What does the notion of media suggest once a specifically technological conception of media is abandoned? Media is so often conceived in terms of the notion of extension (McLuhan), prosthesis or exoskeleton (Stiegler) that it becomes difficult to recognise more intimate fields of mediation. Media are arguably not only devices – they also describe a milieu and a play of negotiation. They are not only things, not only material entities, or even space of material possibility, but also take more elusive shape as dimensions of process, of the interaction between things. Here a static and substantialist conception of media passes into a dynamic one. Media passes into mediation – and interfaces, encounters, patterns and exchanges occur everywhere. So walking through the local forest, just as much as photographing a horse or attending to the Internet, can be regarded as a form of mediation.
This reads strangely because The technological status of media seems so obvious. Within the tradition of critical media theory the notion of media has always been associated with technological forms of representation and transmission that obtain their identity precisely in contradistinction to the field of direct communication and experience (as embodied in speech and literal social action). The technological represents a vital cultural gulf and point of transition – a shift beyond the intimacy of interpersonal and group communication towards the disjunctive and anonymous exchanges that are characteristic of industrial mass society.
Within this context, technological media can at times represent the logic of capitalism (Adorno and Horkheimer) or even a passage beyond human agency itelf (Kittler’s sense of the active machine). The role of critical theory is typically either to expose literal and metaphoric media machinery, and in making it evident to somehow lessen its oppressive power, or to confirm the passage beyond the human per se.
Yet both these perspectives tend to ultimately paint critique into a corner, describing such an airtight technological and cultural system that no possibility of resistance or of exteriority is tenable – most evident, for instance, in Baudriallard’s notion of the simulacrum.
A curious thing about these apocalyptic visions of media is that while they may unflinchingly describe the grim implications of technological modernity and postmodernity, they can often be softly nostalgic about earlier, more apparently direct forms of communication. This is evident not only in Baudriallard’s famous exchange with Enzensberger, in which he critiques the notion of radical media, arguing that the only radical move available is to abandon media altogether (preferring the model of street level political action employed during the May 68 Paris student revolts), but also in Bourriaud’s conception of relational aesthetics, in which the aesthetic reinvention of local level interaction is positioned as an alternative to the spectre of the global digital information system. In both cases, dropping technology is associated with recovering a human space of intimate engagement.
But what if, in contrast, we were to acknowledge that mediation extends beyond the technological – that it goes right down to the level of the human, and, more than this, that it also extends to the non-human, to the realm of matter itself? Social interaction and the interaction between material things (however conceived) is never a matter of pure, undifferentiated encounter. It is always constituted as mediation, as a complex play of interaction, in which precisely multiplicity is manifest.
This clearly needs a great deal more explanation, but here I can only point to the deeper relevance of this change of perspective. At one level it would seem that adopting a broader conception of mediation risks losing all sight of political critique – fading off, perhaps, into a space of metaphysical consolation – but in a time of global enironmental crisis and in a time in which the social so urgently requires critical reinvention, there is no scope for adhering scrupulously to the narrowly human apocalypse of simulation or to a limp and nostalgic dream of direct interaction. Acknowledging a much wider realm of mediation works to establish both a political relation to the broader material field and an acute awareness of the play of distance and displacement that is constitutive of any encounter, any experience, any interaction whatsoever. The space of immediate experience ceases to be a sadly superceded fiction or an utterly emphatic alternative, rather it takes shape as a vital contemporary field that is just as subject to mediation as any other. Rather than crudely opposing presence to mediation, mediation becomes the means that experience as multiplicity gains mobility and becomes manifest.