Co-Sponsored by

Vo l u m e 9 , 1 0

2007 & 2008

Publication of the Society for

Phenomenology and Media

The Society for Phenomenology and Media

Glimpse is the annual publication of The Society for Phenomenology and Media.
2009 by The Society for Phenomenology and Media, San Diego, CA. All rights reserved.
ISSN in process
Copyrights for all articles are retained by the authors. Permission to reprint may be arranged through:
The Society for Phenomenology and Media
Paul Majkut
National University
College of Letters and Sciences
Department of Arts and Humanities
11255 North Torrey Pines Road
La Jolla, CA 92037-1011, USA
Membership in The Society for Phenomenology and Media is $50.00 annually and includes subscriptions
to Glimpse and other SPM publication. Membership ratesin Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and
Africa vary according to economic standards and equivalences.
www.thesocietyforphenomenologyandmedia.org
Co-sponsored by the Benemrita Universidad Autnoma de Puebla through CONACyT (Project 58995,
Philosophy of Technology: The Case of New Media)

THE SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY AND MEDIA (SPM)

SPM Officers, 2006-2009
President: Dennis E. Skocz, Independent Scholar, Arlington, Virginia
Vice-President: Matti Itkonen, University of Jyvaskyla, Jyvaskyla, Finland
Secretary: Stacey Irwin, Millersville University, Millersville, Pennsylvania
Treasurer: Paul Majkut, National University, La Jolla, California
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Editorial Board of Glimpse
Dennis E. Skocz (Independent Scholar, President of the Society for Phenomenology and Media); Alberto
Carrillo-Cann (Autonomous University of Puebla); Paul Majkut (National University); Chris Nagel
(California State University, Stanislaus)

SPM Advisory Board, 2006-2009

Alberto Carrillo Canan, Universidad Autonoma de Puebla, Puebla, Mexico
Stephen Crocker, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Kathryn Egan, Independent Scholar, Provo, Utah
Stacey Irwin, Millersville University, Millersville, Pennsylvania
Matti Itkonen, University of Jyvaskyla, Jyvaskyla, Finland
Paul Majkut, National University, La Jolla, California
Chris Nagel, California State University, Stanislaus, Turlock, California
Dennis Skocz, Independent Scholar, Washington, D. C.
James Strevohec, University of Ljublijana, Slovenia

contents
Preface
Alberto Carrillo Cann ............................................... . . . . . . . . . . page vi
Introduction
Dennis E. Skocz ....................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page viii
UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING MEDIA PHENOMENOLOGICALLY
Dennis E. Skocz .................................................... . . . . . . . . . . page 11
EXPOSURE, ABSORPTION, SUBJECTION BEING-IN-MEDIA
Chris Nagel .................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 17
PICTURING PHENOMENA: A PHENOMENOLOGY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Victor Biceaga .................................................... . . . . . . . . . . page 23
The Poetics of Digital Cinema
Alberto J. L. Carrillo Cann
May Zindel .................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 29
MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND MERCE CUNNINGHAMS DANCE ART
Mnica Elisabeth Alarcn Dvila ....................................... . . . . . . . . . . page 34
MEANINGS OF SELF, PLACE, AND OTHERS IN THE WIRELESS WORLD
Brittany Landrum
Gilbert Garza .................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . page 38
DIGITAL COMMUNITIES OF REPRESENTATION: FROM WITTGENSTEIN
TO BRAZILIAN MOTOBOYS
Alberto Lpez Cuenca .................................................... . . . page 45
THE VIRTUAL POWER IN BLOGS
Hung-Chang Liao .................................................... .... . . . page 53
CHANGING AND UNCHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF INFORMATION
Michael Brownstein .................................................... . . . . . . page 58
HABERMAS, MCLUHAN AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Kevin W. Gray .................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . page 64
EDUCATION, RACISM, AND THE MEDIA
Gwen Stowers .................................................... . . . . . . . . . . page 70
SEARCHING FOR WARMTH IN COMMON DATA LINKS: A MCLUHANESQUE STUDY
OF MILITARY TARGET ACQUISITION
Kathryn Egan .................................................... ......... . page 75
COMPLEX SYSTEMS AND THE REBELLION OF THE MACHINES
Gerardo de la Fuente Lora ................................................... . . page 81
UNMASKING THE SIMULACRUM:
Harry Houdinis Exposs and the Modernist
Meta-Poetics of Confrontation and Exposure
Kurt Cline .................................................... ........ . . . . . page 85
DECEPTION OF SELF
Tracy Dalke .................................................... ........ . . . . page 90
OUT OF GLOBAL DECEPTION
Michaela Ott .................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . page 97

preface
I

t was my privilege and pleasure to serve as

the host for the 10th Annual Meeting of The
Society for Phenomenology and Media, which
took place in Puebla, Mexico, from February 2123, 2008. That conference marked 10 years since
the founding of the Society and brought together
scholars from Mexico, the United States, and
Europe on the theme, McLuhan and Beyond.
Many of the papers presented in Puebla then are
included in this edition of Glimpse.
I want to take this occasion to congratulate and
thank the authors whose papers are included in
this issue of Glimpse for their contributions, not
only to this publication but also to the work of The
Society for Phenomenology and Media. Readers
will form some idea of the creative thinking and
lively discussion which took place in Puebla last
year as well as the previous year in La Jolla,
California as they study the papers selected for
this issue of Glimpse.
Let me also thank my university, the Benemrita
Universidad Autnoma de Puebla, for its generous
support for the work of the Society. The University
hosted the conference in 2008 and together with
CONACyT (National Council for Science and
Technology), project number 58995 (Philosophy
of Technology: The Case of New Media) both
made possible this publication. I speak not only for
myself as a professor of the University, member of
the Society, and editor of Glimpse, but also for the
president and other officers of the Society, all its
many members around the world, and those who
shared their scholarship and exchanged ideas in
Puebla and La Jolla ideas reflected in this edition
of Glimpse.
Several University officers and colleagues
deserve special mention. Among the University
officers, let me thank the Rector, Enrique
Agera Ibnez; the Secretary General, Jos
Ramn Eguibar Cuenca, and the Vice Rector
for Postgraduate Research and Studies, Pedro
Hugo Hernndez Tejeda. As a professor of the
Benemrita Universidad Autonma de Puebla, I
am proud of the contribution these educators and
leaders have made, on behalf of our university,
for scholarship in philosophy and media studies. I
have to mention that, the 10th Meeting of the SPM
took place as part of the annual activities planned
by the Colloquium for Aesthetics and Technology,
which is associated to the Master in Aesthetics and
Arts. In particular I thank the colleagues Professor

vi

Gerardo de la Fuente Lora, Professor Renato

Prada Oropeza, the PhD Student Marco Antonio
Caldern Zacaula, and the postgraduate student
Mnica S. Martnez for their active support. I
would also like to thank our coeditor Professor
Chris Nagel at California State University as
well as our invited coeditor Professor Gerardo
Rivas Lpez. There are others, colleagues and
students, whose names I do not mention now
who helped greatly with the conference and this
publication. You too have my gratitude and that of
my colleagues in the Society.
My friends at the University should know how
welcoming Society members found the university
officers, staff, and professors they met at the
conference and how conducive to their discussions
they found the facilities of the University and the
people and environment of the city of Puebla.
Paul Majkut founder of The Society for
Phenomenology and Media, Professor at National
University in La Jolla, California, and host to the
ninth conference whose papers are included in
this Glimpse deserves very special recognition.
The Society has grown and prospered since its
founding. Paul Majkuts outreach to scholars with
diverse approaches to the media and his readiness
to extend the scope of the Society world-wide
account for much of its success. The quality and
distinctive look of this and other issues of Glimpse
is a tribute to Paul Majkut as well.

In the Introduction which follows, the Society

President, Dr. Dennis E. Skocz, offers a synopsis
of the papers published in this edition of Glimpse.
For my part, as a host for the Puebla conference
and participant in the previous conference in La
Jolla, I can attest to the quality of papers selected
for publication here. They, and others not selected
for publication, inspired animated conversation
during conference sessions and afterwards. A
philosophical and interdisciplinary approach
to the media seems to engage the creativity and
best research of scholars around the world. The
papers are evidence of the value of a sustained
interdisciplinary and international conversation
about the impact of media on contemporary
existence.
I invite members of the Society and other
readers of this Glimpse to engage with the ideas
represented in the papers of this issue. We in the
Society welcome your participation in future
conferences and in publications of Glimpse.
Alberto Carrillo Cann
Professor, Benemrita Universidad Autnoma
de Puebla
Editor, Glimpse

vii

introducton
M

arshall McCluhans face appears on the

cover of this combined issue of Glimpse.
McLuhan and Beyond was the theme of
the Society conference in Puebla, Mexico (February
21 23, 2008) from which most of the 16 papers
in this issue came. This edition also comprises
outstanding papers presented the previous year
at National University in La Jolla, California,
where, in addition to media, international scholars
discussed issues of deception and self-deception
as part of the Societys Outis Project, a five-year
running invitation and challenge to members and
other scholars to address those themes in creative
and cross-disciplinary ways.
The McLuhan meeting in Puebla marked the 10th
anniversary of The Society for Phenomenology and
Media. What better way, many of us thought, than
to hold a conference linked to McLuhans project
a project captured in the title of his pivotal 1964
work, Understanding Media. I say project rather
than influence or work because the intent was
not to pour over McLuhans writings with exegetical
intent or discuss his reputation and legacy, but
rather, to do as McLuhn did: to investigate media,
old and new, in order to understand how each in
its distinctive way mediates our relationship to
the world and to each other. The concluding three
papers of this Glimpse, part of the Outis project,
complement the McLuhan-related investigations
carried out in Puebla. In these papers, as in the
others, the effort is to understand our mediated
relationship to the world and others, specifically,
how deception operates to occlude and falsify
these relationships.
The first two papers, by Dennis Skocz
(Understanding Understanding Media Pheno
menologically) and Chris Nagel (Exposure,
Absorption, Subjection Being-in-Media), tackle
the issue of mediation as such, more than the
work of any specific medium, although Dr. Nagel
specifically illustrates his concept of being-inmedia with concrete reflections on television
and advertising. Dennis Skocz endeavors to
ground McLuhans insights phenomenologically,
suggesting that this approach clarifies McLuhans
ideas and advances phenomenological research. The
two papers draw on classical phenomenological
notions and methods in Husserl and Merleau
Ponty to illuminate and deepen how one might, for
example, think of media as extensions of man (a
principal leitmotif of McLuhans work).

viii

Victor Biceaga and Alberto Carrillo-Canan

with May Zindel address still photography and
movies respectively old media now 40-plus
years after McLuhans rise to prominence. Victor
Biceagas contribution (Picturing Phenomena:
A Phenomenology of Photography) masterfully
analyzes the photographic image beginning with
Husserls sophisticated and nuanced examination
of image and image-consciousness but extends and
enriches the analysis with insights from Roland
Barthes and others outside phenomenology. In
a collaborative work (The Poetics of Digital
Cinema), scholars Carrillo and Zindel show
how an old medium, cinema one that put the
still photographic image in motion undergoes a
transformation with digital imaging technology
and how this transformation of the medium, in
turn, transforms the movie-goers cinematic
experience.
Monica Alarcon (Marshall McLuhan and
Merce Cunninghams Dance Art) links the
oldest medium of all, the human body itself,
with the revolutionary choreography of Merce
Cunningham. Dr. Alarcon explains how in the
art of the dance as transformed by Cunningham
the performer shows, through movement and
repose, the multifarious ways that embodied
beings inhabit a world together.
New media are the focus of analyses by
scholars Garza and Landrum, Alberto Lopez
Cuenca, Hung-Chang Liao, and Michael
Brownstein. Meanings of Self, Place, and
Others in the Wireless World, by Gilbert Garza
and Brittany Landrum, explores the virtual
space of the internet and wireless information
technologies to assess the impact of these media
on our contemporary being-in-the-world.
This last expression invokes philosopher Martin
Heideggers analytic of Dasein, being-there or
human existence; Garza and Landrum suggest
that our present-day way of being-in and beingthere is radically changed by the media they
examine. Alberto Lopez Cuencas contribution,
Digital Communities of Representation: From
Wittgenstein to Brazilian Motoboys, begins with
the astute observation that in representing the
world through digital photography, for example
one is engaged in a practice or performance that
Wittgenstein would call a language game or
form of life. When a group of Brazilian delivery
boys (motoboys) are given digital cameras and
invited to represent their world and share their
images of it, they engage in a collective practice
that results in their constituting themselves as

a [digital] community. Hung-Chan Liao (The

Virtual Power in Blogs) guides us readers into the
blogosphere. Dr. Liao sets the stage for this with
a concise and useful primer on blog jargon and
technology; he then proceeds to trace the impact
of blogging on personal expression and identity,
gender relations, and the discussion of political and
economic issues. Michael Brownstein provides a
thought-provoking comparison of the Wikipedia
of our time and the Encyclopedia as envisioned and
realized in the Enlightenment. The comparison
serves to raise issues about information as such;
hence the title, Changing and Unchanging
Conceptions of Information. Brownstein urges
his readers to go beyond the idea of information
as a representation of the world and see it within
the context of a practice of knowledge, i.e., in
relation to its deployment to broader purposes,
both social and ideological.
Kevin Gray, Gwen Stowers, and Kathryn Egan
focus on the import of media in the political and
social domain, as does Gerardo de la Fuente Lora.
Kevin Gray (Habermas, McLuhan, and the Public
Sphere) shows the role of the coffee house and
newspaper in shaping political and social discourse
in the bourgeois world of the 18th century. Gray
considers whether the present-day public sphere,
sustained by mass media and the internet, meets
the conditions necessary to make it vibrant and
influential. Gwen Stowers offers a wide-ranging
critique of education and the media as fostering
racism or the social construction of race. Dr.
Stowers, an educator, draws on social theory
(Bourdieu), historical ethnography (Takaki),
empirical studies, and her own professional
experience in her indictment of current practice.
Kathry Egan (Searching for Warmth in Common
Data Links: A McLuhanesque Study of Military
Target Acquistion) discusses the role of
information technology in Cold War and post-Cold
War politics and warfare. McLuhans distinction
between hot and cold media informs Dr. Egans
analysis of network-centric warfare in a new
Cold War. Gerardo de la Fuente Lora (Complex
Systems and the Rebellion of the Machines) uses
the cinema to construct a narrative of alienation
in a techno-mediated world. Drawing on stories
of machine rebellion in contemporary films, de la
Fuente concludes his reflection with the vision of
a world saturated with things leaving no place
of last refuge from the proliferation and
government of things.
The concluding three contributions address
issues of deception and self deception. Kurt

ix

voices with a view to summary and synopsis. The

challenge this year was greater since the Society
decided to combine papers from two conferences,
one of which, the ninth annual conference at
National University in La Jolla, included papers
presented under the aegis of the Outis project
(on deception) as well as papers on media and
mediation. This Introduction offers a navigation
tool for exploring the domain comprised by the
contributions included in this issue of Glimpse.
My expectation is that readers will find their own
ways amid the diverse reflections offered in this
edition but that they will find, as this editor has,
striking resonances within the ensemble.
Let me congratulate and thank the contributors
to this edition of Glimpse, as I commend their
work to our readers.

Cline traces the career of the legendary Houdini

(Unmasking the Simulacrum), revealing
for readers a public practice as much devoted
to exposing the fraud and deception of bogus
spiritualists as to staging incredible escapes and
illusions. Tracy Dalke examines the case of self
deception in relation to false memory syndrome.
Psycho-therapeutic practice comes in for scrutiny
in a multi-layered reflection on the relationship of
the self to its past and present and to others in its
history, including psycho-therapists who may be
implicated in the creation of false memories of
abuse. The paper, presented in the context of the
Outis project, reflects as much on mediations, viz.,
those carried out by the self, with and in relation
to others. Michaela Ott gives global scope to
the phenomenon of deception in Out of Global
Deception. Attentive to the meaning of affect,
particularly in the philosophy of Spinoza, Dr. Ott
links the the violent images of globalization to a
condition of living outside [the globe]. Alienation
and disaffection acquire a new depth of meaning
in Otts penetrating and far-reaching essay.
The preparation of an edition of Glimpse invites
an editor to seek common threads in a diversity of

Dennis E. Skocz
President
The Society for Phenomenology and Media

UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING MEDIA PHENOMENOLOGICALLY

Skocz

Dennis E. Skocz

arshall McLuhans name no longer enjoys the broad

recognition it had in the 60s and 70s but many of his
principal ideas captured in phrases like the medium is
the message and the global village have achieved truism status.
McLuhans fecund mind poured out ideas in a creative stream
of consciousness that left many a reader and critic stunned and
challenged to respond. Some touted McLuhans genius; others
questioned McLuhans depth of insight and the grounding of his
many claims in scholarship or science. My intention is not to reopen
an old debate that played itself out decades ago. My aim is rather
to suggest that phenomenology offers a method for grounding and
enriching McLuhans insights into the world-transforming power
of the electronic and other media. Why might this be useful?
My assumption is that McLuhans ideas are almost always worth
thinking about. Even when he overstates his case, he captures
something essential about the way in which the media mediate our
relationship to each other and the world about us. McLuhans mind
also embraces a broad range of media that together and as a whole
play in our lived experience of the world. As idiosyncratic and
unsystematic as his analyses appear, they do offer raw material and
testable hypotheses for an open-ended program of media analysis
which not only encompasses disparate media but offers a common
approach for understanding them. Whether McLuhan wrote about
the Roman alphabet or automobile, his concern was to show how
the medium in question influenced our way of being in the world
often in profound and yet unnoticed ways.
But if one accepts the value of McLuhans project and its
approach, what purpose might its translation into phenomenological
terms serve? If McLuhans work is treasure trove of insights
and his approach provides a means of bringing them into focus,
what can phenomenology add and why might phenomenology be
appropriate for continuing McLuhans project?
My answer could be put this way: McLuhan is best understood
as a phenomenologist offering insight into the nature of the media.
Absent a phenomenological idiom, McLuhan is left to make
claims that are taken as empirical and judged by the standards
of empirical research. Taken at face value his work often comes
across as a pastiche of questionable factual claims and striking
but untestable metaphors. Even a key work like Understanding
Media conventional in appearance reads like a series of
burst transmissions, combining free association and Delphic
pronouncements. The facts never get worked into generalizations
validated by an inductive methodology. The metaphors for
example, that of the media as extensions of human organs and
senses cannot be proven nor do they prove anything. So the
critics and befuddled readers would say. Phenomenology offers
the option of regarding McLuhans claims as insights into the
essential nature of the media. Phenomenology takes seriously the
notion of insight or intuition into the essence of a phenomenon
Wesenschau or primordial dator vision. Phenomenology
offers a cluster of concepts and techniques which makes it
possible to speak sensibly of how things present themselves to
our consciousness or awareness, apart from the content of the
awareness or experience and whether that content represents an

Independent Scholar
(Ph.D., Philosophy,
Duquesne University),
Washington, DC

11

Dennis E. Skocz

existent state of affairs. Without phenomenology,

McLuhans best work may go unappreciated or
discounted. Using phenomenology, meritorious
insights are grounded; questionable concepts find
an appropriate critique.
If phenomenology has something to offer
McLuhan, it arguably gains from working
through McLuhans insights. Husserls ambition
was to understand the relationship of the ego to its
world. He understood that that was a relationship
mediated by imagery and language, spoken and
written. Concepts, including the formal concepts
of logic and mathematics as well as the rational and
empirical concepts of the natural sciences, also
work to mediate our relationship to the world. At
the end of his career Husserl came to speak often
and concretely of a lived experience of the world
understood as life world. And, he suggested that
the scientific constitution of the world worked to
alienate us from the lived experience of that very
life-world from which science itself ultimately
derives its significance.
All in all, Husserl launched a philosophical
movement with a far-reaching program and welldeveloped concrete investigations of foundational
phenomena. Absent from his impressive
philosophical achievement and his meticulous
attention to mediation adumbrated in concepts
of constitution, founding and founded acts of
consciousness, horizonality, and sedimentation
were analyses dedicated to the mediation of
the electronic media or of mediating machinetechnologies like the railroad or the automobile.
The gap is all the more significant when one
considers the degree to which our lived experience
of the world is mediated by the media. McLuhans
work, I would suggest, offers insights which lend
themselves to phenomenological treatment and
help to fill the gap. The Husserlian consciousness
perceiving, feeling, valuing, judging, willing,
acting is yet not adequately described in essential
terms if it does not reflect on the mediated givenness
of what gives itself through the mediation of the
media. The data and hypotheses which crowd
the pages of McLuhans work provide material for
phenomenological analysis: concrete analyses of
how various media present and constitute a field
of awareness or, more broadly, a life-world for the
self. The breadth of McLuhans interest resonates
with Husserls ambition for phenomenology: it was
to be a collective undertaking among researchers
across the world and over generations addressing
an open-ended indeed, infinite task of rational
self-understanding, one that is progressively

enriched by the cumulative results of constitutive

phenomenological investigations (Husserl 20-21).
Obviously, a journal paper cannot hope to
carry out a phenomenological translation of
all of McLuhans work. What I hope to do here
is rather modest. First, I mean to indicate how
Husserls notions of epoche, eidetic reduction, and
imaginative variation taken together open up
and ground the field of investigation staked out by
McLuhan. I hope to suggest how phenomenology
might translate the McLuhan dictum, the
medium is the message. Second, I endeavor to
show how Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of the
body allows for grounding McLuhans central and
organizing metaphor of the media as extensions
of man, specifically of our sensory-motor organs.
The first task addresses McLuhans focus and
approach to the media, i.e., the way they mediate.
The second addresses the nature of the media in
relation to human beings who use the media.
The medium is the message. The message is
what is said; the medium is how the message is
carried. To assert that the medium is the message
is to suggest that the medium itself says something
in the way it presents its content. To assert further
that the medium is the message is to suggest
that how the medium presents its content is
the message we ought to be paying attention to.
McLuhan wants us to shift focus from the program
content of media like television and radio or comic
books and pay attention to the way a medium, as
the specific medium it is, presents its objects or
contents.
Ironically, McLuhans way of presenting
his key ideas often worked to undermine their
acceptance. Some critics took his insistence on
medium over message as discounting program
content altogether and elevating the media as
all-important agents of social transformation.
McLuhan claimed that the automobile had done
more to equalize the races than ethical discourse.
Many people, McLuhan said, have observed
how the real integrator or leveler of white and
Negro in the South was the private car and the
truck, not the expression of moral points of view
(McLuhan 197). The claim diverted attention to
comparative causal analysis which actually had
more impact, the spoken and written expression
of moral arguments and appeals (message) or the
alleged transformative effects of automobile usage
(medium)? At the same time, it left unanalyzed the
arguably concrete ways in which the automobile, as
a medium, alters our perceptions and connections
to the world and to other people. In another

12

UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING MEDIA PHENOMENOLOGICALLY

givenness or ways in which that of which we are

aware itself and as such presents itself (Husserl,
Section 99, 268). One may think of consciousness
as a medium in which various media perception,
imagination, idealization, desire, etc. attend to
objects differently. In such attending, the objects
present themselves or give themselves differently.
Husserl also writes about how non-electronic
media [my expression], specifically sign and
image, present their respective objects; moreover,
Husserl attributes an intentionality to them
these two media in themselves present objects
differently (Husserl, Section 99, 269). The idea
that things like images or signs, that exist outside
of awareness, refer to objects beyond themselves
and that each, after its own mode, present objects
differently is an idea that suggests the possibility
of a phenomenology of media, i.e., how various
media, to include print and electronic media, work
with consciousness itself to present the world.
The key point is this: Husserl addresses how
phenomena present themselves to consciousness.
But what is the value of this detour through
Husserl for understanding McLuhan? Husserls
performance of the epoche shows that the domain
of his investigations and McLuhans is
accessible by way of a repeatable reorientation of
awareness. Understanding the mediating function
of the media does not depend upon the success
or failure of claims that a specific medium has
produced particular empirical transformations
in our relationship to the world and each other.
Husserls method offers a way of distinguishing
phenomena as to their essence this by way of
imaginative variation and the eidetic reduction
(Husserl Section 70, 181-184). What gives itself to
awareness is distinguished as to its essential being
by imagining variations in the appearance and
constitution of the phenomena: as a geometer I can
image triangles whose sides vary in length without
losing sight of what a triangle is. If however I
imagine a figure with four or five sides, then I am
no longer dealing with a triangle. I come to see that
being a triangle means having three sides. By way
of these imaginative variations I come to bring to
intuitive clarity the eidos or essence triangle, i.e., I
effect an eidetic reduction.
McLuhan is most successful in bringing his
own sense of medium to clear vision when he
performs what amounts to a kind of combined
epoche and eidetic reduction, i.e., when he operates
in a way that could be called phenomenological.
In one explanation of his dictum, the medium is
the message, he invites us to imagine an electric

case, McLuhan fails to show how the television

medium, rather than program content, accounts
for the way in which individuals on TV appear to
viewers. McLuhan claims that Nixons appearance
on the Jack Paar program shows how television,
as a medium, softens the image of a person, but
the reference to the Paar show raises doubts about
whether the program content (Paars easygoing
manner relaxed many a guest) accounted for
the softening rather than the medium as such.
McLuhan alludes to Paars tact for the character
of the television medium, but then notes Paars
affording Nixon the opportunity to play the piano
on the show (McLuhan 269). It is easy to imagine
that the programming decision to offer Nixon
the stage to showcase his piano-playing talent
had more to do with any softening of his image
than some particular attribute of television as a
medium. To be sure, one could argue that Nixon
could not have been seen and heard playing the
piano on the radio or in a newspaper, but McLuhan
does not make that point or one like it. Instead, he
makes an undefined and unelaborated distinction
between products and processes, the latter
being something which television favors. The
distinction does nothing to clarify matters and
raises additional questions, e.g., is not television
the medium par excellence for pitching products
with advertising?
Let me begin to suggest how phenomenology
can serve McLuhans purposes. Phenomenology
focuses on the essential. It begins its work by
bracketing the content of consciousness and
attending to the way in which phenomena give
themselves. This is precisely the role of the
phenomenological reduction or epoche. Our
normal relation to the world is one of participation
and engagement. I take objects of perception as
existent. I hold perceptions for true (Husserl 2730). With the epoche, I disengage and bracket the
claims of the world upon me, not to deny them
but rather to regard them in the way that they
present themselves to me, to attend to their nature
as phenomena (Husserl 31-32). With the epoche,
a field of investigation opens up: being as the
correlate of my awareness. Husserl describes the
very thing which McLuhan wants us to focus on:
how the world is given to our awareness (Husserl
33-34; 101-104). In reflecting upon our awareness
or experience of a tree, for example, there is the
self-same tree, the various intentions or
presentations we can bring to bear on it, and,
correlated with the latter, the various ways in which
it gives itself to us, i.e. differences in the mode of

13

Dennis E. Skocz

light bulb. The virtue of the electric light is that

it is all medium, it conveys no message. All
the better to concentrate on how its mediation
reforms our relationship to the world. The very
selection of the light bulb as an example brings
about the result which an epoche would effect: it
precludes any engagement with a message content
conveyed by the medium. McLuhan goes on to
imagine various situations in which the electric
light illuminates its environment. Through these
imaginative variations, we come to see the essence
of medium as that which alters our relationship to
the world apart from any message it might carry
(McLuhan 23-25) . The electric light analysis, I
would suggest, should be a paradigm for the kind
of media analyses that a post-McLuhan science
of the media should follow. Had McLuhan
undertaken something similar with respect to the
automobile and the television, in the two examples
cited above, he might have kept his focus on
mediation.
To sum up what has been said to this point,
phenomenology provides a way of understanding
more precisely the meaning of McLuhans
fundamental insight: the medium is the message.
Epoche or bracketing holds message content at
bay to allow the effect of the medium to shine
through more clearly. With imaginative variation,
media analysis has a tool for teasing out what
is essential to the mediating function of a given
medium, making evident what is essential and
peculiar to the way a given medium alters and
transforms our awareness of the world.
Let me turn now to the central organizing
metaphor for McLuhans work: the media as
extensions of the human being. The subtitle of
Understanding Media is The Extensions of Man.
McLuhan explains the sense of the metaphor
by saying that machine technologies like the
automobile extend the body (the feet specifically)
and that the electronic media extend the organs
of perception (McLuhan 61, 64, 67, 71). The
metaphor is vivid and thought provoking but is
vulnerable to the skepticism of a literal frame of
mind which stands always ready to dismiss the
cognitive value of this or any other metaphor.
If one discredits such a key metaphor, then
any contributions its application makes to
understanding the media are at risk. McLuhan
himself furnishes ammunition to his literally
minded critics by adducing empirical data to
show how a media extension alters perceptions,
referring to the way in which the Mackworth head
camera shows how children watching TV scan

the images on the television screen (McLuhan

269). If the metaphor of the media as extensions
of the body and its organs expresses something
essential, then that insight is not proven by limited
data about the way children, whose experience is
arguably closely circumscribed by class, culture,
and history, perceive TV images. The data here
would at best serve to illustrate a concept already
understood. When McLuhan skips over the kind
of clarification that he gives with the electric light
(arguably a phenomenological clarification) and
proceeds to adduce disparate data from the natural
and social sciences e.g., Selyes work on stress
(McLuhan 52) he reinforces the notion that his
metaphor makes an empirical claim requiring the
support of and subject to the critique that applies
to empirical generalizations.
I would suggest that Merleau-Pontys
phenomenology of the body affords a means of
grounding the insight of McLuhans key metaphor.
The media can become extension of the body with
the world because the body is always already
in and of the world, is itself an extension of our
knowing and acting being in the world. This is
the first point. The second is that the media are
not simply objects in a Cartesian space that join
to other objects in Cartesian space, human bodies,
to set up a linkage between still other such bodies
in order to facilitate the flow of messages back
and forth between human bodies and objects
out there. The media truly extend the sensorymotor functions of the human body. In a way that
Merleau-Ponty will clarify, the body, as it were,
reaches out through the media to the things in its
environment to know them better and act upon
them. Conversely, the media extend back into
the body so as to become virtually integral parts
of body, its other organs. It is this reachback
that serves to clarify what McLuhan says about
the sensibility altering effects of the media on
humans.
Merleau-Ponty tells us that the human body
is not just in space but inhabits space (MerleauPonty 139). It is precisely through the body that
consciousness effects its being toward the world
and the worlds objects. The human body can
never be understood simply as an object located
in the world, known and felt along with other
objects, because the human body is the affective
ground for a world of sensible objects (MerleauPonty 92). Moreover, the body is not just another
body in space that moves and is moved, but the
body is an access to the world with its own bodilypractical knowledge (praktagnosia) of the world

14

UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING MEDIA PHENOMENOLOGICALLY

(Merleau-Ponty 140). In its practical activity the

body extends beyond itself: it is wherever there is
something to be done (Merleau-Ponty 250). The
point made in these brief descriptions is that the
body affectively, cognitively, and practically
is beyond itself and toward the world. The media
do not extend a body that is somehow first inert
and in itself. The human body is already always
geared to the world and extended toward it. Each
of us can catch sight of this body out and about
in the world gathering knowledge by way of the
primitive experience of one hand touching another.
In it, one catches sight (feels?) the touching hand
as thrust towards things in order to explore them
(Merleau-Ponty 93). Even from this brief reprise
of Merleau-Pontys thought, one can see that the
media do not establish a link between the knower
and the known. In what follows, Merleau-Pontys
analysis will show how the media extend this
pre-existing, ongoing linkage that describes the
very being of the embodied human being. The
embodied human being is a reaching out. The
media extend that reaching out and therefore can
properly be said to be extensions of our organs.
But how does this mediated reaching out take
place? Merleau-Ponty offers a description of the
blind man reaching out with his walking stick
(Merleau-Ponty 143). The walking stick becomes
an extension of the blind mans arm and eyes. With
the stick the blind man locates where things are.
With the stick he extends his arm beyond its reach
and with the arm-stick organ (my expression) he
sees where something is and, can locate himself
as well in relation to the things around him. What
is significant in Merleau-Pontys description is that
the tip of the stick is where he feels or perceives the
object it touches. If Merleau-Pontys description is
faithful to what gives itself in the phenomenon,
then the stick assumes the function of the hand
and becomes the locus of a feeling of contact. It is
not the case that the blind man draws an inference
from what he feels in his hand that contact has
been made at the tip of the stick. The stick gives
him over directly to the object at which its touch
terminates. The medium here (the stick) mediates
in an unobtrusive way so that its mediation does
not explicitly interpose itself between the object
known and the knower. The blind man directly
knows the object through the stick. At the end
of this masterful phenomenological description,
Merleau-Ponty extends the analysis to other
media, like hats and cars. In all such cases, getting
used to the medium means to transplant ones body
into it and conversely to incorporate it into ones

body: the two movements and directions which

I referred to above as reaching out and reaching
back are noted here by Merleau-Ponty.
The case of the blind mans stick enriches the
meaning of extension as applied to the media
in relationship to the body. The next case from
Merleau-Ponty describes a mirror world in a way
that allows one to grasp how the embodied self can
be said to inhabit the virtual world constituted by
media like television (Merleau-Ponty 250-254). In
an experiment by the psychologist Wertheimer a
subject is made to view a room through a mirror at
a 45 degree tilt. At first, the subject sees the room
as titled, but, provided that the subject remains
fixed on the mirror image, the room all at once
rights itself. Merleau-Ponty notes that the reflected
room loses is tilt and rights itself when it comes to
be inhabited by a virtual body that relates itself via
possible taskings with objects in the virtual room
so that they order themselves in light of the virtual
bodys projects. The subject, instead of inhabiting
her real body and viewing the reflected spectacle
(room) as an image in the real space inhabited
by the real body, takes up virtual habitation in
the room-spectacle and leaves behind the framing
imposed by the real space to gear herself to the
virtual space as a realm of possible sensory-motor
activity. At this point, the virtual space displaces
the real space and a pact develops: the subject
enjoys the virtual space and that space exerts its
power over the subject. Is this whole phenomenon
described by Merleau-Ponty not the very kind of
thing that happens when one watches television?
The viewer ceases to view the screen image as
an image within the spatial framework of the real
room in which the TV set is located and comes
to inhabit the scene represented on TV. The
viewers inhabitation of the virtual space of the
TV program entails taking the sensory-motor
projects in that virtual/TV space as though they
were taskings presented to her in a bodily-lived
space. As in the mirror-world experiment, a pact
develops between the viewer and the virtual space
of the medium: the viewer enjoys the spectacle
and the medium exerts its power over the viewer.
What may seem like a long preamble through
Merleau-Pontys phenomenology offers a way
to understand McLuhans central metaphor for
the media in a way that grounds and enriches
its meaning. The notion of extension acquires
more concreteness in what Merleau-Ponty says
about the blind mans stick. The description
allows one to understand more vividly the
integration of the medium and the embodied

15

Dennis E. Skocz

Works Cited
Husserl, Edmund..Ideas: General Introduction
to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. W. R. Boyce
Gibson. London: Collier-MacMillan Ltd.,
1962.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill
Book Company, 1964.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of
Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. New York:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962.

media user than does an undefined or unclarified

reference to extension in the metaphor or a sense
of extension which envisions an extrinsic linkage
of elements. McLuhans global village itself a
striking metaphor can be better understood as
a virtual space which one can inhabit in the way
that Merleau-Ponty describes in his discussion
of the mirror experiment (McLuhan 20, 56).
Cohabitation in the virtual global village acquires
a more immediate sense once one has thought
through phenomenologically what inhabiting a
virtual space of any kind might mean. McLuhans
discussion of the numbness which exposure to
the electronic media often engenders acquires a
deeper significance against the background of what
Merleau-Ponty says about media incorporating
themselves into the embodied subject (MerleauPonty 51-56). To the degree that the media capture
our bodily self-space, the affective and information
load they carry becomes that much less tolerable.
Media which have become part of the bodys
bulk become a backchannel for depositing the
cumulative stress of the experiences they gather
up in their incessant global sweep (McLuhan 53).
The limitations of a journal article preclude
any further elaboration of the project I sketch in
this paper. If the analysis carried out here has
been successful, then it suggests the utility of a
phenomenological recuperation of McLuhans
work. If McLuhans strong suit is insight into the
way the media shape our experience of the world
and connect us bodily to that world, then his
reflections would arguably prosper as contributions
to what Husserl might call an eidetic science, one
aimed at elaborating the essential structures of
lived experience in its greatest amplitude.

16

EXPOSURE, ABSORPTION, SUBJECTION BEING-IN-MEDIA

Nagel

Chris Nagel

Preliminary
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of
fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world
is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our
bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric
technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself
in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as
our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase
of the extensions of man the technological simulation of
consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be
collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human
society, much as we have already extended our senses and our
nerves by the various media.
Understanding Media, pp. 3f.

Faculty, University of
California, Stanislaus,
Turlock, California

mmediately following this, McLuhan cites the complaint of

the books editor that so much of his material is new, and thus
likely to hurt sales.1 Perhaps some of what had seemed new in
McLuhans account is his emphasis on the affective dimension of
media extensions. In his view, mechanical technology and its
concomitant media form, print, develop attitudes of abstraction and
detachment, allowing, for instance, a surgeon to act upon a patient
without being humanly involved (McLuhan, Understanding
4). Electric media move us to participate, in depth, in the
consequences of our every action (McLuhan, Understanding 4),
thus toward an implosion of social and political functions,
involvement in which we cannot avoid (McLuhan, Understanding
5). In closing his Introduction, McLuhan proclaims:
The aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth
of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology The
mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. We
are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings
totally. There is a deep faith to be found in this new attitude a
faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being (McLuhan,
Understanding 5f).
How could media, these commonplace, everyday phenomena,
have such broad and profound effect upon us? My sense is that
it has remained unclear what McLuhan understands to be the
relationship between electric media and this faith in ultimate
harmony. Moreover, I believe that the implications, if not indeed
the full meaning of McLuhans pronouncements about media, have
not been made clear. Undoubtedly, McLuhan himself is primarily
responsible for this state of affairs. But rather than decide whether
or not to dismiss him as a charlatan, Id like to take a second look at
McLuhans generalizations about media, by letting them provoke a
more careful examination of our being-in-media.
I will begin by reinterpreting McLuhan from a phenomenological
standpoint, drawing from Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I will turn
from this toward a brief consideration of McLuhans faith in the
harmonizing potential of electric media.

17

Chris Nagel

The Medium is the Message

McLuhans central argument in the first part of
Understanding Media distinguishes mechanical
from electric technology, focusing on the claim
that the shift toward electric media technology is
decisive for human societies and for human being.
In one of his notoriously recursive expressions,
McLuhan tells us that electric light is pure
information, before going on to explain that
the content of any medium is always another
medium, and finally that the message of any
medium or technology is the change of scale or
pace or pattern that it introduces into human
affairs (McLuhan, Understanding 8).2 Similarly,
the content (in scare quotes, la McLuhan) of
any medium introduces a deformation of the scale,
pace, or pattern of human affairs. To study media,
McLuhan explains, we should turn our attention
from the so-called content toward well,
toward what?
McLuhan insists that electricity is decisive as a
medium, that is, as a deformation that alters scale,
pace, or pattern, by making things instant. With
instant speed the causes of things began to emerge
to awareness again, (McLuhan, Understanding
12). As an example, McLuhan presents cubism,
which rejects the illusion of perspective in favor
of the whole presented by way of all facets of
an object painted in two dimensions. Later, [t]
he effects of technology do not occur at the level
of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or
patterns of perception steadily and without any
resistance (McLuhan, Understanding 18).
Readers
of
Maurice
Merleau-Pontys
Phenomenology of Perception may note a passing
resemblance between McLuhans discussion and
Merleau-Pontys accounts of perception. For
example, the notion of media as extensions may
bring to mind the blind mans stick,3 and the selfrecursive relation of media and content may
appear similar to Merleau-Pontys chapter on
The Body as Expression, and Speech. While I
think it is plain that McLuhans writing on media
is not a phenomenology, I dont think taking a
phenomenological approach to his work is arbitrary
or capricious. In a similar way to McLuhans
insistence that we dont see media, MerleauPonty noted the strange blindness of traditional
philosophy to perception. Their projects are both
directed toward making the invisible (media,
perception) visible, or at least palpable.
Here, I will adopt what I hope will prove a
coherent and intelligible strategy by reinterpreting
McLuhans enigmatic expressions as though they

were a first step toward a phenomenology of

media. The initial aim of this reinterpretation is to
account for media as extensions of consciousness,
which means media are extensions of perception
that is, media are ambiguously both projections of
ourselves as perceivers, and situations in which we
perceive. Media are milieux, rather than conduits,
as I will attempt to explain.
Consider this passage from Merleau-Pontys
chapter on Sense Experience:
My body is the seat or rather the very actuality
of the phenomenon of expression (Ausdruck),
and there the visual and auditory experiences,
for example, are pregnant one with the other,
and their expressive value is the ground of
the antepdredicative unity of the perceived
world, and, through it, of verbal expression
(Darstellung) and intellectual significance
(Bedeutung). My body is the fabric into which
all objects are woven, and it is, at least in
relation to the perceived world, the general
instrument of my comprehension. (MerleauPonty, Phenomenology 235)
Sense experience is not a pathway through which
material objects have effects on consciousness,
nor a gathering of data to fill in the formulae of
consciousness, but instead seem to be a kind of
pregnancy or latency of meaning and of objects.
Media, as extensions of consciousness, ground the
antepredicative unity of the perceived world,
for example, by shedding (electric) light upon it.
One of the problems with this is that what media
mediate and what perception perceives becomes
harder to identify. For Merleau-Ponty, perception
is how-it-is-that-there-is-a-world, rather than a
mechanism or conduit for data from the world
to enter consciousness. Similarly, for McLuhan
it appears that media is how-it-is-that-there-isinformation or how-it-is-that-there-is-pattern.
The sense of media mediating between is pretty
thoroughly lost.
This interpretation of the notion that media
are extensions of consciousness seems to lead to
a paradox. In McLuhans terms, media content
is really another medium, which suggests that
there is nothing in media but media. The paradox
in Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of perception
is that the body-subjects projection into the world
(that is, perception itself), as an expression or
behavior with a certain style, finds objects in the
world only because they correlate to that style.
Perception proceeds by projecting a perceptual
field (that is to say, the world), but that projection
takes place only because there is a world there to

18

EXPOSURE, ABSORPTION, SUBJECTION BEING-IN-MEDIA

be perceived. There is a world there to be perceived

neither because of an act of mine to achieve it
(to create the unity of the world), nor because
the objective whole of the world exists a priori,
but because of perception. In turn, perception
is neither a particular act of a bodily organ, nor
a particular act by consciousness, but is instead
the openness of the body-subject to its perceptual
field.
It is not I who touch, it is my body; when I
touch I do not think of diversity, but my hands
rediscover a certain style which is part of their
motor potentiality, and this is what we mean
when we speak of a perceptual field. I am able
to touch effectively only if the phenomenon
finds an echo within me, if it accords with a
certain nature of my consciousness, and if the
organ which goes out to meet it is synchronized
with it. The unity and identity of the tactile
phenomenon do not come about through any
synthesis of recognition in the concept, they
are founded upon the unity and identity of the
body as a synergic totality. (Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology 316f)
The ambiguity of perception, frequently
remarked upon by Merleau-Ponty commentators,
plays an important role here as well. Perception
is ambiguous in several senses or dimensions. For
this interpretation of McLuhan, the most important
ambiguity in perception is that of the projection
and openness of the body-subject. On one hand,
perception is movement towards or into the
perceptual field, reaching, grasping, penetrating,
and appropriating the field and its emergent
objects. On the other hand, for perception to take
place, the body-subject must be open to the field
itself, subject itself to that field.4
The perceiving subject must, without
relinquishing his place and point of view, and
in the opacity of sensation, reach out towards
things to which he has, in advance, no key,
and for which he nevertheless carries within
himself the project, and open himself to an
absolute Other which he is making ready in
the depths of his being Expressed in more
general terms, there is a logic of the world
to which my body in its entirety conforms,
and through which things of intersensory
significance become possible for us (MerleauPonty, Phenomenology 325f).
In sum, perception is Merleau-Pontys account
of the body-subjects being-in-the-world. There is
a world through the covalent projection/openness
of the body-subject. One (possibly controversial)

way to put this is that the world is neither the

body-subjects, nor the worlds; and the bodysubject is neither the worlds, nor its own. They
are co-foundational.
The natural world is the horizon of all horizons,
the style of all possible styles, which guarantees
for my experiences a given, not a willed, unity
underlying all the disruptions of my personal
and historical life. Its counterpart within me is
the given, general and pre-personal existence
of my sensory functions in which we have
discovered the definition of the body. (MerleauPonty, Phenomenology 330)
Returning to McLuhans phrase, the medium
is the message can be interpreted to indicate that
media extend consciousness into a media field.
What becomes sensible within that field is what
correlates to the particular style of the media.
Media do not merely extend certain sense organs.
They serve as projections of perception as a whole
towards the world and touching upon that world. In
so far as they find their echo in that world, media
projections maintain openness to an absolute Other,
and constitute unity and significance. What there
is to perceive through media is therefore always set
forth by the style of media. At the same time that
media are extensions of consciousness, therefore,
they are also modes of openness to the media field.
The medium is the message: the medium is how it
is that consciousness or perception is there at the
origin of sense and meaning.

McLuhan says: Any invention or
technology is an extension or self-amputation
of our physical bodies, and such extension also
demands new ratios or new equilibriums (sic)
among the other organs and extensions of the
body (McLuhan, Understanding 45). The
human-technology relationship involves us in
certain imperatives: we must embrace and
serve technology in order to use it (McLuhan,
Understanding 46). The closure or equilibriumseeking is necessary to constitute unity and
significance. Media are neither mere tools of
ours, nor are we the playthings of media. That
embrace of technology is the establishment
of covalent, cofoundational relationship. We
experience through media only insofar as this
relationship exists.
first example: TV
One implication of this interpretation relates
to the brief explorations of different forms of
media in Part II of Understanding Media. While
it may make sense to regard clocks, airplanes,

19

Chris Nagel

games and weapons as media, and discuss them

alongside telephones, telegraphs, advertisements,
and so forth, it is not immediately clear how
Part II proceeds from part I, and particularly the
discussions of media as extensions and the phrase
the medium is the message.
To take a look at a first example, television,
the cool medium of involvement in depth and
presentation of processes, rather than products
(McLuhan, Understanding 309), contrasts with the
hot medium of print. This is because the form of
the TV image, visually low in data (that is, in
1964), functions by way of the penetration of light
through the screen, producing a mosaic which
the viewer unconsciously reconfigures into
whole works.5 McLuhan notes that for this reason,
the TV image lacks the third dimension, and
therefore requires viewers to close the spaces in
the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation
that is profoundly kinetic and tactile (McLuhan,
Understanding 314).
All media are shapes of perception and
consciousness, which project a media field and
subject consciousness to that field. The unity
of that field, and the unity of perception, are
constantly achieved in the interplay and covalence
of projection and subjection. Perceptual unity
strives to balance optimum clarity and richness,
Merleau-Ponty says, finding objects emerging
in concreteness and wholeness (Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology 318). The low level of data in
the TV image distorts the field in a particular,
describable way. The shape of the TV image
beckons for perceptual contact to close the
spaces, compose clarity, and constitute unity and
signification, like a mosaic or like pointillism
(McLuhans other analogy). Since there is much
more for the TV audience to do, perceiving the
TV field demands greater participation in depth
in the depth of the image. Reiterating this in The
Medium is the Massage, McLuhan writes:
Television
demands
participation
and
involvement in depth of the whole being. It
will not work as a background. It engages you.
Perhaps this is why so many people feel that
their identity has been threatened. This charge
of the light brigade has heightened our general
awareness of the shape and meaning of lives
and events to a level of extreme sensitivity.
(McLuhan, Massage 125)
The way the TV image and TV perception
lead to such heightened awareness and
extreme sensitivity is somewhat more clear
if we understand perception as a projection and

openness to a meaningful whole. The style of that

perception prefigures sense and direction, evokes
a way of being-in-the-world.
second example: ads
The notion that content isnt the key to
understanding media is difficult to make sense
of at first. After all, the chapter on advertising
discusses what looks very much like the content,
or at least the ideological gist, of ads. But the
question for me is, how does advertising work
as a medium? How does it extend consciousness,
what is its particular style, and what media field
opens in and for advertising? McLuhan tells us
something about it:
Ads seem to work on the very advanced
principle that a small pellet or pattern in a noisy,
redundant barrage of repetition will gradually
assert itself. Ads push the principle of noise all
the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are
quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing. This depth principle of onslaught
on the unconscious may be the reason why.
(McLuhan, Understanding 227)
Now, to offer a re-interpretation of this passage
according to the strategy developed so far: The
media field of advertising is founded upon a
particular shape of consciousness, of perceptual
projection and of openness to this media field. This
shape of media-perception is attentive and subject
to contrasts of noise and pattern, redundancy and
repetition. The emergent object in the advertising
field is the pattern, that pellet of clarity and
signification which can only be significant against
the background of redundancy, repetition, and
noise. After all, any ad deliberately attended to is
nonsense. If approached in a perceptual style that
is not projected as advertising, that is, that is not
characterized by pattern-seeking-in-repetitivenoise, the perceptual field fails to be advertising.
Whatever that is, it isnt an ad.
But when advertising succeeds, its affective
power is incredibly impressive:
Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a
programmed harmony among all human
impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using
handicraft methods, it stretches out toward
the ultimate electronic goal of a collective
consciousness. When all production and all
consumption are brought into pre-established
harmony with all desire and all effort, then
advertising will have liquidated itself by its
own success (McLuhan, Understanding 227).

20

EXPOSURE, ABSORPTION, SUBJECTION BEING-IN-MEDIA

The Aspiration of Our Time

I have called McLuhans analysis of electric
medias emerging power and dominion
optimistic. The overriding tendency of his
proclamation focus on emergent harmony,
empathy, and community. On the other hand,
McLuhan occasionally acknowledges the electric
medias potential for dominance:
Electrical information devices for universal,
tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are
causing a very serious dilemma between
our claim to privacy and the communitys
need to know How shall the environment
be programmed not that we have become so
involved with each other, now that all of us
have become unwitting work force for social
change? (McLuhan, Massage 12)
This is difficult to explain within the boundaries
of McLuhans own work. Media, as extensions of
consciousness, appear on his account to open us
to one another, to create the possibility of a global
village, to transcend time and space. Once in a
while, McLuhan takes note of what seems to be
the exact contrary potential. How can the electric
medias potential for both empathy and domination
be accounted for?

Id like to combine two approaches.
The first of these draws upon feminist criticism
of Merleau-Pontys phenomenology. One of the
fundamental problems in Merleau-Pontys work
is the presumption of the anonymity of the bodysubject. Some feminist critics have suggested that
the so-called anonymous body is instead quite
obviously a masculine body: the metaphors of
projection, grasping, penetrating, transcendence,
and so forth describe a style of being-in-the-world
that is culturally linked to a gender performance.6
To call this body anonymous, and worse,
normal, establishes a masculine norm for
perception. Without assessing the value of this
criticism here, Id like to apply this strategy to
McLuhans likewise anonymous man whose
extensions media seem to be.

For McLuhan as well, the extensions of
man for the most part extend transcendence of
consciousness and perception, grant dominion over
time and space. Granted, the affective character
of such extensions is empathetic and deeply
sensitive, rather than heroic and domineering, but
the possibility of that empathy and sensitivity is
founded upon a kind of perceptual superpower.

What is left out of both accounts is into
what or whom these perceptual penetrations or
extensions transcend. The field of perception

and media is after all populated, or else no form of

empathy would be possible. If those Others in the
perceptual or media field are, like the anonymous
man of media extension, also empathetic and
sensitive, then it matters profoundly how extension
happens. There is a covalent relation, after all:
perceiving is not only penetrating, but also being
penetrated; media is not only extending into, but
being extended into. The media field is not only
entered into, but the media subject becomes
absorbed within that field. We cannot perceive
from outside the world.

Furthermore, we cannot perceive
anonymously. The style of perception is already
self-expression, already our presence before and to
the perceptual field. I become the body-subject I am
through subjecting myself to perceptual openness,
to being perceptually penetrated. I become the
media-subject I am through subjecting myself to
media openness, media penetration. When I watch
TV, not only is my perception extended, but so too
is the TV image extended into me.

Finally, insofar as media are extensions
of man, who is this man? Whose extensions are
these media projections? And in fact, we know
a bit about the answer to that question, and to
whom our media perception subjects us. Who is
extending into whom? Who is penetrating whom?
To what end?
Works Cited
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of
Perception. Trans. by Colin Smith. Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1986 [1945].
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1994 [1964].
McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. The
Medium is the Massage. New York: Bantam
Books, 1967.
Notes
Yet here and throughout Understanding Media,
McLuhans account depends on a fundamental
prevailing European philosophical assumption
about the human situation. In brief, there is
nothing new about the mind-body dualism in
McLuhans work. I suppose it is obvious that
no consciousness can be extended through
technological simulation without the underlying
material infrastructure (and all that that implies
about physical changes to planet and people),
but the trajectory imagined here is clearly a
transcendent collective consciousness.
1

21

Chris Nagel

Interpreted through Maurice Merleau-Pontys

account of speech, which in turn owes much to
Merleau-Pontys reading of Saussures linguistics.
Any act of speech takes place in a particular
linguistic situation, a synchronic state, and is
meaningful by way of the diacritical relations
between signs in that synchronic state. At the
same time, as an innovation, a new speech act, it
deforms those diacritical relations.
3
The blind mans stick has ceased to be an object
for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its
point has become an area of sensitivity, extending
the scope and active radius of touch, and providing
a parallel to sight. (p. 143) The blind mans world
differs from the normal persons not only through
the quantity of material at his disposal, but also
through the structure of the whole The senses
are distinct from each other and distinct from
intellection in so far as each one of them brings
with it a structure of being which can never be
exactly transposed. (224, 225)

Often, this is discussed in rather more

metaphysical language than I have used here: the
body-subjects transcendence is often contrasted
with the immanence of the perceptual field, for
instance. The ontological implications of MerleauPontys account of perception are beyond the scope
here; the more descriptive language is more useful
in articulating this interpretation of McLuhan.
5
The argument I am making in this paper seems
only to be all the more pertinent if, as McLuhan
says, improved TV (HD) ceases to be TV at all.
6
Among others, see Sullivan, Shannon,
Domination and dialogue in Merleau-Pontys
Phenomenology of Perception. Hypatia 15,1:
175-182; Butler, Judith, Sexual Ideology and
Phenomenological Description. The Thinking
Muse. Ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

22

PICTURING PHENOMENA: A PHENOMENOLOGY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Biceaga

Victor Biceaga

n the series of lectures entitled Main Issues in the Phenomenology

and Theory of Knowledge,1 Husserl examined in great detail the
formal structure of image consciousness (Bildbewusstsein). These
lectures construe the experiences of looking at images as diverse
as photographs, paintings, engravings, sculptures, films and even
stage performances as instances of picturing acts or acts of image
consciousness. Image consciousness is said to operate on the basis
of a tripartite scheme comprising the following constituents: (i) the
physical image (Bildding), (ii) the image object (Bildobjekt) and
(iii) the image subject (Bildsujekt) (PICM 20-1, 47-8, 584). In what
follows, I will consider Husserls descriptions of picturing acts, in
general, and of experiences of looking at photographs, in particular,
with the purpose of understanding the extent to which the structure of
image consciousness gets played out in a distinct way in the case of
photographs.
As intuitive presentifications, images are, in Husserls terms,
internally representative. Pictorial consciousness requires that
there be an internal affinity (PICM 32) between the intuition of
the image and the intuition of that which is presentified therein.
These two intuitions permeate one another. As a consequence,
viewers see-in or through the image itself that which is referred to
or pointed at by the image. In contrast, symbolic presentifications,
e.g., diagrams or maps, as well as signitive presentifications, e.g.,
written or spoken words, are externally representative. Symbols
and signs bring to mind what they mean by pointing away from
their own contents. Diagrams and maps point at what they mean
because the interconnections between the components of symbolic
representations are isomorphic with the interconnections between
the components of the things they refer to. However, in no way can
one see the electrical circuit in the diagram or the country scenery
in the map. Signs have even less affinity with what they signify
than symbols with what they symbolize. The name house brings
to mind the representation enclosed space used for shelter simply
in virtue of an arbitrary convention. What are the conditions
that must be met in order for surrogates or substitutes to bring
about the experience of seeing in? To understand Husserls answer
to this question, let us now take a closer look at the building blocks
of image consciousness.

Assistant Professor,
Nipissing University,
British Colombia, Canada

i) The Physical Image.

The image consciousness is instigated by a physical image
or an image-thing (Bildding). To take one of Husserls examples,
a photograph of a child is a piece of imprinted paper that has
certain properties: a rectangular shape, a smooth and glossy
black and white surface and a grainy white backside (PICM 20).
The materiality of the image attests to the genuinely perceptual
dimension of image consciousness. The photograph is a physical
thing located in real space and real time that I see in an ordinary
sense in just the same way I see the desk on which it lies and the
other fixtures in the room. Nevertheless, the photograph channels
the regard away from itself as rectangular, flat paper-thing toward
the figure that appears in it.

23

Victor Biceaga

ii) The Image Object.

The physical image is an artefact intentionally
produced to be the substrate or instigator of
the image object (Bildobjekt). When I look at a
photograph of a child I do not merely see line and
color patterns imprinted on a rectangular piece
of paper; I also see that child in or through the
photograph (PICM 37, 54, 202, 582). The visual
sensations occasioned by the photograph of a child
are apprehended, on the one hand, as physical
image the imprinted paper lying on the desk
and, on the other hand, as depicting object the
child figure. The image object and the physical
image are different apprehension of the same sense
contents (PICM 48). In looking at a photograph, I
apprehend contours, shapes and colors that are not
the contours, shape and color of the piece of paper
in spite of being spread on it. In short, the content
of the photograph elicits from the viewer a double
apprehension.

person in her portrait, it is not an aspect of the

person herself that appears but an altogether
different object, i.e., the image substitute of the
person. Although immersion in the apprehension
of one of the components of image consciousness
inhibits the apprehension of the other two, one
usually remains at least marginally aware of the
others and can turn ones regard toward them.
Thus, the tensions between physical image and
image object, on the one hand, and between image
object and image subject, on the other hand, form
the two axes that structure the constitution of
image consciousness as such.
Second, while it is perfectly clear that the picture
thing (Bildding) appears with the fullness and
force of perception (PICM 64), the apprehension
of the image object does not seem to have the
character of normal and full perception, despite
having sense contents implicated in it (PICM
43, 561). The image object appears or hovers
(vorschweben) before the viewer but is not taken as
something real or existing (PICM 21, 571). In other
words, the image object puts up a show without
positing itself as actual.2 Let us say that I look at
a black and white photographic portrait of a child.
If I focus on the cheek, then I have the sensation
grey. But I apprehend this sensation as the color
of the childs cheek rather than as the color of
the photographic paper. However, real childrens
cheeks are not grey. Therefore, my contemplating
the image object is just as much a perception of an
actually existing thing as a projection into reality
of an object of phantasy. Thus, the apprehension of
the image object straddles the perception/phantasy
divide. While I see the photograph as a physical
thing, my phantasy is producing the image object
as representing image. The greyish child figure in
the photograph is an illusory image (Scheinding)
or a figment (Fiktum). This means that the image
object is a nullity (PICM 51) and therefore does
not truly exist either in consciousness or outside of
it (PICM 23, 119).
Although not posited as actually existing, the
image object genuinely appears. In contrast, the
image subject is indirectly presentified but does
not appear. As a matter of fact, the subject depicted
by and seen in the image may well not exist at all.
One sees Hercules in a classical history painting
although Hercules is just a fictional character
rather than a being that actually existed.
Theorists of photography have often
emphasized that the power to compel viewers to
accept the image subject as real is that which sets
photographs apart from other images. For Andr

iii) The image subject.

The image object operates as a semblance of
(Scheinding) or substitute for the image subject
(Bildsujet), that is, the depicted or represented
thing (Sache), which is the third component
of image consciousness. The physical image
awakens the child-figure that hovers before the
beholder and depicts or re-presents the pictorial
subject, that is, the real child that once stood in
front of the camera. Physical images necessarily
manifest themselves as substrates or instigators of
image objects. Depictive images involve a further
doubling of apprehension. One sees the image
object in the physical image and, in addition, one
sees-in the image object the depicted thing or the
image subject. However, the image object is not
necessarily tied to an image subject because many
images are created with no the intention to depict
things or events as contemporary non-figurative
visual art amply illustrates.
To sum up, I will stress two important points
about the phenomenon of seeing-in. First, the
perception of an image has an experiential content
different from that of ordinary perception. In
ordinary perceptual experience, objects are
present there in front of ones eyes, given in person
or in the flesh (leibhaftig). Perception unfolds
within a horizon of determinations varying in
complexity by continually synthesizing multiple
aspects or profiles which are always apprehended
as aspects of an identical substrate. In contrast,
the phenomenon of seeing-in involves intertwined
apprehensions of different objects. When I see a

24

PICTURING PHENOMENA: A PHENOMENOLOGY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Bazin, the camera has an essentially objective

character and the photograph shares a common
being with the object itself rather than being a
mere reproduction of it (Bazin 13-15). Roland
Barthes defines photography as an emanation of
the referent whose function is to authenticate
the existence of a certain being (Barthes 80,
107). In the same vein, Rosalind Kraus talks about
photography as trophy or deposit of the real
itself (Kraus, 107, 112). These theorists argue
that, by virtue of the optical-chemical properties
of the machines that generate them, photographs
adhere to reality and are unable to depict fictitious
entities or events. Cameras map the intensity and
frequency of light rays reflected off the surface of
real things on to contrasting tones and colors of
the film. In this way, the photographic apparatus
operates a determinate and uniform point-topoint projection from objects in the world on to
the flat surface of the film (Friday 41).
Moreover, this photochemical inscription
of light patterns on photosensitive film is an
automatic process. Before taking a snap-shot, the
photographer can choose what direction to point
the camera, when to release the shutter and what
angle, lens, filter, exposure time or type of film
he or she will use. But once the camera is set off,
it is the optical characteristics of the camera that
determine what patterns and configurations the
light rays will imprint on the chemical coating of
the film. Photo cameras confine the part subjective
intentionality plays in image generation to the
trivial task of setting off the image producing
mechanism. As this mechanism operates under
predetermined parameters, the photographer
is spared the task of composition. What the
photographic image represents depends on what
happens to lie in front of the lens at the moment the
shot is taken not on what the photographer intends
to photograph. In contrast, hand-made images are
infused with subjective intentions so that what
they depict essentially depends on what it is that
their author intended to depict.3 By circumventing
the subjectivity of the photographer and co-opting
the material things themselves in the generation of
their own image, the camera lays claim to a special
fidelity to the real.
However, the fact that photographs are caused
by the uniform action of light on the chemical
coating of film is not sufficient to explain what
makes a photograph a depiction of an object or
event. A hammer strike causes a dent in a wall
but this does not make the dent a depiction of the
hammer. If I take a photograph of a fast moving

object with a long exposure time or if my camera

is severely out of focus, the lens may scatter the
light rays such that the resulting image would
look like an indistinct smudge of shapes and tints.
Properly speaking, such photographs are not
photographs of anything. A photograph cannot be
said to depict an object if nobody is able to see
that object in the photograph. Husserl repeatedly
stresses that resemblance belongs to the essence of
image consciousness (PICM 21). More precisely,
one sees the image subject in the appearing image
object because the latter resembles the former with
respect to plastic form (PICM 35, 90).
One can isolate the plastic form of an object
by looking at the object through a window pane
and by tracing the objects outline on the glass.
The material process of photographic image
production is designed to isolate the plastic form
of the object placed in front the lens, impress it on
to film and transfer it on to photosensitive paper.
If the photographer mishandles the camera or
intentionally uses blurring or over-exposure for
expressive purposes, then the resulting photograph
may fall short of isolating and impressing the plastic
form. But the principles of projective geometry
built into the functioning of the photographic
apparatus guarantee that if the light reflected from
the object travels in straight lines from object to
film and is focused on the plane of the film, then
the plastic form of the object is transferred without
alteration.
The claim that resemblance belongs to the
essence of photographic images is problematic
inasmuch as it fails to account for scientific practices
in the context of which cameras operate as data
collection devices or visualizing apparatuses rather
than as likeness generators.4 Chronophotograhy,
X-ray images and astronomic photography make
visible something that is altogether unavailable
for direct visual experience. The purpose of these
technologies is not to produce images resembling
some perceptual originals but to collect data
about physical phenomena. Nevertheless, such
considerations do not challenge the account of the
phenomenon of seeing-in in terms of resemblance
but point out that some photographs do not give
rise to seeing-in. If the image object were entirely
cut off from the image subject, the image would
not be able to depict anything. For depiction to be
at all possible, the image object must resemble the
image subject at least with respect to plastic form.
This requirement is independent of the means by
which images are produced.

25

Victor Biceaga

However, the experience of a double contrast

is constitutive of image consciousness because
images differ by definition from the things they
depict. On the one hand, the image object conflicts
with the image subject just as much as it resembles
or agrees with it. The size of the photographic
image rarely coincides with that of the subjects
photographed (PICM 145, 581). Furthermore,
the shades of grey in glossy black and white
photographs manifestly contrast with whatever
colors the photographed things would display
in actual perception. Whether it simply fails to
record traces of moving objects or whether it
subtracts phases of motion invisible for the naked
eye from the processes to which they belong, the
photo camera utterly transforms the appearance
of moving objects. The motionlessness, color
and size of photographs sharply set them apart
from the appearance their subjects display in
direct perception. On the other hand, the image
object stands in conflict with the perceptual field
in which it is inserted. The frame provides the
locus par excellence where this conflict becomes
manifest (PICM 50, 133, 486). Neither external
nor internal to the image space, the frame
performs a double task of anchoring the image
into a larger perceptual horizon and of channelling
the gaze into an image space endowed with its
own organization. Transmuting tridimensional
space into flat surfaces, the photographic image
brings to appearance an approximate, imperfect
or anomalous (PICM 581) spatiality. The
heterogeneity of the image space in relation to
actual space is also evident if cropping is taken into
account. A photograph cuts out a clearly delimited
section of a visual scene whereas the field of vision
is always fuzzy at the edges. Moreover, cropping
disrupts the kinaesthetic motivations belonging
to the normal spatial constitution. According to
phenomenological descriptions, the lived body
(Leib) participates in perceptual experience as
integrator or coordinator of free movements.
It is always by turning toward an object that
perception takes off. The spatiality of the image
is anomalous because it frustrates the systems of
kinesthetic sensations and disappoints the lived
bodys potentialities for movement. An immediate
consequence of this is that photographs, unlike
mirrors, microscopes and telescopes, curtail the
possibility of bodily orientation toward the objects
whose representation they display.
With one and the same gesture, the physicality
of the image asserts and sabotages the principle
of resemblance placed at the core of image

consciousness. If the image object did not resemble

the image subject, at least in part, one would not
see the former in the latter. If the visual experience
of the image did not diverge from the visual
experience of the objects depicted in them, then
image consciousness would collapse into mere
illusion. But to perceive an image as image is the
exact opposite of perceptual illusion. When I see
the person in or through her portrait I am not under
the illusion that the portrayed person is physically
present before me. The image consciousness is
a non-positing act, in the sense that it does not
presuppose the belief in the actual existence of the
image object, whereas the perceptual illusion is a
positing act in the sense that it depends on the false
belief in the actual existence of the apprehended
object (PICM 563).
Depending on the kind of image under
consideration, the level of adequacy (PICM 61)
or the extent of agreement (PICM 55) between
image object and image subject varies. If the
photographic record of things or events had no
documentary value, then the extensive use of
photographs as incriminating evidence in courts
of justice and as tools of personal identification in
administrative affairs would be unreasonable. But
this sanctions neither the claim that resemblance
with the depicted subject is all that counts in
the assessment of the adequacy of pictures nor
the idea that the photographic medium produces
better resemblances between the image object and
the image subject than what can be achieved by
other means. All images, photographs included,
replicate and at the same time distort the
appearances of things they depict and therefore
resemblance never amounts to complete likeness
(PICM 156). One sees in the image object only
some of the determinations of the image subject.
Moreover, photographs often evoke their subjects
more forcefully by exploiting procedures that
clearly subvert the standard of resemblance such
as blurring, over and underexposure, odd framing
and double impression. To establish the degree of
resemblance between an image and its subject is
not as much a question of whether the image is
true to reality as a question of discerning, picture
by picture, the variable distribution of moments of
partial coincidence and of partial contrast between
image object and image subject.
The coincidence between image object and
image subject is bound to remain partial because
image consciousness brings into conjunction
empty presentations and fulfilling intuitions.
Widely construed, empty presentation means non-

26

PICTURING PHENOMENA: A PHENOMENOLOGY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

intuitiveness, implicitness, non-genuine givenness,

latency, non-developed potentiality. To fulfill an
empty presentation means to make intuitive, to
determine more precisely, to explicate, to genuinely
bring something to present appearance. The core
content of the image object, i.e., the plastic form,
is operational in exhibiting or pictorializing the
image subject. But the content of the image object
includes not only traits resembling those of the
image subject but also divergent determinations
and moments deficiently depictive or even nondepictive. The image object externally indicates or
points at a variety of qualitative determinations of
the subject. When the image object gives no clue
about certain determinations, such as the colors
of the things depicted in a black and white photo,
or the size of the photographed objects that are
unfamiliar, phantasy may oblige and supplement
the missing information. Every image has a singular
distribution of genuinely depictive moments and
emptily presented determinations and therefore
the disparity between the subject intention and the
appearing image is inescapable.
I would like to conclude this paper with a brief
remark about a fascinating short story by Italo
Calvino, which resonates with Husserls view of
image consciousness. Calvino portrays an amateur
photographer striving to surpass the stereotypical
practice of vernacular photography confined to the
ritualistic production of symbolic family unity. In
pursuit of the so-called true, total photograph
(Calvino 235) of his beloved, the main character
tries out innumerable strategies: dissatisfied
with the limited expressive possibilities of the
snapshot, he stages elaborate poses for his model;
disappointed with modern cameras, he acquires
old-fashioned equipment; discontented with the
look of his model caught unaware, he attempts to
photograph her [his model] not only without letting
himself be seen but without seeing her, to surprise
her as she was in the absence of his gaze, of any
gaze.(Calvino 233) But can one obtain the total
photograph by demanding that the camera show
how the subject looks in the absence of any gaze?
Roland Barthes suggests that all photographs
are complete, integral or total in virtue of what
he calls the pricking or wounding force of the
punctum of time. The photograph authenticates
the past reality of which it is an emanation and
converts this authentication into a reminder of the
viewers future death. The photographic image is
full, crammed: no room nothing can be added to
it (Barthes 89). In contrast, Calvinos character
ends up realizing that the total photograph is but a

mirage. Frustrated, he rips up all the photographs

he accumulated and piles them up together with
snippets of film and debris of negatives and
then takes a final photograph of this powder of
images (Calvino 233). The only thing that the
total photograph turns out to document is the
failure of photography to totalize itself. However,
it is precisely such failure rather than an alleged
transparency that allows photographs to remain
true the visual experience of reality. Every
ongoing perceptual act progressively discloses
particular determinations of the same objective
substrate emptily anticipated in advance and at the
same time empties the already fulfilled intentions
that become more and more undifferentiated and
vague as they sink into the past. When Husserl
says that every momentary phase of perception
is in itself a network of partially full and partially
empty intentions (APS 44) he refers not only to
perception per se but to the life of consciousness
as such. Paraphrasing one of Husserls remarks,
it could be said that photography, like perception
itself, is a constant pretension to accomplish
what by its very nature it is not in its position to
accomplish.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard
Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Bazin, Andr. The Ontology of the Photograph
in What is Cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray. Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1967.
Calvino, Italo. The Adventure of a Photographer
in Difficult Loves. Trans. William Weaver and
Archibald Colquhoun and Peggy Wright. New
York: HBJ Publishers, 1984.
Friday, Jonathan. Aesthetics and Photography.
Burlington: Ashgate, 2002.
Husserl, Edmund. Phantasy, Image Consciousness,
and Memory (1898-1925). Trans. John B.
Brough. Dordrecht: Springer, 2005, quoted as
PICM.
Husserl,
Edmund.
Analyses
Concerning
Passive and Active Synthesis. Lectures
on Transcendental Logic. Trans. Anthony
Steinbock. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 2001, quoted as APS.
Kraus, Rosalind. The Photographic Conditions
of Surrealism in The Originality of the AvantGarde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge,
Ma: MIT Press, 1986.

27

Victor Biceaga

Notes
1
These lectures have been edited and published
by Eduard Marbach in Husserliana XXIII
Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung18981925 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1980) and are now also available in English thanks
to John B. Brough, who translated them under the
title Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory
1898-1925 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005) hereafter
quoted as PICM.
2
In the introduction to the English edition of these
lectures, John B. Brough notes that Husserl uses
the term Perzeption rather than Wahrnehmung to
refer to image consciousness precisely because
he wants to set apart the singular character of the
image consciousness as inactual perception which
offers a mere show instead of positing something
as actual and existing (PICM, XLVII).

Scott Walden argues that unlike hand-made

images, photographs are objective because mental
states are only secondarily involved in the image
production process. This means that if images
operate as information channels, then mental
states do not degrade the informational content
that gets transmitted through photographs. See
Objectivity in Photography in British Journal
of Aesthetics (2005) 45(3).
4
Joel Snyder has made this argument in his essay
Visualization and Visibility in Caroline A.
Jones and Peter Galison, eds., Picturing Science
Producing Art, (New York: Routledge, 1998).
3

28

The Poetics of Digital Cinema

Carrillo & Zindel

Alber to J. L. Carrillo Cann & May Zindel

ost theories of cinema focus on time. The dominant

view about cinema is that it is about telling stories by
means of images. The role of script in cinema seems to
confirm such view, and the poetics of cinema has been strongly
oriented according to literary criteria. Nevertheless, digital
technologies seem to question the accustomed concept of cinema.
Such technologies, extensively exploited by the American film
industry, seem to reduce cinema to spectacular and arresting
visual effects, so that the plot increasingly loses importance.
Typical Hollywood production s have plots, which seem to be
irrelevant, and such films consist of short spectacular sequences.
In those sequences time loses importance as the dimension of a
meaningful event and it becomes the dimension of a spectacular
one. Digital image processing in cinema strongly fosters this shift
from the meaningful to the mere spectacular, but with this shift
the imagery turns out to be the real nature of cinema. Imagery as
such, as Lessing noted in his Laokoon, lies in the simultaneous
or synchronic and out of the temporal sequence. In other words,
in discarding meaningful sequences, the increasingly spectacular
character of cinematic images tends to flatten cinematic time. We
could call this phenomenon the digital compression of cinematic
time, a compression fostering expressive planarity in cinema.
Could we now say that cinematic time is essentially flat and any
attempt to tell stories through or in cinema is a mistake concerning
the nature of the medium as an imaginal one? Does this imply that
cinema is basically spectacular? The aim of this presentation is to
briefly address such questions.

Alberto Carrillo-Canan,
Professor, Benemerita

Universidad Autonoma de
Puebla

May Zindel, Benemerita

Universidad Autonoma de
Puebla

The Mosaic or Flat Character of Cinema in General

The most obvious difference of film as compared with
photography is the so-called moving-image. In remembering
Lessings distinction in his Laokoon between painting and
literature on the basis that the elements of painting are juxtaposed,
whereas the elements of narrative are successive, cinema
looks indeed as seemingly hybrid. That appears quite clear in
expressions like motion pictures or time based medium. No
wonder then that most cinema theories focus on time. But time
or succession, as Lessing states, is the medium of literature, so,
theories of cinema stressing time, tend to strongly rely on literary
criteria. Nevertheless, the rise of computer animated graphics and,
in general, the digital processing of images seems to create a quite
new situation, practically and, thus, theoretically.
Nowadays there is a new film genre, a major one, to which
these movies belong: War of the Worlds (2005), The Island (2005),
Mission: Impossible III (2006), Spiderman 3 (2007), 300 (2007),
Die Hard (2007) and Transformers (2007). Arresting, impressive
visual effects and mostly overall sustained spectacularity
characterize movies of this kind. In fact such genre is becoming the
indisputable majority of the so-called blockbusters and constitute
the big-budget Hollywoods product. They are the most important
part of the cinematic entertainment industry. Such movies do really
have a plot, but it is either quite simple or it is completely irrelevant
in the end. Still images, even the spectacular ones, are literally
flat. Lessings criterion is true of them: their elements are merely

29

Alber to J. L . C ar r illo C ann & M ay Zin del

Interesting here is that McLuhan considers

the newspaper as having a mosaic structure;
such a structure is discontinuous, abrupt, and
multileveled (McLuhan, Laws, 55).1 McLuhan
stresses the two- dimensional (McLuhan, Laws,
55) character of the mosaic form (McLuhan,
Understanding, 334). But, remember Lessing, twodimensionaliy or flatness is proper to images and
just the contrary to narrative. In other words, the
incoherence and disconnectedness of news make
of the newspaper something more like an image
than a discourse or narrative. The predominance
of newspaper over books is in this sense a regress
to imaginal, or as McLuhan calls them, preliterate (McLuhan, Global, 11) conditions of
communication. But the newspaper is by no means
an isolate phenomenon.
As is generally known, Benjamin takes cinema
as the paradigmatic medium evincing the modified
structure of experience in the new, fast urban life.
Benjamin compares the canvas with the cinematic
screen, and says that the canvas . . .invites the
beholder to contemplation; he can abandon
himself to the flow of his own associations. In
front of the cinematic image he cannot do that.
As soon as he looks at it, it has already changed.
It cannot be locked into its position. (Benjamin,
164) Obviously, the flow of cinematic images beats
by far the brevity (Benjamin, 188) proper to
news. A little bit later Benjamin quotes Duhamel,
who says: I cannot anymore think what I want.
The moving images take the place of my thoughts
. . . (Benjamin, 164), and Benjamin goes on
noticing that . . . indeed, the change of images
breaks at once the beholders flow of associations.
(Benjamin, 164) The point is not only the fast
changing images, but also their relationship with
each other. The image created by the painter is,
says Benjamin, . . . a whole image, whereas the
cameramans image is manifoldly fragmented . .
. (Benjamin, 158). This is a kind of fragmentation
that compared with the total character of a painting
reminds us of the mosaic form of newspaper
(McLuhan) or of the disconnectedness of the
individual news. In this sense, and comparing now
with theatrical performance, Benjamin says, that
[c]ompetent observers have already noted that in
cinematographic performance the best impression
is mostly achieved when acting is reduced to a
minimum . . . (Benjamin, 152). In fact, [t]he
theatrical actor on stage puts himself in a role.
That is forbidden for the cinematographic actor.
His achievement is definitely not a unitary one, but
it is composed by many isolated achievements.

juxtaposed; they contain absolutely no narrative.

The spectacular movie sequences, on the other
hand are, to be sure, sequences, but their narrative
content plays almost no role. They are a kind of
cultural content (Lash, 68), which, as Scott Lash
points out, . . . leaves no time for reflection . . .
Lash, 18). This must be stressed when assessing
the nature of the new spectacular movie genre.
Spectacular movie sequences are so arresting
that the plot becomes irrelevant, no matter how
intricate it may be. Let us suppose that the plot
of the film is a complicated and subtle one. At
any rate, the complexity of cinematic plot fades
as compared to literary narrative in general.
Furthermore, the complexity of literary narrative
demands a special kind of public, a public that
under the fast changing conditions of the industrial
and urban life vanishes. Poetry, literary narrative
and scientific treatises demand, as Scott Lash
states, . . . conditions of reflection necessary for
engaging with . . . (Lash, 74) them. Yet, already
Benjamin thematized the changed receptiveness
(Benjamin, 185) for poetry by the middle of the
19th Century. He blamed the new industrial and
urban life for weakening willpower (Benjamin,
185), capacity of concentration (Benjamin,
185) and interest (Benjamin, 185) necessary
for engagement with lyrical poetry (Benjamin,
185). According to Benjamin, . . . art demands
concentration [Sammlung] from the beholder.
(Benjamin, 166) But just the rapid new urban life
(Benjamin, 198) generated the need for mass
dissipation (Benjamin, 166), the business of the
so-called entertainment industry. Entertainment
substitutes for reflection and concentration.
Echoing Benjamin, Lash says that [a] certain pace
of movement . . . is conducive to . . . narratives . . .
Just about the right time for reflection. (Lash, 18)
But new [t]echnological forms of life (Lash, 18)
starting with industrialization . . . are too fast for
reflection and too fast for linearity . . . (Lash, 18)
proper to narrative.
Following
the
tread
of
Benjamins
argumentation, the new social life generates a
kind of experience modified in its structure
(Benjamin, 186). The change can be exemplified
by the newspaper. It rapidly displaced books
becoming the most widespread reading material,
but the principles of newspaper information
(Benjamin, 188) are, Benjamin points out,
newness, brevity, understandability, and, above
all, disconnectedness of the individual news of
each other (Benjamin,188).

30

The Poetics of Digital Cinema

(Benjamin, 153) In other words, as compared with

the theatrical performance, the cinematographic
one is affected by disconnectedness (Benjamin,
188) as news are disconnected from each other
as compared with the content of a book. Indeed,
cinematographic montage shows in principle the
traits of that what McLuhan calls mosaic form,
namely, out of necessity it is discontinuous,
abrupt, and multileveled. Due to montage,
cinematographic performance is in principle
nothing but a mere juxtaposition (remember
Lessing again) of more or less heterogeneous
elements. Cinema itself is, from this point of view,
flat in spite of its obvious temporal dimension, that
is, the degree of complexity shown by its narrative
elements does not matter.

the latest soccer match must be written and wired

within 90 minutes after the match. This leaves no
time for reflection . . . (Lash, 18).
But the ephemerality in point correlates with
a reshaped structure of experience. As Lash puts
it, [p]reviously the media content was narrative or
lyric and surely a deep meaning. . . The question
is whether this new content [the cultural content
accessed in real time] , . . . can yield existential
meaning, as once did epic poem or novel . . .
clearly it cannot. (Lash, 70) Communication in
real time is the most salient side of the . . . short
duration culture [but it] started of course with the
newspaper. It printed news.2 . . . Newspapers are
connected with time, with instantaneity of a sort.
(Lash, 73) Real time is the radical expression of
a cultural content, which . . . not only does not
endure, but is constantly new. Indeed the content
is so new that there is no time for re-presentation
. . . (Lash, 73), that is, for reflection (Lash,
19). But real time is the extreme case of that
ephemerality already addressed by Benjamin
in the case of newspaper as a medium weakening
concentration. In general, technology such as
television, newspaper, and digital media . . .
works not through discourse. It has no time for
discoursing. (Lash, 74) Referring to such media
Lash says that [y]ou read them, just woken up,
in the morning paper at the breakfast table; hear
them while attending to the baby, on the six
oclock evening new; or listen to them struggling
through a traffic jam on the way to work, on the
car radio. You receive them under conditions
of distraction and not under the conditions of
reflection necessary for engaging with discursive
argument. (Lash, 74) Those media are just not
[d]iscursive media, like the academic article
or book, [which] work through reflection and
argument. (Lash, 74) The exposure to such media
necessarily effects what McLuhan calls a psychic
training (McLuhan, Understanding, 84) against
concentration (Benjamin) and, especially,
against propositions, statements, organized in
frameworks of concepts supported by legitimating
argument. (Lash, 74) That is a training against
narrative and discourse (Lash).
Like newspaper, cinema does not work in real
time neither much of TV content, nor recorded
radio talks but decisive here is the fast movement
of disconnected image sequences. The result:
A movie like Lethal Weapon 4 . . . is viewable
not through the concentrated gaze [remember
Benjamin about weakened concentration],
but through the glance under conditions of

The Mosaic Character of Cinema under

Digital Conditions
Benjamin as well as McLuhan keenly
thematized the effects of fast technological
forms on perception and consciousness, but both
certainly never faced the deep changes brought
about by digitalization. If under industrial and
urban conditions, proper to that what McLuhan
called the mechanical age, (McLuhan, Global,
9) the pace of movement (Lash, 19) was already
too fast for reflection (Lash, 19) substituting
entertainment for reflection, under digital
conditions the situation becomes much more
apparent.
Following Benjamin and McLuhan, Scott Lash
stresses the speeding-up due to radio, telegraph,
telephone, television, and, above all, the computer.
(Lash, 68) Lash focuses on the duration (Lash,
68) of their cultural contents (Lash, 69). It is in
principle ephemeral (Lash, 72), and the mark
of such ephemerality (Lash, 72) is just that it is
accessed mainly in real time (Lash, 69). This
idea can be reformulated in McLuhanian terms.
The message of such media is not their cultural
content what is seen, said, heard, written or
read by means of them but their . . . power . . .
to reshape any lives that they touch. (McLuhan,
Understanding, 52) The reshaping power is
determined by the real time nature of such media.
Real time speeds up communication and in such a .
. . speed[ing]-up, culture becomes ephemeral. The
monument lasts for centuries, if not millennia, the
novel for generations; a scholarly book a decade.
The newspaper article has value for just a day. The
pyramids took centuries to build; the scholarly
discourse of a treatise entailing reflection
takes, say, four years. The newspaper report on

31

Alber to J. L . C ar r illo C ann & M ay Zin del

distraction. (Lash, 69) Both the glance as

form of perception, and distraction (Lash,
69) as structure of consciousness are, certainly,
the contrary to discursive reception through
concentration and legitimating argument (Lash,
74). Furthermore, [i]t is indeed the content of the
information media that is ephemeral whether in
newspapers, on television, the Internet, telephony,
or the branded products of fast-moving consumer
goods. (Lash, 72) Of course, even if the content
is not accessed in real time, Hollywoods
blockbusters are paradigmatic of braded . . .
fast-moving consumer goods (Lash, 72) of the
entertainment industry.
Now we come back to the hypothesis that a
particular movie can have a subtle and intricate
narrative content. If that is the case, montage
implies discontinuities and abrupt changes of
many kinds, and, specially, different levels; film
accuses thus the mosaic form thematized by
McLuhan. Furthermore, the pace of images is
always . . . too fast for reflection and too fast for
linearity . . . (Lash, 18) proper to narrative. But
if that is already the case with film traditionally
considered as narrative, the situation is much more
clearer in the case of the latest, digital processed
blockbusters. As John Belton stated it already in
2002, [c]omputer animated graphics have enabled
filmmakers to realize fantasy in a way that was only
dreamed of a few years ago. (Belton, 902) That
was true already in 2002; it is clear that the newest
blockbusters are more than ever before a mixture
of special effects and fantasy (Belton, 906)
based on computer-animated graphics. So, today it
seems reasonable to think of a qualitative change
in the status of montage: it is to a great extent
in some films completely digital animation.
Those montages constitute the arresting and
spectacular short sequences enthralling millions
of spectators all over the world, and it must be
noticed that after a few days most people cannot
narrate those films, but nevertheless they still
remember many impressive images. A clear logic
underlies such a situation. Digital filmmakers
take the greatest care about images leading to the
spectacular sequences. Their main task lies in
totally controlling the image and this just means,
that the story loses importance as never before.
In the age of digital imaging the story of a film
is nothing more than an excuse for generating
impressive computer graphics. We have already
seen that according to Benjamin the image created
by the painter is, . . . a whole image, whereas the
cameramans image is manifoldly fragmented . . .

and Benjamin immediately goes on by saying that

. . . its fragments are put together in concordance
with a new lawfulness [as compared with the
elements of a painting]. (Benjamin, 158) Under
digital imaging the new lawfulness (Benjamin,
158) for composing the disconnected elements of
montage is almost nothing more than newness
and spectacularity. The very law for composing
the cinematic mosaic under digital conditions is
spectacularity and impressiveness. That is the task
of total control over the image. Narrative becomes
a mere ghost. But that means that new digital
cinema is essentially flat. Time has no real role to
play in it, but this flies in the face of most theories
of cinema and raises again the problem of the
poetics of cinema and brings us back to Lessing.
Conclusion. Lessing and the Poetics
of Digital Cinema
In his Laokoon Lessing pointed out the radical
difference between painting and literature on
account of their temporal structures: painting
implies synchrony or simultaneity of their elements,
whereas literature relies on diachrony or temporal
succession.3 Lessings trailblazing remark wiped
out the traditional thesis ut pictura poiesis and
the related idea of literature as painting through
words. For the first time it became clear that there
is no general poetics but that the poetics of an art
depend on that arts media. On the other hand, the
temporal element in cinema has lead to consider it a
kind of narrative. Cinema has mainly been thought
of as telling stories through images. But, if
compared with narrative, proper cinema has never
left time for reflection (Lash) modern cinema
relies on impressive and spectacular computer
graphics. Movies are not shorter than before, but
new digital based cinema is not telling stories
using images; it is mainly about imaging. Digital
imaging compresses the temporal dimension
of cinema and reduces it to spectacularity and
newness, and, thus, to a quasi-flat or non-narrative
medium. It could be that with help of computer
graphics Hollywood has understood the real
poetics of cinema. If this is true, McLuhan is
right in saying that intellectuals, that is, literary
trained people, strongly tend to misunderstand
the nature of new media. They cannot understand
their mosaic form, they cannot understand the
structural flatness of new media. In particular they
have misunderstood the flat nature of cinema. If
intellectuals are not looking for entertainment
but for deep meaning, they should not look at
movies but they should read books and engage

32

The Poetics of Digital Cinema

Life and Media in the 21st Century, Oxford

University Press, New York, 1989.
McLuhan, Marshall, and McLuhan, Eric, Laws of
Media. The New Science, (1988), University of
Toronto Press, Toronto, 1999.
McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media.
The Extrensions of Man, (1964), MIT Press,
Massachusetts, 1998.

with sentences and arguments. They should not

try to fight against the flat, superficial character
of movies. They should take it easy and enjoy
the superficial. The only refuge against the flat
character of new media lies in writing and reading
novels, treatises, and academic papers.
Works Cited
Belton, John, Digital Cinema. A False
Revolution, in: Braudy, Leo and Cohen,
Marshall, Film, Theory and Critcism, (1974),
Oxford University Press, New York, 2004.
Benjamin, Walter, Illuminationen. Ausgewhlte
Schriften, (1955), Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt,
1977.
Lash, Scott, Critique of Information, Sage
Publications, Ltd., London, 2002.
Lessing, G.-E., Laokoon, Schriften zur Antiken
Kunstgeschichte, in: Werke in Sechs Bnden,
Band 5, Stauffacher- Publishers Ltd. Zurich,
Regensburg, 1965.
McLuhan, Marshall, and Powers, R. Bruce, The
Global Village. Transformations in World

Notes
1
Cursives inside a quotation are ours, when not
otherwise stated.
2
Emphasis from Lash.
3
Lessing, G.-E., Laokoon, section XVII and
section XX.

33

MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND MERCE CUNNINGHAMS DANCE ART

Alarcn Dvila

Mnica Elisabeth Alarcn Dvila

Introduction
he subject and object of dance art is human body movement.
The dancing body is not a natural body anymore, but a body
that has been transformed through the technique of dance.
That is the reason why the question about technique concerns the
essence of what dance could be or not. In contrast to other arts, little
philosophical theory about dancing exists. Two very important
reasons for this absence are: on the one hand, the role the body has
played in western knowledge theory, i.e., as an obstacle for clear
thought; on the other hand, dancings fleetingness, which leaves
nothing behind and makes difficult a theory about it (Alarcn;
Die Ordnung des Leibes). How can we think about something that
appears and at the same time disappears? Cunningham said:
You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back,
no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls
and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold,
nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is
not for unsteady souls. (Cunningham, Changes)
Indeed, by early seventeenth century, the fleetingness of
dancing art urged many practitioners and theoreticians to find a
way to remember the dancing event. The first attempt to deal with
this difficulty was the more or less successful invention of dance
writing. Finally, the invention of video and film seems to be a good
solution for this problem. At the beginning, the relationship between
dancing and new media was of a more practical nature: firstly,
to preserve, catalogue and archive dancing, and then to manage
dance events. Nevertheless, in the last decades we can notice a new
tendency to apply digital technologies in a creative artistic way that
has had a direct influence in the way of dancing and chorographical
work. Our subject: The Influence of Marshall Mcluhan on Merce
Cunninghams Dance Art pertains to the last approach.
It could be said that the body-technique-media relationship
can be summarized in two points of view. The first one interprets
technique and media as a prolongation of the body and deems new
media as a possible liberation from a one-sided western rational
thinking. The second one sees in the technique and media an
inorganic element and, as such, opposite to the body. Interpreters
taking the second view consider, for example, computer technology
development a negative influence and deem it as depravation of the
human element (Evert, Dance Lab, 22).

Albert-Ludwigs-

Universitt Freiburg

McLuhan and Cunningham

The work of the Canadian theoretician of media, Marshall
McLuhan, has been interpreted through the years in very different
ways; the author himself has been seen as everything from a
prophet and visionary to a boaster. Certainly, his hermetic way
of writing and his own use of media, make it difficult to interpret
his work and personality. Nevertheless, nobody could doubt his
great influence in many meaningful theories and art expressions
(Strate, The Legacy of McLuhan). Dancing is not an exception and
Merce Cunningham is the first dancer and choreographer working
with McLuhans concepts about new media and the change of
perception.

34

MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND MERCE CUNNINGHAMS DANCE ART

At the present, electronics has almost changed

our way of thinking. Our daily lives will
change even if we were not aware of it, and
I am convinced that that will have many
consequences. How can people do all they do
everyday in a perfectly natural way and still go
to theatre as they used to do by the nineteenth
century? (Cunningham The Dancer and the
Dance, 131)
Cunninghams choreographies seem to be a
model on how new media influenced the human
body and its movement.

As we can see below an intelligent body and

a utopia of perception are the characteristics of
Cunninghams art of dance.
Cunninghams dance art
Nowadays, Merce Cunningham is one of the
famous living choreographers of the world. He is
now 89 years old and is still active. His artistic
work with more than 200 choreographies has
revolutionized dancing and reached a special
place in dancing history. His style of dance is
deemed the culmination of the aesthetics of
modern dancing and as the beginning of postmodern dancing. Modern elements in his dance
are his insatiable search for new movements
and his belief that dancing is accompanied with
moments of happiness. His approach that every
movement could be dance and his refused to tell
a history within movement brought him near postmodern dance. Nevertheless, his style cannot be
considered modern or post-modern but rather as
Cunninghams very own style of dance (Huschka,
Merce Cunningham).
Modern dancing came up as a countermovement
to ballet. Ballet is the first art of dance in western
performance art which has a predetermined
vocabulary and a strict technique. Whereas the
ballet intends to stage an ethereal and transcendent
body which negates, through daily training, the
heaviness of the body, modern dancing wants a
natural, individual and expressive body which
incarnates the natural laws of the world. In the
crisis of modern world modern dance won a
special place as the only way to experience ones
own individuality. Nevertheless, this speech
(ballet) maintains the dichotomy it wants to
overcome. Nature-body and woman are domains
that escape the influence of ratio, science, and
man (Alarcn, Einfhrung). Modern dance
proponents, however, accuse the ballet of being
an inhuman art of dance where dancers dance
like a machine. Ballet defenders deploy their
own speech demanding ballet to be considered
as a modern dance form. The controversy
between modern dance and ballet was a topic in
dance theory (Stber, Geschichte des Modern
Dance). This discussion became confused as the
concepts of abstract and inhuman were applied
not only to ballet but also to Cunninghams art of
dance. The incoherence of such a denomination
for Cunninghams style of dance necessitates a
review of the concepts: abstract and inhuman in
dance (Huschka, Cunningham).

Thesis: Sensitive Reflection

Since the early 80s, the body has been considered
an important focus for many academic researches
in areas such as drama, literature and philosophy.
The reason for this relatively new interest in the
body owes to the unanswerable questions of a
dualistic philosophy that reduces the body to a
res extensa and its perception (cognition) to a
subjective domain without claim to know the truth.
It could be said with Wolfgang Welsch that the
dispute between the modernist and postmodernist
is a dispute about the oneness or plurality of
human cognition frames (Welsch, Unsere moderne
Postmoderne). Postmodernism, as an investigation
of a plurality of cognitive capacities, comes close
to antique philosophy which considers thinking as
the act which differentiates one thing from another
independently of its matter, whether in terms of
fancy, perception, or discursive thinking (Schmitt,
Das Bewusste und das Unbewusste). McLuhans
concept of technique as a prolongation of the
human body and especially of the new media as a
prolongation of our nervous system, is a conception
of a body that is not reduced to a piece of matter,
but that is saturated with consciousness. In this
sense, it is appropriate to emphasize the influence
of Thomas of Aquinass concept of the sensus
comunis as a form of sensitive consciousness.
Mcluhan attempted to reconcile Aquinass theory
with history by merging it with Gestalt psychology.
He wrote:
The common sense was for many centuries
held to be the peculiar human power of
translating one kind of experience of one sense
into all the senses and presenting the result
to the mind. In fact, this image of a unified
ratio among the senses was long held to be the
mark of rationality. (McLuhan, Understanding
Media, 155)

35

Mnica Elisabeth Alarcn Dvila

Merce Cunningham began his career as a

dancer within the modern dance company of
Martha Graham. The old dispute between modern
dance and ballet seems to have no importance for
Cunningham. As he danced for Martha Grahams
company, he also trained in ballet at the New
Yorker School of American Ballet. He analyzed
both techniques of dance in his own strict way.
He wanted to understand the kinetic logic of both
aesthetics and techniques. He developed his own
dancing style and technique. For Cunningham
dance is movement in time and space. Dance is
the exhibition of a primal source of energy:
Dance is not emoting, passion for her, anger
against him. I think dance is more primal than
that. In its essence, in the nakedness of its
energy, it is a source of energy out of which
may be channeled the energy that goes into the
various emotional behaviors. It is that blatant
exhibition of this energy . . . (Cunningham, The
Impermanent Art, 311)
Whereas modern dance searched for new
possibilities of movement and experimented a
lot with these, its conception of choreography
was very traditional: dancers continued to dance
according to the music rhythms, the perspective
of the stage was central, and certain themes were
represented in a linear-causal way. Cunningham
belongs to a new generation of dancers and
choreographers that considered that the project of
modern dance had failed and searched for other
alternatives. Sally Banes, a dance theoretician,
wrote about this new tendency in dance:
. . . a dance was a dance not because of its
content but because of its context i.e., simply
because it was framed as a dance. (Banes,
Terpsichore in Sneakers, XIX)
In fact, Cunningham broke with most of modern
dance principles. Among the more important ones,
we have:
1. The main perspective of the stage was replaced
by a multi-perspective related to the viewers
position. The viewer should decide what he
wants to see. The multi perspective corresponds
to a decentralization of the movement of
different parts of the body. The body does not
move as a unit at once but as a body which is the
subject of a process of fragmentation; each part
of the body could move in different directions
and different rhythms at the same time.
2. One of his major innovations is his approach
regarding the independence of dance from
music. Dance and music are independent
forms of art; they only have in common their

temporality. Dancers listen to music first at the

outset and then dance with their own rhythms.
He developed this conception with John Cage
and further applied it to the other arts such as:
the lighting of the stage and costume.
3. His dances were called abstract because
they did not express a content of the soul;
he considers dance as a physical-aesthetic
way of movement. Abstract is nevertheless
a very contradictory concept in dance art
because we cannot dance without the body.
His choreographies generally began with a
question or problem to solve with movement,
for example: how does a body fall? His dances
were also called inhuman particularly because
he integrated fortuity in his choreographies in
order to find new movements. Chance decides
the sequence of movements.
4. His dance does not need to be interpreted or
understood. It should be just perceived. His
choreographies obligated one to perceive dance
differently from modern dance and ballet.
A utopia of perception can be observed in
Cunninghams dance art. Viewers should be
active, not passive. The intention of the unusual
movements is to catch the viewers attention on
the moved forms more than on an interpretation
about it.
Conclusion
Is Cunninghams dance art inhuman and
abstract?
A closer approach about Cunninghams
style of dance shows that instead of being an
inhuman and abstract art, it rather facilitates a
sensitive reflection (Alarcn2007). Cunningham
breaks the immediate connection between the
movement of the dancers and its expression. The
dancer must learn to dance absolutely new and
strange movements that were chosen per chance
and played against their kinetic sense. These
movements do not belong to a known style or
personal preferences. In the process of learning and
dancing, this approach, at the beginning, separated
forms and steps; the dancer has the opportunity to
experience his own body and dancing as for the
first time. Dance is a movement by itself; it is the
dancer who chooses and perceives consciously the
rhythm of the movement of his body.
Dancing has as its subject and object of art,
human body movements. In contrast to other
art forms, dancing cannot be separated from
the body. The dancing body does not allow its
being reduced to a pure material fact nor to a

36

MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND MERCE CUNNINGHAMS DANCE ART

Cunningham, Merce. The Impermanent Art. In:

Esthetics Contemporary. Richard Kostelanetz
Buffalo, N.Y. Prometheus-Books. 1978.
Cunningham, Merce. Changes: Notes on
Choreography. Something Else Press. New
York 1968.
Evert, Kerstin. DanceLab. Zeitgenssischer Tanz
und neue Technologien. Knigshausen &
Neumann. Wrzburg. 2003.
Huschka, Sabine. Cunningham und der Moderne
Tanz. Knigshausen & Neumann. Wrzburg.
2000.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. The
Extensions of Man. Routledge, New York/
London. 1964.
Schmitt, Arbogast. Das Bewusste und das
Unbewusste in der Deutung durch die
griechische Philosophie in Antike und
Abendland. In: Antike und Abendland- Beitrge
zum Verstndnis der Griechen und Rmer und
ihres Nachlebens. Band XL. Walter de Gruyter.
Berlin, New York. 1994.
Strate, Lance. The Legacy of McLuhan. Hampton
Press. Cresskill, NJ. 2005.
Stber, Werner Jakob. Geschichte des
Modern Dance. Zur Selbsterfahrung und
Krperaneignung im modernen Tanztheater.
Heinrichshofen. Wilhelmshaven. 1984.
Welsch, Wolfgang. Unsere postmoderne Moderne.
Akademie-Verlag. Berlin, 4th Ed. 1993.

movement having a cause out of itself. Dancing is

a way of movement where the dancer makes him/
herself move. In other words, only someone that
is and has a body is able to dance. Dancers who
freely use the law of gravity, spin on their toes
and do pirouettes. Concepts such as sensitive
reflection prior to conceptual reflection are
of high interest not only for a phenomenological
reflection but as part of a reflection on media. The
human body, and its ways of taking ownership
of the world, and media use come together in
discourses regarding dance.
Works Cited
Alarcn, Mnica). Die Ordnung des Leibes. Eine
tanzphilosophische Betrachtung. Freiburg. (Ph.
D. Thesis to be published).
Alarcn, Mnica. Einfhrung in die Philosophie
des Tanzes. In: Philosophie des Tanzes. Eine
interdisziplinre Reflexion des Tanzes. Reader
des Denkfestivals. Fwp, Freiburg 2007. pp.
7-13.
Banes, Sally. Terpsichore in Sneakers. PostModern Dance. Houghton Mifflin Company,
Boston. 1980.
Cunningham, Merce. The Dancer and the Dance.
Conversations with Jacqueline Lesschaeve. 2nd.
Marion Boyers inc. New York, London. 1991.

37

MEANINGS OF SELF, PLACE, AND OTHERS IN THE WIRELESS WORLD

Landrum & Garza

Brittany Landrum & Gilbert Garza

Introduction: Dwelling in the Wireless World and Global

Village

Brittany Landrum, Texas

Christian College

Gilbert Garza, Assistant

Professor, Department of

Psychology, University of
Dallas, Dallas, Texas

he advent of electronic media and the increasing ubiquity of the

Internet have opened the door to the realization of McLuhans
(Gutenberg) vision of a global village. The delivery of
the video, Internet, music and telephony by multimedia handheld
devices portends the possibility of monumental shifts in our habitual
modes of meaningfully living self, place, and others. This paper will
informally explore the transformations in the structure of experience
of self, place, and other inaugurated by the advent of electronic media,
especially the growing synchrony between wireless communication
and the Internet. Virtually every major wireless provider now bundles
services such that the new devices (phones hardly captures all that
these devices can do) provide telephony, Internet access, streaming
video with television or television-like content, and music service.
These wireless devices allow one to go anywhere without being
grounded by a landline. They enable us to take the kind of solitary,
paradoxical embodiment that characterizes Internet and previously
television experience (see Garza) and to take it on the road, out
into the shared social world with others even as they call our senses
away from this shared sense of place.
We will explore whether and to what extent these devices
inaugurate fundamental changes in the ontic dimensions of self,
place, and other. We hold that these wireless devices displace the
centrality of the body in the lived meaning of place and render
the other as a disembodied shadow (see Garza). In doing so these
devices radically redefine the meanings of place, self, and other such
that the electronic global village differs substantially from the
earlier incarnations of oral cultures (McLuhan, Gutenberg). In
the age of globalization, wireless devices pose unique challenges to
our capacity for community to the extent that they exclude the body
and separate physical from social place (Meyrowitz). We argue
that both these shifts inhibit the formation of self and community,
as both rely on embodied presence and ritual enactment in shared
space (May).

Wireless Devices: Redefining the Meanings

of Place and Home
We can understand McLuhans statement that the message
of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or
pattern that it introduces into human affairs, (Understanding 152)
phenomenologically. It tells us that a mediums message is a
presumed intentional stance in and to the world a style of revealing
or narrating in which the intending subject and the revealed world are
mutually and reciprocally co-constituted. (See Garza) As technology,
the meaning of any medium involves the realm where revealing
and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens.
(Heidegger, Question 295) As such, technology participates in
the co-constitution of not only the noematic world (the world as it
appears meaningfully to a subject) but also of the intending subject
to whom it appears.

38

MEANINGS OF SELF, PLACE, AND OTHERS IN THE WIRELESS WORLD

The message of any medium or technology

is the change of scale or pace or pattern that
it introduces into human affairs, (McLuhan,
Understanding 152) and not its content. Thus,
we must not be distracted in our investigation
by concerns about what is on wireless devices
so much as we must focus upon how the media
they deliver and their wireless, untethered
character restructure human affairs. We now turn
to McLuhans (Gutenberg) descriptions of oral,
literate, and electronic societies and consider how
these changes brought about by the electronic
culture impact our understanding of place, self,
and other.

position amongst the personally known others of

my tribe.
Literate Culture
Literate cultures rely on the written word as
their preferred means of communication. It was
only with the invention of print that nationalism
could be formed since such nationalism needed to
transcend the aural limitations of oral communities
(McLuhan, Gutenberg). Stories and the story event
changed their shapes with the invention of print. No
longer needing to be retold by sage story tellers to a
presently gathered community of listeners, written
stories could be read by a solitary reader. The
dominant sense became vision and the world was
transformed from a world of sound for a communal
self in shared space-time into a spectacle for the
eye of a detached individual observer. The advent
of print also meant that space and time were
increasingly on their way to being abolished
(McLuhan Gutenberg). Books democratize and
de-centralize knowledge. One no longer had to
be present to a speaker at a fixed time or place to
gather knowledge. The range of the spoken voice or
the lifespan of the speaker no longer limited access
to ideas. With print, the literate culture was born. In
this world, printed words do not hold the magical
resonance in [spoken] words and their power to
impose their assumptions relentlessly (McLuhan,
Gutenberg 114). In the familiar and close tribal
bonds of oral culture, a persons word was enough
to secure the fulfillment of a promise. In the world
of the written word, a person must sign his or her
name as only the written word will bind oneself to
ones promise. This exemplifies the shift from an
oral, aural world to a literate world which is a visual
milieu in which the literate person needs to be able
to see to believe.

Oral, Literate and Electronic Spaces

as Modes of Dwelling
McLuhan (Gutenberg) described oral,
literate and post-literate or electronic cultures
based on their predominant style or medium of
communication. In these increasingly prescient
descriptions, each of these cultures defines
participant membersself, place and relations to
others, rooting them in their world. Oral, literate,
and electronic cultures rely upon different senses to
communicate. The separation and specialization
of sense[s] defines each culture in their structures
(McLuhan, Gutenberg 130). Let us turn to brief
descriptions of these types of societies, rooted in
McLuhans work, that we might return to these
characterizations in our remarks below.
Oral Culture
Oral culture relies exclusively on the spoken
word (McLuhan, Gutenberg 114). Suited to the ear,
oral cultures live in a world of sound (McLuhan,
Gutenberg 114). Knowledge and stories are passed
down from generation to generation by word of
mouth. Such spoken stories have direct personal
significance for the hearer (McLuhan, Gutenberg
114). In oral cultures, one had to be present to hear
the story for it only happened at a specific time
and place. Constrained in this way, oral stories
were only heard within the range of the human
voice. Once spoken, these stories were forever
lost if not heard, remembered and re-told. Oral
cultures cohered about localized space, shared
tribal time, and self- and other-definitive, faceto-face relationships both horizontally among
tribal peers and vertically among a hierarchy
defined in part by access to information reserved
for those higher up in society. Oral spaces thus
emerge as spaces of tribal meaning signifying
personal involvement with and relative stature or

Electronic Culture
With the advent and increasing ubiquity of the
Internet and wireless communication, conditions of
extreme interdependence on a global scale result in
an auditory world of simultaneous events and overall awareness (McLuhan, Gutenberg 124). This
instantaneity mimics the aural structure of the oral
world. However, in electronic culture knowledge is
available on a world-wide basis, no longer limited by
the range of a human voice. Joining groups and the
like on the Internet reveals ties to the oral culture of
the past as one belongs to a tribe in an electronic
village. And yet, these groups are not communal
close-knits tribes of the oral culture.

39

Brittany Landrum & Gilbert Garza

In moving from the private, singular, mecentered culture of the literate (see Meyrowitz),
the electronic culture returns in some ways to
the communal, aural structure of oral culture.
Internet temporality is a singular temporality
disclosed by the pace and movement of each
individual Internet surfer (Garza 194). It
comes to light through ones individual surfing
presence, but does so in the aural temporality
of a speech event (see Garza and Meyrowitz1).
The Internet incorporates the eye of the literate
culture and the aural space-time of oral cultures.
The cell phone and the portable music device
capture the ear of the oral culture, and the habits
of disembodied presence cultivated by electronic
media. Television, pictures, and videos which
draw the eye of the user are mingled with the
cell phone equipped with music and voice which
appeal to the users ear. In combining these,
wireless multimedia devices engage the senses
in hybrid combinations of the balances of the
senses (McLuhan, Gutenberg) that characterize
oral and literate media. Multimedia wireless
devices increasingly draw our senses away from
the shared social world of the flesh, even as their
wireless character frees us to engage these habits
of perception (See Garza) in the very midst of
the shared social world with embodied others.
As multimedia wireless devices connect us
to other people in an oral cultural way, they also
appeal to the eye of literate cultures. In doing
so the wireless world creates spaces that are not
places, disembodied ethereal places that, while
engaging the eyes and maybe the ears, [exclude]
the body and de-emphasizes the otherness
of others (Garza 200). The video aspect of
multimedia enabled hand-held devices are
especially illustrative of this as they break down
a former distinction between print and electronic
media. Meyrowitz points out that the book must
be literally handled and actively interacted with
where the television does not. This is of course
not true of the handheld video enabled wireless
device. Such devices create a situation in which
a previously solitary and private activity is now
carried out in public and what was appropriate to
one medium of communication and its situations
may not be so in others.
As a hybrid of oral and literate culture,
electronic culture breaks down distinctions
between public and private spheres of life
(Meyrowitz) that are definitive of modernity
(Berger and Luckman). In the electronic world
all places are potentially public. (The You Tube

video of President Bushs closed doors G8

backrub of German chancellor Angela Merkel;
people facing consequences for supposedly
private postings on social networking sites, The
Chronicle; appropriation of wireless network hot
spots; the viewing of pornography in public via
television sets in cars, CBS; and the clandestine
cell phone video of Saddam Husseins execution,
You Tube; are but a few examples that illustrate
this.) This confusion of spheres of life and the
situations that support them enacts McLuhans
position that electronic media have extended
our central nervous system itself in a global
embrace, abolishing both time and space as far as
our planet is concerned (Understanding 149).
Overcoming/Redefining Place: An Abiding
Con-fusion
Just as electronic media create a social nexus
that is a strange hybrid of oral and literate cultures
(see Garza), the rise of the multimedia wireless
device extends this confusions penetration into
the shared social world with others. Through
electronic media, what is happening almost
anywhere can be happening wherever we are. Yet
when we are everywhere, we are also no place in
particular, (Meyrowitz 124). An informal survey
of wireless communication reveals confusion to
be a prevalent theme of the world as disclosed by
these technologies. Here we mean confusion
in its original etymological sense of mixed
together, a combination of elements whose lines
of demarcation become blurred and unclear. Let
us turn to two major regions of thematic confusion
to show how the electronic culture redefines the
notions of place, self, and other.
Confusion of Public and Private, Work and
Family Spheres
Cellular telephones partake in this blurring of
the private and public spheres of life by radically
redefining spatiality and temporality. A portable
phone allows people to be in contact with each
other anywhere at any time. Calling from the car,
store, office, park, grocery line, friends house,
and even the bathroom at a baseball game, phone
calls are no longer limited to the central base
of the home phone. This, in turn, allows a wide
range of multi-tasking while using the medium
and invites us to divide our attention and presence
among many places, inaugurating habits of
what we might call multi-presencing 2. The car
ride, the lunch break, a vacation, and a smoking
break are no longer activities filled with you

40

MEANINGS OF SELF, PLACE, AND OTHERS IN THE WIRELESS WORLD

Confusion of Real and Virtual: the World

of Flesh and the Electronic World
At an ontological level there may be little
distinction between virtual and real places (see
Garza) to the extent that the world is always
disclosed in and through the disclosive involvement
of some incarnate Dasein. Still, the embodied
presence of flesh and blood others distinguishes
the shared world of the flesh from the virtual world
of cyberspace. Our informal survey of wireless
communication reveals a thematic confusion of
the virtual world and the real or flesh world as
especially manifest in the confused meanings of
places and persons in this realm. We do not mean
that one mistakes one realm for the other, but
rather that the distinctions between these realms
become blurred and unclear confused. Electronic
media make being anywhere possible, but at the
price that we are also no place in particular. When
this happens, when physical and social place are
separated, the behavior and comportment tied to
such places also become confused (Meyrowitz).
Instances of the confusion of places in the
flesh world and the world of cyberspace abound
in our informal survey of wireless communication
and the Internet. Meyrowitz describes one of
the unique impacts of electronic media as the
separation of social from physical spaces.
In terms of wireless communication, a recent
study of cell phone use (Study says) suggests
that some upshots of the disembodied places
disclosed in the wireless world may be anxiety
and loneliness. Low self esteem and high anxiety
have been reported to be correlated to high cell
phone use in teenagers (Study says). Described
as extensions of themselves, cell phones acted as
portals for teenagers to reach out to other people
to combat the unhappiness and boredom they felt.
The researchers reported that the teenagers they
studied continually checked their phones for
messages and often became irritated when people
didnt call them right back (Study says). The
teenagers in this study became increasingly lonely
as cell phones failed to replace physical presence
and paradoxically highlighted their aloneness
when the devices did not ring or otherwise
connect them to their peers.
Jenaro, Flores, Gmez-Vela, Gonzlez-Gil,
& Caballo found that heavy Internet and cell
phone use was associated with high anxiety and
insomnia amongst their participants. In another
study, Reid and Reid found both lonely and anxious
participants utilized wireless communication, with
lonely participants preferring to talk on a cell phone

and in the flesh others. Instead connecting

wirelessly can create an ethereal gathering of
several bodies that are physically present to each
other, but psychologically elsewhere an absent
presence in the flesh world. While one may still
retain a physical presence, ones psychological
presence is directed to the person on the other end
of the call. Cell phones as a medium allow one
to connect independently with an absent other
as one disconnects publicly from present others.
The addition to cell phones of streaming video,
Internet access, and the like only intensifies
this inclination towards the paradoxical absent
presence we have described here.
A subset of this confusion of the private and
personal spheres is that of the confusion of work
and leisure spheres. Advertisements for wireless
communications devices tout their ability to
make anyplace a work place (Sprint/Nextel)
and to enable their users to never be out of
touch with work. It is an interesting expression
of our cultural values that this crossover between
work and leisure tends to be only one way. We
encourage the encroachment of work into the nonwork world, but usage policies tend to outright
prohibit the encroachment of the personal sphere
into that of work (see New York City Department
of Education; Texas A&M University-Kingsville;
United States Senate; University of MissouriRolla) as extensive loss of productivity results
from personal use of wireless media devices in
the workplace (Yellowless & Marks).
According to Geoffrey Godbey, a leisure
studies professor at Pennsylvania State
University, time dedicated to leisure at home
becomes compromised by the encroachment of
work. The home is invaded by technology making
the work and the world more and more accessible.
In the past generations, leisure time was marked
by large amounts of time dedicated to social
involvement and longer chunks of uninterrupted
time (Gandossy). Today, with the encroachment
of multimedia wireless devices, the time spent at
home can feel as though it is never entirely your
own. Its very difficult to switch off, according
to Roberts, a sociology professor at the University
of Liverpool (Gandossy). As the ubiquity of work
spreads to the home, time dedicated to leisure gets
pushed aside and forsaken when the multimedia
wireless devices remain on. Failure to turn them
off results in a being-here that is always a beingthere, removing the possibility to live and inhabit
the real world.

41

Brittany Landrum & Gilbert Garza

and anxious participants choosing to text on their

cell phones for intimate contact with others. This
last finding in particular points to the paradoxical
connectivity of wireless communication and the
Internet. While serving as a means of connection
for lonely or anxious individuals, these forms of
connection seem to lack precisely the vulnerability
inherent in face-to-face connection that marks it as a
distinctly human and truly intimate mode of beingwith (Heidegger, Being). Such connectivity points
to the possible emergence of a new form of social
interaction, custom made for the unfriendly and
solitary (see Yoffe).
These confused meanings of place give new
meaning to Mays characterization of modern
humanity, rushing to be somewhere, and never
knowing where that place is (May 98). Places
in the wired world are nowhere they literally
are not where. Instead such sites are pathways
on an electrical network rather than physical
locations on the earth. Ethereal and electronic
notions of place seem to leave us lost and confused
in our inner loneliness (May 98). Presented with
absent embodied connections to flesh and blood
others, we turn to our cell phones to dwell in
the wireless world. It is fitting that when there is
no service available, the cell phone roams. As
cattle roam, they aimlessly walk without direction
in search of something. With no service, no
calls, text messages or voicemails, these research
participants were lost without a direction or guide.
Without a stable community in which to dwell
with others, cell phones engendered loneliness
and anxiety.
A preference for the virtual world harbors many
detrimental consequences for those who seek its
deficient mode of being-in-the-world. At an ice
cream store, a cashier listening to an i-Pod failed
to realize her co-worker was held at gunpoint as
the store was being robbed (Burdi). Completely
absorbed in her virtual world, the cashier was bodily
and intentionally elsewhere, literally no - where.
Her deficient mode of being-in-the-world was made
possible by the absorption of her attention and the
shrinking of her world into the musical device. In
another instance, a man using his cell phone to send
a text message was hit by a train as he crossed two
sets of railroad tracks (Gettys). Aware of his bodily
presence for the first train, the man stopped but
proceeded to cross two tracks completely absorbed
in texting and failed to hear or see the next train.
In both cases, the individuals were bodily and
intentionally elsewhere, present to a virtual milieu
with the consequence that they failed to be aware

of their surroundings in the shared world with flesh

and blood others.
New advances in the technology of multimedia
wireless devices have allowed for the possibility
of superimposing a virtual world on top of the
public world shared with others with the invention
of bionic contact lenses (Nelson). These lenses
would display a private virtual world for the
wearers eyes only. Offering the wearer total
immersion in the virtual realm, these lenses pose
serious problems not only in modes of dwelling
but also in terms of safety. The possibility of
always being connected comes with the price of
being disconnected from others and paradoxically
embodied from ones surroundings. These bionic
contact lenses are another example of the confusion that resides between the line that separates
the virtual world from the real world.
Likewise, cell phones engage the user in a
paradoxical embodied presence with virtually
present others at the cost of forsaking connections
with the flesh and blood others with whom they
share physical space. In the cell phone call one
is bodily and intentionally present to the virtual
other as a voice. However, this paradoxical
embodiment whereby ones bodily intentionality
is not directed towards the flesh world renders
ones presence as absent in the flesh world with
flesh and blood others. In this the cell phone
proves faithful to the increasingly if paradoxically
connected electronic world. The cost of this
style of engagement with the world is that it
blur[s] the lines between physical and virtual
worlds (Grossman 49). More of our senses are
engaged by new technology drawing us away
from our bodily engaged inhabited dwelling in
the flesh world to instead dwell on and linger
with the bodiless world multimedia wireless
devices disclose. Simply rendered as a voice, the
paradoxically embodied other can easily become
the target of an angry argument or confrontation
that might not have occurred face-to-face. Facial
expressions, touch, and body language fail to be
expressed through the phone and the expressive
depths lost can occasion a flattening out, even a
de-realization of the other in his or her depth.
Wireless electronic media, categorized as
cool media (McLuhan, Understanding), require
high participation as the user must supply the
information needed to complete or fill in the
gaps of these low definition mediums. The
level of interaction demanded from the viewer
distinguishes the cool media from the hot media.
Both the internet and the telephone invoke

42

MEANINGS OF SELF, PLACE, AND OTHERS IN THE WIRELESS WORLD

step in knowing when to get out, even that one can

get out, is being mindful that one is in.

participation in each persons unique electronic

footprint by inviting him or her to create ones
own world. According to Lew Friedland, people
who engage in these wireless multimedia devices
often do so in public spaces causing an explosion
of rude behavior that deteriorates the community
(Cox). With so many people engaging in their
own conversations with absent others, the sense
of community and being-with others in the flesh
is undermined by the cool nature of these media
devices. Friedland states that people who engage
in these media devices participate in an active
withdrawal from public space (Cox). This
withdrawal from the community and from others
poses many problems including the potential for
rude behavior. According to Honore Ervin, people
get sucked into their own little world of their cell
phones, iPods, and wireless computers. Theyre not
existing in a society and realizing that their actions
affect anyone else (Cox). McLuhans global
village offers the ability to always be connected
at the price of being disconnected and disengaged
with our own surroundings. The use of cool media
devices in the global village grabs our attention
away from our immediate surroundings pulling us
into our own secluded wireless world. With our
attention elsewhere, the sense of community and
being-with others deteriorates as we only inhabit
and share the same physical spaces. These cool
multi-media wireless devices pull us away from
others directing our attention and participation to
the absent other.

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Conclusion: Being-with, Community, and Care

in Cyber-space
The question before us becomes one of the
qualities of self and community as they are remade
in and by the Internet, wireless communication
and the multimedia wireless devices that deliver
them. Since media are extensions of our central
nervous systems (McLuhan, Understanding), just
as tools are extensions of our bodies (see Straus and
Leder), they are capable of being brought within
the realm of the lived body as the disappearing
ground of phenomenal experience (Leder). Thus,
we may not notice the marginalization of vital
embodied existence even as it happens. The
purpose of this paper is to call us to awaken to
these changes as they unfold, to awaken us to
our choosing, lest we become like the bather in
McLuhans example (Address). Immersed in a tub
of water whose temperature increases slowly until
it reaches the boiling point, McLuhans bather
never knows when to get out of the tub. The first

43

Brittany Landrum & Gilbert Garza

Kubose, T. T., Bock, K., & Dell, G. S. The Effects of

Speech Production and Speech Comprehension
on Simulated Driving Performance. Applied
Cognitive Psychology, 20 (2006): 43-63.
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University of Chicago Press, 1990.
May, R. The Cry for Myth. New York: Dell, 1991.
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Essential McLuhan. Eds. E. McLuhand and F.
Zingrone. 1962. New York: Basic Books, 1995,
106-148.
McLuhan, M. Understanding Media. In
Essential McLuhan. Eds. E. McLuhand and F.
Zingrone. 1964. New York: Basic Books, 1995,
149-179.
McLuhan, M. Address at vision 65. In Essential
McLuhan. Eds. E. McLuhand and F. Zingrone.
1966. New York: Basic Books, 1995, 219-232.
Meyrowitz, J. No Sense of Place: The Impact of
Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Nelson, B. Vision of the future seen in bionic
contact lens. MSNBC. 21 Jan. 2008. 23
Jan.
2008
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/
id/22731631/wid/11915829?gt1=10841>
New York City Department of Education. Internet
acceptable use policy. 5 July 2007. 5 July
2007 <http://schools.nyc.gov/Administration/
Off ices/FinanceandAdministration/DIIT/
Departments/WebServices/iaup/default.htm>
Reid, D., & Reid, F. Text or Talk? Social Anxiety,
Loneliness, and Divergent Preferences for Cell
Phone Use. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 10
(2007): 424-435.
Sprint/Nextel. Sprint Business. 22 June 2007. 22
June 2007. <http://www.sprint.com/business/>
Straus, E. Phenomenological Psychology. Trans.
E. Eng. New York: Basic Books, 1966.
Strayer, D. L., Drews, F. A., & Crouch, D. J. A
comparison of the cell phone driver and the
drunk driver. Human Factors: The Journal of
the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society,
48 (2006): 381-391.
Study says anxiety trigger teens heavy cellphone
use. Dallas Morning News 24 May 2006, 8A.
Texas A&M University-Kingsville. Internet usage
policy. 2004. 5 July 2007 <http://www.cis.
tamuk.edu/help/policies/1_080_Internet%20
Usage%20Policy.pdf>
United States Senate U.S. Senate internet services
usage rules and policies. 2005. 5 July 2007
<http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/general/
one_item_and_teasers/internetpolicy.htm>

University of Missouri-Rolla. Internet usage

policy. 2005. 5 July 2007 <http://campus.umr.
edu/it//policy/internetusage.html>
Yellowlees, P., & Marks, S. Problematic Internet
use or Internet addiction? Computers in
Human Behavior, 23(2007): 1447-1453.
Yoffe, E. Facebook for fifty somethings. Slate.
14 July 2007. 14 July 2007 <http://www.slate.
com/id/2161456/>
You Tube. George Bush gives Angela Merkel
massage. 18 July 2006. 5 July 2007 <http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dfrHT8o-0A>
You Tube. Saddam Hussein hanging. 29 Dec.
2006. 8 July 2007 <http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=f7Z7Wi7DD3g>
Notes
1
According to Meyrowitz, broadcast television
exists in a kind of aural, oral temporality
inasmuch as it is on at a specific time, and one
must join the audience, albeit only in tuning
in simultaneously, to participate in the broadcast
event. That this community is separated by
walls and houses, even by vast expanses of space
already differentiates this audience from the
bodily co-present audience of a true oral event.
Of course remote control, channel surfing,
VCRs and ultimately DVRs serve to even further
differentiate television from oral events in that
they somewhat literalize television; both by
breaking up its communal audience, and placing
it in the on-demand temporality of the book and
subsequent electronic media.
2
This is more than an academic concern. Much
research suggests that use of cell phones impairs
ones ability to drive, not simply due to the need
to use ones hands but because of the cognitive
attention and effort required to hold a conversation
(see Kubose, Bock, & Dell, 2006). Other research
suggests that driving while using a cell phone
impairs ones ability to drive similarly to being
intoxicated by alcohol (Strayer, Drews, & Crouch,
2006). The attention and hands-on demands
of such functions as video viewing and text
messaging portend even greater dangers of this
particular manifestation of multi-presencing.
Text messaging, for example, has been implicated
as a possible contributing factor to a recent multifatality accident which claimed the lives of five
recent high school graduates (see CNN, 2007).

44

DIGITAL COMMUNITIES OF REPRESENTATION:

FROM WITTGENSTEIN TO BRAZILIAN MOTOBOYS

Lpez Cuenca

Alberto Lpez Cuenca

his paper addresses a concern of a work in progress

that deals in a very wide sense with epistemological
continuism and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
In what follows I will consider the question of epistemological
continuism specifically through what happens to representation
in what sociologist Scott Lash (2002) calls information society.
Most of this text will be devoted to reconstruct Lashs position
regarding representation in order to frame it within a more general
notion of epistemological continuism inspired by the work of
Wittgenstein. I will argue that it is misguided to think as Lash
does that the modern idea of representation, as an intermediary
between subject and object, collapses under the conditions imposed
by contemporary technologies of communication due to the
untenability of a transcendental subject. I intend to show that from
a Wittgensteinian perspective, we can make sense of technological
immanentism (i.e., the claim that there is no more subject than a
bodily incarnated and socially related one) without claiming that
representation is untenable. Once I have done so, I will present
very briefly an art project working with a group of motorbike
delivery boys (motoboys) in the city of So Paulo and employing
multimedia cell phone technology. My point here is to stress how
digital representation can work as a non-epistemological means
of binding together a community. In this sense, a Wittgensteinian
epistemological continuism can produce a telling account of
how representation may work within digital communities. This is
possible only to the extent that we take representation as mediation
among subjects and experience and as a practice which goes
beyond a disinterested cognitive attitude towards the world, i.e.,
to the extent that we consider representations non-epistemological
bearings.

Professor of Philosophy
and Contemporary Art

Theory, Universidad de
las Amricas, Puebla,
Mexico

Information society, technological culture and the collapse of

representation
That representations may have non-epistemological implications
is far from being a commonplace. Since the Modern epistemological
turn, representations have been widely held as a means to capture,
refer and know reality. Martin Heidegger argues convincingly in
The Age of the World Picture how representation came to be a
synonym of modern knowledge.1
It is through representation that the opposed spheres of subject
and object paradoxically come to be at the same time separated
and connected.2 Although this predominant conception of
representation as quantitative abstract knowledge has become
almost a common sense idea, it can be argued that many forms
of representation from the drawings at Lascaux to the Sistine
Chapel and The Simpsons have worked not only as means to
capture the world but also as a practice that gathers individuals
together.
In recent academic works the non-epistemological side effects
of representation show up as a regular topic.3 However, current
reflections reach the point of considering representation-asknowledge as totally untenable. In order to do so, these reflections
highlight the non-epistemological aspects of the practice of
representing and so claiming the collapse of represention or the

45

Alberto Lpez Cuenca

advent of non-representational theories.4 As a

token of this I would like to present the view of the
American sociologist Scott Lash regarding the role
of representation in what he calls contemporary
information society. In Critique of Information,
Lash holds that criticism has always needed
a detached place from where to develop its
reflection. Lash understands that criticism in
the modern sense of the word was in need of a
privileged trascendental space to develop its
taska space that Lash finds unthinkable in our
global information age (vii). I will not address
here the main topic of Critique of Information
namely, whether or not we can nowadays conceive
of a criticism with no trascendentals. However, in
order to answer this question about the possibility
of a contemporary criticism, Lash puts forward a
compelling description of culture, communication
and knowledge in our days. In that broad picture
of technological society, representation becomes a
blue flower. In what follows I want to reflect upon
the presuppositions on which Lash builds this
picture.
The cornerstone of Lashs argument is that
information society is characterized by instant
communication. By contrast with other means of
codifying and delivering data like writing Lash
argues that the media societys paradigmatic
unit of culture is the communication, which in
its brevity, speed and ephemerality is taking over
from narrative and discourse as the axial principle
of culture (viii). The main characteristics of this
unit of culture are flow, disembeddedness, spatial
and temporal compression, and real-time relations.
According to Lash, these are aspects that make our
age differ from any other previous stage in history.
Thus, [t]here is an immediacy to information that
has little in common with systems of belief like
Christianity or the Enlightenment. The very speed
and ephemerality of information leaves almost
no time for reflection (1). Lash develops this
idea that there is no time for reflection (due to the
immediacy of information) as follows:
Reflexivity in the technological culture is not a
separate process of reflection. There is no time,
no space for such reflection. There is fusion
of words and things, of thought and practice.
To think is not just at the same time to do; to
think is at the same time to communicate. In
the technological culture, reflexivity becomes
practice; it becomes communication. (18)
Reflection
is
then
integrated
into
communication. This is so becasue for Lash in
our current information society we are connected

to others and the world in general. In our society,

we communicate and we do so because we are
interfaced. Lash goes on to write that
In technological forms of life we make sense
of the world through technological systems.
As sense-makers, we operate less like cyborgs
than interfaces. These interfaces of human
and machines are conjunctions of organic and
technological systems. Organic systems work
on a physiological model. Technological systems
work on a cybernetical model. Cybernetic, selfregulating systems work through functions
of intelligence, command, control and
communication. We do not merge with these
systems but we face our environment in our
interface with technological systems. (15)
The speed and ephemerality in which
information technology connects us makes it
impossible to detach ourselves from experience
and so prevents us from opening up a space for
reflection. One of the implications of this picture
pointed by Lash is that we cannot achieve sociality
apart from our machine interface. We cannot
achieve sociality in the absence of technological
systems (Lash 16).
Let me summarize very briefly the main ideas
presented so far: (1) contemporary information
society is characterized by communication as
the basic unit of culture; (2) communication is
distinguished by flow, disembeddedness, spatial
and temporal compression, and real-time relations;
(3) the speed and brevity of communication leave
no time for reflection; (4) we face our environment
in our interface with technological systems;
(5) we can achieve sociality only through these
technological systems.
This is the general picture of information
society that Lash presents. Let me now call the
readers attention to two basic epistemological
assumptions that underlie this portrait. The first
one is that [i]n technological forms of life, the
trascendental term is flattened into the empirical.
The dualism of epistemology and ontology is
flattened into the radical monism of technology
(16). The second assumption is that representation
is no longer possible in the way it was experienced
in the past due to the inmediacy and immanence of
the information order. The main epistemological
consequence of these two assumptions put together
amounts to erasing the distance between subject
and object. Indeed, for Lash there is no longer a
gap between subject and object that representation
has to fill.

46

DIGITAL COMMUNITIES OF REPRESENTATION: FROM WITTGENSTEIN TO BRAZILIAN MOTOBOYS

In this sense, the information age would

bring with it a technological transformation of
experience, knowledge and subjectivity. The core
of this transformation is what Lash calls a radical
empiricism or immanentism.5 As Lash writes
Thus in forms of life, knowledge takes place
in the life-world, through the subject, through
the subject understood as life (the body, class
interest, the unconscious, the will to power).
Through being no longer above things, but in
the world with things, we come to grips not
with epistemology and appearances, but with
deeper ontological structures (15)
It is in this way that Lash brings to an end modern
epistemology understood as representation
of the world by a trascendental subject. Now,
epistemology is to be understood as technological
communication in the life world.
. . . representational culture presumes an
effective dualism, a distance between subject
and object. In the representational culture the
subject is in a different world than things.
Previously existing transcendence and dualism
is displaced by the immanence, monism. There
are two dualisms at stake here. One is between
the subject, whether reader, audience or
viewer, and the cultural entity s/he encounters.
The other is between this cultural entity and
the reality it more or less fully represents.
Relationships between all three of these
elements subject, cultural object and real
object are distanciated in the representational
culture. In the technological culture, all three
are in the same world, in the same immanent
world (156)
Lash devotes a full chapter of his book
(Technological Phenomenology) to argue in
favor of the collapse of representation in the
information age. He does so relying, on the one
hand, in the notion of play as was presented
by Johan Huizinga in his book Homo Ludens
(1938) and, on the other hand, in the empirical
phenomenology of sociologist Harold Garfinkel.
Let me stress the two central ideas presented in
that chapter against representation (and so against
the distance modern epistemology established
between subject and object) and in favor of an
immanentist epistemology:
(1) The first one is that global information
society does not connect to the representational
culture but to the technological culture. And the
paradigm of play is central to this technological
culture (164). According to Lash,

Representational culture speaks the language

of correspondence. Without representation,
metaphor has no sense. Plays magical language
is metonymic, not metaphoric. There is no
symbolic correspondence between the man
and the kangaroo. Instead the man becomes
the kangaroo, hence the significance of the
metonymic mask in play. Metaphor works
through representation, metonymy through
substitution. Play, contends Huizinga, is the
first, the original translation of nature into
culture. (158)
(2) The second idea is that subjects are
empirically connected with other subjects and the
world. And so, against the visual and individualistic
stance of modern epistemology, Lash highlights
the crucial role of the community.
In the representational culture, social knowledge
was the mirror of social nature. Knowledge
stood apart from society as culture did from
nature. At issue is classical positivism. I draw
on phenomenology, and in particular on the
work of Harold Garfinkel, to give an account of
how knowledge in the technological culture is
no longer above or trascendent to but immanent
in, so to speak, social nature . . . (156)
To conclude this summary of the characteristics
of information society that leads to the collapse of
representation that Lash argues for in Critique of
Information let me highlight two points:
For Lash the fact that in information society we
are connected or interfaced with communication
technologies implies that we as subjects are
already in the world with objects. For him, this
means that there is no disembodied subject, that
there is no objective observer as it was pressuposed
by modern epistemology (164). There is, then, no
epistemological distance between subject and
object that representation would have to fill in.
For Lash information societys reliance
on communication explains the central role
that communities play nowadays. Unlike
representation, the mark of technological forms
of life is presence. This is why he writes that
Here representation involves a representing
subjectivity, externalizing his or her subjectivity
as representations. In presentation meaning is
not created by a disembedded and individualized
subject, but inheres in situated ongoing practices
or activities. In presentation aesthetic is not a
property of a subject to be externalized in art but
instead inseparable from the Sittlichkeit, and the
Sitten (or habits) of the community (90)

47

Alberto Lpez Cuenca

Action and community: Views from a Wittgensteinian epistemology

In my view, although Lash offers some
suggestive insights into contemporary information
society, his Critique of Information merely
manages to gather some compelling symptoms of
contemporary societys technological practices.
From these symptoms Lash tends to make general
and bold statements about among other issues
knowledge and the redefinition of subjectivy
that are poorly argued (if argued at all). I think that
his rendering of information society could be
more clearly understood if conceptualized through
a more precise framework, one constructed
neither out of solely sociological or technological
vocabularies but in epistemological terms.6
I think it is worth noting that the current
academic tendency that favors non-representational
theories has, among others, a crucial background
in the work of Austrian philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein.7 In chapter two of Critique of
Information, entitled Technological Forms of
Life, Lash seeks to provide the main characteristics
of life in information society, and in so doing he
almost casually mentions Wittgenstein as follows
But the idea of forms of life the lineage of
Wittgensteins notion is intrinsically antipositivist. Life here is not organicist but vitalist;
it is phenonemological. Thus the centrality
of life or life-force in Lebensphilosophie: of
Nietzsche, Bergson, Dilthey and Georg Simmel
(and in the novel, Proust and Joyce). There is
a shift here from the disembodied Cartesian
ego to the life of the body, from cognition to
perception; from Newtonian time to the time of
experience. (14)
By contrast with Lash, I believe that within a
Wittgensteinian epistemology we can account for
continuism (or immanentism, as Lash writes) at the
same time that we can make sense of representation
as a distinct practice. We can make sense of these
two aspects on the basis of emphasizing the
performative character of representation. This
stance is clearly stated in a famous section early in
Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations:
But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say
assertion, question, and command?There
are countless kinds: countless different kinds
of use of what we call symbols, words,
sentences. And this multiplicity is not
something fixed, given once for all; but new
types of language, new language-games, as
we may say, come into existence, and others
become obsolete and get forgotten.

Review the multiplicity of language-game in

the following examples, and in others:
Giving orders, and obeying them---
Describing the appearance of an object,
orgiving its measurements---
Constructing an object from a description
(adrawing)---
Reporting an event---
Speculating about an event---
Forming and testing a hypothesis---
Presenting the results of an experiment in
tables and diagrams---
Making up a story; and reading it---
Play-acting---
Singing catches---
Guessing riddles---
Making a joke; telling it---
Solving a problem in practical arithmetic---
Translating from one language into another---
Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.
It is interesting to compare the multiplicity
of the tools in language and of the ways they
are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and
sentence, with what logicians have said about
the structure of language.( Including the author
of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) (PI
23)8
The basic point made by Wittgenstein here is
to stress what we do with language. We do many
more things than just representing the world. In
so doing, he is stressing the performative character
of language and of any sort of representation
for that matter.9
The implications that the information age has
upon society and the subject that Lash presents
from a sociological point of view, Wittgenstein had
previously introduced them as an epistemological
transformation of the subject. This subject is
no longer the logical condition of possibility of
experience but is part of experience understood
as a network of intersubjective relations where
knowledge and consciousness originate. When
Wittgenstein used the notion form of life (as
when he wrote that to imagine a language is to
imagine a form of life, PI 19) he did so in order
to integrate language into everyday practice. Once
Wittgenstein makes speaking a language a form of
life, he presents the subject necessarily related to
a whole community as producer of meaning and
also as producer of life.10

48

DIGITAL COMMUNITIES OF REPRESENTATION: FROM WITTGENSTEIN TO BRAZILIAN MOTOBOYS

In his writings since the 1930s, Wittgenstein

proposes an epistemological continuism. In
Philosophical Investigations (1953) and On
Certainty (1969) he conspicuously argues that
knowledge is a more complex process than a
detached representation of the world. However, that
the knowing subject is inextricably embedded in
experience does not imply that representation loses
its function. As Lash correctly argues, there is no
need of a trascendental subject anymore in order
to account for knowledge and communication.
Nonetheless, against Lash, representation can be
understood as a distinct practice in a continuist
or immanentist world of experience. It may not
be the unique source of knowledge but that does
not mean that representation is not a distinct
practice that plays a substantial affective and
community making role. Representation without
a trascendental detachment of the world is what
Wittgenstein offers.11
On the basis of the foregoing, I disagree with
Lash in two respects. First, he understimates
the notion of form of life;12 and second, the
context in which Wittgenstein uses the notion
form of life underlines life not yet as vitalist
or phenomenologicalas Lash suggests
but more generally as action and practice.
Basically, insofar as one is part of a form of life
as a speaker, one is part of a bigger community
of action and knowledge. Language as a mode of
representation and so any sort of representation
is at its root action and interaction with others.
I find this to be the cornerstone for the above
mentioned epistemological framework that
could account consistently for the symptons of
information society.
How could human behavior be described?
Surely only by sketching the actions of a
variety of humans, as they are all mixed up
together. What determines our judgment, our
concepts and reactions, is not what one man is
doing now, an individual action, but the whole
hurly-burly of human actions, the background
against which we see any action (Wittgenstein,
Zettel 567).13
In order to intertwine language, knowledge
and action, Wittgenstein coined the now famous
term language-game. Reagarding this notion

world. Knowledge is rather a practice with social,

emotional implications. Stanley Cavell poignantly
wrote about this condition of language and
knowledge:
We learn and teach words in certain contexts,
and then we are expected, and expect others, to
be able to project them into further contexts. .
. . What on the whole we do is a matter of our
sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of
response, senses of humor and of significance
and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of
what is similar to what else, what a rebuke,
what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an
assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation
all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls
form of life. Human speech and activity,
sanity and community, rest upon nothing more,
but nothing less, than this . . . (Cavell 52)
In this sense, the later Wittgenstein understands
language not as a means to represent and know
the world (as he formerly did in his Tractatus
Logico-philosophicus) but as diverse communal
networks of practices. In brief, I think that
this Wittgensteinian approach to language and
knowledge sheds light on the role of representation
not just as an objective and disinterested way
to capture the world but as a mode to produce
community due to its non-epistemological
grounds.
A digitial community of representation:
canal*MOTOBOYS14
A clear example of this capacity of
representation as practice to bind together
a community is the work of Catalonian artist
Antoni Abad. In his projects, gypsies, prostitutes,
migrants, taxi drivers and people with disabilities
webcast from cell phones to the Internet.
canal*MOTOBOY was the latest of his projects and
was developed from April 2007 in the city of So
Paulo in Brazil. During work day, 12 motoboys
(delivery boys) use cellphones to photograph
and videotape their environment and send all the
information to a web page. At first sight, they
are producing their own maps of the city, their
cartographies of everyday life. They are, then,
making their own representations of the city they
inhabit. I dont mean to deny this. It is clear that
canal*MOTOBOY works through images, texts,
audio and video. However, its result is not simply
to make visible the reality of motoboys or to
produce representations that do not fit in traditional
commercial media. Rather than producing a
different representation of their everyday life, the

he wrote that . . . the term language-game is

meant to bring into prominence the fact that the

speaking

of a language is part of an activity,

or of a form of life (PI 23). These stataments

show that knwoledge is not just representing the

49

Alberto Lpez Cuenca

actions of the motoboys set in motion strategies

of sociability. They produce social relations
through the distinct practice of representation.
I find that canal*MOTOBOY opens up a space
for enunciation and performativity that goes far
beyond a mere representation of the motoboys
lifestyle. When they gather together every week
to discuss and develop the group strategies; when
they organize a panel discussion to consider their
project with traffic Town Hall officials and trade
union leaders; and, simply, when they choose,
tag, and send their video or audio materials to
the web pages project;15 when they do all these,
motoboys create and activate a community. It
seems clear that taking pictures and uploading
them to the web does not explain the strength of
this project. The key is not to represent the life of
a minority group, but to generate life itself trough
the interaction with the social environment, an
interaction that is made possible through the
practice of representation. And the point here
is practice not representation because as I
have tried to argue in this paper, it is practice that
connects us to other subjects and the world. It is
practice (also practices made possible by digital
technologies) that fill the gap between subject and
object imposed by modern epistemology.

we conceive ourselves as subjects and the way we

relate to others and the world. Thus understood, an
expanded epistemology must address sociological
concerns and problems as well as those of the
philosophy of technology. In fact, epistemology
needs to work at different fronts such as political
science and political economy. And in this process
we also have to make sense of representation. For
this reason, epistemology has less to do with the
modern search for the foundations of knowledge
than with the description of what the social
function of knowledge and representation
is. In order to illustrate this, I have commented
on the community making function that digital
representation may held in a project such as
canal*MOTOBOY.
Works Cited/References
Austin, John. How to Do Things With Words.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1962).
Baker, Gordon P., Peter M. S. Hacker. Scepticism,
Rules and Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell
(1984).
Baker, Gordon P., Peter M. S. Hacker. Malcolm
on Language and Rules Philosophy, vol.65,
pp.167-178 (1990).
Cavell, Stanley. The Availability of Wittgensteins
Later Philosophy in Must We Mean What
We Say. Cambridge, London, New York:
Cambridge University Press (1976).
Heidegger, Martin.. The Age of the World
Picture, The Question Concerning Technology
and Other Essays. London: Harper (1977).
Kripke, Saul. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private
Language. An Elementary Exposition. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell (1982).
Lash, Scott. Critique of Information. Londres:
SAGE (2002).
Lpez Cuenca, Alberto. A ruta est sendo
recalculada. O motoboy e a economia poltica
do afeto, canal*MOTOBOY. So Paulo: Centro
Cultural de Espaa (2007)..
Malcolm, Norman. Nothing is Hidden. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell (1986).
Malcolm, Norman. Wittgenstein on Language
and Rules, Philosophy, vol.64, No. 247, pp.528 (1989).
McGinn, Colin. Wittgenstein on Meaning. An
Interpretation and Evaluation. Aristotelian
Society Series. vol.1. Oxford: Basil Blackwell
(1984).
Nyri, Kristf. Wittgensteins Philosophy of
Pictures, Wittgenstein: The philosopher
and his works, Working Papers from the

Conclusion
As a whole, the characteristics of contemporary
information society presented by Scott Lash
in his Critique of Information seem cogent.
That is, contemporary information society is
characterized by communication as the basic unit
of culture and communication is distinguished
by flow, disembeddedness, spatial and temporal
compression, and real-time relations. However,
Lashs stress on the collapse of representation
due to this technological form of life is misguided
and, at the end, fruitless. It seems to me that Lash
understimates the role and extent of representation
in contemporary society. Representation may not
be the basis of any trascendental knwoledge but
it still has a distinct social function. I have tried
to show that we can make sense of the actual
performative role of representation through the
work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In order to do so, I
have proposed an expanded epistemology inspired
in the later writings of Wittgenstein. By an
expanded epistemology I mean the way we produce
and relate to knowledge through social relations as
opposed to abstract theories of information. In other
words, I have suggested that if we ask ourselves
about knowledge, we are asking about the way

50

DIGITAL COMMUNITIES OF REPRESENTATION: FROM WITTGENSTEIN TO BRAZILIAN MOTOBOYS

Wittgenstein Archives at the University of

Bergen, no. 17, Alois Pichler and Simo Stel
(eds.), Wittgenstein Archives at the University
of Bergen, pp. 281-312 (2005).
Steels, Luc. Community Memories for
Sustainable Societys, http://www.csl.sony.fr/
wp-content/uploads/2007/11/anniv-steels1.pdf
accessed January 14th 2008 (2007).
Thrift, Nigel. Life But Not As We Know It,
Non-Representational Theory. Space, Politics,
Affect. Londres y Nueva York: Routledge
(2008).
Wittgenstein, L. Culture and Value. Peter Winch
(ed.) Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Edicin Bilinge
(1980).
Wittgenstein, L. Zettel, G.E.M. Anscombe and
G.H.V. Wright (Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell (1981)
(1981).
Wittgenstein,
Ludwig.
Tractatus
logicophilosophicus. London: Routledge & Paul
(1961).
Wittgenstein,
Ludwig.
Philosophical
Investigations. New York: MacMillan (1953).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty. New York:
Harper (1969).

that in non-representational theory what counts

as knowledge must take on a radically different
sense. It becomes something tentative, something
which no longer exhibits an epistemological bias
but is a practice and is a part of practice (121).
6
cfr. Lashs conviction that only social science
is ready for the task of understanding the current
technological situation: First it is only critical
social science that will even problematize
the information age. While the philosophers,
anthropologists and aestheticians will speak in
absolutes, ignoring the centrality of socio-cultural
change, and the transition to the global information
culture (10).
7
Thrift (2008, 121)
8
And it is indeed interesting making the
comparison because Wittgenstein held in the
Tractatus that the task of language (and actually
of any meaningful representation) is basically to
represent the world: What a picture represents
is its sense (TLP 2.221). The proposition is a
picture of reality (4.01). A proposition shows its
sense. A proposition shows how things stand if it
is true. And it says that they do so stand (4.022).
Propositions represent the existence and nonexistence of states of affairs (4.1).
9
That language is not just representation is also
the key concern of the work of John Austin and
his speech act theory. More to the point, Austin
stressed that mere representation of the world
made through statements are also performative: .
. . stating is only one among very numerous speech
acts of the illocutionary class. Furthermore,
in general the locutionary act as much as the
illocutionary is an abstraction only: every genuine
speech act is both (147). I thank Dennis Skocz for
calling my attention to this point.
10
That Wittgenstein holds that language requires
a community of speakers to develop is a most
discussed issue. It is a view presented by Saul
Kripke (1982) and refuted by, among others,
McGuinn (1984) and Baker and Hacker (1984,
1990). This community hypothesis was then
taken up and notably defended by Malcolm (1986,
1989). I agree with Malcolm that if we discard
the community hypothesis then all that is new
and important in Wittgensteins later philosophy
would be dismissed (Malcolm, Nothing 171).
11
The role and importance of pictures, images
and representation as a whole in the later work of
Wittgenstein has not been properly discussed yet.
In part this is so because most of the discussion
about representation still spins around the
picture theory of the proposition presented

Notes
The fact that whatever is comes into being in
and through representedness transforms the age in
which this occurs into a new age in contrast to the
preceding one. The expressions world picture
and modern world picture both mean the same
thing and both assume something that never could
have been before, namely, a medieval and an
ancient world picture. (Heidegger 130)
2
Man becomes the representative of that which
is, in the sense of that which has the character of
object. (Heidegger 132).
3
A good overview of the confrontation between
epistemologists and ontologists regarding
representation is presented by Clare Hemmings,
Invoking Affect. Cultural Theory and the
Ontological Turn, Cultural Studies, vol. 19, No.
5, September 2005, pp. 548-567. For the specific
issue of art, see a quite disputable argument by
Simon OSullivan, The Aesthetics of Affect.
Thinking Art beyond Representation, Angelaki.
Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 6, No.
3
, december 2001, pp. 125-135.
4
See specially Thrift (2008).
5
It is worth mentioning what Nigel Thrift
writes about what knowledge becomes from the
perspective of non-representational theory: I hope
I have already hinted, by using the term style,
1

51

Alberto Lpez Cuenca

in the Tractatus. See Kristf Nyri (2005),

where he quotes Jaakko Hintikka in this regard:
discussions of whether Wittgenstein gave up
the picture theory in his later philosophy offer
an instructive example of the confusion one
inevitably runs into if one does not distinguish the
different components of the syndrome that usually
goes by the name Wittgensteins picture theory.
(An Anatomy of Wittgensteins Picture Theory,
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Half-Truths and One-anda-Half-Truths, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996, p. 21).
12
A bit earlier he writes that form of life is just
a way of life, a way of doing things (13).

The origin and the primitive form of the

langugae game is a reaction; only from this can
more complicated forms develop. Language - I
want to say - is a refinement, in the beginning was
the deed. (Wittgenstein, Culture 311)
Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence,
comes to an end; - but the end is not certain
propositions striking us immediately as true,
i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our
acting, which lies at the bottom of the languagegame. (Wittgenstein, Culture 204).
14
A detailed presentation of this project can be
found in Lpez Cuenca (2007).
15
Steels (2007) puts forward a compelling argument
in favor of social tagging as the production of
social or collective knowledge.
13

52

THE VIRTUAL POWER IN BLOGS

Chang Liao

Hung-Chang Liao

n recent years, more and more mass media have noted the
popularity of blogs. The blog is a relatively new individual public
medium, and more and more people have begun blogging on the
Internet. The reasons people have for blogging on the Internet is
that by owning a blog webpage, bloggers can document their lives,
release their emotions, and express their comments and opinions
to the public. A blog is a website on which bloggers present
themselves and transmit images and messages to the public. Morris
(2001) defined blogs as frequently updated websites in which there
are dated and brief entries, with the new entries pushing the old
ones to the bottom of the webpage. Grossman (2004) defined
blogs as an amateur website rapidly providing news, information
and personal opinions to blog readers who share the same interest
with the blogger. Rosencrance (2004) defined blogs as a kind of
knowledge management and communication tool.
In general, a blog has four characteristicsArchive, Permalink,
Time stamp, and Date header.
Archive: The media used in the blog could be pictures, articles,
or voices. However, how pictures, articles and voices are integrated
in the blog is important. The blogger may use sequential time, for
example day by day or week by week, to integrate these media.
Bloggers can also integrate different topics, for example, a story
or tour journal, in the blog. While integrating different methods
and media to present his/her articles in the blog, the blogger also
personalizes his/her own blog characteristics.
Permalink: When there is too much content in the blog, it
would become difficult for blog readers to find a certain passage
or certain article. In the blog system, permalink can offer the
function to identify certain passages or articles. In addition, it also
helps connect articles in different blogs.
Time Stamp: When bloggers edit articles in their blogs, the
blog system automatically records the time in the database. This
function is called a time stamp. The purpose of a time stamp is to
set the sequence for managing the database in the blog system.
Date Header: The date header links information between blogs
and other Internet pages. Blog readers can identify when articles
have been written or edited by the date header. By comparing the
date header of articles in a blog with the event presented elsewhere
on the Internet, blog readers can infer and make a connection
between these articles and the event.
Morris and Ogan (1996) think that blogs have reached a kind of
critical mass in creative writing. The blogger is a kind of message
producer, who may have better computer-mediated communication
skills than face-to-face communication skills. A blog is a hyperpersonal communication medium because it decreases the
disadvantages of communication related to social status, gender
stereotypes, physical attraction, social hierarchy, and so on.
Thus, bloggers and blog readers have the courage to present their
opinions, not afraid of being criticized. Stone (1991) thinks that
the social energy in blogs is communication. Blogs symbolize
an invisible but useful communication technology for bloggers and
blog readers (Kelleher & Miller, 2006). The popularity of blogs,
the impact of blogs on mass media and the public agenda (Drezner
& Farrell, 2004), and the credibility bloggers have among readers

Chung-Shan Medical
University, Taiwan

53

Hung-Chang Liao

(Johnson & Kaye, 2004), are all expressed by the

responsibility blog readers undertake to monitor
blogs.
Via diaries, jottings, prose, poetry, fiction
and photos, bloggers express what has happened
or what might happen in their own lives. Being
deeply impressed by bloggers, and furthermore,
following the rise and fall of bloggers moods,
blog readers read bloggers articles and may
respond by pouring out their sympathy or anger
into the virtual space. Bloggers seek identification
and support from other bloggers and readers by
way of their self-disclosing behavior. If their blogs
are read frequently, bloggers in some sense feel
they become popular. In addition, if bloggers and
readers can express their opinions appropriately,
they may expand interpersonal relationships in
cyberspace. A strong virtual community would
result in a positive interpersonal communication.
There are other benefits of blogs. Bloggers and
blog readers can become more knowledgeable
after browsing some interesting topics in blogs.
They can also construct a voice in their writing.
Through these voices, they produce some invisible
power and set up a new platform of voices.
This paper intends to investigate the virtual
power in the blog. In order to explore the virtual
power in blogs, literature analysis and in-depth
interviews were conducted. The literature analysis
included the analysis of the content of blogs.
Twenty popular blog websites were surveyed
and analyzed. In addition, the authors reviewed
Goffmans imagination theory (2002), Webers
self conception theory (1992), and Mausss body
techniques theory (1973) in order to analyze
and discuss the phenomenon of virtual power in
blogs. The people who participated in the in-depth
interviews were two professors in psychology and
education.

elections. These blog websites are used to attract

citizens. So, these blogs discuss many political
issues, for example, homosexual rights or AIDS
issues. In addition, the blog readers can also
propose some issues and ask the lawmakers or
politicians to respond to these issues. Hence, these
blog websites offer a medium for communication
between the politician and citizens. However,
almost 50% of blog websites set up by lawmakers
and politicians are closed after election. It is
possible that some of these blogs are shut down by
politicians because they lost an election.
Economic: Some blogs discuss economic
issues; therefore, some professional knowledge is
presented in these blogs. They also attract economic
experts to join the discussion of economic issues.
It is difficult to attract people to browse and
participate in the discussion on this type of blog.
However, owing to its professional standing, it is
easy for these blogs to construct their authority.
Newspapers and magazines would like to cite
economic articles from these blogs.
Culture: Some blogs discuss the relationship
between native culture and other cultures. These
discussions focus on cultural differences, beliefs,
and religious issues. Discussions of beliefs and
religious views always lead to violent disputes. In
Taiwan, the most severe cultural problem is the
different recognitions of national identity between
China and Taiwan. Some people think that
Taiwanese culture is the same as Chinese culture,
while others think that Taiwanese culture is very
different from Chinese culture because Taiwan
was at various times occupied by Spain, Holland,
China and Japan. Therefore, Taiwanese culture is
composed of a diversity of subcultures. The critical
discussion on some blogs always intends blog
readers to accept some certain ideology. Owing to
the political stress between China and Taiwan, it
is easy for blog discussions to get opposed sides to
fight against each other. Other blogs emphasize the
importance of diversified cultures because many
Taiwanese people marry Filipinos, Vietnamese, or
people from other countries. Therefore, the impact
the new immigrants have made on Taiwanese
culture is also popularly discussed.
Travel: Some blogs offer travel information
for blog readers. For example, if you want to tour
California, these blogs may suggest some scenic
spots and how to travel economically. Also, if you
decide to join a package tour, they may suggest
some tips about choosing tour companies with
lower prices but higher quality. If you decide to
travel alone, these blogs may also suggest some

The virtual power existing in blogs

Based on an analysis of twenty popular blogs in
Taiwan, how these blogs exert their virtual power
is discussed as follows.
News: Some blogs have a space to post hot
news. When the bloggers read the hot news/
information, some criticism and opinions will be
posted in these blogs. If the blogs attract many
people, the perceived reliability of these blogs
would be increased.
Political: In Taiwan, some lawmakers or
politicians have blogs. The purpose of setting
up their own blogs is to let people have a chance
to understand them and to support them to win

54

THE VIRTUAL POWER IN BLOGS

websites which can offer you good hotels and

rental cars with cheap prices. Some bloggers write
their travel experiences in the form of tour journals
or tour articles. If these tour journals and articles
are professionally written, these bloggers would
be recommended as travel experts, and these blog
websites would be highly evaluated.
Marketing: Some people or companies set up
a blog in order to sell their products. Commonly,
they organize a group to discuss quality, function,
or price of similar products. Then, through
discussions on the blog websites, potential
customers would be influenced to favor certain
products. Hence, the purpose of marketing is
achieved through the blog discussion. The use of
blogs for commercial purposes is becoming more
and more prevalent. Some people also use the blog
to market and advertise themselves. They post
photos in their blogs with the notion that maybe
someday they can become a singer or a model.
Somehow, blogs own the power of advertising and
marketing.

explain the complex phenomenon of maintaining

self-presentation in front of people. He thinks
that people always want to create an image in
this society, and people always pay attention to
the image. Therefore, in order to maintain the
image, people would play like actors. Goffman
defines the followings three points--Give-Give
Off, Front Stage-Back Stage, Constraint-Be
constraint. According to Goffman, Give is
defined by most people as performance, action,
behavior they want to have, while Give-Off is
defined as the performance, action, behavior being
expected by others. So, Give is defined by self,
and Give-Off is defined by other people. The
Front Stage and Back Stage are to explain the
different behaviors of some people. When people
present themselves, they want to show their good
image, so they have pressure while presenting
themselves. When bloggers use the blog to write
articles or present themselves, because most
people can not understand the intention of the
blogger, the blogger would do their best to present
a good image to the Front-Stage, that is, to the
public. The Back-Stage means that when people
want to release their pressure and do not want to
present their imaginary image, they would cease
the performance and go back to be the self.
Subgroup/Minority group: The bloggers role,
according to Goffmans theory (2002), should
always fit the blog readers expectation. Hence, in
order to fit readers expectations, some bloggers
would adjust their roles. In the blog website,
playing the role of a subgroup would be easier
to meet blog readers expectations. Even if the
opinions of the mainstream are in conflict with
those of the minority group, interestingly, most
blog readers would support the minority groups
opinions. The professor in education explains
that education encourages the minority group to
speak up for themselves. Most media also like to
report the minority groups opinions. When the
minority groups opinion is in conflict with the
mainstreams opinion, an interesting phenomenon
is that some blog readers would turn to speak up
and give voices for the minority group.
Internet power: The blogger has some Internet
power because the blog is managed and controlled
by the blogger, as the chief-editor controls the
newspaper. So, if blog readers do not agree with
the bloggers opinion and dispute with the blogger,
the blogger may delete these readers opinions;
that is, the blogger can show his/her power over
his/her own blog website. However, if bloggers
demonstrate their power over their blog website to

The virtual power for social structures and

characteristics
Based on an analysis of social structures and
characteristics related to the virtual power in the
blog, the author found that the virtual power could
come from the bloggers sex, his/her viewpoints
on certain issues, or factors such as subgroup/
minority group, Internet power, leader, and
audience segregation.
Sex: The most popular blogs are set up by female
bloggers. In an in-depth interview with a professor
in psychology, the idea was discussed that blog
readers feel or imagine that females are friendly
and helpful and care about others. While reading
females blogs, readers can relax themselves, for
the blog content is soft. Hence, there is a good or
intimate relationship between bloggers and blog
readers. If somebody were to attack or dissent
from the articles in the blog, some blog readers
would post articles to defend and to protect the
female bloggers. Although the reader may offer
reasonable explanations and opinions to express
his/her dissent from female bloggers opinions, it
would be better to keep quiet, not saying anything
in the blog. However, interestingly, in order not to
be attacked by the blog readers, some male blog
readers would pretend that they are female and,
on that basis, get some power to express their
opinions. When male readers pretend that they are
female readers, they can in some way balance the
sex power in blogs. Goffmans theory (2002) can

55

Hung-Chang Liao

excess, the blog readers may refuse getting into the

blog website and transfer to another blog website
or set up their own blogs to fight back. Therefore,
some articles whose opinions are in conflict with
the bloggers opinions would not be deleted but be
kept in the blog websites to make a power balance
between the blogger and blogger readers.
Leader: Leaders or experts also share some
power in the blog. According to Mausss body
technique theory (1973), the leader always
shows his professional knowledge. Mauss (1973)
thinks that people use body technique to control
themselves in order to avoid being controlled
by the outside material. The purpose of using
body technique is for social reproduction. When
many blog readers reproduce their professional
knowledge, the professional knowledge will in
some way control these bloggers ideology. For
example, if the expert writes the experience of
losing weight in his/her blog website, he/she may
suggest which food, which exercise, or which pill is
good for losing weight. Afterwards, that food, that
exercise, and that pill would become popular. The
psychology professor explains that this is a blind
phenomenon. The reason is that blog belongs to a
type of fast medium. When people want to lose
weight, they may go to Yahoo or Google to seek
for a good way to lose weight. Through surveying
the website, people can easily find the experts
articles on losing weight and other articles posted
by readers to support the experts article. If blog
readers believe that experts opinions on losing
weight, through blogging, they would do their best
to make you believe these opinions.
Audience segregation: The bloggers always
use fake names, not their real name, on their blog
websites. Besides bloggers, blog readers also use
fake names to post their opinions. Goffmans (2002)
term for this phenomenon is audience segregation.
The audience segregation is a type of hindering.
When the blog reader is hindered from recognizing
the identity of the blogger, the blog readers cannot
see through the blogger but instead have to try to
understand the blogger from different dimensions.
In order to attract certain readers, sometimes the
blogger intends to create a nice and friendly image
in his/her blog. Sometimes, the blogger would
keep invisible, not letting the readers know who
he/she is. Sometime, the blogger would wear a
persona, masking himself/herself as a smart and
capable professional to attract certain readers.
By segregating and clustering blog readers, the
blogger creates an eidolon blog website, in which

dissenting voices cannot be heard often. In other

words, the blog readers are constrained.
Conclusion
The blog has been one of the most popular
individual media in the network. By blogging
in the Internet, bloggers and blog readers can
sharpen their writing skills, search for realities,
and create a communication outlet. Blogs did not
start to be used popularly in America until 2000.
In Taiwan, since 2003, blogs have become a kind of
fashionable medium for Internet communication.
Many people have used self-disclosure in blogs for
interpersonal interaction. Therefore, the power of
Internet distribution and interpersonal relationship
could not be neglected. This study extended the
work of Sallot and his colleagues by examining
virtual power in relation to blogs (Sallot, Porter,
& Acosta-Alzuru, 2004; Porter & Sallot, 2005). In
order to explain the phenomenon of virtual power,
Goffmans imagination theory and Webers Who
I am theory were explored.
Goffman (2002) emphasizes how the
environment influences each individuals actions.
He thinks that people depend on their will to
construct their self-image. While constructing
their self-image, they are always constrained
by others. Hence, while setting up and playing
their self-image, people have to pay attention to
constrain their own action in order to meet others
expectation toward their role-play. Hence, in some
way, they are constrained by themselves and also
constrained by others. Webers self-conception
(1992) is based on Who I am theory. He thinks
that people continue to develop self-conception
in their lives. However, each individuals selfconception is different. With the learning process
and environmental factors, each individual
gradually builds up Who I am conception in
their psychology. However, while each individual
is in the process of constructing self-conception,
the value of Who I am is always positively
or negatively evaluated by himself/herself.
The positive/negative evaluation will lead the
development of action afterwards.
The researcher discovered that bloggers, while
presenting different self-images to different
bloggers, they gain the power to dominate these
bloggers. However, when the blog attracts
heterogeneous blog readers, the bloggers virtual
power would in some way be constrained. Some
conclusions about virtual power are made as
follows.

56

THE VIRTUAL POWER IN BLOGS

1.

In most popular blogs, the author wears

a make-up in their blogs. They mask
themselves; they do not show their real
selves.
2. By setting up their own blogs, in some way,
they can gain the power to dominate their
blog readers.
3. While the blog attracts heterogeneous groups,
the bloggerss virtual power would in some
way be constrained.
4. When more and more readers browse the blog,
most blogs wish to segregate heterogeneous
readers in order to present different selves
being masked before different readers.
5. The more readers, the less virtual power.

Kellerher, T., & Miller, B. M. Organizational

blogs and the human voice: Relational strategies
and relational outcomes. Journal of Computer
Mediated Communication, 11.2 (2006). Article
1.
http:/jcmc.
Indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/
Kelleher.html.
Mauss, Marcel. Techniques of the Body.
Economy & Society 2 (1973): 70-88.
Morris , H. Blogging burgeons as a from of Web
expression. U.S. News & World Report 130.2
(2001): 52.
Morris, M. & Ogan, C. The Internet as mass
medium. Journal of Communication 46.1
(1996): 39-50.
Porter, L. V., & Sallot, L. M. Web power: A
survey of practitioners World Wide Web use
and their perception of its effects on their
decision-making power. Public Relations
Review 31 (2005): 111-119.
Rosencrance, L. Blogs bubble into business.
Computerworld 38 (2004): 23.
Sallot, L. M. Porter, L. V., & Acosta-Alzuru, C.
Practitioners web use and perceptions of
their own roles and power: A qualitative study.
Public Relations Reviews 30 (2004): 269-278.
Stone, A. R. Will the real body please stand up?
Boundary stories about virtual culture. In M.
Benedikt (Eds.), Cyberspace: First Steps: 81118. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
Weber, A. L. Social psychology. Publisher: New
York: HarperPerennial. 1992.

Works Cited
Drezner, D. W., & Farrel, H. The power and
politics of blogs. Paper presented at the
American Political Science Association annual
meeting, Chicago. (2004).
Goffman, E. A representao do Eu na vida
cotidiana. Editora Vozes, Petrpolis. 2002.
Grossman, L. Meet joe Blog. Time Vol. 163, No.
24 (2004): 65-68.
Johnson, T. J., & Kaye, B. K. Wag the blog: How
reliance on traditional media and the Internet
influence credibility perceptions of weblogs
among blog users. Journalism & Mass
Communication Quarterly 81 (2004): 622-642.

57

CHANGING AND UNCHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF INFORMATION

Brownstein

Michael Brownstein

his paper considers what Ill call the practices of knowledge

embedded in two encyclopedias. I mean by this phrase
the uses, formation, and interpretation of knowledge. I am
talking not only about predominant conceptions of knowledge,
but also, to use a Foucauldian term, the whole deployment of
knowledge, which is to say not only the ways we think and talk
about knowledge, but more broadly, what those ways of thinking
and talking do. These practices of knowledge are obscured by an
interpretative tradition that evaluates knowledge and information
predominantly in terms of its truth value and its claims to authority,
I will argue. Our interpretative tradition is one that too often does
not recognize itself as interpretative, blinding us to much of the
richness of our actual practices of knowledge.
The comparison between Wikipedia and the Philosophes
Encyclopdie caught my attention because these texts (I will call
them both texts throughout this paper, for lack of a better descriptive
term) seem to share a historical lineage but also seem radically
discontinuous. With regard to their claims to truth and authority,
they appear to be polar opposites. By truth, I mean nothing more
than banal correspondence, that is, truth understood as the texts
correspondence to facts about the world; by authority, I mean what
counts as a legitimate source of that information. Whats important
to note is that truth and authority in this sense are not merely
notable characteristics of encyclopedias. Both the Encyclopdie
and Wikipedias self-definitions are constituted by arguments for
the proper way to gather and identify true knowledge; more to the
point, they seem to embody our cultures conceptions about the
meaning, shape, purposes, demands, and definitions of knowledge.
Though they seem to do so in radically different ways, I will suggest
otherwise.
The Encyclopdie became famous (and infamous, in its day)
for embodying the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment. Other
compendia had been written before, which were longer and perhaps
even more accurate, even though the Encyclopdie contained an
amazing 35 volumes and 71,818 articles. (Blom, xvi) What made
the Encyclopdie truly distinct, however, was its organization,
and the way in which its organization made a claim to truth in a
new way. In a schematic outline of the Encyclopdie called the
taxonomy of human knowledge, there were three categories:
memory, imagination, and reason. The studies of these subjects
fell to history, poetry, and philosophy, respectively, with theology
notably ordered as a subspecies of philosophy. The organization
of the Encyclopdie follows from its authors general goal: to
overcome superstitious and dogmatic thought. DAlemberts
Discours Prliminaire a 48,000 word introduction to the meaning,
purpose, and sources of knowledge spells out a programmatic and
uncompromising method for the accumulation of knowledge based
in Lockean epistemology, including the segmentation of scholarly
work into nascent disciplinary fields.1 (Blom, 85) Unbiased,
scientific knowledge was understood, furthermore, to have a
special relationship to freedom, as the texts frontispiece depicts
symbolically: a veil, symbolizing Truth, is being torn from the
face of the central figure by Reason and Philosophy, and a bright
light emanates from her head as a result.2 Situated below truth,

Ph.D. Cand., Pennsylvania

State University, College
Park, Pennsylvania

58

CHANGING AND UNCHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF INFORMATION

was a challenge in its time to traditional modes

of authority, sharing a progressive or radical
quality with Wikipedia. Whats more also
along the axis of authority it is an error to see
the Encyclopdie as purely expert-driven. For
its time, the Encyclopdie was in fact radically
collaborative.5 From the other side, despite its
unorthodox manner of achieving and sustaining
reliable information, Wikipedias functional
conception of truth is in fact quite traditional.
Editors are employed to enforce neutral point
of view infractions; bias-free information is the
unquestionable goal.6 But of course, this goal is
not perfectly met, as the ongoing debate about
Wikipedias reliability makes plain. Neither is
it the case in the Encyclopdie that unbiased
information is achieved or is even the singular
goal of the enterprise. The Encyclopdie is rife
with exactly the kind of unprofessional elements
for which Wikipedia is constantly condemned.7
Beyond these circumstantial similarities, the
normative goals of these respective encyclopedias
make the case for similarity even stronger. Here is
Diderots own statement of purpose:

reason, and philosophy, a host of other figures

presumably symbolize the various branches of
knowledge.
While the Encyclopdie was expert driven,
authoritative, and presumably threatening to both
the church and state, on account of its ostensible
scientific objectivity (notwithstanding its actual
objectivity; more on this soon), Wikipedia is
anti-expert, quasi-authoritative, and threatening
to us precisely because it challenges central
aspects of our scientific traditions. Its sheer
size seems to defy the possibility of reliability;
changing daily, it contains 9.25 million articles
in 253 languages. It is structured by volunteerbased anonymous collaboration, through which
anyone qualifications notwithstanding can
enter an article and anyone again, qualifications
notwithstanding can edit any other article.
Wikipedia stakes its claims to authority in the
wisdom of crowds, whatever that may be. Though
it seems better to achieve the Philosophes goals
by many orders of magnitude, Wikipedia also
appears to be the Encyclopdies Doppelgaenger.
The typical fear, then, is that Wikipedia
threatens a scientific tradition the Encyclopdie
helped to instantiate. From charges about false

Indeed, the purpose of an encyclopedia

is to collect knowledge disseminated around
the globe; to set forth its general system to
the men with whom we live, and transmit it
to those who will come after us, so that the
work of preceding centuries will not become
useless to the centuries to come; and so that
our offspring, becoming better instructed,
will at the same time become more virtuous
and happy, and that we should not die without
having rendered a service to the human race.
(Entry for Encyclopdie)
And in slightly less elegant prose, here is
Jimmy Wales:
Imagine a world in which every single person
on the planet is given free access to the sum of
all human knowledge. Thats what were doing.
(Slashdot.com interview, 28 July 2004)
Both encyclopedias found their normative goals
on an instrumental conception of information.
Enlightened agents are to use true information to
act knowledgably in pursuit of their ends, so the
idea goes. The problem is that this instrumental
conception of information cannot make sense of
the actual practices of either encyclopedia. Here we
begin to see the limitations of the truth/authority
interpretation, and the exclusively instrumental
conception of knowledge it entails.

biographies3 to digital narcissism,4 we seem

to be profoundly anxious about Wikipedias
epistemological status. The New York Times, for
example, is concerned about the extent to which
the online encyclopedia is cited in court decisions
(Cohen, 29 January 2007), the Harvard Crimson
with the use of Wikipedia by Harvard faculty
(Child, 26 February 2007) and the journal Nature
with the peer-reviewed quality of science articles
on the site. (Giles, 15 December 2005) Wikipedia,
argues Andrew Keen, embodies an era of flattened
media, one that is a personalized, chaotic media
without the essential epistemological anchor of
truth. (Debate, 18 July 2007)
Instead of throwing my hat into these
epistemological debates, I would like to consider
the status of these debates themselves, that is,
think about what people talk about when they
talk about these encyclopedias. The tradition
Wikipedia may threaten is one purportedly staked
on the progressive achievement of true knowledge
by experts. But is far from clear, I think, that truth
and authority ought to be the central hermeneutic
axes of this issue.
There are, first, a number of circumstantial facts
about these two encyclopedias that problematize
their ostensibly deep contrast. The Encyclopdie

59

Michael Brownstein

By reorganizing the families and hierarchies

of knowledge, the authors of the Encyclopdie
reoriented scientific inquiry away from its traditional
focus on matters theological and aristocratic.
These goals suggest a subtle friction with the
more purely instrumental uses of information
outlined by Diderot. Far more dissonant, however,
are the contents of the Encyclopdie itself. It was,
in ways that do not line up at all with Diderots
stated intentions, fundamentally strategic. This
is to say that the texts strategic normative goals
more than occasionally override its pretensions
to scientific objectivity. In fact, the project reads
like a polemic against the ancien regime, when
one considers footnotes like that at the bottom of
the entry for anthropophages, which read, see:
eucharist, communion, or hears statements like
this, from Diderot: men will never be free until
the last king is strangled with the entrails of the
last priest. (Dithyrambe sur la fete de rois)
What the encyclopedists considered important
was contextual through and through. Virtually
all of the articles dealing with economic thought
serve to lay the groundwork for what would soon
be called physiocracy. (Will, 198) Blondels article
on Paris is an aesthetic criticism of the citys
declining, old-fashioned architecture. (Cassirer,
389) Perhaps most interestingly, Voltaire uses
an entry for Muhammad as a surrogate for
a critique of Christ; the dichotomy at work is
between the glories of Arab science (read: science
in general) and the irrationality of Islam (read:
religion in general). (Joubin, 198-199) This use
of orientalist motifs illustrates perfectly the
insufficiency of taking the Encyclopdies interest
in objective truth at face value. The ways in which
polemic, critique, and strategic social arguments
figure throughout the Encyclopdie fit in with
larger complications in the Enlightenments selfunderstanding. Such complications are not always
nefarious, as they seem to be when Voltaire
invented an Orient to suit his own (and his peers)
purposes. But nefarious or not, it is clear that
the ways in which the Encyclopdie deployed
knowledge were more complicated than a picture
of combating dogmatism through authoritative
inquiry suggests. They can only be understood
from within the contexts and social conditions
which generated them.
Rather than a pure instrument for enlightenment,
the Encyclopdies deployment of knowledge
was, instead, partly constitutive of the society
that a compendium of information was meant to
improve. Perhaps constitutive is too strong a word

here, in the sense that 18th century Europe could,

presumably, have been more or less the same place
it was absent the Encyclopdie. The point, though,
is that the practical activity of the Encyclopdie
participated in an intentional, strategic way
in the Enlightenments process of re-shaping the
self-understanding of its era. Information does
not simply have a use-value; it participates in
constituting the social worlds in which we live.
Wikipedias normative practices are also
obscured by a too-narrow focus on truth and
authority. Virtually all of the discourse about
Wikipedia, both popular and academic, focuses on
its accuracy, and it does so because of Wikipedias
novel claims to authority. The degree to which
mass aggregates of volunteers can produce a body
of true information is a natural, important, and
fascinating question. But this mode of questioning
fails to see the forest for the trees. Mass
aggregates of volunteers create communities, and
communities are guided by values. We must, then,
try to understand the practical ethos that constitutes
these new and pervasively consequential values.
Its important to note that the way Wikipedia
flattens knowledge and information is not just a
consequence of its open editing structure; that
the entry immediately preceding the one for
Heidegger, Martin is Heidegger, Characters
of Final Fantasy VII is precisely the point of the
project. Wikipedia avoids making distinctions
regarding the worth of content just like it avoids
making distinctions in authorial qualifications.8
This marks not only a radically flat conception
of what knowledge is, but also a normative
commitment to a certain vision for its use.
Wikipedia is meant to be used in endlessly diverse
ways, and its openness at both ends, that is, at the
production end and at the user end, is constitutive
of the project itself. Wikipedia has become a news
source,9 for example, and has lent itself to novel
defense tactics in court cases,10 not to mention its
pedagogical uses in classrooms. These innovative
ends are intrinsic to the Wiki platform itself.
Whats remarkable about Wikipedia is that its
practices are held together by volunteerism, the
desire to participate in joint action, and a strong
sense of shared norms. Violators of community
practices spammers, jokers, ideologues, etc.
are ostracized. Clarity and plain citations are
held in high regard, and transparency is a central
goal. (Benkler, 72) Neutrality, objectivity and
clarity here are expressions of an ethos. Except
for use against egregious violators, virtually
no enforcement tactics with teeth exist. One

60

CHANGING AND UNCHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF INFORMATION

thing thats remarkable about Wikipedia is that

it manages to maintain a relatively high degree
of accuracy despite its open platform. But also
whats remarkable, and what is lost when we
talk exclusively about truth and authority, is the
development of this set of normative, communityorganizing practices out of organic online
volunteerism.
Particularly with the Encyclopdie, but also I
think with Wikipedia, the standard hermeneutic
model focusing on truth and authority captures
the authors own self-descriptions, from Diderot
to Jimmy Wales. What this points to, I think, is
a gap in interpretations, a hermeneutic gap
between the intelligence of social phenomena like
Wikipedia and the Encyclopdie and our standard
ways of evaluating and understanding them. The
practical ways in which these encyclopedias are and
were used defies our conceptualizations of those
uses. This argument does not entail a commitment
to the claim that our conceptualizations or
interpretations of texts conceal the real, unitary
truth of our practices of knowledge. The point here
is only that the truth/authority axes, which are tied
to the normative conception of information which
I have described as instrumental, obscure those
elements of the uses of knowledge and information
which are precisely not instrumental.
On the axes of truth and authority, the question
is whether or not, or to what degree, Wikipedia
undermines the Encyclopdies tradition. When
posed unreflectively as the question rather than as
a question, this focus has the potential to override
broader inquiries into the social force of knowledge
and information practices. In McLuhan-esque
fashion, Arjan Vreekan, for example, has mapped
changes in cultural conceptions of information
in the west when, for example, it is taken up with
17th century empiricism and the idea of primary
qualities, quantified and reified for use by state
bureaucracies in the 19th century, and understood
as something to be bought and sold in the late
20th century. (2005, 18) Why, then, do we stick so
steadfastly to one kind of interpretation, ignoring
along the way the ways in which knowledge
and information are generated by and generate
historical social life?
This hermeneutic gap in our interpretation
of practices of knowledge has quite a bit of
currency today. In conclusion, Id like to consider
one example briefly. Debates about the value
of Wikipedia are usually framed this way, here
from the New York Times: depending on your
lights, [Wikipedia] is either one of the noblest

experiments of the Internet age or a nightmare

embodiment of relativism and the withering of
intellectual standards. (Dee, 1 July 2007) The
most visible proponent of the withering intellectual
standards line is Keen, whose fear I mentioned
before; it is that Wikipedia, and the usergenerated content aspects of the Web generally,
threaten the essential epistemological anchor of
truth in our society by falling prey to the Babel
Problem, which is the worry that when everyone
speaks, no one listens. Digital narcissism,
according to Keen, is the radical democratization
of the production of knowledge, culture, and
information, and his critique is staked on the
claim that this radical democratization creates
a dumbed-down generation of media illiterates.
Keens critique fits into two notable traditions: first,
of those prognosticators of societies impending
doom due to some pervasive new technology, and
second, of those intellectuals, like Alan Bloom,
who believe that democracy depends precisely on
undemocratic practices and institutions.
One response to Keen, which is of course the
typical one, is that Wikipedia is not in fact the
embodiment of relativism. But what this reply does
not tell us, however, is exactly of what Wikipedia
might be the embodiment. We must recognize
that Wikipedia, through its structure, medium,
community, norms, and values, changes the
very questions we ought to ask with regard to its
relationship to knowledge and information. Keens
worry about the decline of civilization might
be factually false (or it might be factually true),
but it fails to see how social practices, including
practices of knowledge, change the questions at
stake. Wikipedia is based in large part on trust.
This is not trust based in the expertise of an
author, but trust based in the capacity of collective
wisdom the so-called wisdom of the crowd to
filter truth from error. We ought to ask, then, how
this innovation affects our whole relationship to
knowledge practices. Does information based on
the ideal of trust rather than the ideal of mirroring
nature create new and different practices of
knowledge and information, for example? More
specifically, perhaps, does the anonymity in
Wikipedias structure change our relationships to
race, gender, or class in the creation and currency
of information? Along a different line of questions,
adopting a theme from political theory, we might
ask in what ways knowledge and information of
which we feel ourselves to be the authors may
figure in to our lives differently.

61

Michael Brownstein

Works Cited
Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How
Social Production Transforms Markets and
Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006.
Blom, Phillip. Enlightening the World. New York:
Palgrave Macmillion, 2004.
Cassirer, Thomas. Awareness of the City in the
Encyclopedie. Journal of the History of Ideas.
Vol. 24, No. 3. Jul.-Sep., 1963. Pgs. 387-396.
Child, Maxwell L. Professors Split on Wiki
Debate. Harvard Crimson. 26 February 2007.
Cohen, Noam. Courts Turn to Wikipedia, But
Selectively. New York Times. 29 January,
2007.
Dee, Jonathan. All the News Thats Fit to Print
Out. New York Times. 1 July 2007.
Diderot, Denis. Dithyrambe sur la fete de rois.
Encyclopdie. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/
text/textidx?c=did;cc=did;rgn=main;view=tex
t;idno=did2222.0000.004
Giles, Jim. Internet Encyclopedias Go Head to
Head. Nature. #438: 900-901. 15 December
2005.
Hafner, Katie. Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in
Wikipedia. New York Times. 19 August 2007.
Hughes, Jennifer. The Wiki Defense. Columbia
Journalism Review. May/June 2007.
Joubin, Rebecca. Islam and Arabs through the
Eyes of the Encyclopedie: The Other as
a Case of French Cultural Self-Criticism.
International Journal of Middle East Studies.
Vol. 32, No. 2. May, 2000. Pgs. 197-217.
Keen, Andrew. Full Text Debate: Keen vs.
Weinberger. Wall Street Journal. 18 July
2007.
Vreekan, Arjan. The History of Information:
Lessons for Information Management.
PrimaVera. Working papers, Universiteit Van
Amsterdam. 2005-19.
Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds.
Interview on Slashdot.com. 28 July 2004.
h t t p: // i n t e r v i e w s . sl a s h d o t .o r g /a r t i cl e .
pl?sid=04/07/28/1351230
Will, Robert M. Economic Thought in the
Encyclopdie. Southern Economic Journal.
Vol. 32, No. 2. Oct., 1965. Pgs191-203.

It came to light in the summer of 2007, thanks to

a new program called WikiScanner, that a number
of corporations such as ExxonMobil and PepsiCo
had favorably edited their Wikipedia pages with
regard to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and the
health effects of drinking soda. (Hafner, 19 August
2007) Certainly there is something problematic
here; comedian Stephen Colbert captured it well
when he created Wikiality.com, The Truthiness
Encyclopedia, which hails the democratization
of knowledge where definitions will greet us
as liberators. I raise this example to make two
related suggestions. First, truth counts. Second,
it counts not because we are only concerned
with the veracity of facts, but also because we
are concerned with the uses of facts, which are
irrevocably intertwined with the social practices
of our culture and the values they embody. There
is an ongoing interpretative debate about the
proper role of corporate influence in our practices
of knowledge, from corporate-owned media to
corporate sponsorships of university chairs. These
are important questions, and they demand our best
hermeneutic skills. They raise questions about our
self-understanding as a society, about who we are
and what we do.
Doing so means attending to the relationship
between our conceptions of what knowledge and
information are and the uses to which we put
them. We ought to do this because I presume that
the degree to which normative work has purchase
in any society is proportional to the extent to
which the concepts and evaluations entailed line
up with the practices on the ground. I fear that this
comparison too often does not line up with regard
to our evaluations of encyclopedias and of media
in general, and that it fails to do so because of the
dominance of an interpretative tradition that too
often does not recognize itself as such. Recovering
the reality of our deployments of knowledge, then,
is a project in service of making knowledge itself
more efficacious in its reciprocal relationship with
our practices and our purposes.

62

CHANGING AND UNCHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF INFORMATION

Notes
1
Diderot writes: Should you wish to exclude
none, who will exactly define the word conjugate,
if not a geometrician; the word conjugation, if
not a grammarian; the word azimuth, if not an
astronomer; the word epic, if not a man of letters;
the word exchange, if not a merchant; the word
vice, if not a moralist; the word hypostasis, if
not a theologian ; the word metaphysics, if not a
philosopher; the word gouge, if not a man versed
in the arts? http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/t
extidx?c=did;cc=did;rgn=main;view=text;idno=d
id2222.0000.004
2
The image can be found on Wikipedia. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedie
3
John Seigenthaler, an assistant to Attorney
General Robert Kennedy in the 1960s, raised
strong concerns about Wikipedia after he
discovered false and libelous information in his
biography that had apparently remained on the
page, unedited, for 132 days.
4
This is Keens complain about Wikipedia, and
more generally, the aspects of the internet that rely
upon user-generated content.
5
Diderot writes, when one considers the immense
material for an encyclopedia, the only thing one
perceives distinctly is that it cannot be the work
of a single man. How could a single man, in the
short span of his life, manage to comprehend and
develop the universal system of nature and art?
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=di
d;cc=did;rgn=main;view=text;idno=did2222.000
0.004
6
This goal seems to be met for the most part.
Natures survey, comparing 42 science entries in
Wikipedia and Britannica, revealed insignificant
differences in accuracy; Wikipedia averaged
4 minor inaccuracies per entry and Britannica
averaged 3. Of the 84 articles sent out for peerreview, 8 serious errors were found, 4 from
each encyclopedia. Cf. http://www.nature.com/
news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html

Consider this entry: Aguaxima, a plant growing

in Brazil and on the islands of South America.
This is all that we are told about it; and I would
like to know for whom such descriptions are
made. It cannot be for the natives of the countries
concerned, who are likely to know more about the
aguaxima than is contained in this description, and
who do not need to learn that the aguaxima grows
in their country. It is as if you said to a Frenchman
that the pear tree is a tree that grows in France, in
Germany, etc. It is not meant for us either, for what
do we care that there is a tree in Brazil named
aguaxima, if all we know about it is its name?
What is the point of giving the name? It leaves
the ignorant just as they were and teaches the rest
of us nothing. If all the same I mention this plant
here, along with several others that are described
just as poorly, then it is out of consideration for
certain readers who prefer to find nothing in a
dictionary article or even to find something stupid
than to find no article at all. http://quod.lib.umich.
edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=did;cc=did;rgn=main;vi
ew=text;idno=did2222.0000.243
8
There are, of course, some qualifications to
create a Wikipedia page. But they are radically
thin. A biographical entry, for example, requires
the subjects name to have appeared in print twice
before.
9
Following the massacre at Virginia Tech, for
example, newspapers were apparently checking
their information against Wikipedia, which had
become a clearinghouse of sorts for breaking
news. Cf Jonathan Dee, All the News Thats Fit
to Print Out, New York Times, 1 July 2007.
10
Floyd Landis, the disgraced cycling champion
of the Tour de France, posted 370 pages of his
testosterone tests online, asking if anyone could
help explain his apparently contradictory results. Cf.
Jennifer Hughes, The Wiki Defense, Columbia
Journalism Review (May/June 2007), pg. 20.
7

63

Habermas, McLuhan and the Public Sphere

Gray

K e v i n W. G r a y

ven though it has been little remarked, both Marshall

McLuhan and Jrgen Habermas take very similar views
of the relationship between the development of modern
society, and the growth of technology. Both argue that the
unimpeded flow of information was necessary for the development
of a modern capitalist society. For instance, McLuhan argues
that a market economy can exist only in a market society and
that the development of a market economy requires societys
transformation by Gutenberg technology (McLuhan, 1969 322).
Similarly pessimistic, both argue that the public sphere was quickly
overcome by the growth of a market in which individuals ceased
to be active members of the public sphere and instead became
consumers of cultural commodities: for example McLuhan argues
that as market society defined itself, literature moved into the role
of consumer commodity. The public became patron (McLuhan,
1969 326).1
What is important here is the power both thinkers ascribe
to technology to change the public sphere. What I have said,
however, is not to say that McLuhan and Habermas embrace
entirely similar positions. In particular, the early Habermass
emphasis on the public sphere as a region where opinions may be
aired and conclusions hashed out does not figure prominently in
McLuhans thought. In my paper, I examine the contention in both
McLuhan and Habermas that the development of new forms of
social organization depends on the development of new forms of
technology, and apply it to the development of the Internet.
I conclude by arguing that Habermas has given us at most
conditions which we can use to evaluate whether any new
technology provides us with the potential for a more democratic
society. Against McLuhan and others, I argue that technology
cannot be abstracted from empirical conditions on the ground.

Ph.D. Cand., Laval

University, Quebec City,
Quebec

Habermas on the Public Sphere

In his famous work The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere, Habermas traces the development of the bourgeois
public sphere from the period of absolute monarchy in continental
Europe, through the end of the 19th century. Using a method of
immanent critique influenced by the Frankfurt School, Habermas
wants to compare the actual development of the public sphere
with its idealized self-understanding. The argument of the book
is that the actual development of the public sphere cannot be
separated from the history of civil society in the High Middle
Ages; what Habermas calls the public sphere of the period is
merely a corruption of an idealized form of public dialogue (which
is expressed in its purest form in the writings of Immanuel Kant
and J. S. Mill). The type of public sphere, and the public opinion
manifest within it, could have existed only in the late 18th-century
in England and the 19th-century in continental Europe, and even
then, was limited to particular social strata.2
As is generally accepted in the literature, it was only with the
emergence of trade and mercantile capitalism that a new social
order began to take shape across Europe.3 At first, representing
a relatively tiny section of the economy, it was integrated easily
into the existing social order. Soon however the prevailing

64

Habermas, McLuhan and the Public Sphere

and less important commercial events (including,

eventually, stories about plagues, murders, etc.).
These journals developed out of the simple rules
of economics: news itself became a commodity,
and the printed journals,
developed out of the same bureaus of
correspondence that already handled handwritten newsletters. Each item of information
contained in a letter had its price; it was
therefore natural to increase the profits by
selling to more people. This in itself was
already sufficient reason periodically to print
a portion of the available news material and
to sell it anonymously, thus giving it publicity
(Habermas 21).
Third, the government created a public by
publicizing the events at court, instructions,
ordnances, etc. Soon, government officials began
to assemble lists of information that were sent to
the editors of journals so that they might be made
public.
It was this combination that lead to the
emergence, in the sense of the word intended by
Habermas, of a reading public a public that had
an interest in and the wealth to buy journals and
to keep abreast of the latest news. This public
expanded rapidly to include not only merchants
and traders, but all others, such as factory
owners, manufacturers, etc., who might need
similar information to plan their businesses.
Here, Habermas argues that because this new
area of commerce had developed free of state
interference (contrary to the organization of the
old feudal system), an area developed between
state regulation and the private initiative of
individuals. This change:
turned the reproduction of life into something
transcending the confines of private domestic
authority and becoming a subject of public
interest, that zone of continuous administrative
contact became critical also in the sense that
it provoked the critical judgment of a public
making use of its reason (Habermas 24).
Habermas argues that the situation (wherein
a public realm is created to mediate between the
emergent claims of private individuals against
the state) created a need for a better informed
public. By the end of the 17th-century, alongside
the usual informational content of journal were
published periodicals featuring pedagogical
instruction as well as criticism and review.
Amongst these articles were published the
opinions of professors, doctors, etc. who wrote
articles for the betterment of the populace.

guild and corporate system, which had served

more as instruments of domination over the
surrounding areas rather than as a system for
free commodity exchange between town and
country, was supplanted by long distance trade
which led to the emergence of different types of
commerce; in consequence the guild-system lost
its importance.
Habermas sees three decisive events leading
to the creation of the public sphere. First, the
demand for information about distant events
led to the creation of a system of information
exchange: with the expansion of trade,
merchants market-oriented calculus required
more frequent and more exact information about
distant events (Habermas 16). A regular mail
service, starting from the middle of the 14th
century, was organized by merchants to carry
news towns became important centers for
the trade of information. Simultaneously to the
organization of stock markets, postal services
and the presses instituted a system of regularized
contact and communication.4
The second important event (as Marx stresses
in the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere)
was the change in the nature of the family. The
industrial revolution changed the nature of the
private realm of a familys affairs. Whereas once
activities relegated to the household economy
emerged into the public sphere for instance,
economic activity had to be oriented toward
a commodity market that had expanded under
public direction and supervision (Habermas
19) For example, activities connected to mere
survival (e.g. the production of food stuffs) which
were formerly private, became elements of the
public sphere.5
Neither of these first two elements, in and
of themselves, was sufficient to account for the
emergence of a public sphere. The exchange of
private newsletters, it is true, was dependent on
the merchants who provided the news, but the
emergence of a truly public sphere only became
possible with the development of a commercial
press. At first, the journals (first published weekly,
then daily as early as the middle of the 17th century)
contained merely a trickle of the information
to be found in private correspondence (which
contained detailed information about Imperial
parliaments, wars, harvests, taxes, etc.) most
of the information that went uncensored by
either the unofficial censorship of the merchants
or the official censorship of the government
concerned foreign events, news from the court,

65

Kevin W. Gray

political functions during the eighteenth

century, but the kind of function can be
grasped only in relation to that specific phase
in the developmental history of civil society
as a whole in which commodity exchange and
social labor became largely emancipated from
governmental directives (Habermas 73-74).
A sphere free from government regulation
developed, wherein the fundamental model
of liberties became derived from the model of
contract law. Of course, not every member of the
public sphere was involved in trade; nonetheless, a
general category of legal standing was developed
separate from estate and birth corresponding
to the fundamental parity among owners of
commodities in the market and among educated
individuals in the public sphere (Habermas 75).
As the nascent market was left largely
deregulated, one could realistically claim that
free competition in economic matters was selfregulating. A society governed solely by the laws
of the free market could in theory present itself,
in its self-understanding, as free from domination
and coercion. The laws of the market prevailed
because they were assumed to be part of an
intrinsic natural order. Conversely the laws of the
state, because they needed to be explicitly enacted,
had the appearance of introducing uncertainty into
the economic system and needed to be justified.
The nature of legislation needed to change.
As public debate amongst individuals paralleled
exactly the market model that had come to
be viewed as the paradigm of non-coercive
intercourse, only legislation that emerged from
such a process of debate could reasonably be
viewed as justified.
Public debate was supposed to transform
voluntas into a ratio that in the public
competition of private arguments came
into being as the consensus about what was
practically necessary in the interest of all
(Habermas 83).
For this debate to take place, a system of rights
thought necessary both for it and the function
of civil society was codified for the first time.
They included, within the public sphere: freedom
of opinion, speech, assembly and association,
freedom to petition, equality of vote (for those
eligible), etc.; within the intimate sphere, personal
freedom, inviolability of the home, etc.; concerning
transactions, equality before the law, protection of
private property, etc.
Habermas argues that the public sphere rose
out of a reconfiguration of the means of social

***
This confluence of specific historical events gave
rise to an unprecedented situation, where a rapidly
expanding parallel system (the nascent capitalist
economic system) created a market for information
and a supply of ready consumers. This area, the
bourgeois public sphere, may be conceived as the
sphere of private people coming together against
the political authorities themselves. This conflux
of historical events led to the peculiar situation
whereby citizens felt free to use reason to challenge
the authority of the state.
At first, however, public reason was used for
aesthetic criticism. The increase in periodical
publications created a change in the locus
classicus of traditional aesthetic criticism.
Habermas contends that periodicals began to
introduce articles treating artistic and literary
criticism. At the same time, an increased audience
for these journals, as well as changes in the court
structure, moved the locus of the public sphere
from the court to the town. Habermas argues that
the new sites of debate, where literature, art, and
later politics, came to be argued over and perhaps
legitimated, were the scores of coffee houses that
began to appear in the middle of the 17th century,
first in London and later elsewhere.
Three important features can be drawn from
this change. First, the coffee houses inverted
the typical deference to rank and social class,
permitting the strength of the best argument to
determine discussion. Second, this form of public
debate permitted a problematization of areas (e.g.
politics) not previously open to discussion. Third,
the process that gave rise to public culture meant
that it was in principle impossible for the public
sphere to become closed any person, provided
they were literate, had access to the necessary
materials to participate in public debate. Access
to the public sphere was essentially the sort of
commodity that could be purchased in the market
place: readers, listeners, and spectators could
avail themselves via the market of the objects that
were subject to discussion. The issues discussed
became general not merely in their significance,
but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be
able to participate (Habermas 37).
The Decline of the Public Sphere
The features that allowed this debate to occur
would not last for long. Habermas documents that
the public sphere took on,

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Habermas, McLuhan and the Public Sphere

sense of the word, wherein much of the choices

surrounding cultural consumption were made by
corporations.8
The claim here is that the expansion of the
public sphere had the effect of leveling all
distinctions between novel, entertainment, human
interest story and advertising. The model of the
public sphere had presupposed strict separations
between the public realm and the private realm,
such that the public sphere was merely a collection
of private individuals come together. Further, the
development of different media technologies in
the 19th and 20th centuries further changed the
role of media in the public sphere radio, film
and television made the consumption of media
a private affair, separate from the world of the
discussion of belle letters. Habermas theorizes
this as a shift in the principle of publicity:
On the one hand, to the extent that the press
became commercialized, the threshold
between the circulation of a commodity and
the exchange of communications among the
members of a public was leveled; within the
private domain the clear line separating the
public sphere from the private became blurred.
On the other hand, however, to the extent
that only certain political guarantees could
safeguard the continued independence of its
institutions, the public sphere ceased altogether
to be exclusively a part of the private domain
(Habermas 181).9
As we have seen, Habermas argues that
this occurs partially because of the increasing
emphasis of profit inside the publishing business
(Habermas 182).10 Remembering the liberal
model of the public sphere, what we see is that
what was originally supposed to keep the press
free of interference that it was held in the
hands of private individuals was no longer a
guarantee of rational-critical debate (Habermas
188). Instead, the fact that private enterprises
became profit-oriented turned the news into a
commercialized, concentrated commodity. In
this way, the public sphere became an area for
advertising, and had an effect on the activities of
private individuals.11
Alongside the growth in state bureaucracy, the
growth of large corporations operating in the media
of the public sphere allowed both to encroach on
the public sphere (Habermas 198-201). As such,
participation in the public sphere ceases to involve
hashing out different arguments, but subscription
to different positions, each of which represented
a party line or editorial policy. Publicity loses

reproduction, and was allowed to arise only due

to the absence of effective state intervention.
By the end of the 19th century however, the state
had begun to interfere with greater and greater
frequency in the affairs of commerce. Habermas
dates the end of this first liberal era to the Great
Depression of 1873.6 As a result of this economic
downturn, all the advanced capitalist countries
abandoned the principles of free trade in favor of
new forms of protectionism. The theory that the
capitalist system was naturally self-regulating
gradually came to be rejected in favor of the
explanation that unregulated capitalism could
ensure fair competition only under exceptional
historical circumstances (Habermas 144). The
processes of concentration and crisis showed that
commerce was not an exchange among equals, as
supposed, but rather, that commerce took place
within a society that was composed of a nexus of
coercive constraints.
Against the liberal interpretation of the state as
a night watchman, voices arose arguing that the
state represented the interests of the bourgeoisie
and had always been as strong or as weak as the
middle and upper classes wished. At the same
time, because of agitation by the lower-classes,
capitalist governments were forced to intervene
more and more aggressively in the public sphere.7
This increased intervention lead to increased
contractual arrangements between the state and
private individuals, further blurring the separation
between state and public sphere.
***
As the dynamics of capitalist economics changed
due to state intervention by necessity so too did
the dynamics of the public sphere. At the close of
the 18th century, the public, as defined by the limits
of the public sphere, expanded beyond the educated
classes to include retailers, members of the petty
bourgeoisie. This was enabled by a decrease in
price of books and periodicals and an increase in
book clubs, societies for popular education, etc.
The increased economic potential of the public
sphere allowed for the commodification of culture.
In these cases, the choices of what reading materials
were relevant what books should be read, what
art discussed passed beyond the control of the
groups membership. A class of experts, professors,
teachers, etc., developed who were responsible for
instructing the petty bourgeoisie on what culture
to consume. Eventually these experts became less
dominant, and book clubs formed, in the modern

67

Kevin W. Gray

its critical function in favor of staged display:

arguments become transmitted into symbols.

more available than it has ever been before. The

second condition however has not been completely
satisfied, as the Internet has not provoked social
upheavals on par with the Industrial Revolution
(irrespective of the enormous changes such
technology has allowed, e.g. the expansion
of advertising, outsourcing, etc.). The fourth
condition is not applicable, as most Western
governments have adopted a largely laissez-faire
approach to the growth of the Internet, similar to
the early period of the industrial revolution.
I believe therefore that any question of whether
or not the Internet has increased the potential for
democratic discourse turns out to depend on the
degree to which Habermass third condition is
met. Only the empirical question of whether or
not economic interests can trump the interests
of a democratic society is relevant in the present
day. And the extent to which social networking
technologies have increased the potential for
discourse must be discussed alongside the question
of how the Internet has produced fetishized
talking points or group beliefs, or economicallyinfluenced knowledge.
Finally, it is for this that I believe we cannot
begin a discussion of democracy with McLuhans
writings. Absent the important consideration of
how economy and industrialization affects the
growth of the public sphere, we will never know
whether or not the Internet has made society more
of less democratic. And for that reason, I believe
we must side with Habermass incomplete analysis
of technology over McLuhans more detailed, yet
defective, one.

Contemporary Relevance
The general contention of those theorists who
are optimistic about the Internets potential for
the formation of a public sphere seems to be that
it would make possible a revised public sphere,
where information can be better exchanged,
groups formed, interests represented, etc.12 For that
reason, we should be optimistic that a revitalized
public sphere (revitalized because of an important
change in technology) might make possible newer
forms of social coordination.
Raymond Williamss critique of McLuhan
(which is perhaps too harsh, but broadly correct,
I believe) is relevant here. If we are to be strict
technological determinists (which is how I
interpret Williamss attack) then there is no reason
to be concerned with how market forces and
social change have changed the reception of new
media. For example, McLuhan says, discussing
the role of media in politics, that it is the instant
consequences of electrically moved information
that makes necessary a deliberate artistic aim in
the placing and management of news (McLuhan,
1964 182). This is perhaps so, but it would
be nave to claim that specific economic and
historical conditions do not play a role in how the
arrangement of news plays itself out.
Let me ask here, what is the relevance of
Habermass discussion. First, he shows how
underlying technological changes modify social
possibilities (in his case, the printing press). Second,
he shows how changes in economic systems
(industrialization) change the transmission of
information (in his case, the growth of capitalism).
Third, he shows how economic interests can triumph
other interests. Four, he shows how government
can interfere with the growth of economic and
technological structures. Of these four, it seems to
me that the first three are particular relevant.

Works Cited
Habermas, Jrgen. The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society. Trans. by Thomas Burger.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. New
York and Toronto: Signet, 1969.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. New
York and Toronto: Signet, 1964.

Conclusions
In this final section, I propose to examine the
applicability of Habermass four conditions to our
present situation. In doing so, I hope to think with
Habermas about the possibilities the Internet may
open up for public discourse.
Clearly, the first of Habermass conditions is
satisfied here: the Internet has created a series of
possibilities unequaled in history. Information
can be exchanged faster in the current context
than ever before: it is simultaneously cheaper and

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Habermas, McLuhan and the Public Sphere

Notes
1
The extent to which McLuhan is as pessimistic
as earlier members of the Frankfurt School, e.g.
Theodor Adorno or Max Horkheimer, is unclear.
2
This is perhaps a good time to mention the
standard critiques of Habermass work that for
our purposes we can exclude. Habermas himself
notes that his discussion specifically excludes any
possibility of plebian public sphere for instance,
that which emerged in France immediately
following the Revolution, or within the Chartist
Movement in England (Habermas xviii).
3
Methodologically, Habermas proposes the
following definition for publicity: events are
public when they are open to all, in contrast to
closed or exclusive affairs as when we speak of
public places or public houses. The public sphere
was first and foremost the realm of commodity
exchange and social labor governed by its own
laws.
4
Nevertheless, this was insufficient, of itself,
to allow for the emergence of a sphere that was
truly public. The merchants were content for the
information to remain private: the documents
they needed, documents which could remain
private, were commercial news letters private
correspondence instituted by commercial news
dealers (who may be described, quite accurately,
as the first journalists).
5
Properly speaking, even the meaning of the
word economic began to change. Whereas once
it referred merely to activities supervised by the
head of the household, it began in the 17th century
to take on its modern meaning (Habermas 20).
6
The depression was brought on by banking and
credit crises in the United States and in Continental
Europe, and worsened by poor harvest in Britain,
which in turn began to restrict the import of
foreign goods.
7
As we see in Bismarcks Socialist Law in
Germany (Habermas 146).
8
Habermas writes: The mass press was based on
the commercialization of the participation in the
public sphere on the part of broad strata designed
predominantly to give the masses in general access
to the public sphere. This expanded public sphere,
however, lost its political character to the extent
that the means of psychological facilitation
could become an end in itself for a commercially
fostered consumer attitude. In the case of the early
penny press it could already be observed how it
paid for the maximization of its sales with the

depoliticization of its content by eliminating

political news and political editorials on such
moral topics as intemperance and gambling
(Habermas 169).
Alongside this was an increase in so-called yellow
journalism of the 1880s, with the introduction
of cartoons, human-interest stories, etc. As
Habermas points out, at the same time as the
public sphere expanded, the number of novels
bought or even read in the average household
plunged precipitously. In his most Benjaminian
of moments, he remarks that the fetishization of
cultural articles resulted in a decline in the quality
of debate in the public sphere.
9
The principle of publicity essentially states that
all arguments must be open public discussion, and
all actions and laws must be made known to the
public so that such dialgoue can occur.
10
Whereas once there was no appreciable
difference between the function of editor and
publisher, gradually two separate men began to
occupy the posts, and the separate functions were
cleaved from one another. At first, literary journals
had been published with little or no regard to
profit; many were the pet projects of individuals
and were often loss-sustaining. At first, political
journals had been attached to parties or viewpoints
of prominent individuals each political journal
was forced to justify its continued existence. With
commercialization however, the economic basis
of the journal was put on higher, more secure
ground. However, the result was that the editorial
section and the advertising section were no longer
independent in fact, the new interdependence
subordinated the editor to the publisher. Since
the 1870s the tendency has become manifestthe
publisher appoints editors in the expectation that
they will do as they are told in the private interest
of a profit-oriented enterprise (Habermas 186).

Habermas here coins the term the

refeudalization of the public sphere
(Habermas 195). Habermas argues that the
role played by representative symbols, rather
than arguments, in the refeudalized public
sphere mimics the role of the public sphere
as a place for staged publicness during
feudalism.
12
I do not propose to summarize all possible
uses of the internet here for construction of a
public sphere.
11

69

EDUCATION, RACISM, AND THE MEDIA

Stowers

Gwen Stowers

Associate Professor, School

of Education, National
University, La Jolla,
California

Introduction
s I watch my students work through the issues of
race and racism, privilege and oppression, it is
apparent how the media has formed how we think
about these ideas, indeed how the media has controlled our
social construction of races, whether or not such races exist
independent of their social construction. This power of the
media is particularly strong with young people and many of
my students have come of age in this time frame. In fact, as
McLuhan predicted, clearly, the medium is the message and
the media continues to create races, influences how we think
about races, the other, and perpetuates racism. I propose to
look at the media construction of these ideas along with how
we have been teaching multicultural education during this
time frame the 1960s until now - and how it has failed us in
terms of developing a more just world.
I plan to use as the theme of this work a short story, The
Indian Paulino by Bolivian writer Ricardo Ocampo, (in
Santos, R., 2000, 253-266). The Indian Paulino takes place
in Bolivia, a country where the three main languages are
Spanish, Aymara and Quechua. The story is a great example
of the power of language and how that power is used to take
the place of and represent the gun power of the colonizers.

Connecting to McLuhan
McLuhan wrote that the starting point is the individual
(1964, 91). At this point, language is the medium, both verbal
and body language. Language is a specific conception of
the world (Gramsci, 1971, 34-43), created out of social and
historical circumstances (Bourdieu, 1991, 105) and represents
power or lack of power (Bourdier, 1991, 68).
The starting point is always the body and McLuhan noted
that the media are simply a technological extension of the body
(1964, 91). Groups of people began conquering other groups
of people using a variety of technological extensions of the
body, from rocks and sticks and clubs to guns and bombs.
Once the conquering group becomes dominant, the physical
force becomes less visible. Other types of media maintain the
dominance and these other types of media are often based on
the dominant language. The media shape and control the scale
and form of human association and action.
At the beginning of online education, it was proclaimed
that the web would be a bias-free environment since people
could remain anonymous and physical features would not be
so clearly visible. If we remember McLuhan, we understand
the web cannot be bias-free.
Those who were dominant before the internet retained
their power after the internet became powerful. The same
ideas were manifest on the internet. It was controlled by the
languages of the dominant groups.
The internet is now available to almost everyone. Andy
Rooney spoke on television recently, covering a number of
racist and oppressive ideas. Before the week was done, his
ideas were spread via the internet across the nation, so that

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EDUCATION, RACISM, AND THE MEDIA

The Social Construction of Race

Races are not biologically differentiated
groupings but rather are social constructions
(Haney Lopez, 1996, xiii). Race is shaped by
the way society gives race meaning. Further,
race is contingent upon specific times, places
and situations. Race is not a fixed term but is a
complex of social meanings that are formed and
transformed under the constant pressures of
political struggle (Haney Lopez, 1996, 136-137).
The first African-Americans arrived in the
United States on a slave ship in 1619 (Takaki, 1993,
55). Like the other laborers, they were probably
indentured servants and at times they ran away
together Black and White until mixing of
the races was made illegal. Takaki goes on to tell
a tale of labeling, demonizing, and ostracization
that went into the social construction of the
African-American as the other and allowed
the institution of slavery. As the English entered
the New World, they encountered the other
and began delineating the boundary between
civilization and savagery and thus began
the social construction of race and ethnicity
(Takaki, 1993, 26). This social construction of
race occurred within the economic context of
competition over land (Takaki, 1993, 39). Tobacco
required land and labor.
Capitalism needs cheap labor. Race was
created by law (Haney Lopez, 1996, 116-136) as
a tool of manipulation and division to maintain a
steady and cheap supply of workers. A group of
people were identified, separated, given little or
no education and poor living conditions, offered
work at lower wages, and thus set up to be rivals of
those earlier workers they displaced. The other
becomes the problem, the danger to fight against,
rather than the system of capitalism that demands
that a few control the wealth.
The power and evil of segregation is that
it equates poverty and prosperity with racial
characteristics, rather than with discrimination
(Haney Lopez, 1996, 12). The law thus gives
support to the idea that races are biologically real
and also supports the belief that racial categories
are a necessary part of human differentiation.
The law continues to act today to further
construct the idea of race. If young Black and
Latino men can be depicted as savages, then we
give ourselves permission to ignore and/or destroy
those we have thus labeled (Higgins, 1991, 129).
This type of racism helps prepare a nation for
war. Soldiers who fought in WWII were taught
to hate the Japs. One man remembered some

even if you missed his broadcast you could hear

his words. And when we see something in writing,
sent across the internet, we have a tendency to
believe that it is the truth, and when it is said by
one of our popular icons, all the more reason to
believe. The media makes true believers. The
internet has multiplied so many times the message
of Andy Rooney that it certainly must be the truth.
It truly makes this the mass age where we are
taught by the media what to think.
Power and Control
Power is what it is all about, and thus the
importance of understanding the message of the
media that work to enforce power whether via
television, gun power or a dominant language.
The power of the media diminishes the everyday
need of the gun, but the gun is always there in the
background.
Violence is the tool of domination. Domination
is the intent to gain and maintain control over
others. It is expressed in behaviors in which the
dominant animal or human has greater access
to desirable commodities and locations such as
food, special resting place, females, and in our
society wealth and material goods (McGuinnes,
1987, xi).
Violence is a tool of colonization. Once
dominance is established, symbolic violence is
enough to maintain the dominance, which was
established originally by open physical violence.
Symbolic violence involves language that is a
body technique. Members of different social
classes use their bodies in different ways to make
language, something learned at such an early age
that it is beyond consciousness (Bourdieu, 1991,
229-251). To be able to give an order, one must be
a recognized authority. To be able to take an order,
one must recognize that authority and the type of
language being used. Language is thus a sign of
authority, of wealth, and of power. The entire social
structure, and the history of that social structure,
is present in each interaction (Bourdieu, 1991, 229251). Words are signs of cultural capital, wealth,
authority and power. Language and conversations
between people from the dominant group and the
dominated group carry enough reminders from
the time of the actual physical conquest to keep
both parties to the conversation in their respective
places, according to Bordieu (1991, 229-251), even
without guns. This is the power of the mass media,
the power to deal with these unconscious messages
that all people understand.

71

Gwen Stowers

of the posters that were displayed during the war.

One poster depicted the Japanese minister being
put into a frying pan (Long, J. 2008). Rather than
being the Japanese people, they, the other, were
simply the Japs. Radio was a powerful medium
during those war years and to this day people
remember some of the stirring broadcasts. All
of this worked to construct race.

under the auspices of providing protection from

the socially constructed crime wave.
The prisons largely house nonviolent offenders
who are 84% of the growth in inmates (Davidson,
1997, 134). Prison growth has occurred as the
nation experienced a drop in crime. The media
continue to deluge us with reports of the latest
violent crime. Fear of crime and violence allows
us to ignore the slow erosion of the constitutional
rights upon which the country was founded. Recent
trends in criminal, civil, and constitutional law
give law enforcement greater latitude to infringe
on individual liberties previously guaranteed by
the constitution. White middle class America
accepts these infringements, having been lulled
into complacency, thinking they will never be in
a situation requiring their right to due process.
When repeatedly and falsely accused, primarily
young African-American and Latino Males lose
their right to due process, White middle class
America looks the other way.
The 1960s held the hope of change towards a
society of racial, gender and all the other equalities
but that did not come to pass. Actually, we are
living in a more divided world where riches are
being amassed on grand scales at the same time
the ranks of poor are increasing. Racial and ethnic
divisions and antagonisms are increasing around
the world. And yet, we dont often question these
things because life is now on such a grand scale,
we are removed from our neighbors and no longer
consider ourselves to be our brothers keepers.
Rather we learn from the media of other ways
to label those different from us. We are taught to
fear those different from us. This fear allows us to
support wars across the globe where women and
children are killed on a daily basis. Once these
people are labeled terrorists it becomes ok not
to care about them as human beings. (Glassner,
1999, 144).

The Social Construction of the Criminal

The label of race has functioned efficiently
when connected with the label of criminal.
The idea of race has been a prime building block
for creating a massive prison industry. AfricanAmericans are labeled as dangerous, vicious,
and more violent regardless of what the numbers
actually show (Miller, 1996, 2,3). The argument
that they must be bad because so many of them
are in prison takes precedence over a rational look
at the poverty and effects of slavery within which
descendants of slaves have been forced to endure
as well as the racism present in the system today
(Miller, 1996, 9). Despite the fact that heterosexual
White men are responsible for a disproportionate
amount of the violent crimes committed in the
United States annually (Jenkins, 1993, 76), when
we think of a violent criminal our minds picture
someone like we see on the television, someone
who is poor, male, and of color. Conversely while
street gangs are responsible for less than two
percent of all violent crimes committed in the
United States annually, still society views every
young Black and Latino male gang member as a
violent criminal.
Miller (1996, 1174-177) showed how the media
worked with the legal system to create a perceived
need for more prisons. Since the people the
prisons were created for were the other, it did
not matter that the prisons used inhumane tactics
of control. Racial minorities, poorly educated and
poor people make up the majority of the prison
populations (Miller, 1996). It is in the economic
interest of corporate and political interests to
socially construct and feed this fear of crime
(Glassner, 1999, 139).
In one study by sociologist Mark Fishman, the
media constructed a crime wave based on one or
two events. The legislature followed by introducing
bills to deal harshly with juveniles and mandate
longer prison sentences (Miller. 1996, 154). Once
this fear is marketed to the general public, societal
institutions become infected with it as well. As
a result, disciplinary structures in schools and
the community at large become more repressive

Multicultural Education
The promise of the 1960s fell flat in large
part because of the growth of the power of the
media over our thought and behavior. We were so
impressed with technology and were so quick to
fall under its influence that we generally forgot to
question the content that was being presented.
As Leistyna writes, a major obstacle of critical
transformative education in the United States is
that theory is often devalued among educators,
and consequently disconnected from the actual
practice. (2007, 59). Student teachers often remark
that they just want to know what to do on Monday

72

EDUCATION, RACISM, AND THE MEDIA

to keep their students busy and administrators

happy. They do not see the connection to theory
and do not understand that if they choose not to
theorize, someone else will. The problem here
is that needs, and not political awareness, are the
impetus for searching out appropriate materials.
(Leistyna, 2007, 59).
This is part of the culture of control and media
control within which we live. Controlling our time
is an important part of the process. An interesting
article by Zhonghe Wu of National University
compared the pedagogy of teachers in the
United States with a group of teachers in China.
The Chinese teachers emphasized developing
procedural and conceptual knowledge through
reliance on traditional, more rigid practices, which
have proven their value for teaching mathematics
content. The United States teachers emphasized a
variety of activities designed to promote creativity
and inquiry in attempts to develop students
understanding of mathematical concepts. Both
approaches have benefits and limitations.
(2004, 145). However, since the Chinese students
score higher on international measures of math
achievement, there may be some things to be
learned.
Questioning is an important part of the process
of learning math skills. With teachers in the United
States, questions remained superficial, such as
did the students follow directions, did they follow
the formula while the Chinese teachers more
often posed questions to help identify students
thinking and help them progress their ideas.
While the US teachers used creative materials and
strategies they failed to make connections between
the manipulatives and the strategy of solving
problems and thus failed to build understanding
for students. (Wu, 2004, 146).
Comparing the process of discussion with
Bolivian and United States students, I noticed a
similar lack of depth and critical thought in the
United States classrooms. Bolivian students and
faculty alike, as standard practice, were well
prepared for discussions, were not fearful about
stating an opposition opinion, and were willing
to spend the time to listen to colleagues without
interrupting. Part of this, as in China, comes from
a tradition that allows the speaker time to work
with ideas. Further, there is a standard procedure
for discussions where questions and concerns are
written and presented to the speaker at the end
of the presentation, rather than disrupting the
speaker. In some ways, this loses the give and take
we are accustomed to in the United States, but it

allows time to develop serious ideas. In the United

States there is never time. Rather time is chunked
to maintain control of students and teachers.
Classroom discussions in the United States have
taken on the format of television programs with
quick exchanges and many interruptions. The
concern is more about discipline and competition
than about thought and reflection.
Teachers generally fail to deal with popular
culture, and thus miss a powerful educational
vehicle. The formative images embedded in media
and popular culture play a central role in shaping
identities and social relations. Disregarding the
impact of popular culture is a major oversight
in that kids in general get more from these
pedagogical images and sounds than they do from
formal schoolinginitial ideas of the world that
enter the classroom. (Leistyna, 2007, 59-60).
Students clearly need to develop critical media
skills but this seldom occurs. Students need to
begin to take apart media images and understand
how the images have played a major part in
forming how people think about our world. This
is particularly scary when we understand how few
people control the media and how unrepresentative
these few are of the diversity that is our world.
Thus in the schools we continue to not engage with
what is being taught as well as how it is taught.
Instead we are taught not to question but to stay
on schedule, to prepare for standardized exams. It
becomes more important to study someone elses
answers for upcoming tests that will determine a
students place in society. More and more time is
spent on test preparation and less time on critical
thought and analysis.
While most schools now celebrate cultural
events, seldom is the culture of power and
oppression addressed. It is difficult to even mention
the words, capitalism, racism and oppression.
The Leistyna article analyzed how change
failed in a particular school district, the groups
over-eagerness to turn toward practical materials
at the expense of theorizing the problems they
faced, a generally depoliticized approach to
knowledge and classroom content, and a disregard
for engaging popular culture and pedagogy, stifled
the possibility for substantive curricular and
pedagogical growth in Changeton public schools.
(Leistyna, 2007, 68). It seems the same happened
on a large scale across our nation.
The sad reality is that kids at a very early
age are racialized, sexualized, gendered, and
positioned and marked by the structures of social
class. (Leistyna, 2007, 63). The media becomes

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Gwen Stowers

Works Cited
Bourdieu, P.. Language & Symbolic Power.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Diamond, J.. Guns, Germs and Steel. New York:
W.W. Norton & Co, 1999.
Glassner, B.. The Culture of Fear. New York:
Perseus Books, 1999.
Gramsci, A.. Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
New York: International Press,1971.
Haney Lopez, I.. White by Law: The Legal
Construction of Race. New York & London:
New York University Press, 1996.
Higgins, C.. The New World Order and the
Historical Subject: Thinking About Street
Youth. Unpublished paper presented at the
Rethinking Marxism Conference, Amherst,
MA, November 13-14, 1992 (1991).
Jenkins, M.. Black urban street groups and
institutional racism: Weed and seed, but did
law enforcement add too much fertilizer?
Disseertatioin
Proposal,
Northeaastern
University, Boston, MA ,1993.
Leistyna, P., Kincheloe, J. & K. Hayes (Eds.)..
Teaching City Kids: Understanding and
Appreciating Them. New York: Peter Lang,
2007.
Long, J.. Personal interview. Playas de Tijuana,
Mexico. 2/17/2008 (2008).
McGuinnes, D.. Dominance, Aggression and War.
New York: Paragon House Publishers, 2008.
McLuhan, M. & L. Lapham. (1964). Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1964.
Miller, J.. Search and Destroy: African American
Males in the Criminal Justice System.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996.
Ocampo, R.. The Indian Paulino. In The Fat Man
from La Paz. (Ed. Santos, R.) New York: Seven
Stories Press, 2000.
Santos, R. (Ed.), The Fat Man from La Paz. New
York: Seven Stories Press , 2000.
Spring, J.. The American School: 1642-1993. New
York: McGraw Hill, Inc., 1994.
Takaki, R.. A Different Mirror. Boston: Little,
Brown & Co. 1993.
Wu, Z.. The Pedagogical Content Knowledge of
Middle School Mathematics Teachers in China
and the U.S. in Journal of Mathematics Teacher
Education 7: 145-172, 2004. The Netherlands:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004.

the way we learn about people who are different

from us. Because we are such a divided nation we
often do not have the opportunity to learn about
people who are different from personal experience.
Rather this information is mediated by the media
and the media are mediated by those in control.
Conclusion
Jared Diamond in his Pulitzer Prize winning
book, Guns, Germs and Steel, (1999), asks the
question, Why did wealth and power become
distributed as they now are, rather than in
some other way? For instance, why werent
Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal
Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated,
or exterminated Europeans and Asians?(15).
Diamond goes on to tear apart the connections
made between race and intelligence and power.
Diamonds main thesis is, History followed
different courses for different peoples because
of differences among peoples environments, not
because of biological differences among peoples
themselves. (25).
And so how can these perceptions be changed?
How can we begin the process of looking at our
perceptions and determining how we came to hold
the ideas we do? McLuhan said that the principal
aim of teachers is the training of perception (1964,
19). This seems to presume a critical stance. We
need to take apart the messages we are being sent
and be proactive in our own thought processes.
The process of change needs to begin with us, the
teachers. Teachers perpetuate the system without
being aware of what we are doing, sometimes even
when we believe we are working for change. This
is because we have also been taught by the media
and have seldom learned to be critical media
consumers.
As I watch my students work through the issues
of race and racism, privilege and oppression, it
is apparent how the media has formed how we
think about these ideas, indeed how the media has
controlled our social construction of races. And
so we begin at the beginning, with the process of
self-reflection. For many, this is overwhelming.
They want to be told what to think.

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SEARCHING FOR WARMTH IN COMMON DATA LINKS:

A MCLUHANESQUE STUDY OF MILITARY TARGET ACQUISITION

Egan

Kathryn Egan

Independent Scholar
(Ph.D., Communications,
University of Southern
California), Provo, Utah

As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village.

Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions
together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness
of responsibility to an intense degree.

(McLuhan, Understanding Media 5)

s I listen to NPRs Morning Edition, February 1, 2008,

Reporter Tom Gjelten tells us that sometime last week,
a missile fired at a compound in northwest Pakistan left
a senior al-Qaida leader dead. Pakistanis in the area say twelve
other people were killed in the strike that claimed Abu Laith alLibi. This was an important leader, a spokesman for al-Qaida and
a trainer of Taliban, teaching them to make road-side bombs, for
instance. At the end of the piece I learn that the killer missile was
fired by an Unmanned Air Vehicle presumably under U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency control.
The UAV was most likely a Predator, equipped with
common data link (CDL) sensors, that is, sensors linked within
a secure network to share ISR (intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance) among air, sea and ground assets1, and their
commanders. The missile-armed, unmanned plane was piloted
remotely (probably by someone at a California airbase). From
half a globe away, analysts were able to include what the Predator
saw as part of the information flow from multiple sensors, data
that are correlated, fused, turned into a target first by computers
in machine-to-machine dialog, then by analysts of the battlespace,
to acquire the targetAbu Laithwith personal accuracy. The
new Cold War of the 21st Century is being fought as if it were a
computer game. The implication is that the patterns of knowledge
made possible with CDL networks, this latest media extension
of man, is making us numb. McLuhan suggests that in the face
of this sort of depression, we should go back to the origin and
development of the media that have made us so. To this end I will
redact the history of the U-2 spy plane, which coincides with the
development of CDL secure military ISR networks.
At the time Marshall McLuhan predicted our revulsion against
imposed patterns, our eagerness to have things and people declare
their beings totally in the faith that concerns the ultimate harmony
of all being, (McLuhan, 6) a U2 spy plane had been shot down by
the Soviets in 1960. The plane is remembered less for what it was
up to as it flew over downtown Moscow than for its pilot, Francis
Gary Powers. Powers spent 17 months in a Soviet prison and then
was exchanged for Soviet spy master Rudolf Able. On February
10, 1962, Powers stepped onto the eastern end of Berlins Glienicke
Bridge, spanning the Havel River; Able, who had been seized by
US security agents after he set up a communist spy network in
New York in the 1950s, stood on the western end. The two passed
one another shoulder-to-shoulder, mid bridge, in what was then
one of the most dramatic moments of the Cold War.
What happened next to Powers was perceived by his family as
tragic. His former CIA colleagues ostracized him for not killing
himself with poison--as spies are supposed to do--but even worse, for
not destroying his U2 spy plane, which was at the time revolutionary.
He actually held a model of the secret plane during his testimony

75

Kathryn Egan

before the Senate Armed Services Committee in

1962. He died 15 years later, at age 47, while flying
a news helicopter for a Los Angeles television
station. His son devoted his resources to rearranging
historys perspective on his father. On May 1, 2000,
the Powers family was presented with the Prisonerof-War Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross and
the National Defense service medal. A lone U2 flew
over as the ceremony took place.
This Sturm und Drang saga is, in Marshall
McLuhans terms, hot, because it was related in
print news stories and on radio, both of which are
considered hot media in that they convey linear
stories to us (receivers) as continuous narrative, a
connected, repetitive structure requiring no need
for our involvement, commitment or participation.
The printed page on which words are trapped in
lines of semantically meaningless letters used to
correspond to semantically-meaningless sounds,
(McLuhan, 83) is taken as authoritative mostly out
of cultural habit. McLuhan believes the phonetic
alphabet with its straight up and down letters all
in a row has the precision and power of teeth. The
written word, based on the phonetic alphabet,
which first allowed for military control from a
distance and for individuality within a culture, has
the power, also, to structure rational life as linear.
It allows us to specialize, and, because we are
specialists, we can act without reacting. We can
think without feeling.
I realize the truth in McLuhans treatise as I read
the story about Powers from de-classified documents
obtained through the Freedom of Information Act
and made available on-line. The linear print story
was hot, because it required no engagement with
readers. I think McLuhan would consider the U-2,
the inhuman survivor in this story, cool. Powers was
a civilian pilot the CIA contracted to fly espionage
missions in an unarmed weather reconnaissance
plane equipped with a Polaroid Land Camera created
for the CIA spy endeavor. He took off from the U.S.
airbase in Peshawar, Turkey, and was supposed to
fly at an altitude above 65,000 feet--sufficiently
high to avoid interception anti-aircraft missiles and
conventional aircraft. The risk was always great,
but greater still for the U-2 to be flying the longest
and deepest over-flight of the Soviet Union ever,
on May Day, a national Soviet holiday, when two
V-75 surface-to-air missile battalions were on alert
in Svedlovsk. The battalions opened fire, and 14
missiles were launched as the U-2 was chased by
a MIG-19. Instead of landing as scheduled in Bodo,
Norway, the U-2, flying within the radius of one of
the missile explosions, suffered some wing and tail

assembly damage; the plane went into a downward

spin; Powers parachuted and was found on the
ground, unconscious, and taken into custody by
the KGB. All of this was extremely embarrassing
to the U.S., and President Dwight Eisenhower took
responsibility for the spy planes flight, so that the
world would not assume the blunder was the work
of unaccounted for functionaries far down the
chain of command; but he refused Premier Nikita
Khrushchevs demand for an apology and cessation
of all U.S. espionage flights over the Soviet Union.
As a consequence, plans were dropped for a summit
conference of attendees from the U.S., the USSR,
the UK and France.
Spying in terms of hot and cool
The Cold War, the hegemonic competition
between the United States and the Soviet Union
and their respective allies, endured from the mid1940s to the 1990s. It was cold semantically
because it never coalesced into direct military
engagement between the two military super
powers. Instead it was fought ideologically, and
occasionally in proxy wars and other non-combat
operationsthe Berlin Blockade, the Korean
War, the Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis,
and the Soviet-Afghan War. McLuhan uses the
French phrase guerre des nerfs, and then refers
to it as a war of icons. It is really an electric
battle of information and of images that goes far
deeper and is more obsessional than the old hot
wars of industrial hardware (McLuhan, 339).
Whereas the mechanical age used weapons that
knocked off one person at a time, and otherwise
persuaded people, individually, to adopt new
points of view, the electronic age persuades with
cool technologytelevision, photos and film
documentariesdunking entire populations in
new imagery (McLuhan, 339).
Spying contributed to the iconography. The
U-2 did not go away, it became cooler.
The original U-2 was a single-seat, singleengine. high-altitude, reconnaissance aircraft.2
Its straight, wide (103 feet) wings made it look
like a glider, hence its name Dragon Lady, and
it was very difficult to land. It had just one main
landing gear mid-planeit had to land exactly
straight, like landing a bicycle, James S. Higgins,
U-2 aficionado, reports. It flew for the first time in
1955. In the version piloted by Gary Powers, he
was to follow a designated flight plan and work
the Polaroid as he flew, but he could not see the
photos he was taking. Upon landing, the U-2 film
was taken by courier plane to Washington, D.C.

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who would do the briefingafter presenting the

evidentiary photographs. British Prime Minister
Harold McMillan reportedly worried about how a
statement of the British government in support of
the American decision would go down without
incontrovertible proof of the missile build-up
(Kent). Reaction to the press coverage indicated
his fears were well-grounded.
The photographs were too cool to be
incontrovertible. Sherman Kent, writing for online Studies in Intelligence, questions the ability of
the uninitiated to identify a thing resembling a
big tent as the air-conditioned structure necessary
for complicated check-out of the missiles. Photos
published in newspapers were so degraded
enlargements of 35 mm shots of glossy prints
taken in natural light without a tripodthat the
readers might have had trouble telling whether
the camera had been pointed down at Cuba from
a high-flying aircraft or pointed up a soundlypositioned proctoscope (Kent).5

to be developed and analyzed. The rationale for

taking the photos (of Soviet ICBM bases) was to
provide documentary evidence that the missile
gap between the US and USSR was an illusion,
contrary to heated Congressional rhetoric, and
especially within The Senate Preparedness
Investigating Committee on Soviet Missile
Capabilities.3 Giving in to his Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary and Deputy
Secretary of Defense, President Eisenhower was
swayed that the only way to counter Democrat
Symington and end the discussion was to allow
for minimal photo-taking overflights. Some of
these were accomplished prior to 1 May 1960,
but that date, celebrating Soviet victory, was
an unsurpassable opportunity to document the
arsenal in all its glory.
The black-and-white stills could not have been
that conclusive, judging by the quality of photos
taken two years later, 14 October 1962, when Major
Richard Heyser flew his U-2 over Cuba north on
a course 60 miles to the west of Havana, passing
over northerly beaches six minutes later. In that
time span he took 928 photos, covering a 75-mile
wide swath. These moments in time as McLuhan
refers to photos (McLuhan, 188), were low end of
cool. The resolution of Heysers best shots was
a matter of three feet.4 Finding their meaning in
terms of missile identification involved experts at
the Naval Photographic Interpretation Center at
Suitland, Maryland, who worked from prints on
clear acetate over a light table. The film arrived at
the NPIC about 10:00 A.M. 15 October. Six hours
later the photointerpreters were almost certain
that they had indentified large surface-to-surface
missiles (Kent). The director of the NPIC phoned
CIA headquarters, and President Kennedys
advisors told him the next morning. After five
days of debate as to what to do, the President
decided on a strict quarantine on all offensive
military equipment under shipment to Cuba, with
the word quarantine substituted for blockade,
because it was thought to be less offensive. After
seven days of secrecy, during which time neither
US citizens nor heads of state of US allies knew
that the President believed the Soviets had placed
medium and intermediate-range ballistic missiles
in Cuba, US ambassadors were sent with letters
addressed to allied heads of state, to be delivered
at the same time President Kennedy addressed
the U. S. by television to report what was going
on in Cuba and what the US government planned
to do about it (Kent). The ambassadorial party
to Europe included three CIA representatives

The U-2 and common data links networked for

target acquisition
U-2 production ended in 1968. In 1980 it was
re-born as the U-2R (R for Reconnaissance),
not to be confused with the infamous U-2; it
was much bigger, with hotter information
gathering capabilities in that GPS, video and
audio components numbed and extended mans
reach for purposes of target acquisition. During
Operation Desert Storm, in the early 90s, the
U-2R was deployed to Saudi Arabia carrying
a Senior Year Electro-optical Reconnaissance
System (SYERS), capable of sending imagery to
a van on the ground that controlled the sensor and
received, processed, exploited and reported digital
imagery collected for theater commanders and
national authorities (Cross). General H. Norman
Schwarzkopf reported to Congress, The great
military victory we achieved in Desert Storm and
the minimal losses sustained by U.S. and Coalition
forces can be directly attributed to the excellent
intelligence picture we had on the Iraqis.6 His
military commander on the ground, Lieutenant
General William M. Keys, USMC, complained,
At the strategic level, [intelligence] was fine. But
we did not get enough tactical intelligencefrontline battle intelligence (Cross). What the pilots
and commanders wanted was high-resolution
photographic images, not just the electronic and
radar imagery relayed to ground specialists for
analysis and report. Schwarzkopf told of a generals
complaint: In every other war but the Gulf war, a

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Kathryn Egan

in its demands of specialist fragmentation from

those who would control it (McLuhan, 29). The
warfighter could act without reacting in a posture
of non-involvement. Although such detachment
might be thought necessary for conducting this
most dangerous social operation (McLuhan, 4),
it does not win modern wars. Case in point:
The current so-called War on Terror, originally
conceived as big, short, cool war like the one Bush
senior conducted in the Persian Gulf in defense of
Kuwaits oil, has instead become protracted. The
War on Terror founded on the identification of
Saddam Hussein, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq,
the Taliban, the Iranian government, Hezbollah
and Al Qaeda, as one big enemy target, and fought
as though such an identification would suffice as
a reason for all out attack leading to freedom,
has instead become another Cold War, a struggle
of long duration that is being fought, as was the
previous one, in many different ways according
to Australian intelligence expert David Kilcullen.8
The first Cold War comprised a nuclear standoff,
insurgencies in developing countries, and a
struggle of ideas in Europe. If the analogy between
that war and the new Cold War holds, then right
now were in, like, 1953 (Packer, 67).
The media are hotter in this new Cold War.
Military intelligence amounts to a barrage of data
and imagery collected by sensors and networked
over secure waveformss to command and control
centers, to create a network-centric approach to air
warfare (Liepman). Much of the data are processed
in machine-to-machine exchanges, eliminating
human error and providing commanders with
knowledge about the battlespace.
Machine-to-exchanges can also speed the
flow of information from sensor to decider,
to shooter, and even directly from sensor to
weapon. Because machines communicate faster
and without human error, these exchanges
will increase both the accuracy and velocity of
combat information . . . (Liepman).
Meantime, the enemy is also tuned in, if
not to the secured military network, then to the
Internet and all that it makes available, especially
as propaganda. Osama bin Laden, for example, has
used video news releases to link Al Qaeda with
the U.S. Democratic Party in order to get George
Bush re-elected, thus keeping himself in the global
eye.9 Without access to global media, satellite
communications, and the Internet, Kilcullen
claims, bin Laden would be just a cranky guy
in a cave (Packer, 60). The new Cold War has
become an information battlefield and cannot be

pilot sent to hit a target had an aerial photograph

in his lap that was no more than 24 hours old of
exactly what they were going to hit.
In 1996 the U.S. House Intelligence Committee
directed a budget increase of $57 million for
critical U-2 sensor upgrades. Now U-2R pilots
are surrounded by cockpit screens displaying live
feeds--images and data--from the target situation,
superimposed over a Global Information Grid
(GIG). The plane is still taxing to fly. A full pressure
suit stands between life and death in the spaceequivalent zone of 50,000 feet (Coy). To prevent
hypoxia the pilot breaths 100% oxygen for at least
an hour before take off as well as during flight.
The space suit also protects against Armstrongs
linethe altitude (63,000 feet) at which water (and
bodily fluid) boils; and it shields the body from air
temperature: -70 degrees F at optimum altitude. But
the U-2R is unarmed and therefore defenseless, so
flight plans have had to avoid known threats.
The U-2R is still among the myriad platforms
that constitute the U.S. military intelligence
arsenal of air vehicles, land rangers, ships, and
warfighters (soldiers) equipped with common data
links that make possible the network of instant
communication--and total field-awareness-McLuhan envisioned as the Global Village.
The U-2R remains unarmed and difficult to fly,
but UAVs have been added to the intelligencegathering arsenal, and some are equipped to
shoot. Global Hawk and Predator UAVs, which
can loiter over target areas for long periods, 7
awaiting the reappearance of targets in hiding, can
also fire Hellfire Missiles.
Air Force officials are now able to match up
[surveillance] images from a Predator with
[target] coordinates in less than a minute.
Operators now can fire a Hellfire Missile in
near real time. The Air Force is pursuing
hunter-killer UAVs, and, in the future, larger
unmanned combat air vehicles with greater
weapons load capability to strike pop-up
targets (Herbert).
Hot media in the new Cold War
McLuhan speaks of the hot wars of the past
in which weapons picked off the enemy one by one
(McLuhan, 339). All wars, he says, have been
fought by the latest technology available in any
culture. The technology of last centurys war(s) in
Iraq and Afghanistan that initially took the shock
and awe approach, emphasizing long-range fire
power and spectacular use of force, was hot. It was
low in opportunities of participation and rigorous

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won using physical force. Instead, terrorism must

be disaggregated. The War on Terror has become
a global counterinsurgency, made up of varied
people with separate, local, grievances. Youve
got to define the enemy as narrowly as you can get
away with, Kilcullen says (Packer, 67).
The introduction of an Army and Marine
Corps counterinsurgency field manual released
in 2006 states, Effective insurgents rapidly adapt
to changing circumstances. They cleverly use
the tools of the global information revolution to
magnify the effects of their actions. Taking up
counterinsurgency tactics learned from Vietnam,
warfighters are advised to focus efforts to secure
the safety and support of the local populace, and
through a concerted effort to truly function as
learning organizations, they will defeat enemy
insurgents. With the goal to disaggregate the
terrorists, or jihadists, warfighters are to become
world experts on their assigned districts. 10
Warmth is what is called for, engagement
rather than disinterest. The cold has to become
warm in the sense of putting a faceor faceson
the enemy, in order to understand him or her. To
this end social scientists can be usefulprovided
the antipathy between academia and the military
can be assuaged. In Afghanistan, where the U.S.
is regarded as occupiersas are all foreign aid
workers housed in Kabuls walled communities
the faces of Kabuls nine thousand orphaned streetdwelling children are the context for the Taliban
jihadists and war lords fight for control of opium
trade. Journalist J. Malcolm Garcia returned to
Afghanistan summer 2007 to seek out six boys he
had mentored then left behind in October, 2004
just after Hamid Karzai became Afghanistans
first democratically-elected president.11 Three
years later, Garcia discovered despair. Afghanis
are jobless and hungry in Kabul, unless they
can find work for the outsiders, the military,
the UN, the aid workers. Farmers, too, are poor,
unless they cooperate with the Taliban and/or war
lords and grow illegal poppy crops. Jobless and
close to starvation, boys and men are coerced into
becoming Taliban jihadis, or supporters of war
lords, their chances for a future. Farmers grow the
opium flower for the cash it brings, not caring that
it is illegal, because Karzai is impotent to protect
them or improve their lives.

extend over a long period. The data content

of these links compose real-time information,
from which meaning is derived by analysts with
varying perspectives, rather like the Cubist artist
who by giving the inside and outside, the top,
bottom, back and front, in two dimensions, drops
the illusion of perspective in favor of instant
sensory awareness of the whole (McLuhan, 28).
The message of CDL technology is a transition
as dramatic as was the movie medium that took
us from purely lineal thinking to configuration.
The warfighter, immersed in total field awareness,
lives mythically and in depth, able to see the
environment rather than the technologythe
way the eye sees without being aware of the eye.
Functioning as a part of the total inclusive field,
the warfighter, inundated with new patterns
of information, (i.e. the perceived enemy is
probably a non-combatant) loses confidence in his
right to assign guilt. That is, until the CDL sensors
reveal patterns and the formal contours of change
and development that analysts have identified as
the enemy. The warfighter becomes involved in
the cool environment wherein a situation has been
revealed: a person of interest, a man known to
recruit and train young men for terrorist acts, has
been identified. The break boundary in the system
has been reached; an individual must be made
accountable for his actions.
Warfighters kill Abu Laith al-Libi, personally,
with few collateral casualties, using precision
technology. The cool war has warmed up; once
again, as in the pre-literate past, the enemy can be
eliminated one-by-one.
Works Cited
Cross, Coy F. The Dragon Lady Meets the
Challenge: The U-2 in Desert Storm. <http://
www.fas.org/irp/progam/collect/u2ds.html>,
downloaded Jan. 21, 2008. Cited on FAS
Intelligence Resource Program, website last
updated March 05, 2000.
Flintoff, Corey. On Patrol with the Army in Rural
Iraq. Morning Edition, National Public Radio,
January 29, 2008.
Garcia, J. Malcolm. All the Country will be
Shaking. Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter,
2007. <http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2008/
winter/garcia-country-shaking/>.
Herbert, Adam J. Compressing the Kill Chain.
Air Force Magazine Online. Journal of the Air
Force Association. March 2003, 86, (3).
< h t t p: // w w w. a i r f o r c e - m a g a z i n e . c o m /
Magazine/Archive/Pages/2003/March>.

Warfighters live mythically

CDLs allow us to live mythically, because, by
McLuhans thinking, they make possible instant
vision of complex processes that ordinarily

79

Kathryn Egan

Kent, Sherman. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962;

Excerpts from: Presenting the Photographic
Evidence Abroad. Studies in Intelligence,
Central Intelligence Agency. Spring 1972.
<http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/cubakent.htm>.
Liepman, Skip. C2 Constellation: Integrated
network of combat capability will create a
new, network-centric approach to air warfare
and achieving battlespace effects. Military
Information Technology. Online Edition,
originally published Aug. 17, 2004, 8 (6).
<http://www.military-information-technology.
com/article.cfm?DocID=574>.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT Press,
1994 [1964]
Packer, George. Knowing the Enemy, The New
Yorker, December 18, 2006, pp.60-69.
Porush, David. Fictions as Dissipative Structures:
Prigogines Theory and Postmoderisms
Roadshow. In N. Katherine Hayles (ed),
Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in
Literature and Science. Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Rich, Ben R. and Leo Janos. Skunk Works: A
Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed.
New York, Boston London: Little, Brown and
Company, 1994.

which Kennedy referred had been taken during a

routine U-2 over flight of Cubasuch flights had
been sponsored by the CIA for years. In August
1962, . . . they hit pay dirt and came up with the
pictures that showed the Russians were planting
ballistic missiles right next door, SS-4s and SS-5s.
When Kennedy was shown the site constructions,
he asked, How do we know these sites are being
manned? They showed Kennedy a picture taken
from 72,000 feet, showing a worker . . . in a latrine.
The picture was so clear you could see that guy
reading a newspaper. (Rich, 187).
6
Cross quotes statements by Schwarzkopf and Keys
from RPT (U), DOD Conduct of Persian Gulf War:
Final Report to Congress, April 92-C-1.
7
Adam J. Herbert writes about Chief of Staff Gen.
John P. Jumpers top prioritycutting the time
needed to strike mobile and emerging targets so that
they will have no sanctuary from US airpower.
8
In his New Yorker article, Knowing the
Enemy, George Packer quotes David Kilcullen
as a student of counter-insurgency. His training as
a cadet at Duntroon, the West Point of Australia,
and his doctorate in political anthropology at the
University of New South Wales, where he wrote
his dissertation on the Darul Islam conflict in
Indonesia, have made him invaluablebut not
very persuasiveto the Bush administration,
Paul Wolfowitz (as Deputy Secretary of Defense)
in particular.
9
Analysts at the CIA, according to Ron Suskind
in The One Percent Doctrine, viewed bin Ladens
2004 video and decided bin Ladens message
was clearly designed to assist the Presidents
reelection. Packer believes this was because
Bushs strategy in the war on terror sustained bin
Ladens global importance.
10
Packer quotes the field manual as soon to be
released in December 2006.
11
Garcia writes about the disparity between
western outsiders and Afghans: Growing public
discontent laces tea-shop conversations with
venom. Afghans dismiss Kabul as the yellow
pages of aid organizations. They call Karzai
Americas dishwasher--a demotion from his
previous title, the Mayor of Kabul, a ruler with
little authority outside the capital. Now Kabuls
citizenry wont give him even that much credit.

Notes
Assets in military parlance are weapons or
means of production of weapons or other defensive
or offensive devices or capabilities.
2
Information about the U-2 is taken from a variety
of sources, including <http://www.jameshuggins.
com/h/u=21/u-2.html>. Huggins writes from
vicarious experience with his brother Jon Huggins,
an Air Force U-2 pilot in the NATO-Yugoslavia
Conflict, serving two tours of duty, followed by
another in Iraq. Most of the links provided on this
site have been removed by the CIA and military
operations.
3
From U2 Spy Plane Program CIA Files: 270 pages
of CIA files covering the U2 spy plane program
archived on CD-ROM.
4
Sherman Kent writes ironically about the use
of blurred, low-definition photographs to make
a convincing argument as to the presence of
missiles, in order to gain NATO support for the
US to quarantine Cuba.
5
President Kennedy reportedly told pilot Buddy
Brown , selected to brief the president on the
Cuban U-2 spying missions, Major Brown, you
take damned good pictures. The pictures to
1

80

COMPLEX SYSTEMS AND THE REBELLION OF THE MACHINES

de la Fuente

Gerardo de la Fuente Lora

erhaps the last big work taking up the exploration of the

nineteenth-century novel concerning the precarious place
of the individual with his singularity and his passions
in the city and in the society, is the film by Ridley Scott, Blade
Runner. There, for last time, as in Frankenstein by Mary Shelly,
the drama of the devices is that of individuals. The androids of a
distant colony of the earth have rebelled and come to the planet
of their creator, committing an infinity of crimes during the trip,
with only the aim of knowing the date of their programmed death.
The machines, then, not only are revealed as finite, but even more
human than the men in the acute consciousness of their limited
condition. To know when the last one of our line will come in the
text of the Big Roll as The Destiny was called by Jacques le
Fataliste (Diderot, 1935) is that not a desire that might define the
individual in general? And if the creator knew this fact: why not
inform the androids of it and allow them then to live in the city?
Why the criminalization of the desire to know?
There is an extraordinary jump, a clear rupture between the
trajectory that goes from Frankenstein to Blade Runner, and the
line of new movies on rebellions of machines that populate the
cinematography of the end of the 20th century until our day. A
surprising common note goes across diverse works: Mad Max
and its several remakes; the whole Terminator series; Twelve
Monkeys; Artificial Intelligence; until the surprising series of the
Matrix. This type of cinema, whose first realization might go back
to Star Wars in the seventies, is distinctively characterized because
in all the cases the story alludes to a rebellion of machines, one
that marks a threshold, a before-and-after situation, that cannot
be described in terms of the vocabulary of human nature and its
passions (Hirschman, 1997).1 The machines that, in Terminator,
destroy human civilization, do not do so individually, but act as an
enormously complex system, without any center, and its operations
that no one drives cannot be described in terms of love, hate,
desire, ambition, happiness and so on. The machines do not act
from knowledge and with will; they have no worries about the
gods. Death and all its linguistic and conceptual constellation has
nothing to do with the story that we are attending. The destruction
is neither nihilistic nor post-nihilistic for the will of nothing has
been and remains overcome. Nor does the problem appear in terms
of the individuals place or his condition defective, frustrated
or disappointing in society; nor, for sure, is it a question of
competition between quasi-human entities to take over the central
position of individuality (Winner, 1986).2 All these questions have
stopped being problems because in fact they are resolved: the men,
simply, are neither a part of society nor of the city. The hominids
drag in sewage, pipes, dumps, mountains of rust, catacombs,
or deserts of infinite sand as in Mad Max. The buildings and
the constructions do not make a human environment, but are
traces, relics in which accumulated dust forms archaeological
segmentations, infinite temporary distances.
What is of man is a species of non-place in a kind of not-time.
The contemporary narrative of the rebellion of the machines
alludes to a future event that paradoxically has already always
happened. The sceneries are, in all the cases, those after battle.

Professor, Philosophy,

Benemerita Universidad
de Puebla, Puebla,
Mexico

81

Gerardo de la Fuente Lora

Even if some scenes could be located in the calm

routine character of some American suburb in the
eighties, the true thing is that this vision is nothing
but the frame the big apocalypse has chosen to
come up. The biggest suspicion about the reality
in which we live occurs in the movie Matrix.
There, life in a city like those in the United States,
goes on normally without individuals knowing
that each of them is actually the embodiment of
a calculation program. In fact everything that
shapes the urban ambiance, the sky and the winds,
the buildings, streets, automobiles, restaurants,
are computer simulations that form one and the
same net. Everything seems the same and yet
everything has changed. As Jean Baudrillard
says (1986), it is not that the environment, the
city, has become illusory such a category would
still belong to the vocabulary of human nature
that precisely would no longer be applicable here
but, on the contrary they have become hyperreal: more real than the real thing itself. The few
men who survive out of Matrix, in miserable
sewage, have an orifice integrated with the body,
so that, through the neck, they can be connected
to computers and cybernetic devices. Although we
are seeing the struggle of man against the system,
the corporal perforation of the individuals, as well
as their direct transfer with the systems, indicate
to us that this history does not belong to humanity.
In what epoch does the history happen? When
did the apocalyptic rebellion of the machines
happen? The protagonists ignore it. The account
of the centuries has got lost and the reality has no
origin.
Matrix also shows that there is no place for the
emancipatory will of the few. The great majority
does not even know that they live in a computer
program, because the life of each one, not only in
the sense of the things to which one gains access,
but even ones personal endowments, ones
corporal capacities, ones beauty, these are much
better inside the cybernetic net than out of it. Why
be liberated? And what might be the meaning of
an emancipation that would diminish the potential
of every individual? In a very notable way, also,
in the film human beings possess a body which
corresponds to their species that is to say, they
do not have a hole in the neck to get connected with
the machines only when they are being a part of
the cybernetic system that dominates them. The
people live, work, drink coffee, interact, go along
the daily life without knowing that their existence
only serves to feed the circuits of Matrix, which,
if it allows the survival of some human trace,

does sot only because it needs the men for inputs

of information. To live, to work, to walk through
the city, to come across others, these are not social
acts; that is the astonishing message of the film.
We are confronted, then, with a surprising
description of the life in the capitalist system
as was described by Marx in the EconomicPhilosophical Manuscripts of 1844. On having
worked the philosopher says to us on having
realized the activity that should humanize them,
men, on the contrary, are dehumanized, and only
when they leave the context of production, when
they are imprisoned in solitude, do they feel that
they are human. A surprising turn is realized then.
The social is opposed to the human; individuals,
Marx concluded, one hundred years before Niklas
Luhmann, do not belong to society (Luhman,
1995).
The emancipatory solution of Marx in 1844, it
is known, is one that he himself will leave later;
here he affirms that there is a type of production,
the creation of some kind of objects, which do
not dominate and deny human beings, but on the
contrary allow them to fulfill their humanity. This
is the Marx of aesthetics, of human liberation by
way of art.
But in capitalism an immense arsenal of
merchandise the objects tend to proliferate, to
repeat themselves and to proliferate. The first line
of The Capital in effect sums up and expresses a
new mode of experience in history: that there are
many things, that the world is immensely filled.
How many violins did he really have and how many
could Pagannini have and with how many guitars
is Eric Clapton provided? How many glasses,
trousers, notebooks, pens, were in the rooms of any
inhabitant of Occident in the year one thousand,
one thousand three hundred or still one thousand
nine hundred? The baroque magnificence of the
altars of the Mexican churches, the effect of rapture
and mystical seduction that they could produce in
the believer with their golden walls, can only be
understood, perhaps, under the consideration that
it did not exist; in no other place area, was there
any similar accumulation of objects. There were
not then the big series of things that populate a
wall of WalMart; one could not go to a significant
exhibition of objet trouv, because any entities able
to be found were scarcely a fistful. To do a picture
with the whole significance of the Campbells
soup-can by Warhol, requires that the represented
object is a common inhabitant of the daily life of
everybody. The world before the capitalism was
practically a desert. Hence the figures of the wealth

82

COMPLEX SYSTEMS AND THE REBELLION OF THE MACHINES

were of the agglomeration of things, magnificence

was given by the proliferation and the repetition of
entities. Treasure was a full chest and the palace a
place in which every step put sight before a tissue
of different things. The experience today of one
who feels overwhelmed by the quantity of stimuli
that a museum or a supermarket provides, or any
medium city, was reserved for centuries to the
elites.
The proliferation of objects, the vertiginous
fulfillment of the world is the background of
Marxist reflections on alienation and of the
artistic-narrative reconstructions of life in modern
society. Suddenly things, proliferating, are gaining
space and pushing the individual. At the same time
that the capitalist productiveness presupposes
and promotes an intensive secularization, the
world of the entities provokes a new uneasiness,
a new mystery. But not of a magic of the type
associated with the ancient gods, but a new secret
and uncanny power of spirits; new gods of a type
mechanic, systemic.
Marx examined the economic conditions
that were causing the incredible proliferation of
objects and the threads of their overlapping in
big systems. But what the artists were comprising
little by little at first, and after them the scientists,
is that the big accumulations of things including
between them knowledge itself can produce
links, articulations, orders, emergent unsuspected
systems. With the expression order out of chaos
the chemist Ilya Prigogine sums the phenomenon
(Prigogine, 1984).
The mysterious dynamics of the big
accumulations of things, was examined, certainly,
by the theoristis that in the first decades of the
20th century were interested in the phenomenon
of the crowd, of the masses. Jos Ortega y Gasset
(1954) and Elas Canetti (1984), tried to discover
the transfiguration of the human passions as an
effect of the agglomeration of the individuals.
Mindsets or new and unknown collective impulses
seemed to arise in mechanical ways, without any
connection with the artificial political body that,
as the product of the free and sovereign decision
of the individuals, Jean Jacques Rousseau, for
example, had foreseen in The Social Contract.
The new reality, arising from the grouping of
the people, was political in an urgent and hard
sense, but not illustrated. Nevertheless the story
of the rebellion of the masses, of its mechanics
and dynamics, still operates as a basic theorem of
modern philosophy to the effect that the passions
are the engine of human action. The description

is even tied to the vocabulary of human nature.

The difficulty now is to think the present as arising
from massive physical connections, i.e., arising
from the interlinking of entities of knowledge that
cannot be described by the terms that we attribute
to human thought.
The increasing connection of things produces
strange events, unsuspected joints that many
times have the appearance of magical effects. It
is as if the proliferation of the things was giving
place to a new re-enchantment of the world as in
times of the medieval magic when everything was
connected with everything else as if there had
been an excess turn in the joint of secularization
and now words were amalgamating again with the
materiality. The connected proliferation of things
would culminate in a kind of new performativity
of language, in a new power of enunciation.
Nowadays we do not witness the revival of
ancient magic. We are not before a delight in the
sacred, but confronted by the enterprise of scientific
reason. Proceeding methodically, experimentally,
first analytically and later synthetically, it is now
possible to produce vast energies, to modify
the climate, to affect the waters or financiers
currents; these are all possible ventures and
ready to hand. But nobody can enumerate all the
consequences that would stem from any of these
changes, and nobody is capable even to imagine
the safe ways that allow for sure experimentation.
A radical suspense hangs over the control and the
government of things; it begins to be named by the
term risk defined by Niklas Luhmann precisely
as what is beyond the calculation of probabilities
(Luhmann, 2005).
Meanwhile we hope that the dust in the scene of
the battle finally should settle and Minervas owl
raise its flight to prepare the concepts and synthesis
of the spirit the philosopher, the last one of the
men. Artistic creations, such as Terminator, Mad
Max or Matrix, see the future from the limit of
the present and they tell us about the experience of
living in a world in which objects have proliferated
to the point of articulating extremely complex
machines physical, cognitive and logical.
In a very full, saturated world, in which all
the spaces begin to be full of things, perhaps
the suspicion of Albert Camus at the beginning
of his L`homme Revolt, becomes true: in our
epoch, every act means to give death. To make
to die would be the destination awaiting us if
there were already no possibilities of expansion,
if all the places had been canceled where to one
might flee, if humanity had been thrown out of the

83

Gerardo de la Fuente Lora

Lem Stanislaw. Solaris. USA: Harvest books,

2002.
Luhmann Niklas, Risk: a Sociological Theory.
USA: Aldine, 2005.
Luhmann Niklas. Social Systems. USA: Stanford
University Press, 1995.
Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844, Moscow: Progress
Publishers. 1959.
Ortega y Gasset Jos. La rebelin de las masas,.
Espaa: Revista de Occidente, 1954.
Prigogine Ilya. Order out of Chaos: Mans New
Dialogue with Nature. USA: Bantam Books,
1984.
Winner Langdon. Autonomous Technology:
Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political
Thought. Camebridge: M.I.T. Press, 1977.
Winner Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor: A
Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

social and already there was not even a place of

last refuge. It turns out to be crucial, for the exact
understanding of the experience of contemporary
living, to recognize that the criminal act of the
systems the rebellion of the machines that, as
in Matrix or Terminator, erases the very memory
of the insurrection and of the men who were its
victims is a mechanical contingency, an inertial
sequence distant of any anthropomorphism, of any
aesthetic tone. The great understanding of the end
of antropomorphism is, surely, that of Stanislaw
Lem in his classic novel Solaris.
What art and cinematography today underlines,
is that there is nothing in the combinations
of elements that today produces good and
manageable realities, which guarantee that the
things will continue that way; even natural law
itself is subject of change. The biggest stabilities,
observes the last Louis Althusser, are besieged by
radical instability (Althusser, 1994, 583).
In this way, it is not that art imagines impossible
paths, but maybe the rebellion of the complex
systems has already taken place.

Notes
1
Albert O Hirschman had described the man and
the world conceived by the modern philosophy as
entities ruled by passions. See Albert O Hirshman,
The Passions and the Interests: Political

Works Cited
Althusser Louis. Le courrant souterrain
du matrialisme de la rencontre, crits
Philosophiques et Politiques. Paris: Le livre de
poche-hachette, 1994.
Baudrillard Jean. Les Stratgies fatales. Paris: Le
livre de poche- Hachette, 1986.
Camus Albert. Lhomme revolt. Pars: Gallimard,
Folio Essais, 1985.
Canetti Elias. Crowds and power. USA: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1984.
Diderot Denis. Jacques le Fataliste et son Maitre.
Pars: Gallimard, 1935.

Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph,

USA, Princeton University Press, 1997.

Langdon Winner has deeply studied the history

of tne human fears about the rebellion of machines.
See Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-ofControl as a Theme in Political Thought, M.I.T.
Press, 1977, and The Whale and the Reactor: A
Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology,
University of Chicago Press, 1986.

84

UNMASKING THE SIMULACRUM:

Harry Houdinis Exposs and the Modernist
Meta-Poetics of Confrontation and Exposure

Cline

Kurt Cline

Abstract
arry Houdinis obsessive vendetta against charlatanism as
revealed through his exposs can be viewed as emblematic
of the Modernist trope of confrontation and exposure. The
American magicians paradoxical relationship to Spiritualism
and to his namesake, Robert-Houdin, is discussed in reference to
the image of the Unmasking. Houdini, preeminently a master of
deceit, feels compelled to expose the deceit of others, to rip off
their masks. In so doing, he gathers to himself the psychic power of
his discredited opponents, as if thereby proving his magic mightier.
But the entire operation is yet another mask. His stage act replicates,
even imitates, the shamanic yuwipi sance, yet Houdinis escape
act removes the spiritual underpinnings which gives such a sance
meaning. Or does it? Through a curious turn, his debunkings
of phony spirit mediums, actually keep alive in an era and
culture imprisoned by if not materialism than its unquestioned
ideology the possibility of the genuinely miraculous. His act
a simulacrum becomes more real than that which it simulates.
In A Magician Among the Spirits and Miracle Mongers and their
Methods, Houdinis researches reveal a lineage of hucksters and
hoaxsters, sometimes indistinguishable from genuine spiritual
adepts, employing shamanic legerdemain to occasion wonder and
healing or perhaps only to bilk the unwary.
Chief among American magician and escape artist Harry
Houdinis written works are his exposs, of which genre he
was a brave but rash adherent. They were a natural extension of
Houdinis act, breathtaking in its meta-artistry. Cash challenges
and his public exposures of fake spirit mediums as well as other
artists whom he felt were copying his act all combined to give
Houdini the air of a real life super-detective, attending spiritualist
sances in disguise and, through his knowledge of legerdemain,
tripping up unwitting con-artists with their very con-artist tricks.
In his 1908 work The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin, Houdini
pens himself as a frank investigator, determined to, if necessary,
rewrite the history of magic in order to do justice to the living
and the dead (9). The work is a quite curious assemblage of
anecdotes and old programs, playbills and posters. However, while
it must be admitted that the French conjuror Robert-Houdin is not
above making himself sound superhuman, Houdinis contentions
regarding his former idol are based on the flimsiest of clues as
when, for instance, the magician contends that Robert-Houdin had
his autobiography penned by a Parisian journalist, which seems to
have been based on the hearsay evidence of a feeble, deaf, former
conjuror Houdini spoke with once. Houdinis accusation, for which
no other evidence has over been found, is made ironic when one
considers that Houdini himself employed a staff of ghost-writers to
put his conceptions into words. Magician Jean Hugard demonstrates
quite a few flaws in Houdinis evidence and reasoning, but it is
Houdinis vindictiveness that mars this otherwise absorbing
account of his attempts to discover the genesis of the various tricks
that, according to Houdini, Robert-Houdin claimed as his own.

Assistant Professor,
English Department,
National Taipei University
of Technology, Taiwan

85

Kurt Cline

Houdinis vendetta against his namesake seems to

enact a palpably Oedipal hatred for his progenitor,
whom Houdini wishes to expose as a charlatan.
The notion of an unmasking is a preeminently
modernist tendency. For the modernist the emphasis
is on the mask, and what greater emphasis can a
mask be given other than just when it is ripped
away? Reality to the modernist is a mask, with
all that that implies. The Modernist artist strips
away the layers of the mask, but not with the goal
of revealing, finally, something tangible behind
the mask. The stripping of the mask just leads to
another mask, another set of aesthetic possibilities,
another persona. The Dadaists exploded the mask
by calling attention to it, by singing and shouting
from behind its cardboard confines. The Surrealists
imploded the mask by drawing it inward, causing
it be inscribed with subconscious contents until it
became the mask of God.
Surrealist magus Andre Breton and Houdini
were about as unalike as two contemporaries
can be. Breton was an intellectual, poetically
and politically committed to a revolution of the
mind. Houdini had never finished grade school
he ran away from his parents home in Appleton,
Wisconsin to join the circus perhaps his greatest
escape. Later, he worked as a necktie cutter until
he made it in vaudeville. The magician did not
have a sophisticated rationale for his art, or any
political pretensions. And yet, both Breton and
Houdini have as the goal of their art liberation.
Houdini expresses this through his escapes,
his films, his love of airplanes; Breton through
his poetry and manifestoes. Both were tireless
researchers into the supernatural. Both were in
search of the miraculous, but carried with them
a hard-headed rationalism at odds with the subtle
energies they sought. And finally, both were
pugilistic adversaries to any that defied them.
Houdini made public denouncements of pseudospiritualists and even any professional magicians
whom he thought were copying his act. He would
challenge and expose his competitor from the
audience, right in the middle of the offending
artists performance. The Surrealists shared with
the Dadaists a pugnacious style reminiscent of
Houdini. Who can forget the evening in 1923
when the snubbed Breton forced to buy a ticket
to see a Dadaist theatrical spectacle starring
Tristan Tzara attacked Pierre de Massot, who
was reading a rather boring Dadaist proclamation.
Thats enough! Breton shouted, striding up onto
the stage. And, with a swing of his stout walking

stick, he broke the pretender-poets left arm

(Brandon, Surreal 168).
There is even the possibility that the similarity
between Houdinis confrontational meta-artistry
and that of the avant-garde Modernists is not
accidental. Houdini toured extensively in Europe
between 1900 and 1904, playing to capacity
crowds and breaking out of a murderers cell in
Leeds, the Amsterdam Prison, and, while in
Moscow, a portable cell designed for transporting
prisoners to Siberia. He was especially loved by
the Germans, probably because he was fluent in
the language. In Dresden, as a photo taken at the
time shows, Houdini challenged the local police
and was duly laden with a fearsome assemblage of
handcuffs, locks, chains and leg irons. Challenging
the Berlin police, he performed a nude escape
from handcuffs, elbow-irons and thumbscrews. In
Dortmund, he escaped from the heavy shackles of
a murderer who had recently been beheaded while
still wearing them. In Cologne, a police officer
named Werner Graff went on public record calling
the escape artist a swindler. Houdini, king of the
debunkers, could hardly allow this. He brought
a suit against the Royal Police for slander and
insisted on proving his skill in the highest court in
the land. A special lock was accordingly designed
by the Cologne police that, once it was locked,
could not be unlocked. Houdini released himself,
by his own account, in a mere four minutes time,
and thereby won the case. The police officer had
to pay the magician thirty marks and print a public
retraction of his comments. This was in 1902.
(Houdini, America 1-12) Such a grand impression
as Houdini made on the German people might well
have had a formative effect on the young Tzara,
Ball and Heulsenbeck, nursing the proletariat
and anti-authoritarian sentiments that would
develop into the confrontationalist aesthetic that
was a hallmark of the Futurists, Dadaists and
Surrealists.
Through his exposs and debunkings Houdini
gathers to himself the psychic power of his
discredited opponents, as if thereby proving his
magic mightier. Houdinis discredited childhood
hero, Robert-Houdin recounts in his Memoirs
what he considers his greatest triumph: a mission
he undertook on behalf of the French government
to prove the superiority of French magic over that
of the Arab tribes people of Algeria. By the French
prestidigitators account, his tricks, bolstered by
disguised principles of optics, psychology and
electromagnetism, baffle the Musselmen into
submission. Houdini does his namesake one

86

UNMASKING THE SIMULACRUM: Harry Houdinis Exposs and the Modernist...

engage in competitions with rival practitioners to

prove the superiority of their powers.
Of course, the context of Houdinis theatrical
display differs from that of the tribal practitioner.
Houdinis act was performed in a vaudeville setting
as a diversion for the working classes yet it shares
the yuwpi mans vision of hope, of liberation from
the invisible forces that bind us. The coal miners
and steel workers who flocked to see Houdinis
show were given this token of the miraculous,
trumpeted on a poster: NOTHING ON EARTH
CAN HOLD HOUDINI A PRISONER.
Houdinis assertion at all times that his effects
were accomplished by strictly natural means
only added to his mystique, as if these were only
words he used to fend off unwanted designs on his
powers. Houdini is paradoxical in that, on the one
hand he seems to have tapped into the collective
mythic storehouse of primordial images, and on
the other he was an intense rationalist. He sought
out mystical experiences with the Spiritualists
but found their banal ghost mutterings empty
and contrived. When the mother to whom he was
overly attached died, Houdini desperately sought
to reconnect with her spirit. The wife of Arthur
Conan Doyle called her back via an experiment in
automatic writing during a seance with Houdini,
but the bereaved son was disappointed when his
mothers spirit communicated in perfect English.
She had only spoken German during her lifetime
(Houdini, Magician 150-155). Houdini spent a
considerable part of his life after that in a crusade
against the Spiritualists, who, if occasionally able
to substantiate their claims before some of the
most learned scientists of the day, were unable to
withstand Houdinis withering gaze or collect his
$10,000 challenge money.
Houdini becomes in the public mind analogous
to the legendary yuwpi man of the Lakota, Horn
Chips, popularly known as the real yuwpi man
(Feraca 61). Like Houdini, Horn Chips defied
all efforts made to debunk him, even holding a
yuwpi ceremony in a lighted room, where a police
chief wrapped and tied him. One is reminded of
Houdinis many similar escapes from handcuffs
and jail cells at police stations all over the world.
Although Houdini accomplished such escapes by
purely natural means including, if nothing else
would work, bribery his actual methods were
never detected by the public, in whose eyes the
American escape artists mystique grew to mythic
proportions.
In Houdini Exposes the tricks used by the
Boston medium Margery to win the $2500 prize

better: not only does his magic baffle those who

would wish to discredit him, he is also able to
expose the false magic of others. Robert-Houdin
admits his own dumbfoundment upon first
seeing the spiritualist performers the Davenport
Brothers. Houdini, by contrast, makes quick
work of the Davenport Brothers and other pretend
spiritualists. Even in his most difficult case, that of
the Boston medium known as Margery, he admits
himself only temporarily puzzled, never fooled.
In his most thoroughgoing expos A
Magician Among the Spirits, Houdini debunks
the spiritualists of his day without a trace of
irony. Houdinis own act is itself but a thinly
veiled shamanic sance, a theatrical replication
even, some might say, a bastardization of the
ceremony of the Lakota yuwpi man, the shaman,
healer, oracle and specialist at being wrapped, who
performs his escape at the climax of a ceremony of
purification, prayer, the smoking of the sacred pipe
and taking of flesh offerings. The escape occurs
contiguously with the manifestation of spirits
also called yuwpi small, hairy, manlike things
credited with facilitating the yuwpi mans escape.
Feraca observed a yuwpi ceremony held in 1956.
The shaman was bound with leather cord, then
wrapped in a thick quilt and tied all around. The
lights were turned out and the spectators heard
piteous moans issuing from the bound bundle
and then the naming of spirit helpers. Presently
there was a pounding on the walls. Rattles
glowing blue-green whizzed by peoples heads.
Those desiring shamanic aid came forward and
explained their problems. Each explanation was
met with more poltergeist activity and with the
rhymed prayers and songs of the shaman, still
supposedly bound. Then the lights were turned
back on and the shaman was seen to be liberated
from his bonds, the quilt used to bind him now
neatly folded back in its place on the altar. Later,
one of the participants found in his jacket pocket
the cord that had been used to bind the shaman
rolled in a ball. (Feraca 57-60).
Although the spiritualist sances of the 19th
and early 20th centuries were, with few exceptions,
contrived renditions of shamanic sances deriving
from tribal-based cultures, and although Houdinis
act replicates the yuwpi sance of the Lakota
Sioux, Houdini denies sances themselves to be
anything more than outright swindles. Through
his debunking of phony spirit mediums Houdini
is able to prove the superiority of his magic, but
even in this gambit he follows patterns laid down
by shamans from time immemorial, who often

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Kurt Cline

offered by the Scientific American, the escapologist

and psychic detective recounts his investigation of
sances conducted by one Mina Crandon, who, of
all the mediums Scientific American considered
for its cash prize to produce, under scientific test
conditions, psychic phenomena, seemed the most
promising. In fact, the magazines investigatory
committee had all but awarded her the prize,
when Houdini was called in. Margery was, by
Houdinis own account, his most difficult case.
It was also a case that tolled a death knell for
spiritualism, since, when it was over, the practices
of mediums had no more credence for Western
scientists. If, however, Houdini killed spiritualism
or at least administered the fatal blow it is
not without irony. It is precisely because he does
know the tricks of the shaman that he is able to
spot Margerys various dodges. And in so doing,
Houdini proves the efficacy of his own magic over
that of imposters. He becomes the shaman again,
but by way of a negative path: each manifestation
must be seen and seen through. Houdini is applying
logic, but also instinct and imagination. He knows
how illusions are created, and so he imagines while
sitting in the darkened sance room how Margery
must be creating the illusion that, for instance,
that there is a megaphone floating in the air or
that, through means of a mysterious pseudopod
emanating from between her legs, she is able to
press a lever that triggers a bell inside a box while
her hands and feet were being held by witnesses.
If the mediums are fakes, then by a certain
logic Houdini is not. Since he can spot a phony
wonder worker, it makes sense that he must be able
to spot the genuine article, or even be one himself.
Houdinis mystique is due to a paradox he comes
to embody in popular consciousness: straddling
the fine line between reality and illusion, he joins
in the one body rational empiricist and mystic. His
is the negative way of Saint Dionysius. He denies
the miraculous to be anything that can be seen
in order to prove that it can exist. When Houdini
does turn to occult matters in his exposs it is
always in the most desultory if not downright
insulting attitude it is possible to imagine. He
makes note of the importance of fire in shamanistic
and alchemical traditions, but speaks of it without
understanding, as worship. The worship of
the fire itself had been a legacy from the earliest
tribes, he remarks in Miracle Mongers and Their
Methods
. . . but it remained for the Rosicrucians and fire
philosophers of the Sixteenth Century under

the lead of Paracelsus to establish a concrete

religious belief on that basis . . . (3)
Houdini is tantalizingly close to the truth. The
shaman, the ancient fire worker, is the progenitor
of the mystical tradition of the alchemists and
Rosicrucians. But Houdini is woefully ignorant
of the meaning behind these considerations. He
thinks the firewalkers of Japan and Fiji and the fire
dancers of the Navajo are just putting on a show
for tourists and explains the seeming miracle of
these practices as having been accomplished
through the application of a substance such as clay
paint. Houdini documents the antiquity of this
trick, called fireproofing. Plainly, he sees Shintoist
priests and Navajo fire dancers as being of a long
line of phony miracle workers including The
Incombustible Spaniard Senor Lionetto and Carlo
Alberto, The Fire King. Is Houdinis lineage of
hucksters and hoaxsters separate from the lineage
of genuine magical practitioners descending from
Hermes Trismegistus and Simon Magus and
culminating in the deaths of Bruno and Cagliostro?
Houdini follows pioneer historian of conjuring
Thomas Frost in seeing the two lineages as one.
Houdini seeks in The Unmasking to discover
who in 18th century France was first to construct
the writing and drawing automaton. RobertHoudin had a veritable menagerie of exquisitely
wrought mechanical life forms orange trees that
bloomed on command, nightingales that sang, an
acrobat who did a trapeze act, and, of particular
interest to us here, a little, ornately dressed man
sitting at a writing table who could write or draw
the answers to questions put to it.
For reasons that baffle Hugard, Houdini draws
connections between the writing and drawing
figure and the talking head designed by Professor
Faber and exhibited by P.T. Barnum in 1873. In
this, Houdini was being quite astute. If he does
not trace the idea of the automaton itself back to its
source which must lie in Gnostic speculations on
the infusion of matter with spirit symbolized by the
willing descent of Sophia into the created world,
and thereby the redemption of humanity, ritually
enacted in the animation of statues as described
in Hermes letter to Asclepius the escape artist
does show an awareness of an ancient tradition of
genuine magic which intersects with legerdemain.
The first automaton, a man-made construction
endowed with movement if not life and apparent
intelligence was perhaps the android of Albertus
Magnus (1193-1280). This was a humanoid figure
whose power of speech was so pronounced that it
reputedly came to annoy the ever studious Thomas

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UNMASKING THE SIMULACRUM: Harry Houdinis Exposs and the Modernist...

Aquinas, who had the thing destroyed (Seligman

145). Since Houdini credits Albertus Magnus
for publishing an early secret of fire-proofing,
a dubious formula of marshmallow, egg-white,
flea-bane seeds and lime that will supposedly
enable one to pick up a red-hot iron without
injury (Miracle Mongers 100), he probably would
have known that Magnus was working in the
tradition among the Magi of the Middle Ages and
Renaissance who sought to construct of a brazen
head that could prophecy. Roger Bacon (1214-94),
legend has it, actually constructed such a head, but
was unable to make it speak until making a pact
with the devil (Frost 47).
In spite of his skepticism, Houdinis psychic
investigations keep him continually at the fringes
of the supernatural in that zone of liminality
between known and unknown that is the true
province of the shaman. True to his religious
upbringing, he honors the possibility of the
genuinely miraculous by refusing to be takenin by imitations. This does not mean, though,
that he rejects the possibility of extra-sensory
phenomena. He records a few chilling instances of
synchronicity, when, in the midst of performing,
he and his wife Bess would experience the
uncanny. They toured for awhile in their early days
with a dodgy mind reading act verging on bogus
spiritualism, and quite a few times their madeup readings and prognostications actually came
true, as when, in a town just over the Canadian
border, Bess, remembering a Mrs. Murphy who
ran a candy store in New York, let on to a spectator
named Mary Murphy that her lost brother John
might be found on East Seventy-Second Street
in that city. Mrs. Houdini naturally assumed that
the two prestidigitators would be safely out of
town by the time her ruse was discovered. But the
spectator wired New York City that very night and
indeed the womans long lost brother was located.
(Brandon, Houdini 69-70)
What Houdini has really shown in his exposs
is that the history of flimflammery goes way back
to the dawn of time too, even as does the history

of the most sacred magic which lies at the heart

of religion. Legerdemain and magic in their
contrasting sense are dual aspects of shamanic
activity. Neither is more originary than the other,
and neither is more real. Nor are real and sham
magic opposites. One masks and at the same
time sustains the other. The wonder occasioned
by shamanic legerdemain increases its curative
powers. In this way, sham magic becomes the
operational force in a real miracle.
Works Cited
Brandon, Ruth. The Life and Many Deaths of
Harry Houdini. New York: Random House,
1993.
--- Surreal Lives. New York: Grove Press, 1999.
Feraca, Stephen E. Yuwpi: A Traditional Lakota
Healing Ceremony. Shamans Drum, no. 49.
1998. 56-62.
Frost, Thomas. Lives of the Conjurors. London:
Tinsley Brothers, 1876.
Houdini, Harry. Americas Sensational Perplexer.
Leicester, England: Wilsons Printers, 1903.
[Souvenir Programme.]
--- Houdini Exposes the tricks used by the Boston
Medium Margery to win the $2500 prize
offered by the Scientific American. 1924.
Houdini on Magic. Ed. Walter B. Gibson
and Morris N. Young. New York: Dover
Publications, 1953.
--- A Magician Among the Spirits. 1924. New
York: Arno Press, 1972.
--- Miracle Mongers and their Methods. 1920.
Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1981.
--- The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin. 1908. New
York: Publishers Printing Company, 1908.
Hugard, Jean. Houdinis Unmasking: Fact vs.
Fiction. York, PA: Magicana for Collectors,
1989.
Seligman, Kurt. Magic, Supernaturalism and
Religion. New York: Pantheon Books/Random
House, 1948.

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DECEPTION OF SELF

Dalke

Tra c y D a l ke

hat greater deception could there be than deception of

ones self, where the past becomes elusive, memories
unavailable, and identity unknown? This phenomenon is
often encountered within the realm of mental illness in disorders
characterized by dementia, delusional thinking, and forgotten
memory the past becomes fragmented, lost, or rewritten causing
one to be deceived and detached from the self. Within clinical
psychology one of the most perplexing and indeed troubling
psychotherapeutic anomalies to arise within the past decade is the
occurrence of false memory syndrome, wherein memories of the
past are rewritten to align with the psychotherapeutic creation of a
new self. This new self is based on fictitious memories, traumatic
stories of childhood sexual abuse, which have been allegedly
repressed within the clients unconscious. Recovered Memory
Psychotherapists help their clients dig to unearth the hidden past,
regress to revisit their inner child, and assemble the disintegrated
personality through hypnotic inductions. However, the self that is
created, the past that is rewritten is often not in keeping with factual
events from the past. Thus, in rewriting the self oneself is figured
anew through interpretation (Freeman, 3). An elaborate deception
of self has occurred.
Let us begin by considering the Eastern parable The Tale of the
Sands, which will serve as a metaphor for the phenomenon of selfdeception in the psychotherapeutic paradigm.1

The Tale of the Sands

Adjunct Professor,
Psychology, Western Oregon
University, Monmouth,
Oregon

A stream, from its source in far-off mountains, passing through

every kind and description of countryside, at last reached the
sands of the desert. Just as it had crossed every other barrier, the
stream had tried to cross this one, but it found that as fast as it
ran into the sand, its waters disappeared.
It was convinced, however, that its destiny was to cross this
desert, and yet there was no way. Now a hidden voice, coming
from the desert itself, whispered: The Wind crosses the desert,
and so can the stream.
The stream objected that it was dashing itself against the sand,
and only getting absorbed: that the wind could fly, and this was
why it could cross a desert.
By hurtling in your own accustomed way you cannot get across.
You will either disappear or become a marsh. You must allow
the wind to carry you over, to your destination.
But how could this happen?
By allowing yourself to be absorbed in the wind.
Just as the stream must succumb to the wind in order to chart
new territory, so must the client in psychotherapy surrender to
the therapy itself, thereby abandoning critical thought in order to
become immersed in the treatment paradigm. I think that thats
what happens in the context of therapy, that we can help people
rewrite their entire histories and view things in ways that are
really quite selective and involve a perceptual filter (Yapko).
Through suggestion, psychotherapeutic techniques, trust, and an

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DECEPTION OF SELF

overwhelming powerful desire to heal, the

client becomes swept away by the wind in belief,
behavior, and will.
Within psychotherapy the goal is typically
to help clients gain personal insight so that
they can successfully adapt to the demands of
their environment. It is found that people cling
desperately to their perceived sense of self
whether advantageous or not, since it offers
consistency and stability within, what for some, is
a frightening and chaotic world, giving meaning
to memories, and a sense of purpose to their lives,
in essence, providing people with a raison detre
(a reason for being). When something happens to
disrupt the equilibrium of the cherished self, as
seen in psychological disorders characterized by
delusions, hallucinations, dementia, and alleged
dissociative states, clients come unraveled and
emerge unable to cope with lifes changing
demands. They cease to be who they were, at
least in the psychological sense. The therapist
then, skilled at recognizing and helping piece the
splintered aspects of self back together, helps the
client rewrite his/her self, although this self is
often not in keeping with his/her perceived former
self. Indeed, the popular self-help movement
boasts of how to create the new and improved
you in only 12 easy steps (in, for example, the
bible of the recovered memory movement, The
Courage to Heal, written by Bass & Davis, 1994).
The danger then is in this rewriting, wherein
oneself is figured anew through interpretation
(Freeman, 3). Someone elses interpretation
becomes the platform from which the new self
is launched, as such, leaving clients susceptible
to therapists biased preconceptions, potentially
illusory correlations, and erroneous diagnoses.
This discussion of self-deception will begin
by examining the False Memory Syndrome
phenomenon (hereafter referred to as FMS)
that shook the field of clinical psychology in
the early 90s. While the occurrence of FMS has
largely dissipated through memory research
debunking claims of the recovered memory
movement, civil litigation against practicing
psychotherapists, and a general unease within the
psychotherapeutic community, we still see too
many cases of clients (mainly women) claiming
to have recovered memories of being sexually
abused in childhood that they had no memories of
prior to entering psychotherapy. This paper will
examine how self-deception specifically impacts
this psychotherapeutic practice in an attempt to
further understand the construction and utility

of this psychotherapy. Theories of self-deception

will be explored, along with an analysis of selfconstrual and how it is subject to the accuracy or
inaccuracy of autobiographical memory.
False Memory Syndrome
What plagues many people when trying to
understand FMS is why any person would make up
such heinous stories of abuse, typically inflicted by
a male family member or close friend (including
satanic ritual abuse for some), if the memories
were not in fact true? In order to examine this
question let us begin by defining what is meant
by FMS (noting that this phenomenon has not,
as yet, been adopted into the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). This
syndrome follows a distinctive pattern of beliefs
and behaviors that appear to develop in the course
of iatrogenic therapy and include the following
characteristics:
a belief that a behavioral problem is a reaction to a
past event that was so traumatic that its experience
was completely repressed or dissociated
development of pseudomemories that one was
sexually abused as a child
centering of identity and relationships around
those pseudomemories (to the point of labeling
oneself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse
development of extreme dependence on the
therapist with a focus away from the issues initially
bringing the client into psychotherapy
defensive avoidance of any contradictory
information or unsupportive family members
(including friends) who themselves, are considered
to be in denial ~ leading to the process of the client
cutting off2
The typical scenario would be as follows. A
woman enters psychotherapy for reasons unrelated
to childhood sexual abuse [hereafter referred to as
child sexual abuse] (e.g., eating disorder, marital
problems, low self-esteem, depression, and so
forth) endorsing a particular personal history or
sense of self (the pre-therapy self ). The therapist,
after listening to the clients description of
symptomatology suggests a diagnosis of possible
sexual trauma in the clients past. The client
typically rejects such a notion, not having had any
prior memories of such events, but is encouraged
to read some books3 and try on the diagnosis
to see how it feels in a few days. Thus, the client
consciously endorses a potentially false self,
thereby knowingly attempting to deceive her self.
During those few days the client is also encouraged
to try a number of different therapeutic techniques

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Tracy Dalke

past. William James discusses the stream of

consciousness that never ceases to ebb and flow
and suggests that the self we construct [is] a
personal representation of consciousness . . .
dependent upon the habits of attention (Frost,
Arfken, & Brock). As the client becomes further
entrenched in her quest to uncover repressed
memories of abuse her narrowed attention on
child sexual abuse victimization and survival
become her only operating reality and thus
cannot escape becoming written into her personal
narrative. Indeed, the self becomes defined by this
history-memory-narrative triad, following in
the direction determined by the psychotherapy.

in order to attempt to gain access to the alleged

repressed memories, including: journaling; dream
analysis; and, body work. The psychotherapist
discusses the Freudian defense mechanisms
of repression and denial, explaining how both
processes are instituted by the Ego to protect the
self from threatening material suggests that in the
face of extreme emotional conflict or trauma, such
protective measures are completely normal. The
client returns to her life with this confusing and
shocking revelation from the psychotherapist and
reluctantly spends the next few days imagining
the possibilities that have been suggested to her.
Upon returning to psychotherapy some women
will readily endorse the suggested diagnosis while
others will claim that they are still not sure about
the diagnosis at which point the therapist will
suggest some further memory recovery techniques
aimed at unearthing traumatic memories from
the unconscious (such as hypnosis, incest group
therapy, and regression therapy), all of which
serve to sustain the belief that the client shows
signs typical of a child sexual abuse survivor. In
an effort to heal from her affliction (be it the
eating disorder, depression, and so on) the client
accepts the proposed therapy and begins her
journey into the world of fantasy, depression,
and isolation and in some more extreme cases,
multiple personalities and institutionalization.
The client abandons herself to the therapist and
the therapy in order to heal from the pain she
is in, just as the stream allowed itself to become
absorbed in the wind in order to cross the desert.
As the negative spiral ensues, the client is left
suffering more than when she initially entered
psychotherapy, as she now has new psychological
afflictions to cope with and no support system
outside of her therapeutic community. Her reality
becomes defined by false accusations, lies, and
betrayal.
It is important to consider the role language
plays in the context of psychotherapy. The self is
a narrative constructed and maintained through
language. By changing the language we change
the narrative. Within psychotherapy the therapist
utilizes a language that is context-specific (in this
case to psychoanalytic theory) and introduces
concepts that are often alien to the client so
called psychobabble. Consequently, the clients
self narrative develops within an often confusing
and misunderstood psychological jargon.
Accompanying this is a new consciousness that
is characterized by the possibility of a history of
child sexual abuse and a misremembered personal

Self-Deception
Let us now address self-deception more
specifically and see how it affects the belief
structure of both client and therapist, first in
coming to explain how the false belief of child
sexual abuse begins; and second, in explaining
how the beliefs are sustained in repressed memory
therapy. Self-deception has various definitions.
By looking at the origin of the words self and
deception we arrive at the understanding of self
as ones own person, not another and deception
as to be ensnared or caught in a trap. So from
this we might extrapolate self-deception to be
the ensnarement of ones actual self in order to
become another.
As mentioned previously, people are very
reluctant to acknowledge information that is
discrepant with their desired self perception. As a
result, people will sometimes mislead themselves
in order to accept as true or valid that which is
false or invalid as a way to justify their false
beliefs. According to Lawley and Tompkins,
when we deceive, delude or deny our self, we
mislead our self, we misinterpret or disown what
we know to be true, we lie to our self, we refuse to
acknowledge that which we know. They refer to
this model as Self-DDD (self deception, delusion,
and denial). Moreover, they argue that in order to
deny, delude, or disbelieve, some maintenance of
the knowledge of which it knows to be true has to
exist. Thus, the paradox of both knowing and not
knowing. This model has been found to operate in
psychological disorders such as body dysmorphia,
Munchhausens disease, compulsions, addiction,
and physically abusive relationships. In each
instance, the delusion serves to justify maladaptive
behavioral actions and irrational beliefs, in essence
becoming a self-handicapping strategy. Lawley and
Tomkins explain that now and then inconsistencies

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DECEPTION OF SELF

this capacity I would be responsible for the life

I choose. He purports, the inescapable condition
of human life is the requirement of choosing
something and accepting the responsibility for the
consequences.4 So if we accept Sartres argument
then our choice to accept any advice deems us
responsible for any actions taken in accordance
with that advice. He suggests that there are only
two choices in being: sincerity (to be) or selfdeception (not to be). By his definition, selfdeception invariably involves an attempt to evade
personal responsibility. Moreover, he explains that
if we focus exclusively on what-we-might-become,
although convenient, this is a self-deceptive means
of overlooking the truth about who-we-actually
are.
In repressed memory therapy the goal for the
therapist is to help the client become a functioning
child sexual abuse survivor who is free from
adverse psychological symptomatology and
empowered by overcoming such adversity. In
most cases of repressed memory therapy the
focus is away from client responsibility towards
parental blame. The argument would be, how
can one possibility be held accountable for her
poor decision-making, depressed affect, eating
disorder, and so forth, when she was so damaged
in early childhood, harboring her wounded inner
child to this day, and plagued by a burdened
unconscious? It would seem then that repressed
memory therapy falls into Sartres description
of avoidance of self-responsibility and cleverly
endorses his explanation of how focusing on what
might be leads to the avoidance of dealing with
what one actually is. Moreover, adopting the label
of child sexual abuse survivor then equates to
playing a role, wherein again the actor is free
from personal responsibility. For some, holding an
accurate perception of self can be upsetting (e.g.,
recognizing ones an addict, or a poor parent), thus
making it easier to adopt the role of child sexual
abuse victim/survivor and blame others for ones
maladaptive actions and poor life choices.
So how does one (therapist or client) become
convinced of something that actually isnt true?
One possible answer is by sustaining a motivated
desire or emotion [that] favors the acquisition and
retention of [the] belief.5 According to this model,
self-deception is seen as an intentional action
wherein the client has a goal, realizes how to
promote her goal, and seeks to promote the goal in
a particular way (Mele). When recalling specific
memories our goals dictate the progression of the
autobiographical narrative in ways that enhance

arise (familial accounts of the past for example)

and doubts surface that cause inner conflict. This
inner conflict, so-called cognitive dissonance, is
a term coined by Leon Festinger in 1957 that refers
to the uncomfortable internal state that arises
when ones beliefs and behaviors are incompatible
with another. The need for consistency within
ones self and the world is a primary motivational
attribute of the human condition. Because of
this need to maintain a particular self-view, the
person engages in more self-deception-delusionand denial until eventually coming to live in what
Baudrillard refers to as a simulation of the truth
(Lawley & Tomkins).
How might this model reflect women in
repressed memory therapy? By knowing and
believing the truth p (not a victim of child sexual
abuse) yet intentionally causing one self to believe
~p (is a victim of child sexual abuse), an impossible
state of mind is created, indeed the paradox
described previously. This discrepant information
clothed in doubt and denial, leads the client to
experience cognitive dissonance (her behavior/
emotional state/level of functioning/dreams/and
therapeutic conversations are all inconsistent
with her beliefs regarding her personal past [not
a victim of child sexual abuse]). Thus, in order to
alleviate the uncomfortable mental and emotional
state caused by this juxtaposition, the client
comes to adopt ~p (is a victim of child sexual
abuse), thereby aligning herself with the promised
benefit of healing from the therapist and escaping
the uncomfortable state of having to believe and
disbelieve at the same time.
If we accept the above model, then the question
arises whether adopting a false belief is a willful
act, an error in judgment, or a moral choice? Who
is responsible the one being deceived or the
one doing the deceiving, and what if this person
is one in the same? Who is ethically responsible
for the harms created by FMS for the client, the
accused perpetrator, and all other family members
and friends who are affected by this false claim?
Should all fault lie with the therapist? One might
argue that in his/her position of expertise and
power he/she bears the responsibility of protecting
client welfare and safety. But, isnt he/she also a
victim of self-deception his/her own, or a victim
of deception by the client? Is the client morally
responsible for the wrongful imprisonments of an
innocent family member?
If we accent Sartres account of being he explains
that being human is having the capacity to create
ones own essence in time. Thus, as a result of

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Tracy Dalke

the new past which in turn invokes even greater

anxiety and fear for the client. Almost like the
bait and switch technique in social influence,
a new emotional misery replaces the former, as a
new personal past and constructed self replaces the
former -- indeed, a false self if we are to accept that
this self is based on recovered veridical memories
of child sexual abuse. As one retractor explains,
[t]he sad fact is that the parents you remember in
therapy are the lies and the parents you remember
before therapy are, in fact, the loving parents
youve loved all your life (McHugh, Lief, Freyd,
& Fetkewicz, 529). For many, the memories of the
loving parent are lost forever.
One last important piece to the puzzle of the
constructed self in psychotherapy is the function
of autobiographical memory itself. Memory is
the foundation of our beliefs about ourselves and
the world in which we live. We have a sense of
owing our memories. While a full examination
of autobiographical memory is beyond the scope
of this paper, we will briefly examine its role in
helping construct a narrative.
It is widely accepted amongst cognitive
psychologists that memories are reconstructed
as opposed to reproduced as a video play back.
Autobiographical memory is subject to error based
on factors such as mood, bias, audience, encoding
and retrieval errors, to mention a few. Ross
suggests in his implicit theory of personal history
that the individual proceeds through an active
reconstructive process when recalling personal
stories. Moreover, organizing our past memories
to appear similar to our current attitudes allows us
to hold a coherent story about ourselves. However,
the accuracy of our memories is influenced by
whether or not we want to maintain stability or
effect change. As such, he claims that errors made
when recalling past events are systematically
formulated in terms of the current self we want to
project. Often, [w]e remember things not the way
they were but the way would have liked them to
have been (Baker, 150). These implicit theories
allow us to reconstruct our selves of the past.
Herein lies the difficulty in any autobiographical
sketch which purports to deal with ones mental
development. It is a story of oneself in the past,
read in the light of ones present self. There is
much supplementary inferenceoften erroneous
inferencewherein must have been masquerades
as was so. (Ross, 341)
In addition to what Gilovich suggested as
the three conditions necessary for the adoption
of a false claim, it is has been found that [a]

the self and maintain its coherence, or in ways

that conform with perceived self-change (PowellUlveland). Gilovich describes three conditions
that serve to create such a belief state:
misperceiving random data and seeing patterns
in behavior where none exist;
misinterpreting incomplete or unrepresentative
data and giving extra attention to confirmatory
data while drawing conclusions without attending
to or seeking out disconfirming data;
making biased evaluations of ambiguous or
inconsistent data, tending to be uncritical of
supportive data and very critical of unsupportive
data.6
Mele explains that we have a tendency to
believe propositions we want to be true even when
an impartial investigation of readily available
data would indicate that they are probably
false. Thus, our wanting something to be true
sometimes exerts a biasing influence on what we
believe. In essence, this process of belief relies
on abandoning all attempts at critical thinking,
a perfect example of a self-fulfilling prophecy
wherein the clients immediate needs are met by
refusing to acknowledge other possibilities. This
also serves the therapist by strengthening his/her
initial diagnosis and providing confirmation of
the initial assessment. By this argument, it could
be stated that self-deception is not necessarily
a weakness of will, but may be a matter of
ignorance, laziness, or cognitive incompetence,7
with the goal of serving the clients and therapists
motivated beliefs.
Emotional contagion is a phenomenon studied
in social psychology claiming that people become
caught up (ensnared) in the emotional setting of
which they are a part. This is certainly evident
in group psychotherapy and in part explains
why it reaps the benefits it does, as clients feed
off of each others progress and insights. Frost,
Arfken, and Brock explain that in avoiding or
distorting information that conflicts with our selfperception, a process he terms the phenomenology
of self-deception, an intrinsic pay-off results, for
example feeling happy or relieved. Conversely, in
recognizing ones foibles and shortcomings, the
client may experience fear and anxiety. He goes
on to explain that anxiety and fear can also result
from a recognition that what one once believed to
be factually true (e.g., an early childhood based
on happy family memories) is in fact not true
at all. The intensity of emotion associated with
this realization is enough to influence all further
self-referential information to be in keeping with

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DECEPTION OF SELF

motivationally biased memory search will result

in the formation of additional biased beliefs and
theories that are constructed so as to justify desired
conclusions (Kunda, 483). Research designed to
identify these sources of belief have found the
following phenomena to be instrumental:
vividness of information vivid data have
a disproportional influence on formation and
retention of belief;
availability heuristic accessibility of events
in terms of frequency in perception, memory, or
construction from imagination influence what is
recalled;
confirmation bias recognize confirmatory
data more readily even when hypothesis is
tentative; and,
causal explanation tendency to search for
causal information to support the endorsement
and retention of ones first hypothesis.
It would appear from the anecdotal accounts
of Retractors that selective-evidence-gathering
is the model subscribed to in repressed memory
therapy. This model describes a combination of
hyper-sensitivity to evidence for a desired state
of affairs and blindness to contrary evidence
(Mele).
So, we have discussed how through a process of
self-deception a false history of child sexual abuse
can come to be believed and endorsed by a client in
psychotherapy. What happens to those few clients
who eventually choose to abandon their false child
sexual abuse beliefs and return to their families
and former pre-therapy narratives? Unfortunately,
these so called Retractors are shunned by
their therapists and fellow group members and
admonished for joining the Backlash and
refusing to come out of their own denial.
As soon as I left therapy, I was extremely
afraid, and I suffered from panic attacks. I believe
this was because of the stress of coming to the
realization that my recovered memories were
untrue. I felt as though my world had been turned
upside down [again]; I was suddenly living in a
different reality than I had been for the past three
years.8

harm and injustice has resulted from the practice

of searching for alleged repressed memories, a
phenomenon itself that is completely unsupported
scientifically. Yet, for some the practice continues
which means more women and men will be
deceived in the future.
Logical deduction suggests that the issue of
self-deception in FMS seems to boil down to the
motivational drive for self-preservation. Anyone
is potentially susceptible to being deceived or
deceiving themselves in the repressed memory
therapy paradigm given the right conditions. Selfchange can be beneficial but at what cost? Should
we advise clients to abandon critical thought and
become swept away in the current of therapy
thus traversing the unknown desert, or do we
heed caution thereby rendering the potentially
powerful and positive influence of psychotherapy
ineffective? Can self-change honestly occur
without some form of deception?
Works Cited
Baker, R. A. The aliens among us: hypnotic
regression revisited. The Skeptical Inquirer 12:
(1997-98): 147-162.
DeRivera, Joseph. The Construction of False
Memory Syndrome: The Experience of
Retractors. Psychological Inquiry 8.4 (1997):
271-292 (1997).
Festinger, L. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.
Stanford, California: Stanford University
Press, 1957.
Freeman, M. Rewriting the Self: History, Memory,
Narrative. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Frost, Christopher, Arfken, Michael & Brock,
Dylan, W. The Psychology of Self Deception
as Illustrated in Literary Characters. Available
at http://www.janushead.org/4-2/frost.cfm.
Kunda, Z. The Case for Motivated Reasoning.
Psychological Bulletin 108 (1990): 480-498.
Lawley, James & Tomkins, Penny. Self-Deception,
Self-Delusion and Self Denial: And How to Act
from What You Know to be True. Available at
http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/Self-DDD-1.
html (2004)
McHugh, Paul R, Lief, Harold, I., Freyd, Pamela,
P. & Fetkewicz, Janet, M. Family relationships
after an accusation based on recovered
memories. The Journal of Nervous and Mental
Disease 192.8 (2004): 525-531.
Mele, Alfred E. Real Self-Deception. Available
at
http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/
OldArchive//bbs.mele.html Powell-Ulveland,

Concluding Thoughts
By the nature of the psychotherapeutic
relationship, therapists are in a position whereby
they hold more power and influence over the
situation than clients. Implicit trust and a faith
in valid scientific practice has to exist for the
client in order for any type of psychotherapeutic
intervention to be successful. A great deal of

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Tracy Dalke

Notes
Reprinted by permission from Indries Shah.
Tales of the Dervishes (E.P. Dutton & Co.,
Inc. 1970, and Collins-Wing, Inc.), pp. 23-24.
Copyright 1967 by Indries Shah.
2
Kihlstrom (in press); cited in DeRivera, 271).
3
A psychotherapeutic technique known commonly
as bibliotherapy.
4
http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/7e.htm
5
http://plato.standford.edu/entries/self-deception
6
see Mele
7
http://skepdic.com/selfdeception.html
8
FMSF Newsletter, 16.1 (2007)

Tracy M. Assuming New Selves: Rewriting

the Self in Recovered Memory Psychotherapy.
Dissertation. Simon Fraser University.
Ross, M. Relation of Implicit Theories to
the Construction of Personal Histories.
Psychological Review 96.2 (1989): 341-357.
Yapko, M. The Seductions of Memory: The False
Memory Debate. Family Therapy Networker
17 (1993): 30-37.

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OUT OF GLOBAL DECEPTION

Ott

Michaela Ott

hese proceedings deal with phenomenology, media and

deception. Since I am no phenomenologist, but someone
actually working on the symbolization of affects in
philosophical discourses and film, I will speak on affects, which
in the English dictionary do not exist. Affectus, affectatio are Latin
terms which were translated into English as emotion or passion or
affection and do not mean the same. And since I am interested in
the theory of affection as Spinoza puts it, which does not mean love
like in English, I will try to connect Spinozism with the question of
deception and of media.
Our most existential deception today, as far as I can see,
concerns the processes of globalization. They are deceptive in
the double sense of epistemological and emotional deception.
We are terrified by the brutal capital logic, we are horrified by
the ecological disaster, we are dismayed by the quantity of human
distress which we can record on the global level. But we are also
hurt by our disempowerment concerning these developments; we
feel impotent and have no other chance but to react. Our hopes of
being self-determined masters of the world and of its change for
the better are deceived. We realize that while being concerned and
affected by the ongoing chances, we dont see the chance to act on
a global level; we feel overwhelmed.
My impression is that we try to compensate for this feeling
of impotence with phantasms. We figure ourselves on a global
platform and confront ourselves with imaginary demands. We,
Europeans intellectuals, try to develop a certain ubiquity and
convince ourselves that we provide a profound analysis of the
situation; we run around in order to demonstrate that we are still
able to act on an international platform. While doing so, we loose
our mind, our soul, our heart. The diagnosis for this behaviour is:
panic.
All we do is to express panic and stress. Since we are not able
to emotionally and rationally cope with the global perspective,
since it is too big for us, since we have lost our cultural frame of
reference, we are running around like planets of our world, exorbital
to ourselves, as Baudrillard said. We have lost the immanence of
our culture and the world.
I would call this a sort of traumatization. We are confronted with
economic and political changes which in their effects are as huge
as a tornado, too big, too unconceivable for our human capacities.
Tornados and natural events of this size were reasons for Immanuel
Kant to reflect on the human capacity of judgement. He states that
huge natural phenomena such as sea storms as a philosopher
of the enlightenment he does not mention God provoke the
judgment of the sublime. We call the phenomena sublime, if they
fascinate us, if they challenge our capacities, if they overwhelm
us by their quantity, by their pure bigness. These are processes of
what I will call affection and explain later; they affect us exactly
because we are unable to grasp them with our sensory perception
or our capacity of representation. They appeal to our intellectual
capacities and force them to conceive of ideas. The sublime in

Professor, Philosophy,
University of Stuttgart,
Stuttgart, Germany

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Michaela Ott

Kants view is an ambiguous judgment: On the one

hand it provokes an obstruction of our vital forces
since it is too violent for our imagination. On the
other hand we are attracted by the huge object and
feel some pleasure despite our sensory resistance
because it forces our imagination to expand. It
forces our imagination to create new ideas. Kant
connects feelings of humility and respect with this
process; he does not conceive of self-destructive
emotions for if we fail to cope with the too big
object.
The globalization has this character of an
object which provokes the judgment of the
sublime: We have no possibilities to represent
it, we cannot symbolize it, we can only develop
concepts and imaginations of what it is like and of
what it wants from us. Philosophers such as JeanFrancois Lyotard connected Kants concept of the
sublime with modern art in order to explain the
unconceivable in paintings of Rothko and Barnett
Newman and their appeal to something beyond
visual representation, something transcendent.
These paintings do not represent the transcendent
by visual means; they may evoke it in their abstract
compositions by showing a certain void and by
underlying the limits of pictorial representation.
Maybe today we have to connect the
judgment of the sublime with the processes of
globalization; maybe this judgment could help to
describe what is going beyond our sensory and
representational capacities. Seen from this point
of view, globalization has something in common
with the experience of colonized peoples being
overwhelmed by the colonizing powers. The
difference today is that we cannot simply attribute
the responsibility for the ongoing processes to a
foreign power, to others; the powers which put
us under stress are not easy to determine. Its our
imagination as well as objective forces. This helps
to increase the stress.
Recent researches in trauma therapy are
orientated towards collective traumatization due
to violations by imposing political powers. Trauma
therapy has been carried out for example with
Bosnian women being raped by Serbian occupants.
It turned out in these therapies that the traditional
Freudian talking cure provoked worse psychic
effects. Repetition revitalized the experience and
deepened the suffering. Certain Germans who
underwent psychological treatments after a heavy
train accident suffered of more psychic problems
than the ones who were not psychologically
treated. Therefore the therapists today speak
of the necessity to interrupt the corporeal and

mental repetitions and to prevent the affects from

developing their automatism. They began to use
hypnosis in order to transfer the patient into a state
of psychic interruption and relaxation.
If we want to apply the insight of trauma
therapy on our personal situation of being
attracted and affected by the global processes,
we have to conclude that we have to interrupt this
process of affection. We would have to deal with
our imagination and our idea of what globalization
is and wants from us. Since the harder we try to
correspond to this abstract and totalizing image
the more it exceeds our capacities of representation
and symbolization and the worse our affective
problems become. It creates states of fear and
panic, leads to rampages among the youngest and
weakest members of our society and creates all
sorts of discomfort in the population which might
explode in violent forms one day.
As an example of an affective integration of a
traumatizing experience I would like to mention
once again a film I have already shown at a
conference of the Society for Phenomenology and
Media in Krakow: The film of the French filmmaker
and ethnologist Jean Rouch, Les maitres fous. He
shows us in an empathetic way how workers in
Accra, the capital of Ghana, leave the city in order
to move to the jungle and to undergo a ritual of
possession. Thanks to music, dances, practices of
trance and ritualized sacrifices of animals they
enter a different imaginary field and become
affected and possessed by so called gods of the
civilizations, the Houkas. They incorporate these
gods in the way that their physical attitude and
their state of mind change: they are no longer
recognizable as the persons they have been
before. But becoming Houka means more: they
also incorporate a foreign political power. They
become the protagonists of the former colonizing
power. They incorporate British generals and
other military persons, they incorporate the wives
of these persons and even the locomotive; they act
as if they were these persons and machines - and
they produce funny effects and provide hilarious
images by that. And they prove that they gain
supernatural forces; fire no longer burns their body
and so on. They not only prove that they become
the others, but more than the others, stronger than
the others. After having celebrated the ritual they
return to the city of Accra and, as Jean Rouch
explains, seem to be relaxed, satisfied, happy. He
shows them smiling towards the camera and doing
their work with pleasure and joy.

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What can we learn from this example of a ritual

therapy? First of all that we have to recognize
that there is an overwhelming process going on
which asks for psychological and maybe physical
treatment. There is a need of gods, so to speak.
There is a need to cope with the existential
unsettling provoked by our ambiguity towards
the process of globalization. On the one hand we
have to be aware of our affection and maybe even
to reinforce it; on the other hand we have to deal
with the imaginary frame and have to regulate our
imaginations. And again: We are the actors and
the victims of this process at the same time. We
have to incorporate ourselves as being the others
who are traumatizing us. We have to counteraffect ourselves.
Contemporary neurobiologists such as
Tomkins or Kernberg are much concerned with
what they call affects also in the English
language. They want to raise the scientific status
of the affect since they are convinced that affects
are decisive for our feeling and thinking and
our general approach towards the world (Stein,
19910. They no longer believe with Darwin that
affects are only inborn natural drives to regulate
the processes of adaptation, but that they are
complex emotional systems with conscious and
unconscious dimensions. Some psychologists
such as Sullivan (1953) and Fairbairn (1954) plead
in favour of replacing the concept of drive by the
concept of affect. The most interesting aspect in
their theories is their insistence on the collective
and cultural side of affects. According to these
theories they are formed and modified by social
influence and education; they transport individual
and collective memory, they are the basis of the
so called mentality of people. The Germans are
the most pessimistic people on earth, maybe my
talk is a good example for that: The question
would be if their pessimistic attitude is only
determined by the traumatizing past, the lack of
self-reliance due to historical experience or also
by natural conditions, inborn information and so
on. The Italian psychologist Luc Ciompi (49) who
is particularly interested in the collective aspect of
affects wants to develop a so called fractal logic
of affect. He conceives of affects as micrological
elements within a social field where they build
up individual and macrosocial expressions
of emotions (166). Together with the French
neuroscientist LeDoux (Stephan/Walter, 2003) he
criticizes Sigmund Freud for his concentration on
the psychic development of single persons instead
of observing affects as socially communicated

entities which continue to change according to

social dynamics and interactions.
But all of these scientists seem to forget an
aspect evident to old philosophers such as Plato,
Aristotle and Spinoza: that affects are connected
with the imaginary horizon and with inner images
and that, in order to moderate affects, we have to
regulate our inner images and our imaginary drives.
Spinoza can be considered the last representative
of the Western philosophical tradition connecting
affective qualities with a meaningful horizon,
with a totalizing image. These totalizing images
had different names: eternal ideas, reason, god,
nature. Affects under the sign of such totalizing
images tend to be devalued. We all know the Stoic
statement that the wise man must not be disturbed
by emotions of any kind, but has to develop an
inner apathy and not to mourn even when his child
dies. Since nature has given everything, it can take
away everything. Nature is identified with logos
and this logos justifies all natural events. Human
affects demonstrate nothing but insufficient
understanding.
But the majority of voices recognize affects
as vital drives necessary for the psychic and
epistemological development. Nevertheless these
voices consider affective states to be dangerous
if not moderated or orientated towards rational
images. The first protagonist of such an ambivalent
attitude is Plato. On the one hand he praises
desire and possession, epithymia and mania, as
precondition for the access to eternal truth and
definitive happiness. Happiness, eudaimonia,
means being with a good demon, being affected
by a good demon. On the other hand, under the
impression of Euripides tragedies and their
performances of the harmful effects of divine
possession and as a political thinker, he identifies
desire with the quality of the lowest social class
which must not become the quality of a statesman
and philosopher who should be distinguished
by reason. Art has to be excluded from the ideal
political state since it provokes bad emotions.
His pupil, Aristotle, is less ambivalent than
Plato, he recognizes eleven affects, pathe, which
are translated into Latin by Cicero as passions
or affects. He discusses them in his writings on
natural science and ethics, and declares them to
be natural and positive drives. But they have to be
moderated by reason. He speaks of pleasure as the
most important affect since it stimulates physical
and epistemological striving . . . and finally leads
to happiness, eudaimonia, as a non-affective state.
The good demon now is reason.

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Michaela Ott

The Christian philosophers who do not speak of

possession nevertheless maintain the same model.
They feel inhabited by the Christian god, praise
love of God as pre-condition for epistemological
and ethical progress. The divine creator is now
considered the good demon; love of God, caritas,
replaces eudaimonia.
When in modern times under the influence
of scientific discoveries the Christian idea of a
personal god who orientates our emotions gets
lost, the philosophies of Descartes, Spinoza
and Leibniz deal with affects in different ways.
Spinoza develops a theory of affect within a
conception of God, who is no longer a personal
God, but in the stoic sense identical with nature.
With this conception of God, Spinoza escapes
Descartes conception of a deceiving God. He
is an all encompassing substance, a principle of
immanence which contains all possible ideas and
all affects. This substance outside which nothing
exists, has infinite modes, called affections of
substance (Def. 5). The human beings are such
affections of the substance; their affects are
considered natural phenomena. Since affects have
the same necessity as natural things, they should
be treated according to the geometric method
as if the subjects were lines, surfaces or solids
(Pref., III). The English translation of Spinozas
term affectus is emotion in the subtitle On
the origins and Nature of the emotions (III),
whereas in the text affectus is translated as
well by emotions as by passions. These two
different translations of one Latin term brings
about confusion and hinders the understanding of
affectus as a term designated to express a natural,
not only human process and the link between body
and mind. And again affectio/ affection does not
mean love, but being physically influenced and
modified by another body.
With the term affect Spinoza designates a
double process: a physical process of affection
of one body by another body and its mental
presentation. I understand by affects/emotions
those affections of the body by which its power
of acting is increased or diminished, is assisted or
restrained, and also the ideas of those affections
(III, Def. 3). This so called psychophysical
parallelism, directed against Descartes concept
of two separate substances, body and mind,
means that body and soul are no controversial
forces, but identical since the corporeal affection
is automatically presented to the mind. Body and
mind are considered one and the same thing,
conceived now under the attribute of thought, now

under the attribute of extension (III, 2, Schol/

Anm.). The parallel action of body and mind
wants to eliminate the idea of a causal relation and
the possibility of deception. The mind is nothing
else but the physical idea: The object of the idea
which constitutes the human mind is the body, or
a certain mode of extension actually existing, and
nothing else (II, 13). The more affections we live
the more ideas we have and the better it is for our
mental capacities.
For Deleuze, the creative idea in Spinozas
philosophy is this conception of a body-mind
system open to infinite connections and new
affections since the human body, as Spinoza says,
is affected by an indefinite number of affections
and is composed of many individuals (II, 15).
This multitude of affections is useful to man; and
it is the more useful the more capable it renders
the body of being affected in many ways and of
so affecting other bodies (IV, 38). Spinoza is the
first philosopher to attribute positive qualities to
physical affections and to understand their creative
potential even for the mental power of man.
Thanks to his appreciation of physical affection,
he does not have to reflect in terms of deception.
If we replace Spinozas God by the social field, we
can discover some similarities between Spinozas
affective network and Ciompis idea of a fractal
affect logic based on a multitude of micrological
elements affecting each other mutually.
But there is also a sceptical moment in
Spinozas concept since he states that affects
provide confused ideas. The mental image of a
physical affection is confused. In order to create
adequate ideas of physical affections we have to
create general concepts. Concepts of the common
aspects of man would be adequate, since they
would be the same as the divine point of view.
Spinoza attributes an important role to this power
of imagination which can select, manipulate and
regulate the images: It is supposed to decide
whether a physical image should be maintained or
not. In general, imagination has to strive, as far
as it can, to imagine those things which increase
or subserve the power of action of the body
(III, 12). It has to organize the mental images
in a way to increase the power of action. This
mental action is finally identified with reason;
reasonable affects do not present corporeal
images, but the common characteristics of things
and men. As general concepts they are adequate
to God, since he himself has these ideas. Spinoza
assumes isomorphic concepts in the human
mind and in God. If we consider our affections

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under a divine perspective we finally succeed to

moderate the affects (V, 14), so that they loose
their impact on us.
The neurobiologist Antonio Damasio (2003)
considers Spinozas conception of an integrated
organism of body and mind as a confirmation of
what the actual neurobiology conceives of mental
activity. He translates Spinozas parallelism
into the concept of feeling brain, which again
means the presentation and presence of physical
images in the mind. The nervous system must be
able to map body structures and body states and
transform the neural patterns in those maps into
mental patterns or images . . . Our hypothesis is
that whatever we feel must be based on the activity
pattern of the body-sensing brain regions. If those
body-sensing regions were not available to us we
would not feel anything (110f.). He calls affects:
mental-level expressions of emotions. They
are motivators and forces of integration: Only
at that level is it possible for emotions to create,
via feelings, the concern for the individual self
(178). The brain is supposed to stimulate certain
emotional states internally and to transform them,
as happens in the process of turning the emotion
sympathy into a feeling of empathy (115). Thanks
to this transformation the brain produces a set of
body maps that does not correspond exactly to the
current reality of the body . . . What we feel then
is based on that false construction, not on the real
body state (116). This false construction seems
to provide a creative organisation of the physical
images for an orientation in the world.
Now the question would be if the Spinozian
model can be helpful for our problem with
globalization. On the one hand we can understand
Spinozas conception of an immanent God, its
attributes and modes, as a description of the
global situation where all sorts of information
can be distributed all over the world and can
provoke all sorts of new effects. The difference
is that Spinozas plan of immanence is God, a
reasonable, benevolent natural organism which
wants the human being as affected as possible
by its substance. It is not comparable to the
heterogeneous processes of globalization which
also produce quantities of affection in single and
collective subjects, but can not become a horizon of
orientation. While being both totalizing image and
visual dispositive, Spinozas God is a reasonable
eye; the human gaze can become identical with the
divine one if it looks at the common characteristics
of things. Globalization is no organism, has no eye
and no reason, there is no visual dispositive in it.

We imagine globalization, we produce a totalized

phantasm of it within ourselves and in the mass
media under the perspective of surveillance and
control. We interiorize globalization as a bad
inner eye. All images of globalization are violent
since they try to synthesize the whole globe and
the multiplicity of actions under a paranoid vision
of terrorism and global danger. They provide the
perspective of police and secret services, they
are electronic surveillance and help to reinforce
the emotions of fear and panic. The first films to
produce such global images were Independence
Day of the German filmmaker Roland Emmerich in
1998 and Armageddon of Michael Bay of the same
year. Even the critical film of Gonzalez-Inarritu,
Babel, while showing wonderful heterogeneous
processes in different parts of the world, connects
them thanks to an underlying paranoid vision.
So what do we have to do in order to stop our
traumatization?
First we have to recognize affects as collective
qualities which nevertheless show different
characteristics according to the socio-political
context and individual experience. These affects
should be appreciated since they connect us with
the world and force us to react, to participate and
to contribute to the constitution of a common
world.
Since these affects can only be orientated and
regulated by imagination, we have to produce
and offer other images. We have to replace the
totalitarian image of globalization by multiple
immanent images referring to processes of
globalization from particular perspectives. We
should be satisfied with confused ideas, so to
speak, since they are less dangerous and violent
than the totalized synthesis of a world under
control. We have to invent singular and specific
perspectives of globalization like in the film
Bamako of Abderrahmane Sissako of Mali where a
local tribunal discusses the economic exploitation
of the country.
We have to figure ourselves living inside the
globe and not outside of it. In this sense French
theorists such as Jean-Luc Nancy differentiate
between globalization and mondialization:
mondialization puts the accent on such immanent
processes promoted by small groups building up
networks and so forth.
In a general sense we should provide
undetermined images for a becoming different
from the world in the process of globalization.
Hopefully these images also provide projections

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Michaela Ott

of the future and create emotions which are

orientated towards the survival of the universe.
Our judgement of the sublime will then mean that
we stay modest in the way that we are ready to
be affected by all sorts of new events, but that we
dont refer them to a unifying image.
Works Cited
Ruth Stein. Psychoanalytic Theories of Affect.
New York: Praeger Publishers (1991).
Ciompi, S. 49 [reference as cited by author].
Achim, Stephan/Henrik, Walter (Hg.). Natur
und Theorie der Emotion. Paderborn: Mentis
Verlag. (2003).
Antonio Damasio. Looking for Spinoza. Joy,
Sorrow and the Feeling Brain, Orlando/Austin:
Harvest Inc. (2003).

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