Media studies – studies of relations, ecology, waste

March 11, 2011

The best way for media studies to really make sense is to think outside media – of where it expands, takes us, if we persistently follow its lead. So far, for a long time, it took us to think about humans, human relations, intentions, unconscious desires, economics as much as politics as power. Such paths need to take us to the other direction too; to things less intentional, but as important; to nature, bacteria, chemicals, forms of life outside our headspace but inside our gut; to milieus of living in which our conscious agency is only a minor part of what matters. To such time scales which take into account uses and practices, but as part of larger concert where some things last thousands, millions, billions of years.

Just like humanities more widely, media studies needs to be transversal – perhaps a concept we can tightly link to “transdisciplinary” as well.

To quote Félix Guattari:

“Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere and the social and individual Universes of reference, we must learn to think ‘transversally.’” (Three Ecologies, 2000:43).

The biggest reason why we should be worried about death and finitude is less in the existential manner, or even what makes our Dasein authentic, but in the way that milieus of life are dying. This relates to fears about “the sixth mass extension” of species, this time caused by humans. The only death we need is that of the subjectivity that cements the economic, political and aesthetic practices that kill nature. This is as much a question for the sciences and engineering, as it is for media theory, arts and humanities.

As Guattari argues, talking about ecosophy, we need to reinvent a multitude of relations where economic struggles, political struggles and struggles of representation, as well as aesthetics, are those that expand the horizon to nature. Hence, media – both in terms of the technologies that return to nature as heavy metals and toxins and as mediators of the mental ecologies in which our destructive tendencies are sustained – is surprisingly close to this problem too.

The affective regimes of media are affective in terms of the relations they sustain – relations between humans, but also to ecosystems, mechanospheres and more. Media studies is thus in a good position to really develop itself into a study of relations, of mediations in that much wider sense.

3. Political Problems: Perhaps the place where object-oriented philosophy has fared most poorly in its polemics with critical theory and post-structuralist thought has been the domain politics. In this connection, object-oriented philosophy has repeatedly demonstrated a sort of remarkable tone-deafness with respect to ethics and politics, ignoring what motivates critical theorists to approach essences, objects, and substances with suspicion and treating these issues as if they were abstract technical, philosophical problems. Here we must be careful, for we don’t wish to claim that ones politics ought to determine one’s ontology. But this is really the crux of the matter. While it is certainly true that politics doesn’t dictate ontology, it is also true that we can draw nefarious conclusions from ontology. And in this regard, ontologies can have very real social and political consequences.

If critical theorists have been extremely cautious with respect to concepts like “essence”, then this is because they recognize that these concepts are not merely descriptive but that they are normative as well. Insofar as the concept of essence is designed to capture that which is common to all instances of a kind, it also functions as a rule for determining what belongs and what doesn’t belong. In other words, essence decides who gets to speak and participate and who does not. Essences are rules for inclusion and exclusion in the social sphere. This entails that talk of essences has very real and concrete consequences in the political sphere. It is based on claims about the essence of the human that the Nazis authorized themselves to exclude and exterminate the Jews and other races. It was based on certain claims about the essence of the human that those that drafted the American Constitution entitled themselves to exclude slaves and women. It is based on certain essentialist claims about “normality” that people authorize themselves to exclude certain people from getting married or citizenship. And likewise, it is based on certain essentialist conceptions of masculinity and femininity, that individual men and women temporalize what is possible for them in the future.

In this regard, criticisms of the category of essence in the social sphere do not arise from any desire to be “fashionable” or out of a hostility to boring middle-agers and their retrograde ideas. Rather, these criticisms arise directly from the concrete role these ideas play in producing oppression and inequality. Yet again and again we find object-oriented philosophy running roughshod over these concerns, ignoring them altogether, and treating rejection of the category of essence as if it were borne of some irrational malice that does not arise from an honest place. Instead we get an abstract philosophical defense of essences completely divorced from the context of these problems that fails to recognize the way in which essences function self-reflexively in the social sphere as both descriptions and norms. In our view, if object-oriented philosophy is to be relevant to these discussions it is necessary that it respond to these concerns and demonstrate how it is capable of ably responding to these problems.

The issue is similar when it comes to discussions of objects and the debate surrounding objects and relations. Those critical of the category of objects are treated as if they have an irrational hostility towards objects based on the concept of objects somehow not being “sexy” compared to relations. We are then given an argument as to how relationism is incoherent so long as it doesn’t posit the existence of autonomous objects. Yet this rejoinder misses the whole point. From the standpoint of the critical theorist, the problem with the category of objects is not ontological in character, but lies in how this concept is politically deployed to obfuscate the nature of the social world in which we exist. What is at issue is not the ontological issue of objects versus relations, but the political issue of conceiving the social as a mere collection of individuals. When society is conceived of in this way our only recourse is to claim that individual people are solely responsible for their place in society as a result of the decisions that they have made and that those in more fortunate positions are entirely deserving of the privilege they enjoy as a result of how it arose from their labor and their labor alone. In other words, object-oriented philosophy unwittingly leads to an ideology in which our society is seen as just, and where any inequality and oppression that exists results purely from the action of individuals who are themselves responsible for where they are. As such, object-oriented philosophy prevents us from analyzing those dynamics that lead to these inequalities despite the well-intentioned efforts of individuals, making it more difficult to change these things.

Again, in our view, if object-oriented philosophy does not wish to embrace these conclusions it is obligated to show us how it can do at least as well as critical theory in explaining these inequalities and devising strategies for changing them. However, this requires object-oriented philosophy to engage in concrete analysis of how social assemblages function rather than repeatedly approaching these issues abstractly as an ontological debate over the primacy of substances or relations. Enough for now.

Levi Bryant opines on the subject of the connections between ontology and politics. I think he has a point, and it's one I have often wondered about in connection to how Marxists might view ANT, for example. I know there have been criticisms from some (including Steve Fuller I believe) that ANT pretends to be politically neutral and is thus untrustworthy in its lack of political critique.

I understand Levi's point here, but I think he overstates his point a bit, gets a bit carried away, and I also think (as he himself allows) that the relation here between politics and ontology is contingent at best, and probably better described as tenuous.

Excerpt from interview of Bernard Stiegler by Irit Rogoff http://www.e-flux.com/journal/transindividuation/

Very interesting to me for his discussions of how technics links to transindividuation and the absorption of the individual into collective experiences, and the way in which rituals can be technics.

BS: Yes. Now the conditions of creating of circuits of trans-individuation are always organological—the creation of circuits themselves are always organological. For example, when you have a discussion between Socrates and Gorgias, this discussion is possible only because Socrates and Gorgias have learned how to write and to read. They have a common skill, a technical skill of reading and writing, which is the origin of the Polis, and without those skills it is impossible to have law, to have geometry, to have a philosophy, to have a relationship to Homer and to Sophocles, all of which define the approved and valued path for Greek civilization. And if you are in a shamanistic society, there is another organology, but you still have one. I just came back from Senegal, for example, and it is extremely clear when you practice ethnography in that context. You immediately have the role for technics when you open spaces for relationships between people that are in fact spaces for transindivduation. In fact, if you don’t practice those technics, you can’t enter in the circuits. It’s not possible.

IR: Give me an example of how you are using technics in this argument?

BS: For example, the drinking of tea of tea in Senegal is a technic. In Senegal you have three times for drinking a tea. You have the first tea, which is “attaya,” extremely strong, the second they call the tea of life, and it is sweet, and the third one, which is even sweeter, is the time of love. But you will never meet a Senegalese person drinking only the first one or only the third one.

IR: It is an integrated system.

BS: It is a ritual and you have a technic for producing this. This is a very common thing. In fact, religious practices are technical, what is at stake in what Foucault calls the “technology of the self” are, after all, all technics. For me writing books is a technic of the self, now music is a technic as well. In Africa music is particularly a technic—extremely important for creating a space or opening of trans-individuation.

Hi everyone,

The Alternative Reality Tour has begun!  It runs 3-12 October across England!

We are coming to car parks, to playing fields, to nowhere places near your town.

We have singers and comedians and writers. We are anti-cuts. We are pro-youth. We are awesome.

The shows are free. We have no profit motive. Our motive is to be wonderful.

We support public art. We despise austerity measures. We like adventure. We will travel.

Fight the cuts. Oppose the austerity agenda. Dress up as the mayor of margate. Encourage 10 year olds to jump off sheppey’s seafront steps.

We do not care for those who do not agree with us. We seek to find, console and empower those who do. We are morally right.

We bring unabashed politicised music and comedy. We bring blankets in case it’s cold. We are on the side of justice. Hence magical things happen to us. Another world is possible. Possible and awesome.

Dates below. Tell your friends. Come and see us!

3/10 – Margate

4/10 – Isle of Sheppey

5/10 – East Bergholt, Suffolk

6/10 – Milton Keynes with Alan Moore!

7/10 – Hull

8/10 – Leicester

9/10 – London. Joining UK Uncut to Block The Bridge!

10/10 – Bedford with Simon Munnery

11/10 – Gloucester

12/10 – Tapeley Park

Missed this! And she came to Gloucester! Fab idea from Josie Long.

It has been suggested that the commercial gains made by the mask—Warner Bros. gets a commission for each one sold—negate the protest. But it is precisely the use of the tools of capitalism against capitalism that is one of the most striking elements of the protests—Blackberry, Apple and Facebook can be used for many purposes, just as tents can be used for camping or occupation. Among a range of wonderful artwork and slogans, the Guy Fawkes mask is a powerful symbol of a nascent movement. It hides its wearer’s face, but it makes their protest all the more visible.

Moreover, just as the player is not a traditional philosophical subject, we must say that the ball is not a traditional object to be handled. We might even reverse the relation, polemically, and say that the players do not play with the ball, but the ball plays with them. The ball is a catalytic force, a "quasi-subject," Massumi writes, and I would suggest that the players borrow its kinetic energy as their own, its "agency" as "theirs" (these quotation marks are mine, indicating a manner of speaking, a rhetorical element that is nevertheless not unreal). "The player's body is a node of expression."[24]

A good game, then, has very little to do with the technical expertise of each individual player, strictly speaking. And while we might say that the rules of the game provide the ontological conditions of play, it is obvious to every spectator that a strict obedience to the rules, regardless of the technical competence involved, will make for a lacklustre performance. If the field is conceived as a linguistic field, the nexus of a language, with rhetorical forces and effects, then what the spectator wants to see is poetry in motion. Importantly, there is an aesthetic component, which Massumi calls "style" -- "more than the perfection of technique."[25] I agree, and see in his idea of style a wonderful resonance with Foucault's ethics and the kind of relational subjectivity that we see in the self-self relation, as the self struggles to craft for herself the terms of her own existence. Foucault suggests that in the subject's ethical relation to herself, there must also be a style, a manner in which the relation becomes a vital force, the mode in which self-transformation proceeds, not technically, according to strict rules or current grammars of self-expression, but rather her self-transformation is enacted stylistically, rhetorically, through what Foucault calls a "style of life."[26] Like the player, she works from within a field of given possibilities, in relation to herself and to others, to imagine new and creative forms of life. For Massumi, it is the star player who makes the most of this aesthetic style: "The star player is one who modifies expected mechanisms of channeling field-potential. The star plays against the rules but not by breaking them."[27] In other words, the star player "bends" the rules and "bends the ball" itself (as they say), enough to make a difference in the play, really putting into play and actualizing a potentiality that is implicit in the field nexus.

To extend Massumi's analysis, if the ball is the intersection of multiple vectors of potentiality, a surcharged node in the field of play, we might also call it a technology of sorts. By this I do not mean that the ball is a techné or a tool to be taken up and used, but like language, it is that which engages us, actualizing the field-potential, potentially subjectivizing us. Like language to the one who speaks, the ball is that which allows for a relational transformation insofar as it can assume and catalyze a nexus of potential; it is a site of sublimation, and in this respect, always overdetermined. After all, no ball, no game. If we consider the field of play as a linguistic field, the ball is like a mobile and momentary expression, a spoken word that is put into play, a speech act that erupts from and punctuates the linguistic field, and an "agency" that belongs to the player as much as she belongs to it. Dynamically binding and releasing potential, transforming it. This helps to illuminate what Foucault means by ethical self-transformation, because the self's relation to the self is mediated by terms that are similarly in flux, and the self relies on such "technologies" to provide the catalytic vehicle for its own styles of life, engendering a way of being. We might think of how we work on the body through physical exercise (all those hateful machines at the gym), or the project of writing and critique, or engaging in political demonstration and social reform -- all of these might constitute transformative "technologies of the self," the terms by which we might work to fulfill the project of an ethical life.

Hi Mark.

What I think Friedman is doing is what you'll see when you enter the "nature" vs. "space" debate in the philosophy of physics. For this type of discussion, I always turn to Yves Simon's "The Great Dialogue of Nature And Space."

Friedman's approach is like a Cartesian defending critics of Newton's inverse square law. Let me present the inverse square law of Newton, a la Friedman - Newton does an excellent job of describing a universe of two stationary point masses as being attracted to each other via an inverse square law that closely agrees in its predictions with the visual evidence. Now, the critic - But the universe isn't just two stationary point masses! Newton failed to describe the actual planets and solar system! Watch his system fall apart as velocities increase! What you are describing can't be found anywhere! Now back to Friedman - Aha! You must idealize the system you study in order to make progress via successful predictions. In fact, idealization - stripping away the inessentials in order to be able to describe the whole (now dessicated of most of its actual, realistic qualities) mathematically - is the way to go for a scientist.

This is the Cartesian approach of "space." The critic of this tends to take the Aristotelian approach of "nature," which is to preserve the whole of the qualities (a planet's "nature") and provide a description of the whole thing, at the expense of making progress via a mathematical description that provides predictions. To a "naturist" a "descriptively simple" approach is always an unrealistic approach. To a Cartesian, the naturist can never get to the good stuff, which is an (idealized) description capable of prediction based on the math of points, sets, and lines.

It is hard to see both approaches at once for what they are, because students are often trained in one or another, creating two schools where never the twain shall meet. In my description above I used idealizations, which are correct within their limitations, but are open to criticism that "no one is a real Cartesian through and through and so you've described nothing and can predict nothing." Oh well, the trick is to be able to see both approaches for their values and shortcomings. Cartesians tend to forget to describe the shortcomings of their predictions because of the assumptions inherent in their theory, while naturists tend to ignore the utility of predictive science. The book I mentioned above attempts to see both at the same time, and so does Martin Heidigger in "What is A Thing," though he spends a lot of time on Kant (yuck!).

Interesting comment about idealisation versus realism in scientific theory. This "dialogue of nature and space" was new to me. It's quite helpful, I think.