Författare: differensmagazine

print media and class conflict

Print Media and Class Conflict

by Jonas Thoresson

for #IV. the medium is the message?

Differens Magazine, winter 23/24

What is the political use-value of media? The answer depends on how the follow-up question, ‘…and for whom?’ is answered. During the epoch of what historian Benedict Anderson calls ‘print capitalism’, from the early modern adoption of print for public use to the advent of radio and TV, such questions were often high on the agenda, whether explicitly or implicitly.[1] This was especially the case towards the end of the epoch of print dominance, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when ‘the social question’ – questions concerning the conflicts and grievances thrown up by the industrial revolution and often centred on class – was both hotly debated and fought out in revolutionary struggles. In the midst of this uproar of modernity, print media appeared in a dual guise, simultaneously promising enlightenment and threatening subjection. Focussing on the British context, these are the themes and questions I puzzle around in what follows.

Marshall McLuhan largely evades such questions in his influential media theories. In Understanding Media (1964) he is primarily interested in understanding how media affects our sense of time and space, and argues a radical technological determinism by suggesting that ‘the formative power in the media are the media themselves’ with little attention to their actual uses.^[2] To be sure, there are things to be gained from a focus on mediality, or the affordances of specific media, but the problem with McLuhan’s media theory is that he wants to radically detach mediality from both its socio-economic conditions of production and the cultural uses of media. A cogent example combining the focus on mediality with attentiveness to conditions of production and the cultural uses that audiences make of media can be found in Imagined Communities (1983), where Anderson draws on print media to explain the emergence of modern nationalism. He argues that modern newspaper readers, all reading their daily newspaper as a substitute for morning prayers, as Hegel famously put it, thereby constructed an imaginary solidarity among strangers. The simultaneity of reading habits facilitated by the daily appearing newspaper, in Anderson’s take, encouraged a shift in temporal conception from what Walter Benjamin called ‘Messianic time’, in which the present is imbued with both the past and the future, to ‘empty homogenous time’, or clock-time, a conception of time also necessary for labour to become a real abstraction.^[3] Anderson’s account carries an explanatory force which is often lost in McLuhan’s musings, however suggestive they may be.

Habermas offers a study similar to Anderson’s in its sensitivity to the interplay of mediality, production, and cultural practices in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), where he considers how the novel and the discursive essay journal as print genres each contributed to the formation of the private and public spheres, respectively. But where Anderson is interested in the emergence of nationalism, Habermas is concerned with elucidating the conditions for rational-critical debate capable of influencing society. He finds in the classical bourgeois public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) a cultural space, between the private sphere and the state, for critical-rational debate on matters of common concern and in principle open to all. While early romance novels helped constitute a private, intimate sphere, journals like the Tatler and Spectator played a key role in the formation of a specific type of polite sociality. The discursive style of these journals materialises the dialectical relationship between print media and the lifeworld of the coffeehouses and literary salons of Enlightenment Europe: articles were both written and read in these cultural settings, and the reader found in the discursive style of the journals a model for emulation in speech. Through such journals, a public opinion could take shape and influence the state. Habermas’s model has been subject to much valid critique, often targeting his overly idealised picture of the bourgeois public sphere. Some of these concerns can be offset by turning to alternative public sphere formations like the proletarian one, which was made up of far more humble and culturally diverse participants. But more importantly, the prospect of allowing communication rather than money or power to steer society in common is even more tantalising to those without political power or capital. Indeed, the normative kernel of the public sphere, the promise of influencing society by means of rational deliberation free from coercion, belongs as much to the bourgeois public as to those it sought to elide, suppress, and exclude. There is a powerful snapshot of an oppositional, proletarian, public sphere that erupted in Glasgow in the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1919 after what became known as the Battle of George Square in Glasgow, when striking workers demanded a forty-hour working week and were met by a police baton-charge and the deployment of troops and tanks to the city, Charles Masterman (Liberal M.P. and erstwhile head of the Wartime Propaganda Bureau) left the following description of the cultural space which had fostered the strike movement in the years leading up to 1919:

They are talking continually, day and night, in a seven-day week, in meetings held outside the works gates, before breakfast, in the dinner-hour, or in surrounding halls in the evening. They are preaching, and with enormous energy, something in the nature of a crusade. […] It is scarcely “Bolshevism” […] But it is a creed denouncing “capitalism” and all “idle wealth”; a belief – whose sincerity need not be doubted – that by the reduction or elimination of the profits and interests of capital, and a direct attack on the great landlord and millionaire, the working people may found a new society, and get rid of their present disabilities. It is at present a “revolutionary demand,” and Glasgow is the storm centre of Britain. One can judge by their bulletins, their vigorous combined action, their replacement of leaders when arrested by other leaders, how completely this creed has mastered the upper guiding group of the strikes organisation.^[4]

The dynamics and problems of such a public sphere, steered by an emancipatory interest, were quite different from its bourgeois rivals. The proletarian public sphere was caught in what Richard Johnson calls the dilemma of working-class printers and educators: on the one hand, they aspired to pursue a project of enlightening debate with practical ends together with its working-class audiences, that is, to represent and coordinate resistance to the liberal project of modernisation so lavishly promoted in the mainstream press, and later to seek means of control over the infrastructure that this project had yielded.^[5] On the other hand, they pursued that project under limiting conditions – limited time and resources or purchasing power among its readership, and limited energy for autodidactic activity. But by the turn of the twentieth century, however, the structure of the public sphere had changed considerably in ways that presented new challenges to working-class publics seeking to improve their common lot.

The nineteenth century structural transformation: commercialisation and taste

The repeal of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ (chiefly stamp, paper, and advertisement duty) in the latter half of the 19^th century marks a decisive shift in the material conditions of the public sphere. It marked the beginnings of a newspaper industry increasingly under the sway of commercialisation. In the early nineteenth century, radical publications were outcompeting their bourgeois rivals in circulation numbers. They did so under conditions of relative technological equality, and E.P. Thompson describes the radical plebeian weeklies of 1816-1820 as means of propaganda in their fullest ‘egalitarian phase’: ‘Steam-printing had scarcely made headway (commencing with The Times in 1814), and the plebeian Radical group had as easy access to the hand-press as Church or King.’^[6] To quell the influence of the Radical press at a time of momentous social and economic transformation, the British state turned to sanctions in the form of taxes and outright suppression. While the Radical publications were thus driven underground, liberal campaigners sought to remove the barriers to commercial competition and thereby place the provision of newsprint in the safe hands of wealthy newspaper proprietors. The advent of steam printing meant that any newspaper enterprise was in need of significant capital outlay to stay competitive, thus limiting the possible owners to those who had either access to sufficient capital on their own, could secure loans, or attract enough advertisers. It was particularly the need to attract advertisers that had troublesome and unforeseen consequences, not just for socialist printers, but for the old respectable press too. The advent of commercial newspapers, printed by steam and beholden to advertising revenues, led to a crisis of taste among editors and journalist of the respectable press, who found themselves forced to adjust their style, to write up or down, to readers approached as consumers.

To editors of old respectable newspapers like the Glasgow Herald, founded in 1783, the structural shift was met with a mixture of fear and excitement. The Glasgow Herald had acted as a regional platform and informer for the local merchant and industrialist classes since its earliest days, and staunchly promoted the liberal-imperialist project of improvement based on free trade. When the first daily issue appeared in 1859 it was set to enter the local daily market as a competitor to the North British Daily Mail, which had dramatically overtaken the Glasgow Herald’s circulation after the repeal of stamp duty in 1855. The move had necessitated new investment in coal-powered printing presses and the excitement of the proprietors is signalled by the inclusion of a poem at the top of the prestigious literary section of the newspaper:

Old King Coal was merry old soul,

       A merry old soul is he;

May he never fail in the land we love,

       Who has made us great and free.

While his miners mine, and his engines work,

       Through all our happy land,

We shall flourish fair in the morning light,

And our name and our fame, and our might and our right,

       In the front of the world shall stand.^[7]

But by entering the daily market for print, the Glasgow Herald simultaneously found itself confronted by what its journalists and editors found to be terrifyingly low tastes, not just on the part of its commercial competitors, but also within a new segment of the reading public. The leading article of the same issue put it this way:

It is a miserable mission to pander to a depraved taste; and we are ashamed to notice that some periodicals, usurping the title of newspaper, have made a trade of serving up trash in the style of the mysteries of London or Paris, for the special use of those who have not information or strength of mind enough to resist the pestiferous influences which such writings communicate.^[8]

This anxiety over taste shows an editorial staff in the grip of forces beyond their control. The pressure to attract advertisers meant that editorial writers were forced to write up or down [jt11] to readers, now approached as consumers. This threatened to disrupt an old community of readers organised around a shared taste, which meant that they had to either transform or differentiate. The Glasgow Herald chose the latter solution and split its readership with the lighter and more jocose evening paper the Glasgow Evening Times, centred on sport, police reports, and ‘entertainment’, but little political content – a true representative of the new commercial press. A style borrowed from the radical plebeian press, but given a new layout and content adapted from the bourgeois press thus emerged with two important ideological consequences.

First, the project of taste had its own ideological problems. In the high-end newspapers this project of protecting good taste can be seen in the careful containment of an aesthetic sphere through layout, for example by specially designated literary pages, designed to preserve a space for art and literature in allocated columns. This way of containing aesthetics signals a conception of culture elevated to abstraction signalled by the capitalised ‘Culture’, inherited from the Victorian post-enlightenment cultural critics. I think here of Thomas Carlyle, who was held dear to the editors of the Glasgow Herald. In Carlyle’s hands, culture was construed as a project of private moral compensation for the ‘mechanical’ world of industrial capitalism and imperial bureaucracy.^[9] Somewhat paradoxically, this model of privatised cultivation undertaken by the solitary reader points towards the emergence of a consumer subjectivity.^[10] While designed to protect a sense of moral dignity for the individual adrift in the new industrial society, the ideological effect of this firm allocation of moral cultivation to the private sphere is plain: it strips the public sphere of moral evaluation, in favour of instrumental reasoning according to predetermined ends. By linking aesthetic evaluation to moral judgement and privatising this sphere, both intellectually and in the material layout of newspapers, a new subjectivity, split asunder, was encouraged. Max Weber sought to capture this split in modern subjectivity when he spoke of utilitarian ‘specialists without spirit’ and hedonistic ‘sensualists without heart’ in his early twentieth century diagnosis of the times.[11]

And second, the newspaper medium with its abstract allocation of categorically separated ‘content’ alongside display advertisements determined by the cost of the advertising space, helped constitute a new subjectivity or role, oriented to reception in the private comfort of the home. This shift mirrors the constitution of a newly circumscribed political subjectivity: the citizen as member of an aggregated electorate (emerging gradually with the expansion of the franchise in the late 19^th century) exercising political freedom, not so much discursively, as by signalling approval at the ballot box. The commercial newspaper played a role in fashioning this narrow form of representation: by monitored readership figures (measured in circulation, or sales) a more mediated form of representation could be mobilised in public discourse, so that the figures of a readership could be contrasted favourably with the number of participants in a street protest, and thereby delegitimise the older embodied expression of discontent.

This was the structurally transformed print public sphere confronted by proletarian socialist printers, who could no longer compete on relatively equal terms with the commercial press, as the plebeian Radicals had done. The commercial appropriation of a popular style, used to clothe a depoliticised content for commercial gain, made that very style suspect to socialists. Thus, a writer for the monthly periodical The Socialist lambasted the sensationalist elements of even the few avowedly labour-supporting papers:

Why should a journal, seriously seeking to advance the working class, encumber its pages with sensational police court news and all the filth of the divorce courts? […] it is foolishness to think that such matter can assist the working class in its efforts of emancipation.^[12]

But the strategy for counteraction differed widely from the project centred on taste. For socialist printers the transformed print public sphere meant that the critical and educational role of their weekly or monthly publications assumed new significance.

The educational imperative of socialist print

The educational imperative of this proletarian formation echoes that of the earlier plebeian formation. As charted by Richard Johnson, the radical plebeians mobilised their journals for a radical enlightenment project of what he terms ‘really useful knowledge’ – an educational project consciously contrasted with the notion of merely ‘useful knowledge’ advanced by utilitarians like Henry Brougham, founder of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK). Against the diffusion of practical knowledge for industrial application and education in constitutional principles advanced by the lavishly funded SDUK and aimed at working-class readers, the radical press retorted with ‘What is useful ignorance? – ignorance useful to constitutional tyrants’ and ‘What we want to be informed about is – how to get out of our present troubles.’^[13] A century later, the mainstream labour movement had come to endorse an educational programme directed by the state and focussed its efforts on campaigning for increased provision, but on adult education very similar concerns were raised about the subjugating and misdirecting effects of liberal education. In a clash mediated by the Forward, one of the central Scottish print platforms for intra-movement debate in the early 1920s, representatives of the Marxist Scottish Labour Colleges attacked the liberal curriculum of the Workers’ Educational Association in the following way:

Education for what? – What does the organised worker want education for first and foremost. To enable him to “talk” Geology? to appreciate Art? to discourse learnedly on Church Music? The organised worker needs an education that will help him to solve his industrial and political difficulties.^[14]

The counterposing of aesthetic education to really useful knowledge made by this proponent of the Scottish Labour College offers a segue for understanding the cultural conflict between proletarian and commercial media. The highly purposive model of education, materialised in the layout of proletarian periodicals, as we shall see, formed part of a wider praxis-orientation.

The practical, organisational role of periodical print in working-class politics of the proletarian phase can be seen in how the weekly or monthly periodical was turned daily in moments of intense political conflict. The special bulletins, which Masterman took note of in the quote above, would be printed for purposes of mediating collective struggle, and a Strike Bulletin was printed on the Socialist Labour Press in Glasgow in January 1919, as a tool for the Forty Hours Movement. A similar bulletin, The Worker, was used in 1915-16 during a confrontation between workers, organised through the Clyde Workers’ Committee, and local employers and the Ministry of Munitions over the implementation of industrial organisational structures geared to optimise production of munitions during the war. Periodicals like The Worker and the Strike Bulletin facilitated communication between workers in different industries during these struggles, but they also mediated struggles elsewhere in the world, from India to the South Africa, to Canada, and thereby created an internationalist imaginary of solidarity to rival and disturb, if only briefly and in a moment of crisis, the imagined national communities. The sporadic, intermittent publication of such journals at moments of crisis also disturb the stability of empty homogenous time, by presenting a rival notion of messianic time, in Walter Benjamin’s sense.

From the perspective of proletarian publishers, however, the aim of newspapers was to construct continuity for political praxis. Thus, contemporary socialist and communist leaders emphasised the organisational value of newspapers, as tools of action co-ordination. In this vein, Lenin put forward a working-class newspaper model for Russia in What is to be Done? (1902), which presented the project of a regularly appearing newspaper as at once practical and educational, and Gramsci focussed much of his attention in the Prison Notebooks on analysing the role and organisational value of newspapers, which he described as political parties in their own right. This view of the newspaper can be better understood when considering the various forms of labour going into the production and distribution of a radical print newspaper, which often relied on infrastructure different from the commercial systems of production and distribution: their presses where old-fashioned (still, at times, hand-cranked) and operated by volunteering printers and compositors, the newsagents might refuse to stock or display the paper, and so alternative systems of distribution via political meetings, union or party rooms, or via shared subscriptions. Even in Britain, where literacy rates were very high by the 1880s, working-class reading practices also differed, and oral reading both publicly and privately was still common: in the Marxist study circles in Glasgow, it was common practice when studying Capital for the students to take turns reading the text out loud. In such a context, the special value of print as a practical and organisational tool receives a distinctive valence in addition to its more symbolic function of constructing imagined communities, as proposed by Benedict Anderson.

Underpinning the central theoretical role of the proletarian newspaper in the framework of revolutionary leaders like Gramsci and Lenin was a slogan committed to print in 1883 by the Social Democratic Federation: Educate, Agitate, Organise. The projected temporality of such activity was less explosive, and more geared to the everyday temporalities necessary for learning, whether the goal was to achieve social revolution in one fell stroke or more gradual reform. A closer look at the Glasgow-based journal The Socialist will shed light on the educational role of proletarian print media.

The organisational logic of proletarian periodicals

Generally, proletarian periodicals do not display such a clear separation in formal layout between moral matters construed as private from public matters to be approached in a calculating, instrumental way. The prevalence of poetry in these periodicals, and their insertion side-by-side with serious and topical leading articles, reinforces the sense that what was to be construed as a matter of public concern was to be directed also by moral imperatives. But this is not to say that these periodicals lacked an organisational logic. The proletarian press was purposely organised as educational media. The same press used to print The Worker and the Strike Bulletin was also used to print the monthly journal The Socialist, the party organ of the Socialist Labour Party, and akin to other monthlies such as Justice (Social Democratic Federation) and The Call (British Socialist Party). Viewed as a medium, The Socialist materialises the political programme captured in the slogan ‘Educate, Agitate, Organise’, by projecting an ideal educational progression anticipated for the readers, and designed to guide them on the path of understanding. This can be illustrated by considering its typical formal layout.

The front page would usually hold a large illustration depicting bold types intended for effective communication – emaciated workers tangled up in machinery directed by fat capitalists, angelic personifications of Socialism wielding the sword of justice against Capitalism’s dragon, demonic figures filling the pages of commercial newspapers with ink of blood against a backdrop of black-clouded skies, breaking up over the horizon by the rays of the Socialist Press, etc. Printed in broadsheet format, these illustrations covering three full columns or more under the masthead would be large enough to be used as posters, to be pinned on a factory wall or in some public space, or to be held aloft by a public orator using the illustration to elucidate a key point. The front page thus projects the initial reception setting: the meal-hour talk at work or the soapbox oration on the street corner. The second and third pages assemble the leading article with shorter pieces combining news and opinion – often with reference to the shortcomings of commercial newspaper’s reporting – dealing with topical subjects such as ongoing strikes, protests, or campaigns. These are often written in a polemical style which somewhat levels the distinction between the spoken and the written. Arguments thus materialised in print form are held in suspense, enabling closer study in settings removed from the high energy of street-meetings and witty style of public oratory. Further into the issue, longer, full-page articles appear. In The Socialist these areoften either detailed reports on important conferences of the trade union movement or the Second International (until the formation of the Third International) and reprints from an emerging Marxist canon, all intended for close study. The last pages and the backmatter contain reports from branch meetings, demonstrations, and upcoming activities: advertisements for study-circles in different localities, as well as lists of literature divided into categories of ‘beginner’ and ‘advanced’ with short descriptions. Lists of technical keywords with short explanations are included either next to the literature lists or to the longer reprint articles, as a study aid particularly to Marx’s writings. Another frequent genre is the how-to guide, where the reader is offered advice on how to organise and conduct street meetings, meal-hour talks at the workplace, and formal study circles. A somewhat humorous example of this is found in an early issue of The Socialist, where the writer provides detailed guidance on how to organise and conduct a soapboxing street meeting, an account which provides a snapshot of this dynamic public culture from before the great geographical transformation of metropolitan cities designed for car-traffic:

In answering questions [from the audience] the speaker should always be courteous. He may be asked some stupid or silly questions, but let him bear in mind that our class has had small chances to educate themselves on their own class interests. But should any “fakir, freak, or fool” dare to cast ridicule on our Party or principles, then the speaker should wade into and annihilate him, as a street crowd always like to see a smart (?) chap get a take down.^[15]

This article also shows an attitude to the cultivation of sociality quite different from the bourgeois emphasis on taste. While a form of politeness is certainly not discarded, little effort is made to refine speech for elegance. Quite the opposite: the speaker is encouraged to deliver the speech in ‘straight plain English, so that all may understand.’ This way of pitching the new worldview of class struggle in a register familiar to the audience is designed with the intent of flattening the barriers of entry to the public sphere, rather than erecting stylistic barriers by means of cultural distinction.

In this way, the periodical is designed as a guiding tool that navigates the audience, as either listeners or readers, from the distinctive cultural settings first of public oratory, then of the private study and the organised study circle, and then back again to the street/factory floor setting, equipped with new knowledge and practical agitational skills. The periodical thus materialises the slogan ‘Educate, Agitate, Organise’ in both formal layout and use.

But furthermore, the pedagogical quality of the periodical signals an expectation of effort from the reader, quite distinct from the easy flow promoted by the style of newspaper articles intended for leisurely consumption. Another aspect that signifies the anti-commercial tendency of the periodicals is their durability, both materially, printed on thick paper with pagination stretching across issues (signalling an expectation to have them bound in volumes), and temporally, by issuing reprints to be read and read again. That The Socialist was printed primarily for its use-value, rather than its exchange-value, is also shown by frequently appearing prompts printed with bold type: ‘Pass this paper on to a mate’^[16] ‘When you have finished with this paper pass it on to a friend.’^[17] Such prompts signal an attempt to maintain a subjectivity expressed through what Raymond Williams terms residual and oppositional notions like ‘absolute brotherhood, service to others without reward’, while appropriating them within the framework of modern socialist ideology.^[18] The proletarian periodical was a key medium for maintaining and reconstituting such a culture.

I described the pedagogical layout of the periodical as ‘typical’, but there is a caveat here, because the pressures of money and administrative power deeply affected both the regularity and formal layout of these periodicals. Kevin Gilmartin even speaks of ‘a form deformed’ in relation to the periodicals of the plebian phase, which often display irregularities in volume and issue sequence.^[19] And alongside the longer-running examples I have cited, newspaper archives record many failed attempts in the face of such pressures. Thus, the Proletarian Schools (an educational initiative directed towards children and young people on the model of Sunday schools) issued three different periodicals in the space of only a few years (The Red Dawn, The Revolution, and Proletcult), while The Vanguard, the paper of the socialist schoolteacher and first official Bolshevik Consul to Britain, John Maclean, was suppressed after only a few issues. Meanwhile, maverick writer-editor-printer-publishers like the anarcho-communist soapbox orator Guy Aldred would consistently issue new periodicals and pamphlets printed using an old letterpress. These examples, all from Glasgow alone, illustrate the real dilemma in which proletarian media were enmeshed, between aspirations for critical knowledge with practical intent and severe limitations of resources, time, and energy.

Some Conditions for Critical Rationality

This cursory glance at the dynamics of proletarian print media, whose use-value was understood to lie in the critical education they offered to a collective project of emancipation under difficult conditions, offers an opportunity to reflect on the contemporary conditions for the public use of critical reason. The already posited dilemma of the radical educator points up the key issues: time, resources, and energy are necessary to meet aspirations for critical knowledge (and by extension, to practically organise for emancipation). To specify the list of resources needed, I would add that alongside the right kind of reading matter, the right kind of cultural spaces are needed. Masterman’s description cited at the beginning of this piece draws attention to some of the localities housing the proletarian public sphere. Some of these were more makeshift than others. Thus, the factory floor could be used, at least when the foreman was out of earshot, but more stable were the numerous halls in the city: these included the trades’ halls, meeting rooms of political parties, and the newsrooms of co-operative societies. Without such relatively autonomous public spaces, the possibility of deliberation is significantly hampered. Furthermore, with regards to time as a condition for critical rationality I would add that a specific kind of time is necessary. This is not to downplay the need for an abstractly conceived quantity of time; Masterman’s description again shows how the talking constitutive of the proletarian public sphere was carried out not just in distinctive cultural spaces, but also in the temporal margins left over after capital had staked its claim, in the morning, the meal-hour, the evenings, and on Sunday afternoons. But in addition to this, a temporality conducive to attention is required. The busy flitting of the gaze across the page of the commercial newspaper interspersed with advertisement and types of content seemingly without organic relation to one another poses a real challenge to the formation of a holistic worldview necessary to map the main social tendencies, and to discern possibilities for action. But at the same time, too much of the solitary reading in the quiet comfort of the home might also be detrimental to emancipatory praxis. This was why The Socialist sought to direct its reader-hearers from the busy street-corner to the focussed study circle, and then back again. This shifting between spaces and temporalities conducive to both critical learning (grounded in sustained attention) and collective action is a demanding prospect today. Contemporary advertisement-driven digital platforms present even more challenging foes today, by virtue of their form and operational logic, than the commercial newspapers of the early 20^th century could dream of. Alongside campaigns to reclaim public spaces, campaigns to reshape digital (and print) media such as those proposed by the Media Reform Coalition offer some potential avenues for reform. Meanwhile, other tactics are worth considering, and I will close out with a productive approach to aesthetic objects which I think is a good supplement to programmes of political reform.

Aesthetic education was often viewed with suspicion within the proletarian public sphere. But this had more to do with its inflection as the development of taste – a project which can easily slide into the development of refined consumption habits, as the connection between taste and the metabolic system already suggests – than with a general hostility to aesthetic expression and evaluation. Indeed, there are alternative ways of appropriating art to the ones discussed above. For example,] Habermas pointed to the possibility for enlightenment in communication using aesthetic objects as points of reference in an intervention into the postmodernism debates. He did so by citing Swedish-German author Peter Weiss’s novels, where politically motivated workers in late 1930s Germany meet up in the public museums of Berlin to discuss art, to appropriate it to their own needs and self-understanding, and as a means of critique under conditions of severe political repression (a form of repression which meant that other ways of organising were largely off the table anyways). Their method for doing so bears close resemblance to the model projected within Enlightenment notions of Bildung, whereby the audience of an aesthetic work seeks to mediate between specialist aesthetics and everyday life. The formative and world-disclosing effect of this aesthetic encounter – of seeing the world otherwise, including as it is not but promises to be – can shape both politically relevant motivations and understanding, or class consciousness. When pursued by subalterns seeking collective ways out of pressing difficulties, this method can take on a more emancipatory direction than the emulation of gentlemanly sociality undertaken by the aspirational individual, the construal of an intimate sphere of pure humanity, or the related protective moral project of the romantic cultural critic.

Footnotes:

[1] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983)

[2] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964) p. 21.

[3] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983) p. 24.

[4] C.F.G. Masterman, ‘Labour Unrest’, Daily News, 11 February 1919, p. 4.

[5] Richard Johnson, ‘“Really Useful Knowledge”: radical education and working-class culture’ in Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (1979).

[6] E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1962) p. 739.

[7] Glasgow Herald, 3 January 1859, p. 3.

[8] Glasgow Herald, 3 January 1859, p. 4.

[9] See Carlyle’s essay ‘Signs of the Times’ (originally published in the Edinburgh Review in 1829).

[10] For a close reading, see Alex Benchimol, Intellectual Politics and Cultural Conflict in the Romantic Period: Scottish Whigs, English Radicals and the Making of the British Public Sphere (2010), pp. 130-148.

[11] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic (1992) p. 124.

[12] ‘A Working Class Paper’, The Socialist, February 1911, p. 44.

[13] See Richard Johnson, ‘“Really Useful Knowledge”: radical education and working-class culture’ in Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (1979).

[14] ‘Workers’ Education’, Forward, 29 July 1922, p. 8.

[15] ‘Regarding Outdoor Propaganda’, The Socialist, October 1904. The term ‘fakir’ referred to official leaders in the labour movement – Daniel De Leon, a strong influence on this particular Scottish Marxist formation, uses the term labour ‘fakers’ in his pamphlets to refer to the same type of official, and the term may have morphed in the British context to receive an orientalist inflection.

[16] The Socialist, 18 September 1919, p. 3.

[17] The Socialist, December 1915, p. 19.

[18] Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977) p. 122.

[19] Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics (1996) p. 88.
times of literature, times of the machine

Times of Literature, Times of the Machine: Poetic Media Archaeologies

by Jesper Olsson

First published in International Journal of Communication 10(2016), 5378–5394. Used by permission.

for #IV. the medium is the message?

Differens Magazine, winter 23/24

“Here also one could experience the texture of time

as it passed, a shadow train, life’s white machine.”

Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station

If there is a zeitgeist to be found in our time, it might very well have to do with time itself, and it is then defined in the negative—as a loss of history and time. Numerous scholars and cultural critics have at least, during the last decades, arrived at conclusions and ideas that suggest as much, from Fredric Jameson’s 1980s declaration of the postmodern as dominated by the spatial (Jameson, 1991) to Jonathan Crary’s reflections on “the incursion of non-time” (Crary, 2013, p. 30) in the 24/7 society to Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s “slow cancellation of the future” (2011, p. 18) and Simon Reynolds’s (2011) analyses of “retromania” as the dominant mode of contemporary pop music. “Nostalgic for garbage, desperate for time” sings the pop combo Vampire Weekend, and if nostalgia has been circumscribed as the reactive affect accompanying a posthistorical situation of late capitalism in the 21st century—forcing our lives into a constant present through technological, economical, and aesthetic means—then a certain desperation for time, for being situated in and actually experiencing time as a modulation of existence, as a forming force of retrospection and anticipation, is the expected companion (see Fisher, 2014).

That art and literature have taken up the latter task is no surprise. In this essay I will look more closely into how contemporary literature, particularly poetry, might explore questions of temporality and time in relation to the discourse sketched above—in relation to the workings of digital media, but also, partly, in relation to the 24/7 society described by Crary (2013). Moreover, I want to show how such poetic work suggests that the presumed loss of time can be further nuanced and differentiated as we dig deeper into the configuration and functioning of the media landscape.

The two poetic works that I will discuss are Evolution (2013, 2014) by Swedish poets and artists Johannes Heldén and Håkan Jonson, and Fjärrskrift (“Distance Writing,” 2011), by Swedish writer Lotta Lotass. Both works combine and move among media technological platforms and environments, and even though they raise many questions and explore several themes, the issue of time is central to them both. Crucially, the materiality and form, the writing methods and the reading acts that they trigger bring up this issue in various ways. In this, the two works continue a long tradition in literature while at the same time torquing it through operations specific to our own situation. Even if not representative of literature or art at large today, these texts offer good examples of how a more innovative poetic endeavor can add complexity to the problem of time.

One might, moreover, claim that the poetry of Heldén/Jonson and Lotass initiate an artistically inflected excavation of the current media landscape. While bringing up time and temporality—and suggesting that these must always be analyzed as multiple factors—the two works both historicize and display the material embedding of digital media and the meanings attached to them. Accordingly, as the metaphors suggest, I want to frame and analyze the works as examples of an artistic or poetic media archaeology, as attempts to explore the material underpinnings and the histories surrounding (new) media (Huhtamo & Parikka, 2011; Parikka, 2012).

A starting point for my discussion is that media technologies and infrastructures shape or even construct time and temporalities. As John Durham Peters underlines in his recent book, The Marvelous Clouds, “Apparatus is the basis, not the corruption, of the world” (2015, p. 28). Such an understanding can be found in the work of a number of thinkers, but here I will relate mainly to what is sometimes called German media theory and to scholars such as Friedrich A. Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski, and Wolfgang Ernst, to outline a mechanical or media-technological codetermination of time.

From TAM to Psychopathia Medialis

From a certain viewpoint, literature, especially poetry, has always been an eminent time machine. As Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1766/1984) claimed in the 18th century in one of the most influential works of modern art theory, poetry, because of its roots in the spoken word, is a temporal art form. Time is its primary medium, just as space is for sculpture and painting. But time has also always been modulated and manipulated in literary works, especially when it has materialized as something spatial—in writing.

This can take place on several levels. On one hand it is possible to jump forward and backward in the represented or diegetic time in narratives, which can be fragmented and convoluted or coherent and continuous. On the other hand, it is possible to play with letters and sentences through mannerist operations that seem to disrupt our understanding of time as linear, progressive, and irreversible. This is the case with such stratagems as palindromes and anagrams, which have been employed extensively in the Baroque period, for example, and in the early 20th-century avant-garde.

The interest in plastic manipulations of language around 1900 might be explained, however, by referring to certain changes in the history of media. Such is the understanding of modernism and the avant-garde of Friedrich Kittler (1990, 1999), who wanted to make a strict distinction between play with alphabetic signs and the effects on time and temporalities that inventions such as film and phonography would have. With such technical media, events taking place at different points in time (and in different places) could be juxtaposed in an amazing way, the speed of events could be increased or decreased, and time could even be made to go backward —a device heavily exploited by early cinema.

Technical operations such as these have fittingly been designated as time axis manipulation (TAM), which Kittler (1999) selected as perhaps the most important trait of technical media invented in the late 19th century. Kittler took a particular interest in Edison’s phonograph in this regard. Writing and the alphabet had been dominant in Western history in relation to the production and dissemination of knowledge (and much besides), but the material that was processed on a technical recording was not letters or symbols, but sound waves: “What is manipulated is the real rather than the symbolic,” as Kittler (1999, p. 35) observes in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. The sounds captured by the machine were not just the ones identifiable by the cultured human ear but also the undifferentiated noises of the world.

To simplify somewhat, TAM and the phonograph disclosed a technical world beyond the human. Certainly this is something that has been affirmed and employed by human actors. One could mention the electronic compositions of Karlheinz Stockhausen, or the German technique of encrypting radio communication during World War I with the help of magnetic wire recordings on high speed. Still, TAM and sound recording in general indicate a transgression of the phenomenological sphere of human perception and points toward the inhuman. The sound as processed by a machine is not the same as the sound heard by an ear.

Kittler’s analysis has been pivotal for later work in media archaeology in a German context and elsewhere, not least for the aforementioned Wolfgang Ernst. Ernst wants to distinguish the archaeological approach from media history as codified by human perception and human modes of understanding time: “In contrast to media history—that is, the human vantage point (Vico)—media archaeology tentatively adopts the temporal perspective of the apparatus itself—the aesthetics of micro-temporal processes. A different kind of temporality is represented here” (Ernst, 2013, p. 141). Even if this “different kind of temporality,” the Eigenzeit of the machine, as Ernst calls it, is ontologically distinct from human time, the gap or difference can be perceived through lags, stops, and glitches in our dealings with media technologies. And it is perhaps at this point that an analysis that takes into account the temporal maladies (the dyschronia) transmitted by digital media should begin—by exploring the material interior of the machine. The works of Heldén and Jonson and Lotass address, as we will see, both the workings of TAM as outlined by Kittler and the temporal specificities of the machine focused in the analysis of Ernst.

This media-archaeological perspective can also take a slightly different form and become more diachronic. Instead of going deeper into the layers of the machine, it is possible to explore the sediments of media history (see Parikka, 2012). This is a crucial aspect of Siegfried Zielinski’s (2006) understanding of media archaeology, or variantology, as he also calls it. If certain understandings of media history rest upon narratives of progress and sophistication—the contemporary discourses on the loss of time sometimes tacitly assume this—then the task of media archaeology is to problematize such narratives. Zielinski considers these symptoms of a psychopathia medialis, which covers up the complexity of every media-historical situation and event. But he also offers a remedy based on a more materialist approach. To counter these stories and in turn breed other generalizing stories (e.g. everything moves faster), we have to search out the hidden passageways in media history, the dead ends and the dead media, for example, to obtain a more truthful account of how technologies have changed and how they affect the experience of time and space.

Zielinski’s answer is articulated both within a scholarly context and in relation to artistic practice. In [. . . After the Media] (2013), for example, he discusses a number of artists—a prime example is Nam June Paik—who give a critical view of the myth of progress. Moreover, the book concludes with a manifesto, “Vademecum for the Prevention of psychopathia medialis,” in which Zielinski describes, in a series of paragraphs, what is to be done, also in an everyday context. To sum up his creed, we have “to learn to exist online and be offline,” which he calls a “balancing act” and a “conscious split” between absorption and withdrawal (“in melancholy and bitterness”) in relation to the experience offered up by new media. “If we don’t succeed in this, we shall become mere appendages of the world that we have created, merely its technical functions” (p. 261). As we will see, the poetic investigations undertaken in the works that will be addressed—of the book, the computer, the paper scroll, the teleprinter—will also connect to the kind of media archaeology outlined by Zielinski.

Temporalities of the Machine and the Book

The Electronic Literature Conference of 2013—“Chercher le texte: Locating the Text in Electronic Literature”—took place in Paris. For this event, the Swedish poet and artist Johannes Heldén, together with artist and programmer Håkan Jonson, composed a new digital piece called Evolution (www.textevolution.net). It was to be the first part of a complex intermedial work, completed with the publication of a printed book with the same title in the spring of 2014. The work as a whole immediately received some attention in the international community of electronic literature and was awarded the first N. Katherine Hayles Prize for Criticism of Electronic literature (see http://eliterature.org/2014/06/announcing-winners-of-1st-coover-hayles-awards).

That Evolution was awarded in this category rather than in the one for electronic literature proper underlines that the work engages in a critical consideration of the historical, technological, and aesthetic conditions of this genre or mode of writing. This is perhaps more explicit in the paper book, but the digital version of the work also brings up and explores a number of issues on how writing is written and reading is read—to paraphrase Gertrude Stein—in the context of the media ecology post-2000.

These issues become clear when one begins to describe the production process. Even though Evolution was conceived of and composed in the early 2010s, its history goes back a full decade. The linguistic and acoustic material used as its foundation consists of the collected poetry written and published by Heldén since his debut book of poetry, Burner (2003), together with ambient music that he composed during the same period. This corpus (the poetry is also rendered in English translation) constitutes the work’s database, which is made operative through an algorithm written by Jonson. The algorithm was, according to the authors, planned to act as a stand-in for the human poet (the machine as poet), selecting and permuting words ad infinitum.

Even though the content of the poetry generated by the algorithm is highly indeterminate, the composition process is also encoded to take into account certain features of Heldén’s previous writing style, such as his manner of spacing and arranging words on a page. There is thus an attempt at marrying individual traits with the seeming neutrality of the program. Moreover, the work of the latter is affected by a series of sequences based on datasets culled from a variety of sources related to nature, such as images of clouds or statistics of tropical storms. Finally, the digital interface that we encounter remediates an iconic book page to frame the machine-generated poems, underlining the hybridity and complexity of a work that aggregates man and machine, nature and culture.

Figure 1. Screenshot from the online version of Evolution (2013).

In a statement attached to the online version of the work, Heldén and Jonson present some of the ideas behind it while also situating the piece in a media-historical context:

“Evolution is an online artwork-in-progress designed to emulate the texts and music of poet and artist Johannes Heldén, with the ultimate goal of passing “The Imitation Game Test” as proposed by Alan Turing in 1951. With Evolution we aim to examine and dissect the role of the author; when new poetry that resembles the work of the original author is created or presented through an algorithm, is it possible to make the distinction between “author” and “programmer”? And is it even relevant? . . . The purpose of the work is not to deromanticize or deconstruct the role of the author, but is rather the ongoing exploration itself. Where will it take us, and perhaps more importantly, what will happen along the way? The release of Evolution will mark the end of Johannes Heldén writing poetry books. He has, in a sense, been replaced.” (Heldén & Jonson, October 10, 2015).

Despite its downplaying of the ambition to “deconstruct” the role of author, the description above makes it pertinent to link Evolution to an artistic avant-garde characterized by similar ambitions leading back to futurism, Dada, and surrealism, passing through the 1960s, and continuing into our own time period. But here it is more important to pay attention to the emphasis on the exploratory aspects of the endeavor: “where will it take us” and “what will happen”? This invites a consideration of the different processes in the work—those of writing and reading—and the multiple temporalities at stake.

As mentioned above, Evolution consists not only of the digital online version. The printed book presents yet another variety of materials, such as samples from the machine-generated poems, a performance script, self-declarative comments and statements, and a few microessays on Evolution and digital literature in general (Cayley, 2014; Engberg, 2014; Ingvarsson, 2014; Lien, 2014; Lindhé, 2014; Olsson, 2014). Most notably, however, the pages of the book are covered by thousands of lines of code from Jonson’s algorithm (Figure 2). This adds another layer to the acts of writing and reading. The poet and programmer reads Heldén’s previous poetry, computer software reads and converts the poems into binary digits, the algorithm reads the poetry data stacked in the database, and the readers of poetry read the poetry on the screen and, perhaps, reflect upon these reading acts by reading the comments and essays in the printed book and by reading the code intended for the machine, which will probably generate allegorical readings.

Figure 2. Code from Heldén and Jonson, Evolution (2014).

In its translations and transports between different sign systems and media—from code to language, from book to machine to screen to book—Evolution comes forth as an aesthetic exercise in what N. Katherine Hayles (2005) has called “intermediation.” It is a poetry that explores the material conditions of writing and reading. In this, the work also brings up questions of time and temporality and how these are always intricately related to questions of media technologies. There are multiple temporalities at play in the work, which are codetermined by the affordances of the computer and of the book and by the specificities of human perception and cognition. I will point out a few of these temporal traits (and the analysis can be brought much further, by taking into account the soundtrack, for example).

Let us start, then, with a first encounter with the digital interface. As a reader, when accessing the URL of Evolution, you are invited to view the iconic image of an open paper book, laid out on a wooden desk, with standard bibliographical paraphernalia present, including title, copyright, and ISBN (see Figure 1). However, a few elements also deviate from paper/print standards—a menu from which you can choose the language you prefer for the poems (English or Swedish), hypertext links to information about the work and its authors, and a gauge for setting the speed of the poems. All of these deviations can be seen as media transpositions of features present in printed books—you can access bilingual editions of poetry, you can usually browse from title page to jacket or back cover to get information on the author, and you do establish a certain pace and speed in reading. Still, the temporalities are different here. The timing of the machine will intervene and modulate the timing of reading.

Computers operate in the interval between nano- and milliseconds, an interval that is hardly perceptible to our senses. Even if not possible to experience directly, the difference between the time of the machine and the phenomenological time of human experience can be addressed. This is doubly inscribed on the first screen of Evolution—symbolically, by the embedding of the links in a space that looks like a page from a paper book, and materially, through the actual speed of linking, a speed that is quite different from the one that usually animates the rhythm and pace of book reading.

The temporality evoked here might be discussed in relation to what Wolfgang Ernst, in his much more technically informed analyses of media, has called the Eigenzeit of the machine. Ernst claims that this time—more on the side of kairos than kronos, to use the ancient Greek distinction—is connected to the “sub-sensorial” and to events and contingencies rather than to extensions and continuity (Ernst, 2012). Such events are embodied in the electric signal processing, in the fast calculations of data, the timing of which we cannot experience but that might be said to manifest itself in lags and glitches, as noise in the channel, as disruptive breaks in the experience of reading a text on a screen, for instance.

Somewhat ironically, as it is supposed to insert an element of human control, such disturbing events are brought up in Evolution through the gauge and the setting of the speed of the poetry that is generated. The pace of the forming of words and sentences ranges from min to max, but it soon becomes obvious that, whether we aim at setting a pace that feels natural or give up this attempt and experimenting with different speeds, a constant sense of delay or deferral (dyschronia) will prevail. On the surface, the reader controls the (timing of the) machine and the (timing of the) reading. On closer scrutiny, this is illusory. Time as event and contingency disrupts the reading.

Such delays and disruptions can be interpreted as a celebration of literature’s indeterminacy, its defamiliarizations of everyday experience, and the discovery of something new in reading—in line with a modernist aesthetic. But it can also be linked to the computer and the kind of writing and reading it makes possible. Even though it might be too far-fetched to actually analyze Evolution through a theoretical lens offered by Ernst’s chronopoetics, the work wants to explore the discrepancies between a human temporal experience—historically shaped and consolidated by book reading — and the temporal specificities of the digital machine.

This understanding of Evolution is supported by how time and temporality, entropy and speed coalesce into themes and tropes in the text. Such issues, along with electricity, signals, subatomic processes, and the like, belong to the evocative lexicon of Heldén, whose writing is, by no coincidence, heavily indebted to the genre of science fiction. On the other hand, these are supplemented by an exploration of processes taking place on a completely different time scale. Heldén’s poetry has always been concerned with questions of ecology and nature and the long durées of natural history, with what has been called “deep time” (see Gould, 1987), which is focused in some of his most recent works, such as Terraforming (2013) and the installation Field (2015) (see http://www.johanneshelden.com).

These themes will also surface in the poetry generated on the computer screen in Evolution. The title, of course, suggests as much. More importantly, such temporalities are also packed into the material and structural conditions of the work. As we observed earlier, the algorithm in Evolution depends on a number of sequences for its output—sequences consisting of datasets culled from sources pertaining to natural phenomena, the weather, and climate change such as “atlas of extratropical storm tracks 1998–1999” or “northern hemisphere land-ocean temperature index in 0.01° Celsius, 1880–2014” or images of bugs and clouds (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Sequence from Heldén and Jonson, Evolution (2014).

Thus it is highly motivated to speak of a sedimented temporality in Evolution—on the one hand, the time of human experience, modulated and refracted by our engagement with books and computers, and on the other hand, the times and worlds of the inhuman or posthuman, either materialized through the microtemporalities of the machine or the macrotemporalities of nature and the planet.

Poetic Media Archaeologies

Evolution can be described as a poetic work obsessed with time, as literature so often has been, but in a manner that is congenial with a present situation marked by the ubiquity of digital media. At the same time—and this must be emphasized—this obsession comes forth partly through a contrast between the digital and print. If the book version of Evolution, with its lines of “unreadable” code, is a reminder of the technical materiality of the digital, of what conditions the mutating clusters of words on the screen make possible—the interface effect—then the reading experience of code on paper, the protracted time and boredom that it evokes, can also be interpreted as an intervention into the seemingly seamless stream of stimuli, quick fixes (likes), and consumption possibilities that shape online experience today.

It is thus productive to pit the book against the computer and treat Evolution as an artistic

media-archaeological investigation. On the one hand, it initiates an exploration of the material and temporal specificities of the computer—an operation of synchronic media archaeology. On the other hand, Heldén and Jonson also employ, in the vein of Zielinski, a diachronic method, by using an old medium (the book) as leverage for disclosing some of the historical conditions of digital media. Not only is the generic book remediated on the screen nostalgically and ironically, but the printed version also becomes a sober reminder of how our interface culture is built on code and signals. Moreover, Evolution shows how our contemporary media landscape, even if often designated as “digital,” is complex and consists of a mix of older and newer media.

Media archaeology is also a productive perspective in approaching the other literary work haunted by time and media that I want to discuss—Fjärrskrift (“Distance Writing,” 2011) by the Swedish writer Lotta Lotass. During the last 15 years, Lotass has published about 20 books hovering between genres—novel, poem, play, essay—while at the same time gravitating toward a set of interrelated topics, such as the hidden spaces of modernity, technology, solitude, science, violence, and exploratory expeditions. She has also, to a high degree, developed a language of her own oscillating between technicity and archaism, and many of her works have explored the material and medial conditions of literature. For example, the novel Den vita jorden (“The White Earth,” Lotass, 2007) consists of a box of 148 loose sheets that the reader can arrange in different ways, thus organizing a narrative of one’s own— an experiment that finds its literary precursors in works such as Marc Saporta’s Composition No 1 (1963) and B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969).

Fjärrskrift continues this line of experimentation with the materiality of literature by taking a step closer to other media and to a hybrid poetic genre such as the artists’ book (for previous readings of the piece, see Olsson 2011, 2015). Published in the spring of 2011, the work would materialize in two forms: as a printout on a paper tape (50 meters long) rolled into a flat cardboard box (Figure 4) and as a movie (1 hour and 2 minutes) showing the printing of the work that was executed by Lotass’s encoding of the poetic text into Baudot (a code invented by Émile Baudot in the 19th century and a precursor to ASCII), feeding the code into a teleprinter, and transmitting it to a receiving machine that once again translated the message and printed it as capital letters on a paper tape (Figure 5). On the screen we see a close-up of the black shiny teleprinter with a mechanical lever that moves up and down on the right hand side and the white paper strip moving across the screen from right to the left and slowly disappearing out of frame.

Figure 4. Fjärrskrift (“Distance Writing,” 2011), the paper strip in a box published by Drucksache.

Figure 5. From the film version of Fjärrskrift (“Distance Writing,” 2013).

It is possible to trace quite a long literary history behind Lotass’s work leading back to Giuseppe Mazzolari’s amazing didactic poem Electricorum (1767), which, among other things, discusses a machina electrica that can be used to send messages across distances in space with the help of electricity (Zielinski, 2006). Furthermore, her work finds a group of relatives in the inventions of the 20th-century avant-garde, such as American poet Bob Brown’s literature-as-film “readies” (McGann, 1993). There are even earlier artistic uses of the teleprinter to be found, such as French lettrist Isidore Isou’s “téléscripteur” from the early 1960s (Bandini, 2003). But, of course, the point of Lotass’s work today is to employ the apparatus as an obsolete or residual medium (see Acland, 2007).

The thematic content of Fjärrskrift touches upon some of the topics mentioned above. One might even tease out the contours of a narrative from the repetitive, lyrical text: Someone is trying to transmit a message to someone (a beloved?) across long distances. The scenery built up includes an arctic landscape or seascape of cliffs, ice, water, waves, and ships. It is an archaic and faraway place marked by silence, even muteness, which is underlined by visually oriented descriptions and metaphors based on words such as stone, statue, and tomb.

Actually, the text, as the title also suggests, explores space and place to a high degree. The visual and optical (light, mirrors, fog, haze, and so on) dominate the poem’s vocabulary. Still, questions of time and temporality are also crucial on a thematic level. The kairotic event of actually saying and sending a message—“säger orden sänder strimmor” (“says the words sends stripes”)—runs as a refrain through the piece, linking, on the one hand, to “sounds,” on the other to “sparks,” both of which evoke communication with electric means. But there is also another kind time that is manifested, related to the stasis produced by a landscape of stone and ice—a time close to the inhuman dimensions of deep time encountered in the poetry of Heldén, and that even seems to approach the end of time: “dagar läggs till dagar läggs till nätter läggs till tid . . . på den plats där tiden själv är orörlig” (“days are added to days to nights to time . . . at the place where time itself is immovable”). Thus, one can argue that the text stages an encounter between the time of human action and passion and a vaster, more indifferent time.

Just as important, however, is the time and temporality embodied in the actual watching and reading of Lotass’s piece. If we venture to deal with the paper strip in the box—a rare “book” printed in 300 copies that is difficult to find today, and expensive to acquire if you do—the reading act will resemble the reading of a scroll or the scrutinizing of encrypted messages received in the war rooms of the last century. Inch by inch we draw the strip between our fingers, palpating the paper as much as deciphering or interpreting the words. The absence of punctuation and the lack of variation between upper- and lowercase letters will probably have disorienting effects, even though the poetic, chanting repetitions will remedy this to a certain degree. In any case, the act of reading will be slower and more tedious than the naturalized movement through a book and will thus set the material medium and the reader’s body as integral parts of the reading experience—and as reminders of how literature is always based on material mediation and is always, then, a bridging of distances.

This material conditioning of the reading act as a temporal experience becomes even more emphasized when we watch the film. Just as with Evolution, the time of the machine will put its mark on the viewing-reading — the speed of the teleprinter is too slow to make for a seamless flow of absorption of words but also too fast to allow for reflective pauses or glances to the side. Moreover, and this is even more pronounced when the work is watched on a big screen, the movement of the strip from right to left is the opposite of the usual reading from left to right, which causes interesting shifts and deferrals, countering the tendency to experience reading as a smooth and disembodied operation. Once again, thus, the technological determination of the experience of time will be manifested and explored in an aesthetically resonant way.

Another similarity between the works of Lotass and Heldén and Jonson is then how they contrast media to denaturalize both the book and digital media of our time. As mentioned above, the act of reading will be disrupted and defamiliarized by the move from the book to the teleprinter strip, forcing out a reading that is aware of its technical and material underpinnings. But Lotass will also, through a diachronic media-archaeological operation, historicize the media of today by bringing up a long and dwindling material history of electricity and coding, writing and reading. At first glance, the use of a teleprinter might come across as a merely nostalgic and retro-futuristic move — only a little more peculiar than some uses of vinyl records or audiotape today. But even if Fjärrskrift can be attributed with such meanings, the work also points out a more specific and partly forgotten history that precedes the design and use of digital media and that thus reminds us of a long time of labor, misplaced intentions, failed inventions, and dead media—the material layers that are part and parcel of the history of the computer.

Concluding Remarks

According to Wolfgang Ernst, a media-archaeological take on media history should not only make us observe the specific ontologies and affordances of the machine but should also have methodological effects on the practice of scholars and critics. Media history cannot be formalized and presented by the means of smooth narration, but the specificities of technical media must transform the analysis and presentation of their effects upon society, culture, and everyday life. Even though it is difficult to find in Ernst a formalized method—and the field of media archaeology is theoretically and methodologically heterogeneous (see Huhtamo and Parikka, 2011) — one might discover ideas on how to proceed in literary and artistic practices that explore the field.

In the works of Heldén and Jonson and Lotass, the media-specific traits of the teleprinter, the book, and the computer are used to reflect upon how media shape our lives and how we might find ways to think through these circumstances while avoiding the ideological traps of immediacy, openness, disembodiment, transparency, and linear technological progress. More specifically, they force us to consider how time and temporality are produced today and yesterday, how they are always codetermined by humans and media technologies, and how this codetermination will always involve imbalances, conflicts, and tensions. In a certain way, time—this “shadow train, life’s white machine,” as Ben Lerner calls it, echoing John Ashbery, in the epigraph for my article—is always utterly inhuman. It just takes place, materialized in the slow transformations of mountains and woods or the rapid processes in digital computers, while we, in our specific finitude, try to translate it and transpose it into the temporalities of human life. And these attempts will always be marked by distortions and deferrals—by Nachträglichkeit, as Freud once named it, within a different theoretical framework.

In this way, we are certainly afflicted by dyschronia—but it is a malady that is perennial, that has always been with us, in different forms, and that is modulated by the media through which we construct our times. To analyze its symptoms and effects, it is necessary to confront, at close range, the specificities of these media. The loss of time and history is thus relative but nonetheless real and intensely experienced. But to articulate productive time poetics and politics in relation to this situation—to critique the 24/7 society, the colonizing of individual and communal experiences, the widespread surveillance practices, the dysfunctional time perspectives of environmental policy, and so on — it is necessary that the analysis on which such poetics and politics is built dis-covers both the historical and material sedimentations of media and their meaning making.

Here the poetic media-archaeological expedition can be an important tactical move. It not only forces us to acknowledge differences and conflicts between temporalities — of man, machine, and mountain — but also their inherent interdependence and the impossibility of escaping to an apparatus-free habitat where a true time awaits to be experienced.

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Lindhé, C. (2014). Evolution = The action of reading. In J. Heldén & H. Jonson, Evolution. Stockholm, Sweden: OEI Editör.

Lotass, L. (2007). Den vita jorden [The white earth]. Stockholm, Sweden: Bonniers.

Lotass, L. (2011). Fjärrskrift [Distance writing]. Stockholm, Sweden: Drucksache.

Lotass, L. (2013). Fjärrskrift [Distance writing; Youtube film version]. Retrieved from:

McGann, J. (1993). Black riders. The visible language of modernism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Olsson, J. (2011). Orden sänder fjärran: Remsor, litteratur och mediearkeologi [Words transmit at a distance: Strips, literature, and media archaeology]. Retrieved from

http://www.drucksache.se/pdf/fjarrskrift_jesperolsson.pdf

Olsson, J. (2014). We have to trust the machine. In J. Heldén & H. Jonson, Evolution. Stockholm, Sweden: OEI Editör.

Olsson, J. (2015). Från kontor till kod [From office to code]. In H. K. Rustad & A. Skaret (Eds.), Alf Prøysen, kunsten og mediene [Alf Pröysen, art, and the media] (pp. 165–187). Oslo, Norway: Novus Förlag.

Parikka, J. (2012). What is media archaeology? London, UK: Polity.

Peters, J. D. (2015). The marvelous clouds: Toward a philosophy of elemental media. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Reynolds, S. (2011). Retromania: Pop culture’s addiction to its own past. London, UK: Faber and Faber.

Zielinski, S. (2006). Deep time of the media (G. Custance, trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Zielinski, S. (2013). [. . . After the media]. News from the slow-fading twentieth century (Gloria Custance, trans.). Minneapolis, MN: Univocal.
the atmosphere of climate change

The Atmosphere of Climate Change

by Nicole Miller

The Atmosphere of Climate Change is a multi-faceted research project undertaken in 2019-2020 that involved interviews, imaginings, media studies, artificial intelligence and the creation of experimental artistic films to explore the atmosphere constructed around the topic of climate change.

for #IV. the medium is the message?

Differens Magazine, winter 23/24

Video: 12 (Media) Neural Network generated images of climate change

Neural Networks and the Study of Atmosphere in Media Images

Me: Is there a media image you recall that reminds you of climate change?

Participant: I don’t have one media image – just a big cloud of stuff that isn’t easily separated.

During an interview with a participant about their memory of climate change images, I was intrigued by the statement that a “big cloud of stuff” was how the topic was mentally revisited. This response alludes to the atmospheric content I wanted to extract from media images, assuming that viewing many images creates an overall atmosphere – a feeling – around the topic of climate change. In order to study the inseparable cloud of atmosphere around images, I implemented the use of a neural network. Atmosphere is a concept that can be difficult to pinpoint due to its invisibility and indescribable qualities, which are sometimes linked to emotions. Therefore, it can be difficult to investigate it. I chose to study the atmosphere through a combination of a defined set of aesthetic properties, such as: color, contrast, shape, and composition. In this way, elements contributing to the construction of an atmosphere can be identified in a quantifiable manner. These properties are similar to those used in art history for interpreting artworks.

Together with individual interviews about imagination, I gathered a collection of 2,000 photographs found on Google Search using terms like “climate change”. There are limitations for a human to analyze a data set this large for commonalities. In addition to the quantitative limitations of human analysis, the complex man-made elements found in the images become an obstacle for discerning the subtle and more aesthetically-based atmospheric qualities of the images. For instance, many of the images contain the earth, but interpreting the images based on color and shape becomes more complicated when human cognitive programming recognizes both the symbolic meaning and signified object in the images. Objective analysis is diverted by human filters which condition humans to be visually literate.

To address this problem, I collaborated with a Research Assistant at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen who worked with machine learning applications in architecture. I collaborated with him to use machine learning as a tool for my analysis. My goal was to have neural networks “think through atmosphere.” In early discussions about the technical details, it became clear that what I wanted to do would not result in clear images of climate change. The method I was interested in is typically used for generating pictures of objects like human faces or animals. Since humans and animals have a particular external form, neural networks can be trained to recognize and replicate them based on common visual similarities in the input data. With climate change, the result would not be the same since the concept is visually elusive and diverse in its representations. In consideration of this, I decided it would be interesting to use neural networks to study an extensive library of climate change media images and then generate images reflective of the collective atmosphere of all of the images.

Artificial Intelligence and the training of neural networks is based on imitating the processes of how the human brain solves problems. The novelty of my machine learning-application is that it is used to reduce human filters, and to allow a formal analysis of the aesthetic patterns present in the collection of images. In particular, during the project’s execution in 2019 and 2020, using neural networks in humanities research was a new approach.

The technical procedure functions similarly to a human’s intake of images. We implemented a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework (Goodfellow, et. al 2014). Training began using 2,000 climate change images as the input data. The training consisted of two networks working together where one, “the discriminative network”, functions as a teacher, and the other “the generative network”, functions as a student (ibid.). The student attempts to create a “climate change photo” beginning with noise, and the teacher judges if it is real or fake based on similarities with the input set, giving feedback to the student on why it is not correct. The student gets better and better at accurately generating something that can pass as a “climate change photo” through repeated attempts and feedback from the teacher. Ultimately, this processual learning results in images that illustrate patterns of aesthetic elements such as color, shape, contrast, and composition, that are deemed by the networks to correlate to climate change photos. I like to think of this as the student imagining climate change. As training progresses, each generation of images gains precision and appears as a smoother, more decisively made image with a higher correlation to the input set. The outcome of the process is similar to human intake of media images, where in the end a single image of climate change may not be memorable. Instead a blur of aesthetic qualities and intuitive feelings of the images one has seen may be more prominent. The neural networks create more precise images in the same way a thought slowly becomes more explicit in a human’s mind or the flow of a film becomes more complex after starting from black.

The training resulted in 16,000 images, depicting the atmospheric qualities of climate change through recognition of the repetitive aesthetic elements in the input set; the generated images serve as a medium for visualizing the atmosphere of climate change. The resulting atmosphere is, interestingly enough, similar to how the interviewees described their imagined climate change objects. This goes to show that there is an apparent connection between the human imagination of a mostly invisible concept like climate change, and the intake of media images. The application of a GAN-framework is novel in that it gives insight into the process of creating an ‘atmosphere’. It makes visible how media contributes to a cultural construction of the atmosphere of climate change, that lives in the imagination of media consumers.

Atmospheric Construction in AI Images

Finding common indices and specific aesthetic properties used to convey ‘climate change’ provides a means to analyze atmospheric construction. This is significant because in the construction of atmospheres lies the ability to influence and exercise power. Deconstructing semiotic commonalities reveals the processes at work, which in turn detracts from the potential influence of images.

The input images used to train the neural networks reflect common indices and symbols of climate change. Charles Sanders Peirce (1991) differentiates between an icon, an index and a symbol; icons resemble what they are depicting, whereas an index gives an indication of what is depicted (e.g. smoke is an index of fire), and a symbol has no relation between the visual depiction and the meaning. The input images of climate change are iconic in that they are photographs which resemble their real-life subjects. A photo of a fire resembles the fire in reality. However, climate change images are iconic in their depiction of specific indices, but not in depicting climate change itself, because climate change cannot be captured in a single photograph. This is why indices are vital to examine; they are the means by which we are able to see climate change through their implication of its existence. One might also argue that many (or even all) depictions of climate change are symbolic. Humans interpret the many images and indices as symbols of the idea of climate change, as they are often removed from a direct connection to their content. An image of Greta Thunberg, for example, is symbolic rather than indexical of climate change. Whereas images of glaciers melting can be considered indexical of the existence of climate change. I would argue that the more a symbolic image is used, the more it can be mistaken for an indexical image. In the example of melting glaciers, every photograph of melting ice taken since the beginning of photography is not necessarily an index of climate change. I find it important to emphasize this, as the symbolic cultural significance of an image can often convolute the precise content depicted.

There are some standard indices in images of climate change that are used to visually signify its existence. Many indices and symbols are repeated in conventional climate change images over and over again creating a visual language. The first is the use of the Earth or the sun changing form. The Earth is often depicted as flaming or melting. The spherical shape is pervasive in many images, even in subtle composition. This was reflected in my interviews as approximately 40% of participants who were asked to give a shape to climate change imagined climate change as a circle, sphere, or ball, often referencing the relationship to the Earth or the sun when asked to reflect on this choice.

Secondly, fire is a standard index of climate change. Many images illustrate the Earth on fire or simply depict large scale fires accompanied by smoke. Many participants cited images of the Amazon burning as influential, which can be explained by the fact that many of the interviews were conducted in 2019, coinciding with large wildfires in the Amazon. As a result, smoke and fire were often found both in the collected Google search images and referenced by participants.

A third common index of climate change is melting ice. The input images I collected show glaciers, glacial retreat, and floodings. Many images are of landscapes in the process of changing through extreme events. Indices like these are typical of visualizing climate change, and the patterns were also represented in interview responses from participants. As such, we can detect their relevance in creating an overall atmosphere around climate change, where their repetition and underlying tone seems to affect imaginings of climate change.

The AI images I’ve generated are reflective of a transition to Delueze and Guattari’s (1987, 570) smooth space. Delueze and Guattari differentiate two different types of spaces: striated space and smooth space. In striated space, a clear orientation and a central perspective is constructed by elements of human engagement. In smooth space, on the other hand, its “orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation” (Deleuze, & Guattari 2013, 573). Conceptually these can be understood as: the concrete and precise derived from the ability of striations to characterize and clarify versus the abstract and imprecise atmosphere of a space characterized by a transitional fluidity. The space of the neural network generated images is less oriented, less clear, and more abstract in its ability to be traditionally interpreted; the training of neural networks demonstrates a means by which to remove the central perspective and human orientation of a 2D image to move from the striated space of a traditional image into a fluid smooth space. In media studies, these new type of images are of potential interest for analyses. Through this process, newly generated climate change images are removed from indices of climate change and instead intuitive elements become more visible. The process used helps to directly visualize the atmosphere of climate change by focusing on invisible abstract qualities and de-emphasizing specific indices and specific objects and environments. In the smooth space of the new images, an underlying atmosphere shaped by the media can be seen. The resulting output can be considered as a deconstructed visual language of climate change communication.

The generated images demonstrate movement, where the feeling of something happening dominates. They appear as harsh in regards to contrast, dynamism of colors, and blurriness of content. The intent of generating neural network images of climate change is not to articulate a precise atmosphere. Atmosphere by definition is often beyond means of verbal articulation which is why I emphasize film and images in my approaches. However, the set of generated images is useful as a tool which allows for underlying aspects of images made by humans and influential on atmospheric construction to become observable. Subtle elements indicative of a constructed way of seeing, through emphasizing a particular atmosphere, are rendered visible.

References

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Goodfellow, Ian, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, and Yoshua; Bengio. 2014.

“Generative Adversarial Networks.” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2014), p. 2672–2680.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1991. Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic, edited by James Hoopes. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
digital mesh

Digital Mesh

Ten fragments from the project “Femton”, 2017 – 2018.

by Max Pihlström

for #IV. the medium is the message?

Differens Magazine, winter 23/24

Fragment I. 21.01.2017

The progress has been slow lately but today I finally crossed some mental hurdles with modest results towards rendering a triangle mesh. In fact I am more inspired than ever nowadays, by things in fields technically outside the scope of this project but which have, as they always have, in significant and even critical ways, supported a matrix carrying ambitions further.

Earlier thoughts around mathematical properties of the schema did not quite yield the crops in shape of epiphanies I was hoping for. I will now go on with an old and proven approach: Keeping things basic

Fragment II. 26.02.2017

It has come to my understanding that the concept of schema on which I have relied much and which I originally borrowed from G. Tourlakis’s book on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, is derived from Kant. Relating to the induction hypothesis of mathematical logic specifically, generally the meaning of Kant’s schema extends to bear upon even the very definition of concept itself. In constituting the rules of production of concepts as comprised of forms/ideas, schemata therefore pertain to the problem of representation.

It’s curious that, when applied to the visual triangulation, I have time and again found the term representation troublesome in its inadequacy to capture a notion of synthesis. Then lately I read G. Deleuze’s critique of the tradition of the metaphysics of representation – the model and its image – for which (in short summary) he wishes to substitute an epistemology of fundamentally affirmative differentiation. In the project of Femton it is precisely the distinguishing power of contour, in all its elusiveness, that has always been key. With an alternative way of constructing contour there arises first and foremost an alternative way of presenting images, as opposed to re-presenting them: imagery as production, not mere acquisition. It’s curious too that Deleuze grounds much of his argument on ideas from calculus and its notation. I have yet to come to terms with how this corresponds with recent developments of embedding differentiable cubic polynomial surfaces in the triangulation.

Fragment III. 12.03.2017

Fragment IV. 5.04.2017

A secondary color buffer can be used for labeling in order to identify which object the cursor is hovering over on mouse clicks. It’s been called a hack, but I find it elegant. It’s both efficient and precise.

Fragment V. 16.04.2017

Essential mesh interactivity is coming along. Unforeseen angles are presented to me, as expected.

Fragment VI. 17.04.2017

Fragment VII. 16.03.2018

After a long hiatus I’m once again working. My approach this time is more bottom-up. As a first step I now have surface segmentation working ~~flawlessly~~. [Edit 24.3.2018: There was a flaw! I believe it’s fixed now but lesson learned I will avoid the previous claim.]

Fragment VIII. 30.03.2018

I’m making progress with how the mesh should be constrained. It will be of a more dynamic nature, that is to say pertaining to what I have previously called the framework (as distinguished from the schema) of the mesh. I expect to be experimenting with different types of iterative diffusion strategies in order to achieve global normalization.

Fragment IX. 17.04.2018

I’m experimenting with mesh diffusion strategies for the middle control node. Plain area minimization by an area cost function with a geometric continuity constraint seems to stabilize well. I’m becoming more open to the idea that this control node is always “floating”, is implicitly defined. But solvable! And its solution should be unique, most preferably. That’s probably the single most important property.

Fragment X. 20.04.2018

Area minimization is a problem with a unique solution. The solution is formal: it may not actually be found, only more or less approximately so depending on the (algorithmic) implementation; and its tractability and implementation specifics may furthermore affect future states of the mesh with possibly diverse outcome. But, at any point, there exists a formal surface. This formal surface is defined by a valid mesh together with the minimization problem and its unique solution.

The mesh is the instruction, the blueprint, from which a surface (i.e. an image) may be constructed and realized. While the realized, actual, observed, de facto surface may differ from the formal surface, this imperfection may still be accepted granted that the deviating realizations, upon operation, will continue to bring about only valid meshes. Importantly, the set of valid meshes should be closed under operation so that the formal surfaces remain within a domain of ideals. The operation itself, however, may well be determined by the much more contingent and virtually undefined surfaces realized in, what you could call, matters of circumstance. There is a separation between the formal and the realized, and yet, also, an asymmetric spiral of communication.

Read more at https://femton15.tumblr.com
infp

Although they may seem quiet or unassuming, Mediators (INFPs) have vibrant, passionate inner lives

by Klara Hjorth

in Swedish

for #IV. the medium is the message?

Differens Magazine, winter 23/24

Jag har blivit så gammal att jag glömt hur man ligger ner. Kan inte längre. Antingen är det för platt eller för mycket, huvudet vridet eller benen uppe. Slutar alltid med att jag ger upp och lägger mig på mage i ”fritt fall”.

jag har gett något som jag skulle vilja ha tillbaka. det var inte meningen. jag trodde att det skulle gå friktionsfritt. jag har sett hur andra har gjort det. jag har bara en riktning, det är inte så mycket mer, jag kan peka, inte så mycket mer.

vissa personer känns som samma personer, dom jag varit tillsammans med har samma kärna.

Om man har tillgång till det fördolda ska man använda det. Helst i fullständiga meningar men min brända hjärna är körd. Min IQ minskar varje år som går. Jag får verkligen skylla mig själv. Min goda plastiska hjärna. Man får högre IQ av att använda språk. Tur för mig jag kan ju go go ga ga

Försöker minnas vad jag gillade att göra ”förut” men jag har bara gillat killar och att göra läxan glosor osv. Ex. frisör är franska. Bok och fönster tyska. Det är synd. Svenskan har bara funnits i tusen år. det är synd. (ta mig inte på orden) Tänk att hela landet först var täckt med is! Inte ens mossan och koltrastarna eller barren fanns. Ska man börja tillbe stenen? Historien är så kort. Så fort man tittar bakåt tar den slut.

Jag försöker vara aktiv i hjärnan, inte bara släpas efter hästen

Jag föddes med ögon (så jag kunde se er) jag föddes med öron (så jag kunde höra er) jag föddes med hjärta (så jag kunde strunta i er).

Det är nog tyvärr mitt kall att vara snäll. Önskar jag ville nåt häftigare. Föreställ er mig göra en pose! nej just det. Mitt ansikte har alltid varit en öppen bok, man tar mig på bar gärning. Mitt ansikte har aldrig gjort mig någon tjänst.

en pappa kan bestämma vem man är. Det är synd. han såg bara det som speglade honom själv. Alla beskyllningar om att jag är innehållslös stämmer därför.

My commitment to authenticity. Jag har aldrig satt en gräns. Jag flyttar mig på varje vink.

The mediator is a relay or a catalyst that is active at the limit of philosophy.

”The middlemen acquires subjectivity in and by the act of mediation. He is performative and exemplary. When he is not in character – when he ceases to do, to act – he disappears. His criterion for success is to stay in the game, the game that deprives him of direct agency and a proper existence.”

Om man inte är någon är det svårt när man blir lämnad. Det blir inget kvar!

Tyson: [1 day ago]

this is very true about me

Lana: [1 day ago]

My sister is a Mediator and I would like to say that you Mediators are really cool!

Madjesticred: [2 days ago]

What a great personality.

Damian: [1 week ago]:

Hi INFPs, ENFJ here Just wanted to tell you all that I appreciate you and that so many of you are the kindest souls I have met and I love how so deeply in tune you are with your feelings. Thank you so much for bringing out the best in us ENFJs

Deep Harmonies: [1 week ago] answer:

Hey.. thank you for your words, they really mean a lot to us INFPs. You’re wonderfully and beautifully made! I enjoy meeting ENFJs, as their personality is so interesting and unique to me. Keep being you! ^^

Loz: [1 week ago]

I did this quiz while literally reading Shakespeare.

Star: [1 month ago]

This very sweet i don’t know my personality like this

Caitlin: [1 month ago]:

i love humanity but sometimes i’m just exhausted
an alternative media materialism

An Alternative Media Materialism

by Jussi Parikka

Excerpt from A Geology of Media by Jussi Parikka. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2015 by Jussi Parikka. Used by permission.

for #IV. the medium is the message?

Differens Magazine, winter 23/24

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).
ceramics and mediality

Ceramics and Mediality

An introduction to the arts and ceramics of Ekta Bagri

for #IV. the medium is the message?

Differens Magazine, winter 23/24

Ekta Bagri is a ceramist and visual artist. Central to her practice is an exploration of clay as a material and a medium. Clay is both a material with its own principles and aesthetic qualities and a medium showcasing human’s relation to earth, exposing historical and political practices of exploitation and coexistence. Through Bagri’s work, human’s connectedness to Earth is made visible.

A central part to Bagri’s practice is researching and experimenting with waste materials. By using soils sourced from construction sites, wild clay found in nature, or by making glazes out of found materials such as animal manure and crushed seashells, she aims both to create a more sustainable art practice and to showcase the aesthetic values in often neglected materials.

By including sound and video elements in her installations, she plays with the traditional conception of ceramics, opening it for further research and reminding us of its transgressive potential.

Ekta Bagri has a BA in Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmiths University of London, and a MA in Ceramics and Glass at Royal College of Art, London. Her work has been shown at, among others, Boomer Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Clerkenwell Design Week, Melt Club, Chrom Gallery and Art Bypass Gallery.

We are very pleased to present an excerpt of her work in the fourth issue of Differens Magazine, The Medium is the Message?

The Clay Cycle, 2023

The Clay Cycle is a series of works where the artist has used ancient construction techniques to press layers of unburnt clay into a mold, thereby forming blocks and walls in which the raw character of the earth is preserved and made visible. Made out of locally sourced materials from places such as construction sites and gardens, the pieces tell a story of their material origin while showcasing earth’s often overlooked aesthetic qualities. By not being fired, the clay can be reused. In this way, the artworks are only one phase of the clay’s life cycle.

Landscape, 2021

The Landscape series are made by firing pieces with wet clay and glazes, creating ‘controlled accidents’ in the kiln. Usually when firing ceramics, the material is supposed to be devoid of any moisture to prevent it from cracking or exploding. Here, the material is allowed to act in unpredictable ways.

Crust, 2022

Crust, 2022 and Sculpture, Untitled, 2022 are both made out of recycled clay from Wimbledon Village construction site, animal and agricultural waste, ashes and waste clay. The glazes are made from crushed sea shells, rice husk, wood ash, nettle, river clay, mountain dirt and sheep manure.

Untitled sculpture, 2022

What happened to the tomatoes?, 2022

Returning to the issue of waste but now from the perspective of food consumption, What happened to the tomatoes? confronts us with what looks like rusted tins of canned tomatoes. This time, however, the tins are made out of clay, asking us what happens to them after we have thrown them away. The ceramic pieces are accompanied by a video and sound installation of exploding tomatoes.

Memory of nature, 2023

Memory of nature shows a distorted and almost chaotic picture of nature. The sculpture sweeps in like a wild wave, taking with it both organic and human made objects. Again returning to the question of the human – nature relationship.

Folded Ceramics, 2020

Exploring clay’s malleability, the pieces form into wave-like shapes, almost appearing frozen mid-motion.
heralds of the ontological turn

Heralds of the Ontological Turn: Re-reading the Toronto school as The Message of Felt Body Worlds

by Maria Rogg

for #IV. the medium is the message?

Differens Magazine, winter 23/24

When she said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”, it was as though she spoke directly to me. I wanted to ask her, “Then, which tools will?”

Minna Salami

Ferments:
- We are discussing under which faculty our media and communication departments are based. Humanities or the Social Sciences?
- Does Big Data analysis provide more useful answers than less tech savvy methodologies?
- My colleague wonders how my phenomenological approach was received. Were there requests for a discursive lens?
These conversational snippets from a PhD-course on classics in media theory resonate positionalities that shape the media and communication discipline since its emergence in the 20^thcentury. Administrative vs. critical research; representation vs. media materiality; and social vs. individual-based approaches indicate the intellectual lineage of a media scholar and continue to provide the constitutive divides through which the discipline develops (Fuchs & Qiu, 2018; Lazarsfeld, 1941). Departing from datafication as a perspective that radically changes our situation and the premises of the discipline, this essay questions if such dualistic organisation is still suitable for attempts to understand, investigate and explain a mediated world – a world in which media technologies and their communication become agents in relation to essentially everything. It turns to canonic texts of the Toronto School, to explore alternatives.

According to Eva Illouz (2003) a text becomes canonic when “it offers a radically new set of metaphors for grasping social reality and reorganizing our understanding of how the social world works” (p. 91). Loyal to the desperate call for reorientation embodied by the interrelated crises of extraction, extinction and objectification, I aim for a provocation of such rethinking by mobilising the “paradigmatic disagreement” (ibid.) of Harold A. Innis (1951/2008) and Marshall McLuhan on mediating media as mere representational powers, by suggesting to re-read ‘The Bias of Communication’ and ‘Understanding Media’ (1964/2001) as early adoptions and media of the ontological turn.

Motivated and discussed along their “language games” (Illouz, 2003, p. 91) in relation to problematizations of datafication as a dualist analytic which implicates major ethico-political challenges, I argue that Innis’ and McLuhan’s style of writing becomes a way of being, knowing and doing their intellectual proposition that the medium of communication affects the message. Thereby Innis and McLuhan themselves literally transform into the medium of situated and embodied knowing as the counter message to datafication as a regime of certainty (cf. Lagerkvist, 2022).

Datafication, the abstraction of “everything” including life into data (Mayer Schönberger & Cukier, 2013, p. 93) changes our situation insofar as it operates the mining of our most intimate experiences for the “capitalization of life without limit” (Couldry & Mejias, 2019). These ‘limitless extractions’ (Couldry & Mejias, 2020) govern inter alia by performing the ideology that calculable reasoning is the only way to explain reality and that data and data-based technology is more accurate, efficient and reliable than human knowledge (van Dijck, 2014).

This changes who studies media, and how they are approached. For Fuchs and Qui (2018) datafication reaffirms the positivist, empiricist origins of media and communication studies (cf. Gitlin, 1978), by embedding “the rise of big data analytics and computational social science” (Fuchs & Qiu, 2018, p. 222) as the dominant paradigm in digital media studies. The view that the query of media is now subject to a social scientific hegemony that advances an “absolutism of pure [digital and quantitative] methodology” is confirmed by Habermas (p. 5, Habermas in ibid.).

On closer inspection however there are trends that complicate this assessment, by reorienting media inquiry towards critical anticipatory and interventionist ends. Applied media studies represents, according to Kirsten Ostherr (2017), an epistemological redirection of “media studies [a]s ideally poised not only to analyse but also to intervene […] new models for understanding humanistic knowledge formation as a productive field that can be “applied” for solving “real-world” problems […]” (Ostherr, 2017, p. 3).

Media studies and the humanities at large are assigned “a new role of critique that goes beyond the description and interpretation of cultural forms to demonstrate how critical perspectives might change or even improve circumstances in the world through direct intervention” (ibid., p. 8). An example is Splichal’s and Mance’s (2018) map of criticality in empirical and non-empirical communication research which intervenes criticality by configuring a non-positivistic network analysis:

“Our analysis was focussed on ontological dimensions of “criticality,” which is taken to mean a future-oriented research perspective aimed at understanding, explaining and transforming dehumanizing and oppressive realities. It should not be seen as an attempt to shift qualitative research toward a positivist approach but rather an effective tool to help qualitative researchers to figure out what lies within the data” (ibid., p. 402)

As “technological artefacts are not neutral intermediaries but actively co-shape people’s being in the world: their perceptions and actions, experience and existence” (Verbeek, 2011, p. 8), the quest for intervention rises in neighbouring domains of media and communication studies such as surveillance studies (Gates, 2011), science and technology studies (de La Bellacasa, 2017), and the philosophy of technology (Haraway, 2016; Verbeek, 2011) as well.

What unites these approaches is averting from the notion of ‘pure information’ (representation), and attending to digital existence: the “point at which data recombine into an identity in the ‘concrete’, ‘corporeal’ and ‘material’ reality” (Ajana, 2010, p. 248). Such existential study of media (technologies) can be seen as a development closely related to the datafication of the self (cf. ibid.; Lupton 2016). Based on the centrality of the body (cf. Ajana, 2010; Ajana, 2013; Fuchs, 2020; Lagerkvist et al., 2022) and a conceptualization of subjectivity as singular-plural (Nancy, 2000) – unique, yet innately relational –media research on the self and the social gradually conjoin in questions about being.

The literature reviewed suggests a growing identification of media studies with ontological questions that disorder the constitutive dualisms and dichotomies of the discipline. The orientation at the relational dimensions of life, the lived experience of becoming-with the world (Haraway, 2016), indicate a heightened interest and urgency in the ethico-political stakes of media as technologies of the self that play a constructive role for our ways of being, knowing and doing. The affiliation of media studies with such postdualist academic trends known as the ontological turn (Escobar, 2018, p. xi), is not entirely new to media theory, despite being a fairly recent development. A rather clear line can be drawn to the environmental media materialism of the Toronto School which I will present, complicate and discuss in the following sections.

Breaking boundaries

Media as our situation

Harold Adams Innis conceptualized media as environments and infrastructures that sustain the lifeworld of ideas (Blondheim, 2003). The writing style of ‘The Bias of Communication’, and the concepts of time and space bias; knowledge monopoly; and inverted determinism could be regarded as the grammar for comprehending the more notorious figure of the Toronto School, Marshall McLuhan and his punchline the medium is the message. Innis focused on the nature of knowledge and its role in society as shaped by the dominant media of its time throughout history. By theorizing mediated time and space bias as a stabilizing, disrupting and recreational force for social change, he introduced the elemental dimension of media. Related to the resilience of a message over space or over time, he assigned certain media, such as oral forms of communication like the pyramids or clay (Innis, 2008, pp. 33, 34), greater efficiency in transporting knowledge over time (time-biased media), while he distinguished other media, particularly written or broadcasted forms of communication, as more successful in delivering knowledge across space (space-biased media). According to Innis, a bias arises, because “[…] the use of one medium of communication over a long period to some extend determines the character of knowledge […]” (ibid., p. 34).

Oral cultures, e.g., succeed in keeping knowledge alive through maintaining a concrete intergenerational continuity through rituals and storytelling, which can be observed in many indigenous cultures that have the ’living knowledge’ of how to integrate human and nonhuman activity without causing harm¹. The limitations on the durability of oral knowledge bind and bias oral societies to its past, while space-biased societies convey information over long distances but have short exposure times. Space-biased societies are thus threatened by their discontinuity in time. In line with McLuhan, Innis worried about the extreme imbalance of time and space-based media in the Western world, which, during that time, tended almost exclusively in the direction of space (Blondheim, 2003, p. 168). It confirmed his hypothesis that the media bias of a society implies a dynamic towards knowledge monopoly, because the dominant medium, in its amplified and perpetuated forms, entrenches its effects on society and blocks the emergence of alternatives.

“Media are essentially an apparatus that provides for the interface of mind and matter – a technical resource that sustains the lifeworld of ideas. By achieving a monopoly, a certain communication apparatus may become the sole provider of physical infrastructure for communications, and thus dominate the nature of knowledge and its diffusion” (ibid., p. 170).

The mental and ideological restrictions implied are illustrated by the consequences of rationalism as a knowledge paradigm institutionalized through print (McLuhan, 2001) which effectively blocked situated, relational and embodied ways of knowing as feasible alternatives. Constructed upon the division between body and mind as mind and matter (Descartes, 1990), this knowledge monopoly dominates based on the alleged superiority of scripted intelligence – today data – used to measure, manage and govern through means of abstraction.

Data complicate things, because they transcend time and space. Data aren’t disposable, but extract our movement as a disposable terrain (Zuboff, 2019). By transporting information across time and space data predict and model the future (Lagerkvist, 2020; ibid.). One way of approaching this would be conceptualizing humanity itself as a technology of measurement, a human machine model based on universal computation as suggested by the media ontology of Friedrich Kittler (Kittler, 2009; 1999). A related, but more expectant approach which better seizes Innis’s confidence in human agency (Blondheim, 2003) is that of elemental media. In line with Innis, John Durham Peters (2015) thinks media as environmental, “as part of the habitat, and not just as semiotic inputs into people’s heads” (p. 5)². As a “gel for growing culture” media compose “a communication environment in which [they] have become equipment for living in a more fundamental way [ …].

Today natural facts are media, and cultural facts have elemental imprint: We can see the internet as a means of existence, in some way closer to water, air, earth, fire, and ether, in its basic shaping of environments” (Peters, 2015, pp. 3, 4, 45). Media have become our situation through which we constitute ourselves as relational beings through communication (Lagerkvist, 2022). Accordingly, media scholar Amanda Lagerkvist suggests to reconceive of media as existential media that envelop and ground us, but that also provide our core tools and ethical task of giving gestalt to our coexistential terrains (Lagerkvist, 2017). We have a role to play.

Such conceptualization of media as “the building blocks and the bricks of being” (Lagerkvist, 2022, p. 16) is based on the existentialist communication theory of Karl Jaspers (1956/2013), for whom “[…] humans are relational beings, whose existence, identity, and humanity depend on intersubjective communication (Lagerkvist, 2017, p. 134). As sustainers of our lifeworld, the phenomenological ground of all intersubjective knowledge in lived experience that is arranged relative to perceiving subjects (Husserl, 1936/1970, p. 142) media become “containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible” (Peters, 2015, p. 17). As our infrastructures and ‘modes of being’ media encompass existential, ethical and ecological bearings (ibid.) and demands.

Innis’s embrace of this task can be traced in his idiosyncratic style of research, which I interpret as a tribute to the fact that our knowledge, while being extended due to various media technologies, is still always fragmentary, within limits, and that “the direction of technology cannot be looked for in technology itself, but must be thought of in a conscious ethos” (Jaspers in Lagerkvist forthcoming, 46). Thus, I suggest that it should be regarded as a style of writing towards the ontological turn. Reading ‘The Bias of Communication’ “is a unique experience” (Blondheim, 2003, p. 164) for being an exhibit of situated knowledge, riddled with contradictions, inconsistencies and bothersome closed individual statements which demand from the reader to create her own gestalt in response to it. Its cultivation of inconclusiveness reminds us of “the limits of our aspirations to comprehensive knowledge, to certainty, and to resolution” (Lagerkvist, 2017, p. 6) and proposes to embrace the ontological and existential tensions and irreducibilities which media co-constitute. “The Bias […] inconclusive but intriguing, begs development and extension, as if anticipating its subsequent re-creators” (Blondheim, 2003, p. 163). Innis’s “unique strategy for communicating scholarship” (ibid., p. 162) cultivates communication as the essence of lived experience, our singular, relational and embodied existence.

According to Innis, “a bias, if recognised, will generate a counter-bias as a corrective, in the cause of equilibrium” (Blondheim, 2003, p. 169). That is the ratio of inverted determinism. By intervening this counter-movement to rebalance knowledge monopoly, Innis postulated that individuals and society have the power to shape their environment by rearranging their media ecology (ibid.). While our “Coded Bias”
(Buolamwini & Gebru, 2018) indicates that today’s inversion might require a reconceptualization of limits (Lagerkvist, 2022), the quest to attentively observe, problematize and act upon how media shape our life through time and space remains.

Acknowledging the inseparability of ethics, ontology and epistemology when engaging in (scientific) knowledge production, with the world itself, and its human and non human inhabitants (Barad, 2007, p. 90), provides an important step. If, as Peters says, “science is ontologically generative” (2015, pp. 40, 41), a reorientation of science away from an ontology of numbers (Fuchs, 2020; Lagerkvist, 2022) towards a relational ontology, might provide the desperately needed corrective to sustain life lived in and through elemental media.

Becoming media

McLuhan’s methodological choices, I argue, are detailed pointers for such reorientation in media and communication research. They aren’t made explicit, yet they fundamentally embed, operationalize and engage the qualitative nucleus of his work. The implicit, the disjointed and the resulting sensuous wanderings of the recipient encompass a methodological ratio, which, akin to Innis, make McLuhan’s style of writing a style of research: the non-linearity and inconsistency, the poetic, the ‘arbitrary’ or emergent connections drawn, the humor, the enforced harmony of competing arguments, the stubborn breaching of disciplinary norms and boundaries lead to the exceptional stringency of his theory, the power of his message. Beyond that, and of greater significance for the present text, his work becomes alive. McLuhan’s methodology triggers. It demands a sensuous response that might be best pinned as the corporeal intellectual state of wakefulness. It is a trade between felt positionality – involvement, imagination, and judgment – and deliberation that I would like to suggest as a directive for a metaphysical critique: a corrective towards the living body.

Rather than media themselves, I would argue that the central subject of McLuhan’s medium theory is the body, corresponding to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment theory (1945/2013) which posits that my body is my perspective upon the world as it shapes how I experience and reshape it. Just as Merleau-Ponty, McLuhan departs from the notion that we cannot understand perception in abstraction from its concrete corporeal condition; a practical, embodied agency that precedes our conscious reflection (ibid., p. xiii). For McLuhan, media are extensions of human senses which introduce, translate and naturalize perceptive patterns that shape human action and thought (McLuhan, 2001).

The phenomenal world is, thus, co-constituted through mediated corporeality. Related to the embodied medium specificity, the body provides a particular point of view, a worldview so to say. By attending to the experiential qualities afforded or amputated by media as means for the social, the bias in McLuhan’s terms concerns translation rather than communication, as the habituation of an extended sense can have a numbing effect that naturalizes alienation. By the concept of ‘autoamputation’ which turns us into servants of technology, McLuhan addresses a form of sensuous deskilling that results from outsourcing our experience to ‘hot media’, media that saturate and isolate the senses:

“The selection of a single sense for intense stimulus […] rallies a response of general numbness […] meaning that while neglecting all the others, humans adopt to their corrupted sense in use. As a consequence of subliminal acceptance and common embrace, humans turn into objects of the stimulating extension, possibly producing a cultural lag” (McLuhan, 2001, p. 45).

The common embrace of such objectification is favoured by mistaking content to be the media effect, while it in fact serves as a sort of mimicry for the medium effect to mature. Media are, thus, neither objects nor concepts, but powers that “alter the sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without resistance” (McLuhan, 2001, p. 19). As “effects involve the total situation, and not a single level of information movement” (ibid., p. 28) the world and the perceiving subject emerge in and through media as two poles of one structure. Yet, we navigate through life based on abstractions of experience that dissect, dichotomize and hierarchize our being-in-the world and corrupt our sense for what media and bodies are and do.

To McLuhan, this disorder is rooted in literacy, as “‘text-based thinking’ meant taking a ‘fixed point of view’ and searching for a fixed ‘truth’; being concerned with linear, logical sequence, emphasizing the mechanical over the organic; separating action from reaction and thought from emotion; focusing on what is happening at the ‘center’ of society, while ignoring activity at the ‘margins’; carefully categorizing and classifying objects, animals, people, and ideas; working toward a discrete niche for every thing (and every body), so that all would be in their designated places” (Meyrowitz, 2003, pp. 191, italics added).

The result is that “we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology” (McLuhan, 2001, p. 16), entrenching that “our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used what counts, is the numb stance of a technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind” (McLuhan, 2001, p. 19). In this biased legacy data acquire their hybrid energy as an overheated cross fertilization of money and code, concealed by the rhetoric of the empowering web that we continue to handle as if it was cool.

It does make “all the difference if a hot medium is used in a hot or cool culture” (ibid., p. 33), because, actually, surveillance capitalism did not “strip away” our “illusion that the networked form has some kind of indigenous moral content, that being ‘connected’ is somehow intrinsically pro-social, innately inclusive, or naturally tending toward the democratization of knowledge” (Zuboff, 2019, p. 7). This break boundary was passed in narcissus style, while we adopt metric ways of being and knowing until there’s no flesh left to chew on.

“All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new form […] and just as a metaphor transforms and transmits experience, so do the media. […] That is what is meant when we say that we daily know more and more about man. We mean that we can translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of expression that exceed ourselves. In the electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of our consciousness. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive.” (McLuhan, 2001, pp. 63, 64)

A renaissance of McLuhan seems highly intuitive given the essential role our technologies of extraction play in “the ecological crisis as a crisis of what the dominant culture has made of reason” (Escobar, 2018, p. 95). The erosion of our planet (Crawford, 2021), surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) and the inhumane objectification of the existential body (Lagerkvist, forthcoming) are, as interrelated crises, implications of datafication as our time’s “broad, and largely implicit configuration of knowledge that significantly shapes the knowledge produced without the awareness of those producing it” (Escobar, 2018, p. 92). They stem from reducing life to signification in and through media technologies which strip bodies of their embodied agency to rule over life by means of a lifeless copy.

To conceive of human (and non-human) bodies as res extensa (Descartes, 1990) in disregard of their relationality, is a project firmly rooted in the rationalistic paradigm of which the distinction and subordination of lived experience to reason is the essential feature (Turner, 2008). By assuming that our senses deceive us and require taming through ‘pure’ intellect³we’re caught up in a logocentrism which literally incorporates ontological dualism, by integrating the body into the subject-object divide. Suggesting that bodies resemble all other forms of devalued matter, the body is objectified, exploited and and governed like a thing.

“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private company, or like giving the earths to a company as a monopoly. […] As long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse” (McLuhan, 2001, p. 75).

But fortunately, McLuhan also helps us to see, feel and awake to alternatives by reversing the human machine metaphor of functions to shed light on the phenomenological body as a medium and metaphor for relations. “For in operating in society with a new technology, it is […] the entire system that is changed. Each new impact shifts the ratios of all the senses” (ibid., pp., 70, 71):

“Our very word ‘to grasp’ or ‘apprehension’ points to the very process of getting at one thing to another, of handling and sensing many facets at a time through more than one sense at a time. […] ‘Touch’ is not skin but the interplay of the senses and ‘keeping in touch’ or ‘getting in touch’ is a matter of fruitful meeting of the senses, of sight translated into sound and sound into movement, and taste and smell. 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 senses, and presenting the result as a unified image to the mind. In fact, this image of a unified ratio among the senses was long held to be the mark of our rationality […]” (ibid., pp. 66, 67).

Here, “the body is not an I think”, but “a grouping of lived through meanings which moves towards its equilibrium” (Crossley, 2012, p. 134). “Accomplished at each moment of existence […] consciousness is being toward the thing through the intermediary of the body” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2013, p. 91) Consciousness is embodied knowledge as bodily integrity. The body is the message. And as such, it has emancipatory potential. Consequently, McLuhan lifts aesthetics, the cultivation of sensual perception, as a site for freedom. Essentially, the artist’s engagement of her senses brings about an awareness of her situation – “the nature of the present” (McLuhan, 2001, p. 72) – that allows her to confront control by anticipating the transforming vision and awareness that media provide, and engage with it intentionally (ibid., p. 66). When describing this quality, McLuhan adopts a phenomenological stance, as he sees the artist’s ability to embrace “the discontinuities of present experience with their demand for sensitive inspection and appraisal” based in “the power for encountering the present actually” (ibid., pp. 76, 77). Thus, the artist “is the man (sic) of integral awareness” (ibid., pp. 72, italics added). Artistic and designerly ways of knowing become existential media techniques that put us in touch with reality by shedding light on “the indivisible relation between the formation of the world of human fabrication and the making of mankind itself (Fry, 2012, p. 1).

The Medium and the Light

As much as Innis’s and McLuhan’s visions may be disparaged as apolitical and deterministic, they provide us with unique metaphors that can explain the central relation between media technologies and ways of knowing which constitute society for better or worse (cf. Sharma & Singh, 2022). By pinpointing how living ‘on automation’ deskills our sense for the existing and reduces life to a mere ‘fact’, they help us to think the interdependencies of power structures that bring about the existential crises that we face. As extensions of our bodies, media shape our perception and the institutions in and through which society organizes itself. Practically, our central nervous system has been extended to include all of humanity – and all of humanity runs together in each of us (Gustafsson, 2016, p. 40 ). Outsourcing our soma “the self that is a united whole of mind and body, in which our physical being produces and affects our thinking, and our mental and emotional experiences influence physical outcomes” (Hook, 2018, p. 3) compromises an ethos of incommensurability that concerns each being.

By reminding us of our unique, relational bodies situated in this ecology Innis and McLuhan pronounce that media matter existentially and suggest to approach technology through the thick and impure involvement evoked by their texts. By writing otherwise they counteract the dualist categorization and hierarchical classification of differences that media technologies co-constitute. For media scholars this suggests approaching research interventions as an opportunity to fully exploit our material: both by problematizing how media operate dualist configurations of being, and, by rationalizing how they embody alternatives. For media are and always will be in between⁴. Media are manifestations of ontological becoming par excellence. Accordingly, Ajana suggests that we “need to explore new ways of ‘performing’ academic writing, ways that blur the boundaries between the creative/experimental and the scholarly/academic […] that can implant the researcher straight at the heart of the burning socio-political and ethical issues in a radically embodied and affective way” (Beer, 2014, p. 331).

Rich stimuli for such activity, I would argue, can be found in emergent literature- lab- and cyber cultures that engage alternative approaches to metaphysics, such as dreaming, alchemy, or witchcraft, to test how radical ontological and epistemological shifts could feel. Examples are the books of Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) and Ursula K. Le Guin (1996), and the holistic works by Giulia Tomasello (https://gitomasello.com/), Dreaming beyond AI (https://dreamingbeyond.ai/en), and Queering the Map (http://lucaslarochelle.com/queering-the-map). They challenge the rational by the immeasurable by fleshing out the intelligible limits of metric measurement. Such limits expose the existential implications of today’s media technologies and suggest to endorse sensuous knowledge in order to breach the “robotic way that dominates how we view knowledge today” (Salami, 2020, p. 17). By proposing that “perhaps, incoherency does not signal a lack of meaning, but an excess of it” (Larochelle, 2022), they actualize the Torontonian faith in reversals as a method of hope.

Epilogue

The posthumous compilation The Medium and the Light. Reflections on religion (McLuhan, 2010) edited by McLuhan’s son, conveys that his father’s theories and spirituality were profoundly interlinked. As a classically educated literary scholar McLuhan was well versed in the Bible and Catholic philosophy. Once he decided to further explore the Christian faith, he chose to do so on its own terms. He kneeled and repeated the same prayer for several years: “Show me”. And ‘suddenly’, ‘instantly’ and ‘not in any expected way’, McLuhan was shown. The Medium and the Light restores what McLuhan perceived as a religious understatement in today’s media development. He saw a parallel between the Christian faith’s deepest secret about the world as the body of Christ and the media development that binds together and enables encounters and interaction across the earth. In the external sense, the world is becoming ”a single body” through media (Gustafsson, 2016).

Footnotes:

¹Cultures that have been denied and dispossessed for centuries, which points to a particularly problematic shortcoming of McLuhan’s reductive and apolitical theories of ‘tribal cultures’, ‘tribalization’ and racialized and gendered culture per se as emphasized in the crucial anthology edited by Sharma, S., & Singh, R. (2022). Re understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan. Duke University Press.

²This is, of course, the realm of Marshall McLuhan who will be discussed at length further below, once Innis’s contribution is satisfied.

³A configuration of knowledge that ‘translates’ mind to reason to science to fact which founds our faith in computational processes (and artificial intelligence) as autonomous and objective analysis.

⁴Or middling, as John Durham Peters remarks Peters, J. D. (2022). What Is Not a Medium. Communication +1, 9(1).

References

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Ajana, B. (2010). Recombinant Identities: Biometrics and Narrative Bioethics. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 7(2), 237-258. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673- 010-9228-4

Ajana, B. (2013). Governing through biometrics: The biopolitics of identity. Springer. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Meeting the universe halfway, Beer, D. (2014). The Biopolitics of Biometrics: An interview with Btihaj Ajana [Interview]. Theory, Culture & Society, 31, 329-336.

https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276414546380

Blondheim, M. (2003). Harold Adams Innis and his bias of communication. V E. Katz in drugi (ur.): Canonic Texts in Media Research: 156–190. In: Cambridge: Polity Press.

Buolamwini, J., & Gebru, T. (2018). Gender shades: Intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification. Conference on fairness, accountability and transparency,

Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. (2019). Data colonialism: Rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject. Television & New Media, 20(4), 336-349. Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2020). The costs of connection: How data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. Stanford University Press. Crawford, K. (2021). The atlas of AI. In The Atlas of AI. Yale University Press. Crossley, N. (2012). Phenomenology and the Body. In Routledge handbook of body studies (pp. 142-155). Routledge.

de La Bellacasa, M. P. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds (Vol. 41). U of Minnesota Press.

Descartes, R. (1990). Meditations on First Philosophy: A Bilungual Edition (G. Heffernan, Trans.). University of Notre Dame Press. . (1641)

Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.

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Fry, T. (2012). Becoming human by design. A&C Black.

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Fuchs, T. (2020). Verteidigung des Menschen: Grundfragen einer verkörperten Anthropologie. Suhrkamp Verlag.

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Gates, K. A. (2011). Our Biometric Future. New York University Press. Gitlin, T. (1978). Media sociology: The dominant paradigm. Theory and society, 6(2), 205-253.

Gustafsson, L. (2016). “Klokast är den som vet att han inte vet” (Sokrates) Om bildning och bildningssyn i det nya komplexiten. Kristen humanism, 17(Kultur som motstånd och motkraft), 39-52.

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Manifestly haraway (Vol. 37). U of Minnesota Press. Hook, K. (2018). Designing with the body: Somaesthetic interaction design. MIT Press.

Husserl, E. (1936/1970). The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr. In: Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill.

14

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Innis, H. A. (2008). The bias of communication. University of Toronto Press. Jaspers, K. (1956/2013). Philosophie: II. Existenzerhellung. Springer. Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed editions.

Kittler, F. (2009). Towards an ontology of media. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(2-3), 23-31.

Kittler, F. A. (1999). Gramophone, film, typewriter. Stanford University Press. Lagerkvist, A. (2017). Existential media: Toward a theorization of digital thrownness. New Media & Society, 19(1), 96-110.

https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816649921

Lagerkvist, A. (2020). Digital Limit Situations: Anticipatory Media Beyond ‘The New AI Era’. Journal of Digital Social Research (JDSR), 2(3), 16-41.

Lagerkvist, A. (2022). Existential media: a media theory of the limit situation. Oxford University Press US.

Lagerkvist, A., Tudor, M., Smolicki, J., Ess, C. M., Eriksson Lundström, J., & Rogg, M. (2022). Body stakes: an existential ethics of care in living with biometrics and AI. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01550-8 

Lagerkvist, A. T., M.; Smolicki, J.; Ess, C. M.; Eriksson Lundström, J.; Rogg, M. (forthcoming). Body Stakes: An Existential Ethics of Care in Living with Biometrics and AI. AI & Society: Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Communication.

Larochelle, L. Queering the Map. http://lucaslarochelle.com/queering-the-map,  retrieved 26.4.2022.

Larochelle, L. (2022). X≠Y∴Z. Dreaming Beyond Ai.

https://dreamingbeyond.ai/en/f/pluriverse/ai-relationality/x-y-z

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Mayer-Schönberger, V., & Cukier, K. (2013). Big data: a revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think. John Murray Publishers.

https://go.exlibris.link/f7ZhSwmz

McLuhan, M. (2001). Understanding Media. Taylor & Francis Group. https://go.exlibris.link/W3ySltMp 

McLuhan, M. (2010). The medium and the light: reflections on religion and media. Wipf and Stock Publishers.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/2013). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge. Meyrowitz, J. (2003). Canonic Anti-text: Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, Canonic Texts in Media Research: Are There Any? Should There Be? How about These? Elihu Katz et al. In: Cambridge, Polity Press.

Nancy, J.-L. (2000). Being singular plural. Stanford university press. Ostherr, K. (2017). Applied Media Studies: Interventions for the Digitally Intermediated Age. In Applied Media Studies (pp. 1-22). Routledge. Peters, J. D. (2015). The Marvelous Clouds. University of Chicago Press. Peters, J. D. (2022). What Is Not a Medium. Communication +1, 9(1). Salami, M. (2020). Sensuous knowledge: A Black feminist approach for everyone. Bloomsbury Publishing.

15

Sharma, S., & Singh, R. (2022). Re-understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan. Duke University Press.

Splichal, S., & Mance, B. (2018). Paradigm (s) lost? Islands of critical media research in communication journals. Journal of Communication, 68(2), 399- 414.

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Turner, B. S. (2008). The body and society: Explorations in social theory. Sage. van Dijck, J. (2014). Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and ideology. Surveillance & society, 12(2), 197-208. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v12i2.4776 Verbeek, P.-P. (2011). Moralizing Technology. University of Chicago press. Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power: Barack Obama’s books of 2019. Profile books.
Sweeping (Figure 2224), 2016, Lisa Torell

Amanda Winberg

for #III. pure danger / dangerous purity

Differens Magazine, winter 22 / 23

Introduction

For over a decade, the Swedish artist Lisa Torell has been exploring the intricacies of the public realm through her art practice. Utilizing a site-specific approach, she engages with chosen places and situations, creating contexts that reveal and challenge the structures and purposes of the specific location. Torell holds that every public space is unique and shaped by cultural, social, aesthetic, and political factors. Through her work, she examines for instance how the welfare state is manifested in urban environments and public spaces, while revealing the presence and absence of care and attention.

Torell’s process involves close investigations of the site, as she’s working during both day and night to discover signs of care and consideration as well as neglect. Her art practice is a combination of observation and participation, relating both to the observer and the observed, as she often invites the viewer to participate in discovering the complexities of these interralations alongside her. In this manner, society and social systems are gradually exposed through collective analyses of paving stones, detritus, imprints, and their textures.

In her piece The Pavement, a Masterpiece, she takes the audience on an ethnographic city walk through Tromsø, to engage the participants in the environment. She talks about the many relatable transitions of being human; the experience of being on our four legs, sitting in a baby stroller, or taking the baby stroller down a little too steep ramp, or of being on crutches. In this work, she talks of the implementation of pavements, street lights, and emphasizes the importance of the tactile differences between gravel, asphalt, and wavy concrete slabs, not for their aesthetic value but for the guidance they provide for those with impaired sight. She points out how this urban planning feels in our bodies and that, if this type of urban planning fails, many citizens would not even be visible in the public spaces. The Pavement, a Masterpiece thus make a great example of how Torell highlights and deals with the ways in which society and individuals positions themselves in relation to visual and spatial codes.

Torell’s artistic focus also extends to semi-public spaces, such as fenced-in parks, art museums, libraries, shopping malls, and swimming pools, which have limitations like controlled opening hours, membership, or entrance fees. For Torell, public spaces are society’s open stage, where politics and reality are constantly played out. She sees the white cube of the art institution or museum as a space for possible visions or speculations of society, which in turn foster forms of perception and modes of perspective.

Her work also explores the agency of art and the ways in which artistic methods can communicate, open up, and embody the politics of places. In her performances, she uses performativity as a tool, since it enables her to work with the presence in every moment and situation that may arise. While performance is acting, performativity is the unique occurrence of an act and the way it unfolds in the presence. [1]

Many of her works are developed outdoors at special locations, and it seems as if she is always seeking ways of working that allow for her to make use of the situations that arise on site, in collaboration with the audience and other foreseen or unforeseen agents. In her work Take Care of the Garbage from 2017, for example, she asks a member of the audience to help her carry garbage, creating a moment of uncertainty that elevates the sense of presence and establishes a sharpening of the senses, provoking new situations and experiences to take form.

For Lisa Torell, public and semi-public spaces offer opportunities for both private and universal experiences. They are spaces where we can reflect on ourselves, compare ourselves, and discover ourselves. Through her work, she invites us to consider the ways in which these contexts shape and are shaped by our communal experiences and perspectives.

Sweeping (Figure 2224)

In her work Sweeping (Figure 2224), Torell explores the complexities of public space and the role of those who maintain it. The piece, which was performed in the backyard of the Istanbul-based gallery Depo, finds the artist meticulously cleaning an asphalt surface in the district-specific municipal orange-red summer uniform typically worn by street and park maintenance workers. As she sweeps away gravel and dirt, a searchlight illuminates her, casting her actions in a powerful and evocative light. This performance allowes for reflections on the ongoing conflicts in the city at the time, as well as on those who had the task of cleaning up after the demonstrations and conflicts. She specifically raises questions about uniforms (park attendants, police, and nurces), trying to investigate if attitudes and general respect towards workers wearing uniforms had changed.The artist also raises important questions about the purpose and function of public space, whose history and experiences may be considered to be swept away when it is cleaned. Throughout her performances, Torell exposes herself not only to the audience but also to the unpredictability of public areas. She willingly puts herself at risk and leaves her comfort zone in order to push herself into a state of total presence and experimental fervor in the present moment. She emphasizes the need to be inventive and to juggle with contexts and materials in order to increase concentration for everyone and notes that a successful situation is often one that verges on failure. This concept of ”slight trembling” is key to her work as it allows for experimentation and interaction.

Sweeping (Figure 2224), 2016, Lisa Torell

Take Care of the Garbage

In the already mentioned work Take Care of the Garbage, an artwork performed by artist Lisa Torell in Venice in 2017, the artist delves into the theme of urban duality, exploring the distinction between what is visible and invisible within the city. Through a series of observations and recordings made during both day and night, Torell juxtaposes the image of laundered clothing hanging on clotheslines in certain areas with the covert disposal of wastewater by the Hilton hotel into the sea. For this piece, Torell spent ten consecutive nights traversing various neighborhoods in the city, filming and recording soundscapes. This process culminated in a silent public walk, during which Torell carried a week’s worth of collected garbage to a designated disposal location. As she moved through the city’s narrow alleys, the sound of cans and glass bottles clinking together provided a sensory accompaniment to the work. Take Care of the Garbage exposes as such the gap between the public representation of the city and its unseen workings, and encourages the viewer to consider the impact of identity versus global necessity.

Take Care of the Garbage, 2017, Lisa Torell

Another work Differens Magazine is honored to present in this issue is Human Population, a series of performative city walks performed between 2016 and 2020 by Lisa Torell, where the artist leads groups of participants on guided tours of various urban centers in Sweden, including Norrköping, Sundbyberg, and Västerås. Through close examination of these public spaces, and of how their spatial and visual codes are understood, the group discovers the societal care, visual priorities in the urban environment, and its direct bodily consequences. As a part of the performance, Torell spreads out a large, translucent sheet of construction plastic on the ground in front of various buildings and on streets and creates frottages with a rubbing technique that gradually reveals the structure of the ground beneath. With tape measures and spirit level, she checks the centimeters and their degrees in relation to accessibility laws. She points out that together, this creates a 1:1 imprint or souvenir over the factual political reality. [2] Through this process, Torell also speaks about the history of accessibility as a human right, exploring themes of voting rights and inclusion in society. Additionally, she points out the significance of the difference between asphalt and wavy concrete pavers to highlight the importance of directional lines and how they can aid those with impaired vision.

Human Population, 2016-2020, Lisa Torell

What Was Seen, Could Be Seen

The work What Was Seen, Could Be Seen, was concieved within the interdisciplinary project ”Residency-in-Nature, Mammas hus i Lainio” that Lisa Torell, together with Åasa Jungnelius and Hans Isaksson, were artistic leaders and participants in. The project took place in the northern village of Lainio in Norrbotten, Sweden in 2018 and 2019, where she and other practitioners lived and worked for limited periods during the years. This rural area is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the Torne Lappmark. Throughout the history of this area, several mapping acts took place, and some more brutal than others. By using drone filming and environmentally friendly chalk spray Torell wanted to draw attention to the act of mapping; what it does to us, places, landscapes, and regions. Through her participation in the project, the work explored the relationship between public and private spaces, land, landscape, and ownership, hierarchies. It also embraced the differences in working as an artist and as a curator. In a region where mapping has been shaped by the process of Swedification and eugenics, Torell’s work came to reflect on questions about the intersection of these histories and their impact on the present.

What Was Seen, Could Be Seen, 2018-2019, Lisa Torell

Noise Reduction and Glitches, Echoes from the Past and Future

In recent time, Torell’s artistic exploration has centered on the digital society, particularly in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on our interactions and communication through screens. Through her recent work, she discusses the shifting boundaries between the public and private spheres in the context of digital practices, particularly focused on the ”semi-public” spaces of the home office. One notable work, exemplifying this, is Torell’s 24-minute long sound installation Noise Reduction and Glitches, Echoes from the Past and Future, which invites visitors to reflect on the human body, individual and social responsibility in a potential future society. Through this piece, Torell encourages visitors to consider various possible scenarios and needs as they navigate the traffic intersection and connection point at Korsvägen in Gothenburg.

The sound installation is a thought-provoking exploration of the meaning of humanity in the year of 2070, and of what this meaning says about our present. The piece thus blurs the boundaries between present and future, as well as utopia and dystopia. Concepts that were once purely science fictional become everyday reality. The work also reflects on the ways in which our bodies and society are being both enhanced and degraded through advancements in technology, genetics, and the manipulation of environments. The narrator’s voice moves between different times and viewpoints to convey a sense of a world in transition. Through its evocative soundscapes and thought-provoking narrative, the installation prompts listeners to question what they are choosing not to see today that is shaping the future, and what they refused to see in the past that they must now live with.

This project, whose 24-minute audio part Difference Magazine is very proud to have the opportunity to present on our website, was produced by the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art in collaboration with the City of Gothenburg’s Traffic and Public Transport Authority, Cultural Affairs Administration and Göteborg Konst as a part of the West Link Project. The installation can be listened to through the GIBCA app or on the website with earbuds while you are walking around in the surroundings close to the travel center at Korsvägen until the year of 2026.

English autoplay version here:

Noise Reduction and Glitches, Echoes from the Past and Future (English), 2021 – 2026, Lisa Torell

Swedish version here:

Noise Reduction and Glitches, Echoes from the Past and Future (Swedish), 2021 – 2026, Lisa Torell

References:

[1] Mieke Bal. Memory Acts: Performing Subjectivity. 2014.

[2] The video documentations of her performances, Lisa Torell has titled In-Situ Souvenirs referring to and paying homage to the French conceptual artist Daniel Buren’s term Photo-Souvenir. For Buren, the documentation of a site-specific work can only be a souvenir of the original work.
Clean, 2022, Rubber Glove Dove Collective (Anna Caroline Kristensen and Astrid Haugesen). Photography: Karolina Bergman Engman

Rubber Glove Dove Collective

Anna Caroline Kristensen and Astrid Haugesen

for #III. pure danger / dangerous purity

Differens Magazine, winter 22 / 23

The artist duo, Rubber Glove Dove
Collective, presents the performance
CLEAN. The duo consists of Anna
Caroline Kristensen and Astrid
Haugesen, who both currently are
studying at The Art Academy in Bergen.
@annakayannakay
@astrid_haugesen

The performance took place 10.06.22 at
NoGoods, Bergen, Norway, a project
space run by Danja Burchard and
Maike Statz in Bergen @nogoods___

CLEAN

Clean, 2022, Rubber Glove Dove Collective (Anna Caroline Kristensen and Astrid Haugesen). Photography: Karolina Bergman Engman

take my hand baby
hand work
hand jobs
head work
hard hands
sweaty hands
smelling in
pink rubbergloves
old, sour
pink rubbergloves
size SMALL

Clean, 2022, Rubber Glove Dove Collective (Anna Caroline Kristensen and Astrid Haugesen). Photography: Karolina Bergman Engman

all places inside are moist
and moldy
the rubber is a thick
smelly cloud and my
fingers are glued together
in a position that I didn’t
choose
Super Glue has a weird
warm feeling when it
dries, as if it is telling you,
that it is dangerous
burning without real fire,
creating a smooth surface
on your fingers
and when you scratch it
off, you scratch off your
skin with the glue

Clean, 2022, Rubber Glove Dove Collective (Anna Caroline Kristensen and Astrid Haugesen). Photography: Karolina Bergman Engman

Dear Cinderella, do
you know that boys
smell bad and that the
hype isn’t real?
Are you wearing hot
underwear on your
wedding night?
Do you have nipples?

Singing like a bird
Endless harmony work
Legs for days
no escape

Mr. Princy Priiiiiiiiince
Mr. princy Priince

And how did we
become Cinderella?
Heel cut
Toe cut
And then the shoe fits
Cinderella you have
such a pretty dress
Such a pretty face
Goodbye Cinderella
Thanks for the ride
Like demons, we have
bird feet

Clean, 2022, Rubber Glove Dove Collective (Anna Caroline Kristensen and Astrid Haugesen). Photography: Karolina Bergman Engman

Glass break easily
Dreams break easily
Find the bitch, Cindy
Find the devil
Be the witch
Cindereeeellaaaaaa!
Take your mice
companions, all your
bird friends and have a
party

Anna Caroline Kristensen’s instagram

Astrid Haugesen’s instagram