An Alternative Media Materialism

an alternative media materialism

by Jussi Parikka

To label yourself a materialist does not necessarily by itself mean much. The term is something that demands explication, instead of explaining by its own powers. The long histories of materialism and idealism in philosophy are one reference point, but so are the everyday uses of the term: do we refer to it as the opposite of spiritual or ethical (as in expressions of disgust toward the materialist aspects of consumer society) or refer to the reality of machines and technology that structure our life. The Marxist legacy in political thought and theory has given us indication what historical materialism is, but so have scholars in media theory: media materialism refers to the necessity to analyze media technologies as something that are irreducible to what we think of them or even how we use them. It has come to refer to technology as an active agent in the ontological and epistemological sense. In other words, media structure how things are in the world and how things are known in the world. In fact, media analysis is an excellent way of “giving material specificity to our descriptions of . . . abstract concepts” (1) of which materiality is oddly enough too easily one.

Cultural and media theory have benefited in the past years from an emergence of several accounts of materiality. In media theory, materialism has often been attached to the term German media theory — a term that has brought unity to a wider field of scholars engaging with material accounts of media culture in rather different ways. (2) Friedrich Kittler is the most famous reference in this context. Kittler inaugurated various provocations regarding computer culture, hardware, and the technological framing of our contemporary life, which implied a certain nonhuman perspective: the human being is primarily a “so-called Man” formed as an aftereffect of media technologies. At times, Kittler was even branded a media archaeologist because he picked up on Michel Foucault’s archaeological and archival cultural history in a new way in his early work. (3) There’s a truth to that label: Kittler was adamant that we need to make sure that Foucault’s understanding of what governs our contemporary life— its archive— is not only about the statements and rules found in books and libraries. Instead, it is to be found in technological networks of machines and institutions, patterns of education and drilling: in the scientific- engineering complex that practices such forms of power that the traditional humanities theory is incapable of understanding or grasping if it continues to talk about hermeneutic meanings or persists to operate with traditional sociological concepts. Kittler was a provocateur in a theoretical psy-ops operation who believed that humanities scholars should work with technology. He himself did. Kittler left behind unpublished writings but also software manuals and hardware, to be part of his Nachlass. His early synthesizer from the 1970 s was resurrected and included in an art performance by Jan-Peter Sonntag to demonstrate this metamorphosis of Kittler: the Goethe scholar turned synth-geek and tinkerer.

At times in accusing, pejorative ways, and at times in more celebratory tones, the likes of Kittler became an emblem of media materialism: to study media, you need to have a proper understanding of the science and engineering realities that govern the highly fine-structured computer worlds in which we live— without ignoring the fact that technical media did not start with the digital. Older technical media play an important part in the histories and genealogies, the archaeological layers conditioning our present. Media archaeology has been one field to constantly emphasize this point.

For Kittler, media studies was never to be reduced to the play of interpretations, semiotic connotations, or modes of representation, which were only secondary effects, second-order phenomena. Media work on the level of circuits, hardware, and voltage differences, which the engineers as much as the military intelligence and secret agencies gradually recognized before humanities did. This mode of argumentation ignored, however, a wide range of politically engaged work that tried to make sense of why media govern us humans on a semiotic level too. Such creeping suspicions that any inclusive account of materiality definitely filtered out many competing ones triggers the question, what is being left out? What other modes of materiality deserve our attention? Issues of gender, sex, embodiment, and affect? Of labor, global logistics, modes of production? In other words, from where do our notions of materiality stem, and what is their ground?

What if there is another level of media materialism that is not so easily dismissed as we would think? What if media materialism is not something that hones in on the machines only? Where do machines come from, what composes technology in its materiality and media after it becomes disused, dysfunctional dead media that refuse to die? I argue that there is such a thing as geology of media: a different sort of temporal and spatial materialism of media culture than the one that focuses solely on machines or even networks of technologies as nonhuman agencies. It echoes John Durham Peters’s point that the axis of time and space— familiar also from the Canadian media theory tradition of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan— is not restricted to traditional ideas about media as devices but can refer back to cosmology and geology: that the geological sciences and astronomy have already opened up the idea of the earth, light, air, and time as media. (4)

This is a green text — in the sense of referring to the ecological contexts in which we should make arguments about media technological culture— as well as a text covered in dirt and soil. Instead of leafy metaphors of animals, technology, and ecosystems, it insists on a particular aspect of this relation between media and the geophysical environment. Scholars such as Douglas Kahn have recently made the same point that Kittler’s agenda could have been more radical and continued from the circuits to what enables hardware: the environmental contexts, questions of energy consumption, and, one could add, the electronic waste that surround our contemporary worries of what transmission, calculation, and storage mean in a material context. (5)

The guiding conceptual ground of this argument refers to geology: the science about the ground beneath our feet, its history and constitution, the systematic study of the various levers, layers, strata, and interconnections that define the earth. It implies the work of geoengineering and geotechnics as specific ways of interacting with the solidity of the earth but also the fine measurements that relate to a wider awareness of the environmental constitution of our lives. Hence geology is not only about the soil, the crust, the layers that give our feet a ground on which to stumble: geology is also a theme connected to the climate change as well as the political economy of industrial and postindustrial production. It connects to the wider geophysical life worlds that support the organic life as much as the technological worlds of transmission, calculation, and storage. Geology becomes a way to investigate materiality of the technological media world. It becomes a conceptual trajectory, a creative intervention to the cultural history of the contemporary.

Geology and various related disciplines and fields of knowledge, such as chemistry and, indeed, ecology, frame the modern world and give it one possible scientific structure. Such disciplines are strongly implied in the emergence of the technological and scientific culture, which feeds to our media cultural practices. It is in this sense that I am interested in finding strains of media materialism outside the usual definition of media: instead of radio, I prefer to think what components and materials enable such technologies; instead of networking, we need to remember the importance of copper or optical fiber for such forms of communication; instead of a blunt discussion of “the digital,” we need to pick it apart and remember that also mineral durations are essential to it being such a crucial feature that penetrates our academic, social, and economic interests. Consider, then, lithium as such a premediatic media material that is essential to the existence of technological culture but also as an element that traverses technologies. This chemical element (Li) and metal is essential for laptop batteries as well as future green technologies (again, battery technology, but for hybrid cars). Platinum-grouped metals might be familiar from jewelry but are as important for “computer hard drives, liquid crystal displays, and miniaturized electronic circuits” (6) as for hydrogen fuel cells. Lots of critical materials are in a crucial position in relation to a variety of civilian and military technologies, including what we tend to call just bluntly “media”: screens, networks, computers, and more. Tracking chemicals, metals, and minerals is one aspect of what I do, extending traditional notions of media materialism into a more environmental and ecological agenda.

Artist Robert Smithson spoke about “abstract geology,” referring to how tectonics and geophysics pertain not only to the earth but also to the mind; abstract geology is a field where a geological interest is distributed across the organic and nonorganic division. Its reference to the “abstract” might attract those with a Deleuzian bent and resonate with the concept of “abstract machines.” But before the philosophical discourse, Smithson’s interest was in the materiality of the art practice, reintroducing metals (and hence geology) to the studio. What’s more, Smithson was ready to mobilize his notion emerging in the artistic discourse of land art in the 1960’s to a conceptualization of technology that we can say was nothing less than anti-McLuhanian: instead of seeing technology as extensions of Man, technology is aggregated and “made of the raw materials of the earth.” (7) From our current twenty-first-century perspective approximately fifty years later, it starts an imaginary alternative media theoretical lineage that does not include necessarily McLuhan, Kittler, and the likes in its story but materials, metals, waste, and chemistry. These materials articulate the high-technical and low-paid culture of digitality. They also provide an alternative materialism for the geophysical media age.

So how does a media theorist turned pseudo-geologist operate? To where does such a hybrid and hyphenated scholar turn? At least in this case, this leads us to track the importance of the nonorganic in constructing media before they become media: the literal deep times and deep places of media in mines and rare earth minerals. It looks at aesthetic discourses and practices, such as psychogeophysics— a sort of speculative aesthetics for the connection of technology and society with a special view to the geophysical— that offer insights to earth media arts. (8) The amount of material would be endless if one were to start looking meticulously at the work of national institutions and geological methods. Geological surveys have moved on from the early work contributing to agriculture and mining to being an essential part of global geopolitics. One can track specific genealogies of geology, politics, and technology even through single institutions, such as the influential scientific agency the U.S. Geological Survey.( 9) Since its founding in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it has served an essential role in mapping the necessary natural resources part of nation building into a technologically advanced country— and now, one can see how the role has widened to a global scale; for instance, in Afghanistan, in parallel to the military operations of the war against terrorism, geologists are mapping the resource basis of the country. It promises, besides copper, iron, and gold, also lithium— even enough for Afghanistan to be branded the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” Old geological surveys and methods are being complemented with aerial surveys by geologists collaborating with the Pentagon by using new gravity and magnetic measuring techniques. (10)

To summarize the preceding preamble, this is a book about technical media culture— digital and analog— that starts from the geophysical. It investigates, employs, and mobilizes terms that refer to the geophysical— that is, not just geopolitical— spheres of media culture in a manner that is a combination of conceptually speculative but thematically and media historically grounded. In other words, a part of the book works through historical sources and examples, but with an emphasis on media arts. Indeed, it is the lens of media art practices and theoretical discourse that offers us a specific way to look at the recent years of climate change, the Anthropocene, and geophysics-embedded work: the ideas about deep time of the media, (11) psychogeophysics, e-waste, the Anthropocene, chemistry, and the earthly as a media history that works in nonlinear ways. This idea of media (art) histories as one of nonlinear strata pushes even the media archaeological agenda of media history to its extreme. Human history is infused in geological time. (12)

Notes

1. Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014), 2. To quote Cubitt in full: “Mediation is the ground of relationship, the relationship that precedes and constructs subjects and objects. Media matter, both in the sense of giving material specificity to our descriptions of such abstract concepts as society and environment, and in the sense of the active verb: mediation comes into being as matter, its mattering constitutes the knowable, experienceable world, making possible all sensing and being sensed, knowing and being known.”

2. As Geoffrey Winthrop- Young aptly notes, the term German media theory is an outsider construct. See Winthrop- Young, “Krautrock, Heidegger, Bogeyman: Kittler in the Anglosphere,” Thesis Eleven 107, no. 1 (2011): 6– 20.

3. Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990).

4. John Durham Peters, “Space, Time and Communication Theory,” Canadian Journal of Communication 28, no. 4 (2003), http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/1389/1467. See also Sean Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics (London: Sage, 1998). Cubitt’s recent book, an utterly important one, The Practice of Light, focuses especially on the modulations of light becoming media.

5. Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 23. See also Sean Cubitt, “Current Screens,” in Imagery in the 21st Century, ed. Oliver Grau with Thomas Veigl, 21– 35 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011).

6. Michael T Klare, The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012)

7. Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (1968), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 101.

8. See also Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal.

9. The current mission of the agency is described as follows: “The [U.S. Geological Survey] serves the Nation by providing reliable scientific information to describe and understand the Earth; minimize loss of life and property from natural disasters; manage water, biological, energy, and mineral resources; and enhance and protect our quality of life.” http://www.usgs.gov/.

10. James Risen, “U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan,” New York Times, June 13, 2010. For a short history of the U.S. Geological Survey, see Geological Survey Circular 1050, http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1050/index.htm.

11. Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).

12. See also Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

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