Introduction:
Materialism designated a set of perspectives united by the claim that the physical materiality be it technology, practice, or body – matters in the shaping of reality. -pg1
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. -pg 1
…to interpret, deconstruct, or critique meaning veiled or buried in the artefacts of popular culture. A television program, from this perspective, is a form of text. It can be analysed with the same techniques one would apply to literature. -pg 2
You think about what media represent. You analyse what an image signifies. You then relate these meanings to larger social structures, ideologies, and economics, discussing how representations construct specific ways of understanding identities and the world. – pg 2
…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. – pg 2
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). – pg 2
Our world has seen a proliferation of devices that reshape human interaction and experience – pg 2-3
…if left to questions of representation alone, cannot acknowledge the ways these changes shape contemporary reality. – pg 3
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 screen is all there is (see Kirschenbaum 2008) – pg 3
Media theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have popularly reimagined McLuhan’s argument through the idea of remediation, suggesting that “new 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. – pg 4
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. – pg 5
We must acknowledge that there are countless ways that media influence the world that cannot be reduces to “meaning”. At the same time, we don’t want to forget about the meaning, content, or practices involved with making media and acting through media. – pg 4-5
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 tools (cf. Kittler 1990a). In learning how to speak and how to write, our bodies are transformed, often in quite literal ways. – pg 7
Or, meaning depends on the particular materiality of media, of practices (like gestures), which result in the symbolic differentiations like nature/culture, inside/outisde, 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 – pg 9
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 world alone. The control over a text’s interpretation depends on it’s 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 19840. – pg 10
With the internet, we still ask questions about the control of information and the democratisation 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. – pg 11
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 materialists 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. – pg 12
We come to understand proper ways of experiencing and percieving the world, along with proper ways of relating to each other, through the material possibilites 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 touch (Hansen 2004; Rotman 2008). – pg 12-13
We do not communicate through language, or through media. Rather we are spoken by language. We understand ourselves in media. Our knowldge of the world does not happen apart from the material forms that organise and shape the limits of relation, knowledge, perception, and memory. – pg 13
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. – pg 13
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. – pg 14
Theorising 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. – pg 14
Movies and artworks, for instance, can communicate feelings and relations in ways that words cannot (cf. Shaviro 1993). – pg 15
What if we change these questions, replacing words 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 the perform relation and effect material changes in people and objects. – pg 15
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. – pg 15
The relationship between technologies and embodied practice, pointing to how materiality – both media and of the body – shapes how we understand culture, identity, and history. – pg 18
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 – two things that are not the same, but do overlap. – pg 18-19
“object-oriented ontology”, which argues that objects are fundamentally seperate 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. – pg 20
Representation and Performances
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. – pg 22
example of how the critique of representation leads to productive changes in the material forms and images that bodies take in popular culture – pg 23
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. – pg 24
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 organising bodies, objects, and relations int he real world. Images and representations should be rethought through their performative materiality. – pg 25
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 recognise 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 naturalised image of how specific kinds of bodies act and relate to other bodies. – pg 26
we understand the foundations of our identities through a personal history of institutions that shape us in numerous, often contradictory ways. – pg 27
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. – pg 28
Another trasition 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. – pg 28
Information moves from producer, through the channels of communication, and causes an effect int he mind of the viewer with little to no conscious input on behalf of the individual held rapt in the glowing light of the screen – pg 28
“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 films, or in any other form of media. – pg 32-33
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. – pg 33
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 of a representation is merely in the mind of the individual. – pg 37
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 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; Hogarn 2015). pg 39-40
This concerns the distinction between symbolic contents within one’s mind and the real, material existence 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 characterises differences between representational ways of understanding media (images produce or construct a reality through 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 placed) and materialist analyses (media are device that shape reality through their physical components) – though I should note, many contemporary “realist” philosophers do not equate materiality with realism – pg 41
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. – pg 41
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 1990’s 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. – pg 42
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 produce a “quantified self”. – pg 43
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. – pg 43
The weak version of idealism that suggests language, representations, and consciousness produce what we experience, usually by organising 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. – pg 44
defining representation as a material, discursive practice – a practice that performs reality, not one that depicts or reflects reality. By emphasising the performativity of representation, we can then begin to examine how the materiality of technology intersects with the concerns of representational critiques, not to displace representation but to expand our understanding of what representation is and does. – pg 45
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” and “masculine” produce specific bodies as having specific genders. – pg 46
Bodies matter in their materiality, but they do not escape processes of signification that shaped 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 constructions,”Butler suggests, “is a return to the notion of matter not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialisation that stabilises over time to produce the effect boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (9). When Butler uses the term “materialisation” 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. – pg 47
As Karen Barad (2007, 46-47) has noted, when we use “representation” we are supposing 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. – pg 49
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. – pg 49
the introduction of performative materialism reframed the concerns of representational critique by doing away with the constructivist or idealist detachment of images and words form 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 – pg 50
“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. – pg 51
following Foucault, it involves not just language, but the capacity to see something, to visualise it, or to make in 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) – pg 62
Foucault acknowledges the importance of materiality but does 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 material-discursive – that is what it means to matter” (2007,153). – pg 63
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”. – pg 63
A file has a specific spatiality and temporality and only included that which can be filed – pg 67
what Ferraris means by soical 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 like phones are often imagined (and used). – pg 68-69
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 claim that any act of communication is likewise an act of documentation, of writing. – pg 69-70
The body is, in a sense, a technology for inscription. We write into it specific practices that becomes the “habits” we perform daily, habits that perform our “habitus”, practices that we inhabit and enable is 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 standardised the ways human bodies eat, move and rest – pg 74
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 medium.It provides a way of looking at the past differently, one that attends to marginalia in order to allow different histories to materialize. – pg 77-78