读书笔记

Media form the infrastructural basis, the quasi-transcendental condition, for experience and understanding. Media broker the giving of space and time within which concrete experience becomes possible. Media can no longer be dismissed as neutral or transparent, subordinate or merely supplemental to the information they convey but with social and cultural agency.

In addition to naming individual mediums at concrete points within that history, “media,” in our view, also names a technical form or formal technics, indeed a general mediality that is constitutive of the human as a “biotechnical” form of life. Media, then, functions as a critical concept in something like the way that the Freudian unconscious, Marxian modes of production, and Derrida’s concept of writing have done in their respective domains. The very concept of media is thus both a new invention and a tool for excavating the deepest archaeological layers of human forms of life.

From McLuhan’s standpoint, a medium impacts human experience and society not primarily through the content that it mediates but through its formal, technical properties as a medium.

# Art

Art is the exploitation of the medium.

The historical dialogue of art media and mass production reached a crucial point in the early nineteenth century. Industrialization exponentially extended the capabilities of mechanical print production, and these transformations were accompanied by changes in the concept of art.

Though works of art had been pressed into the cause of moral reform for centuries, the idea of art as a force for social transformation, not just spiritual improvement, was an idea that gained unprecedented momentum as the cultural effects of industrialization prompted utopian socialist movements.

In the 1890s an art-for-art’s-sake sensibility dominated the circles and salons from which sprang publications and images that characterized the fin de siècle across Europe and England.

For modern art, media were no longer serving as a vehicle or instrument of communication or representation of meaning, but as the very site of meaning and experience.

Not only were mass media and entertainments now subjects for fine art, but mass-media artifacts were materially incorporated into artworks. At the same time, principles of composition, harmony, proportion, and beauty were attacked or eroded.

Yet these critics all maintained some faith in the ability of art to preserve values that were otherwise lost in the broader culture. An earlier Romantic era had embraced imagination and emotion, but these authors stressed the importance of resistance and defamiliarization, concepts inherited from the avant-garde.

Much twentieth-century art seems to play a game of eluding and out-stripping definitions supplied by critics and theorists. Artists cannot resist challenging the premises of such definitions.

By choosing, titling, and signing a mass-produced object, Duchamp was suggesting that the identity of art is based on cultural frameworks— that is, that the foundation of art consists in a set of conventions and ideas, not in formal properties or principles of composition or media.

Ultimately, however, works of art have to be distinguished from the products of other culture industries that permeate daily life.

But it is the art coefficient that provokes wonder and seduces us into consideration of the way it inflects and shapes meaning.

Works of art can no longer be identified by their media, and the im- age of the artist has become a founding myth of celebrity and commodity culture. The definition of art in an era of mass media depends on our ability to distinguish works of art from other objects or images in the spheres of media and mass visual production. Art serves no single purpose, and cannot be circumscribed by agendas or beliefs. But it provides a continuing space for renewing human imagination and giving expression, in any form, ephemeral or material, to that imaginative capability. Finally, the practice of art becomes independent of objects or things, even of ideas or practices. Art becomes a way of paying attention.

# Body - phenomenology

From where does the body acquire its capacity to shape and produce culture? The body is approached not as a static object, an inviolable “natural” entity, but as a dynamic process.

“In contrast to the body, embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment.” Embodiment thus refers to how particular subjects live and experience being a body dynamically, in specific, concrete ways.

If human bodies are in some cases factual ob- jects to be discovered and analyzed, they are at the same time the very medium through which such knowledge is attained. As an object of analysis, that is, the body is unique in that it is always also the means for analysis. - anthropology

The specificity of human embodiment can thus be expressed via the phenomenological differentiation between “being a body” and “having a body”: the former, insofar as it designates the process of living the body, the first-person perspective, coincides with dynamic embodiment; the latter, referencing the body from an external, third-person perspective, can be aligned with the static body.

The tension between the body as object and as agent of experience, a tension inherent to human life itself, shapes the history of the body from the very start, and impacts how different cultures at different times have framed the experience of embodiment in highly divergent ways.

Specifically, we must ask: What has happened to the subject and her auto-awareness in the digital realm?

A body with such fluid borders—borders that allow a womb to be extended to a test tube, for example—opens the door to a potentially endless series of practices, from reproductive to self-enhancing, all of which open for women a much larger platform of gender identification than has previously been available.

Let us conclude, then, by returning to our opening questions: Should the body be considered a medium and, if so, what is at stake? What I have tried to show in this brief overview is that the body has always been a medium, and indeed, that it is the most primordial medium, the basis for all subsequent forms of mediation. Different times and different cultures deploy the mediality of the body in radically different ways, and the fundamental contribution of understanding the body as medium is to reveal the extent to which the resulting body practices are rooted in cul- ture. This same cultural rootedness pertains to practices that are ostensibly most “objective,” for example, practices that analyze the body as an object of science. While it is perhaps easy for the scientist to forget the cultural specificity of her approach to the body, this specificity remains central to our proper understanding of the body’s mediation of life. As I have suggested, this reality takes center stage in more recent conceptualizations of the body in theoretical work and in media art and architecture where the overriding task has been to redress a previous tendency to overlook embodiment when looking at the body—to overlook, in other words, how the body is always our most fundamental medium of knowledge and experience.

# Image

We experience the image as a double moment of appearing and recognition, the simultaneous noticing of a material object and an apparition, a form or a deformation. An image is always both there and not there, appearing in or on or as a material object yet also ghostly, spectral, and evanescent.

Images always appear in some medium or other, and we cannot understand media without constructing images of them.

# Materiality

Like many concepts, materiality may seem to make the most sense when it is opposed to another term: the material serves as a commonsensical antithesis to, for instance, the spiritual, the abstract, the phenomenal, the virtual, and the formal, not to mention the immaterial.

It could well be argued, moreover, that the digital’s apparent threat to materiality helped provoke a new materi- alist turn that began to thrive in the 1990s within a variety of disciplines: anthropology, art history, history, cinema studies, the history of science, and literary and cultural studies. Within media history, media theory, and cybercultural studies, this provocation has focused attention on the materiality of the medium, of information, and of communication, inspiring research on a wide range of topics, from the material substratum of media to the human body’s interaction with technology to the socio-economic systems which support that interaction.

What do scholars mean when they assert that one medium or another has a dematerializing effect? What do scholars do when they attend to “the materiality of communication”? What might scholars accomplish through a materialist analysis of media?

Describing the “dematerialization of material culture,” the archaeologist Colin Renfrew laments the current separation “between communication and substance,” the image having become increasingly “electronic and thus no longer tangible.”

The grand sociological accounts of modernity—by Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel—all consider the increase in abstraction to be a chief characteristic of the modernizing world. One effect of this now-rampant conversion is the dematerialization of the original medium itself; all media may eventually be homogenized within the hegemony of the digital.

# Memory

The Internet age is one of hypomnesis constituting itself as an associated technical milieu.” In his wide-ranging history of the concept of memory, Bernard Stiegler aims toward a moment—one that he suggests we are currently living—in which the “industrial model” of memory undergoes fundamental transformation.

Put more simply, reliance on artificial memory aids makes us vulnerable to manipulation if the technologies of memory are controlled by industries intent on exploiting our desire for their gain; yet on the other hand (and in accordance with their pharmacological logic), these same memory aids hold the promise of expanding our capacity to produce meaning and to form communities open to the future (this is what Stiegler, following the philosopher Gilbert Simondon, means by “transindividuation”).

Human memory is originally exteriorized, which means it is technical from the start. To the extent that participation in these new societies, in this new form of capitalism, takes place through ma- chinic interfaces beyond the comprehension of participants, the gain in knowledge is exclusively on the side of producers.

# Senses