspect of the performativity of media, leading us toward questions of spatiotemporal materialism. When Elizabeth Wayland Barber, an archaeologist and linguist, was studying for her PhD, she noticed something striking about the patterns she saw in

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Classical and Bronze Age Mediterranean pottery. Barber had been taught to sew and weave when she was young and thought that the patterns she saw in pottery resembled common patterns for weaving. When she suggested to the archaeologists at her school that, perhaps, the patterns on pottery originated in weaving, they dismissed her idea. The patterns were too complicated, the archaeologists claimed. And there was no physical evidence that woven textiles had patterns at all, at least when Barber was in grad school. Even today, there are few existent examples of textiles from before medieval times, aside those from Egypt, which are mostly made of white linen—certainly not examples of patterned weaving. Barber was not satisfied with the claims of those she consulted, however. She began doing research, intending to write a short article claiming merely that it was possible that the patterns on pottery were derived from weaving. As is often the case with academic research, a small project ballooned into a much larger one. After nearly two decades of study, Barber published a monumental work (1993) demonstrating that the weaving of patterned textiles happened far earlier than previously thought, a fact long neglected by archaeology, challenging and transforming many of the methodological assumptions employed in the archaeology of textiles. As to why these textiles were neglected by mainstream archaeology, Barber gives two explanations that are significant for us. First, the weaving of textiles has long been labor performed by women and thus was often neglected by archaeologists. Archaeologists had never asked: where are the women in this history? What were they doing in their daily lives? How were these acts central to the everyday organization of culture and society? The absence of evidence was taken as an absence of social activity. Second, the products of women’s labor throughout history have, for the most part, been perishable: Women’s work consisted largely of making perishables—especially food and clothing. So if we are to retrieve significant amounts of women’s history, or of the history of any evanescent occupation in particular (and I am thinking of such things as music and dance as well as food and clothing), we need better evidence than just that which falls into our laps. (Barber 1994, 286)

Barber advocates, then, not just for the direct study of relatively permanent objects that archaeology uncovers, objects strong and stable enough to endure for centuries, if not millennia, but for innovative forms of linguistic analysis, the microscopic probing of artifacts, new kinds of photography and spectrometry, and more. As we saw in Chapter 2, it’s in looking toward the margins we can find inscriptions of neglected histories that otherwise



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appear undocumented. As Markus Krajewski (2018) notes in his history of service as a cultural technique, “subalterns” such as servants play a massive determining role throughout history, channeling and filtering information, managing the movement of bodies throughout physical space, and so on— and yet these subalterns themselves rarely leave firsthand accounts of their own agency. Similar to what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has famously argued (1999, 269–311), subalterns are characterized by their lack of “speech,” or, more explicitly, by the fact that their voices do not enter into discourse in any direct way, are not written down; even if they were, they would not be “heard” clearly. Krajewski elaborates, How can historiography reconstitute the invisibility of servants in a systematic fashion? One would need to shift the focus and engage with the actions of “indirect powers” (Carl Schmitt) in a similarly indirect manner. A systematic analysis would then need to examine the sideshows and backdrops, the secondary characters and all those figures that tend to escape historians’ attention. In other words, looking for subalterns means looking at the margins. (2018, 100)

With scholars like Barber, how we look for “margins” expands with a broad range of techniques we can use to analyze, say, a prehistoric textile that otherwise appears to be deeply damaged and unsuitable for a museum display, embracing ways technologies transform what we can see and sense, and, conjointly, what we can say about what we sense. While the physical materiality of an inscription provides the limits of our archive, many other inscriptions exist, written down—we just don’t always have the capacity to recognize that they’re there. We can use Barber’s arguments as a bridge between our previous chapter and this one. First, we can see how practices of archaeology can permit women from history to materialize in the present by looking anew at the physical things they produced—or, we can prohibit them from materializing when we relegate specific objects to the margins, be it by saying textiles are less significant than other objects or by thinking of them as too damaged to be a useful source of knowledge. But, second, we can see how bodies and histories materialize in the present (or not) because of the durability and temporality of a medium. Barber’s work obliquely reconstructed history when the most direct material evidence of the past—the actual textiles themselves—had fallen apart and been lost. Some media—like pottery or stone—endure fairly well. Others—like textiles—do not. This shapes our present understanding of history, of labor, of gender. The fact that one medium endured over time, while another didn’t, informs our knowledge about gender relations in

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history, which has clouded and distorted our understanding of the skill and technique involved in the “women’s work” of weaving and sewing throughout history. This matters today, not just because scholars like Barber give us a more accurate understanding of the past unclouded by discriminatory ideologies that relegate women to the sidelines of history. The relations in our present often repeat or reframe the past, but only insofar as material artifacts, our archive, permit the past to materialize in our present. The maintenance of patriarchy today happens, in part, because the vast history of women’s labor has been neglected as it does not “materialize” in the same way as the products of men’s labor. This history is performative—it serves to perform gender in the present, along with the limits and possibilities of gender, the ways we have for acknowledging the significance of labor typically gendered as feminine, and how this history shapes how gender is performed not just in museums and their representation and display of history, but in the teaching and practice of specific cultural techniques, like those of sewing and cooking. So, the ability of a medium to persist over time matters. But this ability is related to the ability of a medium to move across space, as well. Not all media are equally mobile, and often those that are the most fragile—like textiles— travel more easily than others. This turns us to our second example. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, European artists stored their paint in pigs’ bladders, tied closed with a string. The artist would prick the bladder with a pin to get paint to come out. Unless stored this way, paint would dry out and become unusable—and even then, paint tended to dry out before it could be used because it was impossible to reseal the hole the artist made to get paint out. The bladders wouldn’t close very well, paint could easily leak, and the bladders could also burst. And bladders weren’t exactly easy to move around with to begin. So, painters at this time worked almost exclusively inside of their studios. This changed in 1841, with the invention of metal paint tubes. Created by John G. Rand, an American artist living in London, the first paint tubes were made of tin with a screw cap. Metal tubes with caps made it so artists’ paint wouldn’t dry out, but they also allowed artists to move outside of their studios and, especially, to paint with natural light en plein air. Artists were slow to adopt this new technology because of the added cost of the metal tubes, but tubes were central for the development of impressionism—noted for its use and representation of natural light—and they permitted artists to experiment with new colors, or at least to use more colors than they would have previously. Because of how paint would dry out with bladders, artists would only use a few colors at a time, focusing on particular parts of a painting. With metal tubes, artists began to use more colors and to conceive



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of paintings as a complete whole to be painted all in one sitting. The artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir has been quoted as stating, “Without colors in tubes, there would be no Cézanne, no Monet, no Pissarro, and no Impressionism” (Hurt 2013). Claude Monet’s 1885 Waves at the Manneport, for instance, was painted in two or three sessions while Monet perched on a rock formation near the northern coast of France. In the painting one can find sand from the beach, physical evidence of how the space of painting had changed because of metal paint tubes. If, with the fragility of textiles, we can see how a medium changes temporal relations through durability over time, with paint tubes we can see how a medium effects mobility and movement, changing relations in space. This theme—that a medium changes relations in time and space—is perhaps the most important observation in the history of medium theory, initially formed in the work of Canadian economist Harold Innis. Since I’ve stated that this book is an attempt to update medium theory for the present, then we should look at Innis’s legacy, which is what I mean by the term spatiotemporal materialism. This chapter begins with Innis, extending his arguments out to more recent themes related to the relation of a medium to space and time, from arguments about the speed of contemporary capital to apocalyptic narratives about acceleration and technology, along with claims about the radically different temporality brought about by the digital processing of computers. Yet, rather than embracing claims about the so-called annihilation of space by time, we conclude by looking at various theories that suggest both space and time are relational categories and are fundamentally multiple—there are multiple spaces and multiple times, not one singular “space” and one singular “time” that is collapsing because of new technologies. The way that spaces and times are negotiated, this chapter claims, is central for a materialist politics of media.

The biases of communication Harold Adam Innis was, and still is, considered to be one of the most significant academics in Canadian history and was one of the first to achieve international recognition. Innis argued, drawing on empirical fieldwork in Canada he termed “dirt research,” that the particular social and economic character of a culture is determined by its natural resources. In books like The Fur Trade in Canada (1930) and The Cod Fisheries (1940), Innis developed a theory of political economy that differed significantly from reigning orthodoxies of his time because of its emphasis on staples. Innis diverged from both liberal theories of economics and Marxist theory, since

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his emphasis was neither on the free market nor on class struggle, though, like Marx, Innis argued for the primacy of specific oppositions and conflicts. If, for Marx and Engels, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (1999, 65), then, for Innis, the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of natural resources, the local economies that harvest these resources, and the unequal global relations produced by their movement and trade. If with Marx we have a materialism that relates to the practices and means of production, stressing the conflicts that arise from inequalities in ownership and the exploitation of labor, then with Innis we have a materialism that comes from the physical composition of the earth’s geography, and the conflicts that arise from global trade exploiting the local particularities of economic production. In his work on staples, Innis claimed that international trade created relations of center and margin, in which colonial powers would import natural resources, like timber, furs, minerals, and food, from their colonies. The centers would then process these resources into commodities, exporting them back for sale in the colonies. This would sustain specific (unequal) international relations through the economic necessity of import and export and would create particular regional relations based on the natural resources of a specific place. Canada’s geography, for instance, led to the development of particular local industries, reliant on the development of infrastructures like railroads that would move the products of these industries (like furs) to economic centers, where they would be integrated into global systems of trade. Unlike similar, more recent socioeconomic models, which argue for a “flat” network of relations to describe economic exchange (e.g., Latour 2005; Latour and Lépinay 2009; DeLanda 2006), the focus on inequivalences in relations is central for Innis. The economic exchange of staples produced and maintained these colonial relations of center and margin, where the colonial center would extract resources from the margin to sustain itself. So, Innis’s economic analysis of staples is, in and of itself, important in a number of ways. It foregrounds how flora and fauna and the larger ecology of a particular geographic space, including built infrastructures, determine how economies develop and, additionally, how globalization and colonial economic systems link global trade with local specificities, perpetuating and legitimating powerful inequalities in the process. Later in his life, Innis turned to examine paper, initially conceiving it as a staple akin to fur or fish. Paper is, of course, a product of natural resources. But paper’s social role is, unlike fur or fish, mostly important as a medium of documentation and communication. So, the turn toward paper seemed to radically reorient Innis’s research, away from the imperialist trade relations between Canada and the UK toward a much larger history of relations



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produced by communication—though there is a great deal of continuity between Innis’s claims about staples and his history of communication. Many of those who have looked to Innis examine either his economic insights or his foundational work on media, rarely uniting both, assuming a hard separation between the two (see Young 2017). Yet all of Innis’s work is invested in the spatial and temporal relations produced through the physical qualities of a particular industry. Both his work on staples and his work on media are concerned with the imperialist relations between center and margin and how these global inequalities are maintained. But, with communication, Innis began to be deeply critical not of the relation between Canada and the UK, but between Canada and the United States. One center had been replaced with another, in which communication monopolies came to replace colonial trade relations (see Berland 2009). The majority of Innis’s work on communication is structured as a series of specific, local claims about the physical effects of a medium, which are linked with abstract claims about the control of knowledge and, at the largest scale, about how a medium of communication serves to determine the fate of entire civilizations. These claims are not a departure from those Innis offered in his work on staples. Again, the most general questions in all of Innis’s work are similar. The American communication and journalism scholar James Carey, one of the most significant authors to link Innis with traditions of American pragmatism and British cultural studies, has suggested that, throughout his career, Innis was concerned with two questions, “What are the underlying causes of change in social organization, defined broadly to include both culture and social institutions?” and “What are the conditions which promote stability in any society?” Stability refers to the capacity of a culture to adapt to economic and political change and to likewise maintain a sense of cultural continuity, preserving particular attitudes, beliefs, and morals (Carey 1967, 6). This understanding of continuity is central for Carey’s thought—he positioned communication as about the performance of ritual, of the maintenance of community over time, rather than the extension of messages in space. Innis had similar interests. He saw newer technologies of communication as too heavily invested in extension in space rather than stability over time—something that he thought was damaging for society. Innis, thus, is a somewhat conservative theorist, since he wanted to identify how a specific culture could both absorb changes in material reality (changes that come from natural resources, from technology, from the environment, from international trade) and withstand any sense of “disruption” that comes from these changes. We can see how different Innis is from, say, many of those developing technologies today, who imagine “disruption” as one of the most sought-after values an inventor or entrepreneur would seek to enact.

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A well-known mantra of those who work at Facebook used to be “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that new technologies disrupt society in deep ways—a belief both Innis and those in Silicon Valley have in common. But— and here’s where they differ—today’s tech industries imagine disruption is positive and beneficial as it leads to “innovation,” and engineers should strive to “break things” without thinking too much about their social implications. Innis, unlike those at Facebook, sees technological disruptions as that which has undermined and destroyed entire civilizations throughout history. His entire body of research, then, is about examining the maintenance of social stability, mitigating against the disruptive effects of material change, be they from relations of economic exploitation and dependence or relations produced (and undermined) by new technologies. Innis claims, “History is not a seamless web but rather a web of which the warp and the woof are space and time woven in a very uneven fashion and producing distorted patterns” (1951, xxvii). Unlike, say, most Marxist or Hegelian notions of history, which suggest that there’s a teleological unfolding of history toward the realization of a specific endpoint (either communism, in the case of Marx, or a synthetic “end of history,” in the case of Hegel), Innis submits that history is deeply uneven, and these teleological trajectories—if they exist—are strongly influenced by various material forces that create odd effects in particular conjunctures. These forces include natural resources and trade, but also media, because media and communication are the primary mechanisms that societies use to maintain governmental order, disseminate information, and perpetuate cultural narratives. A medium has a particular bias. This is, in the legacy of media studies, Innis’s most important observation. A medium can either be time-based, meaning it endures over time (such as, in our initial examples, pottery and stone), or it can be spacebiased, meaning it moves quickly across space (such as textiles and paper). There are a number of reasons that we should foreground Innis, rather than the medium theorists who followed in his wake, like Marshall McLuhan. The first is his ambivalent relationship to teleology. Innis did not appear to believe that there was any intrinsic historical trajectory that came from technological development. Technology would disrupt the social order, destabilizing it. This certainly didn’t mean that it would be “progressive.” Innis tended to be pessimistic about the effects of technological development unless a society could successfully absorb these destabilizing effects of media, though he did not suggest new technologies to lead, intrinsically, to ruin. This differentiates him from McLuhan and his followers, who seemed to embrace an innate trajectory that guides the history of media, one that would lead to a synthesis that McLuhan termed the “global village.” Like



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the Catholic paleontologist and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who imagined that new technologies would eventually lead to a theological synthesis termed the “Omega point,” where humanity merges with god, McLuhan saw technological development leading toward a synthetic, holistic endpoint in which “community” would be realized through the materialities of communication (see Bollmer 2018, 21–23). Second, Innis was far more attuned to issues of economic control and domination than McLuhan, and the inequalities that emerge from either colonial projects designed to extract natural resources or from the capitalist monopolies that exert their power through the control of communication. Alexander John Watson, in a lengthy intellectual biography, stresses Innis’s “dark vision” for the future of society—though, again, I don’t think this can be reduced to intrinsic effects of technology, as if technology exists separate from other social relations. Rather, it has to do with the economic control of communication and knowledge, and the stressing of either extension in space or duration in time, rather than a balance between the two. Innis was pessimistic about technology’s function within society and the inequalities it served to exacerbate and maintain, rather than an inescapable telos leading to ruin. Specifically, he was concerned with the relation technologies like radio and television had with the control over space. Because radio and TV extend communication across space (which is a material function of the medium), they serve to homogenize and control from a distance (a bias of a medium linked with other specific uses of a particular technology). In emphasizing space, the continuity and endurance of particular communities over time is eroded, if not destroyed. While McLuhan greeted with optimism technologies like television and radio, Innis seemed to see “only an endgame called the collapse of Western civilization. We are speaking and writing less and hearing and seeing more material that is now mass-produced by a central source. Innis’s vision thus becomes an increasingly dark one” (Watson 2006, 412). This isn’t merely because of the American “culture industry” standardizing all global entertainment and culture, to use a term from the Frankfurt school that seems to resonate with Innis on this point (see Adorno 1991). It’s because Innis saw new forms of knowledge, new models, new ideas emerging almost exclusively from the margins. The products of the mass media are almost entirely produced cultural centers, like New York, London, or Los Angeles. In doing this, Innis saw a new kind of cultural power to dominate and “disrupt” social coherence on the margins, destroying the endurance of marginal cultures over time, leading to a homogeneity that came from the control of knowledge by cultural centers, fostered by the material capacity of a medium to quickly extend a message across space.

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We don’t need to share Innis’s vision of the future to learn something from his work. We don’t need to have a particular end of history in mind, be it dystopian or utopian, to acknowledge that a medium changes relations in space and time. For the most part, we can usually claim that a medium is either time-based or space-biased; a medium is either biased toward extension in space or it is biased toward endurance over time—few could be said to be balanced equally between space and time. The dominance of a specific medium shapes the social form that characterizes a particular society. Let’s give some concrete examples to explain why this might be. Societies that use stone to record information, for instance, are often very stable and durable, maintaining a particular tradition over time. But these societies are bound to a very small geographic space. A particularly salient example of a society organized around time-biased media is that of the Yap islanders in Micronesia, who use a currency that’s made of very large stones called rai stones. These stones are completely immobile because of their massive weight. So, economic exchange relies on local knowledge about who owns a stone at a particular moment in time. These stones perpetuate specific forms of exchange and economic practices over time, but they cannot move across space, making it so the Yap islanders’ economy is bound to a particular geographical location. Space-biased media, on the other hand, move easily around a vast geographic area, but are often fragile, and are difficult to control. Paper and print are central to the history of nationalism, a key element in how historian Benedict Anderson (2006) described the emergence of nationalism as an “imagined community.” Print, in moving across space, enables strangers to imagine themselves as part of a larger social whole, a community with deeply held bonds even if this community is ultimately abstract and impersonal. The strength of these bonds is, perhaps, surprising—people die for their country in the name of nationalism. Instead of seeing and chatting with our fellow citizens, the fact that we read the same newspapers, books, and magazines links us together as one, even if we do not and will never know the majority of those with whom we share this relation. Imagined communities have limits—limits produced out of, among other things, the fact that there are many languages across the planet. The shared circulation of print enables the creation of a relation across space—a relation that is bound by the limits of language to communicate and understand. We can immediately see the difference between relations produced by print and those produced by stone. For stone currency to be useful as a medium of exchange requires a limited, direct personal knowledge of others in the same community. To recognize a rai stone as a store of value means



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that we’d have to be part of a local community that recognizes it as a store of value, knowing who owns a stone at a particular moment in time. The stones serve to maintain and mark specific relations that are durable across time, but not space. For paper currency to be used as a medium, on the other hand, requires a larger body to regulate and verify its use as a store of value. While I may not accept a written IOU as having any value if I don’t personally know who wrote it, I do accept that a piece of paper, printed by a government, has value as “currency,” even if the paper itself isn’t worth anything. I know the numbers on a computer screen on my bank’s website are linked to a specific monetary value because I maintain trust in economic institutions, even if I have no sensory relationship to the physical thing that is my deposited money. With paper currency (and digital currency), we don’t need to know someone to know that their money is worth something. Money enables our relations to become anonymous and exists as a store of value as long as there’s something (usually a state government) that can guarantee its value (see Bollmer 2016b, 68–97). Hyperinflation—when a currency rapidly loses value in a short amount of time—happens because of a loss of faith in a government’s ability to maintain currency as something that can serve as a means of exchange. Communication via print, more broadly, enables a similar kind of social relation that persists with millions of others we will never meet or know. Each medium, Innis claims, has a strong effect in transforming social and governmental structures (2007, 27). Innis, however, was fairly critical of a focus on a single medium, or the use of an institutional body to maintain their power through the use of communication, which he termed “monopolies of knowledge.” When a government, religion, or class maintains their power by managing the dissemination of information, Innis claims, their power will likely be undermined by a new form of media that transforms or reinvents the spatial or temporal bias of media. The Catholic Church, for instance, long maintained its power (and its vast extension over space) via control of the written word, printed exclusively in Latin, readable only to an elite few. But, as Benedict Anderson tells us, print capitalism, initially content in serving this elite market by publishing in Latin, eventually turned toward publishing in vernacular languages because of the massive market that existed beyond Latin. The Reformation relied heavily on these transformations in printing, undermining the monopoly the Catholic Church had on print. During the Reformation, Martin Luther “became the first best-selling author so known. Or, to put it another way, the first writer who could ‘sell’ his new books on the basis of his name” (2006, 39). While the Counter-Reformation attempted to restrict the expansion of publishing in languages other than Latin, restoring

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its monopoly on print, it was unable to maintain control over knowledge it previously possessed. The Catholic Church, throughout Europe, published various lists, such as the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, or “List of Prohibited Books,” which would enumerate publications Catholics were banned from reading. The Index was published from 1529 until 1966, when the publication of these lists was abolished by Pope Paul VI. It included works like Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, along with unauthorized translations of the Bible. While Innis died before the popularization of the internet, his model can provide a particular way of understanding digital media, even though digital technologies could be said to have both temporal and spatial biases. Given their seemingly instantaneous movement of messages across the globe, digital networks seem so biased toward spatial extension that they completely do away with duration. New technologies create a sense of global synchronicity, an acceleration that comes from how media dictate rhythm. This would be a realization of Innis’s worst nightmare. Through digital media, the center so completely colonizes the margins that no distinction between the two could be said to exist. There are problems with this view, however, which we’ll return to later on. This doesn’t account for how digital media could be said to have a deep temporal bias, as well. The hardware of digital media is often made up of minerals and chemicals that will exist for centuries, if not longer. The ecologist Timothy Morton uses the term “hyperobject” to refer to objects created by human beings that will far outlast human civilization, like Styrofoam or plutonium (2010, 130). Our computers and phones will most likely last far longer than we do (though the inscriptions we’ve made with these technologies—at least the textual ones—might not be accessible then). In a sense, digital media are also time-biased, if in a vastly different way than stone or pottery and in a different way than how Innis and Carey seemed to think about time-biased media (cf. Parikka 2015). Our waste, after all, is not about extending society in time— we quite clearly attempt to exclude waste from social relations. Though (if we return to Barber) waste still can serve as an inscription through which our actions will be known in the future. But the tendency of digital networks to extend in space is, more often than not, the bias ascribed to them. Innis’s work tells us a number of things that we should keep in mind. First, that specific media have particular relations to extension in space or duration in time. These relations are political. They can work to maintain control over knowledge, legitimating specific institutional hierarchies, or they can undermine authority. It’s important that Innis spent most of his time focusing on historical detail, rather than overarching claims (even though his work often leads to these massive, seemingly totalizing claims).



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This is because the particular effects of a medium are what matters, not more general, large-scale changes. As Marshall McLuhan stated, following Innis, “The message of any medium or technology is the change in scale or pace and pattern it introduces in human affairs” (1964, 8). This is a good definition of what a medium is. A medium mediates relations in space and time. But these general “changes” are rarely good enough to tell us much about what a medium does. Instead, we should look at the granular negotiations of relation in space and time—not totalizing claims about instantaneity and speed. And, as my brief discussion of digital media and digital networks implies, the rigid opposition Innis gave between space-biased media and time-biased media may not always be helpful in describing the spatial and temporal effects of digital technology. So, we should look at the details about how a medium changes space and time and how the relations a medium fosters are, then, political—meaning that a medium produces affinities and oppositions through its modulation and management of space and time. As Sarah Sharma has suggested, “To focus on this time and space changing often negates attention to the structural politics of time and space, specifically the different bodies and labor that are reorchestrated to elevate and valorize our media forms over most of humanity” (2012, 67). A medium changes relations in space and time, certainly. But, this reshaping of space and time cannot be the endpoint for any particular analysis of a medium. We should look at specific ways that space and time are reinvented, and the differential politics that comes from the transformation of space and time. Following this argument, we’ll focus on three themes in the remainder of this chapter. The first relates to Marshall McLuhan’s interpretation of Innis, which transforms questions of economic relations and imperial power to aesthetic and phenomenological concerns about perception and experience—a theme that will continue to be developed in Chapter 4. The second examines several claims common in a number of variants of critical theory from the past several decades—that technologies standardize time, that digital media and new technologies contribute to the “annihilation of space by time,” and that there’s an “acceleration” resultant from digital technologies and their relation to instantaneity across space. The third, however, questions and critiques these themes, examining how arguments about experience, synchronization, acceleration, and instantaneity too often overlook the lived forms of difference and inequality that characterize everyday life. Technologies do not enable everyone to experience the same thing, they do not standardize all bodies, and they do not accelerate at the same rate for everyone. The temporal and spatial politics of media should look to the unevenness that emerges when media shape space and time.

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Marshall McLuhan’s global village Media “are staples or natural resources, exactly as are coal and cotton and oil,” claims Marshall McLuhan near the beginning of his Understanding Media (1964, 21), laying out a vision indebted to Innis while diverging from him in a number of ways. McLuhan was—and continues to be—one of the most significant theorists of media to have ever lived, whose interpretation of media is foundational for the perspective outlined in this book. His primary insight was lifted from Innis—media transform space and time. But, instead of stressing economic, imperialist relations between center and margin, McLuhan reoriented Innis to focus on human sensation and experience. It’s not so much that natural resources transform the economic life of a community. They reshape “the entire psychic life of the community. And this pervasive fact creates the unique cultural flavor of any society. It pays through the nose and all its other senses for each staple that shapes its life” (21, emphasis added). Media are, for McLuhan, “extensions” of the human body and its senses, reinventing social relations not simply through, say, the role of print in creating a shared sense of nationalism, but though the sensory organization of space and time brought about by a specific medium. If, for Innis, the role of media is in transforming spatial and temporal relations that are, ultimately, economic and governmental, for McLuhan they’re about the spatiality and temporality of experience. I want to foreground some of the limits to McLuhan’s arguments, so we can know how to approach him and what to reject. It’s clear that McLuhan relies on and repeats a kind of colonial logic of development throughout his writings. Many of McLuhan’s claims are based on anthropological research that, today, is highly questionable—and his use of this research is likewise dubious, outlining a historical trajectory based on technological development. McLuhan looks to the anthropology of Africa, in particular, to describe what Western culture must have been like prior to literacy and technological development. He makes statements that privilege a primitivist way of looking at non-Western culture, suggesting that society prior to literacy is more communal or more “whole” than the ways of living fostered by literacy. There are countless examples of McLuhan doing this in his many books. At one point, in Understanding Media, he suggests the following: The implosive (compressional) character of the electric technology plays the disk or film of Western man backward, into the heart of tribal darkness, or into what Joseph Conrad called “the Africa within.” The instant character of electric information movement does not enlarge, but involves, the family of man in the cohesive state of village living. (1964, 111)



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There are examples of McLuhan also claiming that this “cohesion” of the village is also prerational and, effectively, the result of “disorder” that exists prior to the linear thought of modern rationality. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, he argues that new kinds of electrical technology—the telegraph, the telephone, the television—in returning to primitive orality will also cause an erosion of the dispassionate order of modernity: So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. .  .  . Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all of the time. (1962, 32)

In other words, new technologies undo a kind of European “whiteness” characterized by Enlightenment rationality, unleashing the primitive essence repressed by writing and literacy, represented, usually, by Africa, but often by any non-Western cultural tradition. McLuhan, a literature professor, was heavily influenced by modernist literature and art—especially that of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis— and his arguments should be thought of as linked with other modernist tendencies, which includes primitivism (see, for instance, Solomon-Godeau 1989; Barkan and Bush 1995). Modern art and literature regularly looked to non-Western culture for inspiration, often with the assumption that Otherness carried with it a kind of vitality or libidinal energy lacking in the rationality of the West. Primitivism is not a problem because it acknowledges that different cultures are different, and different practices, techniques, and forms of knowledge result in distinct social forms. Rather, it’s because of the teleology assumed by primitivism, its logic of “development,” which is something that we can follow through many of McLuhan’s arguments (cf. Spivak 1999, 364–85). One could argue that McLuhan is ambivalent about the trajectory he follows, from orality to literacy, to second orality, and that he privileges neither “West” nor “East,” neither orality nor literacy in his teleology. This is, in fact, what McLuhan claimed about his own work— that he was neither for nor against any one position, that he was ultimately “uncommitted.” But, as Andrew Ross has argued in a particularly trenchant critique of McLuhan’s implicit colonial politics, “In fact, it is the uncommitted intellectual, and not the hireling, who speaks most persuasively to, and thus on behalf of, ruling interests, and the McLuhan of the sixties is one of our best examples of this sorry truth” (1989, 119). McLuhan’s arguments, Ross demonstrates, were used to actually legitimate culturally imperialist practices in the 1960s and 1970s, under the guise of development. In other words, we

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cannot take McLuhan’s belief that his arguments were neutral at face value, even if he did not intend for there to be privilege given to any particular mode of communication in his writings. Rather, this neutrality obscured particular arguments about progress and media that emerged from McLuhan’s own, implicitly colonial, arguments about the relationship between the West and the rest of the world. So, it’s not intrinsically a problem to suggest, for instance, that the Yap islanders’ use of stone currency results in different forms of life than those generated by the use of paper money. Primitivism, more than this acknowledgment of difference, arises when anthropological research is assumed to identify states that are more “primal” or more “natural” than those in the West. Primitivism reflects Western desires that assume “civilization” is lacking, which uses non-Western culture, often African or Asian cultures, as models for that which is both closer to nature and “less civilized” than the West. Like the tendency in Western culture literary theorist Edward Said termed “orientalism” (1978), the West invents an Asian or African “Other” that is both more “natural” and more “whole” but is assumed to exist either prior to or beyond the limits of Western culture and enlightenment. The Other is assumed to be irrational and unscientific, but more linked with natural urges and the physicality of the body. They are “exotic” because of their difference, and “desired” by the West because of this difference. Make no mistake: even if orientalism seems positive because it assumes that Otherness has a particular value, it is a form of racism (also cf. hooks 1992, 21–39). This model is not about the actuality of Asian or African life. Orientalist depictions of the Other are a set of representations produced by the West to define what it excludes from Western culture as “prior” to Western “Enlightenment.” The problems of primitivism also take us to the very issues of temporality that we’re looking at in this chapter. By looking at anthropological research on “primitive” peoples, McLuhan “temporalizes” the other, suggesting that specific people and cultures, which exist in the same present, are effectively a representation of “our” (meaning Western) historical past. This is a practice common in the history of anthropology, though one that has been addressed by many anthropologists since the 1980s. Throughout the history of anthropology, the anthropologist, in doing fieldwork, examined people and cultures to identify “human nature” uncorrupted by “civilization.” This is a deeply discriminatory practice, one criticized in Johannes Fabian’s important work Time and the Other (1983). “The Other’s empirical presence turns into his theoretical absence,” Fabian claims, “a conjuring trick which is worked with the help of an array of devices that have the common intent and function to keep the Other outside the Time of anthropology” (xli). Instead, Fabian notes, anthropology and ethnography should foster a



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“radical contemporaneity of mankind,” an attempt to recognize that we all exist in the same present. Many anthropologists have since followed Fabian’s advice, using fieldwork to challenge Western narratives of development and human nature, refusing to temporalize the Other. Nonetheless, this temporal othering implicitly characterizes a number of those following from McLuhan. Some of McLuhan’s contemporaries—the other writers who made up the “Toronto School” of media theory, like Eric Havelock and Walter Ong—have often revised or reinterpreted McLuhan’s claims in ways that are significantly less problematic, removing or addressing the ethnocentric and primitivist bias that characterizes McLuhan’s use of anthropology. This is especially the case with Havelock, whose work focused exclusively on classical Greek literature. In reviewing some of the key claims of McLuhan, it’s worth trying to think through the claims we can keep and use today, and which should probably be discarded given the racist taint of particular bodies of research from the 1950s and 1960s. My view is that we can still use McLuhan to help us describe how media extend the body in space and time. His primitivism is mostly used to legitimate a specific teleology, a form of historical development driven by media change. As long as we refuse this teleology (which is something I’ve been claiming throughout this chapter, and throughout this book), and refuse assuming oral communication is somehow more holistic than written communication, McLuhan is still useful in describing the particular ways that media effect the body and the senses. But we nonetheless need to understand this teleology before we work to discard it. One of the most notable themes McLuhan develops, starting with his book The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), is that there is a fundamental difference in societies organized around orality, or communication via speech, and those organized around literacy, or communication via written documentation (Ong 2002, 6). Literacy is further transformed with print. “Written words are residue,” claims Walter Ong. “Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit. When an often-told oral story is not actually being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it” (11). This oral tradition, untouched by literacy, is referred to as primary orality by these authors. As Havelock notes, “In primary orality, relationships between human beings are governed exclusively by acoustics (supplemented by visual perception of bodily behavior)” (1986, 65). Traditions in oral cultures are maintained through ritual, which requires memorization and repetition. Havelock’s focus on the particularities of Greek literature provides an interesting perspective on how oral cultures became literary cultures, a perspective firmly located within the Western tradition. Consequentially, Havelock does not make the same claims about primitivism and orality that McLuhan and Ong often make. So, how do we find the history of Western

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orality, when all we have are the textual documents of our past—documents that tend to speak of some kind of literacy? A common hypothesis about epic poems like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey is that the name “Homer” may not refer to an “author” in the sense we have of an author today. Homer may merely be the person that wrote down poems that had long been circulated orally, or “Homer” may not be a particular person at all, but a name given to “he who fits (the song) together” (see Graziosi 2002, 51–92). Works like Homer’s are filled with passages and elements that speak much more to oral performance than written documentation. In the Iliad, there’s a lengthy section named “The Catalogue of Ships,” which, true to its name, is a list of the ships that were part of the Achaean army as it sailed to Troy, their captains, and the settlements represented by each ship. Reading “The Catalogue of Ships” is, for most people today, fairly boring. And yet, its recall is a staggering feat of memory. The experience of reading the list is vastly different than listening to someone recite it accurately—and these two forms of repeating this list, either reading a set document or ritualistically performing it, produce very different relations in space and time. Many other important texts of ancient Greece are, like Homer’s poems, also a product of oral traditions, only written down by someone at a later date. Or, writing is what caused “authorship” to exist in the first place. If you recall from our Introduction, the disdain for writing in the Phaedrus is characteristic of the debate about writing from his time, one that is ironic because Plato’s dialogues were fundamentally written down. In the Phaedrus, Socrates decried writing because it separated language from speaker. As Havelock tells us, “As language became separated visually from the person who uttered it, so also the person, the source of the language, came into sharper focus and the concept of selfhood was born” (113). It is only in the move from primary orality to literacy, the change from spoken recitation and performance to a written document, that we find the emergence of our sense of authorship and (intellectual) property, and, with it, the sense of “self ” we have today. There are many differences between orality and literacy that come from the storage and transmission of information. Walter Ong notes that, in cultures that rely on oral communication, trades and education are taught through apprenticeship. Verbal performance is “agonistic,” meaning communication is a space for competition, rivalry and combat. Communication is participatory and involved, rather than the “objective distance” we assume with, say, academic debate and scientific speculation. Communication and memory are “homeostatic,” which refers to how knowledge that is not useful in the present is simply discarded, as it would have to be repeated or recited in the present to continue to exist. These are only a few of the



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elements that Ong (and McLuhan) claims about the social organization of oral cultures (see Ong 2002, 31–76; McLuhan 1962). But one of the most notable distinctions between orality and literacy has to do with questions of community. According to Ong, “Because in its physical constitution as sound, the spoken word proceeds from the human interior and manifests human beings to one another as conscious interiors, as persons, the spoken word forms human beings into close-knit groups. .  .  . Writing and print isolate” (2002, 73). Writing “detribalizes,” to use a term commonly employed by those following McLuhan, a term that reeks of the primitivism that runs through McLuhan’s claims. To some extent we should say that writing and print isolate, but we should be a bit skeptical of some of Ong’s claims that privilege orality above literacy. It is clear that speech requires physical closeness while print does not. We have to be close to someone to hear them unless their voice is recorded, amplified, or broadcast. Speech can never be repeated in precisely the same way. Oral communication is always performed anew, while a written document remains stable over time. Thus, there are particular spatial, temporal, and social relations produced by speech that are different than other media. It is true that print and writing permit us to be alone, even when we “communicate” with others by reading their words and writing to them. Reading a book is a solitary act, though reading it out loud can be a communal one (though this would be to return to orality and its communal relations). But, we should recall the claims of Benedict Anderson. It is the circulation of print across vast distances that permits a “community” to become a “nation,” enabling a solitary reader to imagine themselves in relation with a much larger group of people, most of whom they will never know. Literacy doesn’t destroy the communal aspects of communication, but it does radically reshape them. Neither orality nor writing is more “communal” than the other. But the kind of community engendered by these material practices—their extension over space and their duration over time—are radically reshaped because of the physicality of a medium of communication and inscription. Writing has its own particular social forms, beyond that of the individualism of the isolated reader. Literacy enables the existence of “original” documents, as it is only after something is written down that it becomes an “original,” or an authoritative document, that can be compared with a copy or forgery. With print, literacy leads to the idea of communication as a commodity to be bought and sold, with an “author” that has ownership rights and control over the thing they wrote. Writing produces a sense of linear order, and it reduces redundancy in communication. And so on. The relations a medium produces, by extending or limiting extension in space and time, lead to all sorts of other social and sensory effects.

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One of McLuhan’s most memorable ideas was proposed to describe television, but has regularly been applied to the internet. Television, for McLuhan, was one of a number of technologies that signaled a return to orality, a secondary orality after the rise of literacy and print, a return to the collective, sonic immediacy that was thought to describe speech and orality. “It is the total involvement in all-inclusive nowness that occurs in young lives via TV’s mosaic image” (1964, 335), claimed McLuhan, referring to the poor resolution of older television sets, along with the standardized time of broadcast TV before the “timeshifting” of home recording. Television and radio, in emphasizing simultaneity across distance, enabling dispersed people to hear and see the same things at the same time, signaled a return to oral culture for McLuhan. If print “detribalizes,” then radio and TV “retribalize” (Ong 2002, 134). McLuhan coined the term “global village” to describe the world produced by television, though many of the claims he made about TV seem to be, decades after they were written, better suited toward how we imagine digital media and the internet: After three thousand years of specialist explosion and of increasing specialism and alienation in the technological extensions of our bodies, our world has become compressed by dramatic reversal. As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree. (1994, 5)

In its earliest days, Wired magazine named McLuhan its “patron saint” for these ideas, which, early 1990s’ Silicon Valley-types claimed, applied much better to the internet than to television. The internet—as it was imagined then, and as it continues to be imagined, if with caveats given the overt hatred and harassment that characterize online interaction today—would be a place to finally realize McLuhan’s ideals of a community fostered by secondary orality. The fact that McLuhan is talking about TV is key, because his emphasis was on how television permits viewers to see and hear at a distance, and, with broadcast television at least, that TV synchronizes time—when watching live TV, even if you’re home alone you’re still watching the same thing on the screen as countless individuals across the country, if not globe. One of the most important extensions of McLuhan comes from Joshua Meyrowitz (1985), who linked McLuhan’s claims about space and time with sociologist Erving Goffman’s arguments about the performance of self in everyday life.



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For Goffman, life can be thought of as a kind of dramatic performance— and here, we’re using the more colloquial definition of performance, not the more philosophical version we’ve had in our last few chapters. We perform different versions of ourselves based on who we understand our audience to be. At work or school, we are “onstage,” in public, performing a particular version of ourselves based on the conventional norms of that particular place and audience. At home alone, in private, we are “backstage,” and we may do or say things that we know would not be appropriate in other contexts. Meyrowitz argues that the primary effect of television is that it permits us to see things that are usually thought to be private, or backstage. Television transforms understandings of “appropriate behavior” because it erodes the distinction between public and private, of onstage and backstage. “When we communicate through telephone, radio, television, or computer,” claims Meyrowitz, “where we are physically no longer determines where and who we are socially” (115). Do not take any of these authors as gospel. Their claims came from a particular context, and the teleology here—of a primary orality, literacy, and secondary orality—has all sorts of problems. But we should embrace the basic idea that motivates all of these scholars. Different forms of media, in their physical materiality, shape relations in space and time. The changes media bring about, in their shaping of space and time, have striking effects on social relationships, visual culture, and—as long as we include Innis—the maintenance of institutional, governmental, corporate, and colonial power.

Digital media and time What has happened with how digital media and network technologies shape space and time? We’ll now review three different arguments about the relation between digital media and time. These arguments are relatively intertwined, but each has unique particularities related to the role of media in modulating time, most of which also have some spatial dimension in the theorization of time. In order, we’ll be looking first at media as synchronizing time across space; second, media as compressing space-time and accelerating pace and tempo; and third, media as feeding-forward time.

Synchronizing time “The most profound media of political, economic, and religious power and control, as Harold Innis taught us, concern the keeping of time,”

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says John Durham Peters (2015, 175). The measurement of time, via the standardizing of clocks and calendars, sets and orders minutes, hours, days, and weeks, determining and regulating the living and working rhythms of the vast majority of human bodies across the planet. Both E. P. Thompson (1967), a Marxist historian and one of the founders of cultural studies, and Lewis Mumford (1934), an early theorist of technology and urban space, have claimed that clocks are central to the emergence of industrial capitalism. As rural workers moved from the countryside to the cities, the jobs they once had changed dramatically. As Thompson notes, the temporalities of farming and fishing “seem to disclose themselves” (1967, 59) quite naturally, even if they’re synchronized with the tides and seasons and are, therefore, linked with some sense of time and a range of techniques intended to manage time. These temporalities emerge from a particular ecology of environmental forces—one wakes up to catch fish that only bite at particular times or tills the fields and plants crops in accordance with the progression of the seasons. As workers began to work in factories, the relationship to time changed. If they were once able to live according to the rhythms of sunrise and sunset, the factory required a distinction between work and leisure, of being on the clock and off. Marx, in his version of the labor theory of value, makes this explicit. As Ernest Mandel interprets it, For Marx, labour is value. Value is nothing but that fragment of the total labour potential existing in a given society in a certain period (e.g. a year or a month) which is used for the output of a given commodity, at the average social productivity of labour existing then and there, divided by the total number of these commodities produced and expressed in hours (or minutes), days, weeks, months of labour. (1990, 11)

In Marxian language, the value of a commodity comes from its “socially necessary labor time,” which—in terms of the daily practices of work charted by Thompson—meant that industrial capitalism relied on the measurement of time. Because value comes from labor, the measurement of labor becomes a clear part of the management of worker’s bodies, directed toward their efficiency in extracting the most possible labor power from them.1

A recent strain of Marxist theory argues that this interpretation of the labor theory of value—or at least the interpretation of Marx’s intent in making these arguments about value—is incorrect. Instead, these theorists argue that the goal of Marxist struggles over labor and value are, ultimately, the complete elimination of both of these categories. For one version of this argument, see the Endnotes Collective (2010).

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So, the measurement of time has, in many ways, always been about the management of bodies, their rhythms, and their movements. During industrialization, the clock was there to make sure workers got to work on time; clocks were employed to ensure workers used their time properly and regulated their bodies in the most efficient way. Transformations in industrial capitalism from the twentieth century, often referred to as Taylorism, speak to the centrality of time’s management in the modern factory. Taylorism, or scientific management, is named for Frederick Winslow Taylor, a tennis pro who was trained as a machinist and engineer at the turn of the century. In Taylor’s book, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), he laid out a set of principles that, in practice, reinvented how factory work was performed. Taylor argued that the vast majority of practices in trades were wasteful and inefficient; they could be improved through scientific study to break down and optimize motion, timing specific movements. Taylor believed that scientific management would reduce the working day and make life better for workers and managers, alike. But these kinds of practices were ultimately dehumanizing, reducing workers to unfeeling automatons, along with leading to injury from the repetitive motions they were required to now perform (see Liu 2004, 90–98). This segmentation of time, it should be noted, was only implemented with the help of media. Film and photography were used by Taylor and his followers to chart motion, defining time and motion in particular ways that could be isolated with visual technologies (see Doane 2002; Salazar Sutil 2015). So, one of the roles of media—especially in the form of clocks, calendars, and other methods for keeping time—has been to manage bodily motion. An effect of this is to standardize, if not synchronize, time through its measurement. This was one of the main complaints of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School when it came to media. As Adorno noted, the term he and his coauthor Max Horkheimer coined, the “culture industry,” does not refer to an actual industry but “the standardization of the thing itself ” (1991, 100). Media and technology churn out the same thing over and over. While the most obvious example of this repetition is in genre films that have similar plots and stories, which negate contingency and surprise for repetition, Adorno was probably more correct when noting how technologies were designed to regulate and administer time and rhythm. Clocks, television programming, and other techniques for time management have long been designed to induce standardized rhythms, parceling out life into “work time” and “free time,” one for labor and one for leisure. Adorno’s major complaint was how these techniques were there to administer life, effectively devaluing it by dividing up time, enforcing particular rhythms and ways of living.

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The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, seeming to echo both Adorno and McLuhan, has argued that the primary function of contemporary media is in the temporal standardization of sensation. Television, he claims, “enables a mass public simultaneously to watch the same temporal object from any location .  .  . . As a technique for ‘live’ transmission, it enables this public collectively and universally to live through any event at the moment it is occurring” (2011, 33). But rather than induce a “global village” a la McLuhan, the synchronization of time prevents the possibility of a social relation. Stiegler argues that a social relation can only occur if I understand myself as a distinct individual, separate from others, but in relation with others. In many ways, Stiegler seems to echo some of Innis’s fears. One of the strange capacities of media, and particularly film, is its ability to expand, contract, or reverse time—what Friedrich Kittler referred to as “time-axis manipulation” (2017). But, for Stiegler, in manipulating time the global networks of television and radio synchronize all time into a singular rhythm—eroding the possibility of differentiation, which, he claims, is a requirement for “I” to exist as an individual. Inverting the utopian endpoint of McLuhan’s global village, discussions of media and synchronization see the unity produced by the global temporal flows of media as producing an undifferentiated whole, eliminating the possibility for human interrelation and singularity.

Accelerating time If one of the tendencies of media, throughout industrial history, is to synchronize time across space, many theorists have more recently argued that the coordination of pace is linked with a seeming acceleration of time, as well. There’s a number of different variations on this theme, though most posit a dystopic teleology in which technological acceleration, linked with a demand for increased capitalist exchange, will bring about the end of society. First, the version associated with the French writer and experimental architect Paul Virilio, is that speed and acceleration are leaving geography and space behind. Second, the perspective associated with a number of Marxist theorists, and particularly the geographer David Harvey, is that we’re witnessing a form of “space-time compression” in which speed is reducing distance in new ways, accelerating capital. Third is an emergent claim from a number of younger theorists and philosophers grouped under the name of “accelerationism.” Accelerationism embraces the intensification of speed and pace, arguing that acceleration will bring about the contradictions in capital identified by writers like Harvey, forcing capitalism to collapse via its own drive toward instantaneity. While the accelerationists still appear to imagine that speed will lead to social collapse, they also presume that this



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social collapse is beneficial as it will cause capitalism to destroy itself through its innate tendencies. For Paul Virilio, each new technological invention brings with it an equal potential for an accident—the entire history of technology, in his view, should not be thought of as a history of progress, but a history of new kinds of accidents and traumas, each of which transforms the possible scale of disaster (2007), which also tends to link the history of media with the military and capacities for extending or reinventing warfare (1989, 7). Technology, for Virilio, is inevitably linked with perpetually reinventing the capacity to kill. The second theme is, echoing McLuhan, that new technologies transform the possibilities of vision and experience. The third is that these capacities for vision and violence are linked with a perpetual acceleration, one that moves from vision at a distance in “real time” (18), an idea linked with the idea of global synchronicity (1999, 13), to something that completely escapes the idea of duration (1997, 137). Technologies for synchronizing time (and vision) lead, in Virilio’s analysis, to the ultimate accident, in which time and duration itself are negated in favor of an eternal present in which there is no historical thought, no sequence of events, and no truth. Virilio’s particularly pessimistic vision is, like Bernard Stiegler’s, a seeming inversion of McLuhan. “Soon, we are going to experience the end of the world,” Virilio claims, “not the apocalyptic end of the world, but the world as finite” (1999, 59). After this finitude is, for Virilio, social collapse. Instead of a global village, Virilio sees the synchronization and acceleration of technology as eroding the very idea of limits, which, rather than leading to a theological utopia, turns to the possibility of an accident that destroys the very idea of space, time, and humanity. Virilio is particularly hyperbolic, and once again shows us that one of the biggest problems with past materialist perspectives on media is a deferral to teleology. There’s an eschatology guided by technological development here, a theology rather than a focus on the specific, particular effects of technology’s relation to time and space. But the general tendency Virilio notes is not particularly new. As Marx put it in the Grundrisse, Thus, while capital must on one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e. to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market, it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another. The more developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which form the spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time. (1973, 539)

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Marx is claiming here that capitalist enterprises, in their relentless drive for profit, will work to gradually colonize the totality of the earth to increase the potential size of their market. So, capitalism always wants to expand in space and will use new technologies to extend its reach in space. At the same time, these enterprises need for things to move across space quickly. Value, after all, is a function of time. So, capital inevitably extends over space through mechanisms that enable it to move as fast as possible—which is what Marx means by the “annihilation of space by time.” This phrase refers to speed across distance, and it is in capitalism’s interest to increase speed to increase markets and decrease the cost of producing a particular commodity. Virilio’s arguments—that this tendency will lead to a kind of apocalypse—is an extension of these arguments earlier proposed by Marx. The Marxist geographer David Harvey has argued that “progress,” in general, is typically thought of in the terms critiqued by Marx. Progress is, in short, the annihilation of space by time (1990, 205). Or, even if Western thought has, as Harvey suggests, privileged the thinking of temporality over spatiality, it does so through technologies that Innis would say are spacebiased, as they extend control over space, reducing duration. As Harvey suggests, the entire history of industrial capitalism is bound up in the creation and use of technologies that are deeply spatial, all in the attempt to remove the spatial barriers noted by Marx. The irony is, of course, the invention of an entire set of technological infrastructures, themselves spatial, implemented to do away with space. “Spatial barriers can be reduced only through the production of particular spaces (railways, highways, airports, teleports, etc.)” (232). So, unlike Marx, Harvey does not believe that there has been any actual annihilation of space by time. Rather, technology produces a reinvention of geography dedicated toward multiplying and reducing the time it takes to move across space. Capitalism is perpetually devoted to the compression of space and time. Echoing Innis, Harvey suggests that space-time compression disrupts social life, reconfigures class power, and leads to the “volatility and ephemerality of fashions, products, production techniques, labour processes, ideas and ideologies, values and established practices” (285). It becomes difficult to engage in long-term planning, and products either adopt an overtly symbolic element or become “immaterial” services rather than physical commodities. Financial instruments and techniques, like securities and high frequency trading, are invented to take advantage of changes in practices of economic investing and exchange. The practice of arbitrage, for instance, occurs when a specific asset’s value is different in multiple locations. The arbitrageur purchases an asset at the lower value in one location and sells it immediately at a higher value elsewhere. This practice, which is common



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today, could only come into being with specific technologies used in financial trading that take advantage of space-time compression. The volatility that Harvey notes has a particularly strange role in a wide range of Marxist theory. If one of the main questions of Marxism is still “how will capitalism end?” then one of the answers is to embrace the volatility of capitalism and its tendency toward crisis. As Marx notes in the Grundrisse, The growing incompatability between the productive development of society and its hitherto existing relations of production expresses itself in bitter contradictions, crises, spasms. The violent destruction of capital, not by relations external to it, but rather as a condition of its self-preservation, is the most striking form in which advice is given it to be gone and to give room to a higher state of social production. (1973, 749–50)

This volatility is not aberrant in the history of capitalism, but the norm. Capitalism, in part because of its reliance on technologies to continuously expand, technologies that are linked with spatiotemporal transformations that destabilize society, will, this line of thought goes, fall apart via internal contradictions that, at some point, it will no longer be able to manage. As Marx claims, These contradictions, of course, lead to explosions, crises, in which momentary suspension of all labour and annihilation of a great part of the capital violently lead it back to the point where it is enabled [to go on] fully employing its productive powers without committing suicide. Yet, these regularly recurring catastrophes lead to their repetition on a higher scale, and finally to its violent overthrow. (1973, 750)

So, one of the views following Marx’s claim here is that, if we’re working to end capitalism, we should “accelerate the contradictions.” This politics, which has come to be known as “accelerationism,” suggests that the volatility brought about by new technologies should be pushed further in a deliberate attempt to destroy capitalism through its own tendencies. I should mention that there are multiple versions of accelerationism, and not all are invested in the destruction of capitalism. There are versions of accelerationism linked with far-right politics, and others invested in the traditional goals of leftist politics. Both, however, are informed by an interpretation of Marx given by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In their book Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalism is a force that is inherently creative, precisely because of the

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tendencies noted by Marx. Capitalism constantly “deterritorializes” stable boundaries, undermining established orders, producing new relations and new forms of desire. For Deleuze and Guattari, this means that, instead of resisting this tendency of capitalism, revolutionaries should embrace the innate instabilities produced by capital’s desire to expand and intensify: “Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process,’ as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet” (1983, 240). So, the task of the revolutionary shouldn’t be to resist or work outside of capitalism, but to work within capitalism, to embrace its most destabilizing tendencies, pushing the system so beyond its limits that it will eventually break. While assumed to have an investment in radical leftist political action, there’s no guarantee to the politics of this “revolutionary.” In one of the stranger academic stories of the past few decades, these “protoaccelerationist” ideas are taken up and developed by a British philosopher named Nick Land, who, while being a lecturer at the University of Warwick in the 1990s, cofounded the “Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit” there, or CCRU. Initially in collaboration with those at the CCRU—and as his ideas became more extreme and more reactionary, by himself—Land eventually articulated a kind of political philosophy that saw the embrace of capitalism and technology as a revolutionary force that worked through acceleration, destroying “society” and “humanity” in the process. “Life is being phased-out into something new, and if we think this can be stopped we are even more stupid than we seem,” claims Land (2011, 317–18). Land’s vision is resonant with a kind of transhuman cyberpunk future, in which technologically augmented individuals become something that surpasses humanity, leaving humanity behind, even destroying it. For Land, this isn’t really to be feared, but embraced. Land eventually resigned his lectureship in 1997 and moved to Shanghai, reappearing several years later writing on the internet, supplementing his version of accelerationism with an embrace of authoritarian ideas and racist ideologies (see Sandifer 2017). Land’s version of accelerationism has been—again, bizarrely—both inspirational for far-right tech nerds on Reddit and those writing in an explicitly Marxist tradition. His ideas have provided fodder for both rightwing Silicon Valley engineers, who argue for the necessity of a new kind of philosopher king to properly manage society through technology and inspiration for a new kind of institutional left politics. In their “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek write that Land has “most acutely” identified the revolutionary potential of capitalism with his argument “that capitalist speed alone could generate a global transition towards unparalleled technological singularity” (2014,



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351). But, they claim, Land confuses speed with acceleration, and capitalism cannot be positioned as the true agent of acceleration. Rather, what Williams and Srnicek argue is that leftist politics must embrace technological engineering and speculation, a large-scale project that refuses any deferral to the organic and natural, but instead sees technology and engineering as a means to automate work and liberate human labor. The leftist journalist Paul Mason, likewise, sees new technologies as a means to create a “postcapitalist” world out of the crises that emerge from the acceleration of capital (2015). Mason’s postcapitalism emerges when work is fully automated, and massive divides between the rich and the poor deepen, in part because there’s no need for labor. These left accelerationist authors suggest that we should embrace automation, embrace the crises that technology has been inching us toward, and, in response, socialize most institutions and install a universal basic income. While, for Land, acceleration is about speed, embracing the “accidents” and chaos Virilio feared, for left accelerationism the coming collapse of society through technology should be mitigated by a renewed, institutionally focused form of socialism.

Feed-forward and time-criticality Theories of synchronization and acceleration generally assume an equivalence between the temporal pace of technology and that of human experience and sensation. Because technologies synchronize time, the pace of human life is synchronized. Because technologies accelerate time, then human time accelerates. The media theorist Mark Hansen has recently proposed an understanding of time and media that demonstrates how theories of synchronization and acceleration may be far too focused on the primacy of human experience. Rather, human experience should be positioned as secondary to the technological, as experience “is currently undergoing a fundamental transformation caused by the complex entanglement of humans within networks of media technologies that operate predominately, if not almost entirely, outside the scope of human modes of awareness (consciousness, attention, sense perception, etc.)” (2015, 5). There are two parts to Hansen’s claims. The first is that media change what we can experience and sense—something that we’ve long been aware of and is central to how McLuhan and Virilio talk about sensation and media. Media change how time works and thus can expand or contract time, or reverse time, changing how we perceive and understand our world. But the ways that media like photography or film impacted human sensation was always able to be understood as a direct relation to human sensation. A photograph freezes the visual, temporal human experience of movement. A record, played backward,

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has an impact on the temporal human experience of sound. So, while media have always changed spatial and temporal experience, we’ve always been able to experience these changes in direct terms, within our own experience. The second part of Hansen’s argument, however, deviates from this history and is particularly recent. Hansen argues that new digital technologies, primarily because of their ability to record and analyze particular data about human behaviors and actions, also predict and delimit human sensation in a space that is inaccessible to human experience. Digital, data-based technologies, which Hansen calls “twenty-first-century media,” not only expand the possibilities of human sensation and “broker human access to a domain of sensibility that has remained largely invisible (though certainly not inoperative) until now” but also add to “this domain of sensibility since every individual act of access is itself a new datum of sensation that will expand the world incrementally but in a way that intensifies worldly sensibility” (6). Or, digital technologies gather data about us from a wide range of sources, data that is unknown to us, for the most part. Facebook and Google can determine what websites you look at, what ads you look at, if you’ve started to type something into a status update or search, and so on. They can tell when and for how long you look at something, and, based on GPS data or your IP address, where you use your phone or computer, for how long, and so on. There’s countless things that these companies can know about you, based on how your computer or phone has been designed to sense, monitor, and inscribe data about you and your actions. You may have some access to some of this data. The Quantified Self movement, for instance, uses the capacities of computers to identify and sense bodily actions that exist outside of conscious awareness, often with the intent to optimize, manage, and transform bodily capacity (see Lupton 2016). If you open the “Health” app on your iPhone you can see that your phone has recorded how much you’ve been walking, how many flights of stairs you’ve taken, and more, charting and visualizing these on a graph. But most of the time, we don’t see or know what our computers record about us. Instead, this data is processed and analyzed to, in the case of Facebook and Google, send us advertisements. Or, in the case of Netflix, give us suggestions for TV shows and movies we may enjoy. (Or even make programming decisions—which shows will be funded and renewed and which ones will be canceled.) These choices are rarely delegated to human decision-making but are functionally automated. Rather than transform the pace or tempo of our temporal experience directly, they act prior to our experience, beyond or outside what we can know and see. “The real action,” Hansen states, “is elsewhere, or rather ‘elsewhen’: it occurs, that is, in the microtemporal, and massively researched, details of our sensory-material solicitation by temporary cultural institutions”



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(2015, 58–59). Digital media create “feed-forward loops,” in which what we see and experience is determined in advance by mechanisms that predict what we want to see and experience from data that comes from how media sense how our bodies act and move—actions of which we may be completely unaware. This is a vastly different sense of temporality than any of the others we’ve reviewed in this chapter, with the possible exception of Innis—mainly because it assumes a fundamental incompatibility between the time of human experience and the time of technology. It’s not so much that technology, in constantly accelerating, is accelerating the pace of human life. Rather, the temporality of technological time has detached from human sensation and is predicting and shaping human experience prior to human awareness (cf. Bollmer 2016a). Hansen’s claims are similar—though not the same—as a strain of German media theory associated with some of the followers of Friedrich Kittler, particularly that which derives from the media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst and the claim that media—and digital media in particular—are “timecritical.” Ernst argues that the temporality of digital media is fundamentally outside of any sense of “historical time,” and instead must be linked with the quantitative mechanisms for signal processing. He claims, “Time-critical media processes are first and foremost dedicated to analyzing the specific ways of processing time that were and are introduced into culture through techno-mathematical [or ‘digital’] media” (2016, 4). Ernst stresses that the materiality of digital media is ultimately about computational calculation of time and the synchronization of temporal flows beyond human awareness. Streaming media follow this logic, as streams downloaded from the internet, Ernst claims, are “images and sounds . . . transmitted as numerical values, [a stream] follows a time-critical logic, as it has no other purpose ‘than to be sent quicker and packaged smaller’” (157). Claus Pias, another theorist in the tradition of Kittler and Ernst, argues that video and computer games—especially those games that we could call “action” games (rather than, say, adventure or strategy games)—demonstrate how time-criticality is central to the everyday interactions we have with computers. Games are time-critical because “their play consists of producing temporally optimized sequences of action out of determined options” which is linked with how “the computer emerges as a device for measuring its user. It produces and stores knowledge about its player in the form of data” (2017, 18). For Ernst, the time-criticality of digital media also completely revises how we think of the archival qualities of media—which we discussed in Chapter 2. Ernst’s use of arché in the quote below refers to a system of rules or protocols necessary for something to become written or sensed, a set of “commandments” or rules that stem from the materiality of a medium. The

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archive, for him (as could be said for Foucault as well), is about these rules that come from the technical operations of media. The internet operates as a command system (arché) far more time critical than classical archives ever were. The sound of the archive is the ping signal of data transmission testing. . . . The real archive on the Internet (in the sense of arché) is its system of technological protocols. The archive becomes a memory only at the moment of its standardization. (2013, 84–85)

Or, the archive is not just about storage, but the temporality of processing. With digital media, this temporality becomes more significant than ever before, resultant in what Wendy Chun refers to the “enduring ephemeral” of digital memory (2011, 137). We assume that digital information will both exist forever within the physicality of digital storage media and, as displayed on a screen or on the internet, is constantly refreshed and dynamic, completely lacking duration in time. The “endurance” here has to do with how digital information is stored on media that will outlast human existence, copied over and over onto multiple storage devices, and so on. We can see this in everyday beliefs that something uploaded to the internet will last forever and can’t go away. This belief is grounded in the factuality of media’s materiality but isn’t exactly accurate. We can only experience what is stored through the ephemerality of data processing, which depends on, for instance, the specificity of file formats, the particularity of how computers process time, and beyond. It’s difficult—if not impossible—to play many action-based computer games from the 1980s on computers today without additional emulation that slows a computer down (if the game will run to begin with), because this time-criticality and the particularities of hardware processing are both central to play. As computer processing gets faster, so does the action in the game. Or, what we see on the screen and experience is directly dependent on how a computer materially processes time. The materiality of digital media is explicitly temporal, operating at scales divorced from human sensation, conditioning and determining human experience in advance—often based on data recorded and analyzed at a scale that remains outside of human experience. Hansen and Ernst both argue that the temporality of digital media reveals—contrary to the claims of Virilio and those following the Marxist tradition of space-time compression or acceleration—how attention to “the temporal modes of media almost inevitably leads to a critique of the totalizing collective singular ‘time’ itself. It is thus appropriate to employ concepts that do not always already bind technically signifying time figures to a transcendental signified and burden them with an imaginary called history” (Ernst 2016, 205). Or, there is not a



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singular, lived time, but multiple temporalities that do not—and cannot— correspond. This turn toward the multiplicity of temporalities allows a space for us to insert politics back into any discussion of time and temporality.

The differential politics of time and space So, there are numerous perspectives on media, time, and space. But many of them argue something along the lines of McLuhan, even though McLuhan’s utopian view is often reversed into a dystopian one. McLuhan thought that new technologies, following the teleological trajectory from primary orality to literacy to secondary orality, were collapsing distance and enabling the creation of a “global village,” in which we’d be synchronized temporally and brought closer together in spite of physical distance. Pessimistic views of these same changes, from Virilio and Stiegler, among others, assume similar phenomena with completely different implications. These technologies would lead to a loss of self and a loss of society because of temporal synchronization that completely destroy space. Or, even without this truly pessimistic view of technology and time, the acceleration of media is thought to destroy society—it’s just that this destruction has been rethought as a place for socialist planning and new forms of communism. But a more interesting way of thinking about media, space, and time returns us to Innis, in a way. We shouldn’t fear the creation of a single, homogeneous space of totally synchronized time because this synchronization most likely cannot exist. Rather, we should stress how space and time are multiple and relational. It’s in the politics of these relations that we can see the particular problems or benefits that technologies bring to space and time, not in a totalizing acceleration or collapse of spatial distance. Space and time are uneven, and the maintenance of spatial and temporal divisions fosters new kinds of centers and margins. The temporality of digital media described by Hansen and Ernst takes us in this direction—new technologies, rather than flattening time and space, create a world that seeks to determine human behavior prior to and outside of human awareness. Because these technologies are developed and designed by corporations with particular interests, they can be said to create new kinds of centers and margins, new kinds of monopolies of knowledge, in which power is maintained beyond direct control of human beings. A major problem with these theories is that they assume space and time to be relatively inert, singular categories, upon which the capacities of technology can exert a direct effect. Instead, we need to revise these theories with a different sense of space and a different sense of time. For space, we should follow the claims of the feminist geographer Doreen Massey, who

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argues that space should be thought of through three propositions, some of which correspond to claims I’ve already made, some of which resonate with claims I’ve been making throughout this book: 1. Space is relational. We should “recognise space as the product of interrelations; as constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny.” 2. Space is heterogeneous and multiple and is the grounds for heterogeneity and multiplicity—and vice versa. Space is “the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of a contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity. Without space, no multiplicity; without multiplicity, no space.” 3. There is no ontological stability to space. Space is always in process, always becoming. We should “recognise space as always under construction. Precisely because space on this reading is a product of relations-between, relations which are necessarily embedded material practices which have to be carried out, it is always in the process of being made. It is never finished; never closed. Perhaps we could imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far.” (2005, 9) Massey’s definition of space foregrounds material, relational practices, practices that exist together now, but follow many trajectories which do not always meet. Beyond saying that the spatial is political, her way of thinking space provides, like Karen Barad’s discussion of materiality as intra-active, a different sense of how materiality is political—one that emerges from particular ways of imagining and ordering space and the possibilities for relations that comprise space. One of Massey’s primary targets is what we’ve charted above: the idea of a singular, global present, produced through instantaneity and synchronization. Just as time cannot adequately be conceptualised without a recognition of the (spatial) multiplicities through which it is generated so space cannot adequately be imagined as the stasis of a depthless, totally interconnected, instantaneity. Any assumption of a closed instantaneity not only denies space this essential character of itself constantly becoming, it also denies time its own possibility of complexity/multiplicity. . . . And once again it leaves no opening for an active politics. (76–77)

The idea of technology collapsing or synchronizing time at a global scale denies the possibility that there are alternative times, or other ways of



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imagining and performing space, instead privileging one singular way of understanding and living spatiality—a way that is, perhaps unsurprisingly, deeply linked with Western forms of capitalism. Whether or not capitalism and new technologies are, in fact, creating a uniform geography is an empirical question. And, contrary to many of those who argue for the collapse or annihilation of space, we can find multiple geographies that splinter and intersect. These geographies included lived pathways through space as one walks through a city (e.g., de Certeau 1984) or drives through a city (Thrift 2004), alongside infrastructures rarely seen or touched by many people, like digital networks, sewers, and energy conduits (Graham and Marvin 2001). Each of these geographies creates different relations, and, as a result, fosters a multiplicity of lived spaces that exist together, but cannot be reduced to a singular “space.” Massey uses the term “power-geometry” to refer to how one way of imagining space comes to dominate all others—how the idea of a singular, globalized space brought about by technologically informed capitalism destroys any other sense of space. But these other, marginal geographies are often there to support the dominant way of organizing space, even as their marginality leads to their erasure, rather than an acknowledgment of space’s multiplicity. As David Harvey noted, the “compression” of space and time relies on the building and maintenance of an entire technological infrastructure devoted toward fostering acceleration, including airports, trains, and other means of transportation. While anthropologist Marc Augé refers to these spaces of transit as “non-places” because of their lack of specificity and their interchangeability (1995), they are nonetheless productive of particular relations and thus do not signify an absence of space, but a different geography that organizes space in a particular way. The internet, for instance, relies on a geography of undersea cables, linking up the world in a way that, even though it exists beyond the awareness of many, is still deeply physical and reliant on the labor of specific individuals in particular places (see Starosielski 2015). Space is multiple and is permeated with different ways of organizing relations—but one way of organizing relations seems to dominate all others, ideologically distorting the sheer range of spatial practices and relations possible. Sarah Sharma advances Massey’s arguments further by bringing Innis back into the fold. There are not only differential geographies but also differential temporalities. The role of power here is not just about having one way of imagining space and time dominate all others, but how specific jobs, technologies, and practices are devoted toward supporting and maintaining the view of space collapsing and time accelerating. Our world is filled with what Sharma terms “temporal architectures” designed to manage the

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multiplicity of temporalities that exist, privileging particular bodies and paces over others: Temporal architectures are composed of built environments, commodities and services, and technologies directed to the management and enhancement of a certain kind of subject’s time—a privileged temporality. For the business traveler, these temporal architectures of time maintenance are largely invisible. Instead, the business travelers encounter a solitary road and a culture of disorienting speed, one they feel that they are independently navigating as singular entrepreneurs of their own fates. Their very real need to keep up to speed unintentionally legitimizes the inequitable reorchestration of the time and labor of others. Their temporal architectures are supported by systems of temporal labor. (2014b, 20)

While one temporality is privileged—that of capital, of business, of speed— this temporality can only be maintained through a massive apparatus, not all parts of which remain at the same pace. So, those working in an airport, or the flight attendants on a plane, have vastly different schedules than those travelling through the airport. Those driving taxis sit, waiting, while their fares move from one place to another. Technologies in planes and airports designed to mitigate against jetlag, through the manipulation of the visible color spectrum or neurological waves, are intended to maintain efficiency of particular individuals—but not everyone. They may only be used in first class, while passengers in economy are placed in a different temporal architecture because the price of their tickets dictates—spatially—how their temporality is adjusted. These different individuals may be sharing the same, or almost the same, space, but they are not within the same temporality, and media serve as one of the means to differentiate how particular temporalities are lived. “Time is lived at the intersection of a range of social differences that includes class, gender, race, [immigration] status, and labor . . . capital caters to the clock that meters the life and lifestyle of some of its workers and consumers. The others are left to recalibrate themselves to serve a dominant temporality” (138–39). Or, in other words, there are such things as temporal centers and margins. While Innis’s terms are spatial, Sharma notes how these inequalities can be temporal as well—even when different bodies may be sharing the same space. Sharma terms this the “biopolitical economy of time,” where the temporality of some bodies is invested differently than others. The point here, drawing on both Massey and Sharma, is that there is no singular “space” and no uniform “time.” Acceleration is not acceleration for everyone. Instead,



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there are particular bodies for whom time slows down, and other bodies for which it is speeding up and slowing down at different moments. The specific assemblages within which particular bodies are located are never uniform but involve the negotiation of a multiplicity of times and spaces. One of the functions of media is to act as the means for this negotiation.

Conclusion This chapter has covered spatiotemporal materialism from a wide range of perspectives. It began by looking toward Harold Innis and his framing of media, space, and time as linked with the biases of particular media, fostering certain relations of center and margin. While we then moved from Innis toward Marshall McLuhan, along with recent theories of acceleration and synchronization, we concluded by returning to the political concerns that initially characterized Innis’s writings. Space and time are multiple and differential. One function of media is to modulate and adjust the relations that comprise space and time. There is no singular “space” and no singular “time.” These categories include differential geographies and differential temporalities, and the negotiation of space and time is fundamentally political, as it positions some relations as privileged—as center—while others are left behind or shunted to the margins, even though these privileged relations are often only maintained by those on the margins. The last few pages should call into question both dystopian and utopian ways of imagining media, space, and time. There is no singular “acceleration,” no singular “global village,” and thus there most likely will never be a synthetic whole in which we all join as one, nor will we be able to “accelerate the contradictions” forcing the system to collapse. Rather, new margins will be invented, supporting the center in new ways. And these forms of center and margin may not be limited to human bodies and human relations. We can already see kinds of centers and margins produced through technologies that exist beyond human awareness. This question about awareness leads elsewhere, however, toward other claims about media, consciousness, and the brain. One of the more interesting implications of McLuhan’s writing, as he moved away from Innis toward issues of perception and sensation, was that media and the brain are linked. It’s this link that Chapter 4 will examine.

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Brains, bodies, and metaphors The work of McLuhan and his followers is questionable for a number of reasons. His deferral to teleology is one such issue, in which the development of technology gradually leads to a “global village” (or, to follow the more pessimistic of those indebted to McLuhan, gradually leads to a massive accident and total social collapse). McLuhan also relies on problematic anthropological sources, where contemporaneous “Others” are positioned as if they represent a “natural” point in Western history’s past. But, even with these issues, we should still acknowledge how McLuhan has opened up for us a massive area of study. This isn’t just because of his emphasis on the materiality of media and its relation to time and space. Media theorist Mark Hansen has argued that McLuhan, perhaps more than any other writer, enables us to examine the “role of embodied reception—that is, the active role of embodiment” in human relations with media (2006, 298). This chapter follows McLuhan to examine the relation between media and embodiment. But in turning toward the body I also follow Lisa Blackman when she suggests that a range of recent theoretical, scientific, and technological changes provoke questions about what a “body” even is—“rather than talk of bodies,” she says, “we might instead talk of brain-body-world entanglements, and where, how and whether we should attempt to draw boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, self and other, and material and immaterial” (2012, 1). Attention to the physicality of the body is also attention toward the physicality of the brain, and, by extension, attention to the physicality of media. One cannot split “mind” and “brain,” following the assumptions of Cartesian dualism. Instead, the embodied capacities for action and movement possessed by a body only happen at the intersection of bodies, brains, and media. How we work to draw and maintain the boundaries between, say, body and media, or brain and world, or self and other, are political acts. This draws us again toward an understanding of materiality and media that is “intra-active” and relational.

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Let’s begin with an example. When you dream, do you dream in color? In psychological research from the early twentieth century, it was unanimously argued that the vast majority of people dream in black and white, not color. Numerous studies reported between 9 percent and 29 percent of respondents recalling color in dreams. Some researchers from the 1950s argued that dreaming in color may be a sign of mental illness, with color dreams named “Technicolor dreams” after the film coloring process, heightening the sense that color in dreams was artificial. But these results changed in the 1960s. The number of respondents in psychological studies recalling color in their dreams suddenly reversed—in the 1960s, between 69 percent and 83 percent of respondents reported dreaming in color. In 2008, a psychologist from the University of Dundee, in Scotland, argued that these changes were a reflection of media influence (Murzyn 2008), rather than changes in methodology in the study of sleep and dreaming from the 1960s. Color (or lack thereof) in dreams was, most likely, a reflection of exposure to kinds of television— either color or black and white—in one’s life. These arguments have been supported by subsequent research (i.e., Okada, Matsuoka and Hatakeyama 2011) and suggest that there’s some link between the visual potentials of media and the way the body produces images. While there are a number of interpretations one could give about this research—maybe these findings are more about recall and memory than the actual physiology of dreams, or maybe they do demonstrate a direct, causal relationship between color media and brain physiology—there at least appears to be a link between media and the most unconscious kinds of thought produced by the brain and body. This chapter looks at how the body, brain, thought, and media—and the physical, material interrelation between them—have been theorized at the boundary of philosophy, cognitive science, and media studies. Many philosophers foreground the role of embodiment in enabling the world to become present to experience. Maurice Merleau-Ponty has argued that the body is a medium that negotiates external world and internal sensation. “The world is not what I think,” he claims, “but what I live through” (1958, xviii). Consciousness and experience are not some vague ideal but are linked with the physicality of my body and how my body engages with the physical world I inhabit. While authors like Merleau-Ponty have acknowledged the role of technology in transforming the body’s capacities for movement, McLuhan was one of the first to foreground media as that which remakes the potentialities of the human body and sensation. This opens media studies to a massive range of theoretical paradigms that have often been beyond its scope. McLuhan shifted and reinvented the grounds for understanding media, often in radical new ways we are only now coming to grasp.



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I term this position neurocognitive materialism, which examines how the body, brain, and media are interrelated. The goal of this chapter is to follow some of the paths set out by McLuhan that relate to cognition and sensation, arguing that one of the major ways the materiality of media act is in how they transform embodied sensation and the materiality of the brain. Questions of the brain are often beyond the scope of how we talk about the materiality of media. That is, there’s a materialism from the philosophy of mind, but it’s rarely discussed in media studies. This perspective has its own lengthy history that foregrounds the physicality of the brain in discussions of mind, consciousness, and sensation, and moves us toward one definition of materiality central for a number of innovative theorists in media studies. There’s a second theme I want to address in this chapter. Claims about the materiality of media and the brain are not settled, in any way. In moving toward the brain, we may too easily rely on scientific research about the brain, which is a new, emergent area of study, the claims of which are still unsettled, or—like our example of color in dreams—may have numerous possible explanations. A lot of research on the brain, from just the past decade or so, has already been revealed to be incorrect—or at least is heavily debated among scientists. In the humanities, deferrals to the brain and brain science often neglect the contingencies of scientific research, picking and choosing from particular authors, and consequentially position the “materiality” of the brain as an ideological guide that serves to legitimate a range of relations as “natural” (cf. Rose and Abi-Rached 2013; Leys 2011; Bollmer 2014). Many of the applications of neuroscience in culture tend to be rather reductive and functionalist, foreclosing other, more relational understandings of thought and the brain (see Sampson 2017). We should adopt a healthy skepticism about deferrals to brain science, especially since there are some unique problems in discussions of the materiality of the brain when it comes to the history of media; the claims of science, philosophy, and social theory often seem to rely on models directly appropriated from the technological. This might mean that technologies determine thought and embodiment directly (which would turn us to an investigation of body-brain-world entanglements, following McLuhan). But it could also mean that technologies and larger cultural formations go hand in hand, expressing the same logic revealed through technology. This tendency can be seen when someone applies technological metaphors onto biology, economy, society, and vice versa. For instance, the internet is often described as a collective, worldwide brain. The physicist Stephen Hawking, in an interview, once claimed, “We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain” (Swartz 2014). The brain is often described as a kind of computer—a metaphor central to many versions

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of the materialist philosophy of mind. Metaphorical conflations between technology, biology, and society have a long history and have long been central for the legitimation of other economic or social transformations (see, among others, Carey 1988; Bollmer 2016b; Lieberman 2017). As the sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have remarked, To state what the world is composed of is always to confer a nature upon it. Obviously, the naturalization effect is especially powerful in those disciplines which, aiming to connect biology to society, derive the social bond from implantation in the order of living organisms; or construct their representation of society on the basis of a physiological metaphor— not, as in the old organicism, cellular differentiation, but instead today the metaphor of the neuron, with its networks and flows. (2005, 149)

Boltanski and Chiapello are referring to links between biology and society, legitimating some social form through a reference to “natural” biology, which today is expressed when nonbiological structures are described through the metaphors of brains and neurons. Many have noted this metaphorical link (see Sennett 1994). We may think of the brain as analogous to a computer not because they’re materially identical, but because of a larger cultural formation that imagines the brain and a computer as identical, often to legitimate some tendency as “natural.” Today, specific qualities of the brain often stressed in neuroscience—like its “plasticity” or “flexibility”—are analogous to how neoliberal capital operates, linked with the technological networks that synchronize global capitalist systems. This equivalence seems to indicate that, to follow the philosopher Catherine Malabou, “brain plasticity constitutes the biological justification of a type of economic, political, and social organization in which all that matters is the result of action as such: efficacy, adaptability— unfailing flexibility” (2008, 31). So, we have two positions that we’ll be covering in this chapter. On the one hand, technologies directly change the materiality of the brain by reconfiguring the potentialities and limitations of sensation. On the other, metaphorical equivalencies made between media and the brain may be made too hastily and may serve to legitimate particular ideologies that have little to do with material reality. The first position, we can state, is an ontological one, devoted toward the description and analysis of real links between media and the brain. The main ontological question is, “What is it?” or, “What are there?” Responding to this question is a description of the first principles of reality, of the fundamental categories of existence, and so on. For this position, examining the link between media and the brain is an examination of the ontology of the brain. The second position is epistemological and



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historical. It isn’t interested in defining what the brain is in its materiality, but instead asks “How do we know?” It sees in different technological tools and biological models a material lens through which the rest of the world is viewed and remade. It demonstrates how these lenses change over time, and the brain, body, and society are perpetually reconfigured through particular technological models popular at a specific moment in time. Both of these positions are about materiality, in that they’re both about how technologies physically permit us to see and act. One argues that this relation is direct and ontological—technological materiality directly changes the brain and body. The other argues that this relation is indirect and epistemological—technological materiality provides models through which the entirety of the world is (re)ordered. The ontological position is about describing the materiality of the brain and its functions. The epistemological/ historical position examines how material models become metaphorical, or how material technologies transform what can be seen and said about a body and, in migrating elsewhere, remake practices, habits, and behaviors. We won’t be able to synthesize these two positions. The tension between them will appear at times throughout this chapter. But the fact that these two positions do not align is something to always keep in mind. Now, I want to foreground the role of materialism in cognitive philosophy and neuroscience. I’ll then return to McLuhan and how a number of theorists have followed him, reinterpreting and expanding his claims in addressing the ontology of the brain and media, then elaborating the epistemological role of media and technology as providing models through which the body and society are organized.

Materialism in the philosophy of mind Let’s foreground materialism in the philosophy of mind. Materialist arguments about mind and brain are deeply controversial, though they’ve been one of the most influential bodies of thought to emerge in recent years, especially within Anglophone philosophy. The materialist philosophy of mind has sketched a model of consciousness that brings together innovations in neuroscience, computer science, and a wide range of other disciplines, providing a model of “mind” that crosses technology and biology. There’s a great deal of debate around materialist arguments about the mind, and the review I’m giving here is partial, covering only a few key issues related to this perspective. I’ll attempt to contextualize this kind of materialism in relation to the history of philosophy and psychology and, in the process, demonstrate

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why it’s considered to be so radical. The point here is that the materiality of the brain and mind, while only now beginning to be acknowledged by media studies, has been a fruitful area of debate, one that continues to develop over time. There are some points in this version of materialist theory of which I remain skeptical—namely, how there’s an implicit overlap between human cognition and computational artificial intelligence in many of these authors. But there are a lot of arguments from this strain of cognitive philosophy that I admire, especially that of creating a model of human experience that does not defer to anything metaphysical, such as a soul or self that exceeds the physical, material existence of a body (though, I should note, the “soul” does slip back in with a few of these authors when they talk about “information” and “pattern” as a means for ordering matter). The materialist philosophy of mind is deeply a-theistic, as it attempts to explain consciousness, feeling, and experience without deferral to anything theological or mystical. Anything that exists has to have an explanation that derives from the physical capacities of the world. The materiality of mind suggests that we cannot appeal to a metaphysical “higher power” for hopes about truth, justice, and retribution. Thus, the relationship of materialist arguments and religion is fraught, as should probably be expected. Does this mean that the materiality of mind requires faith in “rationality” and “science” above all? I’m not sure, though some of the most notable voices in these debates suggest this is the case— that materialism and religious thought are incompatible. Not all of the voices that I include here would agree, however. To understand the problems this perspective attempts to solve, along with its animosity toward spiritual and religious arguments about the soul, requires us to go back to some of the very foundations of modern Western thought. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641, René Descartes states, I have always thought that two issues—namely, God and the soul— are chief among those that ought to be demonstrated with the aid of philosophy rather than theology. For although it suffices for us believers to believe by faith that the human soul does not die with the body, and that God exists, certainly no unbelievers seem capable of being persuaded of any religion or even of almost any moral virtue, until these two are first proven to them by natural reason. (2006, 1)

Throughout his Meditations Descartes invokes a position of universal doubt, accepting that all experience is false, and still concludes, “God exists and that the mind is distinct from the body” (3). Even when Descartes doubts



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everything, he still knows he is “a thinking thing” (15), and this thinking is separate from his corporeal body. Even if he accepts all experience to be the delusion of an evil demon, tricking him, he still knows that thought exists— in Descartes’s famous saying, “Cogito, ergo sum,” or, I think, therefore I am. With these meditations, Descartes sets up a specific problem, mind-body dualism, or, apropos of its inventor, Cartesian dualism, that has shaped all of Western philosophy since, a belief that mind must be separate from the physical matter that is the embodied brain. Many of those following Descartes have attempted to challenge his distinction between mind and body, between thought and matter. When Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that consciousness only occurs at the interface between a physical body and its movements in the world, he is challenging Cartesian dualism. One of the most interesting objections to Descartes comes from the history of psychology and from a practical concern invoked to reject spiritualist explanations for reality that deferred to the soul. The American pragmatist philosopher William James, one of the founders of psychology as an academic discipline in the United States, was particularly clear about the materialist underpinnings of psychology. Any explanation of the mind, James notes, requires “a certain amount of brain-physiology” to be “presupposed or included” (1890, 5). Or, James elaborates, “It will be safe to lay down the general law that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change” (5). James’s writings on psychology are an early outline for a materialist perspective on the brain. Our thoughts and everyday acts, James argues, cannot be left as a function of an immaterial “soul.” Instead, they must be understood in light of what science knows about the brain and the body, its functions, its actions, and its relations. Psychology, for James, is not speculation on immaterial “thoughts” divorced from a body. Rather, psychology is about the physiology of the brain and body, and the science of psychology must adhere to materialist explanations for seemingly “immaterial” experiences like thought and mind. James, however, was not a small-minded “rationalist,” accepting only materialist, scientific explanations for all phenomena. He was interested in so-called metaphysical phenomena (like spiritualism, possession, speaking in tongues, and more radical forms of religious belief and practice). This wasn’t because he believed that a “god” was causing any of these phenomena, or, at least, he didn’t believe that a god was causing them without also changing something physical. James thought that psychology, science, and philosophy should accept seemingly strange, inexplicable, or aberrant phenomena as real and material, as corresponding to physical mental states and neurology. “Medical materialism,” to use James’s name for the perspective of medical

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doctors and researchers who look for answers in the rational beliefs of science, too easily disparages religious phenomena because they cannot be explained by accepted medical models of the body, transforming these metaphysical “events,” like hallucinations, into pathologies to be explained away (1987, 21). James argues that, while he finds the “medical materialist” to be limiting and haughty in claiming one state of mind superior over another, all states of mind “are equally organically founded, be they of religious or of nonreligious content” (22). The problem is not with the materialism of medical materialism, but with the model of the normal and pathological it maintains, which, James argues, undermines any claim to physiological materiality. Or, James argues, medical science only selectively chooses which phenomena to explain materially: those which it attempts to define as disorder (22; cf. Canguilhem 1989). His view is that, instead, science should look to all phenomena, accept all as being equally material and real, and thus devise an explanation for the mind and body that accounts for any and all phenomena, without a disqualification that categorizes some mental states as rational and others irrational, some as “normal” and others as “pathological” aberration. James’s theories, while foundational for psychology, have been taken up in numerous ways by other philosophers, often focusing on the separation between mind and brain—the brain being the physical location of “thought” and cognition in the body. This separation, assumed since Descartes, appears to be particularly odd in everyday experience. “The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain process: how come that this plays no role in reflections of ordinary life?” asks Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Logical Investigations. When can we experience this distinction that Descartes found so essential? “Is it when I, for example, turn my attention in a particular way on to my own consciousness and, astonished, say to myself: ‘THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain!’—as if it were clutching my forehead” (2009, §412). The commonly accepted negotiation between these above views is not to do away with mind and reduce everything to the brain, but to argue that mind is what the brain does. “Consciousness” is an effect of the materiality of the human brain, perhaps—as psychologist Daniel Wegner has argued, drawing on wide range of experimental evidence, following in the tradition of James—an “illusion” secondary to the material function of the brain (2002). The materiality of the brain comes first, only secondarily experienced as “consciousness.” One of the most notable contemporary advocates for this kind of materialism, Daniel Dennett, rejects Cartesian dualism not because “I think I can give a knock-down proof that dualism, in all its forms, is false or incoherent, but that, given the way dualism wallows in mystery, accepting dualism is giving up” (1991, 37). Instead of embracing the “mystery” of



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dualism, allowing for a soul as an explanation for experience and subjectivity, Dennett argues that science and philosophy—with the latter drawing on the findings of the former—has to respond to objections from the critics of materialism to give an account for the materiality of the mind (and brain) and nothing else. Notable critics of materialism suggest that the mere material “stuff ” of the brain, alone, cannot act with moral responsibility, cannot “appreciate wine, hate racism, love someone, be a source of mattering,” cannot account for an “I” of subjectivity to think, and cannot serve as a medium in which thoughts and representations occur (33). Philosophers like Dennett, along with others who adopt a similar way of understanding the mind, like Andy Clark, work to understand how the mind works by coming up with answers to questions such as these, derived in part from psychological and neuroscientific studies about the brain (see Clark 2003, 2015; Dennett 2017). The mind and experience are thus reduced to specific brain processes, to the movement of hormones and blood, to the presence or absence of specific compounds and chemicals in the body like serotonin or dopamine. There are some notable problems with these theories. The most significant is often referred to as the “hard problem of consciousness,” first laid out by philosopher David Chalmers in 1995. What Chalmers means by the “hard problem” is that while materialist theories of mind can come up with many explanations for how the brain works and what’s happening physiologically when a body acts and perceives, it cannot explain how these physiological processes result in subjective experience (1997, 5). While some materialists are dismissive of Chalmers’s critique, there are other problems with these authors, as well. Dennett, in particular, is a biological determinist, and his alignment with a group of popular writers called the “new atheists” is deeply questionable. Unlike James, who thought that all experiences, both those “rational” and “irrational,” are valid and should be equally explained through the physiology of the body—leading him toward an “expanded” or “radical” empiricism that accepts all phenomena as true and relational (cf. Massumi 2002, 208–56)—the new atheists disparage religion and attack identity politics as “irrational.” Where James was open-minded in his philosophy, Dennett does not appear to even acknowledge beliefs that he cannot align with scientific truth and progress. Beyond the defense of “rationality” in these materialist arguments, the rise of “neuroaesthetics,” which argues that art and culture can be explained entirely in relation to the materiality of the brain, makes odd claims about aesthetic judgment, as if specific colors and specific patterns are better than others because of how they impact the brain (cf. Chatterjee 2014; Kandel 2016). Neuroaesthetics argues that ideals of “beauty” exist not because of subjective taste, but because particular colors or patterns activate specific

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areas of the brain, releasing neurological substrates, generating feelings of happiness or pleasure. Taste, then, is inborn, not subjective. A similar worldview exists in new kinds of advertising, called “neuromarketing,” which use neuroscientific research to study consumption patterns and consumer decisions. The idea is that we make consumer choices based on, say, how a particular brand’s imagery and design makes us feel at a neurological level (cf. Andrejevic 2013; Sampson 2017). Needless to say, this turn toward brain chemistry as an explanation for all feeling is profoundly reductive. But, even if we do not follow these turns toward “rationality,” we should take from these authors their emphasis on the materiality of the brain and body, rather than a deferral to something ephemeral and detached from material reality. One notable critic of the materialist philosophy of mind, the philosopher John Searle, sees in this version of materialism a deeply functionalist and behaviorist understanding of cognition. Human consciousness becomes explainable entirely in relation to observable behavior, with easy equivalencies between mental states and physiology. We can see the realization of this functionalism when manifested as neuroaesthetics or neuromarketing—the assumption is that physiological brain states translate directly into aesthetic judgment or consumer choice. Searle sees materialist arguments about the mind as deferring not to materiality, but to the “organization” of the mind and its patterns. In a number of materialist theories of mind, this has led to a view that equates artificial intelligence and the human mind, as if “different material structures can be mentally equivalent if they are different hardware implementations of the same computer program” (1992, 43). While many of the specific objections Searle makes have been addressed in the years since he wrote these words, the materialist philosophy of mind still regularly links computational processing with the material function of the brain, a theory of mind called “computationalism.” A recent book by Andy Clark (2015) examines neurological processes that reduce human experience before it becomes “conscious,” where our brain makes a series of predictions to make sense of the massive amount of sensory data we receive. The terms he uses to do this, though, rely on statistical methods of probability often used in the programming of AIs—though, admittedly, these methods do not inherently derive from computer science and can be applied in a range of fields. But, regardless of origins, the effects are the same. The physical operation of the brain and consciousness is described in terms that also characterize computers. Given how Clark wants to unite different philosophies of mind, including computationalist theories, this is unsurprising, but troubling, as it privileges mathematical abstractions rather than the physicality of the



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brain. We lose sight of materiality in the name of materialist explanations for thought. Searle notes that these problems run throughout the history of materialist theories of mind, leading to numerous contradictions that either neglect or privilege the material at different times (52). “Materialist” explanations for thinking, then, often diverge from materiality in the name of “pattern” or “organization,” which links it to a longer history of cybernetics and posthumanism (Hayles 1999; Bollmer 2018, 85–113), assuming the essence of thought exists in organizational structure rather than physical matter and can be removed from the human body and placed into a computational, robotic “brain” with few problems—as long as a computational structure is developed to mirror the physicality of the brain. Throughout this book I’ve been privileging doing rather than anything else (like “being”), so, in a sense, I’ve been offering a kind of behaviorist way of understanding media—at least insofar as Searle defines behaviorism. We’ve been focusing on actions and behaviors and how actions and behaviors (by human and nonhuman alike) are material. But, as I hope has been clear, I’m attempting to avoid reductionism—and I certainly don’t reduce everything to the brain and cognition. The problem of how to be a materialist when addressing the brain while also avoiding reduction to brain chemistry is difficult—one that authors like Tony Sampson (2017) are attempting to think through. Sampson sees one of the major problems with materialist philosophies of mind is its emphasis on reduction, rather than relation. “Reality,” with all the variants of neuro-thought, becomes explainable through rationalist deferrals to science and biology, which focus on the neuron. Sampson, while he wants to hold on to the materiality of the brain, instead argues for a range of relational assemblages in which the brain is one part—a central part, but not the only part. Sampson calls this the “assemblage brain,” where “what becomes brain matter does not need to begin in a location or with a neuron at all. .  .  . Everything is, like this, potentially becoming brain” (xv). Once again, we return to the question of brain-body-world entanglements. We can still take a lot from the materialist philosophy of mind. Namely, we should agree with James, Dennett, and the others in this tradition: thinking and experience are about the physicality of the brain and the body. But, we should refuse to reduce this materiality to the physicality of neurons and little else. This is more a problem for Dennett than James—in fact, our emphasis on an expanded understanding of mind, which we’ll elaborate in the remainder of this chapter, is perhaps more in the tradition of James than philosophers like Dennett. In our emphasis on relation, we should

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add something—thinking and experience are also about the materiality of media and how this materiality is entangled with bodies and brains. This returns us to the larger concerns of this book, returns us to the entangled, neurocultural assemblages theorized by Sampson and Blackman, and returns us to McLuhan.

Media restructure consciousness As we noted in Chapter 3, McLuhan’s division between orality and literacy, while central to the historical narrative he weaves, is highly problematic. We should refuse the teleology that characterizes McLuhan, but we should take from him the specifics he identifies in how different technologies transform the possibilities for communication, subjectivity, and memory, summed up nicely in a phrase of Walter Ong’s: writing restructures consciousness. Writing augments and transforms the potentials for human thought and experience. “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word. Such transformations can be uplifting. Writing heightens consciousness. Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life” (2002, 81). So, for Ong, the effects of writing aren’t just about relations in time and space. Writing brings about fundamental shifts in perception and experience. The same goes for any and all media. “Any invention or technology,” claims McLuhan, “is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body” (1964, 45). A medium focuses on a particular sense—the telephone emphasizes hearing, photography vision. It may extend this sense in space or time, or it may prohibit the use of a particular sense, which is what McLuhan means by “amputation.” And these tendencies toward extension and amputation are not zero-sum. Virtual reality, for instance, requires the use of headsets that isolate the body, placing it into a different “virtual” world. VR extends the body and its senses outward. But, in isolating the body, VR also amputates it, cutting it off from the physical space in which that body exists. A VR headset fundamentally reorients the body’s sensation, extending it in some ways, amputating it in others. Like VR, all technologies transform a body’s extension in space and time; all rearrange and reconfigure how the body senses its world. This emphasis on sensation means, for McLuhan, that media are a part of the human body. It is not merely that technologies extend the body— they enter the body, remaking it through a reframing or reinvention of



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consciousness. Our technologies transform our sense of self, which we should link with the physical materiality of the brain and body. There are concerns that arise from this perspective, however. As McLuhan argues, “Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems. . . . Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left” (1964, 68). The point is not that this extension and amputation via media is good or bad, but that it’s merely a description of what media do. The control of media—which should bring to mind Innis’s concern for monopolies of knowledge—is about controlling and manipulating the very physiology of the body and brain.

Gesture and motion Brian Rotman (2008) is a more recent writer in the tradition that descends from McLuhan and Ong. Rotman draws on recent work in neuroscience and cognitive philosophy to argue that what is specifically lost with the transition from orality to literacy is embodied gesture. While language is a “bio-cultural given rather than a technological medium” (1), writing gives the body a “mind upgrade,” expanding the possibilities for memory and self-knowledge. Rotman examines not how digital media enable a global village, but how new recording technologies enable the inscribing of physical, embodied motion as a form of “gesturo-haptic writing,” which is Rotman’s term for motion capture technology and gestural interfaces that “write” motion. (While motion capture is the best example of what Rotman is talking about, think also about how an iPhone allows you to send messages that are animations created by heartbeats, or the movements of fingers. These are all inscriptions of motion and, I would suggest, count as “gesturo-haptic writing.”) While Rotman does not fetishize orality in the same way as Ong or McLuhan, he nonetheless suggests that embodied movement and the affective element of vocal utterances, so central for oral communication, cannot be captured by writing and consequentially drop out of the constitution of the embodied subject. Alphabetic writing cuts speech loose from the voice, substituting for the individual, breathing, here-and-now agency of the one who utters them by an abstract, invisible author, and replacing a unique event, the utterance which unfolds over time, by fixed, repeatable, atemporal alphabetic inscriptions, inscriptions which necessarily fall short of representation . . .

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alphabetic writing eliminates all and any connection speech has to the body’s gestures. (25)

“Gesturo-haptic writing” returns this affective, gestural element to writing. The inscription of gesture has been common for many forms of media. Painting, in Rotman’s opinion, records “the artist’s gestures through brushstrokes” even though this feature of painting is “downplayed and neglected when compared to painting’s representational function” (43). New recording technologies—like motion capture—excite Rotman precisely because they provide “the possibility of a non-notational medium capable of reproducing the kinesis of bodies” (43). What’s new, for Rotman, is how motion capture can inscribe motion as motion, rather than as static representation. (I should note, Rotman’s reading of painting is questionable. The importance of a painter like Vincent van Gogh results from the motion captured by his brushstrokes, and, with Jackson Pollock, this link between painting and the inscription of motion is explicit. But I think his distinction comes from how an inscription made with motion capture can itself move, while a painting cannot unless it’s animated using, say, film or digital media.) Rotman’s emphasis on motion capture is interesting, if a bit odd considering the absence of motion capture technologies in everyday life. However, video games and CGI in film heavily depend on motion capture in the production of their technologically mediated digital images. The game L. A. Noire uses gestural and affective forms of writing in its gameplay. Key “interrogation” sequences in the game require the player to determine whether a non-player character, represented by an actor encoded through motion capture, is telling the truth or lying. Determining this depends on the player’s ability to read the affective, embodied gestures of the other character. These games are not precisely what Rotman is talking about, but they are an example of the everyday use of motion capture as a form of writing. The ways that motion capture change consciousness happens because of the networked possibilities of digital media. Speaking the subject, of enunciating the “I” of the individual, autonomous self, only comes about in relation to the alphabet, claims Rotman—a claim that, if we recall Chapter 3, is similar to that of Eric Havelock. The self “written” through new forms of recording that reinscribe gesture produce a different way of speaking or embodying the “I.” With the new forms of writing enabled by digital technologies that encode the body, in combination with the possibilities of networking writing online, Rotman claims that we will no longer be the “I” of the modern, liberal subject. Instead, we will come to understand ourselves as “para-selves,” as distributed subjects with porous boundaries rather than stable ones:



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Now the “I” bleeds outwards into the collective, which in turn introjects, insinuates, and internalizes itself within the “me:” what was private and interior is seen as a fold in the public, the historical, the social as outside events enter (and reveal themselves as having always entered) the individual soul in the mode of personal destiny. . . . There is however ultimately no separation between interior and exterior: inner experiential “I” and outer collective “they” fold into each other. All thought, even the most private and enclosed, is from outside itself, socially existing, being publicly mobilized, using and being used by the media and technological apparatuses that surround us, constitutes our psyches. (99, 102)

This is similar, but quite different than McLuhan’s dreams of a global village. Rotman is claiming that global connectivity will transform our sense of self so that we, as individuals, become a global village within ourselves.

Cognition and embodiment Rotman’s claims are intriguing, but there seems to be a logical leap left undeveloped somewhere between his description of gesturo-haptic writing and the para-selves of networked identity. Namely, his emphasis on embodiment seems to drop out in the theory of the para-self. This is a result of competing definitions of what “embodiment” even means. Colloquially, and in some versions of feminist and performance theory, embodiment usually refers to the literal experience of having a body. I cannot literally feel another person feeling, I cannot sense what they are sensing, and so on. I exist within the limits of my physical skin. In the strains of cognitive philosophy and neuroscience appropriated by media theorists like Rotman, Mark Hansen (2004), and Bernadette Wegenstein (2006), however, embodiment means the cognitive possibility of a body. The body doesn’t end at the skin, but includes the physical extensions of the body that are internalized as technologies restructure consciousness. And since technology provides the precondition for these cognitive possibilities, the body is consequentially produced in dialogue with the technological. Or, cognitive embodiment “frames” and materially “gives body” to flows of information that are often thought to be disembodied or immaterial, pointing us toward the conjunction of bodybrain-world. Thus, one of the ways Rotman—along with the others that focus on a cognitive understand of embodiment—moves beyond McLuhan is to identify how technologies aren’t merely there to “augment” the human body.

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With McLuhan, the human body is always at the center of the particular effects of its technological extension or amputation. Rotman, on the other hand, sees network technology and the resurrection of gesture as something that blurs and overturns boundaries between self and other. Rotman suggests that this transformation is historical, but there are other theorists that suggest this blurring of boundaries is inherent to the relational, material interplay between bodies, media, and the environment—which, again, returns us to the body-brain-world entanglements we’re focusing on. An earlier way of thinking about these entanglements came with the theorization of the “technological unconscious,” initially proposed by sociologist Patricia Clough (2000) and elaborated by geographer Nigel Thrift. For Thrift, technologies position bodies and practices in space, fostering this “unconscious” in “the bending of bodies with environments to a specific set of addresses without the benefit of any cognitive inputs, a prepersonal substrate of guaranteed correlations, assured encounters, and therefore unconsidered anticipations” (2005, 213). Technologies like SIM cards, RFID tags, and even barcodes serve to physically locate bodies, tracking, managing, and coordinating movement. The technological unconscious organizes space and directs bodies, outside of human awareness. It locates and directs, at an “unconscious” level, and determines who comes into contact, where, and when, programmed into devices that manage and order space and time. If Thrift thinks of these technologies, while still a kind of “unconscious,” as noncognitive, the media theorist N. Katherine Hayles has reframed them as part of larger “cognitive assemblages” that reshape and distribute “thought” prior to human consciousness. This requires a redefinition of what “cognition” is, one that opens and reframes what it means to think and act. For Hayles, Most human cognition happens outside of consciousness/ unconsciousness; cognition extends through the entire biological spectrum, including animals and plants; technical devices cognize, and in doing so profoundly influence human complex systems; we live in an era when the planetary cognitive ecology is undergoing rapid transformation, urgently requiring us to rethink cognition and reenvision its consequences on a global scale. (2017, 5)

Hayles defines cognition as “a process that interprets information within contexts that connect it with meaning” (22). This means that “thought” is less an attribute than an activity (cognition is a process), one about making decisions and choices (that interprets information), that has specific, relevant outcomes relative to a context (within contexts that connect it with meaning).



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Hayles does not privilege human interpretation and meaning, but does make a distinction between “cognizers” and “noncognizers.” Cognizers “are humans and all other biological life forms, as well as many technical systems,” while noncognizers include “material processes and inanimate objects” (30). Only cognizers can make choices and decisions. Human beings make decisions, animals make decisions, even plants—while they may not have nervous systems—make decisions based on how they sense their environment (so, plants move toward light or respond to the weather). While these decisions may be programmed into technologies, computers are designed to interpret information and make decisions, which means that, for Hayles, they “think” in particular ways. While noncognizers may have strong, agential powers— Hayles notes natural disasters as an example of noncognitive process, which act but don’t make decisions based on contextual information—she still wants to distinguish between objects and processes that make decisions from those that do not. Because of the sheer number of “cognizers” that exist, we cannot say that human beings are the only ones “thinking” or that the thought of any one individual is separate from the rest of the world. Instead, Hayles argues that we live within “cognitive assemblages,” which transforms the “technological unconscious” into a broad range of intersecting, collaborative ways of managing decision: Cognitive assemblages are distinct because their transformative potentials are enabled, extended, and supported by flows of information, and consequentially cognitions between human and technical participants. Hybrid by nature, they raise questions about how agency is distributed among cognizers, how and in what ways actors contribute to systemic dynamics, and consequentially how responsibilities— technical, social, legal, ethical—should be apportioned. They invite ethical inquiries that recognize the importance of technical mediations, adopting systemic and relational perspectives rather than an emphasis (I would say overemphasis) on individual responsibility. (119)

Thus, Hayles reorients “thinking” and “cognition” to a broader range of agencies, one defined not only by action but also by responsive decision-making.

Cognition, decision, and plasticity Hayles’s focus on decision is not without its own problems. The philosopher Catherine Malabou has argued that cognitive decision—or more accurately,

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a lack of cognitive decision—characterizes a range of recent pathologies and disorders identified by neuroscience. Cognitive decision should probably be thought of as the ability to identify differences and to have a particular intention toward something differentiated at a cognitive level. Those with brain damage, or what Malabou terms “the new wounded,” are characterized by “coolness, neutrality, absence, and the state of being emotionally ‘flat’” (2012, 53). These bodies, which include those marked by accidental legions or chronic illness, or psychological categories that are “affectless,” like psychopathy, “display permanent or temporary behaviors of indifference or disaffection” (10). Above all, they do not possess the ability to make a decision at a neurological level. While Malabou is interested in how these bodies necessarily reinvent the categories of psychoanalysis, for us they also point to the limits of Hayles’s distinction between cognizers and noncognizers, and how—while Hayles subverts the typical privileging of human over nonhuman agency—new lines can be drawn that mark some lives as of greater significance than others when we turn to the brain. One of Malabou’s major concerns is how to theorize the brain and thought in a way that does not simply reproduce models that parallel neoliberal capitalism (2008). Neoliberalism is often characterized by networks that maintain flexibility in their relations, in which temporary projects are the norm (see Harvey 1990). Malabou notes that common ways of describing the brain seem to follow these same terms. The links between neurons are “flexible,” the brain is “networked,” enabling some to claim that the social structure of neoliberalism is “natural” because of its parallels in the brain. Malabou argues that, instead of flexibility, we should describe the brain in its “plasticity,” a term she derives from Hegel but which also occurs in William James’s writings on psychology when describing the relation between habit and the brain’s materiality: Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. . . . Organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity of this sort so that we may without hesitation lay down as our first proposition the following, that the phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of the organic materials of which their bodies are composed. (James 1890, 105)

Malabou argues that the emphasis on flexibility obscures the brain’s plasticity. The importance of plasticity is that it “designates solidity as much as suppleness, designates the definitive character of the imprint, of



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configuration, or of modification” (2008, 15). Or, plasticity means that the brain is intertwined with and modified by the external world—relations and encounters leave a physical imprint on the brain that manifests itself as habit, as memory. While these changes are never truly permanent, as the brain is always in flux, plasticity means that the changes undergone by the brain cannot be reversed. Plasticity emphasizes how embodied encounters sediment within the materiality of the brain, shaping and determining future relations and encounters. Plasticity has a history—it accounts for a body’s lived experience at a material level. Flexibility threatens to make everything ephemeral and reversible, while plasticity points to how the brain can be theorized as a surface for inscription, one that is extended and remade by technology, by interactions, by relations, but one that can never return to its originary state as “unmarked.” So, there are many ways of theorizing the brain-body-world entanglements that we’re looking at by way of neurocognitive materialism, though hopefully at this point you can see the distinctions and similarities between a number of these arguments. While the materialist philosophy of mind has a tendency to reduce all thought to a rationalist understanding of the neuron, writers like Hayles, Rotman, Sampson, and Malabou all work to stress the relational aspects of the brain, of how the brain is entangled with technologies and with the world. Some, like Hayles and Sampson, also work to reimagine what might be meant by “thought,” extending cognition out into larger assemblages that cannot be reduced to a particular brain or neuron.

Materiality and epistemology It’s at this point I want to turn away from a more ontological view of the relation between technology and cognition and briefly turn toward a view that argues how technologies transform the possibilities for science to see the body, and then say something about a body. This perspective seems similar but is quite different from those we’ve been discussing. The difference between them is subtle. One argues that transformations of subjectivity and cognition happen because of a direct relation between technology and the brain, the other because technologies provide models and metaphors through which the body and brain are reimagined. One examines the direct linkage between the brain and a medium, and the other examines the normalizing processes of science, means of classification, and the possibilities for inscribing and archiving information. If the previous section followed McLuhan and his theories about media extending the body, those we’re talking about here

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follow our chapter on inscription—and, especially, the works of Michel Foucault. In a well-known essay about the telegraph, James Carey describes the telegraph as “a thing to think with, an agency for the alteration of ideas” (1988, 204). Like Harold Innis, Carey is interested in technology for the spatial and temporal biases implicit in its materiality, how technologies transform particular power relations that impact social and economic life. But, he’s also interested in how the physical capacities of a medium are remade into metaphor and how particular material structures are linked up with other material structures in a way that completely obscures the physical differences between—in this case—physiology and technology. Like Malabou, Carey is interested in how “naturalistic” ways of describing technology and society, lifted from biology, serve to legitimate capitalist relations. While Malabou focuses on the similarities between neurology and neoliberal capital, Carey shows how these equivalencies began much earlier, with the telegraph permitting metaphorical links between technology and industrial capital by way of neurological metaphor: The telegraph permitted the development, in the favorite metaphor of the day, of a thoroughly encephalated social nervous system in which signaling was divorced from musculature. It was the telegraph and the railroad—the actual, painful construction of an integrated system—that provided the entrance gate for the organic metaphors that dominated nineteenth-century thought. (215)

The history of neuroscience is filled with countless technological metaphors, in which a model of a technology is applied to physiology and—at times— vice versa (see Otis 2001; Lenoir 1994). But often the link between technology and models of the mind are not merely metaphorical. Rather, they emerge from how particular technologies visualize the body, inscribing in specific ways. Jonathan Crary, for instance, looks at the history of optical media to argue how technologies produced “observing subjects” as well as the possibilities of vision experienced by those subjects (1990, 5). Particular technologies of vision produced a relation between seeing and seen, resulting in specific kinds of bodies and practices not from a direct linkage between media and the brain, but from how vision was distributed by a particular medium. The camera obscura, for instance, was an early photographic technology: Above all it indicates the appearance of a new model of subjectivity, the hegemony of a new subject-effect. First of all the camera obscura



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performs an operation of individuation; that is, it necessarily defines an observer as isolated, enclosed, and autonomous within its dark confines. It impels a kind of askesis, or withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one’s relation to the manifold contents of the “exterior” world. This the camera obscura is inseparable from a certain metaphysic of interiority: it is a figure for both the observer who is nominally a free sovereign individual and a privatized subject confined in a quasi-domestic space, cut off from a public exterior world. (39)

Crary understands technology as something that emerges from and is embedded within culture. Technologies are produced within specific contexts, expressing specific desires, at specific junctions of science and philosophy. Yet technologies are both produced by culture and, in their material organization and form, produce subjects and identities—and not inherently with reference to the cognitive possibilities of embodiment. The camera obscura, Crary claims, is a precondition to the narratives of photography, although historically these technological forms “belong to two fundamentally different organizations of representation and the observer, as well as of the observer’s relation to the visible” (32). Technology produces subjects, what those subjects experience, and what can be said about those subjects, in accordance with larger cultural beliefs and norms. Likewise, the history of technology as a narrative of simple technological “development” or “progress” cannot be stated as such: the larger cultural and social context within which any one technology is deployed may rely on radically different, discontinuous notions of subjectivity and experience, as expressed, concretized, and normalized through the material possibilities of the medium. Similar claims can be made about the scientific uses of a range of media. The use of photography, stopping time and visualizing the body, was central for medical and psychological research in the late 1800s and early 1900s, also employed in the teaching of doctors and psychologists to demonstrate and visualize particular pathologies. Photography “was simultaneously an experimental procedure (a laboratory tool), a museological procedure (a scientific archive), and a teaching procedure (a tool of transmission)” (DidiHuberman 2003, 30). Photography enabled the recording and ordering of bodies, especially those marked as “hysteric,” and, through photographic evidence, it systematized and defined how hysteria was supposed to exist at a material level. The physical capacities of technologies have influenced emotions research (Malin 2014), along with studies of attention and perception (Crary 1999; Halpern 2014), and even Cold War–era attempts to create means for mind control and telepathy (Velminski 2017).

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Both the ontological and epistemological ways of understanding the relation between technology and the mind begin with similar, if not identical, claims about the power of technological materiality. Both see a medium as a material agency for the alteration of ideas. One, however, sees this agency as direct, as impacting the literal operation of the brain, while the other is more contextual and about models that emerge from seeing through a particular medium. There is a particularly strange paradox that emerges from the juxtaposition of these two arguments. If technologies condition what we experience, then the very possibility of thinking technology is produced, in some way, by that form of technology. We’re back at some of the earliest arguments of this book—we can’t think about media, we only think in media. This is most explicit if we think of technology as a cognitive a priori to sensation and thought, as an ontological assemblage in which our bodies intra-act and experience. What this would mean is that there is, quite literally, no exterior to the technological. Claims about biology and neuroscience are produced by the technological possibilities for body and brain, consequentially plunging us into a massive recursive loop in which our analyses of technology simply reflect how technology is the precondition for any analysis. If technology is embedded in larger historical and cultural contexts, however, then it is possible to suggest that our thought, experience, and discourse can be understood without reference to the cognitive possibilities and limits conditioned by the technological. Many of these historically and contextually specific approaches, in recent years, are about older, often obsolete forms of technology, especially following those in the tradition of media archaeology (see Parikka 2012). It’s entirely possible that we remain unable to comprehend to our own technological context because of the very preconditions that enable thinking our own identities and selves.

Conclusion This chapter sketched a definition of neurocognitive materialism by doing three things. First, it reviewed how “materialism” is used in the philosophy of mind, along with supplying some historical context to understand the stakes of these debates. It then turned toward McLuhan and his understanding of media, embodiment, and cognition, and elaborated how a number of more recent media theorists have addressed both the legacy of McLuhan and the problems with materialism in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind. In following this path, this chapter argued that we should focus not on “brains”



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or “bodies,” but on body-brain-world assemblages that cannot be reduced to the neuron. This chapter also discussed a more historical perspective that sees the relationship between media and the brain as one clouded by metaphorical models, in which particular ways of understanding subjectivity, the brain, and the mind are indirectly lifted from the materiality of particular technologies. Chapter 5 will link these concerns with new theories that attempt to acknowledge the agency of objects, along with what’s called “affect theory” in the humanities, which looks to the embodied, physical potentialities of the body and brain to rethink the grounds and possibilities for culture and society. Affect theory, while massively influential in a wide range of humanistic, theoretical work today, also tends to sideline questions about the materiality of the brain in spite of the close linkages between these two bodies of theory. So, these claims about neurocognitive materialism bleed into the final version of materiality we’ll discuss in this book: the vital materialism of bodies, brains, and things in their lively relationality. But we’ll be approaching affect and vital materialism as a kind of solution to a problem—and our version of vital materialism will take this problem seriously: how to theorize the materiality of objects without reducing them to human experience? It’s to these intertwined issues—objects and affects, interiority and relation—with which we’ll conclude our journey through materialist media theory.

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Objects and relations Is an object something that exists in and of itself? Or does it exist only in relation to something else—a subject that sees it, that uses it? The past decade has seen the rise of a number of competing perspectives that theorize the role of objects in shaping and determining culture, possessive of agencies that exist beyond human experience and knowledge. Some argue that objects are completely withdrawn, separate and independent from human thought. Others argue that objects exist only in relation. In this chapter, we’ll attempt to negotiate between these two perspectives, using them to craft a theory of objects and relations that adds to our emphasis on the politics of materiality. Can we come up with a way of describing what objects do that isn’t all about me, or you, or any other human being using them? By the end of the following pages we’ll be able to answer this question in the affirmative—we do have ways of thinking about objects that do not defer to human thought and intent. But, this chapter is a bit of a departure from our previous ones. Much of what we’ll cover in it has a hostile relationship to materiality, tending to make objects into metaphysical things that exceed material reality and— consequentially—the ability of an observer to grasp and understand them. Embracing a metaphysics of objects is not something a materialist theory of media should do, so, in looking at what objects are, we’ll think through the strengths and weaknesses of some of these theories and work to fold these theories into the version of materialism we’ve been sketching throughout this book—a task that is not without its limitations.

Subjects and objects Philosophers have often started their speculations by looking at their desk and the objects they find there. Edmund Husserl, the philosopher most associated with phenomenology as a method and body of thought, once wrote,

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I am aware of a world, spread out in space endlessly, and in time becoming and become, without end. I am aware of it, that means, first of all, I discover it immediately, intuitively. I experience it. Through sight, tough, hearing, etc., in the different ways of sensory perception, corporeal things somehow spatially distributed are for me simply there . . . whether or not I pay them special attention by busying myself with them, considering, thinking, feeling, willing. (1931, 51)

This seeming infinitude of the world is discovered immediately, intuitively, at Husserl’s desk where he writes, with what is present in front of him. Sitting at his desk, Husserl can let his “attention wander from the writing-table I have just seen and observed,” meaning he can think about objects even if they’re not immediately in front of his face, present to his immediate sensation, like his desk. But, when right there in front of him, “Things in their immediacy stand there as objects to be used, the ‘table’ with its ‘books,’ the ‘glass to drink from,’ the ‘vase,’ the ‘piano,’ and so forth” (52–53). Husserl’s point is that, while he begins with the objects and things around him, he doesn’t apprehend—or experience in consciousness—all of what is physically present in the same way. He knows that a world exists beyond his immediate experience even if he doesn’t see it directly. He knows that specific objects exist in front of him, but he can ignore them as he contemplates the infinitude of the world. For phenomenology, which is a philosophical method designed to reveal the essences of the world through a process of “reduction,” a process Husserl named the epoché, or “bracketing,” which entails removing that which is inessential from thought, Husserl necessarily begins with what’s there on his desk. Even the most abstract speculation begins somewhere concrete, with the objects and things that are there, within grasping distance. But the point of doing this is to give a transcendental understanding of reality, beyond the immanence of the material things that are present. Husserl begins with the objects in front of him to get beyond them, finding the “essences” of reality. So, when phenomenologists look at and take hold of the objects around them, what conclusions do they make? The things in front of Husserl, as he notes, are there to be used. We may experience something we use differently than something we see, or something we recall in our memory. The philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was a student of Husserl’s, makes a similar point when he distinguishes between what he terms “present-athand” and “ready-to-hand.” A technology’s “readiness-to-hand” is linked with its use—each technology is designed to be used in particular ways. “The shoe which is to be produced is for wearing . . . the clock is manufactured for telling the time. The work . . . has a usability which belongs to it essentially; in this usability it lets us encounter already the ‘towards-which’ for which it is



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usable” (1962, 99). There’s a proper use of particular objects, a use that seems to be “in” the object itself but isn’t always self-evident. A hammer, for instance, is only properly used when one holds the bottom of its handle, tightly in the grip of one’s hand. Holding a hammer in this way permits the weight of its head to strike a nail with the most force—but the specific location of holding a hammer isn’t always obvious unless one has been taught how to properly use a hammer. Perhaps one grasps the hammer’s handle too high, or even grasps the head. The same can be said of many technologies, including a range of digital media. Why would we assume the gestures that control an iPhone, like pinching with two fingers to zoom in, or swiping left or right, to be selfevident? We have to learn the proper use of our technologies, often through some kind of education—much of which is built into a technology itself. But, for Heidegger, in being used, in being “ready-to-hand,” a technology withdraws from our experience of it. If we’re adept at using a hammer, we won’t see it, or even feel it as something independent of our body. It will function as an extension of the body—an argument that links Heidegger with McLuhan. When we swipe left or right on our phone, we shouldn’t notice the mechanics built into a device’s interface—a common sentiment in interface design (see Emerson 2014). Rather, our bodies have been trained to act in a particular way that causes us to ignore or forget the technologies we use and the techniques we perform, internalizing them as habit. Heidegger tells us that the “essence” of a particular technology is only disclosed in its use. But, in being used, a technology ceases to be something we experience and contemplate. Something is “present-at-hand”—rather than ready-to-hand—only when we encounter it outside of its use. This happens when something breaks, and we see it outside of our use of it—we experience it as an object. We don’t notice the hammer unless we’re using it incorrectly or if the head snaps off from the handle. We don’t notice our phones except when they’re not working correctly. A phone would be most present when it drops a call or when its batteries fully deplete. We can only experience something as an object when it’s not doing what it’s supposed to be doing or when it disrupts its relation it has as an extension of the body. The irony here is that it is only in its withdrawal from our experience, in its being used, that we can encounter what Heidegger says is the essence of a technology. But it is only when a technology is present-at-hand that we can begin to contemplate it and its ontology. “Readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they are ‘in themselves’ are defined ontologico-categorically. Yet only by reason of something present-at-hand, ‘is there’ anything readyto-hand” (Heidegger 1962, 101). Both Husserl and Heidegger want to get to the ontology of our world, of humanity, of experience. But, Heidegger tells us, technology fundamentally

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obscures this by shaping what we experience and see—it’s almost impossible to get to the essence of the things around us, because, in their use, their essence withdrawals. And, as Husserl’s example unintentionally reveals to us, we don’t pay attention to everything equally. Some things are more important than others; some things we pay attention to and others bleed into the background, forgotten. The objects around me are only selectively present. When you focus on something in your vision, what’s around it becomes hazy. Your attention to one thing makes the others around it into a background upon which the object of your attention emerges as distinct (cf. Bollmer and Guinness 2017). This is not even to mention that, in the process of his phenomenological analysis, Husserl does away with the physical things around him to get to what he thinks is the ontological reality buried beneath appearances. For Husserl, understanding reality requires us to reduce the material specificity away to approach the essences of experience. What matters, Husserl implies, is not the specific things in front of him, but the fact that he has a particular relationship with some of them—a relationship he terms “intentionality”—that allows him to be directed at some objects but not others. Cultural theorist Sara Ahmed finds these reflections of Husserl’s fascinating, but not entirely because of Husserl’s conclusions: How I long for him to dwell there by lingering on the folds of the materials that surround him. How I long to hear about the objects that gather around him, as “things” he does “things” with. This is not a desire for biography, or even for an impossible intimacy with a writer who is no longer with us. This is, rather, a desire to read about the particularity of the objects that gather around the writer. (2006, 29)

Ahmed’s brilliant interpretation of Husserl remakes his focus on intentionality to one of orientation. We not only intend a particular object in consciousness but also are oriented toward particular objects, which causes some objects to emerge in our perception more easily than others. We attend to them, but, in so doing, neglect others—we place others in the background, forgetting them, hiding them, acting as if their agencies do not matter. Our bodies are predisposed toward seeing some things and not others. But, even beyond the physiological capacities a body has for sensation, we often overlook and ignore particular objects, bodies, and relations. Ahmed, in revising Husserl, makes his arguments political. As she continues, Being oriented toward the writing table not only relegates other rooms in the house to the background, but also might depend on the work done



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to keep the desk clear. . . . One might even consider the domestic work that must have taken place for Husserl to turn to the writing table, and to be writing on the table, and to keep that table as the object of his attention. . . . Who faces the writing table? Does the writing table have a face, which points it toward some bodies rather than others? (30–32)

Even acts like observing objects on a table and sitting down to read or write involve numerous material facts—not all of which are equally distributed, not all of which are equally acknowledged as “material.” Ahmed draws us to how materiality is, once again, a process of mattering, one in which a range of subjects and objects are linked in relation, but in which these relations are inequivalent, even oppositional. The lived experience of race and racism, for instance, allows some objects to become present, while others may never materialize. The phrase “I don’t see race,” so often uttered by white people denying accusations of racism, is a refusal to allow race to materialize. It is not an ontological claim, but one that denies specific objects and relations to emerge in perception. The denial of seeing race is a disqualification of race as a category, one that refuses the lived experience of race to materialize, perpetuating the inequalities of racism. “Race” becomes something excluded from one’s world, refusing to let it be acknowledged, refusing to let it exist as sensible. This, consequentially, perpetuates racism by refusing the realities of racial difference and discrimination. I begin with Husserl and Heidegger, along with Ahmed’s interpretation of Husserl, for a number of reasons, reasons that will be woven throughout the remainder of this chapter. First is that Husserl is often thought to most clearly represent a number of tendencies in Western philosophy today disparaged from a number of directions. Namely, his theories all begin with a perceiving ego or subject. Even if Husserl sees a material object, what matters to him are the ideas in his mind, not the physical thing. Objects do not seem to matter in and of themselves. They only matter as something that exist within his consciousness of them. This tendency has been recently termed “correlationism.” The critique of correlationism (and of philosophers like Husserl) suggests that philosophy and theory today should acknowledge a world that exists beyond the human, and objects should be able to exist outside of a human perceiver’s experience of them. So, we should work to understand the objects on my desk divorced from how I apprehend them, rather than a Husserlian view that begins with my experience of the world around me. This is, at least in part, where Heidegger’s comments on readyto-hand and present-at-hand lead us. Heidegger’s argument suggests that objects, in their material presence, “dematerialize” to our experience of them, reduced to extensions of the human body. It is only when they break that

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they become “present.” But to grasp the object’s ontology is to begin with it in use—to begin when we do not see it or experience it. A number of followers of Heidegger, particularly a group of philosophers who have embraced the name “Object-Oriented Ontology” (or “OOO”) have latched upon this idea. Objects, in their real, material existence, are fundamentally withdrawn and separate from human experience (and from each other). Objects, following Heidegger, are isolated and independent, and approaching them in relation inherently reduces the object by placing it in relation. These authors—some of whom reject much of the materialist theory we’ve covered in this book—are seemingly content in identifying the Otherness and autonomy of objects, the fact that objects resist any coherent theorization because of their withdrawal. My view is that we can admit that objects are withdrawn without rejecting their relationality and their materiality. Ahmed’s reading of Husserl transforms phenomenology into a kind of materialism, one that stresses how relations permit specific objects to materialize while others fail to materialize as they become rendered background. Ahmed doesn’t deny the Otherness of objects or the Otherness of others. But she directs us to how the relations between bodies and between objects are locations for political struggle. It is in the negotiation of relation that we can see how some objects “materialize” while others do not. Once again, we see flashes of the politics behind how we’ve been theorizing performative materialism with our emphasis on relation and intra-action. To emphasize once again the importance of relation, this chapter will take up themes from vital materialism. Vital materialism is a name associated with the work of political theorist Jane Bennett and primarily refers to “the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (2010, viii). Vitalism is linked with the physical capacity to affect and be affected, and thus requires us to bring in questions of affect theory, which allows us to synthesize some of the claims of Chapter 4 with those reviewed here. These two perspectives—the “withdrawn” objects of OOO, and the affects and energies of vital materialism—have problems on their own, especially regarding knowledge and agency. Both imply significant difficulties in knowing or doing much of anything and are limited by a pessimistic philosophy that suggests it’s neither possible nor desirable to work to change the world—a pessimism that often comes disguised as a form of progressive politics. These problems are another reason I’ve foregrounded Sara Ahmed, as I think Ahmed, along with Katherine Behar, who has revised OOO into Object-Oriented Feminism (or “OOF”), gives us tools through which to synthesize the best aspects of these two directions to theorize the agency of



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objects. We should maintain OOO’s emphasis on the alterity of objects and should embrace the relationality of vital materialism, placing them together to acknowledge an intra-active politics that still permits human intervention and agency in affecting material relations.

Objects and things We now need to specify some of our terms, which also allows us to show why these theories of objects are often at odds with materialist perspectives. In the history of philosophy, there’s a major distinction between a “thing” and an “object.” Heidegger, in an essay titled “The Thing,” thinks about a jug in detail, extending and revising his comments about the presence of objects and their essences: But what is a thing? . . . The jug is a thing. What is the jug? We say: a vessel, something of the kind that holds something else within it. The jug’s holding is done by its base and sides. This container itself can again be held by the handle. As a vessel the jug is something self-sustained, something that stands on its own. This standing on its own characterizes the jug as something that is self-supporting, or independent. As the selfsupporting independence of something independent, the jug differs from an object. (1971, 164)

While Heidegger begins by talking about the jug in its materiality, he’s pointing to how these material facts about the jug cannot fully define what the jug is. If we think back to Heidegger’s emphasis on the ready-at-hand, what he’s highlighting here is how the use of the jug cannot be located within its materiality, properly speaking. The jug independently “supports” something independent. The materiality gives form to something else; the water in the jug, according to Heidegger, is not “in” it, it is independent, it does not physically merge with the materiality of the container. The function of a jug—which, for Heidegger, is the creation of an empty void that can be filled with other substances—is not about the substance of the jug itself, organized into its base and sides. It’s not about the fact that we can hold the handle of the jug, holding the void created by the base and sides. It’s not about the form of that which is contained within the jug. And it’s not about the potter making the jug, as one cannot, properly speaking, “make” a void. Heidegger, interestingly, describes a jug as something autonomous from human agency, active in and of itself, and in excess of its material grounding (cf. Sofia 2000). What makes a jug a thing

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rather than an object is this excess beyond the material. The word “thing” refers to “a certain limit or liminality,” literary theorist Bill Brown tells us, it exists at “the threshold between the nameable and unnamable, the figurable and unfigurable, the identifiable and unidentifiable: Dr. Seuss’s Thing One and Thing Two” (2001, 5). For Heidegger, Brown summarizes, a thing “is obscured by mere objects” (2003, 141). In psychoanalysis, a thing becomes “the Thing,” or das Ding, and represents the object “lost” in the course of psychological development, the unknown Thing that will eventually lead to satisfaction and happiness, the “thing” that orients desire. “The world of our experience,” Jacques Lacan claims, “assumes that it is this object, das Ding, as the absolute Other of the subject, that one is supposed to find again. It is to be found at the most as something missed” (1992, 52). If only we’d find “the Thing,” psychoanalysis suggests, we’d feel whole and happy, we’d fill the empty void in our soul—though finding this Thing is ultimately impossible. The Thing, instead, is an impossibility that marks the existence of an absence—a void. An object, formalized in Lacanian psychoanalysis as the objet petit a, is the object-cause of desire, the obtaining of which one imagines as leading toward satisfaction. (This is expressed as something like, “If I could only have x, then I’d be happy,” with x being, say, anything one desires, from a particular item of food, a commodity, even another person, or a part of another person.) But, like das Ding, this object is never to be obtained—or, “satisfaction” is never attained even when one is able to possess the object that guides their desire. The true “object”—the Thing that will result in satisfaction—is forever missed. Psychoanalysis argues that we don’t actually want to be happy—we want to keep on desiring more. Material objects are effaced for their role in directing desire, in which the material object obscures something else that can never be obtained. So—even though these terms are ultimately conflated in Lacanian psychoanalysis—there’s a split between “things” and “objects,” between an immaterial excess and material reality. When philosophers tend to describe “things” they mean something that exceeds materiality. This excess still exists when people talk of objects in general, and it allows “objectification” to be a tool of critique. An argument throughout the history of feminist thought—both philosophical and popular—is that representations perpetuate patriarchal norms and misogyny by objectifying women’s bodies. Rather than a full subject, women are devalued into objects. This happens through, for instance, the common tendency in advertising that cuts up women’s bodies, or replaces body parts with commodities, or highlights some equivalence between a body part and a commodity. A notorious series of advertisements for the designer Tom Ford’s fragrances, for instance, equates bottles of perfume and cologne with



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both male and female genitalia. Though these particular ads are egregious examples of objectification, this technique happens throughout advertising. The point is that objectification happens when bodies and people are treated as if they’re interchangeable with objects that are bought and sold, when, in actuality, one’s essence as a subject exceeds the body’s reduction to an object. The feminist philosopher Nina Power has noted how contemporary life appears to be colonized by a number of seemingly different forces that make critiques of objectification difficult. On the one hand, contemporary capital is no longer about workers manufacturing products, but—through neoliberal, informational capital and the rise of service work—about manufacturing identities and relationships. This transformation is often referred to as “immaterial labor” (see Lazzarato 1996), but in the 1980s and 1990s it was also referred to as the “feminization of labor,” as service jobs were traditionally held by women, and interpersonal labor has—and continues to be—labor performed mostly by women. If capital produces objects—as in, the worker’s labor produces commodities to be bought and sold, which obscure the material forces and relations involved in the production of a commodity (this obscuring is what Marxist theory means by “commodity fetishism”)—then today the main object one produces is one’s body and identity. This is combined with recent changes in visual culture and sexuality—in which, Power argues, “parts” of bodies “take on the function of the whole,” and parts of bodies are treated “as wholly separate entities, with little to no connection to themselves, their personality, or even the rest of their body” (2009, 24). Combined, contemporary capital and visual culture result in an erosion of the divide between subject and object, one linked with the kinds of excess identified in theories of things. Where past forms of feminist thought critiqued larger practices of objectification, be it how the male gaze and heterosexuality fragmented women’s bodies into their parts (following a Lacanian understanding of sexual desire, fixated on particular “objects” as it is), or critiquing how patriarchy tends to reduce women to objects, rather than subjects, this no longer seems to be the case: Objectification implies that there is something left over in the subject that resists such a capture, that we might protest if we thought someone was trying to deny such interiority, but it’s not clear that contemporary work allows anyone to have an inner life in the way we might once have understood it. .  .  . If feminism is to have a future, it has to recognize the new ways in which life and existence are colonized by new forms of domination that go far beyond objectification as it used to be understood. (Power 2009, 26)

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The cry of “objectification” was potent because it identified specific moments in which bodies, agencies, and subjects would be reduced to objects to be used, objects lacking their own interiority and autonomy. But, Power notes, this reduction seems to be a generalized condition today, and—if the distinction between things and objects teaches us anything—this interiority or excess has long been an attribute of particular objects, ones thought to be special “things” because of how their essences exceeded their materiality. An illustration of the limits of objectification as a critique, following Power, would be the bottle of KKW Body, a perfume produced by Kim Kardashian. The KKW Body’s bottle is based off of a mold of Kardashian’s torso, without head, arms, or legs. Kardashian—whose fame is linked heavily with the use of social media, reality television, and self-branding—has embraced the reduction of herself to an object to perpetuate fame and stardom over social media. Critiquing this as objectification isn’t really helpful, because the current context suggests that there’s an exceptional amount of value that comes from self-objectification. So, there’s a tradition in continental philosophy that uses the term “thing” to note how the essence of an object exceeds its material existence. This is a problem when it comes to uses of “objectification” as a means for critique, and it’s a problem for materialist theory—or, at least, this highlights how materialist theory understands objects and things differently than many philosophies of “things” elsewhere. The emphasis on excess, however, characterizes a great deal of current work on objects, even if the term “thing” isn’t applied in a way that follows Heidegger or Lacan. It’s to these recent attempts to theorize objects that we now turn.

Withdrawn objects Over the past decade, a set of new philosophical movements have emerged, provoked by a number of problems including not only climate change and the immanent potential of human extinction but also the fact that our technologies and media clearly have agency in shaping the world in which we live, agencies that exist independent of human will and intention. These movements are Speculative Realism (or SR) and OOO. While they’re not the same and shouldn’t be completely conflated, OOO is an outgrowth of some of the issues and concerns of SR. SR and OOO have been widely debated in the past few years and have been influential for art, architecture, and a number of other theoretical debates. They originated out of a critique of Western philosophy that, at first blush, appeared to be quite political, as it



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rejected the anthropocentrism that’s long characterized Western thought and seemed to signal a new way of approaching ecological issues and indigenous politics, overturning a number of tropes that privilege limited versions of Enlightenment rationality, encoded as “modernity” in Western thought (cf. Latour 1993). As SR and OOO have developed over the past few years, however, they’ve lost their political thrust. What I want to do here is highlight a few key claims of SR and OOO, along with the limitations of these perspectives. I’m more interested in these bodies of theory because of the problems they’ve set up rather than the answers they supply: this includes addressing the agency of media and technology, the agencies of things and objects. But the way they answer these problems is, in my opinion, unsatisfying. SR’s emergence signaled a rejection of theories and philosophies that focused on language and social construction. The publication of the collection The Speculative Turn (Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman, 2011) was a manifesto that identified a group of younger theorists who were tired of the focus on language, discourse, and representation, instead looking elsewhere, be it to “reality” or to materiality. One of its editors, Nick Srnicek, stated the following in an interview: Do we really need another analysis of how a cultural representation does symbolic violence to a marginal group? This is not to say that this work has been useless, just that it’s become repetitive. In light of all that, speculative realism provides the best means for creative work to be done, and it provides genuine excitement to think that there are new argumentative realms to explore. (Quoted in Bogost 2012, 132)

Given the visible rise in authoritarian racism, misogyny, and xenophobia exposed in recent years—racism, misogyny, and xenophobia that never vanished but was ignored by those like Srnicek—this comment is deeply misguided (and I think has been repudiated by a lot of Srnicek’s own work since he spoke these words, which has addressed issues of race, gender, and sexuality—at least to some extent—with a model derived more from Marx than SR). But it nonetheless speaks of a general orientation of many of the writers associated with these philosophical movements. Questions of representation and symbolic violence were not “real” in a number of ways. Instead, the focus should be on “reality,” in such a way to move beyond the limits of human experience and knowledge. While many of the authors affiliated with SR have very different perspectives, almost all have been motivated by the charge of “correlationism” as formulated by the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux to describe

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almost all philosophies in the Western tradition. “By ‘correlation,’” Meillassoux tells us, we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other. .  .  . Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another. Not only does it become necessary to insist that we never grasp an object “in itself,” in isolation from its relation to the subject, but it also becomes necessary to maintain that we can never grasp a subject that would not alwaysalready be related to an object. (2008, 5)

Husserl, for instance, would be an archetypal correlationist thinker since he begins with the relation between a perceiving subject and an object. Friedrich Nietzsche would be an exemplar of a correlationist philosopher when he says, “Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying ‘there are only facts,’ I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations” (1968, 458), by which he means that there is no unmediated, unclouded access to the “facts” of the world, thus privileging an interpreting subject. But, Meillassoux argues, the world existed prior to human activity and will exist after human extinction. The usual terms of philosophy have no way of grasping this exterior world and instead reduce everything to human thought—which, Meillassoux suggests, is intrinsically idealist. Meillassoux finds this to be a deep problem, one that denies the existence of the world outside of our limited perspective. The critique of correlationism—and the claim that language, consciousness, mind, and so on are all idealist—has been taken up by SR to advocate for a return to “reality itself ” and “the nature of reality” independent “of thought and of humanity more generally” (Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman 2011, 3). Other advocates for new kinds of realism, like Maurizio Ferraris (2014a), also argue that theories which have long characterized continental philosophy—in particular, philosophy that descends from the claims of Nietzsche—too readily deny the existence of a singular, universal reality and truth. The turn to reality, for Ferraris, should be what philosophy and theory work to perform. He sees the turn to reality and realism as political, as something that can work to undermine current populisms that employ the lies of media propaganda to achieve power (2015, 21). Other SR writers see this turn to a world beyond the human as one that will bring about a more equitable reality that refuses to deny the agencies of nonhuman actors, following some of the arguments of the anthropologist and theorist Bruno



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Latour (see Harman 2009). Even others see the rejection of correlationism as necessary for a kind of human liberation (Bogost 2012). We’re reducing the possibilities of the world in linking it to human knowledge and experience, this line of thinking suggests. Moving beyond human experience would, in realist philosophy, expand the possibilities for the world and the materiality of the things within it. We covered some of this in Chapter 1. The turn to materiality corresponds with this turn to realism. There’s a widespread belief that a focus on images, representations, and so on means that we’re not looking at “reality.” While our claim was that representations are material, in that they do material things and have material effects, participating in processes that produce “reality,” this answer is not the one given by New and Speculative Realisms. So, we should work to understand the differences between these realist perspectives and our materialist one, and what we might want to take from these emerging forms of realism. But this also means that we have to understand the problems with New and Speculative Realisms. Most notably, these authors do not—and cannot—do what they advocate. While their philosophies are deeply committed toward removing the “privilege” given to human beings and human knowledge, in practice they cannot decenter the human so radically—if merely because they’re human beings writing books to be read for other humans, with arguments expressed in language, reflecting the potentials and limitations of language. The very idea of “subjects” and “objects” corresponds to the structure of language, for instance, and would suggest that a world seen through these distinctions would be an expression of how particular human beings perceive the world through language. New and Speculative Realisms rely almost entirely on describing a reality perceivable to human beings (cf. Golumbia 2016, 23–24). Or, as essayist Brian Dillon has claimed, these theories—while supposedly about objects and things—have a tendency to obliterate the particularity of that which they pretend to theorize. The objects these theories tend to discuss exist entirely as lists without elaboration. “A philosophy of the object without objects, a materiality without materials—what good are these to anyone except the intellectually immature and overreaching” (2017, 80), Dillon states. SR seems limited to depicting a “real” world that is everywhere and nowhere, legitimated only through its claims of (speculative) access to the real, rather than any particular commentary on actual objects. Realist philosophies also gloss over wide swaths of philosophy and theory, and often make strawpersons out of those they write against. Meillassoux’s arguments about correlationism depend on a limited reading of the history of Western philosophy, one that cannot account for the vast majority of

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analytic philosophy (including the materialist philosophy of mind discussed in Chapter 4, which works to make sure thought and mind are not “idealist”). Even with the most extreme version of the “anti-realist” arguments addressed by New and Speculative Realisms—“anti-realist” theorists seemingly deny the existence of an external reality beyond human experience, and deny an objective reality or “truth” beyond mediation—it’s clear that realists either distort or misrepresent the claims of those they implicitly position themselves against. Jean Baudrillard is perhaps the archetypal writer who denies the existence of “reality” and “truth” in recent decades, arguing that the contemporary world is characterized by “simulacra,” or copies without originals that act to determine reality in accordance with the copy. The world is remade to correspond to a fictional or simulated model, the “map” precedes the “territory,” and the boundary between “real” and “representation” is eroded so a distinction between the two cannot be made. In the notorious book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995), Baudrillard seemingly denies the existence of the Gulf War of the early 1990s, but Baudrillard’s title is ironic. Arguing that Baudrillard is denying reality is to miss his point. Baudrillard is interested in how war is mediated in the West. The mediated image precedes and determines the “reality” of war in a way that a distinction between “real” and “representation” cannot be made. “Reality” is the representation for Baudrillard. The evidence we have of the Gulf War is that of televised images and games—a fact that has continued to transform war today, when weapons like drones kill through interfaces that blur “actual” war with video game simulations of war, and war is legitimated through mainstream games and entertainment (cf. Lenoir and Caldwell 2018). Or, mediated images are not idealistic but are material and real, in that they organize material reality, affects, and behaviors, intersecting and assembling human and nonhuman. Saying that critiques of media imagery are not “realist” because of their focus on images and fiction, and how images and fiction have guided decisions, actions, and beliefs, is to misread and misunderstand the very point of this critique of media—and is to deny how thought and cognition are themselves material. Several of the writers associated with SR have moved toward what they term “Object-Oriented Ontology” (OOO) in recent years, attempting to correct some of these issues by supplementing realism with the Heideggerian claims about the withdrawal of objects. Graham Harman, the theorist most clearly associated with developing both SR and OOO, has claimed that OOO is a realist theory, but not a materialist one. Because of the withdrawal of objects from each other there’s no direct contact between objects, and no intrinsic relationality between objects (2018, 12). OOO is a “theory of everything” for Harman, one guided by rejecting four assumptions. First,



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OOO denies that everything real must be basic and simple, reducible to basic elements or units. Second, it rejects the idea that something real can be described in direct, literalist language. Third, it rejects the idea that for something to be real it must exist—or, OOO argues that something fictional is still real. Fourth, it rejects the idea that everything real must be physical— thus, it refuses the materialism we’ve been outlining in this book. I agree with the rejection of the first two of these assumptions. Both of these are a critique of people like Daniel Dennett, discussed in Chapter 4, along with the scientific worldview he espouses. Science regularly breaks down material objects into constituent parts, from DNA to chemical elements. This idea is called “reductionism” as it reduces everything to parts, arguing that reality can be understood as emerging from the physical aspects of these small, basic elements, but reductionism is not universally accepted by all scientists. Complexity science opposes reductionism on scientific terms, arguing that phenomena like weather patterns cannot be understood through small, basic parts (see Mitchell 2009). A common argument from complexity science is that “more is different.” The entire system must be accounted for to identify emergent phenomena that would not occur without the “more” of a larger scale. Or, one wouldn’t be able to explain tornadoes or hurricanes if one only reduced the weather to its basic elements. OOO, like complexity science, argues that real things cannot be broken into basic parts, though it doesn’t do so by turning to interactions and relations. Regardless, OOO refuses to separate objects into their constituent elements. The idea that reality can be discussed in literal terms is linked with efforts to reduce reality into parts. If we can reduce something to its basic elements, this line of thinking goes, then we can avoid subjective language for, say, feelings, emotions, and experience. We’d be able to describe pleasurable experiences through the measurement of dopamine in our brains or the taste of food and wine through their chemical composition and the way chemicals interact with one’s taste buds. This is a conclusion that Dennett comes to and is one of the ways he denies the significance of human consciousness. A machine can analyze a glass of wine by understanding its chemical composition, for instance. Dennett sees this process as analogous to the sensation of drinking a glass of wine at the level of the brain. The common terms we use, which may refer to a particular berry flavor, or something else subjective, Dennett sees as approximations for physical processes in the brain and body that can be directly described. Dennett would say, then, the mechanical analysis of chemicals is, in actuality, of no significant difference than what’s happening in our body when we taste something (see Harman 2018, 37). I generally agree with these objections, though I don’t agree with why Harman rejects them. The reason that OOO rejects these two arguments

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is because of Heideggerian arguments about withdrawal. In breaking down an object into its parts and in focusing on literal, scientific language to describe these parts, OOO argues that one is conflating the ready-tohand and the present-at-hand. One ignores the essence of the object and, instead, focuses only on what is sensible (be it to humans or to technologies for measurement). OOO argues that these kinds of reductionism and literal description inevitably miss the object, reducing the object to its parts or its sensory properties, when, in actuality, the object is withdrawn. Unlike Harman, I’d instead suggest that, following complexity science, more is different at a material level and, when it comes to literalist description, particular effects (like “taste”) can only be understood in relation with the material, chemical composition of an object and of the particular body consuming it. Or, something like taste is intra-active and thus cannot be reduced to the basic components of one and not the other. So, these objections can be useful for questions of materialism and materiality, but not the answers Harman supplies as to why we might make these rejections. Harman’s other two claims are more questionable—and our discussion of these claims will continue to demonstrate two different ways of rejecting the idea that objects can be reduced to basic elements. Harman’s third denial suggests that something fictional may not be physical but is nonetheless real. This denial is easy to dismiss. Fictional stories always exist in a physical medium and are an expression of the physical capacities of a medium. They are imagined in the mind according to the physical capacities of imagination and thought. Thus, fiction is material because of the materiality of a medium, which would mean that different incarnations of a story are often radically different because of the contextual, material particularities of how a story is told. Harman, however, wants to suggest that fictional characters remain consistent objects over time. So, the “Sherlock Holmes” of Arthur Conan Doyle is, effectively, the same “Sherlock Holmes” depicted by Benedict Cumberbatch in the television show Sherlock. I think it’s fairly safe to reject this idea. Even though these characters share the same name, along with a number of other aspects in their depiction, there are countless differences as well, many of which have to do with how a medium inscribes particular details of, say, language, set design, costuming, actors’ bodies, physical description, and so on. There is not one constant object called “Sherlock Holmes,” but multiple objects determined by the capacities of a medium to inscribe. Harman’s final denial is more difficult to do away with, however. Harman denies that everything real must be physical—which is a guiding argument for this entire book. Harman (2016) justifies this claim through the example of the Dutch East India Company, known as the Vereenigde Oostindische



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Compagnie in the Netherlands, or the VOC, which was founded in 1602 and disbanded in 1799. The VOC was the world’s first publicly traded company and—as an agent of Dutch imperialism—was given powers such as the ability to declare war, to mint its own currency, and to establish colonies. Harman argues that the VOC should be taken as an object, in and of itself, an object that cannot be reduced to its parts, an object distinct from the Dutch state. It’s also, he claims, an object that should be thought to be static over time rather than something constantly changing in spite of the consistency of its name. Thus, the VOC is not “material” because it has to exist in excess of its material elements. It is singular, rather than a series of different material arrangements—all of which are named the VOC but all of which are, in fact, different because of the particularity of their material parts. Again, we see how Heidegger’s claims about the Thing are central to some of the claims of OOO. The object exists in excess of its material formation. It has to stand independently, obscured by its materiality. Its independence means that it exists beyond its material parts, its sensory expression, its particular form, and so on—it has to have a consistent “essence” that exceeds its physicality. Harman’s arguments resemble a classical philosophical paradox known as “the ship of Theseus” (see Plutarch 1960, 29). Let’s say there exists a ship that sailed in battle by the mythical Greek hero Theseus, kept in a harbor for posterity. As the ship gets older, its wooden planks start to rot and are gradually replaced. After a century or so all of its parts are replaced. Is the ship now in the harbor the same ship that Theseus once sailed? Harman follows those who claim that the “new” ship was the same ship, such as Aristotle, who proposed a solution via his system of “fourfold causality,” which Harman and Heidegger have both drawn on in their writings (see Harman 2010). For Aristotle, an object is composed out of four causes, a “formal cause,” or its design, a “material cause,” or its physical materiality, an “efficient cause,” or the agency of the fabricator, and a “final cause,” which is the object’s intended use. Even though the ships are different in their material cause and efficient cause—the material planks are different, the ships were constructed by different people—the formal cause and final cause are the same—the “old” and “new” ships have the same form and have the same “use” as an object. Aristotle argued that the restored ship was the same because of the final cause, which is, for him, what gives a particular identity to an object—the privileging of which we can also see when Heidegger emphasizes the use of “the Thing” as pertaining to its essence, even though Heidegger and OOO move beyond this Aristotelian model. For them, the consistency of a withdrawn essence beyond use is what makes the object the same over time. Other ancient Greek philosophers, like Heraclitus, argued instead that the new ship was fundamentally different, though that’s in part because of the

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inherent constant of material, physical change—for Heraclitus, everything is constantly differing over time. The materialist theory in this book follows Heraclitus more than Aristotle, though this emphasis on change and flux rejects most claims to coherent or consistent identity over time. Materialist theory would argue that the “you” of this moment is different than the “you” of your childhood, different than the “you” of your adolescence, different than the “you” of a few weeks, days, even minutes ago. Each of these moments involves a range of material facts that are distinct and different. OOO would argue that you are always the same object, regardless of the changes that may have taken place. The point here is not to say that OOO is inherently wrong and materialism is inherently correct. The point is to note that OOO’s theory of objects, derived from a long-standing tradition of philosophy that denies the equation of an object with its physical materiality, seems like it would resonate with what we’ve been discussing in this book, though it comes to very different conclusions, which have different political implications. Harman accuses theories (like materialism) that do not allow for an “excess” beyond physical materiality of “overmining” what they study, which means that an object is “reduced” to what it does or how it relates and interacts with others. This is, for him, a sin that completely denies the existence of objects (2018, 49). Regardless, with OOO we get a philosophy of objects that argues “objects” exist only as some immaterial essence, an essence that is nowhere in particular and does nothing, but is beyond and outside of the physical interactions and relations that materially exist. There is an “objectness” beyond the immanence of the object’s material, physical parts. Hopefully, you can already see some of the ways we might object to Harman. If we go back to our chapter on inscription, for instance, the original, physical thing matters as a marker of something inscribed. The particular parts matter because of their physical link with something that has actually happened in the past, something “documented” in a physical medium. If we think back to our chapter on space and time, when archaeology goes back to look at these “documents” it does so by subjecting an actual, physical object to, say, a series of tests that—depending on the intent and use of particular archaeological techniques—can potentially reveal knowledge about history. The materials used in the original would produce vastly different knowledge than the materials used in the reconstruction, in part because there’d be different inscriptions accumulating in the wood, which would be a result of the particular routes the ship itself sailed. And even if we think of the inscriptions of paperwork, the Dutch East India Company only existed as an object because of the documentation, contracts, and stock that existed to give it transnational authority, documents and contracts that had particular



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biases because of the physicality of the media they employed, legitimated because of how different national bodies “materialized.” The only reason that the VOC was given the powers of governmental authority was because of its authorization as an agent of imperialist trade, which created unequal relations that manifested materially as colonial domination and exploitation. These details matter. They shape the particular form an object takes as it “materializes.” Changes in physical materiality reinvent and transform the existence of a particular object. A materialist perspective allows us to acknowledge the varied actors and agencies that work together to create the reality we live. The theory of objects given by OOO does not. All it allows us to say is that objects exist. But we can’t say anything about an object beyond this statement of its existence. OOO should probably be thought of as the pinnacle of “idealism,” not realism. In it, objects end up being immaterial “things,” unknowable idealist forms without matter, unchanging and stable— even though OOO denies the existence of a mind to have these ideas. There are points that we should take from OOO and SR—we should embrace its attention to a world beyond the human and its rejection of particular kinds of reduction that turn objects into nothing other than their constituent elements. But, at the same time, we should recognize the fundamental incompatibility of OOO with materialist theories of media, though the encounter of OOO and materialist theory also reveals how we should deny certain things—like a coherent sense of identity over time—in favor of contingent, multiple, and relational processes. While there have been a number of critiques of OOO and SR that demonstrate how it rarely lives up to its own demands (i.e., Wolfendale 2014), it’s on this point that we’ll turn to Jane Bennett’s vital materialism. While Bennett shares a number of concerns of OOO, a point noted by Harman (2018, 240–43), she emphases physical materiality, relation, and the agency of nonhuman objects, providing a theory of objects and relations more in line with the materiality discussed in this book. At the same time, Bennett’s ontology is totalizing, and if OOO tends to overstate the absolute alterity of objects by deferring to an unknowable essence beyond physical materiality, vital materialism overstates the intertwining of the world as a whole, evacuating the possibilities for political encounters and difference.

Vital objects and affective energies Jane Bennett’s vital materialism attempts to acknowledge the vast range of agencies beyond the human and places all things on equal ontological ground—something Harman has noted that it shares with OOO (2018,

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240–43). But vital materialism differs from OOO because of its emphasis on physical materiality, relation, and—significantly—the vital “energies” that exist within objects that permit them to act. Vitalism typically defers to a kind of “life force” that animates something from within, perhaps best represented by Henri Bergson’s concept of élan vital, or “vital impetus,” which is an animating, biological energy that exists within organisms, causing them to move, develop, and endure in time without any concrete ending “goal” (1911, 51). Bennett sees theories of vitality, such as the one given by Bergson, as too easily separating matter from the animating energy that exists “within” an organism. Instead, she wants to argue that this animating energy is inherent to matter, and all matter has a capacity to act and affect. So, there are two things that we should note about vital materialism. First, it stresses the physical materiality of objects. But, second, it adds to this by theorizing agency as an affective energetics linked with the relational capacity to affect and be affected by others. Bennett argues—drawing on the long-standing difference between objects and things—that we need to stress thing-power, or “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (2010, 6), the ability of there to be an agentic excess that—while it may not exceed materiality—is nonetheless beyond the typical ways humans have of understanding objects. This thing-power can be seen most clearly with waste. Waste seems like it may be the most “inanimate” of inanimate objects. From empty aluminum cans to paper, to plastic, to old VCRs and mobile phones that are broken and no longer function, these are all things that don’t seem to “do” much of anything. Waste has no clear “use,” and it often lacks a “form”— Heidegger’s discussion of things wouldn’t appear to apply to waste because we never “use” waste. Waste seems to be “stuff ” that we attempt to dispose of and forget. But, as Bennett notes, many of our current ecological crises are produced by waste as it decays, rots, and falls apart, and as the chemicals and minerals in waste leech out and contaminate the water, food, and soil around us. In thinking of these things as inanimate forms of waste, we overlook the vast range of ways that waste is actively reshaping reality. The materiality of waste is the same materiality of human and animal life. In ignoring the physical composition of waste, we’re neglecting the physicality that composes human bodies (12–13). The human body is made up of minerals, acids, and compounds that come not just from within, but from what we eat and consume. Mercury, for instance, is a toxic metal that enters the air not only from volcanoes but also from the burning of coal for power, the refining of oil, and the production of chlorine. Mercury then is absorbed from the air into the water, where—as it moves through the food chain—it accumulates in the bodies of fish like tuna and halibut, then eaten



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by humans, accumulating in our own bodies as a toxic substance that can, in significant amounts, damage the nervous system. Materially, our bodies are linked with other living things and objects as they agentially move throughout the planet. Our biology is remade in accordance with the material waves—like radiation—we contact. With mobile phones and Wi-Fi, these effects aren’t clearly understood yet. For Bennett, this shared materiality of the human body and the things and objects in the world is an ethical one, because human life and the life of the world are completely intertwined. So, in vital materialism there cannot be a divide between subject and object because, as Bennett argues, everything exists as “one matter-energy, the maker of things seen and unseen” (122). The singular understanding of “matter” Bennett gives us means we are all literally comprised of the same “stuff.” But this still neglects what she means by “vitality” and “agency,” which should be thought of in relation to theories of affect. “Affect,” as used in a wide range of contemporary theory, descends from some of the arguments of philosopher Baruch Spinoza, along with William James’s claim that consciousness and experience happen after a physical, bodily change, and that “mind” and sensation are secondary to the physicality of the body and brain. Perhaps the most significant recent theorization of affect is Brian Massumi’s essay “The Autonomy of Affect” (2002), which makes a hard distinction between affect and emotion following Spinoza and James—for Massumi, an emotion is a qualified, captured description of a bodily experience that happens after the fact, while an affect is something material, bodily, and relational. Similar claims can be found in many attempts to theorize affect. For Teresa Brennan, affects are “material, physiological things” (2006, 6) transmitted between different bodies, demonstrating how “we are not self-contained in terms of our energies” (6). For the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, affect is “transpersonal or prepersonal—not about one person’s feelings becoming another’s but about bodies literally affecting one another and generating intensities: human bodies, discursive bodies, bodies of thought, bodies of water” (2007, 128). What characterizes all of these authors is that affect is something physical and physiological. Affect, then, comes to describe an “energy” that moves between bodies, through them. Sometimes, it is clearly felt, if not easily put into words. Sometimes, it exists prior to consciousness and, while it has a material effect, cannot be located within an individual’s consciousness clearly. It’s this affectivity that leads Lisa Blackman to the claim cited in Chapter 4— that instead of bodies we should speak of body-brain-world entanglements. Affect is the material means that these entanglements happen, an energetic substance that exceeds and moves between individuals, linking them to each other and to the world. Affect is also the means that permits Bennett to claim

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that her vitalism is a materialism—affect comes to refer to the energetic potential within materiality to act and affect others. I agree with the general argument presented by affect theory—we should understand relationality and interaction as material, and that these relational, material interactions are about movement and change. Affect directs us to the physical energies that bridge different bodies, and to the active capacities of bodies to move. But affect too easily drifts into becoming a metaphysical substance beyond materiality, and, I worry, it may become something akin to aether (which can also be spelled ether) in the near future (see Milutis 2006). Aether is the name of a theoretical “element” that, from ancient and medieval science through the nineteenth century, was something thought to materially fill space. It was used to account for gravity and the movement of light. Few, if any, scientists believe in the existence of aether today. Nonetheless, aether was thought to be a material substance that existed, even though we couldn’t perceive or experience it. The legacy of aether should cause us to pause in any description of a material “substance” that causes particular effects even though it can’t be properly identified or defined in a consistent way. In drifting toward the metaphysical, there arise a few issues we can see in affect theory: affect tends to produce an odd kind of anthropomorphism, in which everything “feels” and becomes “sentient” (Angerer 2017, 21). In spite of the fact that a number of affect theorists draw attention to alterity and difference, the emphasis on intersubjective flows has led some theorists to either deny the possibility of subjectivity (see Blackman 2012; Terada 2001) or argue for a totalized, singular world in which absolute interconnection means that one can speak neither of causes and effects nor interventions to provoke change, leading to a pessimistic worldview in which the agency of an individual or group simply cannot do anything (cf. Bollmer 2016b). And, finally, the materialist arguments advanced by many affect theorists suggest that affect must be a “thing” found in the physiology of the body that is both material and exists beyond materiality. This leads affect theorists to discuss biology and neurology in ways that are often shockingly reductive and partial (see Blackman 2012, 134; Bollmer 2014; Papoulias and Callard 2010; Leys 2017), plundering from psychology and neuroscience without acknowledging the political implications of the model of the human body and mind these theories demand. Let me briefly address these three problems in turn.

Anthropomorphism and animism The particular form of anthropomorphism that characterizes vital materialist thought is animistic. “Affect” becomes a kind of internalized, overflowing energy, a new “spirit” that animates the bodies of living and nonliving things



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alike. Animism, most broadly defined, means little more than a belief in spirits. It characterizes certain variants of Western theology, but recent uses of animism in theory are more often derived from Pagan, indigenous, or Eastern belief systems beyond Western modernity (see Harvey 2013). The similarities that these theological animisms have with theoretical claims of vital entanglement turn “new animism” into an onto-ethical imperative. Timothy Morton, a theorist associated with OOO, suggests that he aims to reimagine “what counts as people,” and that “Ancient animisms treat beings as people. . . . Perhaps I’m aiming for an upgraded version of animism” (2010, 8). Donna Haraway, the famed feminist theorist of science, suggests, citing a conversation with anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Animism is the only sensible version of materialism,” the only ontology that permits for the sense-ability of agencies and actors beyond humanity (2016, 88–89). While Bennett, in particular, resolutely affirms how these “spirits” must exist materially, refusing to turn toward an immaterial metaphysical “thing” that animates the agencies of bodies and objects separate from materiality, she nonetheless turns to the theological concept of animism because of its seeming location “outside” of Western thought (2010, xviii, 18). This turn toward animism is a problem in contemporary theory. The invocation of animism is made with explicit reference to premodern or Eastern modes of thinking, orientalistically fetishizing particular varieties of thought that are “other” from the West. As I’ve written in collaboration with the art historian Katherine Guinness, The animistic is positioned as closer to nature, as removed from the ethical problems of Western individualism, and is discussed almost entirely through reference to indigeneity or Eastern spirituality. In short, we ask, does embracing the agency of objects and images rely on an ontotheological assumption that requires animistic spirituality? And, if so, is it possible to do this without perpetuating an implicitly orientalist relationship towards Eastern or indigenous spiritualistic “tradition”? (2018, 81)

Or, there’s a difference between theories that claim something is animated by particular energies and forces, and others that end up deferring to a kind of animated “soul” that exists within things. This likewise drifts into beliefs in panpsychism, which is a belief that attributes a mind to all matter (cf. Shaviro 2014), and also relates to how contemporary claims about affect have a strong similarity with nineteenth-century spiritualism, and particularly spiritualism’s emphasis on a “flowing force” that bridges different entities (Blackman 2012, 68). Regardless, the tendency to refer to animism is a way

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in which metaphysical “substances” and agencies creep back into materialist theories of objects and affects.

Alterity and totality According to Brian Massumi, affect directs us to how the “concepts of nature and culture need serious reworking, in a way that expresses the irreducible alterity of the nonhuman in and through its active connection to the human and vice versa” (2002, 39). This is a particularly difficult claim to enact in theory, though it’s one that I agree with. But claims about affect too often forget the aspect of alterity that Massumi highlights, instead focusing on the intertwining and interrelations of all things (see Bollmer 2016b). We can see this at work in one of the few concrete examples that Bennett gives about the political implications of her vital materialism, a “politics” that emerges when one highlights the agentic interconnection of everything. Of a 2003 blackout in the Northeastern United States and Canada, Bennett claims, “The electrical grid, by blacking out, lit up quote a lot: the shabby condition of the publicutilities infrastructure, the law-abidingness of New York City residents living in the dark, the disproportionate and accelerating consumption of energy by North Americans, and the element of unpredictability marking assemblages composed of intersecting and resonating elements” (2010, 36). The blackout affected around ten million people in Ontario and forty-five million in eight American states, including New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, leaving many without power for several days or even over a week. It was primarily caused by a software bug in the control room of Ohio company FirstEnergy, which failed to properly distribute energy across its many power lines, leading to an overload. The software bug (which was part of General Electric’s XA/21 energy management system) delayed an alarm from being triggered by over an hour. Those working for FirstEnergy were thus unaware of what was happening in the power grid they maintained, and—by the time they became aware—their computers were failing, their power lines overloading all across North America. For Bennett, the blackout reveals that a range of events happen at the intersection of human and nonhuman agencies. I think we can agree. The blackout was caused by the infrastructure of the power grid, the software of FirstEnergy’s computers, and the (in)ability of FirstEnergy’s workers to see (and do) certain things about the problem. The everyday effects of the blackout—the lives of the many individuals living without power, their appliances and lights nonfunctional—only happened because of the vast range of interconnections between humans, technologies, and objects elsewhere. But Bennett makes an odd jump from this argument:



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Must a distributive, composite notion of agency thereby abandon the attempt to hold individuals responsible for their actions or hold officials accountable to the public? The directors of the FirstEnergy corporation were all too eager to reach this conclusion in the task force report: no one really is to blame. Though it is unlikely that the energy traders shared my vital materialism, I, too, find it hard to assign the strongest or most punitive version of moral responsibility to them. Autonomy and strong responsibility seem to me to be empirically false, and thus their invocation seems tinged with injustice. In emphasizing the ensemble nature of action and the interconnections between persons and things, a theory of vibrant matter presents individuals as simply incapable of bearing full responsibility for their effects. (2010, 37)

While Bennett hedges her claim (she merely denies that individuals must bear full responsibility for their actions) the blackout did have a particular cause—a software bug—though its effects far exceeded the particular GE XA/21 that caused the blackout because of this bug. This problem has a clear solution. FirstEnergy should not rely so heavily on automated technological systems; they should be sure that their software is checked and tested more rigorously, and their power grid should be strengthened to prevent overloading even without these particular problems. Energy companies should be made to take steps to ensure this happens, enforced by regulatory governmental agencies. But this is not the “solution” Bennett gives. While Bennett does not say that this means there is literally nothing to do, she does end up arguing that “the ethical responsibility of an individual human now resides in one’s response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating: Do I attempt to extricate myself from assemblages whose trajectory is likely to do harm? Do I enter into the proximity of assemblages whose conglomerate effectivity tends toward the enactment of nobler ends?” (37–38). Following this directive would do little, if anything, to correct for the particular causes of the blackout. Switching to a different energy provider would probably do nothing—many of those affected by the blackout were not FirstEnergy customers—and the particular problems would be corrected by additional regulatory oversight and testing—things that, again, most customers wouldn’t be able to directly influence on their own. While one could remove themselves from the energy grid, living without power in a cabin on a lake, the vast majority of individuals do not have the privilege or ability to extricate themselves from the bonds of their daily lives that Bennett seems to unintentionally advocate for in her discussion of this case. Or, Bennett makes “politics” about little more than individual choice and decision (see Lemke 2018),

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even though “interconnection” seems to make individual action irrelevant (Bollmer 2016b). So, there are problems with this ethical claim, but we should also learn a few things from it. Let’s begin by elaborating in more depth the problems by looking at other examples. On the one hand, the kind of interconnection that Bennett claims to exist is totalizing, founded on the claim that we exist as part of “one matter-energy” (2010, 122). Even were we to acknowledge that, within this one matter-energy, we could differentiate clearly between one network or assemblage rather than another, the ability that one could merely extricate themselves from a particular assemblage is questionable— again, people who were not FirstEnergy consumers were affected by the blackout. Many of the technological and economic networks you participate in may be things completely unknown to you. The vast majority of savings and retirement plans in Western countries, for instance, are linked with the stock market, in ways that permit one a very low choice in terms what companies are being invested rather than another. To merely withdraw one’s participation in these financial networks—while possible—is extraordinarily difficult for the vast majority of people. To use another example, because of economic integration, most entertainment companies have some investment in the military and war, and often willingly collaborate with the military in numerous ways, which theorist James Der Darian (2009) terms the “military-industrial-entertainment-media network.” If one wanted to be sure to avoid supporting war and the military, one probably would also have to cease to consuming media and accessing the internet, as—merely by paying Spectrum or Comcast to access the internet—you’re probably giving money to a corporation that profits off war. These examples are economic, and the solution is rarely, if ever, to remove oneself from these networks, but—collaboratively, collectively—to put pressure on governments and institutions to change policies or laws. A number of Australian universities have disinvested from energy companies that burn fossil fuels because of pressure from students and employees, for instance. This speaks not only to a kind of intertwining but also to how there are multiple, differential sets of relations that have limits, and not that there’s “one matter-energy” of total connection. But the choice here is not individual. It has to be made through collective negotiation of relations, through organizing, through popular politics that remake relations rather than withdraw from them. The idea of individualized “exit,” while popular in a range of political theories today, only works if one has the privilege or ability to simply break free of the bonds that sustain daily life, a privilege that invests in some bodies more than others (see Sharma 2017).



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Bennett’s claims about energetic intertwining can be helpful, as long as we avoid a sense of a “one” in which all are equally part, and avoid making politics about individual choice. Relations are not equally distributed, and while we may all exist within one world, that world is divided up and differentiated from within. We have to pay as much attention to difference and alterity— and how differences materialize and are maintained—to the relations and connections that exist between people and things. Networks stop, energies dissipate. Who one is “with” is as important as who one is “against.”

Affect and the materiality of the brain One of the biggest problems with affect theory, however, comes from how its materiality is defined. If affect is material, and it exists prior to thought and consciousness, then it should exist in the very physicality of the body. This returns us to the concerns of Chapter 4. Affect has to be physiological—or at least seems as if it should be physiological. Lisa Blackman has summarized this problem with the following: because affect disavows the spiritual, psychic, or metaphysical, it plunders from the “hard” edges of psychological and biological theorizing in order to offer up suggestions for the possible mechanisms that will explain the transmission of affect. . . . These attempts . . . retreat to the singular neurophysiological body in order to explain the transmission of affect between people. Thus, an understanding of the psychological complexity that would make the transmission of affect intelligible is reduced to the brain and the central nervous system. (2012, 77–78)

Affect theorists have a tendency to draw on various neuropsychological or psychological studies, many of which have deep flaws or are selectively chosen because of similarities with “material,” biological explanations and the claims of Spinoza and James (see Leys 2017; Papoulias and Callard 2010). Affect theory too often “relies on invoking the nervous system, endocrine system, or a particular neuropsychological concept, such as the mirror neuron, in order to animate the body’s lively processuality” (Blackman 2012, 134)—a problem further compounded by the fact that, say, mirror neurons—a neurological mechanism found in macaque monkeys that provides a physiological explanation for the mirroring of facial expressions, which many psychologists believe is central for the neurobiology of empathy—have not been proven to exist in humans. In spite of the stated goals to identify the materiality of relation between bodies, undermining the individuality of

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subjectivity, these turns toward the brain end up reaffirming the singularity of the individual as defined by the materiality of the brain. Additionally, the neurobiology of affect and emotion is used to define particular brains and bodies as disordered, as unable to “feel” properly because they, supposedly, lack the neurological mechanism that allows a brain to experience felt relation. Best seen in the diagnosis of autism, psychopathy, and borderline personality disorder, all of which are defined in contemporary neuropsychology by a malfunction of the brain’s “empathy circuit,” specific bodies are defined as lacking a particular physiological capacity by the same body of research that affect theory uses to define affect as a biological—even ontological—capacity of the human body (see Bollmer 2014). The result is a weird, circular set of contradictions. Neuroscience and neuropsychology identify a particular set of biological mechanisms to describe the physiological processes of relation, which are taken up by affect theorists to define the material existence of affect as an ontological— and even political—force that means “relation” is located within the body. However, neuroscience and neuropsychology also use these same biological mechanisms to identify specific bodies to be pathologized or corrected, as “abnormal” because of their lack of particular brain functions. Some neuropsychologists even argue that these bodies may be best thought of as “evil” because they lack the physiological ability to experience “empathy” (see Baron-Cohen 2011). But affect theory, because it has taken these physiological mechanisms to explain the materiality of human relation, cannot acknowledge the historical construction of particular disorders; it relies on accepting the same physiological explanation for affect and relation that is used to identify psychopathy, autism, and borderline personality disorder as particular neurological problems.

Relations and oppositions So, we have two perspectives on objects that seem completely incompatible. One, associated with SR and OOO, relies on, as Marie-Luise Angerer has put it, “an impenetrable wall between subject and object” (2017, 21). The other, vital materialism, stresses the “life” of both animate and inanimate matter, their relations, agencies, and intertwining, brought together by a physical “affect” that moves beyond and between subject and object. If one emphasizes isolation and separation, the other holistic interconnection. We should embrace these key arguments of both of these bodies of thought. We should say that objects are independent from humans, emphasizing their alterity and their Otherness. But these objects do not exceed their materiality;



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they do not possess some “essence” that exists outside of their material relations. Instead, we are in relation with these objects, acting with them, and the boundaries between self and other are regularly transgressed or remade. This does not lead to a singular “oneness” or holism, and it doesn’t need to defer to “affect” as something that uneasily moves between the physical and metaphysical. It leads to a multiplicity of oppositional assemblages that exist because the lines between them are maintained. The perspective I’m offering here bears a great deal of similarity to Katherine Behar’s reimagining of OOO as “OOF” (2016), and it returns us to Sara Ahmed’s concerns with which we began. Behar wants to embrace OOO’s emphasis on withdrawn objects but revises OOO in numerous ways that also correct for the tendency of vital materialism to lead outward into infinity. It begins by assuming all beings as objects—it assumes that humans are “objectified” from the outset, and thus argues, like Bennett, that “our common status as matter makes way for continuity between all objects, whether human or nonhuman, organic or inorganic, animate or inanimate” (9). But, in doing this, OOF refuses the claims of OOO to “describe” ontology, and it refuses the seeming futility that emerges from the lack of access subjects have to objects: OOF emphasizes ontology as a political arrangement, realism as an arena for self-possession and relation, and objecthood as a situational orientation, so as to apprehend and alter objects’ intersectional prospects for self-determination, solidarity, and resistance. The internal resistant quality of objects may deserve our closest attention. (24)

Or, Behar argues that we have to consider an object as independent and withdrawn, but particular objects always engage with other objects in relation. OOF embraces forms of practice—not speculation—to engage with objects in new ways, inventing new ways of materially existing with objects that encounter each other, because of (not in spite of) their withdrawn separation. The purpose here is to transform the possibilities of orientation, following Ahmed. How can we be oriented toward new, different, or previously unseen objects? How can we allow new relations and new practices to materialize? Ahmed also remakes some of these concerns by noting how affect is not just a relation—it’s not just a force that bridges one and another. Rather, Ahmed suggests that affect surfaces as emotion not only between bodies but also that which orients bodies both together and in opposition: Emotions shape the very surfaces of bodies, which take shape through the repetition of actions over time, as well as through orientations

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towards and away from others. Indeed, attending to emotions might show us how all actions are reactions, in the sense that what we do is shaped by the contact we have with others. (2014, 4)

While affects circulate between bodies, some “stick” in particular ways, producing specific relations between subjects and objects that “materialize” in their repetition. Like vital materialism, Ahmed argues that they are in neither a subject nor in an object, but about how a particular orientation materializes. “Emotions are relational: they involve (re)actions or relations of ‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’ in relation to such objects” (8). Affect allows a particular relation to be sensible and felt, not simply a neutral relation, but a relation toward a particular object, or away from a different object. Affect orients, it arranges. Ahmed’s interest in objects and affects comes from her interest in understanding the particular emotional investments that direct racism, and how particular bodies become “strangers,” defined not as “anyone we do not recognise,” but “as bodies out of place”: To recognise somebody as a stranger is an affective judgment: a stranger is the one who seems suspicious; the one who lurks. I became interested in how some bodies are “in an instant” judged as suspicious, or as dangerous, as objects to be feared, a judgement that can have lethal consequences. There can be nothing more dangerous to a body than the social agreement that that is dangerous. (211)

What Ahmed is talking about is how race—and particularly blackness— can be seen as being “out of place,” and being “out of place” can be used to legitimate killing someone, as seen in the numerous cases in the United States of police violence against African Americans. And here we can see the danger of a perspective that only allows for withdrawn objects, which Ahmed makes by way of a comparison to the Marxist notion of commodity fetishism: Feelings come to reside in objects, magically, as if they are qualities of or in things, only by cutting those objects off from a wider economy of labour and production. It is then as if fear originates with the arrival of others whose bodies become containers of our fear. Given that containers spill, fear becomes the management of crisis. (227)

For Ahmed, particular feelings do not originate from “inside” an object. They come from how particular bodies come into contact and are oriented toward



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each other. Thinking of certain qualities as being “within” an object denies an entire contextual set of relations that invests or defines particular qualities as linked with specific emotional relations. Instead, these relations are repeated, performed, through which particular relations materialize. This is also where we can avoid some of the more metaphysical (or neurological) assumptions about affect. We do not need to have a specific biological concept to describe the materiality of relation. Ahmed, unlike Massumi, often privileges emotion rather than affect. She does not suggest that affect is biological, but that affect theory should be linked with a longer history of feminist theory on emotion. By emphasizing orientation, she shows us how emotion is something performed and performative. We don’t need a substance called affect because we can acknowledge that acts are material. The boundaries between self and other are not idealist representations but are linked with the material existence of bodies and how they act toward each other.

Conclusion Thus, we conclude this chapter by returning to the concerns with which this book began. This chapter examined various theories of objects, in their historical distinction from “things” and in emerging theories of SR and OOO. It examined claims of vital materialism, especially the stress on lively relations. But the oppositional emphases of OOO and vital materialism are incomplete, and thus we worked to bring them together, accepting both OOO’s emphasis on withdrawn objects and the active relationality of vital materialism, uniting these concerns with the arguments of OOF and the claims of Sara Ahmed. Objects are independent, they are different, and they are separate. But this is not just about the ontological qualities of objects. Rather, objects exist in relation, not just relations of “being with” but relations of opposition, relations that are material and real in their performative enaction. Once again, we return to our arguments about performative materialism, stressing action, agency, and, importantly, opposition and conflict. In doing this, we move from the descriptions of ontology to political agencies and struggles, and how materiality should be part of any theory of media, technology, and politics today.

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Conclusion: Ten Theses on the Materiality of Media

We’ve come to the end of this brief overview of media materialism. To conclude, I offer this summary of some key points I’ve made throughout these pages, organized as ten theses on the materiality of media. This book is just an introduction, and these theses are neither the final word on media’s materiality nor the only way of defining the materiality of media—nor do they completely encapsulate all that’s been argued in this book. Rather, they are an attempt to begin something that will inevitably become something else in practice, in relation.

1 Media are performative. Media and technology act, and it is through their material agencies that differential relations are produced and maintained. In acting, media permit some relations and bodies to materialize, while they also prevent others from so doing.

2 Representations cannot be thought of as ephemeral or immaterial; they always exist within a medium and act to produce material effects. Representations are material because of their performativity, how they allow particular bodies to materialize, and how they place bodies in opposition.

3 Media perform through their ability to inscribe, to document, and to write. They permit something to be written down and stored over time. This shapes memory and sociality and locates particular bodies through what can be seen, said, and recorded about them.

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4 Techniques inscribe into the body particular cultural forms and practices that endure over time, providing one way of materially manifesting cultural difference.

5 Media change space and time. They are biased either toward duration in time or extension over space. These biases are political, in that they produce specific relations of domination and control that differentiate centers and margins.

6 There is no one “space” or “time,” but multiple, differential spaces and times that are negotiated and maintained through media.

7 Media transform cognition and thought. This is either a direct transformation, extending the body beyond the limits of the skin into body-brain-world assemblages, or an indirect one, through technological metaphors that remake how a body is understood.

8 Media are vital objects, possessive of their own agencies and abilities. These objects are withdrawn, separate from human experience, unable to be fully known. But they are inherently in relation, acting and intra-acting with humans and their bodies. Materiality is political, once again, by fostering and materializing particular orientations that exist between subject and object, between object and object.



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9 Materiality is about relation, about intra-action, about orientation. Through media we come into contact and become something else. There are no guarantees to this becoming, however.

10 Materiality means we all exist together, in one world, a world that is parceled out into differences and oppositions that exist because we perform them. Our world exists because of what matter performs, and we, too, are material. If we want to create a better world, we have to begin with what matters.

176

Acknowledgments I began writing this book while I was teaching in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University in New Zealand. It was substantially rewritten and revised while I taught in the Digital Cultures program at the University of Sydney, and was completed while I taught in the Communication Department and the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media PhD program at North Carolina State University. Needless to say, it’s the product of a wide range of discussions and interactions with colleagues and students from different contexts, and it’s changed significantly over the five or six years I’ve been working on it, especially given the various political and theoretical developments that have happened in media studies during this time. Research for this book was supported by a research incubator grant from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney in 2013, which allowed me to hire Jorge Valdovinos as a research assistant. Jorge’s work was invaluable for the completion of this book. I’d also like to thank Annamarie Jagose, who was the head of the School of Letters, Arts, and Media of the University of Sydney at that time and whose support was essential for my receiving of this grant. I’d like to thank my colleagues, friends, and students from Wellington, Sydney, Raleigh, and beyond, conversations and discussions with whom directly and indirectly contributed to the crafting of this book. This includes, among others, Ian Goodwin, Radha O’Meara, Emma Willis, Ingrid Horrocks, Tom Apperley, Kyle Moore, César Albarrán-Torres, Gerard Goggin, Chris Chesher, Kathy Cleland, Chris Rodley, Benjamin Ridgeway, Dina AbdelMageed, Yuanbo Qiu, Matthew Webb, Jack Wilson, Steve Wiley, Nick Taylor, Ken Zagacki, Adriana de Souza e Silva, Mally Dietrich, JeongHyun Lee, Larissa Hjorth, Robbie Fordyce, Tim Neale, Yiğit Soncul, and Jussi Parikka, along with the many students in classes on theories of media and technology I’ve taught over the past years not listed here, and my many colleagues in media and cultural studies who have, over the past decade or so, worked to demonstrate how materiality should be central to any approach to media and culture. Many of the themes addressed in this book emerged from the approach to media I initially learned from Sarah Sharma, Mark Hansen, Ken Hillis, Chris Lundberg, and Larry Grossberg. I’d also like to thank Katie Gallof and Erin Duffy, along with everyone else at Bloomsbury who have worked to move this from a manuscript to a published book.

178 Acknowledgments Finally, I particularly want to thank Katherine Guinness. As I neared the completion of this book, I realized that much of what I had written was, in many ways, a reinterpretation of McLuhan that had a decidedly feminist orientation. Katherine’s influence permeates these pages, as the engagement with themes and questions derived from feminist theory (along with those examples that derive from art history) comes from our discussions and collaborations. This book—as is the case with everything I write—wouldn’t be what it is without her.

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Index Note: n after a page number refers to a footnote on that page. Aarseth, Espen  22 accelerationism  102, 105–7 active audiences  29–30 Adorno, Theodor  101–2 aether  162 affect  19, 54, 134, 139, 146, 160–3, 167–70 Ahmed, Sara  144–6, 169–71 alterity  147, 159, 164, 167–8 Althusser, Louis  27 anarchism  34, 38 Anderson, Benedict  88–9, 97 Angerer, Marie-Luise  168 animism  162–3 anthropology  94–5 anthropomorphism  162 archaeology  79–81 archive  62, 64–6, 71, 109–10 Aristotle  157–8 atheism, new  125 attention  107, 117, 137, 144–5 Augé, Marc  113 Austin, J. L.  15, 45–6 authorship  96–7 Barad, Karen  25, 41 n.4, 49–50, 58, 61, 63, 66, 70, 112 Barber, Elizabeth Wayland  79–82, 90 Baudrillard, Jean  73, 154 Behar, Katherine  146, 169 Bell, Alexander Graham  60 Benjamin, Walter  53–4 Bennett, Jane  159–67 Bergson, Henri  160 Berkeley, George  41, 44 Berliner, Emile  60 Bevan, Alex  21 n.1

bias of communication  86, 88 biopolitical economy of time  114 biopower  72–3 Black Lives Matter  35 Blackman, Lisa  117, 161, 167 blackouts, electrical  164–6 body  9, 11, 18, 46–9, 144, 160–2, 169, 174, see also embodiment brain and  117–10, 123–9, 131, 155, 167–8 extensions of  92, 95, 128, 132, 143–5 fragmentation of  148–9 legible body  67 location in discourse  62 as medium  78, 118 representation of  21–2 techniques of  74 traces of  54, 130 transcendence of  42–3, 122–3, 127 visualization of  136–7 Boltanski, Luc  120 Bolter, Jay David  4 brain  118–20, 123, 125–6, 133–4, 167–8 bread  75–6 Breaking Bad  29 Brennan, Teresa  161 Brown, Bill  148 Butler, Judith  25, 46–7, 50 camera obscura  136–7 capitalism  31, 73, 83, 87, 100–7, 113–14 neoliberal  120, 134, 136, 149 print  89 Cardew, Cornelius  58–9, 61

Index Carey, James  85, 90, 136 cartesian dualism, see Descartes, René Catholic Church  89–90 cellular phones, see mobile phones census  67 Chalmers, David  125 Chiapello, Eve  120 Chun, Wendy  110 Clark, Andy  125–6 clocks  100–1, 114, 142 Clough, Patricia Ticineto  132 cognitive assemblages  132–3 cognitive decision  133–4 commodity fetishism  149, 170 communication  7–9, 12, 85–9, 96–7 complexity science  155–6 consciousness  41–2, 107, 118, 123–4, 132 constructivism  24, 39, 40, 43–6 correlationism  44, 145, 151–3 Crary, Jonathan  136, 137 critique  26, 33 Croft, Lara (fictional character)  21–39, 48 cultural industry  101 cultural techniques  8–9, 18, 58, 74–6, 174 cyberspace  24, 39 data  57 Deleuze, Gilles  105–6 Dennett, Daniel  124–5, 155 Der Derian, James  166 Derrida, Jacques  70 Descartes, René  41–2, 117, 122–4 difference, cultural  58, 74, 76–7, 174 digital media  3, 129–30 as computational  83, 109 fears of  11 information and  51, 60, 67, 72 interactivity of  27 materiality of  40, 44

193

spatial and temporal biases of  90–1 temporality of  99, 108–11 Dillon, Brian  153 discourse  62–5 documentality  68–73 drag  46 dreams  118 Drucker, Johanna  15 Dutch East India Company  156–9 ecology  67, 84, 100 media  16–17, 66 Edison, Thomas  60 élan vital  160 embodiment  6–7, 13, 92, 117–18, 137 cognition and  131 technological extensions and  128–9 emoji  9 empathy  167–8 encoding/decoding model of communication  28–9 enlightenment  93–4, 151 epiphylogenesis  14 epoché, see phenomenological reduction Ernst, Wolfgang  65, 109–10 essence, phenomenological  142, 147 ether, see aether Fabian, Johannes  94 Facebook  85–6 false consciousness  28, 29, 33 feed-forward  109 feminism  25–8, 30–1, 49, 131, 148–9, see also ObjectOriented Feminism Ferraris, Maurizio  58, 61, 68–74, 152 filing cabinets  66–8 FirstEnergy  164–6 Flusser, Vilem  57

194 Index forms (paperwork)  67–8 Foucault, Michel  58, 61–5, 72–4, 110, 136 fourfold causality  157 Gamergate  37 gender  46–8, 53–5, 66–7, 80–2, 151 gesture  9, 129 Giedion, Sigfried  74–5 global village  18, 86–7, 92, 98, 102, 117, 131 Goffman, Erving  98–9 governmentality  72–3 Gramsci, Antonio  29, 34–5 Grand Theft Auto video game series  27, 29 graphic score (musical notation)  58, 61 Grosz, Elizabeth  44 Grusin, Richard  4 Guattari, Félix  105–6 Guinness, Katherine  163 Gulf War  154 habitus  74–5, 77 Hall, Stuart  28, 32, 35 Hansen, Mark N. B.  107–9, 117, 131 Haraway, Donna  163 hard drives  40 hard problem of consciousness  125 Hardt, Michael  38 Harman, Graham  154–9 Harvey, David  102, 104, 113 Havelock, Eric  95–6, 130 Hayles, N. Katherine  42, 132–3 Hegel, G. W. F.  41 hegemony  29–35 Heidegger, Martin  142–8, 154–7 Heraclitus  157–8 historical a priori  64–5 history  53–6, 62, 65, 81, 86 Holloway, John  38 Holmes, Sherlock (fictional character)  156

Homer  96 Horkheimer, Max  101 Howe, Susan  52–4, 65 Husserl, Edmund  41, 141–6, 152 Hutchinson, Anne  53 hyperobject  90 hypodermic needle model of communication, see transmission model of communication idealism  24, 39, 41–6, 171 identity  24, 27–8, 43 ideology  26–30, 33, 41 Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs)  27 Iliad  96 imperialism  8, 84–5, 92, 157 indigeneity  8, 163 industrialization  74–5, 100–1, 136 infrastructure  2, 39–40, 69, 79, 84, 113, 164 Innis, Harold  57, 83–92, 99, 104, 109, 113–15, 129, 136 inscription  8, 18, 50, 57–60, 64–5, 68–73, 77–9, 173 intentionality  42, 144 interconnection  164–6 interpellation  27 James, William  123–5, 134, 161, 167 Joyce, James  93 Kahn, Douglas  60 Kardashian, Kim  150 Kirschenbaum, Matthew  40 Kitchin, Rob  57 n.1 Kittler, Friedrich  52, 58–9, 61, 65, 102, 109 Krajewski, Markus  56, 81 Krauss, Chris  54–5 labor  80, 84, 91, 100–1, 121, 145 immaterial  149 Lacan, Jacques  148

Index Land, Nick  106–7 language  7–10, 12–13, 41–4, 64, 153–5 L. A. Noire  130 Latour, Bruno  152–3 Lewis, Wyndham  93 linguistic relativism  8 n.1 literacy  95–9, 128 literature  51, 55, 93–6 Luther, Martin  89 Malabou, Catherine  120, 133–6 Mandel, Ernest  100 margins  53–4, 65, 80–4, 87 Marx, Karl  18, 30, 33, 84–6, 100, 103–6, 149 Marxist materialism, see materialism, Marxist Mason, Paul  107 Massey, Doreen  111–14 Massumi, Brian  14, 161, 164, 171 materialism Marxist  6 medical  123–4 neurocognitive  6, 18, 119, 135, 138–9, 167–8, 174 new  6 performative  6, 15–18, 25, 45–9, 56–7, 61, 66, 79, 173–5 spatiotemporal  6, 18, 78–9, 83, 115, 174 vital  6, 19, 139, 146–7, 159, 164, 168–9, 174 Mauss, Marcel  74 McLuhan, Marshall  3–6, 14, 18, 86–7, 91–8, 102–3, 111, 115–19, 128–35, 138, 143 The Medium is the Massage (LP)  14 meaning  2, 6, 8, 10–12, 21, 51–2, 57 measurement  101 medium theory  3–5, 14, 23 Meillassoux, Quentin  44, 151–3 memex (Vannevar Bush)  67

195

memory  56, 65, 96 mercury  160 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  118, 123 metaphysics  6, 122–4, 141, 162–4, 171 Meyrowitz, Joshua  3, 98–9 Michaels, Walter Benn  52–3, 55 mind  41–2, see also philosophy of mind mirror neuron  167 misogyny  32, 37, 48, 151 mobile phones  68–9 modernism  93 modernity  93 Monet, Claude  83 money  70, 88–9 monopolies of knowledge  89, 111, 129 Montfort, Nick  3 Morton, Timothy  90, 163 motion  54, 77, 101, 118, 129–30 motion capture technology  129–30 multitude, the  38 Mumford, Lewis  100 musical notation  58–9 nationalism  88, 97 Negri, Antonio  38 neuroaesthetics  125 neurocognitive materialism, see materialism, neurocognitive neuromarketing  126 new materialism, see materialism, new Nietzsche, Friedrich  106, 152 Object-Oriented Feminism (OOF)  146, 169 Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO)  19, 146–7, 150–1, 154–60, 168 objects  68–9, 141–6, 150–1, 154, 157–60, 170–1 difference from things  147–8 fictional  156

196 Index objectification  148–50, 169 objet petit a  148 subject and  153, 174 Occupy Wall Street  34, 38–9 Oldenberg, Claes  55 Ong, Walter  95–7, 128 orality  93, 95–9, 128–9 organic intellectuals  34 orientalism  94, 163 orientation  144, 169–70, 174–5 painting  9, 76, 130 paint tubes and  82–3 panpsychism  163 paper  66–7, 84–8 para-selves, see subjectivity, distributed perception  24, 40–1, 95, 107–8, 128, 142, 144–5 performance  99 performative materialism, see materialism, performative performativity  15, 45–9, 82, 171–5 Peters, John Durham  100 Phaedrus  10–11, 96 phenomenological reduction  142 philosophy of mind  18–19, 119, 121, 153–4 phonautograph  59–60 photography  137 Pias, Claus  109 pig’s bladders  82 plasticity  120, 134–5 poetry  52, 55, 96 political economy  83–8 politics  33–6, 165, 174 Pollock, Jackson  130 posthumanism  42, 127 pottery  80–1, 86 power  62–3, 72–3 Power, Nina  149–50 power-geometry  113

presence  10–13, 143–7 primitivism  93–7 print  51–4, 61, 89–92, 95–8 Project Xanadu (Ted Nelson)  67 psychoanalysis  134, 148 public  32–3 quantum physics  41 race  35, 67, 114, 145, 170 racism  92–5, 145, 151, 170 Radway, Janice  30–1 Rand, John G.  82 realism  24, 39, 41–4, 68 anti-realism and  154 speculative  150–4, 159, 168 relation  17, 84, 112, 117, 146–7, 160, 168–70 remediation  4 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste  83 representation  2, 21–6, 32–8, 41, 44–5, 48–9 rhythm  100–2 ritual  85, 96 Robertson, Craig  66–7 romance novels  30–1 Rotman, Brian  129–31 Said, Edward  94 Sampson, Tony  127 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis  8 n.1 Sarkeesian, Anita  37, 48 score, musical  58–61 Scott de Martinville, ÉdouardLéon  59–60 screen essentialism  3 Searle, John  126–7 semiotics  2, 43 Serial (true crime podcast)  69 servants  56, 81 Sharma, Sarah  91, 113–14 Shepard, Thomas  52–6 Ship of Theseus  157 Siegert, Bernhard  9, 61, 76

Index Socrates  10–11, 96 solipsism  41–2 Sopranos, The  29 sound  58–61 sovereignty  72 space-time compression  102–5, 113 spatiotemporal materialism, see materialism, spatiotemporal speculative realism, see realism, speculative speech, see orality Spinoza, Baruch  161, 167 spiritualism  163 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty  81 Srnicek, Nick  106–7, 151 staples (agricultural)  83, 92 state (governmental)  66–7 Stewart, Kathleen  161 Stiegler, Bernard  14, 102 Stone, Allucquère Rosanne  67 storage media  51, 65 subalterns  56, 81 subjectivity  27–8, 33, 136–7, 141, 167–8 distributed  130 synchronization  90, 98–103, 109–12 Taylor, Frederick Winslow  101 technics  14 technique, see cultural techniques technology  14–15, 101 acceleration through  103–12 agency of  12, 87, 91, 103, 118, 151 consciousness and  128–35 disruption of  85–7 essence of  142–3 history of  103, 137 language as  8, 10 materiality of  39–45 metaphorical use of  119–20, 135–8

197

technological determinism  3–6 technological unconscious  132–3 television  98–9, 102 temporal architectures  113–14 textiles  80–2, 86 texts  1–2, 51–2 things  147–8, 150–1, 157 das Ding  148 thing-power  160 Thompson, E. P.  100 Thrift, Nigel  132 Tielhard de Chardin, Pierre  87 time-axis manipulation  61, 102 time-critical media  109 Tomb Raider, see Croft, Lara trade  84–5 transduction  60–1 transgender identity  33 transhumanism, see posthumanism transmission model of communication  28 Treatise, see Cardew, Cornelius “Tropes vs. Women,” see Sarkeesian, Anita United States Department of Defense  40 value  100 Van Gogh, Vincent  130 Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, see Dutch East India Company video games  21, 25–8, 32, 109 Virilio, Paul  102–4, 107 virtual reality  128 Vismann, Cornelia  66, 71 n.3 vital materialism, see materialism, vital Viverios de Castro, Eduardo  163 Vodafone  69 waste  90, 160 Watson, Alexander John  87

198 Index Wegenstein, Bernadette  131 Wegner, Daniel  124 Wilke, Hannah  55 Williams, Alex  106, 107 withdrawal of essence  143 of objects  146, 154–6, 169 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  8 n.1, 124

writing  7–10, 54–8, 64–5, 69, 71, 77, 95–7, 173 alphabet and  129–30 consciousness and  128–9 gesturo-haptic  129–30 xenophobia  151 Yap (Micronesian island)  88