Another conference - I need help
Hi, I’m off to a conference next month and basically have 24hrs to write a paper. This is the abstract. I’d be grateful for comments or suggestions.
ECCR Panel ‘New Media Technologies’
The first European Communication Conference
University of Amsterdam, November 2005
Medium-Force: Exploring the efficacy of combining McLuhan and Latour in Theorizing Digital Connectivity
Joost van Loon
Professor of Media Analysis,
Institute for Cultural Analysis
Nottingham Trent University
Tel: +44 115 848 3423
Email: Joost.van-loon AT ntu.ac.u
Abstract
Nearly five decades have past since McLuhan’s famous ‘coup d’état’ of communication studies entitled ‘Goodbye to the Gutenberg Galaxy’. In this work, he boldly predicted a revolution in the social and cultural organization of the modern world as a largely unintended side-effect of innovations in electronic media. First hailed as a visionary but later vilified as a fraud, McLuhan’s writings still have a strong resonance today, even if only to function as the token straw puppet of technological determinism.
Yet, as Levinson (1997) points out, it seems as if the true value of McLuhan’s prophecies are now beginning to manifest themselves, generating an unsettling unease among media scholars whose currently dominant modes of thought have by and large excluded the intimations of the technological dimension of media-work, in favour of more instrumental ontologies focusing on for example, meaning, taste, interests, intentions, desires and power, which all share an undeclared preference for anthropocentric subjectivism. It is perhaps not surprising that what has made this unsettlement possible is, to a large extent, a feature of technological innovation, namely the emergence of digitalization.
In this paper, I explore the way in which a proper revaluation of medium theory can help us to develop a more fundamental ontology of digitalization, by enabling us to develop a phenomenological encounter with the technological realm. More specifically, it argues that the depth of McLuhan’s approach has perhaps only now become visible because of fundamental changes in communication media themselves. However, I also argue that it is because of developments in other fields than media studies, more specifically science and technology studies and particularly Actor Network Theory that we now have been given better conceptual tools to come to terms with McLuhan’s explorative and imaginative pallet.
In order to illustrate this, I will explore the advantage of combining Medium Theory and Actor Theory in an analysis of region al radio and television news production. More specifically, the differences between radio and television journalism hinge on important distinctions between the specific embedding of these media in socio-technical networks, which themselves reflect the different logical properties of the media in question. What this analysis reveals is that what is often casually referred to as ‘connectivity’ deserves a much closer and more critical look. What exactly is the nature and matter of this connecting? One area we must look into more carefully to provide answers is that of the body.
To conclude, this paper shows that thus far, media theory and even some of the scholars most loyal to McLuhan, have failed to excavate the rich philosophical underpinnings of McLuhanism, which bring us all the way back to Nietzsche. It is the Nietzschean connection that links Medium Theory to Actor Network Theory. It is with the help of two other Nietzschean thinkers, Deleuze and Guattari, that the very phenomenon of digitalization can now be linked to a conceptual framework that does not require the use of false dichotomies of subject versus object, technology versus society, structure versus agency and intentionality versus determination. Whereas this in itself is not new, its application to a phenomenological understanding of media is still relatively rare and therefore a worth while concern for attempts to theorize ‘the media’.
October 28th, 2005 at 7:28 am
You know Joost, I’m beginning to think that you’ve always secretly wanted a weblog [grin] Thanks for posting.
As for your paper, well you know I’m not big on McLuhan, and that I am big on Nietzsche, D&G and ANT, so you’ve got half of me wholeheartedly with the other half resisting. (A dangerous combination.) And if I understand correctly, you’re going to summon the body as technological medium?
I take Simondon’s “in-formation” or matter-taking-form as a critique of the kind of hylomorphism that permeates cybernetic and algorithmic models of media. So I think looking at technical-corporeal materialisations offers a fruitful point of departure, but I’m unclear what aspects of McLuhan and medium theory you plan to marshall [groan], and how they connect to Nietzsche.But I guess that’s the point of the paper, huh?
I guess I mean to say that I see strength in the desire to trouble the “undeclared preference for anthropocentric subjectivism” in media studies. I’m also quite interested in a “phenomenological encounter with the technological realm”. Does this maintain distinct regions? If so, to what effect?
Lingis argues that there are self-contained and mutually external levels which we sense and to which we must adapt, and Simondon focusses on the coming-together of different orders-of-being. If we tie all your regions together, is it in terms of radical contingency? How does this sense of time affect the body?
Anyway, I don’t know if this helps or hinders or even makes sense (I’m still on my first cup of coffee) but there you have it. Good luck with your paper - I’d love to read it when it’s done
October 28th, 2005 at 7:36 am
PS - I went in and stripped your post of all that ugly and extraneous code that EndNotes puts in. It’s often the case that when we copy and paste, we bring code garbage from the original programme that doesn’t translate well online and buggers up certain browsers. (Just think “Cleanliness is Next to Godliness” ;))
October 28th, 2005 at 7:40 am
PPS - I also removed the link to your email so that the robots that scour blogs every day don’t snag your address and increase the spam you get.
October 28th, 2005 at 9:16 pm
Joost:
I don’t know if you are already knew Matthew Fuller’s “Media Ecologies : Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture” (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/026206247X/103-7775828-5725443?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance), but I think it might useful to you…:
“In Media Ecologies, Matthew Fuller asks what happens when media systems interact. Complex objects such as media systems –understood here as processes, or elements in a composition as much as “things” — have become informational as much as physical, but without losing any of their fundamental materiality. Fuller looks at this multiplicitous materiality — how it can be sensed, made use of, and how it makes other possibilities tangible. He investigates the ways the different qualities in media systems can be said to mix and interrelate, and, as he writes, “to produce patterns, dangers, and potentials.”
Fuller draws on texts by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze as well as writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Marshall McLuhan, Donna Haraway, Friedrich Kittler, and others, to define and extend the idea of “media ecology.” Arguing that the only way to find out about what happens when media systems interact is to carry out such interactions, Fuller traces a series of media ecologies — “taking every path in a labyrinth simultaneously,” as he describes one chapter. He looks at contemporary London-based pirate radio and its interweaving of high- and low-tech media systems; the “medial will to power” illustrated by “the camera that ate itself”; how, as seen in a range of compelling interpretations of new media works, the capacities and behaviors of media objects are affected when they are in “abnormal” relationships with other objects; and each step in a sequence of Web pages, Cctv — world wide watch, that encourages viewers to report crimes seen via webcams.
Contributing to debates around standardization, cultural evolution, cybernetic culture, and surveillance, and inventing a politically challenging aesthetic that links them, Media Ecologies, with its various narrative speeds, scales, frames of references, and voices, does not offer the academically traditional unifying framework; rather, Fuller says, it proposes to capture “an explosion of activity and ideas to which it hopes to add an echo.”
October 29th, 2005 at 3:48 pm
dear Anne and Miguel, many thanks for your helpful suggstions. Yes, I just picked up the media ecologies book - what a coincidence
I certainly need to readup on Simondon as well
many thanks once again for your input.
I suspect that your being Canadian may have clouded your possible appreciation of McLuhan Anne; I’ll send you the paper when it’s done