Mediality

1
Mediality

• If media are the message, what are they saying?

2
What is culture?

• A way of life (tied to agri-culture)?
• Arts and crafts (works in which a collective
  spirit is enshrined)?
• A shared set of values?
• A media-effect!
• Culture is the way human beings extend
  themselves via technologies (media) and leave
  themselves behind

3
Extensions of Man sic.

• Technology extends human beings into the world
• Reshapes the world in our image
• We fall in love with this image
• The rapture of self-regard (Narcissus), but in
  denial

Marshall McLuhan
4
Chiasmus I

• Capitalism subordinates men to machines instead
  of using machines to liberate men from the burden
  of mechanical and repetitive work.

Human Being
Dominant
Machinery
Submissive
Karl Marx
5
Chiasmus II
Humans
Gods
To behold, use or perceive any extension of
ourselves in technological form is necessarily to
embrace it. It is this continuous embrace of
our own technology in daily use that puts us in
the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and
numbness in relation to these images of
ourselves. By continuously embracing
technologies, we relate ourselves to them as
servo-mechanisms. That is why we must, to use
them at all, serve these objects, these
extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor
religions
Machines
Servo-mechanisms
Marshall McLuhan
6
A violent Olympus

• The media do not coexist peacefully
• the content of any medium is always another
  medium. (McLuhan)
• Media eat one another
• Our extensions (deities) thrive on the
  competitive consumption of one another

7
But this isus!

• This violent media ecology is our externalized
  central nervous system
• an organism that wears its brain outside its
  skull and its nerves outside its hide
• New media/capacities muscle aside older ones
• Complex, layered system old new

8
What are we doing to ourselves?

• The new media and technologies by which we
  amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge
  collective surgery carried out on the social body
  with complete disregard for antiseptics. It is
  the entire system that is changed. The effect of
  radio is visual, the effect of the photo is
  auditory. Each new impact shifts the ratios among
  all the senses.

9
Who will save us?

• The ability of the artist to sidestep the bully
  blow of new technology of any age, and to parry
  such violence with full awareness, is age-old.
  The artist can correct the sense ratios before
  the blow of new technology has numbed conscious
  procedures. He can correct them before numbness
  and subliminal groping and reaction begin.

10
Spectacle Society

• The spectacle presents itself as something
  enormously positive, indisputable, and
  inaccessible. It says nothing more than that
  which appears is good, that which is good
  appears. The attitude which it demands in
  principle is passive acceptance which in fact it
  already obtained by its manner of appearing
  without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.

11
Its the media, stupid!

• Mail or post written medium physical
  transportation (horseback, etc)
• Pynchons novella is an allegory of media
  monopoly and its subversion
• Radio circuit vs. old mailways
• Conspiracy is a figure for a total media
  ecology

12
Gravitys Rainbow (1973)

• Since 1973, when Thomas Pynchons Gravitys
  Rainbow was published, it has become clear that
  real wars are not fought for people or
  fatherlands, but take place between different
  media, information technologies, data flows.
• Friedrich Kittler on Pynchon

13
Friedrich Kittler

• Media are extensions of our nervous system
• Correlatively the shape of our media systems is
  the shape of our mental or psychic apparatus
• Our mental substance is mediatic, radically and
  completely

14
Friedrich Kittler
We are networks
The body is the site upon which the various
technologies of our culture inscribe themselves.
Indeed, in its nervous system, the body itself is
a medial apparatus and an elaborate technology.
But it is also radically historical in the sense
that it is shaped and reshaped by the networks to
which it is conjoined.
15
The body is not first and foremost an agent and
actor, and in order to become one it must suffer
a restriction of its possibilities the
attribution of agency is a reduction of
complexity. As a result, culture is no longer
viewed as a drama in which actors carry out their
various projects. Rather, the focus of analysis
shifts to the processes that make that drama
possible to the writing of the script, the
rehearsals and memorizations, the orders that
emanate from the directorial authority.
There are no subjects, only media and their
codes
16
How does Videodrome map our psyches?

• Photography
• Video Cassettes
• Radio
• Satellite emissions
• Newspapers
• and above all
• Television

17
Television medium among media

• Niagara of visual gabble
• The ascendancy of the eye
• Total Flow
• mosaic form
• Postmodern, cool medium
• The one you take to bed with you!

18
Television

• Pours out a torrent of images
• Irresistible tidal-wave of messages the message
  of the medium is this total deluge
• Un-navigable totality, perpetual emotion
  machines, wall-to-wall ideology
• Total web replaces vertical structures

19
McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)

• The TV image is not a still shot. It is not a
  photo in any sense, but a ceaselessly forming
  contour of things limned by the scanning-finger.
  The resulting plastic contour appears by light
  through, not light on, and the image so formed
  has the quality of sculpture and icon, rather
  than of picture. The TV image offers some three
  million dots per second to the receiver. From
  these he accepts only a few dozen per instant,
  from which to make an image.

20
Retina of the minds eye