The model of medium theory, proposing that the most significant cultural and social effects of media derive from the intrinsic properties of the media themselves, has historically been viewed with suspicion within studies of media and technology, especially on the critical Left. An extensive literature drawing on political economy and critical sociology has denounced the technological determinism inherent in medium theory, advancing instead a ‘social shaping of technology’ thesis.

However, the impact of digital information and networking provokes a reconsideration of the model of medium theory. Every time it is written or stated that digital convergent technology has re-shaped the use and effects of media forms, then some form of medium theory is being employed. Such widespread informal reference to the tenets of medium theory – including an element of technological determinism – makes a reconsideration of the model timely.

In this paper I assess the strengths and weaknesses of medium theory as a model, re-evaluating the charge against it of technological determinism. I consider the possibility that the ramifications of digital networking in media, communication and entertainment require a theoretical model more attentive to the intrinsic properties of technologies than is evident in much critical theoretical analysis of digital culture. I propose a theoretical model concerned both with the social-economic context of new media technologies and with the properties of those technologies themselves.

First, however, it is necessary to summarise the characteristics of the model of medium theory. I then consider the criticisms leveled at this model, including the various critiques of technological determinism. I review some of the alternative models of technology and culture that have been proposed in opposition to a technological determinist perspective, including actor-network theory. I assess the relative merits and weaknesses of these models, before turning again to medium theory in the age of digital networking and convergence. Is there more value in this much-maligned theoretical model than has generally been surmised?

The Medium Theory Model in Western Thought

Medium theory foregrounds media technology, identifying the cultural impact flowing from the properties inherent in technologies. The model also asserts the specificity of each medium and its technology. In media studies and the theoretical evaluation of technology and society, this model has claimed a profile since the 1960s, but it is possible to find scattered antecedents in Western thought. Around 370 BC, Plato warned in the Phaedrus that writing was the debasement of memory, the degradation of thought. In 1882, Nietszche wrote of the typewriter: ‘Our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts’ (Kittler 1990: 195). These two giants of Western philosophy, at variance in many other ways, and separated by two millennia, pointed directly to the structuring effect on consciousness of media technology; yet this perspective has retained a minority status in philosophy and critical thought.

With a few rare and notable exceptions, philosophers have not reflected on the fundamental role of literacy, or of the printing press and other technologies of media, in their intellectual pursuits. In part this may well be because their life’s work has been so shaped by the properties and potentials of the written word that they lack the perspective, and the desire, to consider themselves as so determined. As a result, Plato’s denigration of writing has seemed to many professional thinkers a puzzling aberration, akin to his proscription of poets: a strange anomaly which separates him from his modern readers. Typical of this response is Walter Hamilton’s introductory remark in the Penguin edition of the Phaedrus: ‘The dialogue ends with a condemnation of writing as a means of communicating knowledge which cannot fail to ring oddly in the ears of a modern reader’ (1973: 10). Derrida’s well-known deconstruction of Plato’s critique of writing is a concerted attempt to salvage writing from its alleged repression. All Derrida’s metaphors and devices – ‘trace’, ‘supplement’, ‘arche-writing’, ‘grammatology’ – are resolutely drawn from the written text; yet there is a curious absence even in Derrida of reflection on the shaping force of the written (technologised) word on deconstruction itself.

An analysis of the intellectual consequences of writing as a technology has been conducted by Eric Havelock in his Preface To Plato. Havelock contends that Plato’s proscription of poets in The Republic is ultimately concerned with the conflict between oral and literate sensibilities. Despite his professed hostility to writing, Plato is in fact fully molded by the properties of literacy. His banishment of the poets is his rejection of the oral tradition, expressing his attempt to replace the orally created and transmitted epic poems with philosophy as the true educator of Greece. Literacy enables the objectification of knowledge, even the objectification of the self as an object of study; it enables thought to conceive of concepts, such as the Forms, which exist outside concrete reality. In Havelock’s view, the literate Plato – preferring logic to narrative, the abstract to the concrete – usurps the oral Homer as the educator of Greece.

It is possible to compile a list of writers, since the second half of the twentieth century, who have expounded the media- technologies-effects theory. It is a multi-disciplinary list, and includes, apart from Havelock: Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Jack Goody and Ian Watt, Walter J. Ong, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Friedrich Kittler and Joshua Meyrowitz. These theorists range across diverse fields of study; the strength of the proposition varies throughout their works. But the basis of the proposition is constant: as media technologies change, profound cultural effects ensue. These effects operate on both the level of the individual psyche and the social formation as a whole. The effects may be observed in the long historical span of inventions from literacy to interactive multimedia.

The advent of the written word, and its effects, has attracted the attention of several theorists, all insistent on the profound consequences wrought by the transition from orality to literacy. Ong maintains that: ‘More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness’. (Ong 1982: 78). Goody, who developed the notion of ‘intellectual technologies’, asserts that writing creates ‘a different cognitive potentiality for human beings than communication by word of mouth’(1977: 128, cited Tofts and McKeich 1997: 46). For Ong, writing is a ‘secondary modelling system’ (8); it is dependent on the prior primary system, spoken language, yet it fundamentally transforms the potential of language. The written word becomes the bearer of information, acquired by the visual sense. The shifts in consciousness made possible by this invention include the development of analytical, rational thought, the cultivation of artificial memory, of precision, linearity, abstraction.

Eisenstein (1979) has conducted an extensive analysis of the printing press as an ‘agent of change’ with major ramifications in politics, science, economics, even exploration (Murphie and Potts 2003: 12). Meyrowitz (1985) is largely concerned with the social and political impact of television; his scholarly account reveals numerous consequences stemming from the intrinsic properties of this technology, which has always favoured emotion and spectacle over argument and reason.

This brief account of some of the major exponents of medium theory has sketched the range of technologies to which it has been applied. I have not yet dealt with Marshall McLuhan, easily the most well known (or infamous) proponent of this model, and certainly a self-avowed technological determinist. McLuhan’s dictum ‘the medium is the message’ popularized the theory of medium specificity and effects in the 1960s; in the late 1990s he was anointed (by Wired magazine and other digital enthusiasts) patron saint of the digital age, in which many of his predictions – it was claimed – were realized. An overview of his arguments concerning media and technology is an appropriate means of addressing the tenets of medium theory, and of evaluating this model in the context of contemporary digital media.

The Characteristics of Medium Theory

McLuhan’s articulation of the model is at once the most succinct and the most bold of all its exponents; he is also (like Baudrillard after him) deliberately provocative in his statements. For McLuhan, all media, including print, invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values; the message of any medium is ‘the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs’ (1974: 16). Each new medium of communication alters the ‘patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance’ (1974: 27). Each medium alters the sense ratios of perception; this relates to both the act of individuals’ engagement with the medium, and the hierarchy within the human sensorium in different historical epochs. This hierarchy of the senses is shaped by the dominant media forms of the time, such as print or electronic mass media. Thus the primacy of sound in oral cultures gives way to the primacy of vision under literacy. Corresponding to this shift, the means of attaining information is also altered. The collective audience of listeners in oral societies becomes an ‘agglomeration of individuals’ in literate societies: atomised readers.

The radical and most challenging aspect of the theory resides in the idea that the technology of any medium will affect the cognitive functions of those who use it. The electronic mass media were the focus of McLuhan’s prophecies: for him they constituted a shift away from the cultural conditioning of print, and its products linearity and rationality. For the like-minded but more cautious Ong, electronic media represent a ‘secondary orality’, a return to a greater communal sense and concentration on the present moment. Most recently, exponents of a ‘Digital McLuhan’ such as Paul Levinson (1999) have considered digital media as the latest intellectual technology to modify the ‘cognitive ecology’ into which it has been introduced. The ‘global village’ announced by McLuhan as the cultural effect of electronic media and the satellite, becomes the virtual global village in the age of digital networking.

The weaknesses of medium theory as espoused by McLuhan are readily apparent. McLuhan prophesied the global village, but he had nothing at all to say about ownership, control or regulation of that village. He proclaimed that the medium is the message, but he had no interest in the content of that message. He could assert that radio created Hitler in Germany and the teenager in the US, but he allowed no role for the economic, political and social factors which most scholars would consider crucial to such historical processes. Accordingly, no-one could claim that a theoretical approach as blithely single-minded as McLuhan’s could constitute a well-rounded media theory; however, that is not the point at issue. I contend that despite the evident flaws in McLuhan’s one-sided model, a focus on the intrinsic properties of media comes closest to revealing the most profound and long-term cultural effects of those media. These are also social and political effects, operating on a deeper level than those assailed by political economists or critical sociologists.

Critiques of the Model

McLuhan’s sweeping generalisations and epigrammatic style leave this theoretical approach open to criticism, as does its technological determinism. There is no doubt that McLuhan, and his more scholarly successors, define cultural history by technological change, in their case the changing technologies of communication. This was certainly the thrust of Raymond Williams’ critique of McLuhan: ‘the medium is the message’ he argued, is such a reductive formalism that all other causes apart from the medium – ‘all that men ordinarily see as history’ – are reduced to mere ‘effects’ (Williams 1975: 127).

There is an impressive literature devoted to the critical theory of technology. This approach has drawn on political economy (ownership, control and regulation of media industries); critical sociology (notions of ideology, hegemony, power and consensus); feminism; audience theory; textual analysis (semiotics, theories of representation); and most recently, post-structuralism (deconstruction, theories of the post-modern). In foregrounding the political and economic decisions underpinning technological development, this literature is a valuable antidote to the doctrine of progress – ‘we have no choice’ – which has been invoked in the cause of technological development since the nineteenth century. This critical approach refutes the removal, in technological determinist accounts, of technologies from the social contexts which shape them. ‘The social shaping of technology’ – analysed in detail by MacKenzie and Wajcman (1988 and 1999) and other theorists of technology – is the approach favoured in the critical theory of technology and media.

Williams’ study of television, which specifically engages with McLuhan’s writing – is a prime example of this approach in the field of media studies. Rather than accepting television’s advent and the shaping of societies in its image – ‘the TV age’ – Williams is concerned with the social needs which were met by the development of radio and TV. Specifically, there was a primary need to connect the domestic space of family homes to large-scale urban communities. As well, Williams analyses the complex of Government policy-making and corporate economic interest which controlled broadcasting, in varying alignments, around the world.

Such a critical account opposes the generalisations of medium theory; it also resists the notion of inevitable social effects ensuing from specific media technologies. There is no question that medium theory requires a dose of social perspective, as contained in such accounts, to offer a satisfactory theory of media and society. Indeed, Williams fills in all the factors McLuhan leaves out: social need, economic interest, political control, specific decision-making, the design of content: in a word, intention.

Much medium theory ignores intention because it have no interest in the social shaping of technology. Nor does it concern itself with how and why various technologies came to exist: its sole aim is to describe the socio-cultural effects of media technologies. Accordingly, the most pertinent criticism afforded by the sociology of technology relates to the role played by new technologies in social change. Does a new technology generate inevitable consequences, or does it merely introduce one factor into a matrix of factors? The standard response to this question from within critical theory is this: a new technology merely opens a door; it doesn’t compel one to enter. (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1988: 6) Technologies don’t determine; rather, they operate, and are operated upon, in a complex social field. It is the way technologies are used, rather than any intrinsic properties of those technologies, that is crucial. The case studies collected in MacKenzie and Wajcman’s The Social Shaping of Technology demonstrate that technology and society are ‘inextricably’ connected, as the editors of this volume assert, and that the historical process is normally so complex that ‘no single dominant shaping force’ can be isolated as determining (1999: 12, 16). The role of the military, corporate research and development, and ideological factors concerning gender and race all figure in the complex of technological development.

A more polemical stand against technological determinism is taken by Leila Green in her book Technoculture (2002). Dismissing technological determinism as one of the ‘myths’ of technology and ‘the old way of looking at things’, she installs in its place a ‘social determinism’, arguing that ‘society is responsible for the development and deployment of particular technologies.’ Breaking the abstraction of ‘society’ into more specific components, she proposes that technocultures reflect ‘the choices of elites in our societies, the people who have most say in how we plan for the future and how we allocate our resources’ (2002: 2-3). With specific reference to media technologies, Brian Winston in Media Technology and Society approaches media history from a cultural materialist perspective: that is, his method is aligned to that of Williams rather than that of McLuhan. Winston’s approach to media history runs counter to the medium theory model, in that his starting-point is the ‘social sphere…conditioning and determining technological developments’ that made various forms of media possible (1998: 2). Winston also moves beyond the ‘lone genius inventor’ model of technological innovation by focusing on the social necessities to which inventors – and other social agents – respond. Winston foregrounds government regulation and other ‘supervening social necessities’ (overlooked by most medium theorists) as crucial factors in the implementation and operation of media technologies. In media and mass communication theory, Dennis McQuail’s influential book (first edition 1983, fifth edition 2005) is largely dismissive of medium theory because of its ‘idealism’ (identified in McLuhan’s theories) and its ‘media-centric’ perspective (omitting socio-economic factors) (2005: 79, 102). Noting that it is not possible to provide ‘proof’ for McLuhan’s ideas (127) or to ‘test’ Meyrowitz’s assertions regarding the cultural effects of television (130), McQuail also makes the general remark that ‘it is very difficult to pin down the “essential” characteristics of any given medium’ (142), and that medium theory is therefore of limited value for researchers.

Medium Theory Responds

How does medium theory respond to such criticism? McLuhan, as we would expect, treats the social determinist perspective with open contempt. Such a response to media, ‘that it is how they are used that counts’ is, he thunders, ‘the numb stance of the technological idiot’ (1974: 26). Other theorists are more circumspect. Weak versions of medium theory argue for a concomitance of media change and cultural transformation, rather than a determining relation. Other versions treat the correlation of media and culture as a complex, rather than direct, engagement. Such approaches attempt to avoid the reductionism evident in medium theory at its most extreme (notably in McLuhan); this reductionism has attracted much criticism (as sketched above), contributing to the critical view that media theory remains a one-sided theoretical model.

A seminar held at the University of Bologna in 1993 addressed this issue, canvassing a wide range of medium theory variants from a semiotic perspective. One conclusion was that the effects of a new medium may be said to operate ‘at the level of communicative relationships’ between social actors; such an interpretation emphasises the reaction of ‘historical actors to the communicative problems created by the new medium itself’ (Bernadelli and Blasi 1995: 11). In doing so, it avoids the abstractions of the strongest version of medium theory (McLuhan’s).

Yet a difficulty remains with the various attempts of medium theorists to avoid the charge of technological determinism. Even a moderate-strength version allows for a ‘pre-condition’ for cultural change created by a new medium. Examples cited at the Bologna seminar included: ‘…Havelock’s concept of alphabetic writing as a pre-condition for the development of western metaphysics and Eisenstein’s theory of the printing press as a crucial agent of the Scientific Revolution’ (Bernadelli and Blasi: 8).

It is readily acknowledged that a new medium opens up new possibilities, yet many theorists fear pushing this too far. They can see the historical door being opened, but they don’t want to push the historical actors through it. Pierre Levy, in his otherwise freewheeling and utopian work on virtual technologies, sounds a note of critical caution in distinguishing ‘…causal or determining actions from those that prepare the way for or make something possible. Technologies don’t determine, they lay the groundwork’ (1998: 128).

This cautionary note, however, is swept aside in the prophetic rush of Levy’s writings, which celebrate the transforming potential of digital networking.

The point I want to make is this: perhaps we should not be so afraid of technological determinism. Perhaps, in certain key instances, new technologies of media do more than open a door. Perhaps the technology of writing, or the printing press, or electronic mass media, or digital networking, bring with them such profoundly new possibilities that they do determine, at least in some degree, cultural effects. To create a pre-condition for cultural change is, after all, to allow for something to emerge that could not otherwise have emerged. This is the ‘different cognitive potentiality’ made possible by a different medium, and the way human subjects must engage with that medium. Indeed, Havelock considers Plato’s philosophical breakthroughs – abstraction and objectivity – to be a ‘historical necessity’ in the wake of the fully developed literacy of the 4th century BC.

A new medium may re-structure human consciousness and its potential, by providing the means for new things to be achieved by that consciousness. This is the most profound impact of the invention of writing; and succeeding media technologies have created their own impacts on the potential of human communication. The shaping effects of a medium may be so powerful that the potential of new technologies may be obscured. The classic instance of this condition is the failure of Edison in 1877 to recognise the potential of his own invention, the phonograph. Completely missing its significance as a mechanical reproduction of sound and music, he thought it would make a good dictation machine – a secretarial aid. Jacques Attali considers an 1890 article by Edison, in which he criticises the use of the phonograph for the reproducing of music, to be an ‘incredible text’; he points out that Edison did not realise the commercial potential of recorded music until 1898 (1985: 94).

The medium theory model provides an explanation for Edison’s ‘incredible’ lack of foresight. Edison was a cultural product of the nineteenth century, the high age of literacy. Reading and writing skills had been disseminated on a mass scale; it was the age of novels, newspapers, letters. Everything was defined in terms of writing, including the reproduction of sound: ‘phonograph’ means ‘sound writing’. The phonograph, along with its predecessors and rivals like the gramophone – ‘sound letters’ – shared the aim of printing: ‘to transform sound into writing’ (Attali 91). So dominant was the concept of mechanical writing that the inventors could not conceive of their sound recording devices except in terms of inscription; Edison could only conceptualise his invention as an aid to writing, a new form of writing.

This remarkable incidence is also a rejoinder to the argument – articulated from a cultural materialist position by Williams – that social need shapes technological invention. The phonograph did not initially answer a pressing social need: there was no pressing societal demand for the reproduction of audio and music. Indeed, the enormous cultural ramifications of sound recording technology were not apparent to its inventor: intention was not a factor in the inception of this technology. Enormous cultural effects emerged as a consequence of the unique intrinsic properties – the recording, reproduction and transmission of music – of the technology itself. This pattern has been similar in the case of many other inventions, including the internet: the intended applications of the technology are quickly usurped by unintended uses, as voiced in the cyberpunk maxim, ‘the street finds its own use for things.’ The medium theory model would add the observation that those uses flow from the character and potential of the technology itself.

Actor-Network Theory and Other Alternatives

Various alternative theoretical models have emerged – within technology studies, sociology and related disciplines – to both medium theory and the opposing theory described above as the social shaping approach. This has occurred in part because at its most extreme, the emphasis on social factors becomes as reductive as McLuhanite technological determinism. As Bruno Latour observes, a polemical ‘social determinism’ arguing, for example, that the steam engine was the ‘mere reflection’ of ‘English capitalism’, is no less extreme and one-sided a view as the technological determinism it seeks to contest (2005: 84).

Theorists of technological change have attempted to devise models incorporating social forces and technological objects into a matrix of inter-dependence. Stephen Hill, for instance, has proposed the theoretical model of the ‘cultural text’, in which technological change is mapped according to ‘the particular alignment’ between the potential of new technologies and various political and social factors (1989: 33). Similarly, Mark Warschauer (2003) has proposed a ‘social informatics’ in which technology is considered in a context including infrastructure and the people working within that system.

A more thoroughly elaborated theoretical model is Actor-Network Theory (ANT), developed by Bruno Latour, Michael Callon and John Law in the 1980s. This model has attracted attention outside its immediate context in sociology because of its bestowal of agency on non-human actors within a network or system. Theorists of digital technology and networks have had recourse to ANT as a theoretical model. For example, Gerard Goggin in his recent book on cell phone culture approves of ANT’s reworking of the ‘formulaic oppositions between technology and society’, which resists both the lure of technological determinism and the ‘countervailing reaction that society determines technology.’ ANT proposes instead a shifting interaction where technology exists ‘in networks of things, actors, actants, institutions, investments, and relationships’; Goggin finds this model useful in charting the cultural uses of mobile phones (2006: 11).

However, ANT has had many detractors since the 1980s on a number of grounds, including objections to its ‘symmetry’ in the treatment of human and non-human actors (MacKenzie and Wajcman provide a summary of this controversy at 1999: 24, while Latour responded to many of the criticisms in an extended essay available at http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9801/msg00019.html). ANT has also been the subject of misapplication and misunderstanding, as Latour readily acknowledges: such misunderstanding was the prime motivation for Latour’s book-length clarification and defence of ANT, Reassembling the Social (2005). Latour makes the helpful point in this book that the development of ANT was inspired by a need to refigure the ‘social’ in a context where ‘science and technology have massively multiplied the participants to be cooked in the melting pot’ (260). That is, conventional sociological theory was thought to be inadequate in the 1980s, in its ability to model aggregations and networks that incorporated new forms of technology. ANT is at the basic level a model for associations and assemblages.

One of several ‘sources of uncertainty’ associated with ANT, in Latour’s view, was the theory’s assertion that ‘objects too have agency’ (63): technologies are considered ‘actors’ within particular networks, along with human agents. ANT is not afraid to assess ‘the many entanglements of humans and non-humans’ (84), yet these encounters occur within a modeling that explicitly ‘keeps the social flat’ (165). There is a flattening out of all actors – human and technological – within ANT, which is committed to focusing on the network rather than individual agents. The association is the thing; all individual elements, whether particular machines or human operatives, are devalued within this model. Within this flattening out of agents, the intrinsic properties of individual technologies are lost, or at least de-emphasised. This leveling of the technological and the social means that ANT is of little use in evaluating the specificity of each technology, including media technologies. The unique properties of each device – what the technology brings to a system or an interaction with human agents – are effectively erased. This certainly avoids a technological determinist perspective, yet it also leaves technologies stripped of their unique qualities.

Ultimately, ANT shares characteristics of other theoretical models that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, including Foucault’s theory of power and various post-structuralist theories of association and assemblage. These characteristics include a post-human concentration on the network, flow or system. Leo Marx has argued that such models bear ‘strikingly close affinities’ to the ‘functioning of large technological systems’. Power is decentralized, flowing endlessly through society like ‘information through a communications network’ (1994: 24). Each model relegates or erases human agency within the greater network. While ANT cannot be conflated with the various forms of post-structuralism, its model reduces the role of technologies to the status of human actors.

Medium Theory in the Age of Digital Reproduction

We are now in position to re-consider the model of medium theory in the context of digital media and networking. On the level of popular discourse, it would seem that medium theory is everywhere, espoused daily. Every time it is claimed that digital media have altered knowledge, communication or social interaction – for the better or for the worse – some form of medium theory, including a degree of technological determinism – is (usually unwittingly) invoked. Examples of this invocation include the assertions that: sampling and downloading have re-shaped the making and consumption of music, that Powerpoint has ‘dumbed down’ presentations and lectures, that the Web has created new forms of knowledge and entertainment, that digital networking has forged new orders of community, that the mobile phone has changed social interaction.

Such sentiments are not reserved for everyday discourse or the popular press; scholarly and critical studies of digital culture share the orientation. Some commentaries take the form of enthusiastic declarations – of the Wired variety – that digital technologies have changed the world ‘forever’ and undoubtedly for the better. This boosterism is countered by cultural analyses adopting a tone of lament for lost social values in the wake of rampaging digital media. The tone of each article, essay or book is usually immediately evident from its title or subtitle. On the enthusiasts’ side: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture (Rodzvilla 2002); ‘How Technology Will Rewire the Music Business’ (Kusek & Leonhard, The Future of Music 2005). On the side of lament (or outrage): ‘How Google is Making Us Stupid’ (Haigh 2006), The Cult of the Amateur (Keen 2006). There are many more examples of both schools that could be cited.

The elaboration of argument in works of either persuasion often contains a clear expression of medium theory principles, even if the model itself is not named. As an example, here is Rebecca Blood on blogs: ‘Everything about them – their format, their reliance on links, their immediacy, their connections to each other – is derived from the medium in which they are born. They are of the Web itself’ (2002: xi). Studies of digital music technologies are especially rife with medium theory and technological determinsim. Digital technology is often afforded agency in the construction of sentences: it is said to ‘bring’ change or ‘enable’ new forms of practice. Here is an example from Kusek and Leonhard’s The Future of Music, a book celebrating the new digital era: ‘Technology has brought powerful and disruptive changes to the ruling incumbents’ (x). This claim is then given more detail: ‘The combination of the CD format, personal computers, and the Internet was a true convergence of technologies that, in combination, started to tear the very heart out of the control that the music industry had over its product’ (4-5). P2P file sharing, ’enabled’ by free downloads of software applications (6) is now ‘unstoppable’ (146). There are ‘Megatrend’ cultural effects of these technologies, constituting ‘changing paradigms of work and leisure’ (165). More soberly, Henry Jenkins writes that digital convergent culture in general is ‘enabling new forms of participation and collaboration’ (245).

The deployment of medium theory’s tenets is no less evident in those writers critical of the cultural effects of digital media. Keene’s The Cult of the Amateur is a polemic ‘about the destructive impact of the digital revolution on our culture, economy and values’ (1). Keen declares that blogs are ‘collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture’ (3). The overall effect of computer-based networking is for Keen ‘mob rule’, intellectual mediocrity and chaos. Perhaps because he – like other commentators of this ilk – adopts an anti-new technology perspective, Keen has recourse to a social shaping argument: ‘the question is ideological rather than technological – and the answer is largely up to us’ (189). His crusade is political, or rather moral: ‘our real moral responsibility is to protect mainstream media against the cult of the amateur’ (204). Yet his book is a condemnation of the socio-cultural effects flowing directly from the properties and potentials of Web 2.0. Haigh’s critique of Google follows a similar trajectory: he attacks the indiscriminate nature of searches, their quantitative rather than qualitative aspect, as a characteristic of the software itself, with deleterious intellectual effects.

I do not wish to endorse either of these perspectives – boosterism or elitist social critique – as a contemporary exemplar of medium theory. Both exhibit a simplistic account of contemporary culture, albeit from diametrically opposed perspectives. My intention has been merely to indicate the pervasiveness of medium theory – or at least crude versions of the model – in many of the descriptions and analyses of contemporary digital media technology. A more sophisticated form of analysis must consider both the social forces and agencies responsible for the development and implementation of new technologies, and the properties and potentials inherent in the technologies themselves. My basic contention in this essay has been that many analysts, especially from the critical theory perspective, have been reluctant to embrace the ‘intractable properties in the things themselves’, in the words of Langdon Winner (27) – who has not been afraid to engage with the qualities of machines. Technologies, he has argued, often carry ‘inherently political’ properties – whether they have been designed with that intention, or whether aspects of their design generate totally unforeseen cultural and social effects. Critical theorists of technology, who have expressed an understandable aversion to the political tenor of technological determinism, nevertheless diminish the analytical power of their studies if they fail to take into account the properties intrinsic to digital technologies.

The other advantage of medium theory as a model is its orientation to medium specificity. Each technology or media form will have unique properties, which in turn will produce the potential for differing cultural effects. It should be uncontroversial to claim that the properties of Net technology require active users; the Net rewards curiosity; it encourages communal interaction. However, we should also remember the prevalence of text as a form of expression on the Net,. This underlying dependence on literacy was always the qualifying factor in the ‘secondary orality’ of electronic mass media culture, as acknowledged by Ong; it is more pertinent than ever in considering digital culture. Email, to take the most obvious example, is a neo-literate form; it partakes of the emotional coldness of text. A degree of literary skill and effort is required to express, in electronic text, the emotional warmth easily conveyed by tone of voice on phone or radio, or by a smile on video or TV. The use of netiquette symbols – ‘emoticons’ – is an attempt to infuse the new medium with a supplement of emotional character. But beneath the hype of email romance, email antagonisms – induced by misinterpreted or unsatisfying email correspondence – is a less remarked-upon product of the digital network.

In a world of networking and interactivity, finally, the typology of specific media with their specific effects begins to break down. The old mass media form – TV – is melding with the participatory digital medium – the Net-linked personal computer – to form a new hybrid technology; the mobile phone takes this hybridity a step further. The fusion of the primarily passive mass media form (a ‘cool’ medium in McLuhan’s terms) with the active digital one, creates new types of engagement. Convergent digital media is a liquid form, and will become increasingly liquid in the future. The hierarchy within the sensorium – as assessed by several medium theorists in different contexts – is in flux. Tactility has re-emerged as a key sense experience, most notably in texting. Pierre Levy has proposed that digital media will break down ‘the facile opposition between the reasonable text and the fascinating image’ (1994: 14); we can add to that the seductive sound, and the engaging touch. The technology becomes more complex, more inclusive; the message will have all the more potential. In our attempts to theorise these developments within media technology and usage, an attention to the intrinsic characteristics of specific technologies will be needed. This does not call for a reductionist form of medium theory, as has been propounded in the past; rather, it calls for a theoretical model sensitive both to the social context of new media technologies and to the properties of those technologies themselves.

Author’s Biography

John Potts is Associate Professor in Media at Macquarie University. He is a founding editor of Scan Online Journal of Media Arts Culture. He is co-author with Andrew Murphie of Culture and technology (Palgrave, 2003) and is author of the forthcoming book with Palgrave, A History of Charisma.

References

Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985)

Bernadelli, Andrea and Blasi, Giulio. ‘Introduction. Semiotics and the Effects-Of-Media-Change Research Programmes’ in VERSUS No. 72 September-December 1995, pp. 3-23

Blood, Rebecca. ‘Introduction’ in Rodzvilla, John (ed). We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture (Cambridge, MA.: Perseus Books, 2002).

Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979)

Goggin, Gerard. Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life (Oxon: Routledge, 2006).

Goody, Jack. The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

Goody, Jack and Watt, Ian. ‘The Consequences of Literacy’ in Jack Goody ed., Literacy in Traditional Societies, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).

Green, Leila. Technoculture: From Alphabet to Cybersex (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2002).

Haigh, Gideon. ‘How Google is Making Us Stupid’, The Monthly February 2006 pp. 25-33.

Hamilton, Walter. ‘Introduction’, Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, (London: Penguin, 1973).

Havelock, Eric A. Preface To Plato (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963).

Hill, Stephen. The Tragedy of Technology (Sydney: Pluto, 1989).

Innis, Harold. Empire and Communication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950).

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006)

Keen, Andrew. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture (New York: Currency, 2006).

Kittler, Friedrich. ‘The Mechanised Philosopher’ in Laurence A. Rickels (ed) Looking After Nietzsche (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).

Kusek, David and Leonhard, Gerd. The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution (Boston: Berklee Press, 2005)

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)

Levinson, Paul. Digital McLuhan (London: Routledge, 1999).

Levy, Pierre. ‘Toward Superlanguage’, ISEA 94 Catalogue (Helsinki: University of Art and Design, 1994)
Levy, Pierre. Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age (New York: Plenum Trade, 1998).

MacKenzie, Donald and Wajcman, Judy (eds). The Social Shaping Of Technology, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, second edition, 1999)

Marx, Leo. ‘The Idea of “Technology” and Postmodern Pessimism’ in Ezrahi, Mendelsohn and Segal (eds) Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).

McQuail, Denis, McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory 5th edition (London: Sage, 2005).

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media (London: Abacus, 1974).

Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Murphie, Andrew and Potts, John. Culture and Technology (London: Palgrave, 2003).

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, (London: Routledge, 1982).

Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII (London: Penguin, 1973).

Rodzvilla, John (ed). We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture (Cambridge, MA.: Perseus Books, 2002).

Tofts, Darren and McKeich, Murray. Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberspace (Sydney: 21C/Interface, 1998).

Warschauer, Mark. ‘Demystifying the Digital Divide’, Scientific American Vol. 289 No. 2, 2003.

Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken, 1975).

Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

Winston, Brian, Media Technology and Society (London: Routledge, 1998).

Folksonomies as chaotic systems

The core “meme” of Web 2.0 from which almost all other memes radiated was: ‘You control your own data’ (O’Reilly, 2005, 3).[1] Key instruments for this user control are tagging systems that allow users to freely assign keywords of their own choosing to Internet resources of their own making as well as to documents produced by others. Tags are used for making Internet resources retrievable for personal use, but in so-called social networks tags are also accessible for others. Of course, as freely chosen keywords tags do not necessarily follow prefixed taxonomies or classification systems. But going by the maxim that interaction creates similarity and similarity creates interaction, the idea – or hope – is, however, that the tagging practices of individual users will eventually converge into an emergent common vocabulary or folksonomy. (Merholz, 2004; Shirky, 2005; Vander Wal, 2005b; Mika, 2007).[2]

It is far from clear, however, that free tagging systems will eventually yield controlled vocabularies, since different users apply keywords in very different ways and the choices users make are always influenced by many and very different factors. Most often mentioned in the literature are the design of a tagging system, the incentives for users to tag resources, the purposes for which users tag resources, and the nature of the tagged object (Vander Wall, 2005b; Marlow et al, 2006; Golder & Huberman, 2006).

These and possibly still other dimensions are as many incentives for idiosyncratic, ambiguous, and inconsistent uses of tags. Therefore many researchers recommend to curb or channel the choices of individual taggers by eventually offering only the most popular tags as options to choose from (Merholz, 2004), or by designing supportive tagging systems that suggest the use of some tags rather than others. Left to themselves, free tagging systems seem to be too wild and too chaotic for any order to emerge. But are these free tagging systems really as “feral” as they seem to be, or do they only look uncontrolled because one has been looking for order in the wrong place?

What follows is the result of what new media practitioners like to call “rapid prototyping”. By way of a proof of concept , I have done a quick-and-dirty analysis of Flickr’s tag cloud. The concept was: if folksonomies encourage users to tap into their own vernacular, everyday natural language must somehow “guide” the tagging practices of users of tagging systems. Flickr was choosen because it offers a “narrow” and “blind” tagging system that only allows owners to tag their pictures and does not come up with recommended tags (like Del.ic.ious, for instance), and because Flickr presents its visitors with a tag cloud in which the hundred and fifty most popular tags are listed. Moreover, Flickr also offers clusters in which the tags from the tag cloud co-occur with other, often less popular tags. Flickr, that is, has been so kind as to do a lot of preliminary work for this rapid research project. This also means, however, that the choice of Flickr was partly arbitrary: if not Flickr but another “social site” had offered such a wonderful tagging system, that other site would have been choosen. Flickr’s tag cloud, then, has been choosen because it may teach us something about tagging systems and folksonomies, and not – or not primarily – because of what tags may tell us about pictures.

Tags: the “unknown knowns”

The most discussed problems with free tagging systems are polysemy, homonymy, synonymy, different levels of categorization, and spelling mistakes.[3] In the case of polysemy, a single tag is used with different related meanings, as when music is used to tag a sound track, a video of a rock concert, a blog about a musician, a picture of a musical instrument, or a file with a musical score. In the case of homonymy, a single tag may have totally unrelated meanings: rock for instance may refer to a stone formation or a genre in pop-music, and apple can be used to refer to a fruit, to New York City, to the former record company of The Beatles, or to the Macintosh computer. In the latter case apple is synonymous with, indeed, macintosh computer, just as fall is synonymous with autumn. Different users can also tag similar objects at different levels of categorization: pets, for instance, can be tagged with the superordinate term animals or with basic-level terms like cat and dog, and geographical locations can be tagged with the name of a continent (europe, asia), a country or state (england, california), or the name of a city (london, paris, la). Spelling is another notorious problem, also known as “meta noise”: the name of the city of York only appears in Flickr’s tag cloud because many users tagged their pictures with New York or New York City without realizing that Flickr interprets these strings as two or three separate tags. Other examples are tags such as san and de that are parts of composite city names like San Francisco, San José but also of the canine species San Bernardino, and Rio de Janeiro or proper names like danny de conte.

It is not hard to see that these problems even affect the reliability of the tag cloud as an accurate representation of the popularity of tags or the relative numbers of pictures tagged with terms from the tag cloud. Pictures of New York City, for instance, are labeled with five different tags (nyc, newyork, newyorkcity, new and york). If one would add these, New York and not London would appear as the most popular city in the tag cloud. Since there are also many users who use all available spellings, the frequency of tags referring to New York does not say very much about the actual number of New York photos on Flickr.

Notions like polysemy, homonymy, synonymy, and levels of categorization only scratch the surface of the semantic problems with tags. Does a tag like england, for instance, mean that the tagged picture shows something from or about England, or does it simply mean that the picture has been taken in England (see Rattenbury et al., 2007)? And what about color terms? Tags like blackandwhite obviously designate stylistic features of a photo, but do tags like red, green, or blue designate properties of the photographed objects, or salient properties of the photo itself? Why is there a tag girl in Flickr’s tag cloud, but not a tag boy? Problems like these do not arise from any ambiguity, polysemy or homonymy of the terms used as tags: there is nothing ambiguous about terms like england, green, or girl.[4] Rather, these ambiguities arise from the different relations these terms entertain with the tagged resources. Since these relationships are not explicitly marked by the tags, the collection of tags in Flickr’s tag cloud turns out to be even messier than it already was through the known semantic ambiguities. But again, is it? It’s time to try and chart these yet “unknown knowns.”

Tags: labels or parts of speech?

As the discussions of polysemy, homonymy, synonymy and levels of categorization already suggest, tags have been mostly discussed as separate, individual items. Tags, that is, have been quite literally taken as “labels” that “name” or categorize the objects they have been attached to and tags have been consequently discussed in terms of problems of reference. Several factors encourage this nominalist approach.

First of all, the vast majority of tags – at least of those used on Flickr – are proper and common nouns and adjectives and these word classes are typically used to identify persons, places, objects and properties. This suggests that naming and referring are the most important functions of tags: they “point” towards the entities they label. This encourages the application of a “picture theory” of language: words “mirror” real world objects or states of affairs and the meaning of a word (or any linguistic expression) consists of its truth conditions (Wittgenstein, 2001; Ayer, 1987). This is, moreover, reinforced by comparisons of folksonomies with professional expert classification systems like the Dewey Decimal Classification designed to explicitly and unambiguously organize the information of particular knowledge domains (see Vander Wall 2005b; Shirky 2005).

Second, an obvious corollary of the previous factor is the absence of verbs, adverbs, and prepositions and present and past participles in Flickr’s tag cloud. Verbs are the cement of linguistic constructions: they constitute the core of a sentence to which every other sentence part is directly or indirectly related. Verbs determine the number of arguments that appear in a linguistic construction (they “project” their argument structure), like Agent, Patient, Indirect Object, Instrument, etc (see Fillmore, 1968; Jackendoff, 1990; Kay, 1997). Prepositions also serve to express the relationships between sentence parts, e.g. location (in, on, at, under, above), time (before, after, while), instrument (with, through), manner (like, as), path (along, over), destination (to, into, towards), etc. In the absence of verbs and prepositions, lexical items become like the loose bricks of a building project: they seem not to fulfill particular functions within a construction, and the only relationship that seems to exist between them is their relative size. Since tags seem not to participate in linguistic constructions, triads like the signifier-concept-referent or user-tag-resource relationships are the most relevant structural relationships that remain: tags look like the entries of a dictionary (Golder & Huberman, 2006; Mika, 2007).

Thirdly, tags are part of asynchronous and asymmetrical processes of sharing and communication. Through tags, the user communicates with a tagging community at large rather than with other individual users, since the feedback he or she gets on his or her tags comes mainly through the records of the tags previously fed into the system by millions of other users (Mathes, 2004: 9). This “communication through metadata” de-contextualizes the lexical items used as tags and deprives them of a pragmatic context in which their meanings can be gauged and negotiated (Tonkin, 2007: 116). The linguistic symptom of this decontextualization is the absence of articles, demonstratives and quantifyers that, together with verbal markers like modals and tense, “ground” the content of an expression with respect to the speech event. Articles, demonstratives and quantifiers serve to identify a particular instantiation of the type evoked by a noun as the intended referent, whereas modals and tense locate the process evoked by a verb with respect to the moment in time of the speech event and the speaker’s conception of reality (see Langacker, 2008: 259). Without context and grounding elements, the user is left with the “dictionary meanings” of the tags rather than with interpretations derived from the linguistic constructions, discursive frames, and pragmatic contexts in which lexical items normally participate. The clusters of tags provided by Flickr suggest that Flickr’s designers are aware of this problem since these offer the user a first aid to figure out in which semantic fields tags operate and thus to minimally “recontextualize” tags.

Fourthly, nominalist and objectivist approaches to language tend to consider polysemy and homonymy as deviations from normal – or rather, normative – word meanings that are or ought to be unequivocal and clearly defined. However, in natural language polysemy is not deviant but default: lexical items that are used with any frequency tend to almost always have multiple, related meanings that have been conventionalized in various degrees (see Langacker, 2008: 37). Meanings are not, as objectivist semantics would have it, independent sense units that “interpret” the abstract symbols of a syntactic string. Conventional meanings are, on the contrary, abstracted from the various usages in which lexical items have been encountered. And rather than clear-cut classificatory or referential descriptions, meanings of lexical items are portals to open-ended domains of knowledge with regard to certain types of entities. Words, that is, do not have meanings, but are cues to meaning, and those meanings are “protean” rather than neatly defined (ibid.; see also Elman, 2004: 306; Evans, 2006:493). After all, if this were not the case, philosophers of language would never have felt compelled to take up the challenge to purify and logify language into what positivist philosophers called “verifiable statements” (see Ayer, 1987). The semantic problems diagnosed in folksonomies are a strong indication that users of tagging systems apply their skills, experience with and knowledge of everyday language usage to their tagging practices: tags, that is, are more like words in natural languages than items in a glossary.

The nominalist approach tends to look at folksonomies as an interesting experiment in alternative, spontaneously and collaboratively created popular taxonomies, the success of which is largely measured by the standards for expert taxonomies. This validation can go both ways: folksonomies are either seen as “feral” hypertexts that need to be tamed by curbing the liberty of the taggers through synonym and homonym control and recommendation systems, or they are promoted as anarchic systems in which individual users can trace their personal profiles and signatures (Rafferty & Hidderley, 2007; Walker, 2005; Vander Wal, 2005; Shirky, 2005). Both approaches, however, see tags as labels for entities that make up either the objectivist “ontologies” of professional taxonomists or the private ontologies of individual users, who tend to be much sloppier and much more idiosyncratic in their use of terms than the professionals (see Mika 2007). Most research of tagging systems focuses on the ternary relationship between tagger-tag-resource in order to extract the “local” ontologies that emerge from the myriads of interactions between individual user-tag-resource triangles within social networks like the Flickr community.

In practice, however, tags hardly ever come as isolated items since most users follow Flicker’s recommendation to use more than two tags (“but not too many” – see Hogan, 2006: 5) in order to increase the retrievability of their pictures by other users. This justifies the assumption that for the users the tags they add to their pictures are somehow related, and since these users are not professional archivists or experts but “ordinary folks” who tap into their knowledge of everyday language for the categorization of their pictures, they very likely bring to bear more of their linguistic competence to their tagging practices than just their knowledge of word meanings (Tonkin, 2007: 116). They may be “speaking” rather than mere “labeling.” Natural languages do not carve up the world the way expert taxonomists do, nor do linguistic expressions simply “mirror” the states of affairs they are expressions about. The question, then, is whether there is more in the tag cloud than mere words?[5] Does something like a “collective intelligence” leave its traces in a tag cloud like Flickr’s and if so, what does it look like?

Photos and Folksonomies: Flickr

Flickr provides an interesting case for a first tentative search for a hidden order in the keywords with which Flickr users tag their photos. Flickr offers a narrow tagging system, that only allows owners to tag their uploaded pictures, and only owners can give other users permission to tag these pictures as well. Flickr’s tagging system is, moreover, blind: it does not recommend tags to the user. Therefore one may assume that the tags of Flickr users express what those users had in mind when they tagged their pictures. However, Flickr presents its users with a so called tag cloud, an alphabetically listed collection of the 150 all time most popular tags in which the size of the tags reflects the relative frequency of their use (fig. 1).

Figure 1. Tag Cloud 2007.

Users who want to increase the visibility of their photos can select tags from this tag cloud. A tag cloud is an indication of, as well as a condition for, a power law effect: a tag cloud may create a positive feedback loop that makes ‘the rich get richer’ (Shirky, 2003). The relative stability of Flickr’s tag cloud over a longer period of time seems to confirm this: the tag cloud printed by Müller-Prove (2007) (fig 2) is not very different from the collection of tags one year later. Indirectly, then, a tag cloud may function as a recommendation system.

Figure 2. Tag Cloud 2006.

Whether or not the tag cloud is instrumental in creating a consensual vocabulary over time is an empirical question. However, the tag cloud represents only a very small portion of the vast amount of tags users have at their disposal and actually use. The amount of tags available to Flickr’s users is not only virtually co-extensive with the lexicon of the English language, but there are also many non-English speaking users who tag their pictures in their own language.[6] Moreover, none of the tags from the tag cloud appears in the list of the “hot tags” of “the last 24 hours” published on the same web page, which suggests that most Flickr members who uploaded pictures in the previous 24 hours did not use the tag cloud as a guide for tagging. Finally, the tag cloud does not appear on the personal pages through which members access Flickr. Nor does it appear on Flickr’s upload page or in the uploading software. These are some strong indications that most Flickr users tag their photos blindly.

The tag cloud, then, offers a glimpse into the most frequent and most common tagging practices of Flickr’s users. Moreover, if one follows the tags in the tag cloud, Flickr presents the user with clusters of tags with which the most popular tags are most frequently combined. This offers a first indication of the semantic fields in which these tags most often operate. Finally, the tags of all publicly accessible photos are public as well: Flickr’s tagging system is blind and transparent at the same time. And, last but not least, with the tag cloud and clusters, Flickr has already done quite a lot of preliminary work.

Categorizing tags

How to bring order into the hundred and fifty tags in Flickr’s tag cloud? A ranking of the tags according to the frequency of their use does not yield much more information than the graphical design of the cloud itself already provided. If one plots the frequency of use in a graph, the typical shape of the power law shows up, but the order of the tags is too random to derive any conclusion from this (or it should be that weddings in new york and ensuing trips from new york to japan are the most popular events among the users of Flickr). However, if one attempts to categorize the tags themselves, more interesting results emerge.

The first thing to notice is that the by far largest category of tags are proper nouns that name continents, countries, states, and cities (see also Mathes, 2004: 4): 41 out of the 145 tags or 28% of the tags in the tag cloud belong to this category of geographical names. Due to the semantic difficulties outlined above, other categories are less obvious and less easy to identify. There are, for instance, a number of other common nouns that refer to locations as well, like beach, museum, zoo, river, street, park, etc. As with pictures tagged with geographical names, pictures tagged with proper nouns like these can be pictures of the sites mentioned through the tags, or pictures taken at those sites. The lack of a “grounding” article, moreover, makes it unclear whether the tags refer to specific sites (e.g., the zoo in Berlin) or more indefinitely to indicate the kind of site (as in We went to the/a zoo).

A look at the clusters in which such tags appear – and a random sample of pictures tagged with these proper nouns – shows that in most cases the focus of these pictures is not on the sites mentioned but rather on the activities for which the mentioned sites provide a setting. The same goes for temporal tags like christmas, holiday, or halloween: these are on a par with tags like birthday and honeymoon, which are almost always added to pictures of activities that are undertaken at the times mentioned by the tags.[7] Nouns like these, then, are largely used to metonymically refer to activities typically undertaken on the times and sites mentioned which at least partly explains the absence of verbs in the tag cloud.[8] More generally, events are often talked about metaphorically as objects, as in going to the concert (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 30-31; Zack and Tversky, 2001: 7) Rather than categorizing such tags as ‘places’ or ‘times’, it seems to make more sense to categorize them as Events. This category turns out to contain 22 tags or 15% of the tags in the tag cloud (fig. 3).

Figure 3. Categories of tags ranked according their frequencies.

Following the same procedure, the remaining 82 tags or 57% of the tag cloud can be distributed over ten more categories: nature (12 or 8.28%), style/genre (12 or 8.25%), places (10 or 6.9%), family (5 or 3.45%), seasons (8 or 5.5%), technique (5 or 3.45%), people (4 or 2.76%), arts (3 or 2 %), animals (3 or 2%), and rest (3 or 2%). The categories style/genre and technique contain tags that mention either properties of the photos themselves, like its most salient colors or whether it is black-and-white, or the cameras and lenses used for making the pictures. Categories like these are, of course, to be expected on a site that is exclusively dedicated to photography (see Mathes, 2004: 4).

It is interesting to observe that there is a strong correlation between the number of tags in each category and the aggregate frequency of use of the tags of these categories (fig. 4). Even more interesting is that the distributions of frequency of use and number of tags of each category follow a power law: geographical names were used 69 ml. times, events 44.5 ml. times, nature 22 ml. times, and style/genre 13 mil. times.[9] After the steep decline of the curve from geographical names through events to nature, the graph flattens out to gradually approach the bottom line (see also Guy & Tonkin, 2006).

Besides geographical names and events, there is one other category that does not appear in the tag cloud but which is added to all pictures uploaded to Flickr: the date and time the picture was taken, which is automatically registered by almost all of today’s digital cameras, included in the metadata of the picture, and published on Flickr under the “additional information” that comes with every public picture. Time, then, geographical names, and events are by far the most frequently occurring categories of tags, followed by the moderately frequently used category nature, which is in turn followed by low frequency categories. Geographical names and events “catch” 43 % of all tags in the tag cloud, whereas the remaining 57% of the tags are distributed over the other 10 categories.

Events, states, and satellites

The predominance of the categories time, geographical names, and events intuitively makes sense: whatever a picture shows, it must have taken place at some time and at some geographically identifiable location, and whatever takes place, chances are that it is some event or other. Time, setting, and event belong to the most basic components of what constitutes a scene in human experience, and these experiential components are reflected in and expressed by conceptual and linguistic structures (Goldberg, 1995: 39; Langacker, 1991: 294-295). The prevalence of the tag categories time, geographical names, and event, then, suggests the working of a basic, if not archetypical argument structure in which time, geographical location, and event are the elementary roles.[10] If these elementary and therefore most frequently occurring roles in a conceptual and semantic argument structure can be called nuclear arguments, other tag categories in the “long tail” of the power law distributions that occur much less frequently than the former ones, can be called satellite arguments: they may but do not need to occur as optional complements and specifications of the scene designated by the nuclear arguments. Tags like family and summer, for instance, may be used to specify that the event of going to the beach on the 7th of January in Santa Catarina in Brazil was with the family and in the summer (fig. 4).

Figure 4. On the beach in San Catarina.

(reproduced with the kind permission of the Elena Langdon and the photographer, Alan Stone Langdon)

In the argument structure, the tags from the categories family (family) and seasons (summer) fill the complementary satellite argument roles of additional participant and specification of time (Siewierska, 1991: 55, 72).

It is clear, however, that not all tag categories in the long tail can be dealt with in this way. Tags from the categories style/genre and technique do not necessarily qualify or refer to events depicted by the photos, and photos tagged with tags from the categories places, people, or arts do not necessarily depict events at all, whereas tags from the categories nature and seasons are often combined with tags from the categories style/genre to tag pictures like close-ups of flowers or insects that can hardly be qualified as events. The same applies to many pictures tagged with urban or street, or portrait or cat (there is nothing eventful about a picture of a sleeping cat, for instance). Moreover, tags from the category events have been used only about 2/3rds of the times geographical names have been used, which suggests that the latter function as a nuclear argument with other argument roles than events. Events typically are scenes in which something happens, that is, events are dynamic situations in which some change, movement, or transformation takes place. But there are, of course, also situations in which no significant changes occur and that are therefore not events but static states. Since the latter are as basic to human experience as the former, events and states are themselves subcategories of the more general category of state of affairs (Siewierska, 1991: 43). The set of nuclear arguments must hence be slightly modified: the nuclear argument roles time and geographical names occur either with the argument role event or with the argument role state, which are both subcategories of the encompassing argument role state of affairs.

Some problems remain, though. Ambiguities in the senses of tags with place names are not solved by attaching them as argument roles to states, since in many cases the tags do not refer to an event or state depicted in the picture, but rather to the place where the picture has been taken. Similarly, tag categories such as style/genre or technique do not necessarily qualify properties of objects, persons, or sites depicted in the picture, but rather properties of either the photograph itself or the manner in which the photograph was taken. This suggest that there is one event that does not appear in the tag cloud because it is hardly ever being mentioned by Flickr’s users, but that is presupposed not only by those who tag their pictures with tags from the categories style/genre, technique, or geographical names that do not refer to sites in the picture, but by all users, as well as the designers of Flickr who added the rubric “Additional Information” to every public picture. It is, of course, the event that brings the photo’s themselves into being: the very act of photography itself, which takes as nuclear argument roles the photographer (usually the owner of the account where the picture was uploaded), the photograph which is the result of the act of photography, the point in time at which the picture was taken (always part of the “additional information”), and as optional satellites the place where the picture was taken, the manner in which it was taken or executed (or “processed” with, say, Photoshop), and the instrument with which it was taken (nikon, canon, macro).[11] The complete picture of the argument structure underlying Flickr’s tag cloud looks like fig. 5.

Figure 5. Argument structure in Flickr's tags.

Some interesting observations can be made. First of all, given the instantaneous nature of the “photographic act,” the time and place at which the picture was taken is usually the same time at which the state of affairs depicted in the photograph took place. The events or states depicted in the photo thus normally “inherit” the time and place arguments of the higher level action of making the photo. Therefore, a picture taken in England will almost always show an event or state of affairs that has taken place in England, although the scene depicted in the photo is not always necessarily about England. Since the point in time at which a picture was taken is also automatically inherited by the depicted states of affairs, tags from the category seasons are more or less redundant. However, they often serve the less redundant function of metonymically referring to states or events that are typical for a particular season (e.g., landscape, snow, beach, hiking, etc.). They may therefore appear in the argument role of states, just as holidays, christmas, or halloween are tags that metonymically refer to events.

Tags from some categories like seasons, family, animals, and places appear at more than one place in the argument structure. Family members or animals, for instance, can fulfill the argument role of additional participants in events,, but they can also be the “subject” or “theme” of, say, portrait photography. In the latter case, as the focal “objects” or “experiencers” of the act of photography – which they “undergo” (e.g. “I photographed X”) – and as non-agentive subjects of the picture’s content (e.g., “here’s X”) which with portrait photography is usually static rather than dynamic, they fit into the role of a “minimal” or “zero”-participant of a state. The particular meaning of a tag, that is, depends as much if not more on its role in an argument structure rather than on its lexical meaning, or rather, this lexical meaning is itself a function of the argument structure in which it is embedded plus, of course, the encyclopaedic linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge the lexical item used as a tag gives access to (Evans, 2006: 492). Again, many of the observed problems with the semantics of tags, like polysemy, arise from the lack of markers of syntactic and semantic functions and relations rather than from presumed intrinsic ambiguities of the used lexical items. According to cognitive linguistics, there are simply no such things as fixed, intrinsic meanings. Since meanings are a function of the utterance and utterance context in which lexical items are used, and every use always entails a slight shift of its meaning, polysemy is the prevalent property of most commonly used lexical items. Fixed and intrinsic meanings are the turf of expert languages in which the meanings of symbols are explicitly – and artificially – defined and have to be acquired during a inevitable period of learning.

Tagging systems like Flickr’s, on the other hand, allow users to rely on their everyday linguistic competence and common “folk” knowledge about the world. Polysemy, homonymy, different levels of categorization, and one could add ambiguity, idiosyncrasies, inexactness, and even incomprehensible or misplaced use of lexical items are therefore not temporary problems that will be overcome by the massive and intense interactions and exchanges between the creators of a folksonomy, but they are at the heart of the major resource folksonomists tap on: natural language. Natural languages provide users with a number of means to constrain the semantic potential of lexical items and to coordinate their efforts to get their intentions across. Since these are absent from tagging systems as we (still) know them, one either has to learn to live with the semantic problems inherent in folksonomies, or find ways to force them to evolve into something like a taxonomy. To bet on a spontaneous transformation from a polysemous, ambiguous and messy folksonomy into a more monosemous, less equivocal and neat vocabulary is not a very realistic option. However, although Flickr’s tag cloud does not display anything like a hierarchical structure in which key terms and tags are related through the parent-child and sibling relationships that characterize classical taxonomies, this does not mean that the tag cloud is a flat and random collection of items. The structures that emerge from the myriads of interactions of the members of the Flickr community turn out to be very similar to the argument structures that govern the semantics of natural languages.

Tag-elese, a language without grammar

Superficially Flickr’s tag cloud looks like a chaotic and random collection of words, but a closer analysis of the tags reveals that the tag cloud is amazingly highly and complexly structured – although maybe not in the way a librarian, an archivist or a lexicographer would go about it. It turns out that the hundred and fifty tags from Flickr’s tag cloud can be distributed over a relatively small number of categories, and those categories in turn fit the slots of a semantic argument structure that is in almost all respects similar to the semantic argument structure found in natural languages. The arguments of this semantic structure themselves operate on two different levels of state of affairs. At one level, the arguments structure the event through which a photo comes into being: the photographic act, which takes place at a certain location, at a certain time, is taken in a certain manner and with a particular instrument. At another level, the argument structure organizes the conceptualization of the state of affairs represented by the photo: a state or event that obtained at a certain time and a certain location, possibly with additional participants, specifications of times and places, or characteristics of the photographed objects (e.g. color).

Several factors obscure this hidden order underneath the surface of Flickr’s tag cloud. First of all, the way tags are presented in the tag cloud already suggests that there is no order since an alphabetical list is a conventional and convenient way of flagging the absence or deliberate refusal of any order whatsoever. Moreover, the tag cloud relates tags only by their size, but does not group or categorize them in any way. Clustering takes place “one click away” from the tag cloud, but in those clusters appear tags that are not part of the tag cloud, and the clusters are statistically but not semantically motivated. The tag cloud and its satellite clusters do not provide any clue to any sort of non-arbitrary order.

Second, there is no straightforward, one-to-one relationship between tags, tag categories, and arguments. A single tag can be a member of more than one category, and a single category can appear in more than one argument. Christmas, for instance, can be categorized as an event, but it can also be used as an iconic representation of one of the seasons. Place names that can be used to metonymically refer to events can obviously also be used to name places, and a tag like architecture can be a member of the category Places as well as of the category art. The category Places, in turn, appears in the argument role of State, but can also function as a specification of Place. Argument structure and tag categories, that is, provide frameworks within which tags acquire their meanings. In this respect, tag categories and argument roles function in ways very similar to grammatical classes and parts of speech in natural language. An event, for instance, can often be referred to with a verb (e.g., explode) or a noun (explosion), and in He kissed Mary and He gave Mary a kiss it does seem to make a difference whether the receiver of this token of affection grammatically is a direct object or an indirect object. This commutability of tags and tag categories, however, is obscured by the presentation of tags as single, isolated items without structural relationships with other units in the tag cloud. This has as a consequence that difficulties in assessing the intended meaning of a tag are ascribed to polysemy as a kind of an inherent semantic failure of lexical items used as tags. In contrast to the lexical items in everyday language, that is, tags do not appear in other lexical items and grammatical elements with which words usually combine into higher-order constructions such as sentences, but as loose, separate items that get attached to a picture in no particular order. If there are no discernible clues to any sort of structure underlying the tag cloud, then there are no incentives to look for one either and one has no other option than to take a nominalist approach to tags.

This leads to a third, and even more fundamental factor that veals the hidden semantic order in Flickr’s tag cloud. As mentioned above, this tagging system – which is certainly not unique in this respect – only allows one to submit single words as tags. This has much more far reaching consequences than the prominent presence of York among Flickr’s hundred and fifty most popular tags, the odd lost preposition such as de or the problems users have with the tagging of places with composite names. Generally, it discourages the use of any item that presupposes or requires another item in order to become meaningful. A prime victim of the tagging practices fostered by Flickr’s system are verbs: verbs profile processes that involve one participant in the case of intranstive verbs, and two participants in the case of transitive verbs, and often require complements in order to make sense. An expression like hit is virtually meaningless if it can not be made clear who did the hitting and who or what underwent it. A verb like walk is not very illuminative either, if one doesn’t know who walked where to. This applies a fortiori to auxiliary verbs and copula. Have, be, can, must, will, shall, may only express very schematic meanings that need other verbs (or nominals in the case of copula) to express the processes they are used to modalize. Neither does it make much sense to enter articles, demonstratives or quantifiers into the tagging system, since these would simply share the fate of the preposition de: they would get separated from the nouns whose referents they are meant to help identify and wind up as free-floating elements in the tag cloud. It is no coincidence that the only pronoun in Flickr’s tag cloud is me because it is the only pronoun that identifies the person in a picture as the same person who tagged it. Other pronouns become meaningful either in a speech event (you, we) or through anaphoric reference, which presupposes an antecedent for which the tagging system makes no allowances.

The discouragement of the use of combinatorial elements, and especially verbs, has even more consequences, because the “tagging-per-single-world” requirement quite literally beheads taggers of their capacities to bring some order in their tags. In English and in many other languages, verbs often are what linguists call the “heads” of a clause: the other parts of a sentence (subject, object, indirect object, prepositional phrases, adverbs, etc) are functionally dependent on the verb. These functions are not only marked by inflections, case markers, and other elements, but also by the word order of a sentence. In English and in other SVO (subject-verb-object) languages, the noun that precedes a verb is a subject, and the noun that follows it an object. If one takes away the head, one takes away the vault that keeps the construction together, because there is no longer a rationale for a specific word order. The seeming absence of order in Flickr’s tag cloud is thus a consequence of linguistic choices the system forces upon the users as much if not more than the semantic blindness of the system that aggregates the tags.

And here one sees the emergence of a fundamental contradiction in tagging systems like Flickr’s and folksonomies in general. On the one hand, folksonomy tagging systems invite users to freely draw on the resources of their own vernaculars, which they happily and massively do. But at the same time, these tagging systems deprive the users of the use of those grammatical elements of a natural language that specify relations, contextualize lexical items, identify referents, express the ontological and epistemological status of the scenes in the pictures they want to verbally tag. By denying – or at least discouraging – the use of articles, demonstratives, quantifiers, modals, copula, inflexions, case markers, pronouns and even word order, tagging systems like Flickr’s enforce a severe degree of de-grammaticalization on the way users can bring to bear their everyday linguistic skills on tagging. Ironically, advanced computer applications that claim to foster “collective intelligence” and promote the “wisdom of the crowds” force their users to resort to “speak” a language that in almost every respect is similar to so-called pidgin languages. Pidgin languages develop in communities where people from different linguistic backgrounds need to communicate with each other without having a common lingua franca at their disposal. In situations like these, as they occurred in Caribbean at the turn of the 19th century, for instance, a “makeshift” language arises which serves as the basic means of communication. Pidgin languages have a couple of features that seem to be relevant for folksonomies. First, they are syntactically severely impoverished. Because they lack ‘morphology, articles, gender/classifiers, case markers, pronouns/agreement, speech-act markers, tense-aspect-modality, complementizers and subordinators’, T. Givón (1989: 246-248) tags pidgin languages as a ‘pre-grammatical mode’ (see also Jackendoff, 1993: 131; Pinker, 1994: 33). And as in Flickr’s tag cloud, pidgin languages are also characterized by an almost complete absence of verbs.

This is, of course, not to say that tags actually constitute a pidgin language, because there are also obvious differences between tagging practices and pidgin languages. Most importantly, English functions on the Internet as a common language for both native speakers and users from non-English speaking communities. The ‘de-grammaticalization’ in tagging systems does not occur for a lack of a common language, but is a consequence of the limitations imposed by the tagging system. However, if “Tagelese” is in any way to be considered a language, the only known language systems it can be compared with are indeed pidgin languages. To give an example, the argument structure of Flickr’s tag cloud shows that as in pidgin languages, in Tagelese the process of degrammaticalization pushes even beyond the level of syntax and affects the level of argument structure as well. The absence of verbs, for instance, induces at a syntactic level the absence of subjects and (direct and indirect) objects, which correlates at the level of argument structure with the absence of the argument roles Agent and Patient. In the tagging system events tend to be reified and represented by nouns (concert, show, festival, football, etc.) or by the names of places and times at which they took place. However, nouns do not have subjects or objects but usually appear in those grammatical roles themselves. In the absence of a verb – or in the presence of a noun that expresses a reified process – the Agent and Patient roles are “periphrastically” expressed by means of prepositional phrases (e.g. the picture of X, the picture by X; compare the beating of X; the beating by X). But a tagging system has no use for prepositions, and since it it does not favor the use of verbs either, there is no room for Agent and Patient roles at the level of argument structure. Agent and Patient roles are therefore “demoted” to the argument role of Additional Participant for which, however, the system does not allow any special syntactical markers.

As speakers and hearers in pidgin languages, the users of Tagelese must infer the intended role of the noun from contextual clues (such as other tags with which a tag co-occurs, and of course the tagged picture). Paradoxically, an asynchronous and disembedding and hence de-contextualizing medium like Flickr’s website enforces a context- and feedback dependent mode of information processing on its users that is very similar to that of pidgin languages (see Givón, 1989: 248)

Pidgin languages tend to develop into more syntactically complex, fullfledged “creole” languages within two or three generations (Jackendoff, 1993: 35; Pinker, 1994: 34). It is, however, not very clear whether Tagelese is in the first stages of the creation of pidgin-like language and on its way to become a more elaborate language system, or whether the current state of Tagelese is a symptom of an opposite development towards a further impoverishment. Is the argument structure in Flickr’s tag system a sign of an incipient process of grammaticalization or is it the vestige of a degenerating language system? Is there a linguistic structure emerging where there previously was none, or is the argument structure as it currently appears in Flickr’s tag cloud what remains of a fully fledged language like English when users are deprived of elementary syntactic devices? Whether the argument roles are the starting points of a process of “creolization” or the last points of resistance against a process of “de-creolization”, the argument roles themselves seem to be the “strange attractors” around which the processes of grammaticalization and/or de-grammaticalization evolve. Whatever may turn out to be the case, the tagging system itself is a major player in this process, either as an impediment to further creolization or as a cause for further de-creolization.

As ‘pre-grammatical modes of language’, tagging systems have no elements of grammar that function as what Givón (1989: 248) calls ‘automatizion clues’ that can be ‘used in information processing via language.’ When Givón observes that processing in the pre-grammatical model is ‘relatively slow,’ ‘more analytic, demanding more attention,’ ‘relatively more feedback-dependent,’ ‘less certain’ and ‘more ambiguous’ (ibid: 248-249) it seems as if he is commenting not on pre-grammatical language modes, but on twenty-first century tagging systems. The notorious and by now familiar problems of polysemy, homonymy, ambiguity, idiosyncrasy, inexactness – other terms used to say that it can be damned hard to find out what a tag stands for – and so on do not stem from a lack of structure, because the argument structure of natural languages transpires in the tag cloud. The meanings of tags turns out to be dependent on membership of a tag category and the role in the argument structure. The problem resides in the absence of grammatical elements to mark and express these argument roles. Tag systems, that is, quite literally embody the paradoxical formula with which the founding father of film semiotics, Christian Metz (1983: 72), once characterized cinema: as a langage sans langue, a language without grammar.

The name “tag cloud” seems to be an appropriate choice to designate an inventory of the most frequently used tags in a tagging system like that of Flickr or other “social networking” sites. As a cloud it looks like an amorphous, unpredictable and chaotic phenomenon. But as a cloud it turns out to be a complex system in which through the myriads of interactions of its smallest component parts, and through its interactions with its environment, ordered patterns emerge that evolve around a few “strange attractors.” In the tag cloud, these strange attractors are the argument structures of the semantics of natural everyday language – the language of the common “folks”. However, given the limitations these tagging systems artificially impose on the deployment of basic linguistic devices, it remains to be seen whether these “folksonomies” will be allowed to “creolize,” or whether they will be pushed further on the way of de-grammaticalization and fall apart into the random collections of mostly meaningless (or too meaningful) items that tag clouds according to many already are.

But this, of course, raises an interesting question. Assuming that Tagelese were allowed to develop into a more elaborate and complex language system, could it go anywhere else than towards the English language as we know it? Tags would most likely evolve into captions, become something like the “lexias” of the good old hypertexts or maybe even (mini-) blogs. In other words: a fully fledged Tagelese could hardly be anything else than a replication of linguistic and communicative forms and formats that are already there. After all, the most powerful, rich, complex, sophisticated, flexible, and effective folksonomies that actually exist are natural languages.

The only viable alternative to this development is a finetuning, differentiation and sophistication of the vocabularies of Tagelese. Something like this already seems to take place. Tagelese would then evolve into a kind of a glossary for specific uses at particular sites on the Internet (since there is no guarantee that the process of differentiation, articulation, and sophistication would evolve in the same manner at each site). This could be the outcome of a further de-grammaticalization of Tagelese whereby the increasing impoverishment of syntactic and semantic structures would be compensated by a higher degree of sophistication, and differentiation of the Tagelese lexicon (or rather, as a language without a grammar, Tagelese would be co-identical with a lexicon). In that case, folksonomies would indeed become taxonomies of the crowds. However, even if the specific meanings tags acquire within particular tagging systems will have been generated by the numerous interactions of masses of users, they will have to be learned by newcomers and candidate users will have to adapt their own language usages to the meanings consensually ascribed to the tags that constitute the lexicon of the members of the community of a social site.

If this process were to occur, however, the very limits of a system that started out as an alternative to authoritarian, expert driven and hierarchical taxonomy would have pushed a user generated folksonomy towards a system that looks suspiciously much like a taxonomy itself.

Cities, girls, and gardens: what about “collective intelligence”?

If it is true that folksonomies offer a peek into the “collective intelligence” or “the wisdom of the crowds” that created them, what, then, does Flickr’s tag cloud tell us about the “collective mind” of the Flickr community? Although answering this question would require an article by itself, some brief observations and suggestions for further research.

Although one of the often mentioned problems with free tagging is that users tag similar objects at different levels of categorization, almost all tags in the tag cloud are nevertheless terms that designate basic level categories, while there are only a very few generic level terms (animals, europe, landscape) and no subordinate level category terms. This is in line with findings of cognitive linguists that this ‘basic level’ is the cognitively and linguistically most salient level of categorization, because it is the level at which people conceptualize things as perceptual and functional gestalts, usually interact with entities, is the level with the most commonly used labels for category members, and the level at which most common knowledge is organized (Lakoff, 1987: 46; Taylor, 1991: 48 Zacks and Tversky, 2001: 5). The massive presence of basic level category terms in the tag cloud suggests that there is not really a problem of different levels of categorization, but rather that folksonomies operate along a logic that differs from that of classical taxonomies in which basic level categories have no special status. On the contrary, since generic and specific levels of categorization usually are the domains of the expert knowledge of professionals and specialists, the massive prevalence of basic level categories is a strong indication that the tag cloud is a repository of non-expert, common sense and everyday “folk” wisdom.

“Folk wisdom”, however, is not necessarily impaired by ambiguity and inexactness. It is true that tagging systems like Flickr’s do not allow users to specify meanings by expressing structural relations, be they linguistic or taxonomic. Inexactness, ambiguity, idiosyncrasy and other sources of confusion may affect tags at the level of individual usage, but at the collective level of the tag cloud one can observe a process of subtle differentiaton and specification. It appears that seemingly synonymous tags express often subtle differences in meaning. The tags city and urban, for instance, are both used to tag photos of urban scenes, and there is, not surprisingly, a great overlap in the clusters in which they appear: both share clusters with tags like street, architecture, building, night, sky, as well as a cluster with the different spellings of and alternative names for New York (nyc, newyorkcity, manhattan). The tag urban, however, but not the tag city, also appears in the clusters graffiti, wall, streetart, stencil, brick and decay, abandoned, rust, old. The tag city, on the other hand, but not urban, appears in a cluster bridge, river, water. City seems to be an unmarked term used to tag common pictures of bright cityscapes and city life, whereas urban is a marked term that designates the more picturesque, dark, and romantic aspects of the big city. Urban apparently evokes the city as a sort of Baudelairian “forest of symbols” whereas city evokes a more neutral – or modernist, Corbusier or Mies van de Rohe like – conception of the city. Since both terms carry different connotations they are not entirely interchangeable. This is an example of the processes of differentiation, sophistication and semantic “finetuning” that might function as a counterforce against enforced “de-grammaticalization.”

Another remarkable phenomenon is the occurrence of a tag girl, but not of a male equivalent. The tag boy only appears in one of the “girl clusters” together with the tags child, children, kid, kids, cute, boy, baby, love. The other girl clusters, however, contain tags like portrait, face, eyes, smile, hair, blue, red, blackandwhite and beach, bikini, summer. As the quite strong presence of tags from the style/genre category in these clusters suggests, girls but not boys are favorite candidates for the role of patient of the photographic act (or, to be more precise, for the role of additional participant in the reified and nominalized event of the photographic act). The almost fetishistic fragmentation of girls’ bodies and faces into partial objects like eyes, smile, hair might suggest that the exercise of photographic skills, suggested by tags like blue, red, blackandwhite, etc. might function as a decoy to distract the attention of other Flickr users to the use of the medium away from the “message,” the actual focus of interest. These cluster suggest a sort of inverted or should we say, perverted, McLuhanism. The absence of boys in Flickr’s tag cloud might give a clue to the predominant sexual orientation in the Flickr community. But then again, this is eventually a matter for empirical research.

However, Flickr photographers do not only exercise their photographic skills and equipment on girls. The tags flower and flowers occur in clusters with tags that designate colors but also mention the equipment and style with which the pictures have been taken (macro, closeup, canon). As the remarkable presence of tags from the categories style/genre and technique in the flower clusters suggest, flowers are – as are girls – favorite subjects for photographic studies (indicated by the tags that fill the argument roles of manner and instrument). The only place that occurs in the flower clusters is the garden, which in turn suggests that Flickr photographers find their favorite “patients,” girls and flowers, mostly in the familiar surroundings of their homes and gardens. A deeper analysis of the tags, their roles in the argument structure, and their co-occurence with other tags at finer grained levels might eventually yield a sort of a virtual portrait of the Flickr user. However, more interesting than compiling a statistical average which only yields a virtual, imaginary and probably highly illusionary picture of Flickr’s “collective mind” are the differences and differentiations that drive the processes of semantic specification. Neither the differentiation of urban as a marked space versus city as an unmarked, default space nor the “rewriting” of the meaning of girl as a favorite photographic object are part of the “dictionary meaning” of these lexical items. Taxonomies and even “folks taxonomies” or controlled vocabularies are not very likely to capture these contextually and pragmatically – and therefore always more or less allusive and floating – meanings. Anyway, there is no guarantee that a folksonomic lexicon would look like the OED.[12]

Say Cheese!

Folksonomies are not “feral” systems. The tag cloud turns out to constitute a Tag-elese, a “language without grammar” that evolves around argument roles that cannot be syntactically expressed. There are signs that the lack of basic grammatical devices is compensated by a process of semantic differentation and specification, which in turn, because it evolves in an uncontrolled manner, might reveal a few things about the collective mind of the Flickr community. A psychanalytic “free floating” attention will probably not suffice to uncover the collective “unconscious” of this and other social site communities on the Internet. Statistics and linguistics will have to do the job.

Finally, whether a tagging system like Flickr’s will ever settle into something like a controlled vocabulary is very doubtful (Peterson, 2006: 4). Folksonomies might not be exactly “feral” animals, but seen from a taxonomist’s point of view, they are and will remain quite different beasts.[13] As ordinary language always was for positivist philosophers of language.

Author’s Biography

Jan Simons is Associate Professor in New Media at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests are the role language plays in understanding media, and the cross-overs between old and new media, in particular film, photography and digital media. His latest book is Playing The Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007).

Notes

[1] This is an extended version of a paper presented at the conference Videovortex: Responses to YouTube, 18-19th of January 2008 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. See: http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2008/01/19/video-vortex-jan-simons-on-the-narrative-of-tagging/. Accessed on 01/22/2008. The title of this article is an tribute to Lakoff, 1987.

[back]

[2] This hoped for eventual convergence of myriads of individual interactions goes by several names like “collective intelligence,” “collective mindset,” “collective ontologies,” “wisdom of the crowds,” etc.

[back]

[3] There are, of course, many more problems with tags, such as unlikely compounds (TimBernersLee, sometaithurts, handsclawsandallkindsofpaws), personal tags (mydog, me, natasja), or one-offs (billybobsdog) (Mathes, 2004; Guy and Tonkin, 2006).

[back]

[4] Of course, place names can be polysemous as well. The tag iraq, for instance, may be used for pictures of sites in Iraq or taken in Iraq, but also to tag pictures of a demonstration against the war in Iraq (Mathes, 2004: 10).

[back]

[5] Because the particular meaning of lexical items is almost always dependent on the particular constructions in which they appear, there is, according to linguistic schools like Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995), Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1987, 1991), and Functional Grammar (Siewierska, 1991) no strict demarcation line between the syntax and the semantics of a language. Polysemy, for instance, often arises from the different constructions in which a lexical participates.

[back]

[6] In a sample of about 3000 tags taken from Flickr, 45% of the tags were valid English dictionary words. But 50 % of the tags in their sample came from “unknown languages”, i.e. languages other than Spanish, French, Portuguese, German and British English (Guy and Tonkin, 2006).

[back]

[7] This is, of course, another source of ambiguities. A couple might tag all the pictures they took on their honeymoon with ‘honeymoon’, including those taken at a baseball match or those of the motor bikes on which they made a trip through the States. For other users than this couple and their relatives and friends, for whom the pictures are probably primarily mentioned, this categorization doesn’t make any sense.

[back]

[8] It is, of course, hard to imagine how festivities like Christmas or a birthday party could be visualized otherwise than through the activities or events that are typical for them. However, the photographs on Flickr do not serve to illustrate or exemplify the festivities mentioned by the tags, but the tags serve to provide some information about the picture. For the owners of the pictures it must be of some importance to clarify that the activities or events shown in the picture happened on a Christmas, a birthday party or a honeymoon.

[back]

[9] Again, the frequency of the use of a particular category of tags does not say anything about the popularity of photographic themes: users may, for instance, tag a single picture with more than one geographical name, like london, england, europe, or santa catarina and brazil.

[back]

[10] Langacker (1991: 294-294) calls these elementary argument structures conceptual archetypes: “Certain recurrent and sharply differentiated aspects of our experience emerge as archetypes, which we normally use to structure our conceptions insofar as possible. Since language is a means by which we describe our experience, it is natural that such archetypes should be seized upon as the prototypical values of basic linguistic constructs.”

[back]

[11] As the time and date at which the picture was taken, information about the camera that was used to take it is also included in the meta-data that Flickr automatically adds to a picture as “Additional Information”.

[back]

[12] Differences and incompatibilities between folksonomies and expert classification systems have been explained by differences in underlying “philosophies”: professional taxonomies are based on Aristotelian principles of classification, whereas folksonomies appear to be based on ‘philosophical relativism,’ since the choice of lexical items depends on the interests, perspectives, purposes and knowledge of the individual user rather than Aristotelian metaphysics (Peterson, 2006: 3).

[back]

[13] ‘In practice, a representation designed for information management and retrieval purposes is typically influenced by concerns other than cognitive or neural realism. Computability, for example, is a primary concern. An optimal representation may therefore be far from realistic’ (Tonkin, 2007: 115).

[back]

References

Ayer, A.J. Language, Truth and Logic (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1987).

Doan, Bich-Liên, Joemon, Jose and Massimo Melucci. (eds.) Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Context-Based Information Retrieval (Roskilde, Dk: Roskilde University, 2007).

Elman, Jeffrey L. ‘An Alternative View Of The Mental Lexicon’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8(7) (2004): 301-306.

Evans, Vyvyan. ‘Lexical Concepts, Cognitive Models and Meaning-Construction’, Cognitive Linguistics 17(4) (2006): 491-534.

Fillmore, Charles. ‘The Case for Case’ in Emmon Bach & Robert T. Harms (eds.) Universals in Linguistic Theory. London, New York, Sydney, Toronto: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston (1968): 1-90.

Givón, Talmy. Mind, Code and Context: Essays in Pragmatics (Hillsdale, N.J. and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989).

Golder, Scott and Huberman, Bernardo A. ‘The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems’, Journal of Information Science 32(2) (2006): 198-208.

Guy, Marieke and Tonkin, Emma. ‘Folksonomies: Tidying Up Tags?’, D-Lib Magazine 12,(1)1 (2006), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january06/guy/01guy.html.

Hogan, Mél. ‘Tag, You’re ‘It’: Preserving the Photographic Personal Archive Through Flickr.com’, (2006) http://www.docam.ca/Pedagogie/Seminaire_2006/Mel_Hogan.pdf.

Jackendoff, Ray. Semantic Structures (Cambridge, Ma.: The MIT Press, 1990).

Jackendoff, Ray. Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature (New York & London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

Kay, Paul. Words and The Grammar of Context (Stanford, Cal.: CSLI Publications, 1997).

Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980).

Lakoff, George. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About The Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987).

Langacker, Ronald. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1: Theoretical Prerequisites (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1987).

Langacker, Ronald. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 2: Descriptive Applications (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1991).

Langacker, Ronald. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Lévy, Pierre. Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace (Cambridge, Ma.: Perseus Books, 1997).

Marlow, Cameron, Namaan, Mor and Boyd, Danah Boyd. ‘HT06, Tagging Paper, Taxonomy, Flickr, Academic Article, ToRead’, Proceedings of the Seventeenth Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia New York: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (2006). See: http://www.danah.org/papers/Hypertext2006.pdf.

Mathes, Adam. ‘Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Metadata’, (2004) http://blog.namics.com/2005/Folksonomies_Cooperative_Classification.pdf.

Merholz, Peter. ‘Metadata for the Masses’, (2004) http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/000361print.php.

Metz, Christian. Essais sur la Signification au Cinéma. Tome 1. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1983).

Mika, Peter. ‘Ontologies Are Us: A Unified Model of Social Networks and Semantics’, Journal of Web Semantics: Sciences, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 5(1) (2007): 5-15.

Müller-Prove, Matthias. ‘Taxonomien und Folksonomien: Tagging Als Neues HCI-Element’, i-Com 1 (2007). http://www.mprove.de/script/07/icom/index.html.

O’Reilly, Tim. ‘What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models For The Next Generation of Software’. (2005) http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228.

Peterson, Elaine. ‘Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems With Folksonomies’, D-Lib Magazine 12(11) (Nov 2006), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november06/peterson/11peterson.html.

Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1994).

Rafferty, Pauline & Rob Hidderley. ‘Flickr and Democratic Indexing: Dialogic Approaches to Indexing,’, Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspectives 59(4/5) (2007): 397-410.

Rattenbury, Tye, Good, Nathaniel and Namaan, Mor. ‘Toward Automatic Extraction of Event and Place Semantics from Flickr Tags’, SIGIR 2007 (July 23-27, Amsterdam) (2007).

Siewierska, Anna. Functional Grammar London and New York: Routledge, 1991).

Shirky, Clay. ‘Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality’, Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet: Economics & Culture, Media & Community, Open Source (2003) http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html.

Shirky, Clay. ‘Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags’, Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet: Economics & Culture, Media & Community, Open Source (2005) http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html.

Taylor, John R. Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

Tonkin, Emma. ‘Between Symbol and Language-In-Use’, Doan, Bich-Liên, Joemon, Jose and Massimo Melucci. (eds.) Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Context-Based Information Retrieval (Roskilde, Dk: Roskilde University, 2007): 113-119.

Vander Wal, Thomas. ‘Folksonomy Definition and Wikipedia’, (2005a) http://www.vanderwal.net/random/entrysel.php?blog=1750.

Vander Wal, Thomas. ‘Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies’, (2005b) http://www.personalinfocloud.com/2005/02/explaining_and_.html.

Walker, Jill. ‘Feral Hypertext: When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control’, in Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, (Salzburg, Austria, Sept 2005), Hypertext ’05 (New York, NY: ACM Press, 2005): 46-53.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (London and New York: Routledge, 2001 [1922]).

Zacks, Jeffrey M. and Tversky, Barbara. ‘Event Structure in Perception and Conception’, Psychological Bulletin 127(1) (2001): 3-21.

Introduction

In this paper I seek to critically evaluate the models at play in an important area of new media cultures — mobile media. By ‘mobile’, I mean the new technologies, cultural practices, and arrangements of production, consumption, and exchange, associated with hand-held, networked devices, especially those based on mobile cellular networks. These mobile phone technologies are now commonly being framed as media (May & Hearn, 2005; Nilsson et al., 2001; Goggin & Hjorth, 2007) — and so we see the appearance of objects such as mobile television, mobile film, mobile games, and mobile Internet.

With its large cultural and commercial claims, this much-heralded move raises important theoretical and political questions. There is an extensive literature on various aspects of convergence, including mobiles, however systematic consideration has not been given to mobile media as a development centring on cellular mobile network technologies. Perhaps one of the difficulties in doing so is the shift of concepts that underlies these changes. While it is easier to isolate and establish the kinds of models used to imagine the mobile phone, there is a complex and dynamic interplay of various models shaping mobile media.

To zero on what is at stake in the shift from mobile phone to mobile media, I want to focus upon three distinct, if related, models. Analysis of these models is helpful to understand the transformations in mobile media. It also helps to cast light on the scene of new media in general. Respectively these three models revolve around: phones; commons; publics.

Phones

To risk a generalization the concept of the telephone took at least a century to develop, achieving firm social, cultural, technological, and commercial stability by the middle of the twentieth century. There is a select but rich literature on the telephone, and social implications (Fischer, 1992; Katz, 1999; Pool, 1977). As a new communicative architecture based on conversations, the telephone became incorporated into various media. For instance, there was the use of the telephone in talk (or talkback) radio (Gould, 2007; Phillips, 2007). The telephone become important for viewers to interact with television (c. Pool, 1973), in what some decades later came to be called participation television (Goggin & Spurgeon, 2008; Nightingale & Dwyer, 2006).

The concept of the telephone broadened with the emergence of telecommunications, and the rise of data communications networks. Later the telephone became an important model for thinking about new media, especially in cultural theory (as for example in Ronell, 1989). With the emergence of telecommunications came the concomitant acknowledgement of the importance of this form of communications in social and political life. Across the world various national governments explicitly endorsed telecommunications as an important public good that should be extended to all citizens within the boundaries of a country, what was captured in the US, and later Australia also, as ‘universal service’ (Mueller, 1997; Wilson and Goggin, 1993) and in Europe as an important ‘public service’ (Garnham, 1997). With the dismantling of state provision of telecommunications in the 1980s and 1990s, and the restructuring of markets under a neoliberal dispensation, came the debates about universal service and universal access that remain unresolved. In the model of the telephone, it could be argued, are inscribed certain ideas of the user (as the subscriber), the citizen, the governmental, and the public — to which I will return.

A shift in the notion of the telephone, and telecommunications, also developed with the emergence of the portable mobile telephone. The mobile phone slowly developed from its beginnings in wireless telegraphy, and radiotelephony, to take its familiar form as cellular mobile telephony in the 1980s and 1990s. Mobile phone culture comes with the global diffusion of second-generation digital mobiles in the 1990s, and their affordances and practices (Goggin, 2006). Text messaging (SMS) represents a transition object between mobile voice telephony and the use of mobiles in culture and media.

Often the transformations underway in cellular mobile platforms are viewed as a simple extension of what is occurring in the Internet, and indeed an instance of the mobile more and more resembling the Internet and computer. There is some truth to this. However it also fails to understand the specificity of mobile cultures, and how they remain in important ways modelled on the telephone. So while the concept of the telephone has changed, not least with the advent of telecommunications, with the restructuring of the same, and with the socio-technical invention of the mobile phone, it remains an important model for thinking about new media. The power of the telephone model is still clearly evident in the realm of policy, regulation, and political economy, as well as the new spheres of digital cultures.

Commons

From the telephone, I wish now to turn to the model of the commons, which has been important for figuring new media. The commons debate has served to constellate a set of crucial propositions about value, democracy, and openness regarding the emergent platforms of contemporary culture. The contemporary reinvigoration of the doctrine of the commons, especially led by the work of a number of legal scholars, such as Lawrence Lessig (2001), has also seen the engagement of audiences outside specialist academic and policy settings — not least in the generation of the creative commons movement (http://creativecommons.org/). While there are limitations to and problems with modelling new media through the concepts of the commons, it does offer an important perspective on the nature of digital technologies, their economies, and social and cultural relations.

Perhaps the most important reason for the influence of the commons is that its correlate is the Internet. Particular aspects of Internet technologies, platforms, applications, cultures, and layers are valorized by proponents of the commons — and these exemplary cases taken from the Internet serve to underpin the normative claims a number of commons theorists make for general notions of society, economic, ethics, and justice. What I wish to do in this paper is to suggest that the commons could be useful to understand what is going on in mobile and telecommunications network — and also to observe that to date there has been very little systematic work along these lines.

Firstly, commons theorists have not really grasped or grappled with mobile networks. If they do discuss mobile networks, these are seen as leading exhibits of ‘enclosed’, proprietary networks, locked down for non-market, public, or creative use by telecommunications companies and handset and device manufacturers. Secondly, when commons theorists — or indeed theorists with coeval accounts of the importance of Internet culture, co-creation, creative innovation– consider mobile networks, they see the real possibilities of openness coming from the ability of mobile devices to access wireless technologies, such as Wi-Fi or Wi-Max. In another move mobile devices gain their meaning and possibilities for openness by being placed in the universe of the social, collaborative media of Web 2.0. Thirdly, the idea of the Internet that many of the leading commons theorists use is based on a quite specific experience of the Internet in North America, oriented around fast bandwidth, the wide availability and affordability of PCs, and the particular educational, work, home, and public settings of computing, Internet, and cell phone use.

Despite the fact that the Internet is taken to be the eminently global medium, and indeed is now a place where languages other than English dominate its users, the dominant understandings of the Internet in the Anglophone world do not reflect this (Danet and Herring, 2007; Goggin and McLelland, 2008). In addition, the Internet is a mobile experience for many users — Japan and Korea being two quite different countries where this is clearly so (for instance, see Ito, Okabe and Matsuda, 2005). Much of the world’s population has access to television, and now cell phones – but personal computers and reliable, comprehensive Internet access are not so widely diffused. I am not suggesting that we now valorize mobiles over Internet, but rather that we recognize, as we are often exhorted to do, the interrelations between these two technological systems, and also to place these in general ecologies of media, communications and technologies. To elaborate on these opening remarks, I’ll now turn to a discussion of commons, briefly discussing wireless, then mobiles.

Wireless and Internet versus Mobile Commons

What the considerable literature on, and activity in pursuit of, the commons highlights with great clarity and urgency are the struggles underway about the shape and characteristics of the digital environment; which is to say — especially once the denotative and connotative power of the digital fades away — the future of media. We can see this clearly in perhaps the most elaborated and lucid recent account of the commons, Yochai Benkler’s 2006 The Wealth of Networks (Benkler, 2006).

Benkler argues that recent transformations have ‘created new opportunities for how we make and exchange information, knowledge, and culture’, and have ‘increased the role of nonmarket and non-proprietary production, both by individuals alone and by cooperative efforts in a wide range of loosely or tightly woven collaborations’ (2). For Benkler, software, video, new kinds of investigative reporting, and multiplayer online games are leading examples. While these possibilities will hopefully yield a ‘open, diverse, liberal equilibrium’ (22), Benkler is also concerned about a dystopian outcome: ‘[The] central question is whether there will, or will not, be a core common infrastructure that is governed as a commons and therefore available to anyone who wishes to participate in the networked information environment outside of the market-based proprietary framework’ (23). Benkler singles out two particular threats (or ‘enclosure’ movements) to a commons, the ‘enclosure movement’ around intellectual property and digital rights management, and the concentration of market structure for broadband wires and connections. In the case of broadband, there have been some countervailing forces, according to Benkler:

The emergence of open wireless networks, based on ‘spectrum commons’, counteracts this trend to some extent, as does the current apparent business practice of broadband owners not to use their ownership to control the flow of information over their networks. (25)

Elsewhere I have discussed Benkler’s valorization of open wireless networks, with their ability to create alternative communication and computational structure, and so offer a real alternative to ‘enclosed’ broadband networks (Goggin, ‘Australian Wireless Commons’, 2007). As I note, what is exemplary about Benkler’s utopian rendering of wireless communication is its contrast with mobile cellular technologies:

The development of open wireless networks, owned by their users and focused on sophisticated general-purpose devices at their edges also offers a counterpoint to the emerging trend among mobile telephony providers to offer a relatively limited and controlled version of the Internet over the phones they sell. (Benkler, 2006: 404)

Benkler sees a conflict between the open, wireless networks and closed mobile ones, in which the only hope for a vision of a commons lies in the extent to which phone vendors ‘build into the mobile telephones the ability to tap into open wireless networks, and use them as general-purpose access points to the Internet’ (405). The outcome of this friction between wireless and mobiles and their inscription in devices, along with the question of whether users will be prepared to carry another wireless device alongside their mobile phone ‘will determine the extent to which the benefits of open wireless networks will be transposed into the mobile domain’ (405).

Leaving aside the lack of recognition of the quite different tradition and concepts telecommunications carries with it (that I have suggested are being used to model mobile media), I now wish to turn to consider mobiles from a commons perspective. Surprisingly, while there have been many attempts to theorize the Internet from the perspective of a commons (indeed, as I have noted, the Internet has not only been seen as a prized instance of the commons, but it has served to model the commons itself), I can find only few mentions of mobile commons.

There is a Canadian mobile digital commons network, which broadly aligns itself with commons movements across digital culture (http://www.mdcn.ca/tiki-view_articles.php) but within its work thus far (which includes the journal Wi) there is no specific thinking through of mobile commons. Otherwise there is little work on mobile commons explicitly, but there is a fair amount of cognate work aiming to open up mobile platforms. Here one finds critiques, typically with the Benklerian flavour, of counterposing the open, public Internet, with the comparatively highly controlled nature of mobile platforms (Rheingold, 2002; Sawhney, 2005). In addition, within the open source and free software movements, there is important work underway to develop concepts and tools for mobile platforms. For example, an early effort to open up mobile technologies, making them available for user experimentation, was undertaken by the Manchester-based art collective, the-phone-book that offered workshops on re-programming mobile phones (http://www.the-phone-book.ltd.uk/).

To summarize my argument so far: the commons has provided an influential model for new media, especially in North America, but around the world it has been used, precisely and loosely, to imagine the digital environment, its struggles and politics. Typically mobile phones and mobile media have been seen as a blockage or dystopian instance, where the commons is very far from applying. Hence typically we can observe two conceptual moves. Firstly, mobile data protocols and applications are contrasted disapprovingly with the open, public Internet. Secondly, cellular mobile networks are contrasted unfavourably with wireless networks, based on the Wi-Fi (802.11) or Wi-Max standards. These two conceptual moves have not, in my estimation, led to focussed attention upon contesting forms of control, and opening up, of mobile platforms — in the same way that we see with the various commons movements in the Internet (though clearly concepts and tools from, say, creative commons, apply to mobiles). Where there has been work on the politics of mobile code, as I have suggested, is in a range of activity from open source and free software movements, artistic and independent cultural production communities. In this light, what I wish to do now is to open up this topic of the mobile commons.

Modelling a Mobile Commons

So, what would a mobile commons look like? If there is an actual, or looming, enclosure of mobile platforms, what forms does this take exactly? There are various ways of conceptualising the layers or levels of technology, but I would suggest regarding mobiles, there are at least five loci of control.

Handsets and devices
Broadly speaking mobiles comprise a handset or device and a Subscriber Information Management (SIM) card. SIM cards carry information on the address (phone number) of the device, as well as account information (Vedder, 2001). In theory, as we know, a SIM card can be taken from one device, and inserted into another to switch an account and user identity across devices. Clearly the SIM card is something under the control of the phone company or service provider, and is difficult for a user to modify — as it articulates the user into two important systems in which security is key. Firstly, there is connection to the telecommunications network. Here addressing is provided by telephone numbers, instead of, or as well as, Internet protocol addresses. Secondly, the SIM card connects the device to the account, subscriber management, and billing systems of the mobile operator. In most cases, it is only possible to use one SIM card with each device. I have, however, seen a marvellous example of the technology being appropriated by low-end modification: in the Philippines the small mobile vendors and do-it-your repairers who have tiny shops in most towns, can affix an additional sim card holder on the inside of the case of the mobile phone. This allows the insertion of an additional SIM card, so the user can switch between two network providers, depending on location or preference.

If the SIM card is a crucial gateway to the activation of the device and access to mobile networks, so too can controls be applied at the level of the device. The most obvious such control is the locking of the phone to a particular network provider. So a user who purchases a phone on a low-cost plan from a provider often has their phone ‘locked’ to the original provider’s network. It cannot be modified, and used on another network without the payment of a fee (or the unauthorized modification and removal of the lock).

While the user is free to use many functions of the device offline, whether clock functions, camera, games, music, radio, storage, or program functions, the activation of the device onto the network lies significantly in the gift of the mobile operator. The systems of access and control that govern the connection of the phone, or mobile device to the network, bear the hallmarks of the regimes of telecommunication. Now many mobile devices also have Wi-Fi capability, and so are able to connect to the Internet directly, through wireless hotspots. In the future, devices are likely to incorporate other network access capabilities, notably Wi-Max.

The other major way that the user can connect to a network is using the Bluetooth protocol. The Bluetooth protocol allows the user to connect her phone to other Bluetooth-equipped devices, including computers, cameras, and printers, and to exchange and share files. The Bluetooth protocol only works over a relatively short range. However, it has emerged as a significant force in new cultures of use and user innovation. Recent research has shown that the sharing of music and images via Bluetooth is an important part of consumption of mobiles of young users, for instance in the United Kingdom and Germany (Haddon, 2007; Schulz, 2007). (Bluetooth is also being used by commercial forces to hail or connect to users, as in the phenomenon of advertising that uses the protocol to interact with mobile phone users when they are in the vinicity of a billboard or shop.) The interesting thing about Bluetooth networks, of course, is that they are very casual, short-term, opportunistic, and formed from contacts in close promixity — an unstable and felicitous performance of network and space. Bluetooth networks are also quite unregulated, in contrast to cellular mobile networks and the Internet (something that is starting to raise concerns, as the use of Bluetooth via mobiles is becoming visible as an activity, especially in teenagers and young people).

The domestication of mobiles that Bluetooth highlights is a general framing of the technology. So, despite the relatively closed nature of handsets and access that I have just mentioned, there has been considerable user innovation, most obvious in the phenomenon of customization and personalization of phones through ornaments, changeable faces on phones, wallpapers, and ring-tones (Hjorth, 2005). This kind of innovation is a classic instance of consumer culture, where users rely on commercial availability of objects, products, or services to domesticate their devices. It is important to acknowledge this creative force in mobile consumption, because it may contribute to the achievement of a commons — but might also point to a different kind of model of mobile media.

Before I discuss the next level of mobile technology and control, I want to briefly note the launch of the Apple iPhone in July 2007. At the time of writing in March 2008 the iPhone was still only officially available in North America and Europe, but it certainly was attracting much excitement. The thrill of anticipation comes from the idea of a Apple design makeover of the cell phone. Also perhaps from the direct confrontation of the assumptions of computing world with those of the mobile handset manufacturers and telecommunications. Early indications are that the iPhone offers some new possibilities in terms of openness, but, like the iPod, quite some restrictions too. The user of the iPhone needs to be a customer of AT&T, and then connects to their second-generation GSM mobile network. Apple’s documentation and advertising carries stern warnings about users re-programming their iPhone to connect to other networks. The iPhone does also promise also is access to the Internet via WiFi, but it is unclear that this device offers any advantages in terms of access (rather than user interfaces and design) over its traditional cell phone competitors.

The fascinating thing about the reception of the iPhone has been the rapidity, fluency and enthusiasm with which users have hacked the device. There are iPhone users in various part of the world where Apple has not yet officially launched the device, such as Australia. Users buy the iPhone overseas, use widely available instructions and software to hack the phone, and then connect it to the mobile provider of their choice. The hacking of the iPhone is a phenomenon in its own right, which has advanced the cause, and raised the stakes, of openness in mobile media.

Network installation and interoperability
People in rural areas have often installed their own telephone lines to connect to the phone system, for instance in Australia and more extensively in the US. However the particular technical characteristics and affordances of mobile network transmission, switching, and digital encoding make it difficult for individuals or loosely-coordinated communities to set up their own networks — in the way, for instance, that activist and community enthusiasts of Wi-Fi do. While there do exist community networks around cellular mobiles, these require a deal of co-ordination, capital, and collaboration with wholesale network providers and operators to be successful.

Operating systems and software
Like computers, cell phones use operating systems and software. The operating systems have mostly been proprietary, notably the Symbian operating system. It is fair to say that there has been less awareness of, and less resistance to proprietary operating systems, and development of alternative, than we see in the open source software movements around computing and Internet. Similarly, most software used on mobile phones is proprietary; for instance, licensed versions of popular computing software, such as Microsoft Office or Acrobat Reader, developed for handheld and mobile devices such as Smart Phones, Portable Digital Assistants, and Blackberries (see http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/). There is a range of software commercially developed and available for mobiles, ranging from the expected office and business applications to new private sphere opportunities such as surveillance of children or employees:

‘Mobile Spy: Reveal the Truth in Real Time’
Are your children or employees abusing the privileges of your Windows Mobile based smartphone? Are you worried they are using the phone for unallowed or inappropriate activities?
Mobile Spy will reveal the truth for any company or family. You will finally learn the truth about their call, mobile web and text message activities by logging into your Mobile Spy account from any computer.
(http://www.mobile-spy.com/spy_features.html)

Recently, there has been growing interest in the use of Linux systems for mobiles, with the first international conference held in November 2006 on the business case and technology choice for all open source in mobiles, but especially Linux and open source Java (http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4240520603.html). There are quite successful software initiatives for mobiles, notably Opie (Open Palmtop Integrated Environment), developed by Trolltech (http://trolltech.com/). Opie forms part of Trolltech’s comprehensive Qtopia Phone Edition applications platform (http://trolltech.com/products/qtopia/phone_edition)

In addition, there are now organizations dedicated to promoting and developing open source software for handhelds such as handhelds.org (which also has a concentration on wearable computers).[1] As is evident, much of the initial activity has centred upon handheld computing devices and PDAs, rather than classic cell phones, though now with the advent of Smart Phones and mobile media the open software community is tackling mobiles. For its part Nokia, as one of the most forward looking mobiles companies, and certainly one that seeks to keep abreast of, draw upon, and collaborate with (or even co-opt) alternative design and creative developments, launched an open source portal for developers in November 2005 (http://www.opensource.nokia.com/; Nokia, 2005).

Control of channels & content
Though the introduction of mobile cellular networks in the 1980s was crucial to the introduction of competition in telecommunications, and the opening of markets, telecommunications carriers still play a dominant role in controlling access to mobile platforms.

Despite interconnect agreements and competition rules, carriers are still able to restrict options for service providers to offer commercial content (videos, downloads, and so on, being areas where clearly third-party content providers and aggregators do have a viable and lucrative business). Thus with the emergence of mobile data services, and new third-party operators (indeed some specialists in mobile services internationally such as Mobile Interactive Group or MIG; http://www.migcan.com/), there have been fierce battles fought between the carriers seeking to develop and promote their ‘portal’ (or proprietary mobile premium services) versus the content and service providers wishing to either sell products to the carriers or to access mobile platforms to sell services direct to consumers (Goggin & Spurgeon, 2005 & 2007).

As well as the industry struggles over mobile operators, new entrants (premium rate content and service providers), and also traditional broadcast interests over the shape and operation of mobile networks, there has also been considerable, if belated, governmental interest. This stems from concerns about inappropriate and inoffensive material being accessed over mobiles, especially by minors. A secondary concern has also been consumer protection issues, especially with the potential of mobile premium services to quickly yield very high customer bills (Goggin & Spurgeon, 2005). The Australian government, for instance, has undertaken a number of reviews in this area, notably the Department of Communications and Information Technology’s convergent devices review (DCITA, 2006; Dwyer, 2006; for an international comparative study, see Goggin, ‘Mobile Content Regulation’, 2007).

In these debates, there has been little discussion of the place of these new mobile data channels and services and user-generated content (for a fascinating discussion, see Feijóo et al., 2007). Theoretically, access to mobile data services, including premium mobile messaging or video services, is open to anyone with sufficient funds. For instance, the not-for-profit, charity, and non-government organization sector has been an innovative user of mobiles, as evidenced in Médicins san Frontierès use of text messaging for contacting their supporters or the enlisting of messaging by organizations in the youth sector, or by organizations working in HIV-AIDs and sexually-transmitted diseases. However, mobile networks are not often conceptualised as distribution platforms that might be open to community, citizen, alternative, cultural producer, or artistic expression in the way that the community broadcasting movement has been successful in having channels, spectrum, and resources set aside for radio and television broadcasting. Such arguments were, however, raised in the 2007 Australian debates on mobile television, though more in the context of the nigh complete marginalisation of community broadcasters from digital television spectrum.

One counterbalance to the mobile operator’s control of cellular mobiles comes from the use of VoIP (voice of Internet protocol) applications over mobiles. Here there are new ways for users to fashion telephony, messaging, and data connection to other individual users or groups overriding to some extent the controls of circuit switching mobile telecommunications network (at least within the limitations of VoIP software, which, for instance, allows conferencing, but with a practical limit of number of users).

Intellectual property
In the realm of the Internet, and digital culture generally, there is a strong trend in intellectual property towards greater claims and regimes of control, extending the theoretical and practical rights of copyright holders. Because of the stronger controls afforded to cellular mobiles, as outlined above, it is arguable that intellectual property extensions, such as digital rights management and anti-circumvention measures, could well find greater support on mobile networks, as they are currently configured, than the Internet in general.

Initiatives on copyright on mobile content are in their infancy, with the Open Mobile Alliance releasing a digital rights management standard in 2002, followed by version 2.0 in 2004 (OMA, 2004; see discussion in de Zwart, Lindsay & Rodrick). While the copyright issues, and one might add the user and cultural citizenship issues, are apparently clearer with mobile premium services, as a species of ‘walled garden’, the rapid growth of peer-to-peer, user-generated content, and content sharing, via mobiles poses a dilemma. Example of such user-generated content includes photos or video either distributed via mobiles or Internet (especially via the new distributed applications such as YouTube or MySpace), or images with a significant news value provided to mainstream newspapers, magazines, or television. As de Zwart, Lindsay & Rodrick argue, advanced digital rights management risks alienating users and copyright owners alike. Instead they call for a balanced approach, suggesting that they are ways of using current developments in intellectual property and copyright systems to better address the interests of all parties in mobile networks.

However, it is fair to say that such approaches would still not go far enough for a vision of mobile commons. Two measures are probably needed here: an extension of current initiatives on commons to incorporate mobile platforms; and a identification of the intellectual property and copyright issues specific to mobiles that hinder the creation and maintenance of a commons.

In this section of the paper, I have provided a preliminary examination of the different layers, and loci of control, of mobile networks. I think it is entirely feasible, indeed quite useful, to develop this into a full argument for a mobile commons, and also to develop a specific vision of what this might look like. One further impetus for such an argument is the movement reworking core landline telecommunications networks as well as next generation mobile networks to be substantially based on IP networks. However, this is a task for another occasion. What I would like to do now is to turn from the model of the commons and in closing consider the model of mobile publics, along with what it implies for thinking about mobile media.

Mobile Publics

So far I have looked at two different models of cellular mobiles that shape the imagining and the politics of what is becoming mobile media. The third model I wish to consider briefly is that of publics.

The meaning of the public, its relationship to audiences, and how publics historically emerge are questions given considerable attention. There are now various accounts available of how publics have emerged in relation to media forms and technologies, such as books and other artefacts of print culture, in relation to television, or in relation to the Internet. There has been a substantial body of work on publics, that seeks to develop alternatives to what is seen as the impasse of available notions, especially of the public sphere (Bennett & Carter, 2001; Kolko, 2003; Robbins, 1993; Warner, 2005). Finally, there is some specific work on mobile publics, most fully elaborated in mobilities research (Sheller, 2004; Urry, 2007). Here the emphasis is on understanding how publics are now formed in more contingent, evanescent, and shifting ways that previously understood.

These different strands of rethinking publics could be fruitfully brought together, and given further impetus, by consideration of the formation of new mobile media publics. Consider for instance two potential new kinds of publics, centring on mobile media: tactical assemblies formed through text messaging; the new urban publics constituted by locative and mobile gaming practices.

Text messaging has drawn much attention because of its use in activism, protest, and dissent. The celebrated example is the overthrow of Philippines President Joseph Estrada in 2001, brought down by popular protest in which text messaging played a key role. For Howard Rheingold, this feds into the phenomena of ‘smart mobs’ (Rheingold, 2002), whereas for others care needs to taken to eschew the technological sublime and instead to understand the precise role of mobiles and messaging in social organising (Pertierra et al., 2002; Rafael, 2003). Heeding such cautionary notes, it is still possible to view the rich phenomenon of text messaging as being associated with new mobiles publics. There are new kinds of assemblies, related to the use of text messaging and mobiles for gathering people together, and acting in concert — and also the related use of text messaging in the subaltern political cultures of a number of countries (not least China) as an alternative channel for the circulation of news, gossip, and satire. Then there are the ways that mobile messaging is implicated in the reworking of media cultures via participation television, and new variations on existing formats of reality and quiz television.

My second candidate for a mobile public are the new modes of urban citizenship, belonging, and engagement that can be seen in the entwining of mobile media technologies, locative media, positioning technologies, mobile social software, and also the urban screens movement (Boeder et al., 2006). Here mobile media are playing an important role as a technology of everyday urban life. However, their significance lies in the affordances and shaping of mobile media to participate in the emergence of a new shifting public. This mobile public is networked yet clearly located; involved in communication with intimates via mobiles, but also manifest (sometimes simultaneously) in emergent communicative architectures (such as SMS projection, installation of screens, and use of mobile media modes of interactivity); interested in gaming, but across platforms, environments, and private and public lives.

I have probably only managed to evoke rather than adequately characterize what I have in mind as mobile publics. However, I am interested in further developing this by enhancing the distinction sometime drawn between the notion of ‘public’ and that of ‘community’.[2] In shorthand, ‘public’ is a concept that gathers together strangers, or people who do not know each other, or do not wish to be strongly and intimated affiliated together. ‘Community’, by contrast, often has a normative sense that citizens need to be brought together in relations of identification and connection that can overcome anomie and the fate of the monad. Now this is certainly arguable, as there is considerable, and indeed fruitful, slippage, between notions of ‘public’ and ‘community’ (see also the interesting thinking about the scale of publics, in the idea of ‘tiny publics’ in Fine and Harrington, 2004). Yet it does have specific, suggestive resonance for thinking beyond the models of ‘phone’ and ‘commons’.

I would argue that the commons engages a different account of politics, and different traditions of political theory (soundly liberal, democratic, and free market), than that of accounts of the publics (especially recent ones). So while the commons is a very useful way to diagnose some aspects of the politics of mobiles, and also to activate measures towards addressing these (as the creative commons movements show), it does not adequately engage with other dimensions of digital culture and new media — notably in the case of mobiles, the new framing of these technologies as media.

As I have contended, the model of ‘phone’ is also problematic, if still powerful. In the co-production of the telephone and the social, I would argue that notions of community were uppermost as this talking technology developed through the twentieth-century (for example, see Fischer, 1992). Yet at the beginnings of the telephone, famously in the example of the Hungarian use of the telephone for broadcasting news — the celebrated Telefon Hirmondó of the 1920s — these technologies were imagined, and shaped, as media (Marvin, 1988; see also the early Italian history of the telephone discussed in Balbi and Prario, 2009). The other interesting thing about the telephone, especially as it shifts into the model of telecommunication, is that it is associated with a very strong sense of the public, bound up with specific, clearly defined notions of the nation-state, its boundaries, and citizens.

Along these lines, another way to remodel mobile media might be to draw together a critique of the commons, with a recuperation and revision of the notion of public associated with the telephone. I can only indicate this here all too elliptically, but suffice to say that it could provide a plausible way to grasp the kind of developments that are currently underway with, say, mobile television — where mobiles are being reshaped in a way that obviously connects them with problematics of publics (and audience), familiar from other traditions of media.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have discussed the question of models of new media by proposing the case of mobile media. As is evident from the foregoing, mobile media is quite a complicated, hybrid object, under transformation, instable, and very much subject to different constructions from different standpoints and observers. This granted, I have argued that a key model for mobile media remains the telephone. Also that this model cannot simply be replaced by that of the Internet, or at least a certain dominant figuration and thematics of Internet and digital culture.

A more purposeful and systematic way to think about the transformation of the model of the phone, warping into mobile phone, might be the commons. This is indeed a model that has been bound up with the Internet, and it could potentially be used to model mobile media. I offer a preliminary account of what a mobile commons would look like, at least the kinds of enclosures mobile networks and technologies could be seen to contain.

Pending such an elaboration of mobile commons, it is important to be mindful of the profound limits, and indeed the problematic politics of a commons approaches. Thus I indicate a third model that could be helpful in advancing a discussion of mobile media, namely that of publics. The concept of ‘publics’ has a number of advantages here. It is the key term in how we imagine society, information, culture, and media, as is familiar from debates on the role of newspapers or television, or indeed the possibilities of convergence and digital technologies. As I have sketched, however, mobile publics are potentially quite different in the kinds of formations, audiences, and citizenship they suggest. To talk of publics also harks back to, and provides a way to take up and re-envision the earlier model of the telephone — offering a resonant, culturally rich, and politically potent way to imagine mobile media.

Author’s Biography

Gerard Goggin is Professor of Digital Communication and Deputy Director, Journalism and Media Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (g.goggin@unsw.edu.au). He is author of Cell Phone Culture (Routledge, 2006), and is currently working on a book entitled Global Mobile Media. Gerard edits the journal Media International Australia.

Notes

[1] Handhelds.org maintains a helpful list of all devices for which Linux ports and support exist, see http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/SupportedHandheldSummary
[back]

[2] For the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘community’, I indebted to a presentation by Gay Hawins and a lively discussion that followed at an ARC Cultural Research Network research roundtable on ‘Communities, Publics, and Practices’, held at University of Technology Sydney, 23 June, 2006.
[back]

References

Balbi, Gabriele and Prario, Benedetta. ‘Back to the Future: The Past and Present of Mobile TV’. In Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth (eds.), Mobile Technology: From Telecommunications to Media (New York: Routledge, 2009), forthcoming.

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006).

Bennett, Tony, and Carter, David (eds.). Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Boeder, Pieter, Lovink, Geert, Niederer, Sabine, and Struppek, Mirjam (eds.). ‘Urban Screens: Discovering the Potential of Outdoor Screens for Urban Society’. First Monday, special issue 4, 11.2 (2006) http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/special11_2/index.html.

Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA). Review of the regulation of content delivered over convergent devices (Canberra: DCITA, 2006), http://www.dcita.gov.au/broad/policy_reviews/review_of_the_regulation_of_content_delivered_over_convergent_devices.

Danet, Brenda, and Herring, Susan C. (eds.). The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture, and Communication Online (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

De Zwart, Melissa, Lindsay, David, and Rodrick, Sharon. ‘Mobile Phones: Copyright in Content’. In Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth (eds.), Mobile Media (Sydney: Department of Media and Communications, The University of Sydney, 2007), 276-287.

Dwyer, Tim. ‘Content delivered over Converged Devices’. Media International Australia, 123 (2006).

Feijóo, Claudio, Gómez-Barroso, José Luis, and Marín, Ana-Ángeles. ‘Why YouTube Cannot Exist on a European Mobile: The European Regulatory Strategy on Mobile Content Access’. In Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth (eds.), Mobile Media (Sydney: Department of Media and Communications, The University of Sydney, 2007), 253-262.

Fine, Gary Alan, and Harrington, Brooke. ‘Tiny Publics: Small Groups and Civil Society’. Sociological Theory, 22.3 (2004): 341-356.

Fischer, Claude. America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).

Garnham, Nicholas. ‘Universal Service’. In William H. Melody (ed.), Telecom Reform: Principles, Policies and Regulatory Practices (Lyngby: Technical University of Denmark), 207-212.

Goggin, Gerard. Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2006).

Goggin, Gerard. ‘Regulating Mobile Content: Convergences, Commons, Citizenship’. International Journal of Communications Law and Policy, 12 (2008), http://www.ijclp.net/12_2008/pdf/goggin.pdf

Goggin, Gerard. ‘An Australian Wireless Commons?’. Media International Australia 125 (November 2007).

Goggin, Gerard, and McLelland, Mark. ‘Introduction: Internationalizing Internet Studies’. In Internationalizing Internet Studies: Beyond Anglophone Paradigms, eds. Gerard Goggin and Mark McLelland (New York: Routledge, 2008), in press.

Goggin, Gerard, and Spurgeon, Christina. ‘Mobile Message Services and Communications Policy’, Prometheus: Journal of Issues in Technological Change, Innovation, Information Economics, Communication and Science Policy 23. 2 (2005): 181-93.

____. ‘Mobile Messaging and the Crisis in Participation Television’, in Maren Hartmann, Patrick Rössler and Joachim Höflich (ed.) After the Mobile Phone? Social Changes and the Development of Mobile Communication (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2008), forthcoming.

____. ‘Premium Rate Culture: The New Business of Mobile Interactivity’, New Media & Society 9.4 (2007): 753-770.

Gould, Liz. ‘Cash and controversy: A short history of commercial talkback radio’, Media International Australia 124 (2007).

Haddon, Leslie, ‘Looking for Diversity: Children and Mobile Phones’, Mobile Media: Proceedings of an international conference on social and cultural aspects of mobile phones, convergent media, and wireless technologies, 2-4 July 2007, The University of Sydney, Australia. Sydney: Department of Media and Communications, The University of Sydney, 2007.

Hjorth, Larissa. ‘Odours of Mobility: Japanese Cute Customization in the Asia-Pacific Region’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 26 (2005): 39-55.

Ito, Mizuko, Okabe, Daisuke, and Matsuda, Misa (eds.). Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).Iveson, Kurt. Publics and the City (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007).

Katz, James E. Connections: Social and Cultural Studies of American life, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1999.

Kirkpatrick, Graeme. Critical Technology: A Social Theory of Personal Computing (Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004).

Kolko, Beth E. (ed.). Virtual Publics: Policy and Community in an Electronic Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House, 2001).

Livingstone, Sona (ed.). Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere (Bristol; Portland, OR: Intellect, 2005).

Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

May, Harvey, and Hearn, Greg. ‘The Mobile Phone as Media’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 8 (2005): 195-211.

Mueller, Milton. Universal Service: Competition, Interconnection, and Monopoly in the Making of the American Telephone System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1997).

Nightingale, Virginia, and Dwyer, Tim. ‘The Audience Politics of “Enhanced” TV Formats.’ International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, 2 (2006): 25-42.

Nilsson, Andreas, Nuldén, Urban, and Daniel Olsson. ‘Mobile Media: The Convergence of Media and Mobile Communications.’ Convergence, 7 (2001): 34-38.

Nokia. ‘Nokia fosters mobile innovation through open source development’. Media release, November 2, 2005, http://press.nokia.com/PR/200511/1019240_5.html.

Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). ‘Open Mobile Alliance Takes Critical Next Step In Delivering Premium Content to Consumers Via Wireless Media Devices’. Media release, February 2, 2004, http://www.openmobilealliance.org/docs/DRMPressReleaseFinal020104.doc.

Pertierra, R., Ugarte, E.F., Pingol, A., Hernandez, J. and Dacanay, N.L. Txt-ing Selves: cellphones and Philippine modernity (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 2002; http://www.finlandembassy.ph/texting1.htm.

Pool, Ithiel de Sola (ed.). The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1977).

____. Talking Back: Citizen Feedback and Cable Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973).

Rafael, Vicente L. ‘The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines’. Public Culture, 15 (2003): 399-425.

Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002).

Robbins, Bruce (ed.) The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology — Schizophrenia — Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).

Sawhney, Harmeet. ‘Wi-Fi Networks and the Reoorganization of Wireline-Wireless Relationship’, in Rich Ling and Per E. Pedersen (eds.), Mobile Communications: Re-negotiation of the Social Sphere (London: Springer-Verlag, 2005), 45-61.

Schulz, Iren. ‘ “Bridging Uncertainty”: Mobile Communication in the Context of Social Networks, Developmental Conditions and Media Arrangements during Adolescence’, paper presented to Towards a Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, September 27-29, 2007, http://www.socialscience.t-mobile.hu/2007/prepro2007_szin.pdf.

Sheller, Mimi. ‘Mobile Publics: Beyond the Network Perspective.’ Environment and Planning D-Society & Space 22 (2004): 39-52.

Urry, John. Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).

Vedder, K. ‘The Subscriber Identity Module: past, present, and future’, in F. Hillebrand (ed.) GSM and UMTS: The Creation of Global Mobile Communication (New York: John Wiley, 2001).

Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books; London : MIT Press, 2005).

Wilson, Ian R. and Goggin, Gerard. Reforming Universal Service (Sydney: Consumers’ Telecommunications Network, 1993).

‘…the ‘axioms of daily life’ stand in the way of the a-signifying function, the degree zero of all possible modelisation.’
(Guattari, 1995 : 63)

The ways we conceive of minds, subjects and technics, particularly media technics, are intimately related.[1] This relation is only partly explained by the often-intersecting histories of media technologies with the philosophies of mind and cognitive sciences. On the one hand, different models of mind suggest different approaches to media forms and technologies. On the other hand, there is the ability for those forms and technologies to move the body to think, to evoke novel resonances between body and world, paired with their provision for realising and developing a calculated return to the affordances that these resonances develop. The dynamic of the relation between minds, subjects and technics, and between these and modelisations of the processes involved, becomes critical to what Bernard Stiegler and associates have called the ‘industry of mind’ (Ars Industrialis 2005). In this article I am mainly concerned with how mind-subject-technics relations are conceived and how those conceptions modulate the industry and vitality of mind.

I will examine some of the more pervasive conceptions of this relation, focusing particularly on the ‘cognitive’ perspective as illustrative of a wider, functional operative tendency in modelisation, if one based on false premises. I will then propose that the ideas of Brian Massumi and Bernard Stiegler provide for a unique approach to the mind, body, technics matrix. These ideas illustrate the relational dynamic out of which such operative tendencies – whatever their premises – emerge and develop.

In doing so, I am proposing a metamodelisation at the junction of their ideas. In Parables for the Virtual Massumi describes ‘The Autonomy of Affect’ in our ecology of thought (Massumi, 2002 : 35). The object of Stiegler’s Technics and Time is ‘technics apprehended as the horizon of all possibility to come and all possibility of a future’ (Stiegler, 1998 : ix). The ecological dynamic I am proposing here describes the recursion between this ‘affective autonomy’ and a ‘technical horizon of possibility’. It provides a metamodel of the relation between body and world, between perception and expression.[2] Finally, I argue that this metamodel allows for the technical architectures that enshrine media processes and models as both the manifestation and modulation of the ‘industry’ or vitality of mind. I argue that these technical architectures are crucial to the creation and maintenance of dynamic ecologies of living. More specifically, they are crucial to the way perceived potential forms the basis for forethought anticipation, and this in turn for the emergence and continuity of a non-autonomous subjectivity.

Black-boxing the Mind

In February 2007 Wired magazine published a feature titled ‘What We Don’t Know’. The feature lists, with some brief expert editorial, all those areas into which human knowledge is yet to penetrate. It is the kind of simultaneous celebration of the great unknown and a chart for its future colonisation that is quintessentially Wired. This following excerpt frames our ignorance regarding human consciousness:

Some philosophers still argue that consciousness is too subjective to explain, or that it is the irreducible result of matter organized in a specific way. That philosophic black-boxing is probably more nostalgic than scientific, a clinging to the idea of a spirit or soul. Without that, after all, we’re just organisms – more complex, but no less predictable, than dung beetles. But scientists live to reduce the seemingly irreducible, and sentimentality is off-limits in the lab. Understanding consciousness means finding the biophysical mechanisms that generate it. Somewhere behind your eyes, that meat becomes the mind. (Rhodes, 2007)

Despite the article’s declared ignorance, Rhodes is fairly assured in his dismissal of philosophy, his confidence in the sciences immanent reduction of consciousness to the ‘biophysical mechanisms that generate it’, and in his emphatic conflation of mind, consciousness and the brain (Rhodes, 2007). The assertion is that although we don’t know how consciousness is produced, we do know that it’s inside your head. We know this because thanks to advances in medical imaging we’ve seen a whole lot of activity going on ‘behind your eyes’. The conclusion apparently follows that when we have cracked the neural code indicated by this activity we will understand consciousness and by implication the human mind. The writer is apparently unconcerned that the a priori reduction of an undefined, if not irreducible, process might be logically problematic.

The Wired article illustrates a pervasive – if often contested – operative assumption that infiltrates much of the popular discourse on mind, intelligence, and subject and all the diverse fields where that discourse plays out; that the biophysical manifestation of the mind’s dynamic can and will be isolated, and if not subsequently instrumentalised then at the very least demystified. This view is pervasive in much mainstream cognitive and neuroscience and the image of thought those sciences communicate to the greater public. It is a resonant image precisely because it reinforces the common-sense notion that thought is contained within, and controlled by, a brain that manages the body’s interaction with the world at large.

The oldest and most common form of ‘black boxing’ in the philosophy of mind assumes that the movement indicated by the perception of thinking-going-on indicates some self-contained causal mechanism. It makes little difference whether that mechanism is conceived as soul, a spirit, or ‘biophysical mechanisms’ as it is in the excerpt above. In each case we have internalised thought’s momentum, thought’s differential.

This article begins by outlining both the phenomenological and rhetorical dynamics that are exemplified in the Wired article. These dynamics indicate a wider operative tendency in some of the basic assumptions within modelisations of thinking and media. They persistently orientate our body’s approach to an ecology that has always arguably included technics but does so increasingly today. I will then introduce the theories of Massumi and Stiegler, which go some way to reconfiguring this dynamic within a meta-model that provides for the mutually recursive development of the relation between body and world.

Recursion is central to the metamodel I will describe. However, from the outset I will need to differentiate between the computational model of recursion that folds from cybernetics into cognitive science and the form of recursion described by the work of Massumi and Stiegler.

Recursion and the developing mind/relation between body and world

Recursion in mathematics is the repeated application of a procedure or rule to successive results of the process (Pearsall et al, 1999: 1198). A recursive function is one defined by its ongoing application to itself or its context. As an aside its worth noting that this is a paradox (an infinite regress) unless we conceive of the definition as topological; a system defined by its recursive definition can only be understood as a ‘continuity of variation’ (Massumi, 2002: 197).

In the context of this article, the relation between body and world is defined in ‘mutual’ recursion. Mutual recursion describes two or more functions that are defined in terms of each other. More clearly, it describes two functions that are defined according to a mutual relation. In a mutual recursion the definition of each system is contingent on the continuity of the other; mutual recursion describes a relational ontology. In actuality this means the two systems are not distinct at all, they are components of a dynamic assemblage.

This article develops the notion of recursion in order to describe the recursive modulation that operates between perceived relation and processes of expression. Expression either reinforces the perceived relation and becomes the basis for an extended system of continuity on the one hand, or realises a further contingency and a new perceptual relation on the other. It is important to note that in this context it is the relational definition established between body and world that develops in mutual recursion.

In such contexts, the definition of the systems themselves change, not simply a set or series of representative values or results. We are talking about recursively defined relational ontology rather than simply a defined recursive function. This marks a significant difference from the form of recursion that I’ll refer to later in reference to Alberto Toscano’s (perhaps rather too dismissive) evaluation of autopoiesis, and which is found in much thinking about cognition (Toscano, 2005: 56).[3] Here a recursion is limited to that which is established between the input of a system and its output in order to control a predefined set of relations. While the argument is beyond the scope of this paper we might argue that this latter understanding of recursion is ‘representationalist’, based as it is on a defined ‘protocol’ or symbolic relation. The form of mutual recursion with which we are concerned operates at a more fundamental level of ongoing systemic definition and redefinition.

In accordance with the conception of a formative mutual recursion, I will suggest that media technics have a specific and profound series of impacts. They institute an architectonic relation based on an established way of perceiving and expressing the body’s relationship with the greater ecology. They also represent both the concretisation, and the bases for extension, of that recursive continuity. In this sense media technics are, as Deleuze described of all technics, the realisation and completion of metaphysics; the modelisation of a relation that, once actualised, structures the potential for, and mode of, future recursion (Deleuze, 1998: 92). In short, our models of mind fold recursively into our technical architectures and our technical architectures tend, at least in part, to enshrine modelisations in architectural/infrastructural forms.

The Mind Interiorised in the Brain

Many mainstream models of mind tend, even by acts of definition, to “interiorise” the origin of thought. The common sense models of a rational structure in which we are a mind, controlling a body, navigating the world, structures our relation and interaction with our ecology. However, as the work of many theorists, philosophers, and an increasing number of cognitive and neuro-scientists has found, there is a persistent suggestion that thought might not be as internally contained or as rational as our commonsense suggests. From Deleuze to Ramachandran, the material relation between body and world is opened up to a metamodelisation in which networks of perception, and vectors of expression realise resonant continuities between body and world. Those continuities can’t be reduced to body or world alone; they can only be understood as relationally defined and defining.[4] It is this resonant continuity that structures the recursive development of an always-emerging subjectivity.

The body as a whole, its world-engaged perceptual mechanisms and dynamics, the limits and tendencies of the senses, become critical to thought’s recursion. Our conception of mind has begun to leak out from ‘behind the eyes’ into the body’s resonant connections with the world. This approach to thought-as-perception transforms our understanding of a world based on mediation into one based on resonance. The senses can no longer be conceived as a mechanism of mediation that more or less perfectly transmits information about the world to a central processor. The senses are nodes in the resonant continuum that connects body and world, actively realising the differential that gives momentum to thought.

Exterior/Interior

Our entire mental environment – and the way concepts or models of this environment fold into this environment itself – thus become the ground upon which we struggle for a vitality of mind/thought. Stiegler describes the dynamic of this fold from concept to expression as characterised by a ‘structural coupling in exteriorization’; a perceived relation folds into the world as the basis for expression (Stiegler, 1999: 176). At the same time, this structural coupling in exteriorisation includes an ‘interior-ization’ of relational potential into a mental ecology.

Stiegler’s ‘interior-ization’ can be usefully thought about along the lines of two different processes; an ‘incorporation’ and a ‘modelisation’. The modelisation entails an abstraction of the structural relation, in which, in Massumi’s terms -

Regularized, repeatable, uniform connection – the systematicity of a thing – constitutes a profitable disengagement of the thing’s thinking from its perceiving in such a way as to maximize its extension into thought under a certain mode of abstraction. (Massumi, 2002: 94).

Steigler argues that conceptions of the human and the autonomy of the subject emerge as the modelisations of a fundamentally ‘technical being’ evolving by convergence and adaptation to itself ; it becomes unified interiorily according to a principle of internal resonance’ (Simondon cited by Stiegler, 1998: 71). The crux of Stiegler’s argument is however that the human is always finding its ‘self’ in the ‘fold of experience’ (Massumi’s term) (Stiegler, 1998: 158; Massumi, 2002: 182). The human finds itself in the potential for a prosthetisisation of the body-world relation. For Stiegler this means ‘the being of humankind is to be outside itself’ (Stiegler, 1998: 193). However the modelisations of the body’s relation with the world folds recursively in modulation of a future perception. As a consequence those models modulate the way we engage with the world; The way we express ourselves as the product of a perceived relation modulates the self we will find in the ‘fold of experience’. The conception of ‘self’, and critically of brain, mind, thought and the matrix of related phenomena, are then modelisations that express their own ‘technical essence’ that ‘remains stable through the evolutional lineage, and not only stable but productive as well of structures and functions by internal development and progressive saturation’ – where saturation is the ongoing organisation (incorporation) of the relation between body and world (Simondon cited by Stiegler, 1998: 77).

‘Incorporation’ can be a rather more dynamic process than modelisation. I have borrowed the term incorporation from Katherine Hayles in order to differentiate the corporeal phase of interiorisation from its modelisation (Hayles, 1999: 198). In Hayles’ schema ‘incorporation’ is placed in opposition to ‘inscription’, which here can be understood as the operative function of the modelisation I have just described (Hayles 1999: 198). In incorporation, our potential to incorporate the resonant continuum of a mental/body/world/technical ecology becomes the basis for anticipation. The anticipation of possible futures depends on a past folded forward – in an ongoing modulation of the relation between body and world. Incorporation occurs not within our heads or brains, but within an immediate ecology. In the process, it enacts a systemic redefinition. For example, we incorporate the intensely-felt potential to cut in the experience of the sharp edge of a stone, the expressive potential of a beat in the stretched skin, the social economy in SMS text messaging. We incorporate the affordances involved as the basis for forethought or calculated expression. We organise our ecology to ensure a return to that material affordance plays out accordingly. We find the right stone for producing a cutting edge, the right mobile plan for economic text messaging.

Technics and Incorporation: A System of Anticpation

Incorporation marks a redefinition of the ‘subject’ as a system of anticipation. But crucially it also marks the genesis of a particular technics in one and the same maneuver. Stiegler describes this as ‘mirror proto-stage…whereby one, looking at itself in the other, is both deformed and formed in the process’ (Stiegler, 1999 :158). This is the process I’ll introduce later as an Instrumental Maieutic (Stiegler, 1999: 158).

As the basis for a technical anticipation the ‘structural coupling’ between body and world (here including media technologies and processes) also marks the genesis of a subject in time as the recognition of perceived potential produces a ‘horizon of possibility’ in the perceptual field of the subject (Stiegler, 1998:ix). Rather than the contrivance of a higher order rationalism located somewhere ‘behind the eyes’, technics becomes the basis for a developing network of technical anticipation. That developing network provides the mnemonic scaffold for a subjective continuity. As Massumi writes; ‘we always find ourselves in this fold of experience’ – in the fold between a lived past and a potential future (Massumi, 2002: 182). It matters little as to whether the basis for anticipation is well founded. An association only need evoke a preemptive expression that either reinforces a structural certitude in a technical relation or realises a contingent differential. Either way, the recognition of a future in an immanent relation realises a recursive continuity between body and world.

Media: Modulations of the Resonant Continuum

As I suggested earlier in the article such a model requires a radical shift in our approach to understanding, modeling and using media forms and technologies. Media technologies move the body to think, evoke novel resonances between body and world, and provide for realising and developing a calculated return to the affordances of a particular mode of connection, of networking body and world. This understanding becomes critical to what Stiegler and associates have called the ‘industry of mind’, by which I mean here the potential for the mind (for thought) to realise a productive difference that moves beyond simple ecological affordance (Ars Industrialis, 2005). This is of course an industry of mind soaked through with media technologies. However those technologies tend to enshrine the assumed autonomy of a cognizant subject. Our operative model of media and technological engagement and of knowledge production more generally are thoroughly invested in the ‘modelisation’ that forgets the generative intersection in which the model as a form of technics itself is realised. Despite the endless deconstructions of text, authorship, and subject offered by forty odd years of poststructuralist analysis we continue to slip into institutional, architectural, and technological models that ‘forget’ the differential relation that provides momentum to thought. Perhaps this is because as Derrida writes we cannot ‘pronounce a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, the implicit postulations, of precisely that which it seeks to contest’ (Derrida, 2001: 354). But perhaps if discourse is conceived as a technical prosthesis enabling a particular style of resonant connection then what we require in order to encourage a vital and thoughtful ecology is a different approach to technics, with a particular focus on the way they realise a recursive continuity between body and world. We also need to carefully work through the complex of recursive modulations between broad conceptions and specific technical modelisations as these become central to the vitality and industry of mind.

Autonomy and Allonomy: The Brain in Mind

The specific conception of mind presented in the Wired article quoted at the beginning is a form of cognitivism. Vincent Descombes described cognitivism thus;

The cognitivists differ from most of their predecessors in adherence to a strict materialist doctrine. They make clear form the outset that, in their eyes, mental life is a physical process and that the mind they seek to reestablish over and against behaviorism is a material system: quite simply, the brain… [Cognitivism] sees itself as a mental mechanics. (Descombes, 2001: 4)

Later in the same section Descombes illustrates the modus operandi of the cognitivist doctrine.

We are expected to know, through the science of physiology, that the mind is located in the brain and that we must conclude, according to this philosophy, that the mind is thus identical to the brain, unless we are prepared to admit that two active powers can effectively occupy the exact same place. (Descombes, 2001: 5)

However, the assumption of the brain as the centre of thought presents a number of issues that have played out endlessly in the various philosophies concerned with the body, subject and mind. The root of the problem is an a priori distinction between allonomy and autonomy. Simply put the term ‘allonomous’ is used to describe systems that are both ‘formed and function under the effect of external causes’ as opposed to the term ‘autonomous’ used to describe systems exhibiting ‘a recursive and self referential causality’ (Toscano, 2006: 58).[5] The problem of the a priori distinction is framed as such; if the brain is conceived as the centre of thought then how do we defend a sensed autonomy from a bio-mechanically determined relation?

The Origin of Thought and System

Alberto Toscano provocatively links Kant to this a priori distinction (Toscano, 2006: 56), and both of these to Maturana and Varela’s theories of autopoiesis (which are strongly associated with so called New or Second Order Cybernetics).[6] Toscano argues that both theories resolve the antinomy of the autonomous and allonomous simply by beginning with the creation of a hard distinction between them (Toscano, 2006: 55). This a priori distinction then frames thinking on the nature of autonomy. Autonomy becomes a question as to how the internally unified system connects with its ecology and how that marks a distinction from the allonomous system. The assertion of a central and contained engine that produces thought’s differential also implies that both forms of system – that internal to the autonomous and that external to it – are given as unified within themselves a priori (Toscano 2006: 59). The opposition of autonomy to allonomy means that we can parlay the difficult question as to how an autonomous system emerges in the first place. However, the opposition/binary definition of the two terms can’t parlay the question that must be answered in proxy to that of the system’s origin; the question regarding the origin of thought.

Famously, Kant finds the ‘problem of an original cause’ evident in the way ‘all the philosophers of antiquity’ resolve the antinomy between nature and freedom (another iteration of the same opposition). According to Kant they do so by ‘going beyond mere nature for the purpose of making a first beginning possible’ (Kant, 1993: 334). As an alternative to this attribution of a transcendent origin Kant addresses the ‘the objective synthesis of appearances’. Once we admit an autonomous internally unified mind connected to the external world via the senses we are confronted with the problem of representation. How do we know the world if perception is always only a shadow of the real? As Kant describes it, this question sees the philosophy of mind tend toward the extremes of either a ‘despairing skepticism’ or the assumption of ‘a dogmatical confidence and obstinate persistence’ regarding the basis for knowledge (Kant, 1993: 309). Kant himself, however, turns the problem presented by representation – a foundational question for media concepts and processes – into a resolution of the question of an origin. He does so by developing a schema that allows at once a distinction and a connection between body and world, or rather, the body/sense as the mediator of information between internal mind and world. For Kant -

There is nothing actually given to us, except a perception and the empirical progression from it to other possible perceptions. For appearances, as mere representations, are real only in perception; and perception is, in fact, nothing but the reality of an empirical representation, that is, an appearance…
(Kant, 1993: 357)

At the same time -

Possible experience can alone give reality to our concepts; without it a concept is merely an idea, without truth and relation to an object’.
(Kant, 1993: 355)

Finally-

To call appearance a real thing prior to perception means that we must meet with this appearance in the progress of experience, or it means nothing at all.
(Kant, 1993: 357)

For Kant then free will ‘succeeds the acts of nature but does not proceed from them’ (‘succeeds’ in a kind of transcendental maneuver versus ‘proceed’ as in a direct biomechanical determination). There is a necessary disjunction between the concept and its origin in ‘possible experience’ (Kant, 1993: 334). Representation furnishes this disjunction. In The Critique of Pure Reason we find a prototype of an explicitly ‘representationalist’ model of mind. That model is illustrative of the tendency for a wider ‘cognitivism’ by which an assumed a priori distinction between human and other, nature and freedom, autonomy and allonomy, frames the postulation as to what mechanism is responsible for that distinction (soul, intelligence, brain) and how in turn we might emulate, understand, or control that mechanism as a means of harnessing what are subsequently placed as virtues of autonomy (innovation, creativity – in short, freedom).

Locate. Reduce. Instrumentalise.

Under the representationalist perspective the mechanisms of thought are buffeted by an order of abstraction from the perceived threat to autonomy posed by the suggestion of a direct biomechanical relation/determination between thought/mind and world. Perception is subject to the resonant tendencies of a perceptual relation but thought is not. As Toscano argues, this tendency is carried through to the philosophies and sciences of the mind, which continue to be invested in models of individual thought, intelligence, creativity. Second order cybernetics is Toscano’s specific target but this need only be an indicator that much of mainstream cognitive science (with notable exceptions) operates according to a similar logic.

Cognitivism is an extreme case of this. By assigning an assumed autonomy to a particular mechanism located somewhere ‘behind the eyes’ in the ‘meat that becomes mind’ cognitivism tends to localise and reduce thought. The logic follows that by studying the brain we will inevitably approach an understanding of thought or mind or consciousness. The genesis of thought, the mind’s vitality, is attributed to an internal mechanism that only requires further isolation in order to be understood and perhaps controlled. The assumption of the subject and thought as internally contained and their mechanism ultimately localisable allows a ‘centre’ of thought to be attributed and epistemologically contained, in lieu of, and always pending, it being understood.

Of course, although it is not my aim to discuss this in any detail as it is so widely known (Weiner, 1950: 95-103; Descombes, 1994; Sutton, 1998; Hayles, 1999: 164-168; Dupuy, 2000; for example), I should remark in passing that cognitivism’s cradle is very much bound up with the development of media forms, especially those of computer media forms, with their inputs, outputs and symbolic processings.

A Persistent Assumption

The persistent assumptions of cognitivism are pervasive in both the history of ideas and in contemporary disciplines and institutions – again most prominently media studies and practices – concerned with revealing and applying an understanding of what Stiegler et al. call ‘the life of the mind’ (Ars Industrial, 2005). The fact that this set of assumptions continues to operate within the sciences and philosophies of mind, subject and intelligence is indicative of their continuing sway. As I have begun to suggest, this sway is in evidence despite a number of influential theoretical models and experimental findings that suggest viable and well-supported alternatives to a hard distinction between autonomy and allonomy. That said, these set of assumptions go well beyond the frame of a particular school of thought. They represent a pervasive, cultural operative assumption and, via this, a tendency that modulates the body’s orientation to the world at large.

Our relationship to the technics of communication and expression are particularly subject to the tendencies of this orientation. The internalisation of thought and the subsequent assumption of a mechanism whose predicate is thought plays into a conception of the body’s relationship to the greater ecology, and to other bodies, as informational. Our models of authorship, of communication, of discourse, and of technics and knowledge more generally (what we might call following Stiegler our mnemo-technical architectures) are modulated by this informational stance (Ars Industrialis, 2005). The author becomes the origin and master of expression as the causal agent of thought. Communication becomes an act of transmitting some abstract message stuff from one body to another. Discourse becomes a means of mediating a priori meaning; it becomes a mode of transmission between author and reader, sender and receiver. Technics becomes the mediation of an a priori intent or agency – it becomes purely instrumental. Knowledge is figured as stored internally and education is reduced to its clear transmission. We can see this playing out in any number of fields. In music the valorization of the musician as ‘creative genius; provides an incipiency for the industrialization of music, the construction of music that is consumed more than its is performed, the marginalization of improvisation as a creative practice’ (Zorn cited in Heuermann, 2004). The valorisation of the authored text in academic discourse marginalizes the development and valuation of more fluid dialogical and open approaches to knowledge production. The reduction of knowledge production to the transmission of information sees it play into rhetorics of exchange, value, and a pervasive ‘audit culture’ with little critical analysis of the recursive effects of such a culture on the production of knowledge (Strathern, 2000). In all of these cases the shadow of late-industrial capital looms large, however the market itself can be understood as a recursively productive mnemo-technical architecture that preferences defined objects of exchange and an economy of supply and demand into which they fold and then marginalizes and controls the potential for more distributed and relational economies and the realization of new modes for the production of capital (Delanda, 1996).

It is clear that 40 odd years of poststructuralist thought has endlessly deconstructed and offered fruitful alternatives to the assumptions that are embodied by this informational stance. More recently the postconnectionist perspectives on the mind as an agile engagement between body and world radically undermine the notion of the mind as internally contained or controlled (Sutton, 2005:12). It is also abundantly clear that operatively if not necessarily theoretically these models persist in many of the systems, technologies, institutions concerned with the life and industry of mind.

Locating Thought

It is important to remember that the persistence of the operative assumption of an informational and representationalist stance does not just come into being by itself. Behind it, we find the hard distinction between autonomy and allonomy. This is more than a simple error in logic.

Here I will suggest that, even in its error, this process exemplifies the very real dynamic of human thought. It illustrates the drive to organise a perceived potential in the service of a calculated return – or rather in the service of a continuity of relation and an ontological certitude. Locating thought’s mechanism within the brain is perceived as the logical first-step toward harnessing the mechanisms of mind, whatever those might be.

If on the other hand the subject can be more accurately understood as co-determined according to the relation between body and world (as would be the case if we removed that layer of abstraction found in representation or mediation) then the ‘mind’ would have to be conceived as ‘subject-to’ the contingencies of that relation. Such a mind would leak out into the world, making it impossible to contain or delimit.

I have only been able to gesture in brief here to the detailed and complementary accounts of the dynamic of cognitivist/representationalist perspectives in both historical and contemporary work in the theory and sciences of mind that is offered by Descombes and Toscano (Descombes, 2001; Toscano, 2002). Rather than further extrapolating those accounts, I will now discuss an alternative to the tendency they critique, and to this tendency’s assumed distinction between autonomy and allonomy, human and other, natural and technical. The alternative is suggested in the intersection of Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual and Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time Vol.1: The Fault of Epimetheus.

Affect and Technics : Massumi and Stiegler

Despite a certain amount of recent work that engages each of these contributions, Parables for the Virtual on the one hand, and Technics and Time on the other, their relation to each other in is rarely discussed in detail.[7] I argue that these two works need to be thought out together. Both theorists are concerned with the dynamics and the incipiencies, the already-beginning-to-happen that describes the human body’s interaction with its environment. Each approach that dynamic from differing perspectives and with recourse to differing theoretical vectors. However their accounts overlap and resonate together in a way that promises a powerful synthesis of these vectors. On the one hand Massumi accounts for the ‘autonomy of affect’ in the relation between body and world (Massumi, 2002: 23):

Affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in a particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is. (Massumi, 2002, 35)

Stiegler on the other hand is concerned with the emergence of both technics and subject in the realisation of a technical relation between body and world.

As I wrote in the introduction, there is a complex formative recursion occurring between the autonomy of affect and the horizon of possibility (Stiegler, 1999). Read together I argue that they offer a unique description of the recursive dynamic out of which a spiraling technical network of realisation and expression emerges and develops. In both accounts media technics, figured more generally in Stiegler’s work as a pervasive and global mnemotechnical architecture, stand at the generative front of this emerging network of affect and technics.

The dynamic of these interactions indicate a metamodel – a flexible, adaptive model – of mind as simultaneously distributed and intensely embodied. That metamodel describes an allonomous affordance as central to a developing and agile (quasi)autonomy. The metamodel is also open to the particular modulations of the materials, technologies, and architectures through which we structure the body’s connections and potential for interaction with the greater ecology. At the same time, this metamodel can account for the tendency towards a more reductive modelisation as it plays out in both technics and concept. So the metamodel provides both a warning regarding a tendency to technical determination on the one hand, and a promise of the expansive virtuality of the mind-body-technics assemblage on the other. Through all this, the mind is assumed to be a generative and generated, recursively developing process, the agility and vitality of which is a function of affect and technics as much as it is a higher order rationalism.

Stubborn Relationality

In Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi argues for a human thought and subject that are fundamentally folded in with the pre-conscious and autonomic modulation of perception. Massumi’s theory is extrapolated from a number of perceptual phenomena that undermine the dominant assumption that the mechanics of perception can be distinguished from the processes of thought out deduction. These phenomena suggest that there is no level of thought removed from the vagaries and determinations of the mechanics of perception. The theory presented in Parables amounts to a refiguring of the mechanics of perception as cognition. At the least, Massumi’s argument erodes the possibility of a hard distinction between perception and thought. In the process he threatens the perceived autonomy of the subject by providing an empirical basis for the suggestion that the subject emerges and finds their continuity in the relation between body and world. Indeed, even the autonomous body is threatened. If the thinking subject is conceived as emerging in the codetermination between body and world then our understanding of the mechanisms of thought cannot be reduced to the body alone. Our conception of thought and subject begins to leak out into the world and our struggle to understand the genesis and continuity of both becomes ecological rather that simply biological – it becomes stubbornly relational.

Lagging, Reading and Being

Massumi’s account discusses two perceptual phenomena that are of particular relevance here. The first is Benjamin Libet’s discovery of a perceptual latency in conscious awareness (Massumi, 2002: 195; Libet, 2004: 32). The second is the phenomena of ‘blind sight’ in which the subject of the cited experiment appears capable of reading and interpreting text below the level of conscious awareness (Massumi, 2002: 199). The first describes the discovery that the human body performs a kind of temporal warp, an antedating of awareness that provides for the impression that our perception coincides with our awareness of it. This perceived coincidence of perception and awareness is an illusion. Libet’s experiments prove that there is a considerable delay between the perception of an event and our awareness of it. Perceptions take up to a half-second to reach the level of conscious awareness. In order to put that in context it is common for a dance track to run at a tempo in excess of 120 beats per minute (BPM). When listening to such a track the beat that I am conscious of has always already passed – my body is already hearing the next beat as I become conscious of hearing the former (try thinking that through while you’re on the dance floor). The present in which we exist has always already passed by the time we become conscious of it. Our body corrects for this latency. In his account of these experiments, Mind Time, Libet describes the experience of this antedating;

If you tap your finger on a table, you experience the event as occurring in “real-time”. That is, you subjectively feel the touch occurring at the same time that your finger makes contact with the table. But…the brain needs a relatively long period of appropriate activations, up to about half a second , to elicit awareness of the event. (Libet, 2004: 32)

The coincidence of event and awareness is a construct. In that up to half-second, awareness is ‘produced and then antedated so that it appears to coincide with the event’. For Massumi Libet’s results indicate that;

… thought is always a complex duration before it is a discrete perception or cognition. Further more it is a recursive duration whose end loops back to its beginning. (Massumi, 2002: 195)

The Libet lag indicates that much of what we perceive as rational thought, as a rational response to information parsed to the senses, is actually occurring below and before the level of awareness. My body is already acting before I become aware of the decision to act. The body has already engaged in some fairly high order processing and ‘heavy’ manipulation of the percept before it becomes available to thought out deduction. The present that I perceive as inhabiting and consciously navigating has always already passed by the time I become aware of it. Our bodies have always already responded autonomically to the modulations extant between body and world.

Massumi’s Recursive Durational Loop

As Massumi notes the inherent latency might otherwise be dismissed as a measurable lag and perceptual curio except that Libet also finds events that occur within half a second of an initial event can be altered by a subsequent event triggered within that duration (Massumi, 2002: 196). The temporal relationship between body and world is modulated by this strange ‘recursive durational loop’ in which the time of the subject is produced rather than simply mediated (Massumi, 2002: 196). The linear continuous time of lived experience is a construct; the body/world relation produces the time of the event, produces awareness, in the act of ‘simply thinking’ (Davis in Tofts et al, 2002 : 15). It’s worth returning to music as an example again because it is a ‘stubbornly relational’ form of expression. According to this account of our autonomic modulation of perception the body might be seen as continually folding a succession of notes into an embodied harmony that constructs melody as a ‘continuity of variation’. Perhaps our musicality is a function of the particular ways in which these autonomic perceptual modulations ‘carry variation’. Where is the music exactly? Neither in the body, nor the instrument, but between them – in the recursive modulation of present and past. Of course the same could be said for any media form. The frames of the film, the succession of stories in news broadcast, the flow of an argument, the structure of a lecture, a marketing strategy. All depend on the ability to effect this continuity of variation between body and world; they depend on realising a qualitative difference, a ‘qualitative thirdness’, between body and world. They also depend on a folding of that ‘thirdness’ into the future as possibility.

If a later stimulus can modulate an earlier one before it becomes what it will have been, the recursive durations start to meld togethe … You get a thirdness: you get a supplemental effect not reducible to the two stimuli’s respective durations considered separately … Since any lapse of time is infinitely divisible, and at every instant there must be some kind of stimulus arising through one sense channel or another , if you try and fill in what happens in the half-second lapses in awareness … you’re left with an infinite multiplication of recursively durational emergent awarenesses, madly smudging each other. (Massumi, 2002: 196)

To make sense of this Massumi posits a ‘double system of reference’ in which lived experience is autonomically ‘elicited’ and folded forward in modulation (a mutual selection) with an emerging present so that each recursive duration leads to a discrete awareness;

Except that only very few make it to awareness, the others subsist non-consciously … our lived experience swims in an infinite cloud of infinitesimal monadic awarenesses, gnats of potential experience. Every awareness that achieves actual expression will have been in some way modulated by the swarm from which it emerged. (Massumi, 2002: 196)

The Libet Lag indicates that this ‘elicited and involuntary’ modulation between perception and lived experience occurs before and below conscious awareness (Massumi, 2002 : 207). The implications for thought and for our conception of the subject are profound and in a very pragmatic sense they encourage a shift in our relationship to media forms and technologies which are now conceived as actively modulating thought’s dynamic. As Massumi writes; ‘Every first-time perception of form is already, virtually, a memory…perception is an intensive movement back into and out of an abstract “space” of experiential previousness’.

Virtually Reading

Blind-Sight describes the condition in which subjects blinded in one eye due to neurological damage demonstrate an ability to perceive without any awareness of perception. The subject of the blind-sighted experiments described in Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual can locate the position of objects with an outreaching of the hand without any awareness that they had perceived the position of the object. More importantly for Massumi’s argument is that a flash card presenting text revealed to the blind-sighted eye modulated the interpretation of a card revealed to the sighted eye. The blind sighted subject appeared capable of reading ‘higher’ order abstract forms below (or before) the level of conscious awareness; ‘….An unconscious perception involving highly developed cognitive skill was modulating conscious awareness’ (Massumi, 2002, 198-199). Massumi suggests that the phenomena of blind sight gives some veracity to his posited ‘double system of reference’. In addition ‘blind-sight’ suggests that higher forms, ‘words, numbers, grammars recursively time smudge as messily as anything – they re-enter the relational continuum…A practiced meaning had become non-conscious perception capable of positively colouring the conscious production of more meaning’ (Massumi, 2002 : 199). Much of the work we usually attribute to higher level/conscious/rational thought is actually occurring before and below the level of consciousness suggesting that Massumi’s recursive duration modulates complex and socio-cultural forms as much as it does simple triggered stimuli:

The most material of experience, the firing of a single neuron, is always-already positively sociocultural. Conversely and perhaps more evocatively reading ceases to be a practice of mediation. We are capable of operating socially and culturally on a level with matter. (Massumi, 2002 : 199).

A Continuity of Variation

The Libet lag and the phenomena of blind sight suggest that ‘a body doesn’t coincide with its present, it coincides with its potential…it coincides with the twisted continuity of its variations’ (Massumi, 2002 : 201). A past folded forward in modulation with an unfolding future constructs the present subject as a continuity of variation. Massumi notes that without the recursive duration the body would be cut off from its past (Massumi, 2002: 200). In order to forge a temporal continuity with the lived past that ‘experiential previousness’ must be contemporaneous with the present; lived experience only becomes the past if it folds into the present. In the same instance there could be no possibility of change without the potential for that change to fold forward in modulation with the present; ‘Anything that varies in some way carries the continuities of its variation’ (Massumi, 2002 : 201).

Thought finds its very continuity in the potential for a recursive modulation. In fact Massumi’s model suggests that the human subject is this recursive modulation and remodulation of potential. Under Massumi’s model of perception as cognition the subject becomes a dynamic continuity of movement and sensation (Massumi, 2002 : 21).[8]

The model of the thinking subject that emerges from Massumi’s depictions of these phenomena is remarkably different to the operative cognitivist or representationalist status quo. The subject is not given but rather emerges as a dynamic continuity folding forward in modulation with potential futures according to the peculiar incipiencies of perceptual relation. The subject is not insulated by a layer of abstraction from the vagaries and determinations of perception but rather emerges and finds its continuity according to the relational continuum established between body and world. This resolves the hard distinction between autonomy and allonomy; autonomy is the product of an allonomous affordance.

Rethinking Media in the Recursive Duration

It is in this context that we need to rethink media. Massumi argues for the development of ‘technologies of emergent experience’…’that can be twisted away from addressing preexisting forms and functions’ and are designed to elicit involuntary, undeterminable and therefore potentially generative resonances from which might emerge novel and dynamic continuities of technical relation (Massumi, 2002: 192).[9] In fact all media forms and technologies, in the light of Massumi’s re-centering of the dynamics of perceptual relationality, become ‘technologies of emergent experience’ to obviously varying degrees and according to their particular affordances (Massumi, 2002: 192). Massumi’s theory provides a very different approach to designing, designing with, and analysing media forms and technology in terms of the way they structure this fold between experience and its expression in continuity.

In a similar spirit to Massumi’s ‘technologies of emergent experience’, Stiegler and associates argue for both the realisation of an Industrial politics of mind/spirit and the production of Technologies of Mind/Spirit (or what I would suggest we call a spirited technics) in the service of ‘the life of the mind’ (Massumi, 2002: 192; Ars Industrialis, 2005). The media and technologies that modulate the resonant potential between the body and the world become critical to a vitality of mind because it is in the dynamic of that continuum that we’ll find the differential that provides a momentum to thought.

Stiegler and Massumi are by no means alone in this approach to media technics. Matthew Fuller, for example, writes evocatively of the ‘synthetic, mutational capacities of media, the distortions they effectuate and the powers they release’ (Fuller, 2005: 171). Fuller perhaps expresses the problematic most clearly when he writes that:

…the question is how to couple reality forming, ontogenetic drives …without falling into the normalizing [modelising] trap of the latter, but using it as a mechanism by which a greater intensity of life may be sprung. (Fuller, 2005: 171- my brackets)

I argue that Massumi’s re-centering of the strange mechanics of human perception, coupled with Stiegler’s approach to technics begins to provide one possible answer to Fuller’s question. That answer develops as a metamodelisation of the mind-body-technics relation. That metamodelisation is fundamentally, technically pragmatic and empowering. It turns out, according to these two theoretical vectors, that an allonomous affordance, far from signifying an ecological determination, fundamentally empowers a subject that has always been, and is always becoming, technical.

Midwifery and Knowledge

In Technics and Time 1 : The Fault of Epimetheus Bernard Stiegler develops a theory of technics that like Massumi’s refiguring of perception effectively de-centers human thought and subject. Stiegler’s theory describes the subject as realised and finding its continuity in the codetermination between body and world that he calls Instrumental Maieutics (Stiegler, 1998: 158). As the term instrumental indicates this instrumental maieutics has substantial implications for our thinking of technics and media technologies specifically.

The term ‘maieutics’ is drawn from the Socratic process of ‘realising’ an innate knowledge that is conceived as lying dormant in the body of the subject. Maieutics refers to the Socrates dialogical approach to argument. Via his dialogical probing of the assumptions that underwrite common thinking Socrates brings his interlocutors to realise the truth that was ‘already-there’. Rather than conceiving of knowledge as being communicated from one body to another, moving from a sender to a receiver, Maieutics conceives of knowledge as realised within the body by virtue of an interaction. The term ‘Maieutics’ refers to the Greek term for ‘midwifery’. In the dialogue Theaetetus Socrates figures himself as the midwife, who is passed child bearing age, expert at identifying pregnancy, and able to bring the fruits of that pregnancy into the world (Plato, Theaetetus: 10-12). In maieutics knowledge is coaxed from the body as a baby from the womb. Read in the light of this metaphor Stiegler’s addition of ‘Instrumental’ to Maieutics sees the concept played out in a number of interesting ways.

The Body Knowing

Instrumental maieutics sustains the notion of an innate knowledge from its classical forbear. We can modulate the notion of the “innate”, update it for twenty-first century sensibilities and call it the “embodied”. However, simply finding knowledge within the subject begs two questions. First, what function does the instrumental plays in the process; how does the technical infrastructure facilitate the realisation of the already innate/embodied? Second, what is the status of the “in” in “innate”?

Let us briefly postpone dealing with the second question (the status of the “innate”) in order to deal with the first (the function of the instrumental). Knowledge, or the potential realisation of knowledge, subsists in the extended network of bodied affordances that defines and continually redefines the subject as a continuity of variation. We can then rule out the idea of a medium of transmission. From the outset the call to maieutics places Stiegler’s model in stark juxtaposition with the ‘transmission’ paradigm of the information sciences (a paradigm that finds only its truest form and most applicable context in the Shannon/Weaver paper in which it was originally stated) (Shannon Weaver 1949). There is no fully formed sender, no receiver, and no abstract message ‘stuff’, more or less faithfully transmitted between the Socrates and his respondent. Apologies for the mixing of metaphor but it goes to the point; here we have a ‘midwife’ (a maieutician) who (for the sake of argument at least) is figured as ‘barren’, not having the facility to produce knowledge themselves but able to recognize the potential for knowledge in the body of another. That midwife deploys a technical system that facilitates the realisation of an embodied potential for knowing. Given that the realised knowledge is figured as singularly bodied (Socrates is figured as barren – not possessing another body’s knowledge a priori) we should understand the knowledge as irreducible-beyond, specific-to, and contingent-upon, the context of its instantiation.

Now we can move to the question of the status of the “in” in “innate”. As knowledge is left unrealised in any singular technology or body, knowledge must be realised differentially, relationally. One plausible way to figure the matrix of singular bodies, technics, and the realisation of knowledge is to understand technology as instantiating or facilitating a resonant continuum, a sympathetic movement between body and world and to understand that resonant quality as the basis for ‘knowledge’. Under an Instrumental maieutics the latency of knowledge is then simultaneously distributed and embodied. It is distributed in the sense that it is identified as a form of differential resonance shared between bodies (body and material or body and technology) that cannot be reduced to either body alone. It is embodied in the sense that while not reducible to either body alone neither can it transcend the context of its instantiation or its modulation according to the bodied tendencies and intensities in which that resonant quality is realised.

Furthermore, as Massumi describes it, there is a ‘qualitative thirdness’ realised in the resonant potential between body and world (Massumi, 2002 : 196). The ‘qualitative thirdness’ realised between bodies is excessive. It cannot be reduced to either body alone.

A Fleshy Dynamic

The notion of a qualitative thirdness realised in the resonant potential shared between two bodies appears a little abstract until it is exemplified in the fleshy dynamic of perception. I’ll argue that Massumi’s description of perception-as-cognition provides a model of the human perceptual dynamic that augments Stiegler’s description of an integral Instrumental Maieutic. Perception is a resonant quality. It depends on the potential for a sympathetic movement shared between bodies that are otherwise distinct in space or time. Sound is the most obvious example of a quality in which the resonance of one object moves the air, which moves the eardrum, the small bones, etc, etc. Perceiving the object requires a network of resonant potential as does being perceived. Massumi notes that; ‘Perception, before it is a thinking out, is already a limited selection of potential pertaining to a thing’ (Massumi, 2002: 93). He later extrapolates the implications of this limited selection as the basis for a relational ontology. The resonant connections between things/bodies begins with, are contingent upon, and fold out from, the dynamics of perception; ‘A thing is its being perceived. A body is its perceivings … separately each is no action, no analysis, no anticipation, no thing, no body’ (Massumi, 2002 : 95).

All knowledge folds out from the perceptual continuum as the basis for anticipating a return to lived experience But that anticipation is always contingent upon a return to the material conditions that gave rise to the resonant quality in the first instance. This is the role of technics. On the one hand, if the result of expression is as anticipated then the technical certitude is reinforced. On the other hand, if the expression is incongruous with its basis in perception then the contingency realised in expression folds into perception and reconfigures it more dramatically, beyond an easy utility. Expression beyond utility becomes the basis for the always-ongoing development of a resonant network of technical potential.

Because the ecology is dynamic, driven by the cardinal force of an originary entropic differential, the contingent tends to be pervasive and our technical development always ongoing. However, despite this entropic drive the organisation of inorganic matter in the service of a calculated return to perceived potential marks a gradual – if dynamic – modelisation of the body’s relation to its immediate ecology. There are two sides to this. First, the more I plug into material prostheses organised according to their perceived utility, organised with a view to a calculated return, the more chance variation is likely to be ‘modulated’ according to form and logic of that utility or prosthetic. The process leads to the increasing systematisation/habituation of the potential between body and world and means that the possibility of realising contingencies/potential beyond the form and logics of those phyla is increasingly unlikely (Delanda, 2001). Secondly, however, the more resonant relations are created via technical prostheses, the more variation is created.

In sum, there is an ongoing uneasy relation between processes of modelisation and metamodelisation that is intrinsic to technics. It is more obviously the case with media technics. In none of this is either knowledge or technics the expression of the human as already there. The human is both realised in the possibility of a return to perceived potential engendered in technical relation and intensely felt in the body of the subject.

The Second Origin and Originary Differential

Stiegler proposes his theory of Instrumental Maieutics in response to the work of anthropologist Leroi-Ghouran on proto-human development. He offers a deconstructive reading of Leroi-Ghouran’s theory regarding the relationship between technics and intelligence. Leroi-Ghouran’s theory is formulated to avoid at all cost the assumption of an a priori or given rationale or spirit as driving the technical differentiation of the human. His alternative is to apply a zoological framework to the question of the relation between a developing brain and an emerging technics. From the Zoological perspective technics can be understood as an extension of bodied incipiencies out of which behavior folds in the process of interaction/actualisation. Stiegler’s reading of Leroi-Ghouran illustrates the initial successes of this approach and then its final betrayal in the assumption of a second order of intelligence that lies in excess of the technical – a symbolic and creative intelligence (Stiegler, 1998: 150-154).

Leroi-Ghouran assigns the emergence of that new order of intelligence to cortical development (Steigle, 1998: 155). The cognitive development that this new order indicates is strangely divorced from the zoological processes of codetermination that proved so successful in moving beyond the entrenched assumptions and dichotomies that Leroi-Ghouran was rallying against. The evidence of technical stereotypes, the instances of which are not only culturally or geographically specific, leads Leroi-Ghouran to the assertion that the emergence of the stereotype is due to a ‘genetic memory’ of the technical – the technical is figured as the ‘direct emanation of species behavior’ (155). This prompts the question of technical differentiation between human groups and ‘within’ the stereotype; how does the technology develop beyond the stereotype specified by the so called ‘genetic memory’. In answer to this question Lerio-Ghouran posits a second order symbolic or creative intelligence that transcends the technical and allows him to account for that socio-cultural development (Stiegler, 1998: 156).

In his analysis of this attribution of a second order or creative intelligence, Stiegler argues that the non-specificity of culture or species in technical development (the emergence of technical archetypes across cultures) combined with the evidence of a co-relative cortical development only indicates their codetermination. It doesn’t indicate that either cortical or technical development determine the development of the other – that one can be attributed as the origin of the other. The incipiencies realised between the ‘naked’ human and material world are indeed determined via a ‘direct emanation of species behavior’ (Stiegler, 1998 : 154). But as a ‘direct emanation’ the tool becomes a part of the body – or rather the material of the tool and the body become the basis for a technical assemblage, a codetermination. The value of Leroi-Ghouran’s zoological approach to technics lies in the realisation of this codetermination between body and world.

For Stiegler this means that a second type of memory indeed augments and modulates genetic memory. However, the memory of the stereotype lies not only in the mind/body of the human but also in the material trace of the technical artifact itself. In this case ‘not only’ means ‘not at all’ because the genesis of the technical form is realised between body and world – in their ‘structural coupling’ – neither body or material alone describes the technical artifact. There is therefore no need, nor a justification for, attributing the repetition of the stereotype to anything other than a co-determination; the realisation of material tendencies and their fold into an ecological incipience. It is the process of a ‘structural coupling in exteriorization’ that Stielger calls an Instrumental Maieutic (Stiegler, 1999 : 158)

A Matter of Survival

Stiegler’s reading exposes the anthropologist’s work as illustrating a tendency of human thought to assume what Stiegler describes as a ‘second origin’ (Stiegler, 1998: 151). Stiegler’s ‘second origin’ describes an underlying drive to identify and to capture a causal agent and an attendant inability to see the time of the subject as the product of a perceptual relation (151). This extends the implications of the Kantian distinction between autonomy and allonomy. It begins to offer some understanding as to what that opposition is predicated upon, and the way that the opposition modulates – and occludes – the recursive development of a fundamentally technical subjectivity.

As a matter of survival any sense of movement or change in our ecology – even if to our advantage – is perceived as a potential threat to the integrity of the organism. We are driven to identify contingency in order to anticipate, and in anticipation, to incorporate, that flux in the service of a continuity of form. We are driven by the imperative of form (from which modeling also arises) to identify and attribute the source and cause of the perceived movement. The imperative motivates the assumption of a linear causality in part because that logic is effective; ‘find the cause and manage the movement/contingency’. We can see this logic playing out in the cognitivist approach to thought where thought is a movement that we need to account for and that motivates thought’s isolation/reduction to a particular mechanism. As we’ve seen the premise is that having isolated that mechanism we can then achieve some control over thought. However, the assumption of a causal logic tends to obfuscate an originary differential; we isolate a component in a system of mutual affordances and arbitrarily assign it a causal agency or primacy.

If we take, however, a differential as the (un)origin of an event, a spatial relation actually projects and sustains a temporal continuity in the form of a dynamic ecology. An apparent logic of linear causality finds its origin in the entropic drive of an originary differential. In the end (and the beginning) all linear causality must boil down to its root in an originary differential that produces and defines a temporal envelope. The task of elucidating the dynamic of emergence becomes less about attributing a single causal agent and more about understanding the relational dynamic in which the potential for change lies. The intersection of Massumi and Stiegler’s two approaches to our ‘ecology of thought’ goes some way toward illustrating that relational dynamic.

In Recursion. In Conculsion.

The work of both Massumi and Stiegler suggests that, in practice, the concept of an autonomous subject emerges as a function of the dynamics of human perception in modulation with the incipiencies of its greater ecology. This subject is ‘simply thought’ rather than an agent that thinks (Tofts et al, 2002: 15). Stiegler’s theory of instrumental maieutics grounds an understanding of the emergence of a subject, capable of forethought anticipation, in the genesis of a technical relation between body and world. The autonomic modulations of Massumi’s recursive interweaving of durational loops is close to Stiegler’s conception of a subject that emerges according to incipient potential realised between body and world. Combined, the two theories rewrite the relationship between body, world and technics. Technics are no longer the contrivance of a higher order rationalism but a developing network of technical anticipation that provides the mnemonic scaffold for a developing subjectivity. At the same time the ‘no-difference between hallucination, perception and cognition’ described by Massumi means that the very persistent sense of an ‘I whose predicate is thought’ folds forward in recursive modulation of the relationship between body and world (Massumi 2002: 190). The logics that emerge from this – or technics, models or metamodels – have real effects (Massumi, 2002: 207; Tofts et al, 2002: 15). They shape our institutions, our media technologies, and our relation to the world and each other generally.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the metamodel suggested by these complementary theories is that they explain the way the tendencies of human perception, what Massumi calls the body’s ‘ways of carrying variation’, fold naturally into the emergence of the form and logic upon which the cognitivist model, as an exemplar of a more general dynamic, is based (Massumi, 2002: 201). But they also indicate the folly of an endless rationalist deconstruction of the ‘form and logic’ of the ‘liberal’ subject. We can’t re-engineer the bio-dynamics of the perceptual systems that fold naturally into the assumption (where assumption becomes a stance or orientation of the body) of an ‘I’ whose predicate is thought.

What we can do, given our new understanding of the strange relation described by these theories, is hack the system. We can design mnemotechnical systems that promote and augment the mind’s vitality, that conserve the virtuality of the mind in spite of the development of our mnemotechnical ecology always tending to a point of systematisation and eventual over-determination as a function of the dynamic that constitutes it. This ‘hack’ is easier to gesture toward than achieve. Particularly considering the complex interweaving and transductive interference and reinforcement that occurs between layers of the global mnemotechnical architecture. It is important to note however that we are not hacking established technics here, but rather, hacking the ‘proto-technical generator’- the recursive durational loop – in order to realizes new economies, new excesses lying beyond an a priori capitalization or rationalization, perhaps new modes of surplus based on logics of connection and contribution rather than scarcity and demand.

Internet media, or dynamically networked media more generally, are particularly promising in this regard for two reasons. They maintain their molecularity and they have the potential to record and ‘intelligently’ distribute the ‘qualitative excess’ realised as the body moves through media. The web, particularly since the advent of real simple syndication (RSS) and user generated content has become a stream of qualitative excess. It engages bodies, motivates thought and provokes expression in a way that continually realises new connections between otherwise disparate datasets. Those connections are only constituted according the network’s potential to move bodies. Engines such as Del.icio.us, Last.fm, or Stumbleupon.com open us onto a continuity of variation. That continuity is based not on pure chance or broadcast economies but on the trail of an affective engagement that links the movement of bodies into ‘involuntary and elicited’ vectors of potential becoming (Massumi, 2002: 189). These sites specifically are examples of an often overlooked and rarely discussed facet of metadata tagging in the contemporary network. These are not (primarily) social networking sites. They are sites whose efficacy depends on mining the affective intensity that moved a body to bookmark in the Del.ico.us, to ‘Tick’ a suggested site in StumbleUpon or simply listen to a suggested track in Last.fm. In each case its not an arbitrary keyword that makes a meta-tag useful. It is the fact that the body was moved to meta-tag an data object at all, or simply engage with it in the first place. It’s not the arbitrary collection/selection of friends or the attribution of a personalized folksonomy that matters in these networks but the realization and capitalization of an intense and generative relationality between otherwise distinct bodies. These networks promise a markedly divergent model for a fluid, less stratified knowledge ecology and economy.

Under the metamodelisation suggested here our media forms and technologies move to the foreground in the struggle to ensure a vital ecology of mind. Media and technology are partners with, not just extensions of, our perceptual network. They actively modulate the subject’s coincidence with its potential. They shape the potential for expression, for variation, for development before and below the level of consciousness. Yet this isn’t simply a call to reclaim our control over the means of media and technical production. The very notion of ‘reclaiming’ control is fundamentally undermined by this alternative to the cognitivist approach to mind. The only way forward is to hack the recursive durational loop and the instrumental maieutic, to circumvent any pretense to control in the service of realising a ‘qualitative’ difference in the relation between body and world.

I will end with the most important point that I take away from Parables for the Virtual. The crucial point is figured in the introduction of the book and the whole work that follows seems to echo and develop around this single problematic. Massumi identifies a critical paradox in the ‘dynamic unity of movement and sensation’ that is a function of the recursive durational loop (Massumi, 2002: 21). The crux of the paradox is that for the ‘virtual to fully achieve itself it must recede from being apace with its becoming’ (Massumi, 2002: 21). In order for the virtual subject to achieve its ‘full’ potential, or rather, in order to realise the body’s potential in relation with its greater ecology the subject must forgo the very momentum of which it is constituted. The intersection of the two theories described above is perhaps a site from within we might approach the design of technics capable of forcing this recession from being apace with the subject’s becoming. The production of an appropriate technics and architecture becomes crucial anywhere in which the aim is to realise qualitative difference between body and world in modulation of an emerging subjectivity.

Author’s Biography

Mat Wall-Smith is a Lecturer and Ph.D candidate writing about ecologies of thought, affect and technology in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

Notes

[1] By technics I mean both technology as ‘organized inorganic matter’ and technique as an orientation between body and a particular object; ‘It is organized inorganic matter that transforms itself in time as living matter transforms itself in it interaction with the milieu. In addition it becomes the interface through which the human qua living matter enters into relation with the milieu’ (Stiegler, 1998: 49).
[back]

[2] Guattari on metamodelisation; ‘The stakes of a metamodelising theoretical composition of analysis are accordingly raised. They primarily involve a repudiation of the universalist and transcendent concepts of psychoanalysis which constrain and sterilize the apprehension of incorporeal Universes and singularizing and heterogenic becomings’ (Guattari, 1995: 72). Metamodelisation is also discussed elsewhere in this issue of the Fibreculture journal.
[back]

[3] While Toscano’s use of Maturana and Varela is effective as a rhetorical trope its arguable whether autopoeisis can be so easily reduced to the assumption of an a priori unity as it is in Toscano’s work. The description of an ‘embodied mind’ that leaks into the dynamic of perception does account for an incorporative process (Varela et al, 1992). For one example of the sophistication of their approach look to Varela’s work on Multi-stable perception and a relational temporality in The Specious Present (Varela in Petitot et al, 1999).
[back]

[4] A limited selection; Deleuze, 1994: 229-231 on the synthesis of the Idea; Deleuze, 1999 : 72-73 on the origin of thought; Varela et al, 1991 on the embodied mind; Thompson in Varela et al, 1999 on ‘filling in’ and embedded mind; Clark and Chalmers, 1998 on the extended mind; Clark, 1997 : 1213-1218 on ‘Where does the mind stops and the rest of the world begins?’; Stiegler, 1998: 150-154 on Technical Consciousness; Massumi, 2002, for example Chapter 1, on ‘The Autonomy of Affect’; Ramachandran, 2004: 48 on ‘Peak Shift’; Damasio, 2003: 183-220 on ‘Mirror Neurons’ and representation; Brooks, 1991 on Intelligence without Representation; Murphie, 2005A on ‘Differential Life’.
[back]

[5] This is a very different form of recursion to one which I’ll describe as central to a dynamic ecology of mind for reason that I detailed earlier in this piece. In short the recursion there is an informational or representational recursion working within a set of an a priori symbolic equivalence, a form of recursion that privileges a already defined unity as the centre of thought – a computational recursion. The form of recursion with which I am concerned is at the level of a systemic definition and redefinition according to an the exposure of a relationally contingent system to a modulating force.
[back]

[6] Here I am following and developing a trail traced by Toscano’s Theater of Production with closer reference to relevant sections of The Critique of Pure Reason (Toscano, 2006; Kant, 1993).
[back]

[7] Stiegler is central to Andrew Murphie’s work on models of cognition and their relation to modernity in which Massumi’s work also plays a central role (Murphie, 2005A). He also engages both Massumi and Stielger on the relation between mind, body and technics (Murphie, 2005B). Stiegler’s work has been discussed critically and in some detail by Mark Hansen (Hansen, 2004 : 255-270). In the same work Hansen engages in passing with Massumi (227-231 & 109-110), the latter in a limited reading of the potential Massumi promises for new media technics. Hansen uses both but not in relation in his later work (Hansen, 2006). Anna Munster deploys Parables for the Virtual in various analyses of new media art and aesthetics throughout her recent book (Munster, 2006). Terranova discusses Massumi in relation to the body and the network (Terranova, 2004: 151, 152).
[back]

[8] Massumi calls the subject a ‘dynamic unity of movement and sensation’ (Massumi, 2002 : 21). I have changed this to continuity for the sake of clarity in this context – ‘Unity’ hints at a more complex problematic/paradox than I can adequately address here.
[back]

[9] The ‘undeterminable’ is a term used in Delueze’s three part Schema in his discussion the realisation of the Idea – the undeterminable refers to a contingent externality in the relation between body and world (Delueze, 2004 : 217).
[back]

References

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 18-21.

Ars Industrialis. ‘Manifeste’ on the Ars Industrialis (web site), (2005), accessed 8.6.2005 at http://www.arsindustrialis.org/manifeste.

Brooks, Rodney. ‘Intelligence Without Representation’, Artificial Intelligence Journal 47 (1991): 139-159.

Clark, Andy. Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).

Clark, Andy and Chalmers, David. ‘Extended Mind’, Analysis 58 (1998): 10-23.

Deleuze Gilles. Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical (London: Verso, 1998).

Deleuze Gilles. Foucault (London: Continuum, 1999).

Deleuze Gilles. Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum, 2004).

Delanda Manuel. ‘Markets, Antimarkets and Network Economics’, Found Object 8 (1996): 53.

Delanda Manuel. ‘Philosophies of Design: The Case of Modelling Software’, in Delanda M, Zaera A., Wagensberg J. & Boogazine A. (eds.) Verb: Architecture Boogazine (Barcelona: Actar, 2001).

Descombes, Vincent. The mind’s provisions : a critique of cognitivism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Damasio, Antonio Looking for Spinoza : joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain (Orlando, Fla., Harcourt, 2003).

Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Fuller Mathew. Media Ecologies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).

Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm (Sydney: Power, 1995).

Hansen Mark. New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).

Hansen Mark. Bodies in Code (New York: Routledge, 2006).

Heuermann Claudia. Bookshelf on Top of the Sky (DVD) (Tzadik, 2004).

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999).

Kant Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason (London: Orion Publishing, 1993).

Murphie, Andrew. ‘Differential Life, Perception and the Nervous Elements: Whitehead, Bergson and Virno on the technics of living’, Culture Machine 7 (2005A), http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Articles/murphie.htm.

Murphie Andrew. ‘The Mutation of “Cognition” and the Fracturing of Modernity: cognitive technics, extended mind and cultural crisis’, Scan 2 (2) (September, 2005), http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=58.

Massumi Brian. Parable For the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

Munster Anna. Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Lebanon: Dartmouth University Press, 2006).

Pearsall, Judy. (ed.) The Concise Oxford Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)

Plato. Theaetetus (Middlesex: Penguin, 1987).

Ramachandran V.S. A Brief History of Human Consciousness (New York: Pi Press, 2004).

Rhodes, Richard. ‘How does the brain produce consciousness’, Wired 15(2) (February, 2007), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/bigquestions.html?pg=3#consciousness.

Stiegler Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

Sutton John. ‘Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: history, the extended mind, and the civilizing process’, Submitted for Richard Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind (Ashgate) accessed 2.7.2007, http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/SuttonExograms.rtf.

Strathern Marilyn. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (New York: Routledge, 2000).

Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004).

Tofts Darren, Cavallaro, Alessio, & Jonson, Annmarie. (eds.) Prefiguring cyberculture: an intellectual history (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).

Thomson Evan, Noe Alva & Pessoa, Luiz. ‘Perceptual Completion: A Case Study in Phenomenology and Cognitve Science’ in Petitot, Jean et al. (eds.) Naturalizing phenomenology: issues in contemporary phenomenology and cognitive science (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).

Toscano Alberto. The Theatre of Production: Philosophy of Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

Varela, Franciso, Thompson, Evan & Rosch, Eleanor. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

Varela Francisco. ‘The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness’ in Petitot, Jean et al. (eds.) Naturalizing phenomenology: issues in contemporary phenomenology and cognitive science (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).

Enmeshed in technical, logistical and even militaristic concepts, transmission is frequently regarded as an inadequate way to think about communication: merely informational (for the one-way imparting of messages or signals only), or anti-social. This is not to suggest that all critics do this, but traces of a negative and even moral judgement regarding transmission can be evident even in the best analyses.

Take James W. Carey’s well-known discussion of the ‘transmission’ and ‘ritual’ views of communication. The former is linked to the ‘extension of messages in space’, the latter to ‘the maintenance of society in time’; the former to ‘imparting information’; the latter to ‘the representation of shared beliefs’ (Carey, 1992: 18). Carey takes steps to recognise transmission as an ancient and legitimate mode, and in fact he situates it as culturally dominant, linked as it is to the ‘transmission of signals and messages over distance for the purposes of control’ (15). As if to reclaim the term Carey notes ‘we have been reminded rather too frequently that the motives behind this vast movement in space were political and mercantilistic’ (16). Carey observes that when read against the extension of Christian Europe to the Americas transportation takes on a moral meaning: ‘the establishment and extension of God’s kingdom on earth. The moral meaning of communication was the same’ (16). But there is a sense that a counter-morality creeps into Carey’s work here, that it is the ritual view that is tied to culture. ‘Commonness’, ‘community’, ‘communion’, as well as ‘sharing’, ‘participation’, ‘association’, ‘fellowship’ (18), are all aligned with the ritual view, not transmission.

Let us not rehearse the standard concerns with what has been dubbed the informational or, of more significance to us, the ‘transmission model of communication’. Suffice to say that the extension of Shannon’s technical theory into the field of human communication (where the line between signals and meaning blur, where technical functions of encoding and decoding become linked to human actors, leading to a simple and mechanistic conception of communication as one-way transport) has been contested.

Instead, let us focus on some more neglected aspects. Such as the way transmission has come to name an entire ‘model’. In this way, an approach that is mainly about the capacity to transmit information has been generalised across the area of communication. The idea of it being a schematic diagram of a general communication system, as represented in the following figure in Shannon’s paper, recedes.

Shannon uses the word ‘model’ only once in his Bell System Technical Journal paper. And yet, Daniel Chandler (1994) declares,

Here I will outline and critique a particular, very well-known model of communication developed by Shannon and Weaver (1949), as the prototypical example of a transmissive model of communication: a model which reduces communication to a process of “transmitting information”. The underlying metaphor of communication as transmission underlies “commonsense” everyday usage but is in many ways misleading and repays critical attention.

It may be that this use of ‘model’ draws from the association of the theory with a diagram, as much as a philosophical edifice. Elsewhere I have attempted to argue against the trend to bind Shannon and Weaver together, exploring their different contributions to the mathematical theory (Maras, 2000).

The coding of transmission in negative terms can take other forms, some overt, others more subtle. Some critics see it as reductive. For Chandler (1994), the transmission model is one ‘which reduces communication to a process of “transmitting information”’. I. A. Richards, in a chapter on ‘The Future of Poetry’, shares this view. ‘As Transmission occurs, that which has been living activity (of unimaginable complexity) dies — to become merely physics’ (1968: 166). Transmission here is linked to the engineer’s outlook on communication, further defined as a ‘vulgar packaging view’ (174). ‘The great danger there which a crude use of encode and decode, message and signal would bring in would be a recrudescence of the separation between what is said and the how of saying it’ (173). Richards refuses here a reduction of poets and readers to sources and destinations. He argues against a separation of message and signal engendered by the ‘theory of communication’, in which the message is ‘wrapped up in language like a parcel for transmission’ (Fiske, 1982: 27). Gunther Kress, arguing for the inseparability of ideas of communication and culture, retains the term ‘transmission’ but tries to take it out of a sender to receiver framework that ignores culture and imagines senders and receivers as ‘asocial isolated individuals’. ‘We are formed by cultural meanings and we are transmitters of culturally given meanings’ (Kress, 1988: 13).

John Fiske distinguishes between two main schools of the study of communication. The ‘process’ school ‘is concerned with how senders and receivers encode and decode, with how transmitters use the channels and media of communication’ (Fiske, 1982: 2). The ‘semiotic’ school ‘sees communication as the production and exchange of meanings. It is concerned with how messages, or texts, interact with people in order to produce meanings; that is, it is concerned with the role of texts in our culture’. Fiske tries to give these two schools equal standing in his primer, although important differences exist in the way they constitute messages. The process school ‘sees a message as that which is transmitted by the communication process’ (3). It is linked to the figure of the sender and concepts of intention. The semiotic school regards the message as ‘a construction of signs’. ‘The emphasis shifts to the text and how it is “read”’. A legacy of Fiske’s approach is that it becomes difficult, in a categorical sense, to figure transmission as part of the world of semiotics, and awkward to think about process (or rethink process) within the tricky duality of the semiotic and process schools. Transmission, in Fiske’s reading, becomes a stepping-off point for a revised account of communication in terms of ‘structured relationships’ in which ‘producing and reading the text are seen as parallel, if not identical processes’ (4). It is left conceived in narrowly defined terms: combined ‘with matters like efficiency and accuracy’ which underpin the more important concept of the ‘process school’ or ‘process models of communication’ (25). Transmission is irrevocably tied to the ‘transmission of messages’, an approach that, for Fiske, takes ‘the form of the message or the codes used, for granted, whereas the proponents of the semiotic school would find this the heart of the matter’ (31).

But these responses to transmission do not exhaust all the possibilities. I want to suggest that in parts of Régis Debray’s work the concept of transmission is put to work in a way that is not fully accounted for by conventional critiques of the term. Transmission in his work is not culture-less, or tied only to messages, or aligned with space, but placed in a relationship to symbolic power, value and authority, and time. Refusing to work solely within communications research, cultural studies, semiology, media studies, the approach Debray outlines, ‘mediology’, wants to study ‘transmissions [sic] as an object unto itself’ (2000: 122). But before I discuss Debray I want to consider some prior deployments of the concept of transmission in the area of media and communications. Firstly, in the work of Wilbur Schramm, who gives it a foundational place in his understanding of the process of communication. Secondly, in the work of Stuart Hall, whose work on encoding and decoding has been central to the understanding of messages in cultural studies. Through a metamethodological study of this work I don’t want to merely repeat the critique of transmission. Instead, I seek to read along the grain of the critique, and look at the deployment of transmission ideas. By disturbing the lines within which transmission may usually be constructed, my intention is look at a different aspect of the modelling and diagramming of communication by exploring the role of concepts of transmission in the construction of communication theories, culture and symbolic power.

How Communication Works: Wilbur Schramm

Wilbur Schramm declares in the Foreword to his 1954 anthology, The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, that what students require is an understanding of

… how the communication process works, how attention is gained, how meaning is transferred from one subjective field to another, how opinions and attitudes are created or modified, and how group memberships, role concepts, and social structure are related to the process.

Schramm is relying on the so-called transmission model as the backbone of his understanding of the process. But his description of this process has a historical context, and is embedded in a set of disciplinary problematics. These problems include propagandist use of communications, the commercial conditions of research, the need for a scientific perspective (the latter derived from behaviourist paradigms), and the mis-match between the ‘pseudo-environments’ that citizens impose upon their environment and the real world (see Czitrom, 1982: 123–146; also Mattelart and Mattelart, 1992: 68–69). The term ‘pseudo-environments’ comes from Walter Lippmann, but the fact that Schramm draws on Lippmann as an anchoring point in one of the first major textbooks in the field is significant, for it grounds the study of communication processes in a particular set of issues around perception and meaning, ‘the conditions under which communication tries to modify the “pictures in our heads”’ (Schramm, 1954: 109). These pictures form part of an interpretive process, viewed variously as ‘the end product of the decoding’ to ‘the mediating response in which a stimulus arouses in us’.

While the first chapter of Schramm’s text, called ‘How Communication Works’, is grounded in the mathematical theory of communication, it is worthwhile noting that this theory does not blind Schramm to other theories and processes. In a later section called ‘The Meaning of Meaning’, Schramm speaks of the importance of the ‘interpretive process’, and the structuring of experience according to frames of reference in which we make reality meaningful to us. ‘We select, add, distort, relate’ (1954: 110). But the field of communications research did not pursue the path of a generalised ethnography of interpretive processes and the structuring of experience (an area that arguably cultural studies claimed some years later). Instead, its grounding in the communications process led to more functional trajectories. Schramm advises we ‘tend to structure experience functionally — so that it works for us’ (111). ‘In each case, the experience is being perceived in such a way as to work for the perceiver — to match up to his needs, values and expectations’. And this rapidly becomes a practical issue for communicators. ‘Practically speaking, then, these are some of the workings of perception a communicator must expect, and, so far as possible, allow for, as he tries to communicate his meaning’ (111). In this fashion, in Schramm’s work, the communication of meaning forms the framework through which the workings of perception are to be understood. A conception of the process model of communication, supported by the transmission view, forms the set of a number of precepts that communicators should keep in mind:

• The receiver will interpret the message in terms of his experience and the ways he has learned to respond to it.
• The receiver will interpret the message in such a way as to resist any change in strong personality structures.
• The receiver will tend to group characteristics in experience so as to make whole patterns. (111–113)

The workings of perception become not the true object of study, but a design problem for the sender. ‘The moral for the communicator trying to get his meaning across is … that one must know as much as possible about the frames of reference, needs, goals, languages, and stereotypes of his receiver, if he hopes to design a message to get his meaning across’ (114).

Carey would remind us that ‘getting one’s meaning across’ is a basic precept of the transmission view. In a sense against Carey, Schramm aligns the transmission view with the attempt to establish ‘commonness’ (Schramm, 1954: 3). Schramm notes, ‘at this moment I am trying to communicate to you the idea that the essence of communication is getting the receiver and the sender “tuned in” together for a particular message’.

So what are the means by which Schramm grounds his theory, his notion of process, in the transmission view? It is precisely through Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication, presented in diagram form. Schramm advises that communication always requires three elements: ‘the source, the message, and the destination’. ‘First, the source encodes his message. That is he takes the information or feeling he wants to share and puts it into a form that can be transmitted. The “pictures” in our heads can’t be transmitted until they are coded’ (4). This latter statement is crucial. Coding is a prior operation to transmission. Transmission is dependent on it. The type of coding (into written or spoken or other form) will impact on how far the messages travel, and how long they last.

At this stage in the history of the field of communications research, any concerns over extending Shannon’s work to human communication are not acute. Schramm suggests ‘it is perfectly possible to draw a picture of the human communication system that way …’. ‘Substitute “microphone” for encoder, and “earphone” for decoder and you are talking about electronic communication. Consider that the “source” and “encoder” are one person, “decoder” and “destination” another, and the signal is language, and you are talking about human communication’ (4).

Encoding and Decoding: Stuart Hall

Other commentators are more circumspect about treating signals and language as equivalents, characterising signals as ‘messages without meaning’ (Roszak, 1988: 25). While critics have noted that the resulting definition of information is counter-intuitive in the sense that it is not information of a kind that informs, but a quantitative measure or construct (24), the message/signal interface points to one of the most generative areas of Shannon’s mathematical theory: the space of encoding and decoding. Shannon explains this aspect of his theory in the following fashion:

A transmitter which operates on the message in some way to produce a signal suitable for transmission over the channel. In telephony this operation consists merely of changing sound pressure into a proportional electrical current. In telegraphy we have an encoding operation which produces a sequence of dots, dashes and spaces on the channel corresponding to the message. In a multiplex PCM system the different speech functions must be sampled, compressed, quantized and encoded, and finally interleaved properly to construct the signal. Vocoder systems, television and frequency modulation are other examples of complex operations applied to the message to obtain the signal. (Shannon, 1948: 2)

Shannon’s account of this operation underpins contemporary understandings of compression and recording, and the signal to noise ratio.

If Schramm’s approach is transmissive by virtue of the way he makes transmission dependent on coding, it is worth comparing it to a different approach drawing on ideas of encoding and transmission namely Stuart Hall’s famous essay, Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973) delivered as a paper for the Council of Europe Colloquy on ‘Training in the Critical Reading of Television Language’.

Mine is a restricted engagement with Hall, in the sense it is focused on this one essay. But having said that, the essay, perhaps Hall’s most famous, itself went through different versions. The 1980 version published in Culture, Media, and Language, is called an ‘edited abstract’ of the 1973 version, but it has superseded the first version in a sense, being more widely referenced and available. The 1973 version interests us here because of the way the it draws on key ‘transmission’ concepts like ‘message’, ‘process’ and ‘reception’. Hall has reflected on the ‘model’ in an interview recorded in 1989 and published in 1994, ‘Reflections upon the Encoding/Decoding Model’, and I shall draw on this text also.

For Schramm, a crucial aspect of communication is the work of getting the receiver and the sender ‘tuned in’ together for a particular message. This is a task of building up ‘commonness’, and the perpetual risk is of distortion or non-identity in the message. ‘And there is good reason, as we shall see, for the sender to wonder whether his receiver will really be in tune with him, whether the message will be interpreted without distortion, whether the “picture in the head” of the receiver will bear any resemblance to that in the head of the sender’ (Schramm, 1954: 4). Interestingly, Hall’s starting point is very similar to Schramm’s: ‘the question of the encoding/decoding moments in the communicative process’ (Hall, 1973: 1). But the emphasis is difference. For Hall, ‘communication between the production elites in broadcasting and their audiences is necessarily a form of “systematically distorted communication”’. Distortion is not a risk, but implicit in the system.

The take up of encoding and decoding, and ideas of the communication process, both important aspects of the mathematical theory, operate differently in Hall’s theory. Although both theorists draw on encoding/decoding ideas, Schramm uses the concepts to seal meaning into the message, while Hall uses them to open out the construction of messages as meaningful within the rules of discourse. Hall’s is not a program for getting the receiver, the audience, to ‘receive the television communication better, more effectively’ (Hall, 1973: 1).

At the same time, contra Schramm, language cannot be treated as more or less like a signal. For Hall, language opens outwards to a concern with ‘“social relations” of the communication process’ on the one hand, and ‘“competences” (at the production and receiving end) in the use of that language’ on the other. The symbolic form of the message, the transformation of event into story and language (and the rules underpinning that transformation), is a key concern for Hall. The focus on symbolic form means that Hall tends not to conceive of communication exchanges occurring in a vacuum, but sees production, circulation and reception in a circuit.

Another aspect of Hall’s approach is that, as Michael Gurevitch and Paddy Scannell note, Hall in a sense decouples decoding from encoding and makes them independent. ‘The receivers of messages are not obliged, on this view, to accept or decode messages as encoded’ (Gurevitch and Scannell. 2003: 239–240). Encoding and decoding are not points or stages in the communication process, but what Hall calls ‘determinate moments’ out of which key elements are formed: ‘the apparatus and structures of production issue, at a certain moment, in the form of a symbolic vehicle constituted within the rules of “language”. It is in this “phenomenal form” that the circulation of the “product” takes place’ (1973: 2). This focus on the phenomenal form of the signal takes Hall beyond a strict understanding of the mathematical theory of communication, whose intention is in a sense to strip form away in order to produce pure signals. Perhaps in response to this, Hall modifies his terminology, and suggests that ‘the “message-form” is the necessary form of the appearance of the event in its passage from source to receiver’. Signals no longer travel through vacuous channels, but make passage through a ‘meaning-dimension’ or ‘mode of exchange of the message’, which form moments. ‘The “message form” is a determinate moment, though, at another level, it comprises the surface-movements of the communication system only, and requires at another stage, to be integrated into the essential relations of communication of which it forms only a part’. This leads Hall to speak of ‘institutional structures’, ‘networks of production’, ‘organised routines and technical infrastructures’ as part of the broader circuit. It is as though the frames of reference discussed by Schramm are developed more widely in terms of the institutional structures of broadcasting. Interestingly, the dominant metaphor is not transmission but that of ‘yield’. ‘In a determinate moment, the structure employs a code and yields a “message”: at another determinate moment, the “message”, via its decodings, issues into a structure’ (3).

While the framing of the communication system is different to Schramm’s, I want to suggest that a transmission framework persists as a substrate throughout Hall’s text. Not simply in terms of the ‘technical infrastructure’ Hall writes into his diagram of communication, but in terms of tools to think with. While Hall draws on concepts of encoding and decoding, he is not using them to solve the problem of processing of messages into signals per se. He uses the concepts instead to discuss the discursive and symbolic nature of messages. This results in a mixture of signaletic and semiotic frameworks in his work. In some respects, (alongside his interest in Marx and Althusser) it is as though Hall is working off, building on or improvising (in the jazz sense) from an understanding of communication linked to transmission. In other words, there is a kind of ‘dependency’ on transmission concepts, and a conversation going on with transmission theory. The concepts of encoding and decoding are perhaps the most noticeable examples of this, but so is the persistence of concepts of ‘message’, ‘noise’ (16), and most importantly the concept of a communication process. ‘Production and reception of the television message are, not, therefore, identical, but they are related: they are differentiated moments within the totality formed by the communicative process as a whole’ (3). Hall, like Schramm, leaves room for perception: ‘Before this message can have an “effect” (however defined) … it must first be perceived as a meaningful discourse and meaningfully de-coded’ (Hall, 1973: 3). But in this passage he also keeps in place an informational notion of the message. Hall does not fall into a narrow effects or direct-influence paradigm here, and hastens to add that it is the ‘set of de-coded meanings which “have an effect”’. And even if there are traces of the idea of messages having an effect (however defined), the process of encoding is aligned with the idea of a meaningful discourse, a process (as has been mentioned) of ‘yielding’ and ‘realisation’ rather than sheer transmission of signals.

Hall’s encoding/decoding model is read, and explicitly presented, as a distancing from the linearity of the sender/message/receiver model. In other words, it is read against the transmission theory. Gurevitch and Scannell emphasise that while Hall’s use of the terminology of encoding and decoding looks like a throwback to ‘the Shannon and Schramm models’, that impression is misleading (2003: 239). To suggest that Hall is working off a transmission framework, or that there is a conversation with transmission theory going on in this work, seems from this perspective unlikely; if not a kind of heresy given his theoretical opposition to an idea that content is something pre-formed that is then transmitted. Indeed, in his discussion of the activities of the media group at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Hall highlights the importance of a ‘break’ with ‘direct influence’ and ‘media as trigger’ ideas linked to a ‘stimulus-response model with heavily behaviourist overtones’ (Hall, 1980: 117). This model stood in the ‘dominant’ position. Hall also emphasises the importance of getting away from ‘the notions of media texts as “transparent” bearers of meaning’ that underpin content analysis. Alongside an emphasis on more active conceptions of the audience and reading, and a focus on ideology away from ideas of ‘mass culture’, any suggestion of a link to transmission seems odd.

But Hall himself gives some basis for this view. In his ‘Reflections upon the Encoding/Decoding Model’, Hall explains that his essay was positioned against the ‘traditional empirical, positivistic models’ of the Centre for Mass Communications Research at the University of Leicester. That is, against a ‘particular notion of content as preformed and fixed meaning or message which can be analysed in terms of transmission from sender to receiver’ (Hall, 1994: 253). Hall imagines his essay as an interruption to a view that looks at communication in terms of the perfect transmission of meaning. He also describes it going ‘against the grain’ of a ‘rather overdeterminist model of communication’. Hall is vague in his characterisation here, but we can assume it relates to the way meaning is fixed through singular acts of encoding. In light of this critical stance, the opening of the 1980 version of the essay is significant. There, Hall presents an image of a traditional mass communications that constructs communication ‘in terms of a circulation circuit or loop’, leading to an idea of ‘sender/message/receiver’. But he goes on to say that it is ‘possible (and useful) to think of this process’ in another way. His focus is on doing this ‘in terms of a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments — production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction’ (Hall, 1980: 128). But the link to the process (beyond negative critique) is nevertheless forged. In their reading Gurevitch and Scannell speak of Hall incorporating the notion of production into an ‘encoding/decoding framework’, a formulation which leaves a place for transmission concepts.

A closer reading of the 1973 text can give us a better sense of why Hall would feel it not only possible but useful to think the process another way. But reading the 1973 text closely some thirty-five years on is not a straightforward task. The text is situated not only within a set of pre-existing debates but within a range of intertexts: as well as its other versions there is work exploring the empirical aspects of Hall’s model, such as David Morley’s, and a small sub-literature around the Encoding/Decoding model, teasing out issues of signification, preferred reading, and links to concepts of articulation. Of course, Hall’s own reflection is part of this intertextual field. Significantly, the version being reflected on by Hall in 1989 is the 1980 version, as this contains the references to Marx he mentions being outlined in the ‘opening paragraph of the paper’ (1994: 254, 261). This tendency to move away from the 1973 version is significant in terms of our interest in transmission. In his reflection Hall stresses, ‘I don’t want a model of a circuit which has no power in it. I don’t want a model which is determinist, but I don’t want a model without determination’ (1994: 261). And in this desire, even though Hall demonstrates a complex investment in the idea of a model, he still wants one. The statement also captures a particular sense of a determining circuit without power that is linked to traditional mass communication research. This image of the ‘circulation circuit’ is at the start of the 1980 version of the essay, but not present in the same way in the 1973 version, where the focus is on systematically distorted communication and countering an ideal of more effective reception (what we might dub the early Schrammian paradigm). The 1980 version starts with how traditional mass communications has imagined the process according to a particular image (the ‘circulating circuit or loop’), but in 1973 the idea of a communication process is treated with greater respect, aligned positively with social relations. The 1980 text foregrounds concepts of discourse, and production, and problematises notions of the process through the idea of social relations of production and reproduction in a way different to the 1973 version (see Hall, 1994: 255, 260). In 1973, Hall mentions ‘essential relations of communication’ (1973: 2) but in 1980 he speaks more of ‘social relations of the communication process’.

A comparison of the first pages of the two versions of the essay is interesting (see Appendix One). Gurevitch and Scannell note that the 1973 version is ‘topped and tailed’ in the 1980 text (2003: 238). But what is especially of interest is the way the remaining passages from the 1973 text undergo modification. The 1973 text focuses on a specific area of ‘practices of production and circulation in communications’. There is ‘something distinctive about the product’. The 1980 text ‘highlights the specificity of the forms in which the product of the process “appears” in each moment’. The forms rather than the product are a focus. The earlier version has more of an ‘exchangist’ feel typical of the ‘circulation circuit or loop’ Hall talks about. In line with this, ‘The “object” of production practices and structures in television’ in 1973 ‘is the production of a message’ (1973: 1). In 1980 this is qualified to ‘meanings and messages in the form of sign-vehicles’. In 1973 Hall urges us to ‘recognize that the symbolic form of the message has a privileged position in the communicative exchange’ (1973: 2), but later ‘we must recognize that the discursive form of the message has a privileged position in the communicative exchange (from the viewpoint of circulation)’ (1980: 129).

In terms of messages, what we are talking about is what Hall would call the ‘discursive form’ of sign-vehicles (1980: 128). This is in keeping with a more structural tenor of the 1980 piece. But note that in 1973 the term ‘phenomenal form’ is used, which grounds the sign and the concept of forms back into the subject or receiver. And this leads to a key point, that the 1980 version actually specifies ‘the moment of production/circulation’ as a moment. The key passage is as follows:

The apparatuses, relations and practices of production thus issue, at a certain moment (the moment of ‘production/circulation’) in the form of symbolic vehicles constituted within the rules of “language”. It is in this discursive form that the circulation of the “product” takes place. (1980: 128)

But in 1973, the ‘moment of production/circulation’ isn’t specified. We can suggest that this is because Hall maintains an idea of the communication process and imagines the receiver within the circuit.

The apparatus and structures of production issue, at a certain moment, in the form of a symbolic vehicle constituted within the roles of “language”. It is in this “phenomenal form” that the circulation of the “product” takes place. (1973: 2)

Consistent with this, in 1973 Hall suggests that:

It is also in this symbolic form that the reception of the ‘product’, and its distribution between difference segments of the audience, takes place. (1973: 2)

This is different to:

But it is in the discursive form that the circulation of the product takes place, as well as its distribution to different audiences. (1980: 128)

The further Hall moves from the traditional mass communications position, the more he is forced to account for circulation in theoretical terms. In the 1980 version, discursivity conditions circulation. It provides the forms in which circulation happens. In the 1973 version we are talking about plain reception. Other phrases support the idea that the some circulating circuit is important to Hall. The 1973 text links production to ‘initiating the message’, and maintains an idea of completing the circuit. ‘Once accomplished, the translation of that message into societal structures must be made again for the circuit to be completed’. In the 1980s version the notion of completing the circuit is highly qualified: ‘Once accomplished, the discourse must then be translated — transformed, again — into social practices if the circuit is to be both completed and effective’. And, in a new passage, Hall brings in the concept of articulation to do the heavy work.

If no “meaning” is taken, there can be no “consumption”. If the meaning is not articulated in practice, it has no effect. The value of this approach is that while each of the moments, in articulation, is necessary to the circuit as a whole, no one moment can fully guarantee the next moment with which it is articulated. Since each has its specific modality and conditions of existence, each can constitute its own break or interruption of the ‘passage of forms’ on whose continuity the flow of effective production (that is, ‘reproduction’) depends. (1980: 128–129).

Here, the concept of articulation (along with that of discourse) effectively provides a new infrastructure for understanding the way the different moments in the system are understood. The concepts of process, reception, symbolic form, become less crucial.

This reading is not deconstructive to the extent that there is some irreparable flaw in Hall’s argument. It is rather to suggest that in thinking about communication, we make use of the tools we have, which can include theories of transmission. Rather than focus on Hall’s essay in terms of the ‘interpretation of texts’ (Gurevitch and Scannell, 2003: 238), I am focusing on the communication theory aspect. My suggestion that Hall may be working off a transmission framework could be read as a developing or evolving process of writing against transmission. And interestingly, even in the reflection, he mentions that a definitive version of the ‘Encoding/Decoding’ hasn’t been written yet (1994: 261). Gurevitch and Scannell describe it as a ‘text in transition’ (2003: 238).

Reading Hall’s essay, a strong impression comes across that he thinks little of mass communications research. He situates his essay historically against a fairly narrow conception of ‘communication studies’ (Hall, 1994: 271). Although Gurevitch and Scannell warn us of the dangers of linking Schramm and Hall, revisiting the theme of transmission in Hall’s essay in the context of more traditional theories such as Schramm’s can, however, lead to some interesting findings. For example, regarding the way transmission is a critical departure point but also structures the terms of discussion, and initially provides conceptual mooring points for Hall’s essay; even if in the later development of the article he lets go of these mooring lines like a ship heading out to sea. In relation to the 1973 version of the essay, there is a sense that it is in dialogue with a version of Schramm’s approach. It becomes an extended reflection on ‘the a-symmetry between source and receiver at the moment of transformation into and out of the “message-form”’, an elaboration of distortion and misunderstanding as they arise ‘from the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange’ (Hall, 1973: 4). This lack of equivalence is a problem inherited from mass communications theory. There are moments where transmission punches through in Hall’s essay, such as when he wonders about studies of violence, ‘how many other, crucial kinds of meaning, were in fact transmitted whilst researchers were busy counting the bodies’ (7). Or again: ‘I have been trying to suggest … how an attention to the symbolic/linguistic/coded nature of communications, far from boxing us into the closed and formal universe of signs, precisely opens out into the area where cultural content, of the most resonant but “latent” kind, is transmitted’ (11). At the same time, there are moments when semiotic language penetrates into the communication process such that ‘visual signifiers’ are ‘decoded’ (11), or when de-coding is linked to the work of reading and broader semiotic work (14), leading eventually to Hall elaborating the four ‘ideal type’ positions for decoding for which is paper is best known. Hall opens up a new area he call’s ‘meta-codes’, particularly a ‘professional code’ which ‘broadcaster’s employ when transmitting a message which has already been signified in a hegemonic manner’ (16).

Debray and Transmission

A close reading of Hall’s encoding-decoding essay shows more than just a critical relation to the transmission view. An analysis of this potentially ‘positive’ relation to transmission is not always teased out, perhaps obscured by a contemporary orthodoxy that says transmission is an inferior model. But uses can be made of transmission, especially in particular kinds of semiotic situations, such as those where message trans-decoding occurs across diverse communities of receivers, and within constructed flows typical of television. As Umberto Eco indicates, ‘things are completely different when we consider a message transmitted to an undifferentiated mass of receivers and channelled through the mass media … within a communicative code … not shared by all receivers’ (1980: 133).

Following discussion of two Anglo-American cases, Régis Debray’s deployment of the concept of transmission provides an example of a different approach, which I shall attempt to delineate here, focusing on his Teachers, Writers, Celebrities (published in France in 1979, in English in 1981), but drawing also on, Media Manifestos (published 1994, in English 1996), and Transmitting Culture (1997, in English in 2000).

Some general aspects of Debray’s work are worth noting. Firstly, Debray does not construct his approach in what he terms orthodox ‘academic compartmentalisations’. He has sought to develop his ‘mediological’ perspective as a sub-discipline of the Human Sciences in its own right. In general terms he has explained that this is because ‘mediological ambition is too fervent about religion, art, and the immobilisation of time to call on information and communication sciences so disdainful of the antique’ (2000: 123). He declares that he would be concerned if his mediological work was found in the ‘media studies’ section of bookstores (8) — admittedly, as we shall see, there is a real sense that when Debray speaks of media it is not in a sense that media studies might normally engage with. Secondly, Debray’s explicit engagement with other national scholarly traditions of media, communications and cultural studies in the works mentioned above is minimal. This is, for readers not familiar with the French academic scene, at times frustrating, and at points weakens his assertions: such as when he hopes that one day analysis of the concept and the practices corresponding to the term ‘mass media’ will ‘reveal the radical heterogeneity of the universes in question’ (Debray, 1981: 86). Thirdly, and related to the second point, Debray’s work, which spans many approaches (including the history of technology), reads as argument with and against semiology and signification (1996: 143–145; also 2000: 119–120). Yet his engagement with semiology doesn’t look at how this perspective might be adapted in different contexts (Hall would be a case in point). But these same quirks lead to some unusual and inventive deployments of concepts such as transmission.

We should, before proceeding, distinguish between Debray’s deployment of the concept of transmission in his work, and his own comments on transmission. The latter are elaborated most explicitly in Media Manifestos, where he presents a three-fold challenge to the notion of an act of communication, conceived in terms of a sending and receiving pole, allowing for coding and encoding (Debray, 1996: 44–45). Firstly, against the view that the act is instantaneous, Debray suggests ‘transmission is a historical process’, defined by a ‘thick temporality’ that conditions the sending of all messages, and the idea of sending messages itself. Secondly, against a view that the act is interpersonal, he insists that ‘transmission is a collective process’, involving many people on the line, between the points, but also historically structured ‘personified social organizations’, or ‘collective individuals’, at either end of the line. Debray in later work broadens this idea: ‘cultural transmission begins where interpersonal communication ends’ (2000: 98). Thirdly, against the notion that the act of communication is peaceful (supported we can say by ideas that communication is about tuning in, sharing, or community), Debray states that ‘transmission is a violent collective process’. Transmission on this understanding is a combat against noise, inertia, other addressees, other transmitters. It relates to systems of authority and relations of domination. Debray states, ‘to transmit is to organize, and to organize is to hierarchize. Hence also to exclude and subordinate — necessarily’ (1996: 46). While many commentators question the suspect linearity of the transmission view, Debray challenges the assumed horizontality of the standard diagram. The poles of communication are at different heights, ‘placed at uneven levels by an institutional relation of inequality’ (47). Somewhat cryptically Debray concludes, ‘transmission is thus not communication’.

Another noteworthy comment on the idea of transmission appears in Transmitting Culture. There Debray goes against the idea that the signal is simply carried by the channel. By contrast, Debray argues that ‘Transport by is transformation of. That which is transported is remodelled, refigured, and metabolised by its transit. The receiver finds a different letter from the one its sender placed in the mailbox. … To transmit should not be considered merely to transfer’ (2000: 27). In this sense, Debray, like Hall, challenges an idea of a message in which content is fixed.

Turning to Debray’s earlier work, we can explore how he puts the concept of transmission into operation, keeping in mind that it predates the publication of Media Manifestos. In broad terms Teachers, Writers, Celebrities is a work about the intellectual field and its modification through different institutional arrangements. He is interested in how the position and role of the intellectual is transformed through French cultural history. The book attempts to chart the rise of an alliance between the intelligentsia and a ‘new mediocracy’ ‘with which indeed it is beginning to merge’, ensuring it ‘a monopoly in the production and circulation of events and values, of symbolic facts and norms, over an increasingly wide area’ (Debray, 1981: 1). In terms of concepts of transmission, his starting point is not then concepts of encoding and decoding. His problem is not Schramm’s (identity between source and destination, or attunement between sender and receiver), nor Hall’s (structural non-identity between acts of encoding and decoding, even if they share an interest in symbolic form). In some ways his interest is in a more basic and sociological version of the concern about getting a message across, albeit against the backdrop of a discussion of symbolic value and power. Debray’s discussion is not focused on the sender as abstract actor, but on the intellectual as defined and constructed under particular material conditions. In Teachers, Writers, Celebrities he is interested in how the media world or ‘cycle’ transforms those conditions.

As a way of understanding this transformation of conditions, we can suggest that Debray’s analysis of the media has two main aspects.

Firstly, he is concerned with the means of communication themselves. Debray is worried about access and bottlenecks across the ‘mass mediatic network’, ‘whose gangways and decision-making centres remain inaccessible to the intellectual workers at the base’ (90). In this sense, Debray draws on ideas of transmission to account for the operations of the mass media. As such is he interested in channels and their control and the fact that ‘mass communication is a one-way process’ (1981: 103). ‘The rarefaction of the means of mass communication — or in plain language, the bottleneck — has inevitably displaced the site of intellectual power into the sphere of the mass media’ (121). This results in what he characterises as a ‘new deal, a new game and new stakes: the growing supremacy of the press over literature, and journalists over authors’ (10).

This leads to a second set of concerns around the transformation of fields by the field of the media.

We are seeing something more serious that [sic] the mere displacement of one institutional hierarchy (in the university: assistant lecturer, lecturer, senior lecturer, full professor) by another external to it (in the media: freelancer, columnist, sub-editor, leader writer, editor-in-chief). We are seeing the university corps and, at a more structural level the intellectual corps, voluntarily relinquish its own logic of organization, selection and reproduction and adopt the market logic inherent in the workings of the media. (46)

Here, Debray pursues a point also made by Bourdieu, that the televisual, journalistic field has a transformational effect on other fields of cultural production (Bourdieu, 1998: 2). But he perhaps goes further in postulating the impact of the means of communication, and their institutional arrangement, on the ‘material conditions of the existence of thought’ (Debray, 1981: 13).

What is giving way, almost without realizing it, is, perhaps, a system of thought in which information could inform its supports rather than the reverse; a cultural technology in which the needs of production could still, at certain privileged points in the system, have the upper hand over the imperatives of distribution. … How will the richness of the old messages resist the homogenization of supports, which aligns the content of thought with the demands of a single market? (92)

In a classic political economy framework, Debray is outlining control of production by distribution. But in a different sense, it has to do with the autonomy of thought within the system.

Debray’s discussion predates much of the interest in networked cultures and new media, although he increasingly speaks of computers and networks in later work. This is not the place in which to evaluate all of Debray’s claims, such as when he suggests that the ‘mass media are a machine for producing simplicity by eliminating complexity’ (94). Nor can we look in detail at his broader thesis about the interactions between the academic, publishing, and media systems. What we can suggest is that Debray’s interest in the material conditions of communication and intellectual work (fields), and attunement to institutions and arrangements of cultural authority and power (apparatuses), gives his analysis of the transmission of symbolic value a very different cast to conventional discussion of transmission in mathematical engineering terms, and in semiotic-linguistic terms. His focus is not the intentions of the sender, nor the hegemony of dominant codings, but the dynamics of influence and symbolic power, including a ‘new kind of medium which, not content with transmitting influence, superimposes its own code on it’ (140).

‘Without a channel, there can be no transmission and, a fortiori, no reception’ (147). In some ways, Debray here is using transmission to re-open a set of issues around control and power that early communication research attempted to analyse and unpack. But unlike early US studies of influence in the political process, Debray’s work is not premised on a unitary notion of communication process or focused on interpersonal communication (see Czitrom, 1982: 135¬–136). Indeed, the concept of the ‘mediasphere’ emerges as something of an alternative vehicle for the concept of transmission to that of ‘process’. He desires to

proceed as if mediology could become in relation to semiology what ecology is to the biosphere. Cannot a “mediasphere” be treated like an ecosystem, formed on the one hand by populations of signs and on the other by a network of vectors and material bases for the signs. (Debray, 1996: 109)

This concept of the mediasphere is important to consider as without it Debray’s analysis could easily fall into a kind of functionalism: here is the system, and this is the role of intellectuals with in it. And at times he fosters this perception, such as when he suggests ‘the media work automatically’ (Debray, 1981: 148). But a broader conception of the intellectual as mediator or intermediary conditions this view (21). For Debray the transmission of influence depends on ‘operational intermediaries’ who facilitate the organisation of the intellectual corps and its creativity (154–155). This idea opens up the need for an analysis of the symbolic order, the production of consensus, and mechanisms of promotion, rank, and social capital (217). In Media Manifestos, this idea is taken further. Concepts of ideology give way to practices of organisation. Debray replaces the word ‘communication’ with ‘mediation’. The communicator becomes the mediator. ‘The Word cannot transmit itself without becoming Flesh, and the Flesh cannot be all love and glory; it is blood, sweat and tears. Transmission is never seraphic because incarnate’ (Debray, 1996: 5).

Transmission in Debray’s work operates at the nexus of a range of issues: the ‘getting across’ of ideas, mediation, capturing thought, transmission of culture, and influence and inheritance. Religion, politics, disciplines, representations are all sites of analysis. His studies have an over-arching interest in a notion of putting theory into practice that has its roots partly in Debray’s interest in Marxism (see 102). Debray is interested in social ideas, but also ‘the plots that weave them with their milieu …’ (108). At times transmission is a focus of critique, and at others a vehicle for his ideas about politics and ideas. And indeed this points to an apparent paradox of Debray’s work: he builds a theoretical apparatus on transmission but also links the term to combat and degradation. In his critique of the ideal of truth he writes, ‘A material system of transmission necessarily degrades information’ (84); but as well as being an argument for a more complex materialism it points to an ambiguous relation to transmission. There is no doubt that transmission indicates and opens up a field of analysis for Debray, but it is also a concept that is consistently re-worked by him. His discussion of noise and feedback at times occurs squarely in the informational frame (129). At other times, he modifies this frame. An insight of mediology is that ‘a message’s efficacy is not inherent to it but the factor of a certain milieu of transmission or mediasphere’ (122). But at the same time he suggests that the idea of ‘the transmission of ideas as a translation of idealities across an inert and neutral technologic ether’ needs to be given up (121). These two statements are not inconsistent, but between them the concept of transmission plays a different role in indicating the space of messaging and system of communication. This different role has to do with pragmatic-mediological questions on the one hand — where Debray looks at ‘go-betweens’ and the relations of communication (see 138) — and a functionalism where transmission helps anchor the system such that he can speak of ‘the mediative function’.

Beyond the Process and Semiotic School Distinction

If it can be said that a tension between the ‘process’ and ‘semiotic’ schools persists in our ways of thinking about communication, structuring the very terrain of this thinking, then we can suggest that a particular violence against the concept of transmission is part of this landscape.

This is not to suggest that ‘semiotic’ arguments to do with the non-identity of practices of encoding and decoding, the role of language and discourse, or the cultural orientation of actors, are unimportant. Nor is it to say that a critique of transmission is unnecessary. Or that an understanding of what Jacques Derrida has called the ‘postal principle’, implicit in transmission systems, and sometimes obscured by them, is irrelevant. On the contrary, this principle structures the ‘sites of passage or of relay among others, stases, moments or effects of restance’, and makes any idea of destination and correspondence dependent on systems of address based on identity (Derrida, 1987: 27). These systems structure and place conditions on the addresser, the addressee, the form of message and code, various go-betweens, and thus contribute to the fragility of the idea of a destination. Re-theorising this principle through the concept of writing Derrida writes, ‘There is no destination … within every sign already, every mark or trait, there is distancing, the post, what there has to be so that it is legible for another, another than you or me …. The condition for it to arrive is that it ends up and even that it begins by not arriving’ (29).

In suggesting that a violence against transmission is part of our intellectual landscape, I want to contend that the critique of transmission as an image of communication carries with it baggage that is still to be unpacked (not least of which has to do with the construction of the mathematical theory into the ‘transmission model’). Transmission has become caught up in the challenge laid down by the ‘semiotic paradigm’ to ‘the lingering behaviourism which has dogged mass media research for so long’ (Hall, 1973: 5), as well as concerns about collusion of educators and cultural policy makers with the ‘re-signification’ of dominant interests in the ‘communicative chain’ (19), but its place in the critique has not always been fully developed. At times ‘the transmission model’ seems to stand as the key problem, while at others it is incidental to a behaviourism that is deemed more dangerous. At times it is the enemy, at others collateral damage.

Once we start looking at the critique of transmission, rather than falling in behind it, particular interesting phenomena emerge. The deployment of concepts of transmission and message, encoding and decoding, is one significant area of interest here, a convergence between communication engineering, the sociology of media, and linguistics that has been discussed by Mattelart and Mattelart (1992: 44). The way Fiske’s work in particular gives us a rather a-historical picture of the development and precepts of the process model is also important here, especially in relation to the development of Schramm’s position (see below). But also important are practices of transmission. These are often obscured by an emphasis on the working system as a whole. As Debray asserts, ‘human beings have always transmitted their beliefs, values and doctrines from place to place, generation to generation’ (2000: vii). The critique of transmission has opened up an important questioning of the nature of content, process and the meaning of communication itself. It has provided crucial alternative frames of inquiry, beyond the effective and efficient transfer of messages. In doing so, engaging with transmission is central to contemporary critiques of technology, information, progress, propaganda and culture, all areas in which transmission takes on special force. But, while transmission as an image of communication may not capture all aspects of cultural exchange and persistence (and dissemination, or diffusion could form alternatives here), it is important to continue to stay awake to the mode in which things do get transmitted: some things explicitly so (packaged), and some less explicitly so; some tied to intentions, and others not.

The task of working out what might persist, and what doesn’t, involves arguably some concept of transmission. In Transmitting Culture this leads Debray to provocatively put to one side communication and its linguistic, immaterial base, and ‘differentiate the material act of transmitting from communication’ (2000: 1). In doing so Debray seems to distance himself from theorisations of transmission that might link it to radical concepts of the vehicular, trace, and writing, such as that explored by Derrida in ‘Signature, Event, Context’. There Derrida examines communication as understood ‘in the restricted sense of the transmission of meaning’ in relation to writing as a means of communication (1982: 310), and as a general condition of all communication (relating to marks, traces, spacings, the play of absence and presence). Debray orients transmission towards the material dimension of bodies, sounds, perfumes and ritual, of buildings and flags, of power and motion carried across by mechanical and physical means. This axis relates to transportation through space, but Debray also links it to transportation through time. Echoing an Innisian/Carey distinction between media with a bias toward space or time, ‘if communication transports essentially through space, transmission essentially transports through time’ (Debray, 2000: 3). But, intriguingly, Debray inverts Carey so that transmission relates to time rather than space. Also, we should recall here that Debray adds another aspect to this idea of transportation discussed earlier, that ‘transport by is transformation of’, that the message is transformed in transit.

Debray’s study challenges one of the assumptions guiding our discussion, that transmission is an image of communication. It is for this reason, worth dwelling further on how Debray defines a different realm for transmission. He explains,

The contrast is thus stark, to my way of thinking, between the warmer and fuzzier notion of communication and the militant, suffering nature of the struggle to transmit. Here the communicational fiction of the lone individual producing and receiving meaning gives way to people establishing membership in a group (even if only one they seek to found) and to coded procedures signalling that group’s distinction from others. There is a sense in which the natural environment communicates information about itself to me through visual, tactile, olfactory and other senses. Even more can I say that animals give off or send out messages …. But I cannot speak of animals, nor of my physical surroundings, as transmitting per se. Everything is a message, if you will — from natural to social stimuli or from signal to signs — but these messages do not necessarily constitute an inheritance. … At most, one can define an act of transmitting as a telecommunication in time, where the machine is a necessary but not sufficient interface and in which the network will always mean two things. For the pathway or channel linking senders and receivers can be reduced to neither a physical mechanism (sound waves or electric circuit) nor an industrial operating system (radio, television, computer) as it can be in the case of diffused mass information. The act of transmitting adds the series of steps in a kind of organizational flowchart to the mere materiality of the tool or system. The technical device is matched by a corporate agent. If raw life is perpetuated by instinct, the transmitted heritage cannot be effective without a project, a projection whose essence is not biological. Transmission is duty, mission, obligation: in a word, culture. (2000: 4–5)

In this passage, it is interesting that channels, senders and receivers remain familiar touchstones. But several other steps are intriguing and make this scenography strange. Here, unlike Debray’s earlier work, transmission is not just about the mass media. It is about culture, but understood in a particular way. ‘Transmitting means organizing’ (15). It is distinguished from the natural environment, non-biological in nature, and linked to organisational practices and a corporate agent. The technological context is broader in this conception, less a system and more akin to a technics in Lewis Mumford’s sense, an ensemble of technology and human behaviour (Mumford, 1963). And the connection between ethnos and technics, and the capacity of the human sciences to think about technology, becomes a growing interest for Debray (2000: 54). Finally, the problem of influence in Debray’s work is redefined around inheritance, and ‘telecommunication in time’. His concept of culture and transmission merge around this project or projection, which opens up a political dimension to transmission, but also provides Debray with a way to suggest that not just any message is transmitted, it has to do with acts of mediation and transformation between ages, groups, and generations. Debray asks, ‘how to avoid the pitfalls of seeing things everywhere transmitted?’ (8). He responds by concentrating on the perpetuation of symbolic systems: ‘on religions, ideologies, doctrines and artistic productions’ (9). The areas serve to frame the more general interest in ‘the processes, agents, and vectors that ensure thought’s transmission’ (66)

Attempting to differentiate transmitting from communication is a formidable task, and interestingly Debray casts doubts on a complete separation (2000: 7). By way of clarification he explains he is interested in the ‘varieties of organized materials required to materialize organizations’ including instruments of communication and their semiotic, material, distributive base (12). This allows him to suggest for instance that ‘a modification of the networks of communication has the effect of altering ideas’ (23).

But, back to the differentiation of transmission and communication: in the UK and US, culture and communication have been linked together and united in a critique of transmission (see Kress, 1988; Carey, 1992). In the US, a particular combination of forces made the institutionalisation of the concept of transmission (along with those of process and flow) a priority for the emerging discipline of communications research in the post-World War Two period. And with it came a dependence on particular acts of communication, ideas of effective transmission of the message, feeding into a concept of the communications process available for scientific study. For Schramm, reflecting in 1972 on his earlier work in the 1950s, Stimulus–Response psychology, and the tools of content and effect analysis were key to the study of human communication. ‘We felt that Shannon’s information theory was a brilliant analogue which might illuminate many dark areas of our own field’ (Schramm, 1972: 7).

Tracking the place of transmission in communications thinking involves being attentive to variations in the field, and different frames of engagement. Schramm’s own work provides an illustration of the importance of this. We can recall that in the 1950s Schramm’s introduction to his anthology was called ‘How Communication Works’, which said something about the capacity of the new discipline to explain the process and its workings in toto. In the 1970s, the introduction becomes ‘Nature of Communication Between Humans’, a more modest, and descriptive (or non-normative) exercise. In the 1950s it was possible to regard Shannon’s model or a derivative of it as an adequate picturing of the communication process. In the 1970s this was no longer the case. Characterising what he terms the ‘Bullet theory of communication’ Schramm notes, ‘in the early days of communication study, the audience was considered relatively passive and defenceless, and communication could shoot something into them, just as an electric circuit could deliver electrons to a light bulb’ (1972: 9). ‘Thus by the middle 1950’s the Bullet Theory, if you will pardon the expression, was shot full of holes. If anything really passed from sender to receiver, it certainly appeared in very different form to different receivers’ (10). Privileging concepts of relationship over receivership, and interaction over action, Schramm tries to capture the concerns of earlier decades in which Shannon’s theory was held to have real explanatory power. ‘We had been concerned with “getting the message through”, getting it accepted, getting it decoded in approximately the same form as the sender untended — and we had undervalued the activity of the receiver in the process’ (11). The term ‘transmission’ is not as prominent in the 1970 text. Instead, Schramm looks at definitions that foreground the idea of the ‘transfer of information’. Moving away from a sheerly linear concept of the process of communication — and in the process complicating Fiske’s distinction between process and semiotic schools — Schramm begins to conceive of the message as not transmitted, but having a life of its own. Anticipating Hall he writes, ‘Furthermore, the meaning is probably never quite the same as interpreted by any two receivers, or even by sender and receiver. The message is merely a collection of signs intended to evoke certain culturally learned responses …’ (Schramm, 1972: 15).

We can suggest that in the work of revisionism that Schramm does in the 1970s transmission is downplayed, more circumscribed, but also linked to a somewhat embarrassing past position. The diagram representing the mathematical theory no longer has the same central status in the theory. Shannon’s ‘engineering’ approach certainly appears in a section on ‘How does it work’ that looks at a range of attempts to model or diagrammatise the process. Schramm’s focus is not on getting the message across as it was in the 1950s but feedback as a kind of interaction. Following this discussion, Schramm notes that ‘we have not yet introduced the framework of social relations in which we said all communication necessarily functions’ (27). This reads as a highly significant gap or omission. And with the introduction of his framework, Schramm places transmission in a specific place in his idea of the function and goals of communication. It comes into play in a limited way for the communicator whose purpose is informational and instructional rather than persuasive and entertaining (36–37).

Metamethodological Conclusions

Metamethodological analyses are by their nature open-ended, attentive to variations and modulations in their area. As such, while comparison of cases can be informative, conclusions can be provisional — not just because the terrain of analysis might be uncertain, but because ‘the environment’ is one of the terms often opened to question (see Debray, 1996: 111). In lieu of a set of final findings, we can perhaps return to Fiske’s point that against the tendency to take messages and the codes used for granted, we consider this the heart of the matter.

But there are today questions as to whether semiology and signification is the sole means to approach these codes. For Debray, transmission should be connected to particular ‘practices of organisation’ in which processes are subject to forces, fields and apparatuses that shape the material conditions of the existence of thought. Debray’s own challenge to signification theories is important in terms of Hall’s encoding/decoding theory and where it goes. For Hall, poststructuralism (especially the work of Roland Barthes) opened up new possibilities.

Barthes’s notion of textuality … is no longer amenable to the identification of those clearly distinguished analytic moments of encoding and decoding. I can only describe this spatially. It flattens out my circuit. Instead of a circuit, which has a clearly distinctive movement around, of an expanded kind, it kind of lays reading and the production of meaning side by side. It makes it lateral rather than a circuit. (Hall, 1994: 272)

And with this development, transmission arguably becomes a less crucial and interesting term. But it is this lateral flattening effect that Debray reacts to when he criticises semiological attempts to explain communication and transmission through signification.

While this essay has not sought to examine all aspects of Debray’s approach, his approach is unique in going against the grain of Carey’s time/space formula and aligning transmission with time instead of space. It also cuts across a tendency in cultural studies to place transmission and culture in different corners from one another. Schramm and Hall both have a prominent position in the transmission literature because they are re-modellers of communication. One line of remodelling seeks to control. The other attempts to interrupt the process to tease out the moments at which power operates. Both relate to symbolic power and how it is exercised, circulates, and operates (Schramm through a focus on intention, and Hall through the concept of hegemony). Debray’s uniqueness is in writing a critical exploration of transmission into this questioning of symbolic power to show that power doesn’t just operate linearly and horizontally, but vertically and transversally across different fields and apparatuses.

What is interesting for our purposes is how Debray negotiates in his own context the semiotic and process school duality, while retaining an interest in transmission. As if speaking of Shannon’s model itself, he writes,

At the entry to the “black box” there are sonorities, letters, faint traces; at the exit: new legislations, institutions, police forces. To dismantle this “box” is to analyze what we shall call a fact or deed of transmission, or to produce the rules of transformation from one state into another …. The structural stability of languages and codes is one thing, the quaking of a stable structure by an event of speech or word, or by any other symbolic irruption, is another’ (Debray, 1996: 10–11).

In this sense, Debray negotiates a place for both rules of transformation and communicators. But to situate Debray as a neat hybrid of Hall and Schramm would be to underestimate his own mediological method, which lays down its own challenge to any metamethodological discussion of the theories of communication. Debray might ask, to what are we standing above? How have we drawn the line between method and metamethod? This essay has shadowed Debray’s mediology to the extent it looks at the relations between ‘higher social functions’ (in this case those of the communication theorist) with the ‘technical structures of transmission’ (Debray, 1996: 11). But it is necessary to say that in a sense Debray arrived first, tracing the contributions of Eco, and Barthes, the semiological tradition in France in Media Manifestos. In a different guise, especially when dealing with academic contents and contexts, metamethodology may indeed merge with a version of Debray’s mediological method. Perhaps not the research program in culture and technology implied in Transmitting Culture, tracking diachronically how founding ideas were founded, and synchronically how systems and technologies dislodge traditional domains (2000: 99), but closer to the ‘case-by-case determination of correlations, verifiable if possible, between the symbolic activities of a particular group … its forms of organization, and its mode of grasping and archiving traces and putting them into circulation’ (1996: 11).

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the anonymous fibreculture journal reviewers of this essay for their comments and suggestions.

Author’s Biography

Steven Maras lectures in media and communications at the University of Sydney.

Appendix One – A comparison of excerpts from 1973 and 1980 versions of Stuart Hall’s ‘Encoding/Decoding’ essa

(back to the body of the article)

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. On Television and Journalism (London, Pluto, 1998).

Carey, James W. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 1992).

Chandler, Daniel. ‘The Transmission Model of Communication’ (1994), http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/trans.html.

Czitrom, Daniel J. Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).

Debray, Régis. Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms, trans. Eric Rauth (London: Verso, 1996).

Debray, Régis. Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France, trans. David Macey (London: New Left Books and Verso Editions, 1981).

Debray, Régis. Transmitting Culture, trans. Eric Rauth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982).

Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Eco, Umberto. ‘Towards a Semiotic Inquiry into the Television Message’, in John Corner and Jeremy

Hawthorn (eds.) Communication Studies: An Introductory Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1980), 131–149.

Fiske, John. Introduction to Communication Studies (London: Methuen, 1982).

Hall, Stuart. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, Occasional Paper, Media Series: SP No. 7, 1973).

Hall, Stuart. ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (eds.) Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (London: Routledge, 1980), 128–138.

Hall, Stuart. ‘Introduction to Media Studies at the Centre’, in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (eds.) Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (London: Routledge, 1980), 117–121.

Hall, Stuart. ‘Reflections upon the Encoding/Decoding Model: An Interview with Stuart Hall’, in Justin Lewis and Jon Cruz (eds.) Viewing, Reading, Listening: Audiences and Cultural Reception (Boulder, Westview Press, 1994), 253–274.

Gurevitch, Michael and Paddy Scannell, ‘Canonization Achieved? Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding”’, in Elihu Katz, John Durham Peters, Tamar Liebes, and Avril Orloff (eds.) Canonic Texts in Media Research: Are There Any? Should There Be? How About These? (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2003), 231–274.

Kress, Gunther (ed.), Communication and Culture: An Introduction (Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1988).

Maras, Steven. ‘Beyond the Transmission Model: Shannon, Weaver, and the Critique of Sender/Message/Receiver’, Australian Journal of Communication 27.3 (2000): 123–142.

Mattelart, Armand and Michèle Mattelart. Rethinking Media Theory, trans. James A. Cohen and Marina Urquidi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).

Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1963).

Richards, I. A. So Much Nearer: Essays Toward a World English (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1968).

Roszak, Theodore. The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking (London: Paladin Books, 1986).

Schramm, Wilbur (ed.). The Process and Effects of Mass Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1955).

Schramm, Wilbur and Donald F. Roberts (eds.). The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, revised edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972).

Shannon, Claude E. ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (July, 1948): 379–423, (October, 1948): 623–656. http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/paper.html.

My claim is that communication considered from the standpoint of how it is modeled must not only reckon with Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver but regain their pioneering efforts in new ways. I want to regain two neglected features. I signal these ends by simply reversing the order in which their names commonly appear.

First, the recontextualization of Shannon and Weaver requires an investigation of the technocultural scene of information ‘handling’ embedded in their groundbreaking postwar labours; not incidentally, it was Harold D. Lasswell, whose work in the 1940s is often linked with Shannon and Weaver’s, who made a point of distinguishing between those who affect the content of messages (controllers) as opposed to those who handle without modifying (other than accidentally) such messages. Although it will not be possible to maintain such a hard and fast distinction that ignores scenes of encoding and decoding, Lasswell’s (1964: 42-3) examples of handlers include key figures such as ‘dispatchers, linemen, and messengers connected with telegraphic communication’ whose activities will prove to be important for my reading of the Shannon and Weaver essays. Telegraphy and its occupational cultures are the technosocial scenes informing the Shannon and Weaver model.

Second, I will pay special attention to Weaver’s contribution, despite a tendency to erase him altogether by means of a general scientific habit of listing the main author first and then attributing authorship only to the first name on the list (although this differs within scientific disciplines, particularly in the health field where the name of the last author is in the lead, so to speak). I begin with a displacement of hierarchy and authority. I am inclined to simply state for those who, in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, ‘know my method’, that I focus my attention on the less well-known half of thinking pairs – on Roger Caillois instead of Georges Bataille, on Félix Guattari rather than Gilles Deleuze. In the absence of my own sympathetic Watson, I will provide two detailed accounts of the effects of this reordering of names and reprioritizing of features. Weaver’s task was to communicate about the mathematical model in non-technical terms; he did this in the original writings on the model and much later in his career as a scientific proselytizer. He was assigned this later task by the president of the Rockefeller Foundation and didn’t realize, by his own admission, was he was getting into; yet, he managed to produce several versions of explanatory texts as well as theorize about popular scientific writing (Weaver, 1967). This displacement of authority allows me to circle back to an older technology, namely telegraphy, that newly figures in the regained history of the mathematical model I am offering here. This both unfixes the scholarly preoccupation with telephony under the sign of Ma Bell, and foregrounds the service environment of the telegram office that influenced the model in the first place and recurred in later reflections on it in the second place.

The Mathematical Model of Communication Revisited

The celebrated Shannon and Weaver (1964; orig. 1949) model of communication was described in two essays dating from 1948 and -49: Weaver’s ‘Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication’ and Shannon’s ‘The Mathematical Theory of Communication’. Shannon’s work was undertaken in the laboratories of Bell Telephone and was originally published in the Bell System Technical Journal. These two essays are classics of information and communication theory and, even though it is Norbert Wiener who is mentioned most often in connection with the development of statistical communication theory and cybernetics, Wiener credits Shannon with generating his own interest in the field. He can be, however, less generous and probably more accurate in noting that the engineering approach to communication based on statistical theory was an ‘idea [that] occurred at about the same time to several writers’ (Wiener, 1962:10). It is not unreasonable to think of this discovery in terms of simultaneity and complementarity.

Scholars in the area of information theory with an interest in the work of both Shannon and Weiner separate them on the basis of the two concepts that will play a large role: encoding and decoding. Robert Ash (1965: v), for instance, writes:

The Shannon formulation differs from the Wiener approach in the nature of the transmitted signal and in the type of decision made at the receiver. In the Shannon model, a randomly generated message produced by an information source is encoded, that is, each possible message that the source can produce is associated with a signal belonging to a specified set. It is the encoded message that is actually transmitted. When the output is received, a decoding operation is performed, that is, a decision is made as to the identity of the particular signal transmitted. In the Weiner model, a random signal is to be communicated directly through the channel; the encoding step is absent. The decoder in this case operates on the received signal to produce an estimate of some property of the input. In general, the basic objective is to design a decoder that makes the best estimate.

Of course, there are other significant differences and similarities (how the channel is modeled, for instance, and the scale adopted for addition and multiplication – two rather than ten – which Weiner borrowed from the Bell Labs) between the Shannon and Weiner models, but they do not concern me here. It is worth noting, however, that the production of an identity between encoded messages by decoders remains a fundamental problem in communication, no matter if we are considering signal accuracies or the asymmetry (non-identity) between meaning structures at either end of the model.

Shannon’s inclusion of an encoding step, and the need to follow-up on it but in reverse at the decoding end, reveals that the mathematical model is at the very least labour intensive. Roman Jakobson (1990: 495-96), it may be noted if only in passing, took great care in exploring the many points of contact between information and communication theory while respecting their respective autonomy. He points out, for instance, that the same issue of meaning had bedeviled communication theory and linguistics until both finally overcame their mutual tendency to exclude it and set about tackling its relation to context.

My focus is on the problems outlined in Weaver’s paper with occasional references to Shannon. The reason for this is simple. It is the commentary on general problems rather than the mathematical expression of the model itself that provides the backdrop against which subsequent deployments of it in a variety of cultural domains may be best appreciated. Weaver approaches communication in a most general way in terms of a broad statement about minds affecting other minds by means of various technical procedures. For Weaver, communication poses problems at three levels: technical, concerning the accuracy of transmitting a finite set of symbols conceived as an engineering problem (accuracy); semantic, a concern with the precise conveyance of meaning, posing the problem of identity between intended and received meaning (philosophical problem); and effectiveness, i.e. does the received meaning have the desired effect on the decoder, influencing his or her conduct (again, another philosophical issue, but one obviously not far from marketing)? It is to the first level that Weaver directs his attention.

At the level of technical communication, the two-terminal model presents an information source from which issues a message to a transmitter that sends a signal through a channel subject to a certain amount of noise. The signal is received by a receiver, which delivers the message to its final destination. Ultimately, my interest will fall on the receiver’s decoding practices rather than the transmitters encoding of a signal into a message. Weaver’s model presents both problems because it doubles the efforts of communication at both terminals of the model. The information source, to begin with, involves the selection of a message out of a set of possible messages (the message may consist of words, pictures, music, etc). The transmitter changes or translates the message into a signal; the signal is sent through a communication channel from the transmitter to the receiver. On the encoding side, messages are selected, translated, and then transmitted. The process is threefold. The media referent for the model is telegraphy, involving the selection of a message consisting of written words and its translation into a series of dots, dashes and spaces. The receiver on the decoding side must share this code and functions, as Weaver (1964: 7) puts it, as an ‘inverse transmitter’. Sometimes, noise gets into the transmission. It is unwanted and distorting, adding or subtracting from the signal, thereby creating uncertainty about the message. As for the message itself, the transmitter encodes it from an information source. Despite the technical nature of the representation, the interpersonal drama of the situation is fairly obvious: a message is delivered to an operator who then translates it into a shared technical code; the alphabet translated in Morse telegraphy consists of dots and dashes used in mechanical transmission, but what comes through at the other end, either recorded on paper or heard by the operator, needs to be converted, written out in longhand and delivered – sometimes by messenger boys to the homes or offices of off-site recipients. The prose style was known as telegraphese, a terse, clipped English for the most part written in longhand, but pared down to its essentials. This is a subcode within the encoding operation that Weaver neglects to mention, upon which may be grafted other subcodes (ciphers and private codes) and other decodable features of the communication.

The other two levels raise semantic issues and call for the invention, in Weaver’s (1964: 26) estimation, of a semantic receiver that is interposed between the engineering receiver (changing signals back into messages) and the destination. There is implicit in this communication a chain of command that will become clear in a moment. The addition of a second decoding has the goal of ‘match[ing] the statistical semantic characteristics of the message to the statistical semantic capabilities of the totality of receivers, or of that subset of receivers that constitute the audience one wishes to affect’ (Weaver, 1964: 26). Implied here is the need for sensitivity to small groups of receivers, but in the language of matching statistically the characteristics of messages with the capacities of audiences. The idea of the capacity is particularly rich (Weaver, 1964: 27) and relevant to the lecturer: it works on the analogy of crowding too much information over a channel since, no matter how efficient and clean the encoding, it is still possible to both overwhelm the channel and overburden the audience’s capacity to receive the message, or what remains of it. Overstimulating the audience will also produce error and confusion. Of course, this is conceived of statistically. Capacity often pertains only to the channel as a piece of technical equipment defined mathematically and not at all to a specific scene of cultural communication (lecture) or message content. As Colin Cherry develops the concept, information capacity is Shannon’s great expression of a maximum that gathers the features of time, bandwidth, and signal power, with the addition of a noise rate. I concur with Cherry (1966: 41) that ‘perhaps the most important technical development which has assisted in the birth of communication theory is that of telegraphy’, but there is more going on in this admission than technical description.

Information theoretical models of communication were little concerned with meaning and not at all with individual messages, being instead most concerned with the statistical characteristics of messages. To put it bluntly, information is not meaning: engineering triumphs over semantics. What could be said is more interesting than what is said because the analysis of informational units called bits, the selection and combination of which is subject to degrees of freedom and constraint, are described by a logarithm (x is the logarithm of y to the base m). If one begins with the base m = 2, with x the number of alternatives, this tells you the number of bits of information, y (if the base is 2 and the alternatives are 16 then there are 4 bits of information). It is not my intent to follow Weaver as he clears the ground for the statistical study of language. I will rather focus on the social scene of the communication in relation to the engineering or statistical approach to communication.

It turns out, upon close examination, that the social scene of the engineering problem of communication is stratified in various ways, the most obvious of which is by gender in a service environment. Weaver (1964: 27) writes:

An engineering communication theory is just like a very proper and discreet girl accepting your telegram. She pays no attention to the meaning, whether it be sad, or joyous, or embarrassing. But she must be prepared to deal with all that come to her desk. This idea that a communication system ought to try to deal with all possible messages, and that the intelligent way to do this is base design on the statistical character of the source, is surely not without significance for communication in general.

Shannon remarked at the outset of his paper that semantics are irrelevant to engineering. Rather, the focus is on the selection of the message from a set of possible messages. In terms of Weaver’s analogy, the telegraph girl should be discreet and have no interest in meaning, which is say, in content; her task is to translate English (or whatever language) into code and then, all things being equal, have someone like her down the line de-code the information into telegraphese. The social scene here is a service environment (the telegraph office, indelibly stamped with the Western Union name), but in the military and/or business chain of command, orders are issued by superiors and delivered for execution by employees at the telegraph desk where dispatches are relayed. Translation of the message is a gendered activity (Martin, 1991) that requires compliance, discretion and, above all else, suspension of moral interest. Yet no person has ever been completely separate from meaning, that is, a pure handler. Not even the analogical telegram girl conjured by Weaver.

If the encoder is a discreet girl, then who is the receiver? This is a question that becomes important as soon as one senses that the non-mathematical dimensions of the mathematical model have a gender and a hierarchy of power/knowledge. The receiver as the one who reconstructs backwards the messages from the signal, but the destination is the person for whom the message is intended. The receiver is not the destination. The receiver is another telegraph operator low in the hierarchy who then gives the message (via intermediaries) to ‘her’ superiors or customers. The model of communication is subject, then, to meta-modeling operations around gender and chain of command (or at least a service environment). This side of the model is stratified – or to use a less sociological term – staggered. This was already evident in early technologies like the vocoder (analysis and compression on the encoding side and resynthesis or reconstitution of speech at the decoding side) (Cherry, 1966: 45). At the heart of the engineering model is the figure of a discreet girl whose activities should pique the interest of those who would dismiss the model because it offers nothing greater than a statistical description of the transportation and transmission of messages. One of the contributions to the understanding of telegraph culture made by popular science writers (Standage, 1998) is the extent to which the profession was stratified by speed (sending and receiving messages), by urban versus rural locations (the former highly valorized, and the latter stereotyped as slow and backwards), and by gender as it was decoded flush with technology (the allegedly ’lighter’ touches of women’s fingers on the Morse keys), and within the array of informal communications among members of the telegraphic community. The emphasis is on affective textures and sociability in the telegraph operator subculture. At the same time, many accounts of telegraphy in the history of communications are bewitched by the purely technical aura of the electrical sciences, the triumph of trans-Atlantic cables, and the advent of wireless. It is now common for historians to compare and contrast telegraphy with the Internet (Winseck, 2004).

Let’s return to the technical problem of noise. What is to be done about noise in the channel? How does one combat this chance variable? The issue is formulated this way: the received signal E is a function of the transmitted signal S and the variable N, so that E = f(S,N). The Shannon and Weaver solution is to situate an auxiliary observer in the communication model. This observer-device surveys what is sent and received, noting the errors, and transmitting data about them over a correction channel so that the receiver can make the corrections. Correction is a clean-up operation, a secretarial function. Cleaning-up the message adds meaning. In between the information source and the transmitter, the original message branches off and upward toward an observation device, back to which flows the corrections concerning the received message from the receiver. From the observation device flows forward correction data past the receiver and the received message to a correcting device that sends the repaired message to its destination. This is a cumbersome solution. Even though it reduces it considerably, the additional channel required for this solution does not eliminate noise – there remains an arbitrarily small fraction of errors. Other ways of battling noise include various uses of redundancy, sending the same message many times and determining the probability of errors, understanding the redundancy at the source at the destination as well (in telegraphy, despite the clipped nature of its syntax, the redundancy of the English language remains and has to be accounted for in some manner).

We should not be surprised by the quantitative nature of the solutions attempted in the form of surveillance devices. However, I am arguing that the mathematical model of communication is far from value neutral or even, strictly speaking, a technical problem. It poses a cultural problem the demonstration of which is part of how it may be constructively regained. This project also requires further reengaging with failed representations of the Shannon and Weaver model.

Straw Model

As I have been insisting, the telegraph office is the medium to which readers of Shannon and Weaver need to turn in order to productively regain their work. Unfortunately, the era of telegrams is over with the elimination of the service by Western Union in January 2006 after 155 years in the business. The transit from telegraphy to telematics is complete. But was the situation in the late 1940s any more promising for telegraphy?

By looking at how the Shannon and Weaver model appears in work of Marshall McLuhan, singly and with his son Eric, we will find that the great thinker of media has little to observe about the message of the telegraphic medium. McLuhan’s own theory of communication was articulated against the reigning cybernetic model of the time in which the receiver was thought to merely (re)produce and ‘match’ what was encoded and sent, often having to turn to a supervisor to deliver the goods to their final destination. McLuhan did not appreciate the rationality of the linear mathematical model of communication. The distinction that was often made by McLuhan between ‘matching’ and ‘making’ marks out two apparently different conceptions of communication.

Marshall and Eric McLuhan, for instance, devoted a few pages in The Laws of Media (1988: 86ff) to a critique of the Shannon and Weaver model. They claimed the model was based on the assumption that ‘communication is a kind of literal matching rather than resonant making’. To borrow the terms used by the McLuhans, the Shannon and Weaver model is figure without ground; left hemisphere (quantity, precision) over right hemisphere (holistic, simultaneous); matching over making. The model embodies efficient causality – a force that is testable and controllable, without paying proper attention to the ‘side-effects’ of communication, which it excludes, and in so doing misses the new ground or ‘environment’ that emerges and shapes the experience of users; indeed, it transforms their worlds. For the McLuhans, communication is about making and interaction (‘participation’), about freedom from fixity and rigidity. Matching what arrives at the destination with what was formed at the source ignores participatory meaning-making.

The McLuhans consider almost any artifact to be amenable to the study of its transformative effects on users and grounds. But their construction of the receiver liberated from the ‘hardware model of information theory – transportation of data from point to point’ (McLuhan and McLuhan, 1988:111) – is in the service of a description of the sensory surround of the new electric environment of ‘tactile acoustic space’. In other words the McLuhans announced a theory of perception that took making to mean that receivers were creative artists. Theirs was a poetics of adaptation by degrees. I want to put this in somewhat negative terms. For McLuhan (1968: 124) the failure to create an anti-environment ‘leaves one in the role of automata merely’.

Throughout his career Marshall McLuhan sought refuge from fundamental socio-technological change in artistic strategies understood as coping mechanisms (artists create anti-environments, counter-situations or pen counterblasts that allow one to become aware of what is otherwise all but invisible, the environment presently structuring one’s experience). A counterblast, McLuhan explained, ‘does not attempt to erode or explode’. It calls for the creation of counter-environments ‘as a means of perceiving the dominant one [environment]’. A counter-environment doesn’t destroy, it ‘controls’ and ‘creates awareness’. McLuhan clarifies that art copes with environments by creating anti-environments. It is a question for McLuhan, it is fair to say, of the survival of certain valorized artistic practices.

How does this bear on telegraphy? My hypothesis is that the social scene of decoding at the telegraphy table, and later at the telephone switchboard, influenced the formulation of problems and solutions in the mathematical model of communication. Yet it is by regaining the gender attributed by analogy to the theory, the operations of a hidden service environment, and properties of the medium that key criticisms, dismissals, and misconstruals may be swept away. There is in the mathematical model, contra McLuhan, making at stake. Telegraphy is a gendered technology, not simply by analogy, especially after the 1870s in the United States when women broke into what was hitherto a boy culture. Prior to this time, as one of Thomas Edison’s biographers reminds us, tramp telegraphers such as the young Edison drifted from city to city in search of work and established friendships with operators down the line whose signature ‘touch’ of their keys was known to those sensitive enough to hear it (Israel, 1998: 22).

The existence of vocational knowledge is hardly news. But the issue here is that meaning was communicated between operators in addition to the content of the messages. The issue of touch signature survives today in the expressive dimensions of writing computer code. The channel itself had the capacity to turn handlers into meaning-makers by subtle encodings of an operator’s body. Of course, face-to-face socializing during down periods would often take place from table to table in a given office (before the invention of the cubicle); and, of course, socializing also took place along the wires between geographically dispersed operators. The telegraphic scenes of encoding and decoding on an individual level influences the formulation of problems and solutions around specific practices. There were basically two ways to receive a message: listening to the short intervals (dots) and long intervals (dashes) between clicks and writing out the message in long hand, or a decoding practice assisted by the registration on paper of the dots and dashes, which would then be translated and written out in longhand for the recipient. The double-scene of decoding, without or with a step of paper registration, would require the operator to translate the Morse Code and then deliver the message, the final destination being someone other than the operator (this suggests the social inequality of the position of the operator in a service economy, and Edison was fired more than a few times in the 1860s for various reasons). A certain level of secretarial proficiency is presupposed here (that is, in terms of code facility) but more important was the general knowledge that an operator could bring to fill in the inevitable gaps in the message; to this end, Edison was constantly consuming newspapers so that he could overcome the tremendous noise in the system (the down time produced by static, broken wires, obscure ‘private’ codes, and the rules telegraph operators introduced to ensure clean and efficient communication free of fraud and error). This meant Edison was a maker not a handler or mere matcher.

Yet let’s be careful here because agency has slipped from the discreet girl into the fingers of an active male receiver. Senders and receivers of both genders are active in the range of communications available to them in using the code and technology, and both are subjected to the telegraphy office’s chain of command. The channel of the telegraphy was filled with all sorts of noise such as fluctuating currents, leakages, but also content meaning provided by operators, etc. If we adopt the language of Edward Sapir (1949: 13) for a moment, it is evident that a ‘language transfer’ from speech (phonocentric ‘original language system’) like Morse code (beyond writing toward a remote region in Sapir’s estimation) entails the principle of a reverse transfer (partially or back to the origin) that holds much potential for noise. The notion of operator discretion must also be considered in its most general rather than moralistic sense because the scene of telegraphic decoding often involved discretionary interpretation even if, in the end, this simply meant informed guesswork that faithfully reproduced the original encoded message, which could be easily confirmed in the case of news stories, but not so readily in the case of proprietary business information. The issue of privacy was present though it would intensify with further revolutions in telecommunications, beginning with the telephone. Inverse transmission in the double-scene of decoding involved supplementation of the message. From the signature touch of the key to the tone of a female operator’s voice, to her familiarity with certain users/subscribers, and role in office politics, there is a remarkable play at work in the channel that relies upon relays operated by employees.

Matching cannot be simply contrasted, emptily and unproductively with making, as if the latter was annointed with activeness against an allegedly passive matching operation. Making the link between encoding and decoding and lives lived is the hallmark of cultural studies as it has rethought the model of communication and this insight can produce as informed reading of the mathematical model as well. One may only speak disparagingly about the ‘automata’ of the transportation model (poles of sender-relay-receiver) by completely eliding the constraints of the social semiotic scene of communication. The processes of subjectification that rendered young women (telegraph and then telephone operators) active (Martin, 1991: 61) nodes in the labour process also gave rise on their part to resistances and strategies of coping (personal and collective, technographic and semiotic) with discipline, standardization, exhaustion, and exploitation.

Cold Warrior

Warren Weaver was a consummate promoter of scientific institutionalization. His wartime activities concerned now-classic problems of machine translation in the service of intelligence, theory of air warfare, especially computing problems around antiaircraft and air-to-ground fire, as well as cryptography, all undertaken within his committee, the Applied Mathematics Panel, under the auspices of Dr. Vannevar Bush’s Office of Scientific Research and Development. His public labours as a popularizer of science began prior to the war in the 1930s in his capacity as an officer of the Rockefeller Foundation. He won prizes for his popular science writing from both UNESCO and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The promotion of R & D and proselytizing for science’s wartime accomplishments are intimately linked with Weaver’s name and he publicly intervened in debates around the establishment in the US in the postwar years of national funding bodies for science research when they were threatened by critics of big science.

Weaver’s humanism could be quite misleading. For instance, he described how he deployed his notion of communicative accuracy – an audience is moved in the right direction of correct understanding without being mislead when the inaccuracies of the communication do not unduly hinder this movement – as chair of a committee of geneticists on the likely genetic effects of nuclear fallout from atomic weapons testing. The split committee (between a group warning of grave risks and another of tolerable risks) was won over, difference resolved, by Weaver’s concept that put the emphasis on general agreement over specialist qualifications and public debate over what he defined as minor issues. Communication accuracy smooths dissensus by means of generalization and the diminishment of difference; it is a form of ‘quietism’ – removing debate from the public realm (Weaver, 1967: 183-4).

For all of Weaver’s sophistication in promoting the needs of science and ‘progress’, he had at his ready a, to adopt a McLuhanism, rear-view explanation. In a more popular version of his famous essay on information theory, he turned immediately to the example of telegraphy to explain the mathematical model, using as ‘content’ the sending of a birthday greeting by wire (a non-commercial usage). Circa 1952, this may have seemed strange to a telephone using public; indeed, it does not seem concerned with state of the art telecommunications and information technologies (television or early computers); nor, for that matter, was he interested in technical improvements in telegraphy (automation of transmitters, increase in wire capacity, etc.). Indeed, Weaver optimistically generalizes to telephone communication from telegraphy. More importantly, he explains key concepts like the stochastic process of likely message choice by means of Morse code design, underlining probability as opposed to predictive laws:

When the telegraphic code was first designed, why did Morse assign the simplest symbol of one dot to the letter E, and the most complex symbol of three dots, a space, and a dash, to the letter Z? For the very good statistical reason that he counted the supply of type in a printing office, and found that they had a maximum number (12,000, in fact) of examples of E and the minimum number (only 200) of Z (Weaver, 1967: 207).

Weaver has recourse to telegraphy because he wants to explain an unfamiliar thing, a mathematical theory of communication, by analogy with a familiar thing. This use of analogy was described by Max Black (1962: 231-32) in terms of how theory takes hold by analogy of something better known and established for the sake of using the resources thus acquired to advance the understanding of a relatively difficult and unknown model. This seems to be what motivated Weaver to turn to telegraphy. The intellectual respectability of extension by analogy – without metaphor there might be no algebra, quipped Black – also has drawbacks because it relies too heavily on a specific technology that ‘insulates’ the theory from criticism. It also permits, as we have seen in Weaver’s notion that the analogy of telegraphy is generalizable to telephonic communication (not to mention, television, smoke signals, drumbeats, heliograph signals, etc.), an opportunity to avoid explanation in the name of suggestion (plausibility) and deceptive smoothness (universal translatability between disparate systems as long as approximate structural similarities appear to be maintained). This overcoding operation is facilitated by familiarity and helps extend the theory’s reach through a process of naturalization of its components, reproduction of their relations, and inoculation against the introduction of new, heterogeneous elements.

The restoration of context – technology and its intersections with gender and socio-semiotic scenes of decoding – undertaken in this essay had the goal of unearthing some of the cultural content that has been hinted at but not fully excavated in communication theory by thinking culturally with Shannon and Weaver. In short, the general communication model proposed by Shannon and Weaver was most readily explicable in terms of a specific 19th century – a Victorian, if you like – technology. Weaver asked, then, readers to look backwards in order to grasp it.

I regain from Shannon and Weaver contexts both socio-semiotic and technological that transcend the model’s status as a mandatory stopover’ and ‘founding reference’, as Armand and Michèle Mattelart (1992: 44) put it, for all socio-culturally minded readers in communication studies. It is this status itself that has proved problematic because it has resulted in a certain kind of inability to tarry befalling enthusiasts and critics alike; an impatience that is evident in the abundant summaries of the model’s key components, as they were graphically represented, available in literature that demonstrates the widespread desire to show the model’s limitations (a linear model adequate for only communication engineers; Mattelart, 1992: 68). My strategy is not to uncritically revalorize the mathematical theory and to point backwards the circular and feedback models that came in its wake. Likewise, I do not want to deny the negative influence of the mathematical model’s legacy of presenting communication as one-directional, based on shaky behaviourist postulates (stimulus-response), and a ‘totally inadequate grid to apply to the human communicational situation’, as Anthony Wilden (1980: 96) stated definitively. Despite this, however, the features of a specific human communicational situation can be not inadequately applied to such a grid in a socio-semiotic decoding of the mathematical model.

In the end, it is simply that this model must be forced to reveal its meta-modelings in the context of its ideological underpinnings, socio-technical entanglements, and discursive strategies, exposing the extent to which ‘mathematics’ is suspended in complex non-mathematical interchanges the critical apprehension of which permits a reordering in which Weaver comes before Shannon.

Author’s Biography

Gary Genosko is Canada Research Chair in Technoculture at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Canada. His recent work has focused on the intersections of administrative technology, race, and alcohol in historical context. He is currently working on ‘Phreaking the Maple Leaf’ – Canadian hackers, phreakers, and anti-surveillance cyborgs.

References

Ash, Robert, Information Theory (New York: Interscience Publishers, 1965).

Black, Max, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1962).

Cherry, Colin, On Human Communication (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1966).

Israel, Paul, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998).

Jakobson, Roman, ‘Linguistics and Communication Theory’, in On Language, eds. L. Waugh and M. Monville-Burston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990).

Lasswell, Harold, D, ‘The Structure and Function of Communication in Society’, in The Communication of Ideas, ed. L. Bryson (New York: Cooper Square, 1964).

Martin, Michèle, Hello Central? Gender, Technology and Culture in the Formation of the Telephone System (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1991).

Mattelart, Armand and Michèle, Rethinking Media Theory, trans. A.A. Cohen and M. Urquidi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).

McLuhan, Marshall, ‘Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment’, in Innovation: Essays on Art and Ideas, ed. B. Bergonzi (London: Macmillan,1968).

McLuhan, Marshall and McLuhan, Eric, Laws of Media (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).

Sapir, Edward, ‘Language’, in Selected Writings of E. Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality, ed. D.G. Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949).

Shannon, Claude E. and Weaver, Warren, The Mathematical Model of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964).

Standage, Tom, The Victorian Internet (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998).

Weaver, Warren, Selected Papers (New York: Basic, 1967).

Wilden, Anthony, System and Structure: Essays on Communication and Exchange (London: Tavistock, 1980).

Winseck, D., ‘Telegraphs, Online Content Services and the Early History of “Electronic Publishing”’, in Communication History in Canada, ed. D. Robinson (New York: Oxford UP, 2004).

SuperModels

What does physical eroticism signify if not violation of the very being of its practitioners? …The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives. (George Bataille, 2001: 17)

To become a supermodel is a dream of many young girls, longing for their own bodies to exemplify the image of desire and eroticism. Young women’s bodies provide a framework for the fashionable or, in other words, for the endlessly restless style of contemporary longing. In wanting to be, say, another Elle MacPherson or Christy Turlington, they long for the awkward unfoldings of early womanhood to blossom into the very shapes and forms that collective desires inhabit, or flow through. As they feel the stirrings of their own desire intensify, they want to feel the flow of collective desire turn back to pass through them, setting up one endless vibration of desirability in which their individual being becomes collectively powered by erotic circuitry. In a manner that is ultimately a complex dynamic of power or force relations, the supermodel stands as a vibratory nodule of desire.

Models, in general, exemplify or portray properties that are not actually present, whether this is because they don’t exist (yet), are too complex to exist simply (never being available to comprehension in its entirety) or are by nature ungraspable (virtual). Supermodels tune in to the ungraspable through their very (desirable) flesh.

In early 2005, a couple of recent architectural graduates ran a design studio called ‘superModel’ in the landscape architecture program at RMIT University. The studio focussed its design investigations around the production of performative physical models as well as digital ones, picking up on a tide of interest in work that architect Lars Spuybroek had been referring to as ‘analogue computation’. The studio investigated performative modelling techniques that were able to ‘compute’ a set of circumstances in a manner more complex than could be done otherwise. Discursively, this move was a recognition of the way that computers have helped us to understand material properties and forces in computational terms, at the same time as it acknowledged the limitations of the digitally described event by shifting computation outside the computer. By the end of semester, a sea of strange objects had been produced, each a testament to an investigation of dynamic material relations.

These particular tutors were also among the more sophisticated of a new wave of digital-savvy graduates emerging from RMIT’s architecture program. This studio was run hot off the pressing formation of their now well-published practice, kokkugia. These days, they are Australian exports, practicing, teaching and doing postgraduate research at prestigious institutions in New York and London. It’s a path not unlike that of an Australian supermodel, such as Elle.[1] If young girls actively style their bodies to resonate with the shape of desire, young architects can shape their (desirable) models as similar receptacles with which to grasp the ungraspable – or unspeakably desirable aesthetic conditions such as the pursuit of style. Within architectural discourse, strange as it may seem, style is still a dirty word. It has a reputation for superficiality and anti-intellectual imitation; somewhat like the judgements often passed on models of the nubile-body variety. But this judgement, as I hope to have argued by the end of this paper, simply reflects its own superficiality, being more a product of a long history of denial and shame than of a lack of actual depth in the judged subject.

Architecture’s Modelling Dynamic

… he suggested that the dynamic had served each of us well. Something in the way he said this gave me the feeling that the dynamic was moving on, perhaps down the block, where it would serve some other confused family. And we would be left dynamic-less, four people alone with all the wrong feelings for one another. (July, 2007: 189)

Like all families, the culture of architecture is held together by a more-or-less unspeakable dynamic that serves to both cultivate the status quo and maintain the confusions necessary to sustain it. However, this always skirts a fragile surface because the discipline also exhibits compulsively persistent attempts to transform itself. As such, the struggle (and the excitement) lies in testing the limits without allowing the status quo to completely fall apart.

One episode of this ongoing drama can be read through an obsession with diagrams in architectural discourse in late 1990s. The diagram enjoyed a brief but intense period of attention in which it became not just a tool with which to investigate or generate, but a tool that was in itself being re-investigated and regenerated. In general, a common tendency in this reappraisal of the role and nature of diagrams was an implicit desire to render them more pliant, responsive and performative. This wave of diagramming seems to have recently reappeared in the fleshier guise of a reconsideration of models.

In architecture, the term ‘model’ is most commonly used to refer to a three dimensional representation of an intended building, usually in the form of a physical maquette or miniature version of a building and, increasingly, three dimensional constructions using digital media. But the model is also an overall diagram: a system of relations mapped out through all the various kinds of representational artefacts produced during the activity of designing (physical maquettes, drawings and diagrams on paper or in software, etc). In other words, models describe or exemplify assemblages of relations, or systems. Models are never just modelling something, they are also things in themselves and, as such, are always a complex tangle of the general and the particular. In large part, the recent reconsideration of models involves a recalibration of this complex tangle.

The making of models has a special interest for architecture because modelling is at the core of what architects do. The discipline is always caught in an intermediary condition: architects don’t actually make buildings (builders do that), they make models of potential buildings. While this makes architectural discourse particularly adept at modelling imagined futures, it also becomes especially fragile and sensitive to shifts in the status and nature of models and modelling. Architectural practice is so deeply imbricated within the life of models, that to question them is to question architectural identity. This issue has a long and dramatic history, episodically played out through the propensity of architectural discourse to appropriate epistemological models from other disciplines as a way of reorienting and reinvigorating its internal logics. Architecture loves testing out novel moves as it models new clothes acquired from epistemological boutiques.

Unsurprisingly, the areas of architectural discourse most closely related to the field of new media studies have been most actively rethinking and reworking the nature of modelling and diagramming over the last decade.[2] Here we find modelling emphasised over ‘models’ per se, where the modelled thing is meaningful in terms of the process through which it emerged and/or the processes of interaction for which it is designed.

The superModel studio is one example of this recent interest in the (re)making of models. Increasingly, models are made to explore relations in generating dynamic systems rather than to represent something. In other words, what the models describe or exemplify are the dynamics of differential relations, commonly employed to generate flexible, complex systems arising through a simple, internal, material/relational logic. This is very present at RMIT in studios and seminars run by a range of academic staff, such as Tim Schork and Paul Nicholas (mesne), Craig Douglas and Rosalea Monacella, Jerome Frumar and Tom Kovac, Leanne Zilka and myself. Notably, the activity of model making has been the subject of an ARC project, Homer Faber; Modelling Ideas, by Mark Burry, Peter Downton, Andrea Mina and Michael Ostwald.

The Pandora’s Box of Emergence

For some sectors of this network of practitioners, the term ‘emergence’ has served as an important model of and for the design process exploration involving the making of these performative models. More or less explicit claims to an affinity with emergence can be found in practices such as kokkugia along with, amongst others, mesne, biothing, Matsys, Aranda/Lasch, MOS and most clearly by name, The Emergence and Design Group (a subset of the practice network, Ocean North).

Emergence is a model of design or creative process that I would argue has been implicit to the investigations that thread back to Greg Lynn’s seminal experiments in the ‘folding’ 90’s and, indeed, to historical precursors such as Archigram and Cedric Price’s Fun Palace. As a model of design process, emergence casts the designer out of the role of a controller – or centralised commander – and into a more participatory, guiding role. It involves a mode of composition or creative practice that amplifies and highlights the act of entering into dynamic relation, negotiation and interaction.

Elsewhere, via a discussion of biothing, I have argued that we are witnessing the development of a new compositional paradigm (Ednie-Brown, 2006). What’s ‘new’, however, is primarily a foregrounding of largely unspoken, implicit operations that more-or-less quietly massage all acts of creative composition. In what amounts to the surfacing of a secret history, there has been a fair amount of squirming and blushing as Pandora cleaves open her box, although the awkwardness gets mostly smoothed over by the buzz of swarming novelty.

The most stunningly noticeable tendency of the field is the proliferation of charismatic (‘hot’), aesthetically sophisticated (‘cool’) formal objects that are largely abstractly sculptural in the sense that they don’t have any function outside of aesthetics. If the priority is process, then why does it appear so formalist? These architectural emergentists, such as The Emergence and Design Group, have tended to emphasize mathematics and computational scripting techniques and (Darwinian) evolutionary processes. Aesthetics are downplayed in the rhetoric, and troublingly aesthetic questions – such as how to select one form out of the many generated through these techniques – remain awkwardly unanswered.[3] Questions of aesthetics – seen to be embarrassingly ‘fluffy’ – are kept locked away in the closet (or herded back into their box).

Michael Hensel, a director of Ocean North and co-author of multiple publications on the topic of emergence and design, made a surprising move during his recent keynote address to the AASA architecture conference at UTS in Sydney (September 2007). Referring back to a paper by Adrian Lahoud earlier that day, which had examined the critical difference between weak and strong emergence, Hensel seemed happy to throw the relationship between his work and emergence into doubt. This was perhaps meant lightly, as a throw-away aside. But the throw-away infiltrated his presentation which, after so much emphasis upon it in the past, now avoided the topic of emergence, emphasising instead environmental issues (or sustainability) as the primary goal of his exploratory endeavours. The shift of emphasis was quite marked, but the work itself had not changed.

Does this indicate simply a change of garment, as the architectural designer parades their model-bodies? Or is it just that every time Pandora squeezes open her juicy box, it is slammed shut too quickly – closing the lid before Hope can escape?

A less jumpy, more formally ‘tasteful’ lid was slapped over the opening by a very recent edition of Architectural Design, Elegance (2007), guest edited by Ali Rahim and Hina Jamelle. This edition gives emergence, as a model of design process, a stylistic or tasteful goal: that of elegant composure, which ‘has the ability to push forward the discourse of contemporary architecture by accepting that complex architectural compositions require an accompanying visual aesthetic as sophisticated as the current techniques used to generate form.’ (Rahim and Jamelle, 2007: 6) Techniques modeled around the notion of emergence can now target the production of ‘elegant sensations’, which ‘have particular formal characteristics, such as presence, formal balance, refinement of features and surface, and restrained opulence.’ (Rahim and Jamelle, 2007: 9)

Interestingly, several of the essays in the edition suggest elegance involves the concealment of process. In ways that I am about to address, emergence was a little too troubled, messy and risky. Situating emergence in the service of elegance is an elegant move in itself, only involving a change of three letters. As I will discuss towards the end of this paper, it is a clever response to the worrying, nagging questions prodding at the overt aesthetic prowess of this field of work. It satisfies the problem of how to answer these sticky questions of aesthetic composition, while keeping any embarrassing details stylishly covered over. But, as something is gained, something else is put at risk.

Troubled waters

Joseph Earley claims that ‘the word “emergence” was first used in English during the sixteenth century — as a fancy and learned way to refer to the process of coming up out of the sea.’ (Earley, 2002)[4] This remains an amusingly apt kernel for the subsequent development of the term, which refers to a model of the complex operations of the world. Referred to as ‘a ubiquitous feature of the world around us,’ (Holland, 1998: 2) emergence becomes the name for a contemporary understanding of the laws of nature.

As a discursive construct it seeks to explain, often through mathematical frameworks, the way that complex, global forms of organization come into being through simple, local behaviours and rules, in the absence of any apparent, centralized or dominant control mechanism. A very powerfully significant feature of emergence is that it is no less applicable to economic systems, games and urban planning than it is to living and natural systems. Since its first appearance in the english language, emergence has snowballed into layers of white noise and froth, artfully sweeping together culture and nature.

From its earliest philosophical conjectures, the issue of emergence has been tied up with the battles between theories of evolution and creationism; the world as machine and the existence of God. It is a construct that seeks to explain how novelty arises, whether it be new species of life, innovative theories or technical objects. As such, emergence intrinsically concerns processuality and how things are created or generated and has significant relevance to problems of creative process.

In other words, emergence is an issue of composition: the process and outcome of combining things to form a whole. As soon as that connection is made, the notion of composition as a formal arrangement of parts is given a processual or performative spin, because emergence models processes of interaction or the dynamics of unfolding relations.

For the sciences, there is a palpable anxiety concerning the fact that emergence refers to something that can’t be fully explained. There is no scientific definition of emergence. However, there are well-understood descriptions. Steven Johnson’s popular book, Emergence, first published in 2001, summarises emergence as the movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication. One of the more cited publications on the subject, Emergence. From Chaos to Order (1998), is by John Holland, a professor of psychology, electrical engineering and computer science who is promoted as ‘the father of genetic algorithms’.[5] Here he similarly describes the hallmark of emergence as ‘much coming from little.’ (231) But these are provisional descriptions strapped around an elusive problem and as Holland admits: ‘It is unlikely that a topic as complicated as emergence will submit weakly to a concise definition, and I have no such definition to offer.’ (3) At the end of his book, he outlines a series of obstacles standing in the way of a better understanding of emergence. But before he launches into this list he writes:

There is one larger issue, however, that I will avoid. It may be that the parts of the universe that we can understand in a scientific sense – the parts of the universe that we describe via laws (axioms, equations) – constitute a small fragment of the whole. If that is so, then there may be aspects of emergence that we cannot understand scientifically. (231)

How might these scientifically unattainable aspects be understood? Aesthetically?

Emergence may befuddle the reductive tools and conventions of science, but emergent phenomena are nevertheless deeply familiar to us all. Some of the more aesthetically oriented examples of character, atmosphere and style are also deeply familiar qualitative ‘things’; textures or consistencies that we know even though we are not sure how we know them.

Contemporary accounts of emergence do not tend to discuss these kinds of phenomena, concentrating more on organizational complexes which clearly arise through operational systems (such as behaviour in economic markets, games, cellular automata) and/or those apparently independent of human perception (weather, ant colonies, crops and nature in general).

As remarked upon earlier, architecture has largely followed suit (or lab coat, perhaps). This attention to techniques and technologies over the aesthetic properties or implications of the work is almost certainly not the case in terms of what goes on when a designer designs, but it is the case when they come to discuss what they produced. This lack of acknowledgement is symptomatic of a broader problem in the arts and humanities related to the supremacy of scientific frameworks. For some time, architecture has spoken in scientifically oriented terms while operating through highly, but unarticulated, aesthetic means. It is a somewhat dysfunctional, complex discursive dynamic.

Emergence as a Model of Creative Process

In one poignant section of Holland’s Emergence, he moves into the realms of aesthetics in addressing the question of the nature of emergent phenomena. After devoting the majority of the book to an intricate exploration of constrained generating procedures, or the micro-laws of specific processes of emergence, he turns to address their connection to the macro level, or to the emergent phenomena themselves: ‘Whether it is Conway’s automaton or some real world process, we do not expect the emergent phenomena we observe to have simple descriptions in terms of the underlying laws. Indeed, in both cases, we search avidly for simplifying macrolaws.’ (189)

Holland insists that a deeper understanding of emergence requires that we better understand, or model, the macrolaws of emergent phenomena. He writes that as we move between levels, there is an axiomatic shift: the scope and nature of the laws of the system changes. There is shift in order. A move ‘down’ to the micro-level involves a burrowing into the details, wherein we loose sight of the global qualities of the macro-level. On the other hand, a moving out to survey the big picture means that the details can no longer be seen. This shift in law and order, inasmuch as it describes a leaping between scientific reductionism and aesthetic wholes, can also be likened to movements of attention involved in stepping back from a drawing to appreciate the overall composition and then shifting back in, to working up close on the more local behaviours within the pen work techniques. Or, in a more contemporary framework, the shift between fiddling with code and considering the forms that code generates. Refining our understanding of how these levels work together entails a kind of attention that deepens the creative process. Or, perhaps more precisely, it offers (at least) two different kinds of depth, adding dimensions to the field of attention. For Holland, the (creative) process of invention or innovation offers clues regarding what we might need to look out for.

Emergence comes in different strengths or intensities, sometimes classified as nominal, weak and strong. (Bedau, 2002) One example of strong or ontological emergence is the coming-into-being of innovation. An innovation may emerge, but we can’t track the steps back to generalize that process in order to control the production of more innovation, at will. The process is not reproducible – evidenced in the struggles to generate successful institutes and research centres whose mandate is: innovate. Innovations do not simply rise (magically) out of the sea, they fold back to recalibrate the waters, altering the conditions from which it arose, This has been referred to as the ‘vicious circle’ of ‘downward causation.’ (Bedau, 2002) ‘Ultimately,’ Holland writes, ‘to understand emergence, we must understand the process that engenders these inventions,’ (202) suggesting that true innovation involves a leap that remains mysterious only because we lack a well-defined model of the creative process.

The ‘creative process’ is not the same thing as the mechanical laws that internally define a system displaying emergent outcomes. It is also not the same as the conventions through which scientific research displays its processes of enquiry, which Holland characterizes as ‘careful, step-by-step reasoning, each step following directly and closely from the previous step.’ (204-5) The problem with this neat and tidy form of explanatory, logically reasoned display, he writes, is that ‘this widely accepted scientific standard has given rise to a view, held by some scholars and scientists, that this step-by-step, almost mechanical procedure is the way that science is actually constructed. It is a view that marginalizes imagination and creation. But few scientists, if any, actually carry out their research in this fashion.’ (205)

Innovation in the sciences occur, Holland argues, via quite a different process: one of a transversal mapping of relations from one model into another new model. As an example he refers to James Clerk Maxwell’s use of a mechanism-oriented fluid mechanical model to arrive at his equations for electromagnetic fields. Maxwell writes about holding onto a ‘clear physical conception’, borrowed from one area of physical science, in developing a new conception of another. Holland discusses this as a metaphoric conjunction where a source model is used to develop a target model, via the link of metaphor.

But this transversal movement of a pattern from one site to another does not happen without involving the affects of a submerged, embedded background of disciplinary knowledge and assumptions, accumulated as ‘a complicated aura of technique, interpretation, and consequences, much of it unwritten.’ (206) Both source and target come to the party of metaphoric conjunction with their auratic accumulations unfolding a ‘recombination of these auras, enlarging the perceptions associated with both the target and the source.’ (207-8) The result: something new. While the new thing is, most explicitly, the ‘target’, the source is also renewed. In other words, the newness is all encompassing: what emerges is an all-over, over-all shift in the nature of the world.

Holland goes on to suggest that an as-yet-unformulated carrier model of creative process would pertain to the conjunction of poetry and physics. ‘In a sense,’ he writes, ‘the poetic framework is too loose whereas the scientific framework is too tight.’ (219) The loose and the tight need to join forces, combining their ‘auras’ in a mutually transformative conjunction. The important implication here is that the invention of a model of creative process would involve a mutually affecting conjunction of science and aesthetics.

This is implicitly embedded in the way that emergence alerts us to the relation between different modes of knowing the same thing, generally understood in terms of the difference between laws of the micro and the macro. This can be generalised into two divergent and competing epistemologies, roughly sketched here out as science and aesthetics. As different modes of attention, scientific reduction is oriented toward discrete micro-relations and aesthetics toward the macro-configurations. In the inventive, creative process – as in strong emergence – both modes or levels are involved in change, affecting one another in a co-determining manner.

At first sight the creative leap arising from metaphoric conjunctions between models might seem more like a macro-macro pattern match, rather than the leap between the micro and the macro that tends to describe emergence, placing it in an ambiguous relation to the usual description. But the conjunction between patterns or models involves both micro and macro levels. In fact, it involves a breakdown of the two-tiered model into a far more spatially folded one, where an intensive order arises through the intimate meeting of disparate micro-organisations, such that together, they transform or leap into a change of overall state. It’s what we might call the emergence of a new style. As Sandford Kwinter eloquently put it : ‘each innovation is the product of single and novel way of being in the world, an invention that then re-disposes the world according to entirely new rhythmic values.’ (Kwinter, 2000: 35)

The emergence of new models of creative or design process, as developments upon, and of, the model of emergence, would not simply lie in scientific forms of attention becoming more attuned to aesthetics, but also in aesthetic forms of attention becoming more attuned to the abstract, micro-relational scales of events that science excels at. For aesthetics, the micro-relational dwells in the textures of affect.

Situated Composure – the ethics and art of emergence

To tend the stretch of expression, to foster and inflect it rather than trying to own it, is to enter the stream, contributing to its probings: this is co-creative, an aesthetic endeavour. It is also an ethical endeavour, since it is to ally oneself with change: for an ethics of emergence. (Massumi, 2002: xxii)

In a paper titled ‘The Challenge of Complexity: Unfolding the Ethics of Science,’ Isabelle Stengers warns against complusive reductionism and calls for scientists to take a more generative, risky, uncertain stance. This, she suggests, is an ethics that unfolds from complexity science itself:

Complexity, as it started with the discovery and study of surprising properties, usually related to the irreducible importance of nonlinear relations … would produce the opportunity to entertain a different relation with the past, emphasising openness, surprise, the demand of relevance, the creative aspect of the scientific adventure, and not reduction to simplicity. True scientific simplicity is never reductive; it is always a relevant simplicity that is a creative achievement. (Stengers, 2004: 96)

Related issues are explored through a remarkable little book called Ethical Know-How. Action, Wisdom and Cognition by Francisco Varela (1999). Varela distinguishes between ethical expertise and ethical deliberation. Most western writers on ethics, he claims, tend to focus on reasoning as the central issue wherein ethics becomes an issue of deliberation. (23) Ethical expertise does not centre itself on rational judgements of reasoning or on how this may be applied as ethically instrumental. Rather, it is based on the inextricability of the specific tissue of circumstances or situatedness. With some affinity with Foucauldian and Spinozist approaches to ethics, as well as Felix Guattari’s notion of the ethico-aesthetic, his notion of ethical know-how dwells in a ‘skillful approach to living … based on a pragmatics of transformation that demands nothing less than a moment to moment awareness of the virtual nature of our selves.’ (75) To act ethically, one must be acting with sensitivity to the particularities of the situation where there is not a reliance on a set of rules:

To gather a situation under a rule a person must describe the situation in terms of categories we may call cognitive. Instead, if we try and see correspondences and affinities, the situation at hand becomes much more textured. All relevant aspects are included, not just those which fit the reduction of a categorical analysis. (28)

Action becomes infused with flickers of relevance, becoming situated in a field of potential such that the creative and transformative possibilities are multiplied and amplified. To put in terms used by Paulo Virno (2004), ethics is no longer about the virtuous, but about the virtuoso: the skilled performer. As the architectural emergentists have demanded more dynamically performative properties of their models, they have also demanded more of their own performative capacity.

The kind of virtuosic know-how being discussed here does not exclude forms of knowing that ‘fit the reduction of a categorical analysis’, clearly inscribed in the demands on these architects to manipulate digital code, as well as draw and render form. ‘Knowledge of’ and ‘know-how’ are not set up in opposition; know-how incorporates both rational forms of categorical analysis and the situated forms of aesthetically inclined knowing.

Theorist Mark Taylor, in summarising ‘the moment of complexity’, writes that ‘according to complexity theorists, all significant change takes place between too much and too little order,’ (Taylor, 2001: 14) resonating with Holland’s suggestion that innovation requires finding an artful middle ground between the looseness of poetry and the tightness of science. Along similar lines, Varela suggests that:

… intelligence should guide our actions, but in harmony with the texture of the situation at hand…truly ethical behaviour takes the middle way between spontaneity and rational calculation. (31-32)

This property of ethical expertise might also be called ‘the art of emergence’. Steven Johnson writes that:

We are only just now developing such a language to describe the art of emergence. But here’s a start: great designers … have a feel for the middle ground between free will and the nursing home, for the thin line between too much order and too little. They have a feel for the edges. (Johnson, 2004:189)

Stenger’s assertion that an ethics that unfolds from complexity science calls for a more uncertain stance, can also be seen as a call for scientists to embrace the art of emergence wherein, perhaps, lies the missing model of creative process. It would seem that the ‘art of emergence’ involves what Varela calls ‘ethical know-how’.

I should emphasise here that ethics is not about the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, redemption or claims for redemptive powers. It’s about a ‘measured’ practice of engaging with the world, of how we behave, of what we acknowledge is at stake. Ethico-aesthetic know-how is about the amplification of potential – which doesn’t necessarily lead to the ‘good’ because it magnifies risk. Even if there are no easy rules or moral guidelines here, there is an important principle or navigational directive. That is: that the performance of any act strives for a balance between affecting and being affected, between active reflection and the immediacy of embodied response, between sensitive responsiveness and determined agency. This is a politics of action that neither caves in passively to collective desires or beliefs nor holds to individualism, authorship or dictatorship as the power of truth. It’s both determined and respectful, pushy and playful.

Barbarella and the threat of Plastic Models

These pushy and playful politics resonate with the modelling activity of the new architectural emergentists. As I have discussed in some detail elsewhere (Ednie-Brown, 2006 & 2007), the performance of the designer is met with dynamic, life-like diagrams that are themselves configured in terms of behaviours and performance. The strength of the life-like nature of these diagrams (or abstractly experienced objects) means that they become like puppets that the designer guides, but with enough in-built character to take a part in leading or guiding the way. In other words, the design material is not passive but pushy, involving a dynamic between designer and the designed wherein each both affect and are affected by one another.

However, it would seem that the ‘art of emergence’, in terms of what is verbally articulated, is precisely that which is denied in favour of an appeal to scientifically and mathematically rigorous method. A scan over an impressive collection of relevant work in a recent exhibition, Scripted by Purpose, devoted to modelling via digital code, quickly demonstrates the irony of this situation. What we find is a proliferation of a particular formal language in what amounts to largely ornamental objects, generally of some beauty, or at least, a compelling charisma. Are we back in the land of Elle + Christina (styled and dressed by predominantly male designers)?

Perhaps. But as suggested at the beginning, it would be remiss to dismiss them as superficial. In considering the value of these architectural supermodels, we will turn back in time to the late sixties and the film Barbarella, which, according to architectural theorist, Reyner Banham, was an architectural supermodel of its time.

In a short essay ‘The Triumph of Software,’ published in New Society in 1968, Banham chews over a growing sensibility related to software and responsive environments. He offers a laudatory review of the film Barbarella, which had been released that year, using it to exemplify this sensibility. He holds this in contrast to a hardware related sensibility, exemplified by Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001, also released in 1968. He writes of Barbarella’s ‘ambience of curved, pliable, continuous, breathing, adaptable surfaces’ and juxtaposes it with ‘all that grey plastic and crackle-finish metal, and knobs and switches, all that … yech … hardware!’ in 2001. Banham’s essay was printed with an image from 2001 of a semi-naked male lying somewhat impassively relaxed in a hard surfaced, hard edged environment juxtaposed with an image of Barbarella in tight, sheer garments and on all fours in her fur-lined space-ship, looking a little startled.

Banham paints a picture of a battle between the behind-the-times hardies and the finger-on-the-pulse softies. Banham, being a softie, celebrates that which he sees as the “whole vision” of the film as ‘one in which hardware is fallible, and software (animate or otherwise) usually wins.’ (630) Banham hails Barbarella as a cult movie whose responsive environments will ‘become what the film is remembered to have been about.’ (629) It is a ‘splendid coincidence’, he writes, that a company called ‘Responsive Environments Corporation’ went public on the New York stock exchange in the same week that the film premiered: ‘Whatever the company is about, Barbarella is about responsive environments, of one sort of another, and so has been the architectural underground for the last three years or so.’ (629) Banham exposes his admiration for fur as a superior and super-friendly material, linking its enigmatic nature to the inflatable, and thereby to Archigram’s inflatable prototype personal environment. He makes a connection, in other words between ‘natural’ materials such as fur, and the ‘artificiality’ of plastic membranes.

Interestingly enough, ‘The Triumph of Software’ has been re-addressed by theorist Sylvia Lavin, who is also Greg Lynn’s partner. In an essay titled ‘Plasticity at Work,’ Lavin briefly critiques Banham’s review of Barbarella in order to position the role of plasticity in relation to modernism. Lavin claims that Banham is ‘more-or-less the only architectural critic to say anything interesting about plastic,’ (2002: 75) but she critiques the opposition he sets up between hardware and software, suggesting that the plasticity of software rather bought something repressed within hardware to the surface. She tracks the role of plasticity in architectural discourse back to its earliest days, with Vitruvius’s Ten Books, where he codified the ‘plastic arts’ as derived from the Greek term plassien, or to mould. (76) The plastic arts were rooted in the material and manual labour of ceramics, stucco, plaster and sculpture and distinguished from the ‘higher’, liberal arts which pertained to abstract rather than material properties.

Lavin notes that in modernism the use of the term ‘plastic’ seems to attain a higher status, where she claims that almost every major modern architect was interested in the kind of plasticity discussed by le Corbusier as a pure creation of the mind. Architecture was now both of a ‘higher’, abstract order and a plastic thing: ‘Plastic…is modernity itself for Wright and Le Corbusier in the form of plasticity.’ (76) The growth of plastic production and application in the 1960’s becomes a very material analogue of the pure but plastic, conceptual mind. A tension arises here between mind and matter. This gave rise to a sensibility in which, as Lavin puts it, modernity itself ‘is disfigured by a plastic already embedded in modernity’s ideology.’ (75)

As Lavin’s argument suggests, through this shift in the connotations of the term ‘plastic’, one can see less of an opposition between the hard and the soft (or the rigid and the responsive) than a transformational surfacing of a plastic materiality, implicitly embedded in the conceptual plasticity of modernism. This background materiality, I would argue, can be seen as the plasticity of affect, which highlights the sensual aspects of thinking and the bodily reality of the mind.

The main point of Lavin’s essay seems deeply related to her later published book on the architect Richard Neutra, Form Follows Libido, where she writes that her ‘study seeks to explore the zones of affective intensity that came to infiltrate the cool and neutral spaces of modernism.’ (2004:9) That which infiltrated and disfigured modernism was ‘affective intensity’– the force of relations at the fold of mind and matter. If this sensibility – this sensitivity to affective intensity – was emerging in the 60’s, it re-emerged in a different form in the 1990’s, when ‘folding’ explicitly took centre stage through Greg Lynn.

Lavin gave birth to her and Lynn’s first child while finishing the fourth chapter of Form Follows Libido, which was titled ‘Birth Trauma.’ This was in the late 90’s, around the time that Lynn’s Embryological Houses were being widely published. If something was conceived around that time, it was perhaps lodged in Lavin’s introductory question regarding why Neutra’s work is still considered to be contemporary. This eventually leads to her final remarks that ‘today’s interest in Neutra, the moodiest of architects, reveals that architecture… [is] again able to generate new affective environments. That’s why these houses by Neutra are not merely modern but rather contemporary.’ (144) If Neutra’s affective sensibilities are poignantly contemporary, then Lavin must have had some particular contemporary architecture in mind. In drawing attention to Neutra’s part in a history of relationships between architecture and psychoanalysis (or the analysis of affects) she associates his work with both Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry. But in her relationship with Lynn, there is perhaps an even more poignant association.

In her book, Lavin reveals numerous amusing and rather intimate details about Neutra that architectural discourse (in maintaining a proper poise for this modernist exemplar) has chosen to ignore. One of these details pertains to how Richard Neutra’s wife, Dione, would often play the cello in the background while he delivered his lectures. The air would be filled, explicitly, with a constructed background tone. Her cello playing was, in a sense, part of his architectural atmospherics; the air filled with a musically composed affective texture. Like Dione’s cello music swirling around and through Richard’s lectures, Greg’s plastic diagrams and environments could be considered as the architectural atmospheres in which Sylvia speaks of a contemporary, affective sensibility.

This swirling, or swarming affectivity is precisely that which is unleashed from the Pandora’s box of emergence and the architectural supermodels. The performative model amplifies qualitative, plastic properties, infiltrating the intimate interactions between designer and the design process and, often, between the (interactive) forms and those people or forces who encounter it. Highly composed expressive forms usher affect into the scene with greater ornamental flurry than has been tolerated for some time. But affect, which hovers around ‘feelings’, bodily sensations and aesthetics, remains a blushingly pink cloud in architectural discourse, best kept at a distance, safely summed up on romantic or auratic horizons.

The problem – and the potential – of these architectural supermodels, is that they threaten to open up an uncomfortably close intimacy of material relations. This threat unsettles the cool, disciplinary restraint that gives architecture its refined poise and cultural status. The threat does not come from body shame, but from a fear of shamelessness.

Shameless Supermodels

Any line of social action, from a casual conversation to an artistic performance to a sexual interaction, is vulnerable to breakdown from too-close attention to its necessary machinations. Awkwardness, not just practical ignorance, threatens to provoke a destructive shame. But the alternative is not the transcendence of shame. A constant running on the surface of shame is a necessary foundation of social action. (Katz, 1999: 171)

In one of the more memorable scenes of Barbarella, the figure of evil, Durand Durand, tries to kill Barbarella (supermodel of virtue) with the Excessive Machine, a large, rubber and plastic piano-meets-bed-like device that induces such heights of ecstasy in women that it kills them. Even if you’ve seen the film before, it’s worth watching this scene again on YouTube. This particular bit of video uses different music to that in the film, but it includes what Reyner Banham called ‘the best line in the script: “Have you no shame?”.’ (1968: 630) Durand Durand’s expression of disgust was provoked when Barbarella not only survives the Excessive Machine, it does not survive her. As Banham writes: ‘the insatiability of her flesh burns its wiring and blows its circuits.’ (630)

Barbarella becomes an explicitly vibrating nodule of desire – an expressive supermodel – through her impressive ability to sustain an embrace of affective intensity. This affective intensity moves within her, as she moves within it, without becoming submissive or too easily impressed or attempting to control it through distancing and denial. Barbarella had the power to both affect and be affected in a way that her adversary could not sustain. Software triumphs over hardware.

This YouTube version unfortunately doesn’t include the early part of the scene, where Durand Durand is preparing for the ritual killing, which involves playing music through the machine. Before the playing commences, with black gloves on his hands, he holds up the musical score such that it fills the screen. What we see is not the usual musical notation, but an arrangement of coloured geometrical shapes that reeks of a geometry-loving modernism. This musical score, resonating with his odd, geometrically-burdened outfit, tells us that this is a man of culture, even if a culture that believes in the nobility of evil and murder. Other references reinforce this, such as his belief in ‘truth and essence’ over ‘humanism and moral principles’ (which are ‘rubbish’), and his black box of tools with which he promises to do things ‘beyond all known philosophies.’

The accusation, ‘have you no shame?’, neatly ties this scene into a parable of the creative sensibility which sociologist, Jack Katz, argues: ‘depends not on a fear of shame, but on a fear of shamelessness.’ (1999:169) Barbarella, it seems, had nothing to hide or, at least, her capacity to embrace and affirm affective intensity was not kept hidden. Her ‘shamelessness’ was the shameful thing because she had moved outside the modernist virtuoso’s spectrum of power.

In a study of emotions by Katz, he picks up on the shame of Henri Matisse when it was revealed to him, through a slow-motion film, that he made certain motions before his pencil touched the paper. He lifts a quote from Matisse: ‘I never realised before that I did this. I suddenly felt as if I were shown naked–that everyone could see this–it made me deeply ashamed.’ (169) Matisse felt exposed, as if the revelation of this little bodily gesture had dissolved his artistic aura, like the little boy pointing at the Emperor’s lack of clothes. Had he been shameless, like Barbarella, he would not have been concerned about letting his delicate, silken aura slip to the ground.

Katz writes that shame is ‘at once an experience of revelation and of mystification. The experience hovers between exposure and cover up. What is revealed is something that one does not yet and perhaps cannot fully confront.’ (149) Katz suggests that this double experience of revelation and mystification in shame is related to our outside-of-awareness social involvements in which we shape our behaviour through processes of making sense that are ‘disguised aesthetically’:

We see in the experience of shame a taken-for-granted, ubiquitous, even ontological demand that the individual make sense of his or her conduct in society, which means shaping his or her behaviour in some coherent relationship to collectively recognised forms; and, further, that the process of making sense be itself disguised aesthetically, i.e. by becoming a seemingly natural, idiosyncratically tailored way of being with others. (173-4)

Running on the surface of shame, as “a necessary foundation of social action” (171) sustains and is sustained by the development of artful composures that gives a sort of ‘natural’ air to one’s way of being. This is precisely why elegance was such a wise choice of emphasis to wrap up the processual mess of these frothing forms, because it is exactly what elegance is: an artful composure. The risk of shamelessness is something that ‘elegance’ does not threaten, and is in this sense, is the safest of aesthetic categories, and perhaps, the epitome of style.

Both Barbarella and the art of emergence play provocatively with the ethico-aesthetic demand to find a ‘balance’ between the polar ‘opposites’ of all conditions (too much order and too little, formality and informality, the one and the many, concealment and exposure etc etc). But these dualities are less opposites than categories that define the limits of various states of relation. ‘Balance’ does not equate to stillness or sweet, peaceful composure, because it might tend more toward a wildly oscillating performance of relation. Situations are rarely, if ever, free of struggles to connect, conflicts of interest/affect or obstacles to sharing/engaging – or, in other words, of the rather inelegant mess of life.

The Elegant Antidote

Thus it may have been in self-defense that Lyon’s aggravated preteen body replaced itself with an unaggravated, rather amazing woman’s body in the summer after her freshman year of high school. I thought this elegantly bubble-bottomed response was brilliant; I could not have said it better myself. (July, 2007:192)

Just as Miranda July seems to hear the wordless expressions uttered by bodies and their gestures, we might do well to appreciate the maturation of an architectural style in its teens, having been in development since its (re)birth in the early to mid-nineties. If the exhibition Scripted By Purpose, offers a good coverage of the latest generational phase, then, just like a young girl-woman, it has recently developed into some very elegantly bubble-bottomed responses.

If emergence is a passing fashion for the architectural supermodels (or the emergentists-cum-elegants), its not just that the garment is worn, its how you wear it. For Architecture, the act of modelling (in the broadest sense) is a complex dynamic that sustains the very identity of architectural practice. For some more than others, it matters how good you look when you do it, and whether you make it into the glossy magazines or not. But those who do ‘make it’ tend to do so because they’ve made sense of their conduct in (architectural) society by shaping themselves and their work into forms that, at best, provocatively test the limits of collective recognition, while managing to artfully compose that process of making sense.

If all social activity involves the experience of shame, as Katz argues, we are also always negotiating the ethico-aesthetics of emergence: always negotiating the hover between exposure and cover up, too much control and too little. But if Barbarella has something to teach us, it might be that this latest move toward elegance might flip the scale out of balance as it veers dangerously toward concealment and control.

But we ought not to believe everything architects say. And as I read through the essays of the AD edition, Elegance, the words ‘elegance’ and ‘elegant’ are used so often that, like many overly repeated things, they began to look strange, becoming a rather inelegantly composed combination of letters. ‘Elegant’, it struck me, requires only minor alterations to become ‘Elephant’. Actually, if you take a second look at all of the work published there, it borders on, if not enthusiastically embodies, a composed form of wild grotesquery.

Perhaps the fact that, with one minor exception, there is no colour in the projects published – being quite consistently all white or light grey – helps create the sense that the collection elegantly holds together. But, if you white washed a bunch of elephants and got the angles right in the photographs, it could well have the same effect. Whether the elephant remains inelegant or is styled to be otherwise, it remains a beast, like all beasts, of fabulous and wondrous complexity. Similarly, these architectural supermodels, no matter how you look at them, do embody an awesome formal complexity that is, frankly, brilliant.

In what amounts to architectural discourse’s equivalent of new media studies, there has been a lot of dressing and redressing of models. They have been dressed in folds, hypersurfaces, diagrams, emergence and, finally, they became elegant. Underneath all the change of garments is a model that, perhaps most fundamentally of all, is a vibratory nodule of desire. Isn’t that what Botticelli’s Venus presented the world with, as she rose elegantly out of the sea?

Perhaps one could say that this model is always clad in shameless self-promotion, with a bit of soft porn thrown in. But like Barbarella, this ‘hot’ architecture might, through its insatiable flesh, blow some more fuses in some socio-cultural machines of instrumental mastery – while developing some intricate and new ways to openly embrace and express the swarmings of affect. And this virtuosic capacity is not, as many others have pointed out, without some profound ethical and socio-political implications.

Author’s Biography

Dr Pia Ednie-Brown is a senior lecturer at RMIT University in the Architecture program and at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL). Her research is concerned with design composition in relation to emergent socio-cultural paradigms. She is currently directing a multi-disciplinary research project, ‘The Biospatial Workshop’, exploring speculative design at the intersections of biology, computation and sustainability.

Notes

[1] Not all models are female, but most of them are. Similarly, not all young architects are male, but most super-architects certainly are. While this paper is not explicitly focussed on gender issues in architecture (a currently under-discussed topic in itself) these issues are (dysfunctionally) embedded in the complex dynamic that is the subject of this paper.
[back]

[2] This field of architectural discourse is discussed in Anna Munster’s Materialising New Media, where she situates the work of architects such as Greg Lynn and Bernard Cache, in exploring how ‘the topology of the fold … provide us with detailed new media studies.’ (9) At stake here is a remodelling of design or creative process, in itself. Lynn, accompanied by others in the field, set about remodelling (yet again) the schematic of design process through these explorations.
[back]

[3] This question has been asked so many times that it has become an ever-present echo in contemporary architectural discourse. It was an unanswered question, for instance, that Peter Eisenmann asked of Greg Lynn’s work at the 2000 ANY conference in New York. This in no way diminished my personal surprise when, at the AASA conference at UTS in September 2007, Michael Hensel admitted he could not offer any answers to that same old question, when asked of him by theorist Helene Frichot from the audience. This simply demonstrates the degree to which the aesthetic nature of such a decision is either too shameful to discuss, or beyond conscious reach.
[back]

[4] Earley cites his source as: Brown, L., ed., The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Clarendon, Oxford, 1993).
[back]

[5] On back cover of Holland (1999).
[back]

References

Banham, Reyner, ‘The Triumph of Software’, New Society, (October 31, Vol 12, No 318, 1968): pp 629-630.

Bataille, Georges, Eroticism. Mary Dalwood (trans), (London: Penguin Books, 2001– first published 1962).

Bedau, Mark. ‘Downward Causation and the Autonomy of Weak Emergence’, Principia 6, (2002): 5–50.

Castle, Helen and Rahim, Ali and Jamelle, Hina (eds). Elegance, Architectural Design Academy Editions, 77.1 (London: Wiley-Academy, 2007).

Ednie-Brown, Pia. ‘All-Over, Over-All: biothing and Emergent Composition’, Programming Cultures: Art and Architecture in the Age of Software, Helen Castle, Michael Silver (eds), Architectural Design Academy Editions, 76.4 (London: Wiley-Academy, 2006): 72-81.

Ednie-Brown, Pia. ‘Ethico-Aesthetic Know-How: The Ethical Depths of Processual Architecture’, in Kirsten Orr and Sandra Kaji-O’Grady (eds), Techniques and Technologies: Transfer and Transformation: IVth International Conference of the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia 2007, [http://hdl.handle.net/2100/501] Sydney (2007).

Earley, Joseph. ‘How Dynamic Aggregates May Achieve Effective Integration’, Advances in Complex Systems, 6 (1), (World Scientific Publishing Company, 2003) :115-126.

Holland, John. Emergence. From Chaos to Order, (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

Johnson, Stephen, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, (NewYork: Schribner, 2004 – first published 2001).

July, Miranda. no one belongs here more than you, (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2007).

Katz, Jack. How Emotions Work (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Kwinter, Sanford. ‘The Gay Science (What is Life?)’ in Bruce Mau, Life Style (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2000).

Lavin, Sylvia. ‘Plasticity at Work’, Mood River (Ohio: Wexner Centre for the Arts, 2002): 74-81.

Lavin, Sylvia. Form Follows Libido. Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2004).

Massumi, Brian (ed). A Shock to Thought. Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).

Stengers, Isabelle. ‘The Challenge of Complexity: Unfolding the ethics of science. In memorium Ilya Priginine’, Emergence: Organisation and Complexity, 6.1-2 (2004): 92-99.

Taylor, Mark C. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

Varela, Francisco J. Ethical Know-How. Action, Wisdom, and Cognition, (Stanford: California, 1999).

Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. James Cascaito, Isabella Bertoletti, and Andrea Casson (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004).

Félix Guattari, writing both on his own and with philosopher Gilles Deleuze, developed the notion of schizoanalysis out of his frustration with what he saw as the shortcomings of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, namely the orientation toward neurosis, emphasis on language, and lack of socio-political engagement. Guattari was analyzed by Lacan, attended Lacan’s teaching seminars from the beginning, and remained a member of Lacan’s school until his death in 1992. His unorthodox uses of Lacanism grew out of his clinical work with psychotics and involvement in militant politics. Paradoxically, even as he later rebelled theoretically and practically against Lacan’s ‘mathemes of the unconscious’ and topology of knots, Guattari ceaselessly drew diagrams and models. Deleuze once said of Guattari that ‘His ideas are drawings, or even diagrams’ (Deleuze, 2006: 238). His single-authored books are filled with strange figures which borrow from fields as diverse as linguistics, cultural anthropology, chaos theory, and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Guattari himself declared schizoanalysis a ‘metamodeling’, but at the same time insisted that his models were constructed aesthetically, not scientifically, despite his liberal borrowing of scientific terminology.[1] The practice of schizoanalytic metamodeling is complicated by his and Deleuze’s concept of the diagram, which they define as a way of thinking that bypasses language, as for example in musical notation or mathematics. This paper will explore Guattari’s development of metamodeling as a corrective to Lacan’s increasingly purified structuralism.

It is well known that in the Anti-Oedipus Guattari and Deleuze invented ‘schizoanalysis’ as a critique of psychoanalysis (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983). Guattari later defined schizoanalysis as ‘metamodeling’(Guattari, 1996: 122). He understood the term ‘model’—which in French can also mean ‘pattern’—in roughly two ways. In one sense, the model is a learned pattern of behavior inherited unquestioningly from family, institutions, and socio-political regimes, and which in the end functions as a prescriptive norm imposed by a dominant social order. In another sense, and in keeping with the social sciences, a model is a means of mapping processes and configurations.

Long before he began characterizing schizoanalysis as metamodeling, Guattari had been highly critical of the role of the first type of model in standard psychoanalytic treatment. For him, a key aspect of psychoanalytic transference is the transference of models, defined as an inherited pattern of social norms. He sees transference in the relationship between mother and fetus. ‘What is transmitted from the pregnant woman to her child? Quite a bit: nourishment and antibodies, for example’. His argument here draws on the notion of message transmission in biological processes. He extends the biological to the social by insisting that ‘what is transmitted above all are the fundamental models of our industrial society’ (Guattari, 1996: 66). In a later essay, he explains that a child in utero would be able to receive a ‘message’ about ‘industrial society’ via the body of a mother, as in the case of morning sickness made more severe by the mother’s stress in the face of power formations at the level of the socius (Guattari, 1984: 164-166). In other words, transference need not be verbal, and physical transmissions (of the mother’s stress affecting the fetus, for example) may carry social messages, such that ‘the message is carried not via linguistic chains, but via bodies, sounds, mimicry, posture and so on’ (Guattari, 1984: 165).

In the psychoanalyst’s consulting room, he once again finds a transference of models which takes place non-verbally at an unconscious level:

Regardless of the particular psychoanalytic curriculum, a reference to a pre-determined model of normality remains implicit within its framework. The analyst, of course, does not in principle expect that this normalization is the product of a pure and simple identification of the analysand with the analyst, but it works no less, and even despite him… as a process of identification of the analysand with a human profile that is compatible with the existing social order. (Guattari, 1996: 65-66)

Echoing this idea that psychoanalysis functions as a transmitter of mainstream social models, in another essay he declares accusingly that ‘From the start, psychoanalysis tried to make sure that its categories were in agreement with the normative models of the period’. He adds the clarification that in the present historical moment, ‘the dominant models’ are all subordinated to ‘that model of models, capital, and are imposed with the collusion of families, schools, institutions, and even mainstream psychoanalysis’ (Guattari, 1984: 85). Capitalism, that megamachine of subjectifying subjection, or perhaps better, subjection by means of subjectification, depends on the transmission of models, which in turn mold human existence. ‘Capitalist refrains… must be classified among public micro-infrastructures, whose purpose is to regulate our most intimate temporalizations, and to model our relationships to the landscape and to the living world (Guattari, 1979: 111). Psychoanalysis plays a crucial role in capitalist subjectifying subjection because capitalism itself has denuded existing social models and systems of reference. The analyst’s ‘work is… to forge a new model in the place where his patient is lacking one’, a duty made necessary because ‘the modern bourgeois, capitalist society no longer has any satisfactory model at its disposal’ (Guattari, 1996: 65-66). Armed with its models, psychoanalysis ‘arrived in the nick of time, just as cracks were appearing in a lot of repressive organizations—the family, the school, psychiatry and so on’ (Guattari, 1984: 85). In short, the imposition of standard models is oppressive, and yet, paradoxically, ‘individual and collective subjectivity lack modeling’ (Guattari, 1995: 58).

To state matters perhaps too schematically, as a practice, psychoanalysis transmits socializing models, even while as a theory, psychoanalysis ‘models’ in the second sense of the term, by mapping the processes and formations of the psyche. For example, for Guattari the Oedipus models in both senses of the word. He and Deleuze fully acknowledges that psychoanalysis did not invent the Oedipus, that ‘the subjects of psychoanalysis arrive already oedipalized, they demand it, they want more’. The Oedipus is imposed by ‘other forces: Global Persons, the Complete Object, the Great Phallus, the Terrible Undifferentiated Imaginary, Symbolic Differentiation, Segregation’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 121). As much as he dislikes it, Guattari does not even deny the force of the castration complex. He demands instead that psychoanalysis quit supporting the dominant order by inventing models that serve capitalism’s nefarious purposes.

Schizoanalysis to the rescue. Guattari declares that ‘Schizoanalysis, I repeat, is not an alternative modeling. It is metamodeling’ (Guattari, 1996: 133). It is ‘a discipline of reading other systems of modeling, not as a general model, but as instrument for deciphering modeling systems in various domains, or in other words, as a meta-model’ (Guattari, 1989: 27). Why doesn’t Guattari merely invent and disseminate an alternate model, rather than proposing the inelegant and potentially superfluous term ‘metamodeling’? Because, as he says, ‘Schizoanalysis does not… choose one way of modeling to the exclusion of another’ (Guattari, 1995: 60-61). This applies to both definitions of modeling, as authoritative prescription or as accurate description. I should perhaps add a third definition of model, that of repeated pattern or skeletal blueprint—in other words, as structure. Guattari objects above all to this third, structuralist, definition of ‘model’, as manifested in the ‘habitually universalising claims of psychological modeling’. Guattari calls instead for a ‘metamodeling capable of taking into account the diversity of modeling systems’ (Guattari, 1995: 22). As he puts it elsewhere, ‘all systems of modeling are equal, all are acceptable, but only to the extent that they abandon all universalizing pretensions and confess that they have no other use than to work at mapping Existential Territories’ (Guattari, 1989: 12). In Guattari’s view, each subjectivity combats alienation (a term he used often in his earliest writing) by constructing its own ‘existential territory’ out of the various semiotic materials and social connections available, holding everything together through means such as the ‘refrain’.[2] This is how, for example, schizophrenics reassemble a functional universe, even though they are completely unable to live according to dominant social models. ‘Thus it’s not simply a matter of remodelling a patient’s subjectivity—as it existed before a psychotic crisis—but of a production sui generis’ (Guattari, 1995: 6). This is how metamodeling functions therapeutically. In a way, says Guattari, ‘subjectivity is always more or less a meta-modeling activity’, or ‘a process of self-organization or singularization’ (Guattari, 1989: 27-28).

[Schizoanalysis] tries to understand how it is that you got where you are. ‘What is your model to you’? It does not work?—Then, I don’t know, one tries to work together. One must see if one can make a graft of other models. It will be perhaps better, perhaps worse. We will see. There is no question of posing a standard model. And the criterion of truth in this comes precisely when the metmodeling transforms itself into automodeling, or self-management [auto-gestation] of the model if you prefer. (Guattari, 1996: 133; translation modified)

In other words, as Guattari puts it earlier in the same interview, ‘Without pretending to promote a didactic program, it is a matter of constituting networks and rhizomes in order to escape the systems of modeling in which we are entangled and which are in the process of completely polluting us, head and heart’ (Guattari, 1996: 132).

Schizoanalytic metamodeling, then, can be distinguished from standard psychoanalytic and capitalist models in several ways. Guattari’s metamodeling promotes a radical, liberatory politics. It creates a singularizing map of the psyche. It allows one to construct one’s own metamodels. It recognizes, and even borrows from, existing models. It can transform an existence by showing paths out of models in which one may have inadvertently become stuck. Rather than looking to the past, it looks to future possibilities. ‘What distinguishes metamodeling from modeling is the way it uses terms to develop possible openings onto the virtual and onto creative processuality’ (Guattari, 1995: 31). Metamodeling produces, creates, finds new paths. This may be Guattari’s best description of schizoanalysis as metamodeling:

Nothing was further from my intention that to propose a psycho-social model with the pretention of offering it as a global alternative to existing methods of analyzing the unconscious! …my reflection has had as its axis problems of what I call metamodeling. That is, it has concerned something that does not found itself as an overcoding of existing modeling, but more as a procedure of ‘automodeling’, which appropriates all or part of existing models in order to construct its own cartographies, its own reference points, and thus its own analytic approach, its own analytic methodology. (Guattari, 1996: 122)

The idea of appropriating ‘all or part of existing models’ best describes what Guattari does with the topologies, schemas, and mathemes of psychoanalysis, as I hope to show in the remainder of this paper.

Guattari’s fondness for models and modeling informed his reception of Lacan’s teachings and writings. He was attracted to Lacan’s early uses of modeling, but later repelled by the latter’s growing preoccupation with ‘mathemes’ and topological knots, concepts not introduced into Lacan’s training seminars until 1971-1972.[3] More than fifteen years before becoming obsessed with these formalistic mathematical structures, Lacan was talking about cybernetics and machines, topics which clearly excited his young follower Guattari, who in 1961 sent his teacher/analyst a letter in which he responded in detail to the now-famous 1955 ‘Seminar on the Purloined Letter’.[4] Interestingly, in his letter which later became a journal article, he discusses not Lacan’s famous reading of the Edgar Allen Poe short story, but rather the published seminar session’s introduction, a text which describes variations on the children’s game of even and odds. This text includes mathematically-inspired schemas plotting out a series of binary combinations, with pluses and minuses (representing even/odd or presence/absence), then numbers, then Greek letters, and then circular geometric lines. Jean Oury, director of the La Borde psychiatric hospital where Guattari worked throughout his adult life, recalls that he and Guattari happened to love inventing and playing these types of combinatory games, and that together they made their own even-odd game based on this Lacan lecture (Oury and Depussé, 2003: 199, 203). It appears that Guattari also drew on several other sessions of Lacan’s 1954-55 seminar, which was devoted to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and which ends with a lecture on cybernetics, the scientific field devoted to theorizing the most modern type of machine, one based on binary combinatories and which makes use of memory as well as repetition, the very mechanisms of Freud’s repetition automatism.[5]

Early on in the course of this year-long seminar, Lacan presented his audience members with a ‘little model’ in order to help them see ‘the meaning of man’s need for repetition. It’s all to do with the intrusion of the symbolic register’. He goes on to explain that ‘Models are very important’ even though ‘they mean nothing’. Humans respond to models because ‘that’s the way we are—that’s our animal weakness—we need images’. The model that he chooses is the adding machine, which is ‘an essentially symbolic creation’ and which ‘has a memory’ (Lacan, 1988: 88-89). But why does he call this use of the image of the machine a ‘model’ rather than a metaphor? And why does he note that models ‘mean’ nothing? I would argue that this is because the model demonstrates a common mode of functionality, rather than designating other kinds of shared qualities. To use terminology that Guattari would develop many years later, the model does not signify, but rather, it ‘diagrams’ (which will be explained later in this paper). Lacan’s adding machine model, like compulsive repetition in humans, operates according to the same mechanisms as the symbolic order itself. It does not ‘mean’ or signify, but rather it incorporates processes. ‘The machine embodies the most radical symbolic activity of man’.[6]

By pointing out the machinic nature of the symbolic order, Lacan calls into question man’s freedom to choose, suggesting that humans, like machines, are caught up in an external determinism, of which repetition automatism would be a symptom. ‘It would be very easy to prove to you that the machine is much freer than the animal. The animal is a jammed machine’ (Lacan, 1988: 31). Psychoanalytic treatment is premised upon and made possible by the external determinism to which man is subject, as evidenced by the involuntary return of that which was repressed in the unconscious, in the form of slips of the tongue, dreams, or obsessional behaviors. ‘What is the nature of the determinism that lies at the root of the analytic technique?’, Lacan asks. He replies that analysts ‘try to get the subject to make available to us, without any intention, his thoughts, as we say, his comments, his discourse, in other words that he should intentionally get as close as possible to chance’. This is why Lacan compares cybernetics to psychoanalysis. ‘To understand what cybernetics is about, one must look for its origin in the theme, so crucial for us, of the signification of chance’ (Lacan, 1988: 296).

The ‘radical symbolic activity’ shared by humans and calculators alike is demonstrated not only in the determining displacements of Poe’s purloined letter, but also in the game of even and odds that the fictitious detective Dupin explains to the tale’s narrator. Dupin tells the story of a schoolboy who always wins at guessing the number of marbles (two or three) in his opponent’s hand through a technique of identification, by which he manages to think like the other by adopting a similar facial expression. For Lacan, identification belongs to the imaginary order. He thus points out that this identificatory technique would not be available to a machine capable of playing even and odds, and that thus the machine plays the game entirely on the level of the symbolic (Lacan, 1988: 181). Even/odd, presence/absence, Freud’s fort/da from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the on/off of an electronic circuit, the 0/1 of computerized messages, Pascal’s gambling calculus—cybernetics is the science of machines capable of playing this schoolboy’s game strictly by manipulating symbols. In other words, for Lacan cybernetics is the science of the symbolic order, since ‘Everything, in the symbolic order, can be represented with the aid of such a series’ (Lacan, 1988: 185).

Lacan drafts two members of his seminar audience to play even and odds, then records, transcribes, and transcodes the results, according to a set of combinatory rules of his own devising. He first notes the even/odd guesses as pluses and minuses, which he groups into threes. He then transcodes these patterns twice more, first into 1s, 2s, and 3s, then into Greek letters, all according to a set of strict transformational rules. He points out that the resulting patterns are determined by a mathematically limited number of combinational possibilities. He connects the dots to show the restricted trajectory of the symbols which have been subjected to the rules of his game. The short but complicated demonstration is meant to illustrate the mechanistic way that the signifier determines interpersonal relations among subjects. He notes the ‘similarity’ between this demonstration and his famous ‘L-Schema’ (figure 1) which shows the relations between a subject and its O/others.[7]

Figure 1. Lacan's L-schema (from Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, vol. 2, The ego in Freud's theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and John Forrester: New York: Norton, 1988, p. 243)

In sum, both humans and machines remember and repeat, and can therefore both play such guessing games. Remembering and repeating are not thinking, however, as Freud had already amply demonstrated. ‘We are very well aware that this machine doesn’t think’, states Lacan. ‘But if the machine doesn’t think, it is obvious that we don’t think either when we are performing an operation. We follow the very same procedures as the machine. The important thing here is to realise that the chain of possible combinations of the encounter can be studied as such, as an order which subsists in its rigour, independently of all subjectivity’ (Lacan, 1988: 304). This rigorous ‘order’ which subsists independently of subjectivity is the symbolic order itself. ‘The passage of man from the order of nature to the order of culture follows the same mathematical combinations which will be used to classify and explain’. Lévi-Strauss calls these ‘mathematical combinations’ the elementary structures of kinship. ‘Man is engaged with all his being in the procession of numbers, in a primitive symbolism which is distinct from imaginary representations’ (Lacan, 1988: 307; Lévi-Strauss 1969). Man too can function as a cybernetic machine. Lacan’s model works.

Prior to his seminar on Poe, Lacan had explained the way in which the psyche follows the lead of the numbers in the even/odd game, referring to Freud:

Freud is the first to notice that a number drawn from the hat will quickly bring out things which will lead the subject to that moment when he slept with his little sister, even to the year he failed his baccalaureat because that morning he had masturbated. If we acknowledge such experiences, we will be obliged to postulate that chance does not exist. While the subject doesn’t think about it, the symbols continue to mount one another, to copulate, to proliferate, to fertilise each other, to jump on each other, to tear each other apart. (Lacan, 1988: 184-185)

The chain of numbers itself pulls along pieces of repressed affect and memory. What is subjectivity, if not the very intersection of this messy meeting point of signs and signifying residue irrupting from the unconscious?

Guattari was clearly fascinated by these copulating, combative, enumerated signs which seem much less structuralist than the signs of Lacan’s later formalisms. It should be noted that these ciphers and symbols ‘drawn from the hat’ are not exactly signifiers, nor are they sterilized of desire by their being caught up in a combinatorial logic. In ‘D’un signe à l’autre’, Guattari develops a hypothesis of sexually reproducing signs, which he then models with a playful series of dots, letters, pluses, and minuses. His game becomes an ambitious genetic search for ‘a prototype sign which, all by itself, can account for all of creation’ (Guattari, 1966: 38). His aspirations, then, far exceed those of the Lacanian project: whereas Lacan merely seeks to demonstrate the constitution of a subject grounded in language, Guattari is looking for the origins of the universe.

He begins his essay by breaking down the sign down into constituent parts, and in so doing borrows from Lacan’s June 1961 lecture on Freud’s einen einzigen Zug, or in French the trait unaire, translated into English variously as ‘unbroken line’, ‘single-stroke’, or ‘unary trait’.[8] This lecture was part of Lacan’s 1960-1961 seminar on transference, during which he painstakingly schematized the intersubjective relations involved in one-on-one psychoanalytic treatment. Lacan redefines Freud’s trait unaire as a ‘minimal sign’ which is not yet a signifier. Freud introduced the trait unaire (einen einzigen Zug) in his discussion of the partial identifications of love and rivalry. He hypothesized that a subject caught up in a relation of love or rivalry may identify with a ‘single trait’ of someone else, as for example when someone adopts another’s symptom. Since Lacan considers love and rivalry to be imaginary identifications, and since for him symbolic identification consists in an identification with a signifier, he concludes that imaginary identification consists in the introjection of only a partial signifier, the trait unaire (Lacan, 1991: 417-418). Guattari shows little interest in identification, but he seizes on the notion of the trait unaire as partial signifier, around which he builds an ontology.

The value of this trait unaire for Guattari lies in its ‘primordial’ status in relation to the sign (Lacan, 1991: 418). However, it is not primordial enough for him. He wonders at what moment this minimal sign is actually born, noting that a splotch (or blob, blot), a bar, a mark, or a point do not become ‘signifying material’ until ‘they are used in another system’ (Guattari, 1966: 33). Between the almost accidental creation of a splotch and yet prior to the development of Lacan’s minimal sign, or trait-unaire, Guattari locates a ‘sign-point’ or ‘point-sign’ (point-signe), which he defines as unique, undividable, and ‘engendered by two mother splotches processed by the vacuum [vide]’ (Guattari, 1966: 35). This begetting of the sign is thus a ‘phenomenological-mathematical’ (Guattari, 1966: 34) operation, dependent on the notion of the ‘vacuum’ which Guattari seems to borrow simultaneously from philosophy and particle physics.[9] These splotches do not yet signify, but they do copulate and, with the help of the phenomenological-mathematical void or vacuum, produce offspring composed of elementary particles. Guattari decomposes the newborn sign-point by hypothesizing that it has a false interior and several false parts, a cavity and anti-cavities (Guattari, 1966: 35). This strange sign-point is the ‘raw material of the sign, and not a signifier in itself’ (Guattari, 1966: 43). Sign-points can, however, form chains. When, in turn, two sign-points mate, they form the trait-unaire, Lacan’s ‘primordial symbolic term’. This genesis of the sign is what Guattari models in his essay. Three sign-points make up a ‘basic sign’ (signe de base), and a enchaining of basic signs according to strict rules yields a variety of patterns which can be transcribed with pluses and minuses. Guattari is thus borrowing some elements from Lacan’s even/odd game, but he does not seem interested in questions of chance. The former’s manipulations of patterns, which he also winds up linking with geometric lines, eventually lead him back to the sign-point, which he breaks down again, this time into elementary particles charged negatively or positively.

After several pages of tedious combinatories, Guattari turns to concrete applications, but on a much grander scale than his teacher Lacan. Whereas the latter is content to model interpersonal relations on the intimate scale of the one-on-one psychotherapy or the family, rarely mentioning society at large, Guattari speaks of the insertion of machinic processes into capitalist production and mass consumption, and the potential effects on human subjectivity. He finds binary enchainment at work in poetry, phonetics, and musical notation. One segment of his game-playing involves a binary encoding based on phonetics, in order to show that a ‘mechanism’ of transcription into pluses and minuses can ‘articulate’ into binary chains ‘any type of ambiguity regarding rhythms, accentuations, intonations, letters, phonemes, morphemes, semantemes, etc’. (Guattari, 1966: 50). He gives a musical example, suggesting that a good musician would be able to recognize the title and composer of a symphony, solely by studying an amateur listener’s careful notation of the sounds produced by the bass drum, cymbals, and triangle during the performance—contingent of course on the listener transcribing enough information. Guattari then connects this semiotic problem of ‘transcription’ and ‘codification’ to the far-reaching consequences of ‘machinic’ processes in contemporary technological society.

Guattari thus theorizes components and parentage for Lacan’s trait unaire, suggesting that it is not the most basic signifying entity, then extends the consequences far beyond the interpersonal relationship between analyst and analysand. He wants to build a bigger, better model than Lacan’s cybernetic version of the L-schema (figure 1). Thus the disciple is taking apart his master’s machine model, and scattering the parts all over the place. The tiniest pieces intrigue him the most. In order to better understand them, the disciple turns not to his master’s cybernetics, but to theoretical physics. Guattari observes that physicists machinically manipulate symbolic material in order to produce and reproduce not just symbols, but elementary physical particles. This observation leads him to propose a semiotic theory of the atomic and cosmic universe:

The collective enunciation of theoretical physics… continuously composes and recomposes a gigantic signifying machine in which machines themselves and the signifier are indissolubly intertwined. This signifying machine is capable of intercepting and interpreting all theoretically aberrant manifestations of elementary particles. These particles not only reveal an inability to plausibly explain their behavior, but, in the most recent cases, it seems that their coming into existence depends on the technical-theoretic enterprise itself. (Guattari, 1966: 53)

Theoretical enunciation precedes material existence. Guattari has strayed far from the purview of Lacan’s seminar on narcissistic identification, and has begun formulating the basis of his theories of the machine and of a-signifying semiotics, which will resurface again later in my paper.

Figure 2. Guattari’s 'Place of the signifier in the institution.' (from Félix Guattari, The Guattari Reader, edited by Gary Genosko: Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996, p. 149)

It is now time to examine what I consider to be Guattari’s first drawing of a metamodel—or rather, to put it in terms more consistent with schizoanalysis, his first drawing of a momentary snapshot within a longer-term grand-scale metamodeling project (figure 2). This metamodeling process will swallow up Lacan’s models of the linguistically-dominated psyche. Guattari presented this major cosmic-scale ontological drawing in 1973 at Lacan’s own school, the École Freudienne de Paris, in a paper published as ‘The Place of the Signifier in the Institution’ (Guattari, 1996: 148-157). As a practicing psychotherapist working in a psychiatric institution, Guattari had already spent many years adapting Freudian and Lacanian one-on-one therapeutic techniques to the specific needs of a setting with multiple patients, doctors, nurses, and other service personnel. Implicitly referencing this context, he prefaces his presentation by noting that the position of the signifier in such a setting ‘was not identifiable from the classical analytical perspective’, which is a bold claim to make at Lacan’s own school, given the pains with which Lacan had, as we saw above, mapped the trajectory of the signifier in private, office-bound analysis (Guattari, 1996: 148). The inadequacy that Guattari finds with Lacanian models such as the L-schema (figure 1) is semiotic in nature, since ‘dual analysis and institutional analysis, whatever their theoretical arguments, essentially differ as a result of the different range of semiotic means that one and the other bring into play. The semiotic components of institutional psychotherapy are much more numerous’ (Guattari, 1996: 152). His essay enumerates and maps these additional kinds of ‘semiotic component’ brought into play in the institution. I characterize this drawing and essay as ‘metamodeling’ because they take bits and pieces of other models, in an attempt to solve a specific, singular problem

To state the essay’s problematic in simple terms, speech functions differently in different clinical settings. Lacanians and Freudians tend to limit their practices to the medium of language, translating all symptoms into the symbolic register through interpretation. However, while language is the neurotic’s preferred medium of expression, most psychotics express themselves best using non-linguistic semiotic material. The hospital setting thus involves not only many more interlocutors, but also many more substances of expression. Guattari’s grappling with these semiotic issues will continue throughout the 1970s, culminating in L’Inconscient machinique (1979) and the jointly-authored A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Throughout his writing of this period, Guattari focused his metamodeling energies on Lacan’s ‘unconscious structured like a language’ and its corollary algorithm S/s, derived of course from the structuralist reading of Saussure.[10] He denounces the Lacanians’ move ‘to put everything connected with the psyche under the control of the linguistic signifier!’ because not only does this linguistic tyranny fail to recognize the many other modes of expression, but also and especially because according to Lacan himself, to submit to the signifier is to be cut off from the real, which is to say from any capacity for political intervention (CH 5). Psychoanalysts, who ‘have made analysis an exercise in the sheer contemplation of evolving signifiers’, thoroughly miss the mark because, argues Guattari, ‘The psyche, in essence, is the resultant of multiple and heterogeneous components. It engages, assuredly, the register of language, but also non-verbal means of communication’ (Guattari, 1984: 78).

Perhaps paradoxically, given his insistence that language not be placed at the top of the hierarchy among the components of the psyche, Guattari begins his analytical remapping of Freud’s topologies and Lacan’s mathemes by undertaking a detailed engagement with linguistics, though with some important caveats. He insists that the study of signs not be limited to language. Just as importantly, he refuses to study signs in isolation, taking a pragmatic approach which foregrounds content and context, which for him means subjectivity, desire, politics, history, and the socius. He therefore constructs a semiotic metamodel which would encompass and traverse not only the psyche, but also the social, economic, and political spheres. The result is a ‘general semiology’—a crazy dream of Saussure’s which Hjelmslev took seriously, says Guattari (2006: 207). This enlarged semiology extends from the analyst’s office to the elementary particles of the universe, in keeping with Guattari’s early ambition of accounting for ‘all creation’ with a theory of the sign.

In drawing the place of the signifier, Guattari creates a matrix with headings on the side and top, which intersect to create six squares (figure 2). I have shaded in light gray the heading rows to make the matrix easier to read. The headings correspond to Hjelmslev’s categories (expression, content, form, substance, matter-purport). Guattari adds his own categories (a-signifying, signifying, a-semiotic). In the text of the essay, he uses the matrix to map Peirce’s typology of signs, or, in Guattari’s Hjelmslev-inflected jargon, the Peircean ‘semiotic components’: sign, symbol, icon, index, diagram. The point of the drawing is that whereas the psychiatric institution must engage all six squares of the semiotic matrix (as well as the ‘a-semiotic encodings’ on its periphery), psychoanalysis does its best to limit itself to the egg-shaped area marked ‘signifying semiologies’, which I have shaded in a darker gray. This new theoretical apparatus does not invalidate Lacan’s language-based model, but rather augments it, enveloping his realm of the all-powerful signifier, rather than replacing it. Unlike Lacan’s schemas, Guattari’s enlarged semiotic metamodel includes a place for the real, because Guattari conceives his matrix as integral to ‘a micro-political analysis which would never—or a least never deliberately—let itself be cut off from the real or the social’ (Guattari, 1984: 78).

One problem that Guattari finds with a binary system like language is that it, like capitalism, renders everything translatable according to standard of general equivalency. In order to re-differentiate what the structuralists made equivalent in imposing the linguistic model, Guattari proposes his typology of encodings (natural, signifying, and a-signifying) (Guattari, 1977: 253/ 1984: 90). It is fundamental that schizoanalysis recognize the various different kinds of semiotic component, because to acknowledge semiotic difference is to begin resisting the leveling effects of the capitalist axiomatic (Guattari, 1977: 253 & 294). He justifies his resistance to linguistic dominance by observing that genes, insects, birds, dancers, artists, children, mathematicians, galaxies and psychotics engage in many acts of expression that bypass language. They use components other than signifiers, and yet they are not stuck in the Lacanian imaginary either. Furthermore, he argues, ‘It would be ridiculous to suggest that the same system of signs is at work at once in the physico-chemical, the biological, the human, and the machinic fields’ (Guattari, 1984: 133). He therefore envisions a semiotics which can account for signifying speech (parole), as well as scientific signs, technico-scientific machinisms, and social assemblages (RM 248). The very notion of ‘sign’ must be rethought in order to account for the transmission of messages and organizational configurations in the distinct realms studied by biology, language, and physics. Encoding, transcoding, translating, communication, the transmission of messages, expression—these acts are not all equivalent, nor do they all require language, or at least not always.

I will begin with the category of semiotic component which takes up the largest area of the matrix. Semiotically formed substances (or signifying semiologies) occupy the four squares of the middle and right-hand columns. This area includes two sub-categories of component, the semiologies of signification which correspond to languages, and the symbolic semiologies which include non-linguistic media of expression such as gesture, ritual, nonsense, sexuality, body marking, song, dance, mime, non-verbal traffic signs, and semaphores. Semiologies of signification, or languages, are confined to the ellipsis encircling the intersection of the four squares of semiotically formed substances. Here within the elliptical boundary line, speech or writing overcodes all other semiotic modes. It is quite possible for humans to occupy the entirety of the four squares on the right of Guattari’s semiotic matrix. This would be the case of traditional or primitive societies, with non-linguistic rituals and markings which are not signifiers. Peirce’s icons and indexes likewise derive meaning without passing through the linguistic signifier. This is the land of polyvocity, as opposed to the strict bi-univocity enforced within the oval alone. Dwelling in the polyvocal terrain does not necessarily mean living without language, for the domain of symbolic signification includes the signifying ellipsis. Rather, it means allowing for multiple substances of expression.

The modern social order has not seen fit to let its fully integrated subjects live outside of the ellipsis, according to Guattari’s analysis. The signifying signification at work here is imposed by power formations, he explains. It does not come from deep semiotic structures, as Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar model would seem to suggest. Instead, signification always arises out of an encounter between the formalizations of a given social sphere, and a linguistic machine which systematizes, hierarchizes, and structures, in the service of the law, morality, capital, religion. Power produces signified content, while the linguists make it look like the formalization of signifiers is naturally accompanied by a similar formalization of content. Such is the illusion perpetuated by André Martinet’s notion of ‘double articulation’, claims Guattari (Martinet, 1964: 22-24; Martinet, 1968: 1-35; Martinet, 1969: 169-170). Content consists in an aggregate of relations of force, entailing all sorts of compromises and approximations. Again, the matrix does not entirely negate the work of Chomsky or Martinet, but merely confines them to their small place within a larger general semiology. This, again, is an example of metamodeling.

This small egg-shaped domain on the matrix is the confined area which Lacan described so well with his S/s formula—the matheme of the unconscious. Here in the ellipsis, everything is ‘structured like a language’—or at least seems to be, because the signifier creates the clever illusion that all is representation. Viewed from within its contours, which is to say from within the dominant social order of contemporary capitalism, the ellipsis ruled by language seems much bigger than it is. This is because the signifying machine has reduced all strata to two, the formalization of content and the formalization of expression. This is why so many readers of Hjelmslev have confused his categories of content and expression with Saussure’s signifier and signified, which is a misreading, according to Guattari.

Anyone dwelling fully within the oval area must show evidence of full accession to the symbolic order, and anyone who needs help getting there must report straight to the analyst’s couch. Psychoanalysts locate their cozy consulting rooms inside the ellipsis of signification, where two subjects—analyst and patient—remain without access to the real, imprisoned within a ‘signifying ghetto’ (Guattari, 1984: 92). While Lacan’s concept of the unconscious ‘structured like a language’ may work for treating neurotics in private practice, Guattari finds this model woefully inadequate in the setting of a psychiatric hospital filled with psychotics, whose screams, cries, gestures, odd behaviors, or even excrement function expressively far outside of the domain of the signifier.

Traditional analysts use transference and interpretation to insure that the walls of their consulting rooms lie fully within the bounds of the ellipsis. Should any non-linguistic substance of expression stray into the ellipsis, the analyst would quickly translate it into signifying signification, thanks to the wonders of interpretation.

Children and the mentally ill often express the things that matter most to them without reference to signifying semiologies. Experts, technocrats of the mind, representatives of the medical or academic establishments will not listen to such forms of expression. Psychoanalysis has worked out an entire system of interpretation whereby it can relate everything whatever to the same range of universal representations: a pine tree is a phallus, it’s of the symbolic order and so on. By imposing such a system of translatability these experts take control of the symbolic semiologies used by children, the mad, and others to try to safeguard their economy of desire as best they can…. For the psychoanalyst, it has now become a crucially important question of power: all expressions of desire must be made to come under the control of the same interpretative language. This is his way of making deviant individuals of all kinds submit to the laws of the ruling power, and it is this that the psychoanalyst specializes in. (Guattari, 1984: 168, trans. mod.)

To interpret a symptom is to translate a non-linguistic symbol into language, allowing the signifying machine to crush the patient’s intensive multiplicities, so that these intensities can, in the oval office, only be indexed or referenced through connotation, cutting them off from the semiotic sphere, and thereby quashing their political potential (Guattari, 1977: 299-300/ 1984:164-165). Structuralists too prefer life in the ellipsis, because they care neither for intensities, nor for politics, nor for unruly forces (Guattari, 1977: 291-292).

Since the psychiatric hospital engages all six squares of the semiotic matrix, it includes within it the signifying ellipsis as well. While it is true that psychotics lack full access to this space due to their failure to accede to the symbolic order, administrators, staff, and visitors all engage in signifying signification whenever they converse or write reports. At the same time, those working in a psychiatric institution cannot afford to pay attention only to the play of signifiers, because in a live-in situation, the doctor cannot dominate the patient simply by manipulating transference. Patients and staff interact constantly, negotiating flows of nutrition, waste, and affect.

Though Guattari often seems to prefer the polyvocity of symbolic signification to the bi-univocity of signifying signification, he in fact does not advocate that those living under the reign of global capitalism try to live as primitives. Such a return to a Rousseau-esque state of nature would not even be possible. For one thing, the reign of symbols entails forms of territorialization that in themselves limit freedom, and sometimes even perpetuate cruelty. While multiple forms of expression are unleashed in the right-most four squares of the matrix, this, for Guattari, is still not the best place for unleashing the true creative potential of revolution or of art. What is missing here is the crucial dimension of material flows. In the end, symbols provide no greater access to the real than do signifiers, because they remain mired in substance—the stuff of signification.

Guattari credits Hjelmslev with bringing to light a-signifying semiotics and a-semiotic encodings, Guattari’s other two major categories of semiotic component. This, however, entails using Hjelmslev’s concepts in ways he never envisioned (Guattari, 1984: 99). Guattari takes the greatest liberty with the concept of matter (also translated as purport or meaning), which he locates well beyond the semiotic sphere to include material intensities. As the semiotic matrix shows, this domain of the map remains completely cut off from the signifying semiologies of language and symbols, which are confined to the two other columns. Substance (middle column, figure 2) exists only in its formed state. This is where Guattari transforms Hjelmslev’s model into something completely new, by claiming that the a-signifying and the a-semiotic entail bypassing ‘substance’, which Hjelmslev never considered possible, because he thought only in terms of language. Bypassing substance is possible because Guattari places raw un-formed matter, or material flows, in the left-hand column. This column is not involved in the formalization of substance to create signification. He departs from Hjelmslev again by insisting that form animates substance, because he associates form with the abstract machine, the deterritorializing force that makes and un-makes the strata (Guattari, 2006: 212). Form as abstract machine creates the strata of symbolic and signifying signification, the multiple strata of the former and the single stratum of the latter, such that both semiologies of signification actualize, manifest, and capture the de-territorializing force of the abstract machine (Guattari, 1984: 99). This is why Guattari locates creativity in the domain of a-signifying semiotics, about which more in a moment.

Guattari’s category of a-semiotic or ‘natural’ encoding takes issue with those who would equate the genetic code with language (figure 2, curved line beneath the boxes).[11] Other examples of natural encoding include endocrine regulation, as well as the message-relaying functions of hormones and endorphins (Guattari, 1977: 263, 304 & 332/ 1984: 97-98, 167 &130). With natural encoding, no translation is possible from one code to another, or from a natural code to a semiotics, because these codes are completely territorialized, confined to a highly specific domain. Linguistic signs cannot directly intervene in the biological, physical, or natural worlds. Jakobson, then, was wrong to confuse biological encoding with language, according to this line of argument (Guattari, 1977: 302). Unlike a human speaker or writer, the genetic code knows neither emitter nor receiver. No one ever ‘wrote’ the genetic codes. No one receives the genetic message (Jacob, 1974: 200; Guattari, 1979: 211). These a-semiotic ‘natural’ chains of encoding do not involve semiotics at all, but instead formalize the arena of material intensities. This is why Guattari draws biological encodings outside of the semiotic matrix, connecting form directly to matter (figure 2). Such encodings do at times appear in the psychiatric institution, for example in conjunction with pharmaceutical treatment.

Since it is impossible to return to primitive symbolism, and since man has no access to a-semiotic ‘natural’ encodings, the only hope for the liberation of desire lies in the domain of a-signifying semiotics (figure 2, the two longest curved lines). This is the domain where Guattari locates the ‘diagram’, a concept which he appropriates from Peirce. Examples of diagrammatic or a-signifying semiotics include mathematics, computer encoding, music, economic functions, and art. While these processes may make some use of language, they operate by transmitting ideas, functions, intensities, or sensations with no need to signify any meaning. Guattari’s diagrammatic processes bypass substance (middle column, figure 2), allowing for a direct connection between form (the third column) and matter-meaning (the first column). Form interacts directly on matter, with no recourse to signification (Guattari, 1977: 281/1996: 150-151). The diagram is never located in a semiotic stratum (Guattari, 1977: 353/ 1984: 145). A-signifying or diagrammatic semiotics function whether or not they represent something for someone. It is a matter of producing, reproducing, and engendering by way of a reciprocal relation between material fluxes and the semiotic machine (Guattari, 1977: 281/1996: 150-151).

The a-signifying nature of this semiotic component can perhaps be made more clear with the example of mathematics. Even though mathematics has been said to be the ‘language’ of physics, this comparison remains a mere analogy—and a poor one, at that. The problem of comparing mathematics to a language consists in the dual role played by mathematics in a domain like physics: it can articulate either a semiotic process of representation (like language) or a material process of production. ‘We thus wind up with a physico-mathematic complex which links the deterritorialization of a system of signs to the deterritorialization of a constellation of physical objects’.[12] The diagrammatic consists precisely in this conjunction between deterritorialized signs and deterritorialized objects.

Among his favorite examples of a-signifying semiotics, Guattari cites the virtual particles of contemporary theoretical physics, echoing some of the observations cited above from the much earlier essay ‘D’un signe à l’autre’. As he points out in his later writing, these particles are in many cases only theoretically formed, discovered through mathematics rather than through experimentation. In some instances, these particles are later detected through observation and experiments, or are produced in particle accelerators. Many particles are not detectable directly, but only by their effects. Their existence may be brief. Guattari insists that this possibility of forming physical particles theoretically (through mathematics) profoundly changes the relationship not only between theory and practice, but also between sign systems and physical entities. ‘Physicists ‘invent’ particles that have not existed in ‘nature’. Nature prior to the machine no longer exists. The machine produces a different nature, and in order to do so it defines and manipulates it with signs (diagrammatic process)’ (Guattari, 1984: 125). This ‘diagrammatic process’ makes use of signs, but not language. He therefore no longer characterizes theoretical physics as a ‘gigantic signifying machine’ (Guattari, 1966: 53), but rather cites the theoretical engendering of physical particles as an example of an a-signifying diagrammatic process.

These a-signifying diagrammatic semiotics operate within the mental institution as well, especially when they unleash creative productivity. ‘The institution sometimes succeeds in setting going a-signifying machines that work towards a liberation of desire, in the same way as do literary, artistic, scientific and other machines’. However, outcomes may not always be so positive, especially if the institutional psychotherapist turns to interpretation. ‘The a-signifying and diagrammatic effects, as well as the effects of significance and interpretation, can thus assume far greater proportion than in one-to-one analysis, and can poison every smallest detail of everyday life’ (Guattari, 1984: 77; trans. mod.). Thus one must be cautious, even when operating within the potentially libratory domain of the diagrammatic. Semiotics can exercise powerful forces.

Just as modeling can mean mapping, as noted earlier in this paper, so schizoanalytic metamodeling includes cartography, but of a much more overtly political nature than mere social science modeling. With the phrase ‘analytic-militant cartographies’ Guattari invokes the idea that the maps and metamodels of schizoanalysis can show the way toward positive transformation and change—and can indeed even bring about libratory mutations (Guattari, 1996: 132). The political potential of Guattari’s semiotic matrix lies in its refusal to let go of the real, as does Lacan by focusing on a signifier which cannot possibly even ‘represent’ the real. Guattari’s matrix can include the real because it does not confine itself to the domain of representation—in other words, the small ellipsis of language (figure 2).[13] Guattari refuses to accept the primacy of the symbolic order implied in Lacan’s various topological models, because these cleave the symbolic from the real. Forging a path of access to the real opens up political possibilities, whereas blocking out the real shuts down politics. The capitalist and psychoanalytic politics of signification which upholds the tyranny of the signifier in turn preserves the domination of the ruling classes. ‘The result of this is to block the semiotic praxis of the masses–of all the various oppressed desiring minorities–and to prevent their entering into direct contact with material or semiotic fluxes, preventing their becoming connected up to the de-territorializing lines of the different sorts of machinism and so threatening the balance of established power’ (Guattari, 1984: 105). Society would actually function better if the unleashing of a-signifying semiotics made a space for desire, which Anti-Oedipus showed to be the most powerful of all productive forces. ‘Desire, once freed from the control of authority, can be seen as more real and more realistic, a better organizer and more skillful engineer, than the raving rationalism of the planners and administrators of the present system. Science, innovation, creation—these things proliferate from desire, not from the pseudo-rationalism of the technocrats’ (Guattari, 1984: 86). Desire here must be understood as a real material force. I find it instructive that although Guattari rarely uses the phrase ‘desiring machine’ after Anti-Oedipus, he continues to evoke machines as such, especially as he traces a historical evolution of technology which he calls the ‘machinic phylum’, evoking the latest discoveries in evolutionary biology (Guattari, 1989).

The very real materiality and historicity of Guattari’s machines make them relevant to current debates in cyberculture studies today. Beginning with the 1966 study cited at length in this paper and continuing up through his 1991 call for a ‘post-media era’ of creative human-technology interaction, Guattari never lost sight of the intimate, intricate interrelations between the history of technology and the history of capitalism (Guattari, 1966; Guattari 2002). Interestingly, even while insisting on the real, material, and socio-political dimensions of machinic processes, Guattari does not deny the semiotic dimension, even though semiotics plays a less visible role in his later work. Indeed, prominent ‘new media’ critics such as Mark Hansen have been criticized for abandoning ‘the semiotic approach in its entirety’, precisely because new media technology ‘is literally built on symbolic logic and a cybernetic methodology’ (Barnet, 2003). Lacan and Guattari immediately recognized the psychoanalytic implications of the symbolic logic of cybernetics. Guattari’s discussions of a-signifying diagrammatic information transmission reveal that the very real intervention of information technology into human subjectivity and interactions comprises not only linguistic, affective, and material dimensions, but also a new way of thinking semiotically without signifying signs. The semiotic specificity of digital transmission can be mapped using Guattari’s matrix. Its contribution to our understanding of cyberculture would be the matrix’s ability to differentiate among the physic-chemical, the biological, the human, and the machinic, while at the same time allowing for intersections and bypasses between and among these disparate domains. Digitization does not in the end turn the world into code, and this point is of the utmost political, social, and existential importance. Guattari’s 1973 matrix shows the coextistence of other forms of semiotization, while at the same time highlighting the libratory potential of the diagrammatic processes exemplified by computer encoding itself. It is not the code which subjugates, but rather the translation of other forms of encoding into one single kind of semtiotic. Creativity necessarily involves a variety of types of semiotic components.In his 1991 article calling for a post-media era, Guattari was primarily concerned with relations between media consumers and mass media products, as well as between media producers and creators. He emphasized the need for greater interactivity, participation, and space for cultural minorities, in order to surpass the current mass-media era (Guattari, 2002). I would add that this would necessitate a schizoanalytic remodeling of subjectivity, the metamodeling blueprint of which must incorporate the creative potential of diagrammatic components of Guattari’s general semiology matrix.

Author’s Biography

Janell Watson is Associate Professor of French at Virginia Tech, USA. She is the author of Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust, and is currently completing a book on Félix Guattari.

Notes

[1] (Guattari, 1995). This book includes a chapter entitled ‘Schizoanalytic Metamodeling’ (translation modified). Many translators have rendered Guattari’s very ordinary French term modélisation as ‘modelisation’, which is a neologism in English. I instead use ‘modeling’, which better reflects Guattari’s borrowing from standard social science terminology. Métamodelisation and ‘metamodeling’ are neologisms in both languages.
[back]

[2] To cite the jargon typical of Guattari’s later work, schizoanalysis is ‘a transformational modeling such that, under certain conditions, the following can engender each other: Territories of the Self, Universes of alterity, Complexions of Material Fluxes, desiring machines, semiotic Assemblages, iconic Assemblages, intellectualizing Assemblages’ (Guattari, 1989: 74).
[back]

[3] From 1953 until his death in 1981, Lacan presented his teachings as public lectures, choosing a new theme each academic year. The lectures are grouped by year and theme into 27 ‘seminars’. Many of these have been published as individual volumes under the title The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (W.W. Norton), whiles others exist only in manuscript form, and as notes taken by seminar attendees.
[back]

[4] Guattari later published the gist of the letter as an article entitled ‘D’un signe à l’autre’ (‘From One Sign to the Other’), which, to my knowledge, has not yet been translated into English, even though Deleuze considered it one of the two most important essays in the collection Psychanalyse et Transversalité (Guattari, 1966; partially reproduced in Guattari, 1972: 131-150; Deleuze, 2004: 203).
[back]

[5] (Lacan, 1988). ‘Repetition automatism’ refers to recurring psychic phenomena such as the nightmares and flashbacks symptomatic of what today is called post-traumatic stress disorder. Freud had originally characterized dreams and other unconscious manifestations as partaking in a pursuit of pleasure, and thus was surprised when shell-shocked combat veterans reported the uncontrollable repetition of their unpleasant battlefield experiences. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he developed the notion of the death drive to account for repetition automatism (Freud, 1961).
[back]

[6] (Lacan, 1988: 74). Lacan defines the ‘symbolic’ or ‘symbolic order’ in relation to the ‘imaginary’ and to the ‘real’. The Symbolic is the order of language, of the imposition of the law of the father, and of human social relations among subjects and their ‘Others’. The Imaginary is the realm of dual relations such as love, hate, or rivalry, which take place on the level of ego and identification. The Real is first defined as that which cannot be represented, but in Lacan’s later work comes to be associated with unbearable jouissance (enjoyment and/or sexual orgasm) or traumatic encounters.
[back]

[7] (Lacan, 2006, 2002: 31, 39-41). This drawing (my figure 1) shows the Subject (S) in relation to the Other (A, for Autre). The point is that two subjects cannot interact directly, but must pass through the imaginary relation which doubles the Subject’s ego (a for autre) with its mirror image (a′), the small other—Lacan’s famous objet petit a. The small ‘o’ other (a′) as specular double functions as the Subject’s object-cause of desire.
[back]

[8] Guattari does not explicitly cite this lecture, but he does refer to Lacan’s trait unaire, and this chapter provides the most extended discussion of it that I have found. (Lacan, 1991: 405-422). On the translation of the term into English, see Evans, 1996: 81.
[back]

[9] Elementary particles are mentioned several more times in this essay (Guattari 1966: 43, 46-47, 55).
[back]

[10] Saussure draws a diagram of the sign with the signified (‘concept’) on the top and the signifier (‘sound-image’) on the bottom, showing these two elements locked in a reciprocal relationship. With his formula S/s Lacan reverses the positions, putting the signifier on the top, capitalizing the S for signifier to further emphasize that it in fact determines the signified (Saussure, 1966: 66-67). For a critical analysis of Lacan’s structuralist reworking of Saussure, see Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1992.
[back]

[11] The term ‘code’ here is used quite differently than in the Anti-Oedipus, where it referred primarily to social and psychic processes which channel desire. By the late 1970s Guattari had explicitly widened the definition to include not only ‘semiotic systems’ but also ‘social fluxes and material fluxes’ (Guattari, 1984: 288). The semiotic component of ‘natural encoding’ designates the work of codes in material fluxes. Social codes would be classified among the signifiying or symbolic semiologies, depending on whether the context is a traditional or modern society; computer codes would belong to the category of a-signifying diagrammatic components.
[back]

[12] (Guattari, 1984: 123). On this point, Guattari cites theoretical physicist Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, who argues that mathematics does not represent or record the concepts of physics, but that instead mathematics operates in a dynamic relationship to physics in the production of concepts (Lévy-Leblond, 1989).
[back]

[13] Throughout his many work, Slavoj Zizek repeatedly makes it clear that Lacan is not all language: there is the real, the gaping hole of the real. Guattari’s point, thought, is that Lacan’s S/s model of language still cannot reach the real, limiting the human ability to intervene in the real. Lacan’s real is a gaping, traumatic hole because he envisions no semiotic means of intervention. Semiotics, for Guattari, can always potentially be harnessed as a machinic mode of direct intervention. The real, for Guattari, is the material, the economic, the political. This implies that if Lacan defines the real as he does, it is because he does not wish to deal with socio-political concerns.
[back]

References

Barnet, Belinda. ‘The Erasure of Technology in Cultural Critique’, Fibreculture: The Journal (2003), http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue1/issue1_barnet.html.

Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004).

———. Two Regimes of Madness: Text and Interviews 1975-1995 (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006).

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 1 trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

———. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2 trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London, New York: Routledge, 1996).

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961).

Guattari, Félix. ‘D’un signe à l’autre’, Recherches 2 (1966): 33-63.

———. Psychanalyse et transversalité: Essais d’analyse institutionnelle (Paris: Maspero, 1972).

———. La révolution moléculaire. (Fontenay-sous-Bois: Recherches, 1977).

———. L’inconscient machinique: Essais de schizo-analyse (Fontenay-sous-Bois: Recherches, 1979).

———. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1984).

———. Cartographies schizoanalytiques (Paris: Galilée, 1989).

———. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

———. The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996).

———. ‘Toward an Ethics of the Media’, trans. Janell Watson, Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics 14 (2002): 17-21.

———. The Anti-Oedipus Papers, trans. Kélina Gotman, ed. Stéphane Nadaud (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006).

Jacob, François. ‘Le modèle linguistique en biologie’, Critique 30.322 (1974): 197-205.

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan ed. Jacques Alain Miller and John Forrester, Vol. 2, The ego in Freud’s theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis 1954-1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988).

———. Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Vol. 8, Le transfert, 1960-1961 (Paris: Seuil, 1991).

———. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006, 2002).

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).

Lévy-Leblond, Jean-Marc. ‘Physique: C, Physique et mathématique’, in Encyclopaedia Universalis (Paris: Encyclopædia universalis, 1989), 270-274.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, ed. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

Martinet, André. Elements of General Linguistics, trans. Elisabeth Palmer (London: Faber and Faber, 1964).

———. La Linguistique synchronique: Études et recherches (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968).

———. La Linguistique: Guide alphabétique (Paris: Denoël, 1969).

Oury, Jean, and Marie Depussé. À quelle heure passe le train… Conversations sur la folie (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2003).

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).

The Fibreculture Journal and Open Humanities Press

Issue 12 of the Fibreculture Journal marks the exciting event of the journal joining with Open Humanities Press. OHP is a major initiative in online publishing in the humanities, ‘an international open access publishing collective in critical and cultural theory’.

Those of us who have worked on the Fibreculture Journal from 2003 are very happy to be invited to join with OHP, and grateful to the organizers, especially Sigi Jöttkandt, Gary Hall, Paul Ashtonand David Ottina, for all their work bringing OHP into being.

The Fibreculture Journal has always been fully committed to online and open access publishing, and to the best in critical and cultural theory. It has now published 84 articles on a range of critical issues in what was, when we began, internet and new media studies. In the period of 5 years since the journal began, “new media” studies has gone mainstream. “New media” themselves have infected, transformed and sometimes undermined all previous media, to the point that some traditional media have recently begun perhaps to look a little like “heritage” media. Galvanized by the OHP initiative, we are currently reviewing and reorganizing our operations in order to adapt to these shifts in contemporary media. We will also expand our ability to publish articles and make use of the latest technologies of publication and open discussion.

Issue 12 – Models, Metamodels and Contemporary Media

This issue of the Fibreculture Journal arose from conversations the editors had in 2006 in Sydney. We realised that we were both interested in the question of the roles that models play in cultures, and this quite separate to the question of whether these models were accurate or not.

The issue pays close attention to the roles that models play in contemporary media, the adequacy of these models to new media cultures, and the state of methods and disciplines based upon various models. There is a surprising range of articles in this issue, but this range in itself demonstrates that the issue of modeling is central not only to media studies, but to media production and media use (as the two of these increasingly merge). The range of articles here also reflects what is perhaps a proliferations of models – and questions about modeling – that accompanies the proliferation of ecologies in which contemporary media find themselves.

The issue departs from Félix Guattari’s suggestion that new, transdisciplinary metamethodologies are needed in order to upset existing formations of power and knowledge. It contains discussions of the modeling operations involved in contemporary media practices and cultures, and of the invention of new models in a transdisciplinary context. It also contains critical evaluations of the current mix of models at work (and play) within new media cultures. Several articles also detail the complicated tangle of the histories of media thinking, media practices and models, even as these histories meet something of a fork in the road when confronted by digital and networked media. At the same time, the emergence of metamodels – and perhaps the very concept of metamodelization – allow us to reconceive the potentialities of media histories. These histories are brought into fuller contact with a more flexible ‘post-media’ society, as Janell Watson describes it in this issue.

In what follows we will first give a more detailed description of what is at stake in modeling and metamodeling and second give a brief description of the specific approaches to these issues in the articles published in this issue.

On the Passage from Modeling to Metamodeling

Modeling operations involve petrified representations that have absorbed and arrested a-signifying semiotic flows and reconstituted them in meaningful ensembles as static, central reference points. Such models contain simplified core components that are safely repeated, soberly recoded, delicately redrawn and augmented in applications to specific phenomena. However, models operate largely by exclusion and reduction, tightly circumscribing their applications and contact with heterogeneity. The world of models is arid, lacking ambiguity and uncertainty.

By contrast, metamodeling operations – not to be confused with higher order or general modeling – introduce movement, multiplicity, and chaos into models. Metamodeling de-links modeling with both its representational foundation and its mimetic reproduction. It softens signification by admitting a-signifying forces into a model’s territory; that is, the centrality and stability of meaningfulness is displaced for the sake of singularity’s unpredictability and indistinctness. What was hitherto inaccessible is given room to manifest and project itself into new and creative ways and combinations. Metamodeling is in these respects much more precarious than modeling, less and less attached to homogeneity, standard constraints, and the blinkers of apprehension. It is not, however, completely without constraints.

How, then, does one get from modeling to metamodeling?

Models are imperfectly representational. Their simplicity makes them partial and limited. Some very abstract models like those of pure mathematics and pure theory are not descriptive in a literal sense of visual mirroring and may be used to advance certain kinds of claims without implying the pre-existence of empirical data to ground them. Other models display varying kinds and degrees of similarity with real objects and processes, but the static visual and spatial dimensions of models convey weakly dynamic processes and only vaguely suggest what a fuller picture might look like through the partial connections with the features they present.

Models mark their territories: as cognitive aids to discovery; as guides for thought and exploration; as creative aprons that helps inform imaginative extrapolations and build new hypotheses; as instantial patches that instantiate the axioms of a theory; as representational swaths that bear upon the world in some designated manner, minimally or maximally, in matter or in mentality. Models occupy a good deal of property and have the capacity to bewitch users into opting for sedentary iterations of the same schema. Much modeling is no more than an exercise in tracing.

On the other hand, models are not obviously or exclusively representative of a real. Their axis of reference is primarily with other models that purport to model the same things. These other models may be arranged hierarchically such that higher models refer to lower ones or, one looks into the future ‘not to predictions about data, but to predictions about a model of possible data’ on the basis of high level models (Giere, 1999: 55). Models may be about other models. However, there may be isomorphism between models and thus their components are perfectly analogous. The important relation in this instance is between the model and the theory it satisfies and other models that do the same, only better, or worse, or equally, maybe just differently, and these differences may be themselves modeled, and compared.

In a remarkably compact phrase, Myrdene Anderson and Floyd Merrell (1991: 3-4) state: ‘models reek of iconicity’. This claim has quite interesting implications. It entails that models may be distinguished from representations: ‘”Modeling” captures the complementation, the provisionality, the counterfeit involved in open-ended synergies. “Representing” by comparison conjures up a highly targeted, a priori, nonproblematic closed system’ (4). Somewhere between determinate reference and its rejection stands this deployment of C. S. Peirce’s icon. For Peirce, icons were semiotic phenomena best described through likeness (mental photograph, diagram, analogy, image). ‘The Icon is the visual essence of model building’, as C.W. Spinks writes (1991: 445). Peircean icons are not only linked to visuality but also to discovery, concept generation, and experimentation based on observation. However, the relation between the iconic sign and the object to which it bears a likeness or with which it shares some characters does not entail representation in the strict sense of validating the object’s existence. Indeed, icons do not provide a guarantee of the existence of the objects they resemble; they are strictly speaking hypothetical signs linked closely to possibility that generate concepts in the minds of those observing their qualities. Although icons are also subject to existential grounding (indexicality) and proof (symbols) they are loosened from the demands of a rigorous referentiality. Additionally, icons have an array of nuanced classes of semiotic relations.

Deleuze and Guattari have taught us the importance of liberating the diagram both from the yoke of the Saussureanism and the Peircean icon. Guattari developed the semiotic category of diagrammatism through the division of icon and diagram along the lines of signifying semiotics and a-signifying semiotics, the latter involving signs which are more deterritorialized than icons and which work without the authority of a signifying semiology. Diagrams are irreducible to icons, Guattari contended, because icons remain encysted in pre-established coordinates, beholden to a meaning they cannot do without.

It is via diagrams that the passage from modeling to metamodeling takes place. Importantly, the diagram’s productivity entails that metamodeling is productive of a new kind of reality; it functions; forces things together; doesn’t need meaning, just the manufacture of it. Diagrams get models moving and in full flight they become metamodels. But wait. Metamodels must be able to account in some way for their own vigor. They cannot simply be, of course, modeled (slowed down, solidified), but are themselves philosophically diagrammable (mappable yet a bit sketchy), at least with reference to specific domains. Diagrammaticity is a like slice of chaos released by a metamodel and which opens up a new world through which it coils itself along, like a virtual worm. Yet worms are tightly scripted. This is the metamodel’s mechanism of constraint, which echoes the machinic rigor and automatism of a-signifying trigger signs. The diagrammatic metamodel remains exploratory, fulfilling, and not at all static, because its constraints are productive, yet they filter pure potential. Caution and sobriety are urged in the face of creative proliferation, and lest this kind of happy talk prove too overwhelming, let’s add that the recourse to the model’s purchase on representation cannot be ruled out (even if it is striated by non-representational lines). Metamodels are, in this respect, models of hybridity. Metamodels unfurl vast discursive and non-discursive worlds with multiple semiotics engaging both representational and non-representational processes across actual and virtual domains. The sections of such worlds are not equally accessible. Self-powered original and imaginative flights are not always incarnated in actual matter and escape coordination of any type and elude capture by identification, roaming far from anything that might crystallize them. Sometimes this is visualizable, but not exclusively. For the afffectual dimension of metamodels must be considered, as well. Our task here is to release some of the potential enveloped in metamodeling to account for new media, affecting and being affected in the process, attentive to constructive constraints in the unstilling operations of our contributors, and on the lookout for sources of pollution.

Unstilling Operations

The unstilling operations in issue 12 of the Fibreculture Journal are wide-ranging. There are two discussions of Shannon and Weaver’s central model in the history of both thinking about and using media – or should we say the model that has created the very idea of a centre to thinking about and using media. These discussions ‘unstill’ Shannon and Weaver without the all-too-easy gesture of throwing them away. They find themselves alongside discussions of the tensions surrounding computational and other approaches to modeling in architecture, the tagging of photographs in Flickr, the possibility of a mobile media commons or public, and a detailed examination of the implications for contemporary media of the complex relations between models of media and of thinking processes.

The issue begins with Janell Watson’s gloriously subtle and clear unpacking of Guattari’s concept of the meta-model. Watson examines the metamodel’s emergence from Guattari’s sometimes forgotten yet intensive engagement with the work of Jacques Lacan. In the process, she makes what is at stake regarding models and metamodels for media cultures very clear. In particular, Guattari’s concept of a post-media culture is clearly located as emerging from a long engagement, on the part of both Guattari and Lacan, with cybernetics and a culture immersed in machinic practices. Pia Ednie-Brown’s article on modeling in contemporary architecture manages to attain a delicate balance between a complex discussion of emergence and computational design in architectural modeling on the one hand and, on the other, the further complications of embodied and affective contexts which challenge any form of modeling.

This is followed by the two transversal rethinkings of the work of Shannon and Weaver, by Gary Genosko and Steven Maras. Although they take their engagement in very different directions, both these articles begin by dismissing both the common rejection of Shannon and Weaver and the easy acceptance of their famous model for general communications systems. The result is both the discovery of new life in Shannon and Weaver’s model in the context of a broader metamodelization, and some striking reconceptions of fundamental issues in the history of media theory. Focusing more on the work of Weaver than Shannon, Genosko returns to the embodied contexts of telegraphy in order to open up both the history and present of the real, messy interactions involved in media work. Maras takes another look at the key concept of transmission, in the history of both media theory and cultural theory, the latter particularly as it is used in Stuart Hall’s crucial discussion of the relations between media and culture in ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’ (1973, 1980). Maras finds more of the concept of transmission in Hall’s work than is often believed. In doing so, he allows for a much more complex understanding of the relations between transmission and sign systems. Maras then turns to the work of Régis Debray, who has presented a very different concept of transmission as part of his ‘mediology’ (Debray, 2000: 122). In all, Maras makes clear the full extent of what is at stake in the various modelings of transmission in relation to other key components of media models and practices.

Mat Wall-Smith’s discussion of models, mind and media folds a number of new aspects into what has, in this issue, become itself a complex ecology of practices, models and metamodelisations. Wall-Smith takes recursion as a central if destabilising factor: in media events and in the models of media events; in events of thinking and in models of thinking processing; indeed in the relations between all of these. In doing so, he stages a fascinating meeting of the work of contemporary thinkers Brian Massumi (on the autonomy of affect) and Bernard Steigler (who so completely understands the extent to which the human is technical, in fact mnemotechnical, being). Wall-Smith arguably rewrites almost the entire context of media events. Yet he does so in a manner which insists on openness and contingency.

Gerard Goggin’s discussion of the models and politics of mobile media raises fundamental questions about the discourses and political formations surrounding mobile media. He identifies some troubling gaps in the thinking about mobile media that also open up potential for quite different social contexts of mobile media use. Goggin is particularly focussed on the possibility of a new type of Commons spread across mobile media networks, at a moment when most discussions of Commons restricted it to the Internet, as normally conceived. He also begins to open up the very attractive possibility of mobile publics.

Jan Simons demonstrates how much can be achieved when traditional assumptions and models are turned on their head. He does so in a rich analysis of tagging practices on the sociable media photography site, Flickr. It is common at the moment to fetishise a near future, rigidly ordered (often by experts) semantic Web. It is often assumed that this will function neatly and smoothly, as opposed to what is often seen as the clumsy and non-expert use of metadata such as tags by ordinary “folk”. Simons points out that this all depends on fairly strict models of media practice, control and indeed of language, in which the best that can be hoped for is that somehow the “folksonomy” involved will emerge with something like a coherent order – one without too many contradictions or too much inconsistency over time. Simons demonstrates that this is a grounding assumption in much contemporary media practice involving metadata. He then goes on to show the great value of abandoning such assumptions in favour of an analysis of tagging as an ongoingly open, and in fact highly effective, practice of natural language. Finally, in a detailed and coherent account of the history and present of theories of technological determinism, John Potts puts “medium theory” back on the agenda. However, he does so in order to map out a much more interesting pathway than usual, between the social context of media technologies and the properties of the media technologies themselves.

We think this issue of the Fibreculture Journal is much more than a snapshot of important issues in contemporary media cultures and theories. It is more of a high resolution panorama, if one can conceive of a panorama that is constantly morphing into new shapes. We also hope this issue will give support to those who do not wish to subscribe to given models once and for all time. Such researchers might also prefer not to participate in media research merely by staging gladitorial contests to the death between their own favourite models and those of others. Instead, the work in this issue might prove useful to those who wish to use models, but perhaps only in the context of an ongoing metamodelization.

Author’s Biographies

Gary Genosko is Canada Research Chair in Technoculture at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Canada. His recent work has focused on the intersections of administrative technology, race, and alcohol in historical context. He is currently working on ‘Phreaking the Maple Leaf’ – Canadian hackers, phreakers, and anti-surveillance cyborgs.

Andrew Murphie (http://www.andrewmurphie.org/) is Editor of the Fibreculture Journal and Associate Professor in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales, Australia. Recent publications include: ‘Performance as the Distribution of Life: from Aeschylus to Chekhov to VJing via Deleuze and Guattari’, ‘Differential Life, Perception and the Nervous Elements: Whitehead, Bergson and Virno on the Technics of Living’ and ʻDeleuze, Guattari and Neuroscienceʼ.

References

Debray, Régis. Transmitting Culture trans. Eric Rauth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

Giere, Ronald N. ‘Using Models to Represent Reality’, in Lorenzo Magnani, Nancy J. Neressian, and Paul Thagard (eds.) Model-Based Reasoning in Scientific Discovery (New York: Kluwer Academic, 1999).

Hall, Stuart. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, Occasional Paper, Media Series: SP No. 7, 1973).

Hall, Stuart. ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (eds.) Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972–79 (London: Routledge, 1980), 128–138.

Anderson, Myrdene and Merrell, Floyd. ‘Grounding Figures and Figuring Grounds in Semiotic Modeling’, in Myrdene Anderson and Floyd Merrell (eds.) On Semiotic Modeling (Berlin: Mouton, 1991).

Spinks, C.W. ‘Diagrammatic thinking and the portraiture of thought’, Myrdene Anderson and Floyd Merrell (eds.) On Semiotic Modeling (Berlin: Mouton, 1991).