the critical mass of mediation
The Critical Mass of Mediation
by Søren Andreasen and Lars Bang Larsen
Excerpt from The Critical Mass of Mediation by Søren Andreasen and Lars Bang Larsen. Published by Internationalistisk Ideale in Copenhagen, Denmark, 2012. Used by permission.
for #IV. the medium is the message?
Differens Magazine, winter 23/24
Hegel argued that nothing is just immediately present. Everything becomes what it is through mediations, conceived as connections within the processes that establish things. In the Hegelian sense, mediation describes the tension of the process of a becoming.
This is unlike a relation that is static and fixed. A relation is ready, whereas mediation is something that is in the making, is being produced, that has not yet found stability.
To Adorno, mediation is a transformation in which the elements of the art work become other than what they were initially: a transformation or abstraction of our emotional response to the art work. “Artistic truth,” Adorno writes, “signals the breakthrough of objectivity into subjective consciousness. Objectivity mediates aesthetic experience even when subjective response is at its most intense.”
This process of objective proportioning is the precondition for an “intense, comprehensive” aesthetic experience. The aim of thinking through such a process of mediation is not to arrive at a harmonious experience of art—far from it. Instead mediation guarantees the self-critical spirit of the artwork because mediation enables us to see ourselves from the outside, and to perceive the inadequacy of the representations with which we approach the artwork and the emotional response it elicits from us as historical beings.
To put it simply, mediation is a conduit for difference. It is related to non-identity, to use the name Adorno gave to that which is heterogeneous to all concepts, and hence escapes transparency. Non-identity is the inadequacy of our representations, an inadequacy that continues to nag us because meaning trickles out from our concepts or is left uncovered by them. Non-identity is a word for the fact that objects don’t come out right in their concepts.
One would have to say: it haunts, it ghosts, it specters, there is some phantom there, it has the feel of the living-dead— manor house, spiritualism, occult science, gothic novel, obscurantism, atmosphere of anonymous threat or imminence. The subject that haunts is not identifiable, one cannot see, localize, fix any form, one cannot decide between hallucination and perception, there are only displacements; one feels oneself looked at by what one cannot see…
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, 1993
The only thing he doesn’t keep control of is the actual manufacture, the pressing, of the records and the distribution. The only people around to give him any trouble all this time are the distributors—cigar-chewing fatties… and—well, to be honest, there is a lot that gives Phil Spector trouble, and not so much any kind of or any group of people as much as his… status. A Teenage Tycoon! It is too wacked out. He is betwixt and between. He identifies with the teenage nether world, he defends it, but he is already too mature for it.
Tom Wolfe, The First Tycoon of Teen, 1964
I need my mediators to express myself and they’d never express themselves without me: you’re always working in a group, even when you seem to be on your own.
Gilles Deleuze, Mediators, 1985
Imagine that you are surrounded by nothing but echoing. Besides how you might feel—pleased, indifferent, disorientated—you are left in a reality of reverberations.
When there is echoing, there is time and space. It is an effect of a delay in time and space, a signal that drifts while it repeats and mutates.
What kind of sign, then, is echoing—if it indeed is one? By definition a sign is something that is repeatable: A sign which does not repeat itself, which is not already divided by repetition, is not a sign.
In order to refer to the same thing each time, the signifying referral therefore must be ideal—as ideality is the assured power of repetition. But by being an impure repetition, echoing is a mockery of the sign’s ideality. It repeats a source by turning it into something else. At the same time, echoing is not non-repetition because it sticks to its source. The echo is new and not new; it is life and non-life. As it mutates, it clings and reveals your position in time and space by answering back with a voice that it borrowed from you. The echo is sign and material: a sign because it is communicated, a material because it is perceptible.
But even understood as sign-material, the echo is tricky. What happens when somebody produces echoing? And why would anyone want to pursue such an objective in the first place?
In the twentieth century it was held that art could become the heart of humanity by negating spectacle and empty appearance, and by healing fragmentation and fissure. In that perspective, echoing is the worst thing that could happen. It unsettles the body and humbles free will. It is a movement without essence that defies control—a mess, the cancellation of any Utopia. The American art historian Clement Greenberg, italicising his disgust, described how in the abstract painter Barnett Newman’s paintings “… the picture edge is repeated inside and makes the picture, instead of merely being echoed.”
Ultimately, the way to master difference and artistic quality was to become God. In 1922, Kasimir Malevich defined the stakes:
In all his creations man hopes to reach God or completion, collects himself to reach the throne of thought, the absolute conclusion, after which he will act, not as man, but as God, he will rise into Him, become perfection. But what must he do to achieve this—only little, control the stars and the suns of space, the universal systems. Until then our Earth will carry mankind in its frantic fall into endless nothingness, ringing the object-less movement’s rhythmic vortex out into the universe.
But what if cosmic supremacy couldn’t be achieved in time and space due to the echo’s treason? Then there was another argument that would save you from being sent howling out into the void.
It went: never mind, let us simply abjure the world instead. Let the world ring out into the nothingness it came from. Utopianism and nihilism—two sides of the same coin—are symptoms of the inability to make peace with a space-time that can’t, in one way or another, be transcended. Malevich was at the same time the biggest utopianist and the biggest nihilist—the sweet nothings of his Suprematist painting could hold both positions.
The echo disturbs claims to transparency. As Henri Lefebvre said of the Situationist movement’s practice of frequent expulsions amongst its members, “It was really about keeping oneself in a pure state, like a crystal.” To keep oneself in an echo-free state necessitates the suppression of the reverberations that one’s engagement has in everything that isn’t governed by law. Consequently, to embrace echoing is to increase the probability of your corruption in the space of the present.
One of the twentieth century art forms that let the echo in was Op Art. Here the painted patterns of swelling or warping produce impressions of movement, hidden images, flashing and vibration, generating a suggestive experience of space which is based on a mix of geometry, perception psychology and constructivist design. In an Op Art piece, geometry constitutes an imagery of optical tricks and stylish surfaces that neglect the symbolic status of geometry as a Primary Structure, warping this transcendent idealism into an affective spatiality which is close to hallucination.
Serial Form is another artistic attitude that injected echoing into the volume of space. These modular-based sculptures are defined by a succession of moves, all of equal value and controlled by the anticipation of future movements of the parts. It is a serial principle of ‘internal repetition’—a successive delay between sequence and progression—that almost literally short circuits the unity and coherence of space, producing an impression of an ever growing synthesis of volume, that is explicitly opposed to ‘Platonic virtues’ and ‘Minimalism’s purist-type homage to industrial production’.
Also the psychedelic imagery and agency of the 1960s belong to this line of art, not only because it employed similar compositional and stylistic features but also through a radical emphasis on the materiality of experience. Here, the art piece’s suggestive space stimulated impressions of an expanded space which was translated into media freak outs, demonstrations and acid tests. You could even call this decade’s drug fascination a kind of reverberation in the Primary Structures of cultural and social space: a lot of minds and bodies were chemically swelling and warping in protest.
What these practices have in common is their desire to open up to suggestive spatialities which are situated simultaneously in reality’s physical properties and in the ideality of conceptual powers. They constitute spaces that can only be measured by the time scale of experience as they are neither directly present to the senses nor fully accessible to conceptual powers. The impure nature of the echo might thus be thought of in terms of ambivalence, indirection and synthesis; the echo is an indication of a space which you can only get access to through the delayed experience of echoing.
In the world of sound production the artificial echo has a primal scene in the work of the American producer Phil Spector. In the early 1960s, he created a simple ‘machine’ to add echoing effects to his recordings; to re-record already recorded sounds a microphone and a loudspeaker were placed at each end of a narrow corridor formed by two metal plates.
An infinite variety of reverberation effects could be generated by adjusting this arrangement and by endless re-recording.
Echo ambience was a popular feature of pop music long before Spector, but was until then produced by using the acoustics of accessible spaces for live sessions, such as empty cinemas, theatres or churches. Since Spector, the producer has controlled the definition of specific sound qualities in the studio.
The question is what happens to the echo when it is deliberately produced. Keeping in mind the recording techniques of Phil Spector, is it still true that, as we write in the above, ‘When there is an echo there is time and space’? What kind of time and space does the echo of two metal plates in a studio indicate—that of the echo machine? In a way, yes, since the method of production is a reference in itself, in Spector’s case The Wall of Sound, his trademark style. But this technique also functions as a way to work independently of accessible space and to echo any imaginable structure. You could call this hypothetical time and space, brought about by the realities of the echo machine(s) and the psychological and social being of the producer(s). But the hypothetical time and space are still separate from the latter by not being determined by psychology or social space.
Of course, Spector didn’t make his echo machine hypothetically. It was cutting edge sound equipment in the service of the pop industry. But it remains that ‘echo production’ involves the producer in a very direct way: echoing simply would not exist unless someone had decided to produce it. In some cases, the decision to make an echo is a way to recognise oneself: a way to think and act when one cannot or will not recognise oneself in relation to accessible time and space, or when one can only recognise oneself in relation to hypothetical time and space.
In this way, the production and consumption of echoing are at the same time a negation and an anticipation of accessible time and space. We can define hypothetical time and space as a dimension inside accessible time and space where structures of distortion, speculation and pleasure are brought about by somebody’s discomfort, ability or playfulness. This type of agency is never neutral, because its ideas and actions aim at establishing themselves in tomorrow’s world through their resonance in people and symbolic exchange, and in markets and institutions.
Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube. The Ideology of the Gallery Space, 1976
The subject of the production of the artwork— of its value but also of its meaning—is not the producer who actually creates the object in its materiality but rather the entire set of agents engaged in the field.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 1993
Mediation creates facts that reality imitates. The mediating function is evasive, it disarticulates itself because it is a function that does not reflect or problematise itself. When democratic and cultural institutions are under pressure, criteria for evaluating mediation are stressed too. The risk is that these criteria—the concepts we have for freedom, creativity and democratic reason—will withdraw to the non-places of power.
The neoliberal policymaker deals in modalities. Michel Foucault: “the problem is not whether there are things that you cannot touch and others that you are entitled to touch. The problem is how you touch them. The problem is the way of doing things, the problem, if you like, of governmental style.” In other words, after the Third Way paradigm cancelled ideological conflict in the 1990s, politics became defined by styles and inflections. It became adjectival and gestural, a representation of strategy, or a question of strategic representation. In a word: spin.
The post-industrial, global, seemingly total state of mediation is present in our very nervous systems.
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi sums it up by saying that we now live in a milieu where “mediatization prevails over any other form of relation with the human body.” One might add that it prevails over any other form of relation with the intellect and with social life too. Life has become so mediated that Paul Rabe now’s concept of re-mediation, describing the shifting of an object into another medium, has become a chronic (Bifo would say pathological) condition: when everything—subjectivity, work, art—is incessantly shuffled around in media and apparatuses, re-mediation no longer marks a rupture or a conditional shift, but has become a function or an imperative. The tendency is that nothing exists as an end for its own sake, but as a means and an instrument, in metonymical chains of valorisation.
Mediation can be conceived as an expedient structure. That is, a distributive relation that becomes significant in itself. When passed through such an expedient structure, an object emits signification in ways that are typically disconnected from considerations of how the object’s being circulated affects its enunciation. The most banal example of this is from the mass media where fame becomes its own purpose: when fame breeds fame, famous people are famous for being just that. In other words, the materiality of mediation replaces the materiality of the object which is mediated. The catalyst in a chemical process is always disjunct from the final product. This is not the case with mediation.
Since the present society to a large extent works through competitive relations, mediation comes to signifiy the upholding of profitable tensions. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello define mediation as connectivity, “the art of making and using the most diverse and remote kinds of connection.” This definition resonates in a logistical world that encourages processes of continuous allocation, re-combination, expansion etc. In these processes of reconfiguration there is usually always money in between, and social and conceptual relations that were previously categorically separated from production are now commercialised. Boltanski and Chiapello: “The importance accorded to the role of mediators, personal relations, friendship or trust in profit creation in a connectionist world—and correlatively, the fading of the distinction between private life and business life—thus tend to bring relations that were once defined precisely as ‘disinterested’ into the commodity sphere.” Conceptualised in this way, a mediating process is first and foremost relativising, and therefore by definition annuls the possibility of disinterest and autonomy. Hence mediation produces secondary communities, to use Adorno’s term, defined as sites where people are related to one another through “intermediary objectified social processes”—commodity exchange.
By extension such a diagnosis stands in contrast to the old Kantian definition of aesthetic experience as disinterested pleasure. In her essay “Artistes vs. Managers”(1998) Ève Chiapello argues that the traditionally difficult relations between art and management have improved since the 1980s. This is the case where innovation is being prioritised as a guiding concept for social reproduction, and contemporary art has been accepted on a broader social basis, immediately and without waiting for the “test of time”. Chiapello writes that,
“With new forms of artistic production… came the necessity of using and accepting management practices or dividing the labour. At the same time the authority of artists decreased, since the idealist and romantic view of the artist as a genius and an inspired creator was attacked by philosophy and sociology.”
In this respect there is not necessarily any opposition between the middle men and the artists. Artists, too, manage and mediate.
When the commodity sphere is opened up like this, it transforms the concept of mediation by depriving it of significations of actual tension (as in Hegel) and critical transformation (as in Adorno). The risk is that the concept of mediation is put to rest between processes of commodity exchange and notions of conflict resolution. In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), one finds an idealised picture of the conflict resolution subject, the intermediary or the middleman.
The last text frame of the silent film reads: “The heart must be the mediator between brain and hands!” This text accompanies a scene of the film in which the hero (the heart) manages to broker peace between the uprising workers (the hands) and the factory owner (the brain). Mittlung can be a positive process in a conflict, but it is inimical to the aesthetic challenge of the status quo. Who needs mediators—consensus guys—in the field of art?
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