Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy (original) (raw)

Transmission and/or Understanding? On the 'Postal' and 'Erotic' Principles of Communication Two Preliminaries and a Problem How can the meaning of media be thought about in such a way that we acquire an understanding of our relationship to both the world and to ourselves? How can a concept of the medium be developed that encompasses our experiences using media? How can we determine what media 'are' in a way that embraces both generally accepted (voice, writing) and newer forms of media (computer, Internet)? How can media be conceptualized in a way that enables not only a reformulation of traditional philosophical questions but also a new conception of philosophy? Assuming first of all that one media concept could actually address all of these various questions, wouldn't this concept remain so abstract and general (in a bad sense), wouldn't it turn out so bare and tenuous, that it would say nothing and therefore not provide any answer at all? As in most cases, it depends on the attempt. 1 And in order to let the cat out of the bag immediately let me state that this attempt will address the question 'What is a medium?' in the context of the idea of the errand. The messenger thus represents a primal scene of media transmission. You could even say that the messenger represents the force behind these reflections on media, and my claim is that this relationship -measured against the present state of the debate over media -provides a new perspective on the phenomenon and concept of media. Isn't this a strange or downright outlandish effort? The messenger appears to be a relic of an epoch when the technical support of long-distance communication was not available, and it became obsolete with the development of the postal service or at the very least with the invention of the radio, the telegraph, and the telephone -not to mention the computer. What could the archaic institution of the messenger offer to modern media theory, whose reflections and explanations must address more advanced media? This provocative impression, which is often evoked by references to the messenger, is further reinforced by two associated preliminaries and an intruding problem: (i) First Preliminary: 'There is always an outside of media.' Messengers are heteronomous. The messenger perspective thus challenges attempts to conventionalize media as autonomous sovereign agents or the solitary The following section continues with a look at contemporary reflections on media, albeit limited to the discourses of cultural studies and philosophy. 1 The debate over media that was first articulated in the 1960s and continues to flourish today is confusing, multivocal and heterogeneous: there is no consensus in the phenomenal domain, the methodological approach or even the very concept of media. Nevertheless, through the multitude of heterogeneous voices -at least in the cultural studies camp -it is possible to perceive a certain vocal range that could be called the 'bon ton of the media debate'. This 'bon ton' involves reflecting and researching media with an attitude that is committed to a maxim of generativity. Lorenz Engell expressed this maxim with enviable clarity: 'Media are fundamentally generative.' 2 The meaning is obvious: in contrast to a marginalizing perspective, which treats media as negligible vehicles that add nothing to the messages they convey, this maxim signals a change in perspective that turns towards the media themselves rather than their contents. By shaping their contents, media fundamentally participate in the generation of messages -when not entirely producing them. Marshall McLuhan's provocative thesis 'the medium is the message' radically challenges the assumption that media are transparent and thus a secondary phenomenon that offers the most unimpeded view of the 'actual' objects of humanistic work, like 'sense', 'meaning', 'spirit', 'form', and 'content' -an assumption that had previously been taken for granted by the humanities. 3 The 'culturalization of the humanities', which was so characteristic of the outgoing twentieth century, thus found a support and a material grounding in the medialization of sense, spirit, and content. In the heterogeneous field of media theory a small common denominator is the idea that media not only relay their contents, but are also fundamentally generative. Doesn't this assumption of the shaping power of media towards their messages represent a necessary presupposition for all media theoretical efforts, insofar as these efforts would make themselves meaningless without this assumption? Where then lies the problem with the 'generative maxim'? 4 In order to trace this problem, I will now turn to philosophy.