Holger Schulze

Experiencing Medialized Senses

On the Tectonics of Media

Presentation for the Workshop

›Digital Media: A European Perspective?‹

ECREA-Section 'Digital Culture and Communication'

University of Sussex Brighton

1^st to 3^rd of November 2007

Experiencing Medialized Senses

On the Tectonics of Media.

by Holger Schulze (Berlin)

This contribution presents a new anthropological and phenomenological approach to media studies.

In recent years the environment in which we live has transformed itself more and more into a fully mediatized and artificialized environment. The utopias and visions of early media anthropologists have thus been realized - though in an often disillusioning and trivial way.

Our daily and professional lives nowadays habitually progress through and by means of mediated performances, actions, and speech acts - such as this brief abstract itself, written in a language that is not my mothertongue: nevertheless this abstract is the medium of our first encounter.

The dominance of this imaginarium called ›The Media‹ is both fundamental and trivial.

But how do we ourselves live and experience our life in this imaginarium? How are we ourselves represented and perceived in the Medial Imaginarium? And what are the new, old, and thoroughly existential doubts, aporias, and questions that drive us as we go about our lives in diverse and ever-diversifying Medial Imaginaria?

Before all of us met in here, in this room, most of us knew each other fairly well – but some of us barely knew anyone in here.

I personally knew only one person in this room before I came here. The others I knew partly as names mentioned by the person I know and subsequently from some organisational e-mails or some of their writings. They were mentioned in texts I read, in information papers ahead of this workshop − or I barely knew them at all. I assume the situation of some of you was nearly the same as you prepared yourself and your lecture for this workshop.

As a common practice to strengthen social cohesion, most or at least some of us heard rumors or hearsay about the quality of the works of some other unknown participants; and perhaps heard brief statements, maybe in fragments, on the individual attributes of a person. Age, look, habit, education and research focus were probably mentioned.

Some of us may even have visited the websites of the institutes where others work − or at least they used a common internet search engine, the algorithms of which nowadys constitute our informational imagination of a whole world outside of our reach.

We came across short biographies, maybe newly uploaded or outdated portraits; we skimmed over selective lists of publications and maybe we even followed some links to further publications or affiliate institutes. We might have even talked to friends or colleagues about some of the participants that seemed especially interesting and inspiring for our own current research; which led us to other rumors and sayings on the qualities of work and person.

All this might also have happened concerning the institute and staff of the University of Sussex here; I heard of the campus here; with all the rituals and routines connected with such a workshop, embedded in the section ›Digital Culture and Communication‹ of ECREA; yesterday we had the opportunity to make ourselves comfortable with the qualities of the first rather cubically shaped architectural space in which we heard some of us talking and posing questions.

Now we changed the room to this different cubically shaped space, in another building, and we have anew the opportunity and maybe duty to adjust ourselves to the resonances and natural oscillations in here – after we all were given the chance yesterday evening to make some more experiences with each other, whilst having dinner, drinking and talking at a restaurant.

§1

Medial Narrations

Medialized narrations and depictions of people, things and thoughts are the basis of our encounters in shared physical spaces. In former centuries or cultures those imaginary worlds or imaginaria we collectively construct through all those sayings, depictions, inscriptions, sketches, letters and rumors might also have been predominant before any actual encounters; even if those times did not make use of electro-technical devices to transmit their information. Those imaginaria form a kind of halo around any person, any institution or any entity in question: They are the narrative trail we see after any encounter − and they are the first glimpse we get of a person or object before any encounter with it, her or him.

The theoretical outline of media I would like to present here, does not therefore exclusively refer to a cultural history of technology − as impersonated in german speaking countries for instance by Friedrich Kittler and his Berlin School; nor do I refer to the wide range of internationally acknowledged and also economically applied rather behaviorist studies on human behavior under the influence of mass media.

The approach I would like to propose refers to integratively and anthropologically centered traditions of media theory as formulated by Fritz Heider and Régis Debray. Their hypotheses and concepts allow to take in account the numerous experiential phenomena of perception and self-perception whilst we are acting and appearing in medial environments. Thus we are able to take a closer look at the more detailed experiences of narratological practices in any individual use of media and any life with media nowadays.

*

In 1926 Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider (1896-1988) analyzed in his essay Ding und Medium¹ (»Thing and Medium«) the elementary epistemological and perceptional qualities our cultures and scientific traditions expect a medium to have. The difference between any thing with medial qualities and any other thing with the qualities of a mere object, he writes, is, that mere things perform natural oscillations out of their own right − but real media have the useful ability to resonate and thus to transport and to transmit oscillations of other things:

daß Dinge Eigenschwingungen ausführen

und Medien aufgezwungene Schwingungen.²

This resonating and thus transmitting quality of media lies at the core of most modern and pre-modern discourses and concepts of media. It is in the more sociological and rhetorical theory of medial transmission as proposed by French philosopher Régis Debray, that this fundamental insight gets unfolded into a broad theory of medial memory, communication and tradition.

In his writings since the 1990s Debray defines media as machines and social structures for transmission through shorter or longer distances of space and time.³ Medial transmissions he thus sees as characterized by a twin structure: On the one hand we have a »matière organisée«, M.O., which represents the individual material as organized − for instance in an electrotechnical machine to transmit radiowaves, a TV-set, Personal Computers, mobile phones and even a very material auditorium as the one we use right now; on the other hand we have the »organisation materielle«, O.M. By this term Debray summarizes the whole of infrastructural and social organization − for instance in academic institutions, television networks or in transmitting internet protocols.

In perfect harmony with the phenomenological tradition this brief theoretical framework as provided by Debray and Heider reminds us of the fundamental, not only electrotechnical nature of media in any perceptional and epistemological process. Their terms and concepts allow us to transcend the sometimes tragically fruitless and dichotomized discussion of a psycho-social apriori of media on the one side versus a technological apriori of media on the other side. Keeping the interlocking relationship of technical means and cultural practices in mind we can now take a closer look at the experiences and performative acts connected with media in any individual use.

§2

Tectonics of Media

When we talk about the ways we experience our daily lives amongst media and how we live with mediations of other people and of ourselves, it seems appropriate to look closely at the ways we ourselves − as participants in the so-called scientific community − act whilst referring to and generating new medial narrations and depictions.

Out of the traces of our medial practices and the entities they form, something gets established over time; an »organisation materielle« as Debray would put it. I would prefer to call it a specific Tectonic of Media.

Each sociologically identifiable field, system or imaginarium seems to evolve a specific infrastructure that organizes the exchange between its protagonists, participants and entities. The scientific community itself for instance has developed a highly formalized but also widely informally structured tectonic made of publications, lectures, talks before and after the lecture, symposiums and their highly important talks whilst drinking coffee, at dinner or lunch; submitted papers, peer reviews, proposals, diverse kinds of agencies and − not to forget − the positions of professorship, chair or dean of a faculty.

All those performative acts and social functions frame, predetermine and generate the tectonic structure of what we might call the ›scientific imaginarium‹. In reference to mentions, depictions or even newly coined terms of people, things and thoughts this imaginary representation gets stabilized. We talk about an especially thought-provoking, elucidating or also disappointing appearance or lecture of a person; we emphasize or question the authorship of some institution or also person to evaluate a document; and we follow the recordings of all the utterances, social moves or decisions an institution or a person made.

We also go back to the archives, the storage of those medially recorded, performative acts, and we countercheck our opinion, our view on this person, institution or circumstance by going back to those sources. Thus, the medial narration we tell other people about this person, institution or entity, becomes more and more reproduceable, more and more solid and convincing to ourselves and to others. This person (or institution) is present as a medial persona, in its artefacts – even if he or she is absent.

In this presentation I would like to take a closer look at two generative elements of how such a medial narration gets constructed − in scientific communities especially: one as the most important form of physical presence of agents therein, and the other one as the most important medializing shift of this physical presence into a medial representation. I am talking here of the mere »Appearance« (in German: »Der Auftritt«) of a person, an institutional agent or an object − and I am talking of the »Recording« (in German: »Die Aufzeichnung«) of such a performance. They are both strongly connected to each other; and this connection also has to do with physical specificities of that transmission.

§3

The Appearance

(or: »Der Auftritt«)

In the last weeks – I suppose – you and I might have thought a bit now and then about your and my, our appearance at this workshop. Now you are here and – after the perfomances of others in this place and community – you might have found your adequate position and place amongst others. You and I, we might have realized in what respects our presentations are going to find resonance among the audience – and in what respects the audience in question, the pretty exact number of a dozen listeners and speakers in this space could probably be a bit irritated. Maybe it is even hard for you to follow my train of thoughts or methodical or even epistemological position?

Just minutes ago I went up here to give this little lecture and, by smalltalk and ›bigtalk‹ around the presentations beforehand, I could feel the tension growing in this physical place. A physical tension, emitted by the physical presence of the human collective present here. We, as human beings sense the attention that gets collected around us as a person, our body, bodily moves, our body language, vocal languages, my facial expressions, breathings in between my words and phrases. As presenter or lecturer here I can feel embedded in this situational and spatial body of streams, of vibrations and whispers, careful listeners or distracted human beings in the audience; maybe partly dealing with their own affairs, flicking through papers, checking SMS or e-mails, drafting papers for other occasions, organizing ideas or inspirations for further articles or projects in the back of your minds. While someone in front is speaking.

*

In this brief phenomenological description, hopefully thick enough, you might have noticed that the situation of an appearance is not only visually or sculpturally, sociologically or psychologically described; but in descriptions of physical emmissions, of radiance, vibrations and transmissions of vibrations through time and space, small time brackets and close spatial relations.

These descriptions of the experiences on a medial stage refer to the methodological and epistemological fundaments of a Historical Anthropology of Sound. This field of research draws its genuine method from the genuine dispositives concerning the generation and transmission of sound. A definition in the recent edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica sums this up very nicely:

Sound:

Mechanical disturbance

from a state of equilibrium

that propagates

through an elastic material medium.

To think medialized sensations and self-perceptions in this sense, like radiating waves of emission, this way of hearing to medialized situations changes some ways of thinking the media via its experiential side: it may be a medialization fairly close to your emitted physical action or rather remote and medialized via audiovisual or textual representations in artefacts.

In immersive situations – as always in perceiving and emitting sound as well as tactile or even olfactorial perceptions – the tension of performative actions or mere acting habits gets undoubtedly sensed rather physically in the whole body of the protagonist in question. The performative tension as well as the tension of attention increases or diminishes, depending on the situational dispositives of the audience and the situational presence and ability to improvise of the protagonist onstage. A Tectonic of Attention and of Performance gets mutually constructed.

Going back to Heider we generate this tectonic while we, as protagonists resonate with audience emissions on the one hand; but on the other hand in all these situations full of tensions we nevertheless try very hard to perform genuine ›oscillations‹, actions we can refer to as ›our own‹. These performative acts then can fuel medial narrations after our performance; narrations that get told and written on the person, institution, agent or entity in question.

Following Debray we are thus able to use this material auditorium here, the building of this lecture room and also this opportunity being invited to this workshop and the attention of all the persons gathering here to transmit: an impression of us as a person and of our acting habits, our ways of speaking, our visual and multisensual impression (in noise, smell, kinaesthetic routines etc.) and, also, but not always in the foreground, of the topics, issues and arguments, that are important to us.

Thus the »matière organisée« of this room and building and the »organisation materielle« of ECREA, the Digital Culture & Communication Section, the Centre for Material Digital Culture, the University of Sussex and, most important in not so few cases, the informal, personal ties and attractions of invited speakers here, they all work together as interlinked means of transmission. A narration, as similar as that could also be told about an appearance in the digital, may it be an online-publication of an article, a videocast-lecture or a symposion in Second Life.

§4

The Recording

(or: »Die Aufzeichnung«)

Imagine this workshop, these lectures being recorded – from beginning to end? And now remember the first time you ever heard your voice or even your visual, two-dimensional appearance being recorded and played back?

Or even – and now I am anticipating future recording techniques: Imagine your three-dimensional physical appearance in time and space, you sitting here, walking through the room, standing up for questions or the coffee break or even standing here in front and holding a lecture, imagine all this being recorded and in future times undoubtedly being navigated through by any interested user, right now or in retrospect. Going back and forth through our movements, our ticks and winks, our breathing, interested or irritated facial expressions, our going too fast forward, our stumbling and stuttering – sometimes at least.

*

What might be irritating in all these recordings has often been discussed in terms of ›other-perception‹ and ›self-perception‹, in terms of reflectivity and in terms of an intervention with (long-term) consequences in a beforehand non-public situation: The transformation of the so-called ›private‹ into a so-called ›public‹ situation via mere recording. These points discussed are in no doubt of some relevance to the process of recording and thus medializing a situation in a technical manner. But coming again from a historical anthropology of media I would like to point out at least two differing aspects here.

First of all I would like to propose furthermore to not dichotomize public against private situations – but to talk about situations with a medial stage and an audience that both ar situated on axis between smaller or bigger ones, closer to or rather far away from the performing person's bodily actions. The family or the peer group provide at least as important medial stages as the recently discussed imaginations of a digitized, urban and networked ›agora‹; or the huge stadiums of popular culture, be it television, open air festivals, a videocast or boingboing.com.

On the other hand I would like to point at the technically induced transformations of physical experience that happen when any material entity gets recorded. In the visual as well in the auditory any recording not only constructs an artefact metaphorically; but the technical means, the rate, measure and speed of data recording, the chosen angle and time span, the calibration of the recording facilities (not to mention the intervention by cutting and editing) – all of this generates an artefact that after all cuts out of past and future experiences a sensomotoric restricted and concentrated representation. This artefact bears only little reference to the visual, sonic, the kinaesthetic and the multisensual experience our physical presence, our bodies provide for us. Our bodies as wholes are sense organs.

Performing on growing and presumeably ever bigger and bigger medial stages, human beings, me and you, do learn in their lives what happens on such stages: Which acting habits provoke a desired reaction in the audience, transmit intended attitudes or propositions important to us – and what gets washed out in this performance, drifts away, gets overshadowed by other happenings onstage, so no-one in the audience would ever realize what could have been one's intention.

This experiential side of acting habits on medial stages is central to a Historical Anthropology of Performance. By concentrating on Debrays »matière organisée« we can understand how proprioreceptive phenomena of medial performances, provoked by a specific »organisation materielle«, how those phenomena of self-perception must necessarily transform and often vanish in the process of recording. The physical experience changes completely and what I do perceive in seeing a videocast is completely different in what I would perceive in being on set. The oscillations – speaking with Heider again here − that get possibly medialized are in a visual or audiovisual recording only very few. Leaving out the sense of space, the smell, kinaesthetic perceptions, temperature, all those tiny particles flowing in a given room and – most important: the specific tension of attention in front of an audience. The camera or the microphone transmits a distinctly different tension of attention.

§5

Medial Narrations

The appearance on a medial stage or the recording of performative acts are just two generative elements of a specific tectonic of media.

Some other elements that generate and transform medial narrations I had to leave out here: I did not mention the mere function of mentioning someone, I left out the function of a medial authorship, the medial depiction and I did not talk about the generative quality of the storage of medial recordings.

These elements we mostly do not experience right now, as I am speaking to you, they organize the medializing trail of performative acts – for instance after we all have left this tiny, but finely working medial stage here. Maybe we will refer to the presentation of others here in form of a printed text, some time from now? The archived quality of a medial performance then comes into play – may it be in text, in visual, acoustical recordings or be it just mere gossip.

So appearing and recording do generate the material out of which a medial tectonic as a whole can be understood in media theory: You and I, we do experience, change and re-tell medial narrations mainly after encounters with people, things and thoughts; and those medial narrations get transmitted via recordings of performative acts.

You might argue now: »But such narrations have been predominant in all cultures we know of!« And you would be perfectly right.

But there is a striking difference that characterizes our highly medial and artificialized cultures from those in pre-electrified times of slower distant communication. The last decades it has become a mere necessity and a trivial common practice to get in contact with many other people, things and thoughts, every day, mostly or even only by way of their medializations. Imaginary artefacts, other people or communities have formed and their medial representations are your and my preferred reference in our daily practices of living in this world of broadband- or mass media and in any ›narrowband‹ communication, one on one.

Appearance and recording are for these medial practices the single situations and transformations that keep generating ever more occasions for medial narrations and thus medial tectonics. They allow us to have encounters in a distance near to touch – even in a fairly nominalistic and sometimes wannabe-disembodied world of the scientific imaginarium.

Sources

Sandra Beaufaÿs, Wie werden Wissenschaftler gemacht? Beobachtungen zur wechselseitigen Konstitution von Geschlecht und Wissenschaft, transcript Verlag Bielefeld 2003.

Régis Debray, Introduction à la médiologie, Presses Universitaires de France Paris 2000; (dt.: Einführung in die Mediologie, Haupt Verlag Bern Stuttgart Wien 2003).

−, Transmettre. Odile Jacob Paris 1997 (engl.: Transmitting culture. New York: Columbia University Press 2000; dt.: Der doppelte Körper des Mediums (Le double corps du médium − Kapitel 1), in: sinn-haft − Zeitschrift zwischen Kulturwissenschaften 8 (2004), Löcker Verlag Wien 2005, H. 17, S. 14-29).

−, Manifestes médiologiques. Editions Gallimard Paris 1994.

−, Vie et mort de l'image. Une histoire du regard en Occident. Editions Gallimard Paris 1992 (dt.: Jenseits der Bilder. Eine Geschichte der Bildbetrachtung im Abendland. Übersetzt von Anne-Hélène Hoog, Erich Thaler und Thomas Weber. AVINUS Verlag Rodenbach 1999)

−, Cours de médiologie générale. Editions Gallimard Paris 1991.